Jean Cocteau: A Master Modernist

A Sketch Portrait of This Literary Flaneur and Leader of a Dozen Artistic Revolutions in Paris

CLIVE BELL

IT is still popularly supposed that Jean Cocteau is the last word in modernity; and so, in a sense, he is. He is modern, because he happens to be thirty-odd years old and completely himself; he is, from time to time, a last word, because he happens to have genius. That, however, is not what the public means; that is not why the moment some new literary movement forces itself to the front, Cocteau is proclaimed its father; that is not why the Dadas even were said to be his children—as, in a sense, they were: even their attitude towards him being that of most modern children to their parents—dislike, tempered by fear. For the next ten years, it may well be the same with each little movement that struggles into the open. Cocteau will be reputed its organizer and prophet. For another ten years, J dare sav, he will stand in the public mind, as he stands now, for all that is most modern. I think I can see why.

Superficially, in his early effort, in his vocabulary, his themes and in his way of life, Cocteau did seem to have been touched by that pervasive and essentially modern spirit which, blowing from your side of the Atlantic, began some dozen years ago to charm with its siren voice and southern perfumes the ears and noses of young Lat initv. I call it the Jazz spirit. It induces a wild, and perhaps slightly injudicious, admiration for what 1 suspect of being not quite the best that America can do. At any rate, since very few Latins can read English, it has led to Mr. Louis Hirsch and Mr. Irving Berlin being esteemed by continental experts far above Henry James and Mr. Conrad Aiken. This up-to-date spirit manifests itself, not only in a religious enthusiasm for brazen sound and electric light, but in an awestruck humility before Atlantic liners and a touching belief in "business men, hard and merciless, who dominate the millions with their writing and adding machines".

The Magnate after Office Hours

IN England, we are tolerably cynical about hard and merciless business men. Like you, we know too much about them. We know that, rather than hard and merciless, they are apt to be flabby and sentimental; and that, after five o'clock, there is nothing they like so much as crying their eyes out over Mary Iickford. Also, though we have far fewer typewriting machines, we have enough and have had them long enough to breed that familiarity which breeds something worse. At least, we have grown sufficiently used to these chattering Yojos to treat them as something less than fetishes. Wherefore Jazz-fever is less catching here than in Latin countries; and had Cocteau been born in London, he would probably from the first have written less reverently of steamships.

This early dalliance with a dusky love is not, however, what makes him appear sometimes the most modern of men. It is his prodigiouslv open mind. Though he cannot quite boast that nihil humani ahennm esse putat, if for "nihil humani" you substitute "no idea", the ancient saw holds good.

There are many people whom no idea frightens; the extraordinary thing about Cocteau is that no new idea wounds his vanity by seeming to rob him of painfully acquired prestige. Though Dadas and Post-Dadas may please them selves proclaiming that by their inventions and discoveries they have rendered his published writings obsolete and his talents and culture superfluous, Cocteau is quite willing to enjoy any drop of sack that can be squeezed from their intolerable deal of bread. He does not feel, as most of us feel, an instinctive dislike for, a desire to denigrate, any novelty that appears to make hay of his past; and in the explanation of this virtue, we shall discover the very core of his attitude to life and art. Cocteau is never hampered by his past, because he never leans on it. Somewhere or other he has said: "If you want to remain young, you must always be making a fresh start". Cocteau is an eternal debutant.

Cocteau's Attitude to Life

ONE can easily fail to realize what a prodigious gift this is. Many modern critics have asserted at one time or another that one must walk on one's own feet, that one must not lean on the past; but Cocteau refuses to lean even on his own past. Most of us feel about new ideas, about new theories of life and art, much as the honest tradesman who has worked his way up in the world feels about communism: we feel that our hard-earned savings are being filched from us. Cocteau does not live on his income; and he is always readv to start afresh beside the youngest apprentice in the shop. He asks to be judged, if he is to be judged at all, not by what he has done, or what he has acquired, but by what he is.

In a little book called "Le secret professionnel" (1922)—a little book which, in my opinion, is the best criticism and appreciation of the movement of contemporary ideas that we possess, and quite one of the most remarkable publications of our day—Cocteau throws out one of those illuminating, deep-sinking observations of his which hitches very neatly onto the one I quoted above. "What I propose", says he (I paraphrase freely, because some people seem to find his French difficult) "is to dispense with a style. Let us have style, instead of having a style. No one, as a matter of fact, gets rid of a certain gait which, to the eye of a delicate observer, gives a family likeness to all his works. But let us carry our style next the skin, instead of wearing it on our sleeve; let us bother about having good stuff to our coat, rather than about putting smart patterns on it."

Here is the same preoccupation with escaping from the personal cliché. The artist is not to lean even on his own past. Each time that he wishes to express something, he must quarry the material in which it is to be expressed fresh from the depths of his being. Like a silkworm he must spin his own cocoon, not keep a cupboard full of neat "sections" as a bee-master does, or a schoolmaster.

His Intelligent Literary Method

AND, to do him justice, Cocteau practices what he preaches. His style is closely knit; he tightens his words over each idea until they fit like a glove; padding there is none. Invariably, he kills with the first barrel; there is none of that "tailing" with the right and bringing down with the left about his prose. In a word, his style is perfectly classical and in the great French tradition. If sometimes it seems difficult, that is because he makes a habit of using images, not, as most writers do, merely to illustrate ideas, but to express them. We are grown so much accustomed to images which merely illustrate without pushing forward the argument, that we expect to be able to read them carelessly without losing the thread. Not so can you treat Cocteau's writing. The images are an essential part of the argument which travels inside them. Wherefore, an inattentive or unintelligent reader, who shuts his eyes as the image leaps, finds himself at the close of a sentence on the far side of a hedge in an unknown field, and cannot make out where the devil he has got to.

Yet you must not suppose, because he explodes the tricks of professors and pokes fun at obsolescent schools, that Cocteau belongs to the modern. That is a common error; it is an error, none the less. Schools of any sort are not to his taste—not even his own school; and he despises the imitators of the moderns, if possible, more than the rest. To repeat what has already been said, and said once and for all, by Picasso or Stravinsky or Tzara or Cocteau himself, is just as silly as to repeat what has been said by Sophocles or Shakespeare. Most futile of all is the ambition of being "the last word"; for, as Cocteau brilliantly says, "when the clock of genius strikes, instantaneously all the clocks in the world go slow". To fuss nervously about being punctual is, as everyone knows, the sign of a fool. Time was made for slaves.

So far I have written only of Cocteau, the thinker, the man of ideas the most brilliant of his interesting generation—the man who has given concrete shapes to winds of impulse; and I have left myself no space in which to write of the artist. Cocteau is a poet; but, as you would expect, he is of the race that depends as least as much on intellect as on temperament—he is nearer to Donne than to Keats.

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I have space for just one example. Lcs Maries de la Tour Eiffel (which was introduced in the United States by Vanity Fair) is a delicious poetical fantasia. Now, the usual movement of fantasia is from somewhere near common sense to topsy-turvydom. Not so with Cocteau: beginning in a world of wildest absurdity, he imposes on each extravagance that arises in his mind a kind of nightmare logic. There is method in his madness. The piece opens thus:

FIRST PHONOGRAPH: You are on the first stage of the Eiffel Tower.

SECOND PHONOGRAPH: Hullo! an ostrich. She's crossing the stage. She's gone out. Here comes the sportsman. He's looking for the ostrich. He looks up. He sees something. He puts the gun to his shoulder. He fires.

A scene of pure absurdity. Yes; but the ostrich turns out to be that classic "little bird " which is always going to pop out of the camera at the moment when we are invited to look pleasantly at the lens. And so on, throughout.

It is the ludicrous, but highly intellectual, coherence given by a Bedlam logic to fantastic and poetical notions that gives this little ballet its delicious and surprising quality. It affords Cocteau an opportunity of showing all his parts; providing a problem which suits him, in my opinion, better than that of his novel Le Grand Ecart—the problem of telling a simple story subtly. Nevertheless, Le Grand Exart is a fine piece of fiction . . . but to begin writing about that would be to begin a new essay.