From 1900 – 1904, Cocteau attended the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a physical relationship with schoolmate Pierre Dargelos who would later reappear throughout Cocteau's oeuvre.
From 1900 – 1904, Cocteau attended the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a physical relationship with schoolmate Pierre Dargelos who would later reappear throughout Cocteau's oeuvre.
The Difficulty of Being (Neversink) - Kindle edition by Jean Cocteau, Geoffrey O'Brien, Elizabeth Sprigge. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
Jean Cocteau was a French poet, librettist, novelist, actor, film director, and painter. Some of his most important works include the poem "L’Ange Heurtebise" (1925); the play "Orphée" (1926); the novels "Les Enfants terribles" (1929) and "La Machine infernale" (1934); and his surrealistic motion pictures "Le Sang d’un poète" (1930) and "La Belle et la bête" (1946).
Background
Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a town near Paris, to Georges Cocteau and his wife, Eugénie Lecomte; a socially prominent Parisian family. His father was a lawyer and amateur painter who committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. Thrown out of school as a boy, Cocteau was the problem child of a well-to-do Parisian family. After his father committed suicide, the boy grew closer to his mother, who appears as the dominant female character in much of his later work. As a child Cocteau also formed a lifelong passion for the theatre, which he described many times as being “the fever of crimson and gold.”
Education
From 1900 – 1904, Cocteau attended the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a physical relationship with schoolmate Pierre Dargelos who would later reappear throughout Cocteau's oeuvre.
When Cocteau was eighteen years old, his poems were publicly read in Paris by the actor Edouard de Max and several of his theatre friends. Enamored with the young poet’s work, the actors presented a reading at a theatre on the Champs-Elysees. Following this introduction, Cocteau became an active participant in the Paris arts scene. In the period before World War I, he was associated with the avant-garde Cubists, Fauvists, and Futurists. Cocteau met and worked with such artists as Pablo Picasso and Erik Satie, published several volumes of poems, began writing plays and ballets, and established himself as a leading member of the French avant-garde. Always a poet first and foremost, Cocteau emphasized from the beginning of his career that, whatever the genre in which he worked, all of his creations were essentially poetry.
Cocteau’s first early success was the ballet Parade, written with composer Erik Satie, painter Pablo Picasso, choreographer Leonide Massine, and Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev of the Russian Ballet. Telling of a group of mysterious promoters trying unsuccessfully to entice spectators into a circus tent where an undefined spectacle is taking place, Parade is generally considered to be the first of the modern ballets. It was also Cocteau’s “first public attempt”, Alan G. Artner explained in the Chicago Tribune, “to express the mysterious and eternal in the everyday.”
Another early success was 1921’s “Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel’ (‘The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower’). Written for “Les Ballets Suedois”, a Swedish ballet troupe working in Paris, the ballet consists of a series of unrelated nonsense scenes set during a wedding reception at the Eiffel Tower. Wild events take place: a camera gives birth to an ostrich; a lion eats several cast members. Cocteau claimed that the work was meant to introduce a “classicism of shock” to ballet. Whatever its intentions, ‘The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower’ was denounced by the avant-garde Dadaists of the day as well as by the Parisian middle-class audience.
Cocteau’s involvement with the ballet and theatre brought him in the early 1920s into contact with a group of six young composers. Acting as their spokesman, Cocteau brought “Les Six”, as they became known, into prominence throughout Europe. During this time Cocteau also began a homosexual relationship with Raymond Radiguet, the young author of several novels. When Radiguet died of typhoid in 1923, Cocteau was distraught. He turned to opium, then a brief reconciliation with the Catholic Church, and finally to a series of young lovers. One of these lovers, Jean Desbordes, inspired a novella entitled “Le Livre blanc.” Published anonymously because Cocteau wished to avoid embarrassing his mother, the book is a frank, first-person account of a homosexual’s life in 1920s France, ending with the narrator leaving the country to seek freedom and love. “
“Opium: The Diary of an Addict” recounted the facts of Cocteau’s opium addiction, for which he twice required hospitalization before being cured. The book is based on Cocteau’s notes of a three-month hospital stay in late 1928 and early 1929. It is, as Mc Nab described it, “a fascinating account of the stages of withdrawal.” Cocteau also wrote several poems, collected in Opera, in which the opium experience figured prominently.
During the 1920s Cocteau also devoted his time to writing several novels, a new genre for him. These novels are usually concerned with protagonists who cannot leave their childhoods behind them. In “Le Grand Ecart”, for example, Jacques Forestier finds that beauty always brings him pain, a pattern established when he was a child. As a young man, the pattern continues when he loses his first love to another man, leading Jacques to attempt suicide. In addition, as Mc Nab pointed out, the novel anticipates Cocteau’s later obsession with childhood.
In “Thomas l’Imposteur”, a novel released only days after “Le Grand Ecart”, Cocteau told the story of a young boy of sixteen who finds stability and purpose in his life only by joining the French Army during World War I. To enlist in the army, Guillaume Thomas has lied about his age and borrowed a friend’s uniform. Soon he is even posing as the nephew of a military hero. “The Children of the Game” was begun while Cocteau was in the clinic recovering from his opium addiction. It was first published in 1929. The novel focuses on the doomed relationship between a brother and sister whose isolated existence is threatened and eventually destroyed by the outside world. To escape the loss of their isolation, the two siblings commit a double suicide. “Les Enfants terribles” has won lasting critical acclaim for its haunting evocation of childhood. After publishing “Les Enfants terribles”, Cocteau essentially gave up long fiction.
During the 1930s Cocteau devoted his time to the theatre, writing two of his most accomplished dramatic works at this time: “La Machine infernale” and “Les Parents terribles.” “La Machine infernale” is an update of the Oedipus legend from ancient Greece. But Cocteau transforms the story into a kind of “Parisian drawing-room comedy.” This was accomplished by having the characters live in ancient Greece and modern France at the same time. Characters speak in contemporary slang, jazz music can be heard in the background, and talk of war and revolution is common. All of these factors successfully mingle the present and the past.
With “Les Parents terribles” Cocteau adopted a Naturalist approach to the theatre. “The characters”, Guicharnaud and Beckelman explained, “constantly remind us that they are acting out a play — vaudeville, drama, or tragedy, depending on the moment and situation.” The plot revolves around a troubled marriage and a mother’s obsessive love for her son. When the son falls in love with a young girl, his mother is distraught. Unknown to both of them, however, is that the girl is also the mistress to the boy’s father. The play ends with the mother’s suicide.
The play was first produced at the Theatre des Ambassadeurs in Paris in 1938, where it ran for 200 performances. When the Municipal Council of Paris protested that a play about incest was being performed in a city-owned theatre, however, “Les Parents terribles” moved to the Bouffes Parisiens, where it ran for another 200 performances. In 1941, when a revival of the play was staged in occupied Paris, fascist opponents organized nightly disruptions until the police were forced to close the play. A later attempt to produce the play in Vichy France ended when the Nazi occupiers forbade it.
Cocteau’s cinematic work began in 1932 with “Le Sang d’un Poete”, a film that C. G. Wallis in the Kenyon Review called “one of the authentic classics of the cinema, in the small group that includes “Caligari”, “Ten Days That Shook the World”, some Rene Clair, and some Chaplin.” Divided into four parts, the film follows the poet through a series of hallucinatory experiences which transform him from a naive young man into a “depersonalized poet,” as Wallis noted. Cocteau described the film as “a realistic documentary of unreal events.” The protagonist of “Le Sang d’un Poete” speaks to a living statue, steps through a mirror into another realm, gambles for his fate, and — twice — commits suicide. The film ends with the living statue, a woman, rising into an immortal realm accompanied by a bull.
Cocteau’s visionary approach to film is also evident in his “La Belle et la bete”, an adaptation of the beauty and the beast legend. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times found the film to be “an eminent model of cinema achievement in the realm of poetic fantasy”, while Oxenhandler, writing in Yale French Studies, claimed that “the camera-work in this beautiful film situates it in that area of imagination where we half believe the impossible, where metaphor is normal speech and miracle is a deeper truth than nature.” “La Belle et la bete” tells the story of a beautiful maiden who falls in love with a monstrous-looking man. Cocteau’s version of the story tells a psychological drama with autobiographical overtones. When the beast discovers that he is loved, he is no longer an outsider, he gains self-knowledge. The film ends with the beast becoming beautiful.
Cocteau also filmed his plays “Les Parents terribles” and “Les Enfants terribles”, as well as “Orphee” and “Le Testament d’Orphee”, both adaptations of ancient Greek myths. In all of his work, Cocteau held true to certain principles of artistic creation. One of these principles was the invocation of mystery. Some of the mystery that Cocteau sought in his art is also found in the enduring public image he created for himself.
Cocteau died of a heart attack at his chateau in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne, France, on October 11, 1963 at the age of 74. His friend, French singer Édith Piaf, died the day before but that was announced on the morning of Cocteau's day of death; it has been said that his heart failed upon hearing of Piaf's death. Actually, according to author Roger Peyrefitte, Cocteau was devastated after a breach with his longtime friend and patronness Francine Weisweiller. According to his wishes Cocteau is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. The epitaph on his gravestone set in the floor of the chapel reads: "I stay with you."
Achievements
Jean Cocteau was an enormously influential French artist and writer known as one of the major figures of Dada and Surrealism. With an oeuvre that spanned painting, novels, poetry, plays, and films, Cocteau established himself as a leading creative force in Paris.
Cocteau was supported throughout his recovery by his friend and correspondent, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Under Maritain's influence Cocteau made a temporary return to the sacraments of the Catholic Church. He again returned to the Church later in life and undertook a number of religious art projects.
Views
Jean Cocteau denied being a Surrealist or being in any way attached to the movement. During the Nazi occupation of France, Cocteau's friend Arno Breker convinced him that Adolf Hitler was a pacifist and patron of the arts with France's best interests in mind. In his diary, Cocteau accused France of disrespect towards Hitler and speculated on the Führer's sexuality.
Quotations:
"Style is a simple way of saying complicated things."
"There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard."
"An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."
"I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul."
"Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort."
Membership
In 1955, Cocteau was made a member of the Académie française and The Royal Academy of Belgium. During his life, Cocteau was commander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Mallarmé Academy, German Academy, American Academy, Mark Twain Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes Film Festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association and President of the Jazz Academy and of the Academy of the Disc.
Personality
Jean Cocteau never hid his homosexuality. Frequently his work, either literary, graphic, or cinematographic, is pervaded with homosexual undertones, homoerotic imagery/symbolism or outright camp. Jean Cocteau saod about himself "I was never a handsome man. Youth has replaced my beauty. By nature, I'm neither cheerful nor gloomy. Although I can be too gloomy, or too joyful. In a conversation that stirs the soul, I happen to forget sorrows, infirmities, and myself, so I am intoxicated with words and thoughts. And the ability to forget grievances is so strong that sometimes unexpectedly, when I meet an enemy, I smile at him. His amazement acts on me like a cold shower and makes me wake up. And I do not know how to keep on. It surprises me that he still remembers the evil done by him, while I have already forgotten about him. Just exactly this innate inclination for evangelical virtue prevents me from dogmatism."
Quotes from others about the person
Cocteau’s willingness and ability to turn his hand to the most disparate creative ventures, do not fit the stereotypical image of the priestlike — or Proust-like — writer single-mindedly sacrificing his life on the altar of an all-consuming art. But the best of his efforts, in each of the genres that he took up, enriched that genre.
Interests
Artists
Edouard de Max
Connections
Cocteau had affairs with Jean Le Roy, Raymond Radiguet, Jean Desbordes, Marcel Khill, and Panama Al Brown. In the 1930s, Cocteau is rumoured to have had a very brief affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the daughter of a Romanov Grand Duke and herself a sometime actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong. Cocteau's longest-lasting relationships were with French actors Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, whom Cocteau formally adopted.
