The Difficulty of Being

“One of the most inspiring creators—and self-creations—of the twentieth century.”

—
THE NEW YORKER

“To enclose the collected works of Cocteau one would need not a bookshelf, but a warehouse.”

—W. H. AUDEN

“One of the master craftsmen.”

—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

“A [man] to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundations of the Heavenly City.”

—
EDITH WHARTON

“[Cocteau] had, and still has, a huge influence on the avant-garde of American film.”

—
THE GUARDIAN

“Cocteau has the freest mind, and the purest, in Europe …”

—
EZRA POUND

“A comet that passed over French cinema, throwing a vivid light on the landscape.”

—DAVID THOMSON,
THE NEW BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM

“He left his mark on an entire era.”

—
NEW YORK TIMES

“A true Renaissance man.”

—
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

“Brilliant jack-of-all-trades, longtime adept in the art of enchantment, this creator whose originality eluded the confines of any particular artistic or literary movement dedicated himself to but a single master: astonishment, his own as much as that of others.”

—
ACADEMIE FRANCAISE

THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING
 

JEAN COCTEAU
(1889–1963) was born in the Paris suburbs to a wealthy family. His father, a prominent attorney and amateur painter, committed suicide when Cocteau was nine, and he was sent off to a private school—from which he was expelled a few years later. Cocteau ran off to Marseille and then Paris, where he haunted theatrical and artistic circles. He published his first volume of poetry,
Aladdin’s Lamp
, at nineteen, and another two years later called
The Frivolous Prince
, which became his nickname. He soon circulated in the highest ranks of Parisian bohemia and counted Proust and Gide among his friends. During World War I, he served with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver, a period in which he met and became close to Apollinaire, Picasso, Modigliani, and many others with whom he would later collaborate. A leading exponent of avant-garde art, he created scenarios for the Ballet Russes and librettos for operas by Stravinsky and Satie. He wrote and directed his own films, including
Beauty and the Beast
, a seminal work in cinema history, and
Orpheus
. His other important works include the play
The Human Voice
and the novel
The Holy Terrors
. Known in his lifetime for a libertine lifestyle—he lived with the actor Jean Marais and was, at one time, an opium addict—Cocteau died of a heart attack after being informed of the death of his friend, the singer Edith Piaf.

ELIZABETH SPRIGGE
(1900–74) translated the works of Jean Cocteau and August Strindberg. She was also the author of a biography of Gertrude Stein.

GEOFFREY O’BRIEN
is the editor in chief of the Library of America. His writing has been collected in
Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film, 2002–2012
.

THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

I was by no means the only reader of books on board the
Neversink.
Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.
—
HERMAN MELVILLE,
WHITE JACKET

“I do not for a moment conceal from myself,” Jean Cocteau writes at the end of
The Difficulty of Being
, “the terrible harm that a witty lawyer, a witness for the prosecution, and the distance that separates the jury from a poet, can do to my work through my personality.” He adds in a footnote: “I know very well what will be said about this book. The author’s preoccupation with himself is exasperating. Who is not thus preoccupied?” To talk about Cocteau, or to see his work clearly, one must first, as it were, get Cocteau out of the way. He plants himself in the heart of every sentence and every image in the same way that he planted himself in every salon and theater and literary forum. François Mauriac called him a “ubiquitist”; some have been tempted to see in him a sort of Zelig of twentieth-century French culture, evading precise definition even as he pops up at every turn.

He was indeed everywhere, from the moment he made his first minor splash as a teenage dandy whose poems were presented in 1908 at a public reading organized by the equally dandyish actor Édouard de Max. It was always as a poet that he defined himself, but his sense of what poetry was extended
easily to theater, ballet, art, design, fiction, film. He wrote the scenario for the Diaghilev ballet
Parade
, with music by Satie and stage design by Picasso; he promoted and collaborated with the composers of Les Six; he wrote the libretto for Stravinsky’s
Oedipus Rex
. He produced at least one pervasively influential novel,
Les Enfants Terribles
, and a series of films that may well prove his most enduring works. He was also a star—he affixed a star under his signature in case anyone should forget—a celebrated conversationalist whose nonstop monologues could seem like a way of sustaining his very sense of being, a scene-maker whose name and image were familiar even to those otherwise unacquainted with his work.

He provoked scandal (aside from any scandal that may have been stirred by his openly gay mode of life)—with the incestuously charged stage melodrama
Les Parents Terribles
; with the homosexual theme of the anonymously published novel
The White Paper
; with his memoir of drug addiction,
Opium
—yet seemed always to embody his own declaration (in the 1918 artistic manifesto
Cock and Harlequin
) that “tact in audacity consists in knowing how far one may go too far.” His poems, plays, and novels fill three thick volumes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, with much more potentially yet to come. Adored by the dowagers and socialites of the Right Bank, he was an object of abhorrence to many on the cultural left. André Breton, a lifelong foe, declared in 1959 that Cocteau “must be considered the anti-poet because his constitution is that of the arch impostor, the born con man.”

Instances of the prosecutorial approach that Cocteau anticipated are not hard to find. There is no need to look further than Frederick Brown’s 1969 biography,
An Impersonation of Angels
, with its title already implying a certain fakery as Cocteau’s very essence. From the evidence that Brown deftly
assembles, one is encouraged to form an impression of Cocteau as an eternal bourgeois child in search of approval from the moneyed and powerful; a self-promoting narcissist obsessed with celebrity, associating with artists greater than himself in order to inflate his own credentials; a seducer of young men and a smoker of opium; in essence a hollow man constantly seeking to elaborate further flourishes for his self-created legend, theatrically stage-managing his crises and illnesses, endowed at best with a facility verging on glibness; a great pretender; a trickster half taken in by his own tricks.