A COCTEAU FOR OUR TIME

1 5 8 Y A C O C T E A U F O R O U R T I M E V I N C E N T G I R O U D In the introduction to his absorbing biography, Claude Arnaud contrasts the high international reputation Jean Cocteau enjoyed in his lifetime with the suspicion and even rejection he su√ered – and to some extent still su√ers – in France. In a country where a pejorative value is traditionally attached to the adjective versatile, his protean achievements – as poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, diarist, graphic artist, designer, and film director – were bound to be held against him by the avant-garde and academia. Yet despite being repeatedly labeled uneven, frivolous, superficial, opportunistic , and derivative, his oeuvre has stood the test of time surprisingly well. If Gallimard’s prestigious Pléiade collection, belatedly to be sure, admitted him into its pantheon, beginning with his poetical works in 1999, it was clearly because his works continued to sell and be read. Nor is a cultural picture of the first half of the twentieth century complete without him. Surprisingly, there have been few biographies of Cocteau. Arnaud is particularly critical of his principal predecessor, Francis J e a n C o c t e a u : A L i f e , by Claude Arnaud, translated by Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandel (Yale University Press, 1,014 pp., $40) 1 5 9 R Steegmuller, whose life of Cocteau came out in 1970, for focusing on the man to the detriment of the oeuvre and for being unsympathetic toward his subject’s homosexuality. By contrast, Arnaud places the question at the center of his investigation. Indeed, compared to his two great contemporaries, André Gide and Marcel Proust, both of whom Cocteau knew well, let alone the closeted François Mauriac and Henry de Montherlant and the neurotic Marcel Jouhandeau, Cocteau comes out as the first truly gay writer in the modern sense, comfortable with his identity and open about his personal life. As Arnaud points out, he and Jean Marais, even when their intimate relationship was over, were ‘‘the first male couple beloved by the public.’’ Notwithstanding two serious relationships with women (Madeleine Carlier in his youth and Natalie Paley in the early 1930s), Cocteau appears to have come to terms with his nature early and without di≈culty. This is all the more remarkable considering that the suicide of his father, when Cocteau was nine, may have been due in part to a repressed homosexuality; a maternal uncle, caught in the Eulenburg scandal (involving charges of homosexual relations among German aristocrats ), also ended up killing himself. An indi√erent student, expelled from school at age fifteen, Cocteau , whom Arnaud labels a ‘‘child prodigy,’’ took some time to find his true voice. (Did he have his old self in mind when, in the 1950s, he declared about a much-publicized child poet: ‘‘All children have genius, except Minou Drouet’’?) While he had published three volumes of poetry by the age of twenty-three, he eventually disowned them, as he came to shed most of his youthful friendships and influences, from Maurice Rostand and Lucien Daudet, e√eminate sons of the world-famous authors of Cyrano and Letters from My Mill, to the then hardly less famous Romanian-born poet Anna de Noailles. The defining moment in Cocteau’s aesthetic upbringing was his discovery of the Ballets Russes, which dazzled Paris audiences from 1908 through 1914. Cocteau’s own contribution to these seasons, the 1912 ballet Le Dieu bleu, with music by Reynaldo Hahn, was a flop; nor did the project of a ‘‘David’’ with Stravinsky materialize. Only five years later did Cocteau take his revenge with Parade, his baptism into modernism: in his preface to the ballet, Apollinaire used the word surrealist for the first time in describing it. Arnaud, however, makes clear that this first collab- 1 6 0 G I R O U D Y oration with Picasso (for the painter’s debut) and the equally touchy Erik Satie was anything but easy. World War I, paradoxically, was for Cocteau not so much a trauma (though he witnessed...