Jean Cocteau

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean Cocteau called himself a poet, and only a poet, even after he had written novels, staged plays, drawn erotica, and directed films that critics still study. He divided his entire output into kinds of poetry: poésie de roman, poésie de thêatre, poésie critique, poésie graphique, poésie cinématographique. The National Observer once suggested that of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to twentieth-century art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man. Annette Insdorf said he left behind a body of work unequalled for its variety of artistic expression. How does one man move between an opium-cure diary, a Stravinsky libretto, and a chapel mural without ever picking a single discipline? What did it cost him to befriend the persecuted and the powerful in the same decade? And why, when he died on the 11th of October 1963, did a near-certainly false story about a singer's death cling to his name?

• 2. The Frivolous Prince

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  Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, in Yvelines, to Georges Cocteau and Eugénie Lecomte, a socially prominent Parisian family. His father, a lawyer and amateur painter, died by suicide when Cocteau was nine years old. From 1900 to 1904 he attended the Lycée Condorcet, where he met a schoolmate named Pierre Dargelos and began a relationship with him. Dargelos would reappear throughout Cocteau's later work. He left home at fifteen, restless and already aimed at a literary life. At nineteen he published his first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, and by twenty-two he had a reputation in Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, which was the title of another book he put out at that age. Edith Wharton described him as a man to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City. The young poet she sketched was already collecting the friends who would shape him for the next decade.

• 3. The Avant-Garde Circle

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  In his early twenties, Cocteau fell in with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice Barrès. In 1912 he collaborated with Léon Bakst on Le Dieu bleu for the Ballets Russes, danced by Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky. During World War I he served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver, and that stretch brought him to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and many others he would later work alongside. The Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which became Parade in 1917, produced by Diaghilev with sets by Picasso, a libretto by Apollinaire, and music by Erik Satie. The premiere was hostile. If it had not been for Apollinaire in uniform, Cocteau wrote, with his skull shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would have gouged our eyes out with hairpins. His influence spread to a group of composers known as Les Six, who in the early twenties gathered with him at a wildly popular bar called Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a name Cocteau himself had a hand in picking.

• 4. Radiguet And The Pipe

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  In 1918 Cocteau met the French poet Raymond Radiguet, and the friendship reorganized his life. They wrote together, socialized, and traveled, and Cocteau even helped Radiguet obtain an exemption from military service. He promoted the younger man inside his artistic circle and arranged for Grasset to publish Le Diable au corps, a largely autobiographical story of an adulterous affair between a married woman and a younger man, pulling strings to win it the Nouveau Monde literary prize. Some contemporaries and later commentators suspected a romantic element to the bond, a perception Cocteau knew about and worked earnestly to dispel. Radiguet's sudden death in 1923 splits the record in two. Some say it left Cocteau stunned, despondent, and prey to opium addiction. Others note that he skipped the funeral, as he generally did, and left Paris at once with Diaghilev for a Ballets Russes performance of Les noces at Monte Carlo. Cocteau himself claimed his opium use was only coincidental, sparked by a chance meeting with Louis Laloy, the administrator of the Monte Carlo Opera. The habit, and the struggle to quit it, reshaped how he wrote. Les Enfants Terribles was composed in a single week during a strenuous opium weaning. In Opium: Diary of a Cure he recorded his recovery in 1929, alternating vivid pen-and-ink drawings and moment-to-moment notes on withdrawal. Through it he leaned on the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who drew him back briefly to the sacraments and joined him in founding the literary magazine Le Roseau d'Or.

• 5. Stage And Screen

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  On the 15th of June 1926, Cocteau's play Orphée was staged in Paris, followed quickly by an exhibition of drawings and constructions called Poésie plastique-objets, dessins. He wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, first performed at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on the 30th of May 1927. The novel Les Enfants terribles appeared in 1929. Cocteau made his first film, The Blood of a Poet, in 1930, though it was not publicly shown until 1932. It is now generally treated as a surrealist film, even though the surrealists themselves refused to accept it as truly one of theirs. His 1930s are better measured by the stage, above all La Voix humaine and Les Parents terribles, which was a popular success. His 1934 play La Machine infernale, a version of the Oedipus legend, is considered his greatest work for the theatre. He also published journalism in this period, including Mon Premier Voyage: Tour du Monde en 80 jours, a neo-Jules Verne around-the-world reportage written for the newspaper Paris-Soir.

• 6. Politics And Occupation

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  My politics are non-existent, Cocteau confessed to a friend, and he spent his life trying to keep a distance from political movements. According to Claude Arnaud, from the 1920s on his only deep convictions were a marked pacifism and antiracism. He praised the French republic as a haven for the persecuted and called Picasso's anti-war painting Guernica a cross that Franco would always carry on his shoulder. In 1940 he signed a petition from the Ligue internationale contre l'antisémitisme protesting the rise of racism and antisemitism in France, and after seeing the plight of colonized peoples on his travels he declared himself ashamed of his white skin. The contradiction came during the war. In 1938 he had compared Adolf Hitler to an evil demiurge bent on a Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre of Jews. Then his friend Arno Breker convinced him Hitler was a pacifist and a patron of the arts who had France's best interests at heart. During the Nazi occupation he joined a round-table of French and German intellectuals at the Georges V Hotel in Paris, alongside the writers Ernst Jünger, Paul Morand, and Henry Millon de Montherlant, the publisher Gaston Gallimard, and the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt. In his diary he accused France of disrespect toward Hitler and speculated on the Führer's sexuality. His 1942 article Salut à Breker, which effusively praised Breker's sculptures, got him arraigned on collaboration charges after the war. He was cleared, having also used his contacts in a failed attempt to save friends such as Max Jacob. Later, drawing closer to communists such as Louis Aragon, he would call Joseph Stalin the only great politician of the era. In 1940 his play Le Bel Indifférent, written for and starring Édith Piaf, was enormously successful.

• 7. Films And Murals

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  Cocteau's later years belong mostly to his films, which he usually both wrote and directed, and which helped carry the avant-garde into French cinema and nudged the coming French New Wave. After The Blood of a Poet, his best-known films include Beauty and the Beast in 1946, Les Parents terribles in 1948, and Orpheus in 1949. His final film, Le Testament d'Orphée in 1960, featured Picasso and the matador Luis Miguel Dominguín, along with Yul Brynner, who also helped finance it. The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, and Le Testament d'Orphée together make up the so-called Orphic Trilogy. In 1945 Cocteau was one of several designers who built sets for the Théâtre de la Mode, drawing on the filmmaker René Clair for a piece called Tribute to René Clair: I Married a Witch. His Journal entry for the 12th of February 1945 describes the maquette as a smoldering maid's room with an aerial view of Paris seen through holes in the wall and ceiling. On an iron bed lies a fainted bride, dismayed ladies behind her, while a bride-witch astride a broom flies through the ceiling with her hair and train streaming. He turned to sacred spaces too. In 1956 he covered the Chapelle Saint-Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer with mural paintings, and the next year he decorated the marriage hall at the Hôtel de Ville in Menton.

• 8. The Fair Sex

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  As far back as I can remember, Cocteau wrote, and even at an age when the mind does not yet influence the senses, I find traces of my love of boys. That line opens Le Livre blanc, the mildly homoerotic, semi-autobiographical novel he published anonymously in 1928. He never repudiated it, and a later edition carried his foreword and drawings, the same book in which he said his misfortunes came from a society that condemns the rare as a crime. Cocteau never hid his homosexuality, and homoerotic imagery and camp run through his literary, graphic, and cinematic work alike. In 1947 Paul Morihien issued a clandestine edition of Jean Genet's Querelle de Brest featuring 29 very explicit erotic drawings by Cocteau. In the 1930s he is rumored to have had a platonic affair with Princess Natalie Paley, daughter of a Romanov Grand Duke and once the wife of the couturier Lucien Lelong. His longest-lasting relationships were with French actors, including Jean Marais, whom he cast in The Eternal Return in 1943, Beauty and the Beast, Ruy Blas in 1947, and Orpheus. The diaries of Liane de Pougy, who lived from 1869 to 1950, were published as Mes cahiers bleus in 1977 and describe him. By 1955 the institutions had embraced him: he was made a member of the Académie Française and the Royal Academy of Belgium, and he served as commander of the Legion of Honor and honorary president of the Cannes Film Festival.

  Cocteau died of a heart attack at his château in Milly-la-Forêt, in Essonne, on the 11th of October 1963, at the age of 74. Édith Piaf had died the previous day, and her death was announced on the morning of his own. The almost certainly apocryphal story holds that his heart failed when he heard of Piaf's death. The truer account is duller and sadder. His health had been declining for months, and he had suffered a severe heart attack on the 22nd of April 1963. The author Roger Peyrefitte points instead to a breach with Cocteau's longtime friend and patron Francine Weisweiller, over an affair she had been having with a minor writer, a rift the two did not mend until shortly before he died. By his own wishes he was buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. The epitaph set into the stone reads, Je reste avec vous, I stay with you. The film critic Pauline Kael noted that revivals of The Blood of a Poet later made Cocteau one of the most important filmmakers of his time, because he was an artist using the medium for his own end, and made audiences look at films in a new way, as invited filmmakers rather than mere spectators.