The Difficulty of Being (2 page)

Some of this of course is more or less on target—not surprisingly, since much of the evidence is drawn from Cocteau’s own writings. “No one knows his own weaknesses better than I,” he writes in an early passage of
The Difficulty of Being
. “If I happen to read some article attacking me, I feel that I could strike closer to the mark.” Yet he is not inclined to self-condemnation. This book, written in 1947, is written rather in a mood of detached self-examination. He makes himself his own portraitist, his own commentator. He looks for a sense of grounding: “Woe to him who has not kept a plot of ground on which to live, a small piece of himself within himself.” He seems determined to work out some basic definitions, to lay down for the record the terms within which he has lived and worked. It is most fundamentally a work of criticism, in which by paying close attention to his own writing process he creates a different kind of writing, opaque and deliberate. Cocteau maps his own limits and seems to come at moments to the very edge of dismantling that persona he created but of which he is in some sense a prisoner—but only to the edge.

There is less of the charmer or circus performer on this occasion. A certain effortless fluency had always been a mark, and a danger, of Cocteau’s style. He was known as a wit from
an early age. French dictionaries of quotations contain many pages of his aphoristic remarks, which often find a way to blend oracular pronouncement and ebullient one-liner into a single unmistakable tone. It was this quality, perhaps, more than any other that was distrusted by the surrealists. How could any style so sparkling, so immediately pleasing, have anything to do with what they understood by art or poetry? In
The Difficulty of Being
that flair for bedazzlement is restrained and put under pressure, as if by slowing himself down Cocteau could arrive at a more painful level of truth-telling.

The book was written in the wake of what in retrospect was one of his greatest achievements, the film
Beauty and the Beast
. Making the film had been an exhausting process aggravated by the acute eczema that had begun to afflict Cocteau, and which he details in many pages here. The horrors of that pullulating skin ailment torment these sentences as they did his body. There was also, perhaps, a lingering sense of the cloud that still hung over him in the wake of the Liberation; he had only narrowly avoided more severe criticism for some of the friendships he had maintained during the Occupation with Germans such as Ernst Jünger and, more disturbingly, the sculptor Arno Breker, Hitler’s own preferred artist. He was approaching sixty, and the preoccupation with death in which his work had always been steeped was now becoming a more plausible and everyday presence.

The stock elements of Cocteau’s poems and plays—the mirrors and masks and angels and sacrificial victims and messengers from beyond—are notably absent here. The conjuror lays aside his tricks. But Cocteau being Cocteau, might this not be a subtler form of conjuring? He invokes Montaigne at several points, as if to suggest that he too is showing
us his real face without mask or makeup. No magic here, no marvels, no fantasy, these being only sloppy evasive terms in which to talk about artistic craftsmanship. The craftsman’s gift “does not lie in card tricks. He goes beyond jugglery. That is only his syntax.” Rituals and dangerous habits, yes. Cocteau comes close to acknowledging a fundamental vulnerability, a subjection to fears against which, perhaps, his whole body of work has been raised as a protective counter-world. “My worst fault,” he acknowledges, “like almost everything in me, springs from childhood. For I am still the victim of those unhealthy rites which make children obsessive, so that they arrange their plates in a certain way at meals and only step over certain grooves in the pavement.” The techniques of art may be only an adaptation of these earlier methods that evolved as a stay against the overwhelming invasions of anxiety. When he speaks of the ultimate source of his poetry, it’s located in “a zone in man into which man cannot descend, even if Virgil were to lead him there, for Virgil himself did not descend into it.”

The darkest passages—and there are many dark passages in this book—are alleviated by the presence of other people. Memories of Apollinaire, Proust, the ever-regretted Raymond Radiguet: these provide companionship for a writer who can state that “I like other people and only exist through them.” (He was indeed someone who found it almost impossible to be alone.) A prosecutor, again, might take such reminiscences as one more instance of Cocteau inserting himself into literary history to establish his claims. In any case it is difficult to let go of the vision of Proust reading from the as yet unpublished
Swann’s Way
—“Proust would start anywhere, would mistake the page, confuse the passage, repeat himself, begin again, break off to explain that the lifting of the hat in the first chapter would reveal its significance in the last volume”—in
the midst of his cluttered sanctum, the “Jules Verne room,” where Proust figured as Captain Nemo, the obsessed navigator steering with uncanny knowledge by instruments whose precise use seems random and chaotic to anyone but himself.

Those scenes of the past do inevitably take on a nostalgic glow in light of the present moment in which Cocteau registers the death of friends and lovers and the visible deterioration of his body. The “plot of ground” he has sought out as a place to live is evidently far from being a place of tranquil reflection, in the unlikely event that reflection was ever a tranquil matter for Cocteau. It is curiously in a chapter devoted to laughter that he comes close to conveying the deepest possible sense of inward turmoil. He opens with a typically elegant aphorism: “Like the heart and like sex, laughter functions by erection. Nothing swells it that does not excite it. It does not rise of its own accord.” For several pages he improvises on this theme, making offhand remarks about jokes, banter, theatrical comedy, and audience reactions, and then abruptly changes gear: “What would become of me without laughter? It purges me of my disgust … It is the sign that I am not quite sunk by contact with the vegetable world in which I move.”

We are suddenly brought into the garden—just such a garden as in another text might be the very image of a lost paradise—but for which Cocteau is nothing but the site of endless bitter struggle, of unleashed appetites and permanent danger: “It is Dante’s
Inferno
. Each tree, each bush, shudders in the place assigned to it, in torment. The flowers it puts forth are like fires one lights, like cries for help.” Vegetable life is immortal, renewed over and over through the planting of seeds, but the price it pays for that immortality is immobility. Man has the great gift of movement—but, “because everything has
to be paid for,” he pays for it with death and the knowledge of death.

It is a kind of natural history writing toward which Cocteau is tending here and elsewhere. He sees his art as arising in just such a dangerous and contentious garden, of its own force, an “ ‘absurd genius,’ genius that man, whether he likes it or not, has in common with the plants.” This is finally Cocteau’s self-defense. He cannot be blamed if he is only the vessel or vehicle of something beyond himself: “I am never tired of examining that phenomenon in which we appear to be so free and are, if the truth were told, without a shadow of freedom.” The apparent gaiety and free-form spontaneity of his creations cannot disguise the terrifying pressures that give rise to them. Beauty is monstrous: “It is certain that the rhythm of this great machine is a cruel one.”

In a later book he would write: “Poetry is a religion without hope.” The graceful resolutions that art finds it finds for itself alone, and the sole immortality is the survival of art. In his last film,
The Testament of Orpheus
(1960), Cocteau would film his death, burying himself within the filmic image as if he could also be reborn within it. The only hope that
The Difficulty of Being
dares indulge in is one that could have been, and perhaps was, lifted from Whitman: the hope that this very book will be read by “the youth of a period when I shall no longer be there in flesh and bone.” He addresses himself amorously to this future reader: “Little by little you will feel that I inhabit you and you will resurrect me.” Such a hope is all that remains to him after the act of demystification he has performed here. Whatever prestidigitation and acrobatics he has elsewhere indulged in are here laid bare, not bitterly, but for once with a harsh clarity.

I REGRET THE TELLING OF TOO MANY THINGS THAT
are there to tell and too few of those that are not there to tell but which come back to us, so completely surrounded by emptiness that we no longer know if it was a train, or which one, that carried the bicycles in the van—but why, in God’s name?—since the market-place (and I’m thinking of the one at Saint-Rémy-sur-Deule or of Cadet Rouselle
^*
or of any other place of grimy slate) was on a sheer slope ending at that accursed house—or maybe not—where we lunched, guilty of what and with whom, I ask myself. There is enough to let me remember this and the steeply sloping
place
in the sun, but not enough for me to recall the date, the name, the region, the people, the details. All of which places this
place
, a regular sun-trap, in such precarious balance that I feel sick at the thought of it still existing in space with that low house and those people down below.

And other things not to tell. Such as about a village fair where I got lost, on the other side of the Seine at Sartrouville perhaps, near a laundry-boat on which was written:
Madame Levaneur
. There they smoked cacao-leaf cigars. And those cigars, those too, have nothing to do with anything sober or human like the Académie française or the Post Office.

Then too a shawl over my head and the vast coolness of the glacier, and the name Interlaken, and the flower edelweiss and the jerking funicular that starts at the bottom with iced beer, a volley of shot right into one’s temples, and ends at the top in a glass structure, with cyclamen, yellow butterflies, and clerics who chloroform them and crucify them on cork.

Another thing. Well, as for this, I no longer know in what life, and it was certainly not in a dream. (At least one knows where dream things are: in the dream.) A young chimneysweep in a top hat, on a bone-shaker, with the elegance of an acrobat of extraordinary versatility, capable of scaling the ladder he is carrying on his back like a musical instrument. This was near a noisy saw-mill. And others, others, others. And from the emptiness the wreck of derelict emotions flowing in on the scum and returning to the open sea.

So there it is. This is how it strikes me in the peace of this countryside, of this house that cherishes me, that I live in alone, in this March of 1947, after a long, long wait.

I could weep. Not for my house nor for having had to wait for it. At having told too many things that were there to be told and too few of those that were not there to tell.

In the end, everything is resolved, except the difficulty of being, which is never resolved.

Milly
March 1947

I HAVE PASSED THE HALF-CENTURY. THAT IS TO SAY
that death should not have very far to go before catching up with me. The comedy is well on its way. There are few cues left to me. If I look around (at what relates to me) I find nothing but legends thick as leaves on the ground. I avoid getting involved and being caught in this snare. But, except for Roger Lannes’ preface to Seghers’
Morceaux choisis
, I find nothing of myself (nothing, that is to say, that reveals my face). Neither in praise nor in censure do I find the slightest attempt to disentangle the true from the false.

It is true that I can find excuses for the silence of those who could unravel threads. My hair has always grown in all directions and my teeth too and my beard. My nerves and my soul must surely grow in the same way. That is what makes me incomprehensible to those who grow all in one direction and are incapable of imagining a hay-stack. It is this that baffles those who could rid me of this legendary leprosy. They do not know how to take me.

This organic disorder is a safeguard for me because it keeps the thoughtless at a distance. I also get certain advantages from it. It gives me diversity, contrast, a quickness in leaning to one side or the other, as this or that object invites me, and in regaining my balance.

Certainly it makes my dogma obscure, my cause difficult
to defend. But since no one comes to my aid, I run to my own and try to keep up with myself.

For the last five months I have been directing my film
La Belle et la Bête
in a deplorable state of health. After a bad bout of sunstroke in the Bassin d’Arcachon, my life has been a ceaseless struggle with germs and the havoc they cause to one’s constitution.