Cocteau Revisited

Cocteau Revisited Alfred Cismaru Texas Tech University ' 'Lunch at Véfour with Greta Garbo. Paul-Louis brings her to my house and we all go together. What a strange thing: it seems that no one at the restaurant recognizes her. The owner and chef of Véfour, Olivier, will tell me tomorrow that someone had asked if Garbo was Madeleine Solange. And when he answered, 'My God, no, that is Greta Garbo,' the interlocutor had remarked: ? was sure she was a movie actress.' Lost is that sense of grandeur, of the legendary, of the sacred. We are so engrossed in the secular now, so bogged down by the transitory and the derisory assailing us from all sides. ' ' ' This is one of the notations Jean Cocteau made in his Diary on November 29, 1951 (36-37 in French original). That he should deplore the masses' ignorance of the legendary and the sacred is, of course, understandable, for he too, and in his own eyes, belonged then, as now, to the stuff that makes for inviolate myths. There is much talk about Cocteau now, in Paris and in many other places as well (the University of Texas in Austin, for example, had a one-week Cocteau festival in the spring of 1985). Jean Marais, his lifetime friend, is dedicating a series of plays to his memory. Libération in September 1984 printed a special number hors-série quite similar to its publication of the interview with Andy Warhol: fine paper, larger-thanusual print, and colored photos depicting, alongside sober, yet quasireverent language, the story of the poet- playwright- film directorpainter - actor and animator of so many French intellectual and artistic activities since the 1920s to the dawn of the 1960s. An intimate friend of Picasso and Matisse, of Stravinski, discoverer of Radiguet, close associate of the Surrealists, pal of theater persons such as Barrault and Dullin, and of writers including Colette, Genet, de Beauvoir, and Sartre, Jean Cocteau was, like a lightning rod, an excellent distributor of (intellectual) electricity. In fact, it may be said without exaggeration, that he invented a lifestyle that synthesized one of the ambitions of the early twentieth century: the ability to be a voracious dilettante in such a way that no negative connotation could be ascribed to the phrase. In the summer of 1984, Gallimard published the Diary which the writer kept from 1951 until his death. It is interesting to note that in the beginning he quotes one of his titles, Le Passé défini. Yet it is not the usual past suggested by this tense that is evoked by the special issue of Libération. Text and pictures bring strangely and tremulously to life Cocteau shaving; Cocteau smoking and holding his cigarette between 69 70Rocky Mountain Review his lips without ever bothering to shake off the ashes; Cocteau on one of the sets of his films; Cocteau correcting galley proofs; Cocteau at the Paris exhibition of Arno Breker (Jewish painter) in 1942 during the Nazi occupation (he was even able to navigate through it in a number of official capacities — although his more anti-Nazi friends, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and others, took him to task for it); Cocteau painting; Cocteau on his knees working on stage props for one of his plays; Cocteau teaching a company of dancers how to interpret one of his ballets: his face always wiry, his hair disorderly, in what might be called today an African hairdo, hands long and lean, with veins protruding and erect under the skin, and lips always in a smiling position, but smiling imperceptibly only, as if even the approximation of laughter was, in him, controlled by intelligence, and therefore ever so subdued. His presence in Libération, as in other texts on and by him, transcends the pages and can be quite overwhelming. That is because his narcissism was such that it became, in fact, a springboard for the development of the self in the century's God = man idea. It is enough to recall the inventiveness with which he directed the film Sang d 'un poète — it was in 1930 — and how, in spite of the many ellipses in the narration he...