Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)

In his 1946/47 stage production, Cocteau intriguingly returns to the major themes of 'Beauty and the Beast' with a much darker beat. One long decade after the assassination of her husband, a reclusive queen comes face-to-face with the deceased's doppelgänger and anarchist poet, however, fate has other plans. Poet Stanislas falls in love with the frozen queen Natasha. Opening the play to a cinematic vision in grandiose royal surroundings , Cocteau neatly contrasts the visuals by keeping the show more dialogue close and intimate. The dialogue is excruciatingly painful to sit through, perhaps being a period piece, we have to make do with characters speaking in more elaborate terms and beating around the bush. The situations the story unfolded were rather unconvincing, and quite dry. show less

When me and my sister were younger – like four and five, or five and six – we used to play these epic games in the back seat of our parents' car on long journeys. The car was a big old Citroën estate, like the vehicle from Ghostbusters, and the back seat folded down to form a huge play area (this was before anyone bothered about seat-belts in the back).

The games we played were incomprehensible to everyone but ourselves, and now we're older they've grown incomprehensible to us too. All I show more can remember are a few titles. One game was called ‘Baby in Australia’, which – bizarrely – was about a baby travelling around the United States having adventures. It was like Rugrats meets The Littlest Hobo. I'm not quite sure why we gave this such a confusing name. Another, more logically titled, game was called ‘Strongbaby’ (one word), and involved a baby with superhuman strength. I'm not certain now to what use an infant would really put Hulk-like strength, nor for that matter why we were both so obsessed with babies. But mothers and fathers reading this will readily appreciate that our own parents were happy to tolerate what appeared to be incipient psychological problems on the grounds that it kept us quiet for the length of a three-hour jaunt up the A1M.

I hadn't thought about this for years. Then I read Les Enfants terribles and it all came flooding back. If you've read the book this may sound alarming, but fortunately in our case it apparently never went further than a lot of weirdly regimented transport-based role-plays. For Paul and Élisabeth, the central characters of Cocteau's dark and dreamy novel, the shared world of childhood fantasy takes on a more all-consuming and sinister aspect.

Orphaned twins, they construct a haven of their own in their dead mother's apartment on the rue Montmartre (just round the corner from where I work), where their room is all low lighting, red textiles, pictures pinned up from newspapers, and a collection of hoarded ‘treasure’ brought back from the outside world. Here, in the middle of the night, the teenagers play what is only ever referred to as ‘the game’, a sort of never-ending psychological test of one-upmanship which governs their entire lives: the game is nothing less than a ‘semi-consciousness into which the children plunged’, which ‘dominated space and time; it initiated dreams, blended them with reality’.

Outsiders are brought into this private world, but they are always ultimately cat's-paws used by one sibling to get at the other. The self-imposed rituals are about domination, and there is a crackle of erotic charge everywhere: indeed at times this reads like the most literary treatment of D/S ever made. This is not to say that the book is about sex; it is much more oblique and remarkable than that. In one extraordinary scene, Élisabeth waits until Paul is just dropping off to sleep, and then, at three in the morning, she suddenly produces a bowl of crayfish from under her bed and starts eating them, ignoring Paul's anxious requests for her to share.

‘Gérard,’ [she says to Paul's schoolfriend who is with them,] ‘do you know of anything more depraved that some sixteen-year-old kid reduced to asking for a crayfish? He'd lick the rug, don't you know, he'd crawl on all fours. No! Don't give it to him, let him get up, let him come here! He's so vile, this gangling great oaf who refuses to move, dying for nice food but not able to make the effort. It's because I'm ashamed for him that I'm refusing to give him a crayfish….’

[—Gérard, connaissez-vous une chose plus abjecte qu'un type de seize ans qui s'abaisse à demander une écrevisse? Il lécherait la carpette, vous savez, il marcherait à quatre pattes. Non ! ne la lui portez pas, qu'il se lève, qu'il vienne ! C'est trop infecte, à la fin, cette grande bringue qui refuse de bouger, qui crève de gourmandise et qui ne peut pas faire un effort. C'est parce que j'ai honte pour lui que je lui refuse une écrevisse….]

An hour later, when Paul finally gives up and goes to sleep, Élisabeth wakes him and forces him to eat the crayfish, ‘breaking the carapace, pushing the flesh between his teeth’ as Paul struggles to chew while half-asleep: ‘grave, patient, hunched over, she resembled a madwoman force-feeding a dead child.’

It's an incredible scene the like of which I've never read anywhere else, and all described in this beautiful, verbally rich, precise Coctellian prose. The oppressive and erotic atmosphere is picked up on later by one of Élisabeth's friends, who is pining submissively after Paul: she ‘thrilled to be a victim because she felt the room to be full of an amorous electricity whose most brutal shocks were made inoffensive’. The novel's dénouement is going to prove her horribly wrong on this point.

The conclusion is dark and very French: the quasi-incestuous power-play cannot survive impact with adulthood, and implodes with considerable collateral damage. But how difficult for a writer to enter into this private world of childhood fantasy, and how perfectly Cocteau pulls it off. Some of his lines froze me with horrified delight: when the children find their mother dead in her room, the body is described as a ‘petrified scream’ – ‘ce Voltaire furieux qu'ils ne connaissent pas’. He combines the eye of a poet with a good novelist's willingness to examine the psychic areas usually left unexamined.

This year marks fifty years since Cocteau's death, and it's a good excuse to try him out if you haven't yet (as I hadn't until recently). Reading this is like having a beautiful dream that modulates into a beautiful nightmare. I kind of want to send a copy to my own sister, but I can't help feeling like that might be in bad taste. show less

The eroticism and profundity of Tempest of Stars in the midst of my lack of sleep has lost on me. Too brief if not mediocre these poems can be brutishly dreamy with a nice touch of (not even completely explicit albeit fondly phallic) nude illustrations. I can't help but see how some of these poems intersect interestingly with Cocteau The Filmmaker and his bourgeoisie background. His brilliant works like La Belle et la Bête and Orphée particularly come to mind in some of the lines I show more encountered. I think its opening poem, curiously titled "Amour" / "Love", is magnetic enough to plow through this short collection (included below) and I liked the sentiment of "The Poet at Thirty" which I can't find online and link here:

"The twist of a knife is well worth a rose.
Let me kill you slowly,
expertly; your lover
changes you into a dead woman,
metamorphoses you into a beast, an inkpot,
until you shout it.”
— Love

—— Other bewitching excerpts from this collection:

"How is it that time’s deceptive perspectives
take me back to the places where I wrote
Plain-Chant? I find the same sea on these shores
where I seemed to float

dreaming of love, sleep, illustrious things,
whatever youth imagines crazily,
and while this fire activates dormant cells
I drift with memory,"
— from POSTHUMOUS

"The waves, the leaves, the wind
and other faceless creatures
love you, and know you’re still alive,
conjurer of landscapes.
A greengage immolates itself,
its gash bleeds gold;
marble won’t weigh on this man
whose statue is a cloud."
— from IN MEMORY OF CLAUDE DEBUSSY

"A kite from your childhood
suddenly without thread you free yourself
sitting on it
With your ursine hand Garros
then
you point out something to me
and I bend over the edge of the abyss
and I see Paris below
and my city humbler
in its scale
deserted
vulnerable alone its jade coloured Seine
and the more I watch it diminish
the greater my sad love grows
For who goes away from what he loves
to destroy his sad love
and its figure
isolates himself divests himself
hides the rest"
—from INVITATION TO DEATH show less

A minor work from the terrifyingly multitalented Jean Cocteau, novelist, poet, screenwriter, artist, photographer, film director, et various al. My only previous exposure to his œuvre had been the proto-Surrealist ballet Parade, for which Satie had written the music and Picasso had designed the sets. (Those were the days!) Parade was so crazy it started riots; with that in mind, it was a surprise for me to read the carefully measured sentences and elegant judgements contained in this show more collection of micro-essays.

Although the title means ‘Queens of France’, the subjects are not all crowned royals, but rather Cocteau's pick of the queens of French culture, society, fashion and history. He starts with Saint Geneviève in the fifth century and works his way forwards to Anna de Noailles, spending just a couple of pages on each, and summing up what he sees as their intrinsically French, intrinsically female qualities.

It's an interesting format, and reminded me a bit of various French short story collections about series of different women – Nerval's Les Filles de feu, for example, or even Barbey d'Aurevilley's Les Diaboliques. Cocteau has a similar tendency to see women as symbols of some ‘eternal feminine’, but, generally preferring men as he did, he doesn't eroticise them in anything like the same way.

The sketches were originally written to accompany illustrations in a book, and they are very short. What makes them worthwhile are Cocteau's turns of phrase, which everywhere show a wonderful range of vocabulary and a good eye for descriptive flourishes. The Duchess of Étampes has the air of ‘a mouse that's been changed into a princess’, ‘toujours prompte à se loger dans les fromages’; Louis XIV is described in passing as ‘a monumental masterpiece of self-satisfaction’; Madame de Pompadour is ‘a fairy, but a fairy that changes footmen into mice and coaches into pumpkins’; Anna de Noailles has ‘the thin shoulder of a Spanish Christ’. On Joan of Arc he begins intriguingly:

Of all the writers of France, Joan of Arc is the one I admire the most. She signed her name with a cross, not knowing how to write. But I speak her language….

It's all very fresh and very clean. A relatively inconsequential work, no doubt – but for me, having pigeonholed Cocteau as purely an avant-garde experimentalist, it was quietly revelatory. show less