by Jean Cocteau
THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING
FOREWORD
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
* The simple-minded hero of an old popular song, symbolizing anything ramshackle or nonsensical. E.S.
ON CONVERSATION
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.
I am writing these lines on a mountain of snow surrounded by other mountains, beneath a sullen sky. Medicine asserts that germs surrender to altitude. It seems to me that, on the contrary, they love it and gain strength here at the same time as I do.
Suffering is a habit. I am inured to it. During the film they talked about my courage. I would call it rather a laziness in looking after myself. I let myself sink as heavily as possible, with a passive strength, into work.
This work distracted me from my illness and as it was clear that the snow treatment was useless, I found it more profitable to keep doggedly to my work than to seek exile in tedious solitude. Even here, where I should curb my spirit and live curled up in a ball, I never cease conversing with you.
With whom else should I converse? These hotels are the receptacles of a new society which lives at our expense and emulates a luxury learned from films and newspapers. As a result there is this hurly-burly of children galloping between the tables, whose families don’t know that there is such a thing as being well brought up. In doorways the ladies give way to us. One recognizes here the usual method of showing the customer out of a very small shop. These ladies and gentlemen go about looking positively mediaeval in their sporting outfits. They put on their skis, climb slopes and proudly break their legs. I keep to myself as far as possible, walk in the snow, shut myself up in my room, and avenge myself on this piece of paper for not being able to give myself up to the only sport I like, which in 1580 was called conferring, and which is conversation.
Now the sun is out, painting our lovely world with many colours. Afar through my window this world shows me a pageant of knights on horseback, surrounded by pennants, lances, escutcheons, fanfares, hustings of a white tournament. The peaks are flecked with shadows and with snow more dazzling than scarlet. But I converse none the less, for my joy is no joy if I cannot share it with someone. At Morzine, I have no contact with anyone. These people scarcely have the power of speech. They only use their mouths for eating. Many leave, recalled by the business which gives them wealth.
ON MY CHILDHOOD
I WAS BORN ON THE FIFTH OF JULY 1889, PLACE Sully at Maisons-Laffitte (Seine-et-Oise).
Maisons-Laffitte is a kind of park for trainers, strewn with villas, gardens, avenues of limes, lawns, flower-beds, squares with fountains. There the race-horse and the bicycle reign supreme. One used to play tennis at this house or that, in a bourgeois world which the Dreyfus case split in two. The Seine, the training track, the wall of the forest of Saint-Germain into which you enter through a little gate, deserted corners in which to play detectives, the camp below, the little inns with their arbours, the village fair, the fireworks, the gallantry of the firemen, the Mansard château, its wild flowering grass and its busts of Roman emperors, all this made up a kingdom calculated to encourage the illusion childhood has of living in places unlike any others in the world.
Last year I had the painful experience of being taken by friends to that Place Sully, full of those pale green spikes that creep up inside one’s sleeves and of wild pinks. I fondly thought that I would show them my house and perhaps, difficult though this is, make them share the dream it conjures up for me. My first feeling was of being lost in space, as happens when one is blindfolded and released at one point when one thinks one is at another. Was that my white gate, my trellised fence; were those my trees, my lawn, the house where I was born and the long windows of the billiard room? A sand track had replaced grass, pond, flower-beds. A tall grey structure flanked by a barn occupied the site of our house. Grooms came and went, looking at us suspiciously as they passed. This produced in me, while I held on to the bars of the repainted gate, like
a prisoner shut out, a painful sensation which was nothing more than my memories being pitchforked away, unable to find their old ways and the niche where I believed them to be sleeping until I came. I turned round. Would I perhaps find a refuge on the other side of the square? We used to cross it in the sunshine to go to the clos André (so named after my uncle). The iron gate would creak open and reveal on the right the pelts of heliotrope. And then Eden opened. The kitchen garden of discoveries. For it is in the shade of thickets of lilac, of red-currant bushes, of outhouses that childhood seeks to understand the secrets of the grown-up people’s universe.
An even worse surprise awaited me. The clos had been parcelled out in lots. It was crowded with little workmen’s houses which appeared to be numberless. The grapes in their paper bags, the hot-cheeked peaches, the hairy gooseberries which burst in the mouth, the smell of the geraniums in the greenhouse, the flagstones of the hen-run, on which the greengages fell, splitting their heads and bleeding gold, the frogs in the pond, dead in operatic attitudes with the hand on the heart, all this magic became, in that minute, the ghost of one murdered, asking for justice.
We visited avenues where there was less destruction than in my square. Gardens and houses still so unchanged that I could have dug up some object buried forty years before, when we played at hidden treasure. We strolled along the boundary of the park where Max Lebaudy (the little Sugar Manufacturer) organized bullfights and washed his carriages in champagne.
You may imagine how such sights could excite the cruel and adventurous spirit of children. In 1904 we used to prowl round that fence and try to scale it, standing on the saddles of our bicycles.
But enough of that. To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream. It is as well to remind oneself that everyone harbours such memories and does not impose them on us.
If I have complained for rather too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it. But I have quickly strapped my bags and I shall not speak of it again.
ON MY STYLE
I AM NEITHER CHEERFUL NOR SAD. BUT I CAN BE completely the one or completely the other to excess. In conversation, if I am in good form, I forget the sorrows behind me, a pain I am suffering from, forget myself, so greatly do words intoxicate me and sweep ideas along with them. They come to me far better than in solitude and, often, to write an article is torture, whereas I can speak it without effort. This frenzy of speech gives an impression of a facility that I do not possess. For as soon as I hold myself in check, this facility gives way to arduous labour, the climbing of a hill that seems to me precipitous and interminable. Added to which is a superstitious fear of getting going, being always afraid of starting on the wrong tack. This induces a kind of laziness and is akin to what the psychiatrists call ‘the agony of the act’. The white paper, the ink, the pen alarm me. I know that they are in league against my will to write. If I succeed in conquering them, then the engine warms up, the work drives me and my mind functions. But it is essential that I should interfere as little as possible; that I should almost doze over it. The slightest consciousness of this process stops it. And if I want to get it going again, I have to wait until the machinery chooses, and not try to persuade it by some trick. That is why I do not use tables, which intimidate me and look too inviting. I write at any hour, on my knee. With drawing it is the same. I know very well how to fake a line, but that’s not the real thing, and I only give birth to the true line when it so wishes.
My dreams are nearly always criticisms of my actions, so severe and so accurate that they could be a lesson to me. But unfortunately they caricature the very structure of my soul and discourage me rather than giving me the means to battle with myself. For no one knows his own weaknesses better than I, and if I happen to read some article attacking me, I feel that I could strike closer to the mark, that the steel would bury itself up to the hilt and there would be nothing left for me to do but fold up, hang out my tongue and fall on my knees in the arena.
One must not confuse intelligence, so adept at duping its man, with that other organ, seated we know not where, which informs us—irrevocably—of our limitations. No one can scale them. The effort would be seen through. It would further emphasize the narrow space accorded to our movements. It is through the power to revolve within this space that talent proves itself. Only thus can we progress. And each progress can only be of a moral kind, since each one of our ventures takes us unawares. We can count on nothing but integrity. Every trick leads to another. A blunder is preferable. The anonymous public boos at it, but forgives us. Tricks give themselves away in the long run. The public turns away with the blank expression of a woman who once loved but loves no longer.
That is why I took pains not to waste my strength at school. I correct carelessly, let a thousand faults pass, am lazy about rereading my work and only reread the idea. So long as what’s to be said is said, it’s all one to me. All the same I have my method. This consists in being quick, hard, economical in words, in unrhyming my prose, in taking aim regardless of style and hitting the bull’s-eye at whatever cost.
Rereading my work in proper perspective I am ashamed only of the trimmings. They harm us, because they distract from us. The public loves them; it is blinded by them and ignores the rest. I have heard Charles Chaplin deplore having left in his film The Gold Rush that dance of the bread rolls for which every spectator congratulates him. To him it is only a blot that catches the eye. I have also heard him say (on the subject of decorative style) that after a film he ‘shakes the tree’. One must only keep, he added, what sticks to the branches.
Often the decoration is not of one’s own volition. It is the result of a certain balance. For the public such balance has a superficial charm which consoles them for not properly appreciating the basic matter. This is the case with Picasso. This complete artist is made up of a man and a woman. In him terrible domestic scenes take place. Never was so much crockery smashed. In the end the man is always right and slams the door. But there remains of the woman an elegance, an organic gentleness, a kind of luxuriousness which gives an excuse to those who are afraid of strength and cannot follow the man beyond the threshold.
ON THE WORK AND THE LEGEND
TO BE GIFTED IS TO BE LOST, UNLESS ONE SEES clearly in time to level the slopes instead of sliding down them all.
How to conquer a gift should be the main study of anybody who recognizes one in himself. And such a study is a subtle matter if by ill luck one only becomes aware of it rather late. I have spent my life and am still doing so, opposing an ill-starred destiny. What a dance it has led me!
And what a complex matter it is to be clear-sighted, since gifts assume the first shape they meet and this shape might perchance be the right one. Mine was wrong. What saved me was that I went so badly astray that I could no longer have the slightest doubt.
My family was no help to me. It judged by success. It was amateur and meddlesome.
Raymond Radiguet, during the Great War (which he called the summer holidays) read, on the Marne at Parc Saint-Maur, the books in his father’s library. They were ours. Thus we were his classics. We bored him stiff, as was only natural, and at the age of fourteen he longed to refute us. When I met him at Max Jacob’s, he pulled me out of a pitfall, for through fleeing from myself as fast as my legs would carry me, I was in danger of finding myself one day heaven knows where. He calmed me down with his own calm. He taught me the true way. That of forgetting that one is a poet and of allowing things to happen subconsciously. But his engine was new. Mine was carboned up and noisy.
At this time Raymond Radiguet was fifteen. Erik Satie was nearly sixty. Those two—at opposite ends of the pole—taught me to understand myself. The only glory of which I can boast is that I was amenable to their teaching. Erik Satie was an incredible character. By that I mean that one cannot describe him. Honfleur and Scotland were his paternal and maternal origins. It was from Honfleur he
acquired the style of Alphonse Allais’ stories, stories in which there is hidden poetry and which are quite unlike any of the silly anecdotes that go the rounds.
From Scotland he got a dour eccentricity.
In appearance he was a civil servant, with a goatee, an eyeglass, an umbrella, a bowler hat.
Egotistic, cruel, obsessive, he listened to nothing that did not subscribe to his dogma and flew into violent tempers with those who opposed it. Egotistic, because he thought of nothing but his music. Cruel, because he defended his music. Obsessive, because he went on polishing his music. And his music was tender. So was he, in his own way.
For several years Erik Satie came in the morning to 10 rue d’Anjou and sat in my room. He kept on his overcoat (on which he could not have borne the slightest stain), his gloves, his hat tilted over his eyeglass, his umbrella in his hand. With his free hand he shielded his mouth, which would curl when he talked or laughed. He would come from Arcueil on foot. He lived there in a small room where, after his death, all the letters from his friends were found under a mountain of dust. He had not opened one.
He scrubbed himself with pumice stone. He never used water.
In that period, when music overflowed in all directions, acknowledging the genius of Debussy, fearing his despotism (they fraternized and quarrelled to the end), he turned his back on his school and became, at the Schola Cantorum, the comic Socrates we knew.