Jean Cocteau: Past Tense: Volume I, Diaries. John Howard translation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, September 9, 1987.
Novelist, playwright, filmmaker, painter Jean Cocteau stayed at or near France’s artistic avante-garde for most of his long career. His diary records the confrontation of a predominantly ‘Greek’ mind and sensibility with a radically non-‘Greek’ world. A certain Aristophanic wit whets itself thereby: When he hears that Monaco’s prince claims to find the casino that underpins his country’s economy embarrassing, “I answered that the prince was wrong, that the casino was the last temple. The acknowledged Temple of Chance: a god much more powerful than is imagined in our age of economic planning.” The ancient Greeks saw this more clearly than moderns do, and Cocteau rather likes the older gods—”Gods with nothing terrible, nothing vague about them. Gods who are concerned with human affairs, who marry the wives of men and give them children.” Americans will find him a bit reminiscent of his contemporary, Ezra Pound, who also preferred Hellenism to Hebraism for its clarity of thought and cleanness of style.
Cocteau is ‘Greek’ both when he looks at art and when he makes it. “To admire is to efface yourself. To put yourself in someone else’s place. Unfortunately so few people (and so few French people) know how to get outside themselves,” escape their own (very modern) individualism or ‘subjectivity.’ From Descartes to Rousseau to Sartre, the French trap themselves inside themselves; when they break out, their politics inclines toward dream-work, the residue of excessive inwardness.
In his own work, which he always calls poetry though it comes in many genres, Cocteau insists not on ‘creativity,’ as moderns do, but craftsmanship, the Greek technē. Today, he complains, “Whatever is botched and perfunctory is called ‘human.’ The profession, the craft, which consists in fabricating the vehicle by which the human is expressed, passes for an intellectual task from which humanism is excluded. The well-written, well-painted work is ‘cold’…. This is the defense of the mediocre. It has the advantage of numbers on its side.” In his own way, he extends Tocqueville’s insights on democracy.
Cocteau therefore applauds Matisse, who buys phonograph records to play while painting, but who “stops at Beethoven,” that Vesuvius of emotion whose eruptions thrill mass audiences. Even the diary form itself, the most personal genre, bends to Cocteau’s non-individualistic purposes. He uses it not to confess but to record. Events do not serve introspection, or self-advertisement; they stimulate (often aphoristic) expression of perceptions registering the world instead of the feelings.
Nor does such poetic expression imply estheticism. “It is likely I would not have devoted myself to poetry in this world, which remains insensitive to it, if poetry were not a morality.” “In a world of disorder, set oneself in order.” Cocteau calls this “acute individualism,” but he means something ‘Greek’: “One’s own equilibrium collaborates with a universal equilibrium whose advantages we shall never know.” Expression of oneself—the disciplined ordering of oneself, not ‘self-expression’—”is what I call an ethic.”
“What is more hateful than Jules Laforgue and free verse? True freedom must be won within the rules. To escape prison under everyone’s nose.” Such freedom calls for “hard virtue,” not “the soft kind.” It requires not only discipline but intelligence to guide that discipline. Cocteau would “restore to God the intelligence transferred to the devil’s account, especially in the sixteenth century, when the devil took the leading role…. The older I get, the more I believe that it is not only goodness which counts—but a goodness which does not extinguish mind.” Cocteau thus admires Nietzsche’s “diamond edge” in the aphoristic writings but deplores Zarathustra.
Cocteau departs from the Greeks in at least one respect. While lauding intelligence as integral to morality, he claims to dislike prudence, rather as Nietzsche does. He nonetheless exercises it, in his own way. When dealing with a journalist, “I say a few words which he makes as much noise out of as he can. Whereupon I am held responsible for the noise. This conspiracy of noise has replaced, in my case, the conspiracy of silence. Moreover, the two get along famously together. For noise conceals real work and establishes the reputation for brio which critics confuse with professional conscience.” When he says, “I am a lie that always tells the truth,” Cocteau means that social life imposes masks no poet removes; the poet uses his mask, speaks the truth through it, as Greek actors did.
Moderns try to dispense altogether with masks. This leads to the comedy of sincere effusion. “Our age is academic and uneducated; everyone is a professor who knows nothing and is eager to teach it to everyone else.” Cocteau sees that “the trouble started with the Encyclopedists,” those devotees of ‘Enlightenment.’ “They told everyone to think. As a result, stupidity thinks—something which had never been seen before.” Unlike any other Frenchman on record, Cocteau rates Gulliver’s Travels over Candide, saying, “Laputa is a very good account of what is happening right now in America and Europe.”
It is the dogmatism as much as the misjudged egalitarianism of ‘Enlightenment’ Cocteau dislikes. “Don’t close the circle. Leave an opening. Descartes and the Encyclopedists closed the circle. Pascal and Rousseau left it open. One must avoid filling in the gaps. Our age has made this mistake.” Politically, one must avoid the temptation—one almost imposed on prominent artists—to have an opinion. “Our modern terminology is very dangerous; if people can no longer use words like ‘message’ and ‘commitment,’ they doubt their own intelligence; they reach a point where they claim that the refusal of political commitment is a negative commitment.” But the refusal to ‘take a stand’ need not betray opportunism; it may be a very sensible thing to do.
Cocteau learned this in the harsh school of experience, and it took more than one lesson. He flirted with fascism in the 1930s, then had his brush with Communism after the Second World War. He failed to heed his own advice, yielding to the temptation of petition-signing and remark-making. He tries to explain one of his acts of idiocy: “I once said there is one great politician of our time: Stalin. This had nothing to do with the system [i.e. the Soviet regime]. Stalin refuses all dialogue because he knows that a conversation with fools always degenerates into a dispute.” Yes, but even such degeneracy might be preferred to mass murder. Cocteau evidently shared the illusions (circa 1952) of French intellectuals generally regarding Stalin’s crimes, reports of which only became believable to the Left after Khruschev reported a few of them in 1956. He does offer one sensible political comment: the Americans, he observes in the early 1960s, are giving the Soviets time to strengthen themselves militarily; this will prove ruinous for the Americans. Twenty-five years later, no prudent person could simply deny this prediction.
He is better on his fellow-poets. “Will the monstrous stupidity of Gide’s Journal ever be discovered?” “It was the child in Gide that I liked. His immoralism seems to me a lot of nonsense. And his Nobel [Prize] is a hoot.” Proust “is very hard in his judgment of snobs and pederasts in order to deflect attention from his own person.” Charlie Chaplin “has [the] childlike fury of humanitarianism,” as he attempts to involve his audiences in his own self-pity.
Five more volumes of Cocteau’s Diaries await translation, and they make a good introduction to his other works, which, except for the films, do not travel easily overseas. Intelligent ‘Greekness’ may have its limitations, and Cocteau’s version, for all its celebration of hardness, has soft edges (the old gods didn’t always marry the wives of men). But his form of intelligence does put overweening modernity in perspective, often in a salutarily jarring way. Many of us get what we deserve in life, but only a remarkable man metes out what he deserves in his very style of writing.
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