The Difficulty of Being

by Jean Cocteau

  What memories I have of all this! What could I not write about it! That is not my purpose. After the scandal of Le Sacre, I went to join Stravinsky at Leysin, where he was looking after his wife. There I finished the Potomak, begun at Offranville at J. E. Blanche’s house, under the eye of Gide. Returning to Maisons-Laffitte I decided to put an end to it or to be reborn. I became a recluse. I tortured myself. I questioned myself. I insulted myself. I punished myself with self-denial.

  I kept nothing of myself but the ashes. The war came. It found me well prepared to escape its traps, to judge what it brings, what it takes away and how it delivers us from stupidity, now busy elsewhere. I had the good fortune to be living close to the marines. Among them an incredible freedom of thought prevailed. I have described this in the Discours du Grand Sommeil and in Thomas l’Imposteur.†

  I repeat that, in Paris, the field was free. We occupied it. As early as 1916 our revolution began.

  After Stravinsky, Picasso. At last I knew the secret without knowledge of which all mental effort is fruitless. A world existed in which the artist finds before he seeks and finds unceasingly. A world where the wars are the wars of religion. Picasso, Stravinsky were its leaders.

  One attaches too much importance to the word genius. One is too economical with it. Stendhal used it to describe a woman who knew how to step into a carriage. In this sense I had genius and very little talent. My mind went by instinct straight to the mark, but did not know how to use it. One can guess what the friendship meant to me of the creators of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and of Les Noces. I elbowed my way through a mass of quarrels, disputes, trials for heresy. I searched for myself. I thought I recognized myself, I lost sight of myself, I ran after myself, I caught myself up, out of breath. As soon as I succumbed to some spell I was up in arms against it.

  That youth progresses by injustice, is justice. For soon enough comes the age of looking back. One returns and can then enjoy what one strode over or trampled underfoot on one’s way.

  The first chimes of a period which began in 1912 and will only end with my death, were rung for me by Diaghilev, one night in the Place de la Concorde. We were going home, having had supper after the show. Nijinsky was sulking as usual. He was walking ahead of us. Diaghilev was scoffing at my absurdities. When I questioned him about his moderation (I was used to praise), he stopped, adjusted his eyeglass and said: ‘Astonish me.’ The idea of surprise, so enchanting in Apollinaire, had never occurred to me.

  In 1917, the evening of the first performance of Parade, I did astonish him.

  This very brave man listened, white as a sheet, to the fury of the house. He was frightened. He had reason to be. Picasso, Satie and I were unable to get back to the wings. The crowd recognized and threatened us. Without Apollinaire, his uniform and the bandage round his head, women armed with pins would have put out our eyes.

  A little while later the Joseph of Hofmannsthal was given a triumphant reception. I was in his box. At the tenth curtain call Hofmannsthal leant over to Diaghilev: ‘I would have preferred a scandal,’ he told him. And Diaghilev, in the same manner he had used when he said to me ‘Astonish me,’ replied to him: ‘But you see … you see that’s not so easy.’

  From 1917, when he was fourteen, Raymond Radiguet taught me to distrust the new if it had a new look, to run counter to the fashions of the avant-garde. This puts one in an awkward position. One shocks the right. One shocks the left. But, at a distance, all these contradictions come together under one label. Clever the one who can sort this out. The young people who visit our ruins see only one style. The age called ‘heroic’ displays nothing but its daring. This is how a Museum works. It levels. Ingres and Delacroix side by side, Matisse with Picasso, Braque with Bonnard. And even, let me say, in a recent revival of Faust, the old garden set, the work of Jusseaume, had become, thanks to dust and unconscious similarities, a magnificent Claude Monet.

  But this phenomenon of perspective does not concern youth. Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.

  * The Greek soothsayer. E.S.

  † The Impostor, translated by Dorothy Williams. Peter Owen, 1957. E.S.

  ON FRANCE

  FRANCE IS A COUNTRY THAT DISPARAGES HERSELF. This is all to the good, for otherwise she would be the most pretentious country in the world. The essential thing is that she is not self-conscious. Whatever is self-conscious neutralizes itself. In my novel Les Enfants Terribles I took great care to show that this sister and this brother were not self-conscious. Had they been conscious of their poetic strength they would at once have been aesthetes and have moved from the active to the passive. No. They loathe themselves. They loathe their room. They want another life. That, no doubt, of such as imitate them and lose their privileges for a world that only exists through the certainty that privileges are elsewhere and that they don’t possess any.

  I have at home a letter of de Musset’s written at the period most rich in genius. He complains that there is not one artist, not one book, not one painter, not one play. The Comédie-Française, he says, is crumbling in the dust, and Madame Malibran is singing in London because the Opéra sings out of tune. Every period in France has this peculiarity that, with all the richness under her nose, she sees nothing there and looks for it elsewhere.

  How ridiculous are those who try to express her greatness in words! ‘Greatness, purity, constructive works.’ Such is the modern refrain. Meanwhile greatness, purity, constructive works are produced in a form that remains invisible to them and would seem to them a disgrace to the country. And the critics judge the works and do not realize that they are judged by them. Who makes the greatness of France? It is Villon, it is Rimbaud, it is Verlaine, it is Baudelaire. All that splendid company was put in the lock-up. People wanted to drive it out of France. It was left to die in the poorhouse. I do not mean Joan of Arc. With her it’s the trial that counts. Sad is her revenge. Poor Péguy! I was so fond of him. He was an anarchist. What would he say of the use made of his name?

  France’s attitude after the liberation was simple. She did not take one. Under the yoke of armed force, how could she? What line should she have taken? Said to the world: ‘I didn’t want to fight. I don’t like to fight. I had no weapons. I shall not have any. I possess a secret weapon. What? Since it is secret, how can I answer you?’ And if the world insists: ‘My secret weapon is a tradition of anarchy.’

  That is a powerful answer. An enigma. Enough to perplex the great powers. ‘Invade me. All the same in the long run I shall possess you.’

  Since such a Chinese attitude has not been adopted and we have talked a lot of hot air, what chance is now left to us? To become a village, as Lao-Tze advocates. To be no longer enviable save through the invisible, more spacious than the visible, and sovereign.

  Lao-Tze, speaking of the ideal empire, says: ‘To hear the cocks from one end of the land to the other.’

  What is France, I ask you? A cock on a dung-heap. Remove the dung, the cock dies. That’s what happens when you push folly to the point of confusing a dung-heap with a heap of garbage.

  ON THE THEATRE

  EVER SINCE AS A CHILD I WATCHED MY MOTHER and my father leaving for the theatre, I have suffered from the fever of crimson and gold. I never get used to it. Every curtain that rises takes me back to that solemn moment when, as the curtain of the Châtelet rose on Round the World in Eighty Days, the chasms of darkness and of light became one, separated by the footlights. These footlights set the bottom of the wall of painted canvas aglow. As this flimsy wall did not touch the boards, one obtained a glimpse of coming and going in a furnace. Apart from this gap the only aperture by which the two worlds communicated was a hole edged with brass. The smell of the circus was one thing. The narrow box with its uncomfortable little chairs was another. And as in the rooms of Mena-House, where the windows open on to the Pyramids, in the little box the oceanic murmur of the audience hits you in the face, the cry of the attendants
: ‘Peppermints, caramels, acid-drops,’ the crimson cavern and the chandelier which Baudelaire liked better than the show.

  As time passes, the theatre I work in does not lose its prestige. I respect it. It overawes me. It fascinates me. There I divide in two. I live in it and I become the child permitted by the ticket seller to enter Hades.

  When I put on La Voix Humaine at the Comédie-Française, and later Renaud et Armide, I was astonished that my colleagues should consider this theatre to be the same as any other and would produce plays there written for no matter where. The Comédie-Française remained in my eyes that house of marble and velvet haunted by the great shades of my youth. Yesterday, Marais telephoned from Paris saying they had asked him to return there, but this time on first-class terms. He asked my advice, no doubt in order that I might dissuade him. I have a number of reasons for doing so. But I hesitated to reply. The naïve respect which this theatre rouses in me had just waved its red cape. In a flash I saw Mounet-Sully crossing the stage from right to left in the guise of the young Ruy Blas. He was old. His beard was white. Almost blind, his head sunken between his shoulders, he held a candelabrum. And his walk was the Spaniard’s.

  I saw de Max, with a hand covered in rings, shaking his black locks in the air and trailing his veils. I saw Madame Bartet, old bird without a neck, singing Andromache. I saw Madame Segond-Weber, in Rodogune, poisoned, and goose-stepping off the stage with her tongue out.

  All this was hardly likely to encourage a young man. And yet I hesitated to say to him: ‘refuse’. Once the receiver was hung up again, those superb old-stagers were still operative. Reason told me: ‘This actor has just made your film. He is acting in your play. He is to act in your next. He is in demand everywhere. He is highly paid. He is free.’ Unreason showed me the child that I had been, led to my Thursday seat by an attendant with a pink bow and a grey moustache, and Marais in that frame of gold, playing the part of Nero in which he is incomparable.

  That’s how I am, ensnared by charms. Swiftly dazzled. I belong to the moment. It falsifies my perspective. It puts a stopper on diversity. I give way to anyone who knows how to get round me. I take on responsibilities. I dawdle over them and miss the mark right and left. That is why solitude is good for me. It reunites my quicksilver.

  The sun which had been shining is veiled in mist. The motley families depart. The hotel empties and I can do my holiday tasks. Between two pages of writing I search for the title of my play. Now that it is finished the title eludes me. And the title La Reine Morte, which would suit it, troubles me greatly. My queen has no name. The pseudonym of Stanislas: Azraël, is suitable, but they tell me that this would be remembered as Israël. One title alone exists. It will be, so it is. Time conceals it from me. How discover it, covered by a hundred others? I have to avoid the this, the that. Avoid the image. Avoid the descriptive and the undescriptive. Avoid the exact meaning and the inexact. The soft, the hard. Neither long nor short. Right to catch the eye, the ear, the mind. Simple to read and to remember. I had announced several. I had to repeat them twice and the journalists still got them wrong. My real title defies me. It enjoys its hiding-place, like a child one keeps calling, and whom one believes drowned in the pond.*

  The theatre is a furnace. Whoever does not suspect this is consumed in the long run or else burns out at once. It damps one’s zeal. It attacks by fire and by water.

  The audience is a surging sea. It gives one nausea. This is called stage fright. It’s all very well to say to oneself: it’s the theatre, it’s the audience. It makes no difference. One makes up one’s mind not to be caught again. One returns. It’s the Casino. One stakes all one has. It’s exquisite torture. Anyone but a conceited ass goes through it. There is no cure.

  When I rehearse I become a spectator. I am bad at correcting faults. I love actors and they take me in. I listen to something other than myself. The night before the show my weaknesses stare me in the face. It is too late. Consequently, overcome by something very like sea-sickness, I stride up and down the ship, the bunkers, the cabins, the alleyways to the cabins. I dare not look at the sea. Still less dip into it. It seems to me that if I were to enter the auditorium I would sink the ship.

  Here am I then in the wings, straining my ears. Behind the set a play is no longer painted; it draws its own outline. It shows me its flaws in draughtsmanship. I go out. I go and lie down in the dressing-rooms. What my actresses leave there, when changing souls, creates an inevitable vacuum. I suffocate. I get up. I listen. Where have they got to? I listen at doors. Yet I know this sea is subject to rules. Its waves roll in and roll out at my command. A new house reacts to the same effects. But let one of those effects be unduly prolonged and the actor falls into the trap. With difficulty he refuses the rescuing hand of laughter. Such cruel laughter should wound him; it flatters him. ‘I suffer and I make them laugh,’ he tells himself, ‘at this game I win.’ The rescuing hand is quickly offered and quickly grasped, the author forgotten. The boat drifts and you will soon be wrecked. If the actors listen to these sirens, the drama becomes melodrama, the thread connecting the scenes is broken. The rhythm is lost.

  From afar I supervise my crew badly. The ‘imponderables’ escape me. What am I to change? Here are the interpreters who check over and perfect the machine. Here are those who live on the stage and try to conquer the machinery. Diderot speaks lightly. He was not born on the boards.

  I know authors who supervise the actors and write them notes. They achieve discipline. They paralyse. They lock the door that might have suddenly blown open.

  Two great schools of acting confront each other on the stage. They, the authors, prevent the one from embellishing its straight line with some inspired invention, they wake the other from its hypnosis. I prefer to risk the chemistry. Either red or black will come up.

  Writing this paragraph I seem to be in the dressing-room of my actor Marcel André, with whom I like to discuss such things. Yvonne de Bray and Jean Marais are on the stage. Their temperaments harmonize. One wonders by what mechanism they respect the dialogue they are living, forgetting that one wall of the room they are in is missing. Marcel André is speaking. I listen to him. I also listen to the silence of the house. He, for his part, is listening for the call-bell that will bring him into the play. We are only half alive.

  Delicious moments of suffering that I would not exchange for anything.

  Why do you write plays? I am asked by the novelist. Why do you write novels? I am asked by the dramatist. Why do you make films? I am asked by the poet. Why do you draw? I am asked by the critic. Why do you write? I am asked by the draughtsman. Yes, why? I wonder. Doubtless so that my seed may be blown all over the place. I know little about this breath within me, but it is not gentle. It cares not a jot for the sick. It is unmoved by fatigue. It takes advantage of my gifts. It wants to do its part. It is not inspiration, it’s expiration one should say. For this breath comes from 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.

  What have I to do with genius? It only seeks an accomplice in me. What it wants is an excuse to succeed in its evil deeds.

  The main thing, if our action is divided, is not to fuse our efforts. I never settle for one of its branches without amputating others. I prune myself. It is even pretty rare for me to draw in the margins of a piece of writing. That is why I have published albums of drawings relating to my writings but not together. If I did publish them together, the drawings were made a long time afterwards. In Portraits-Souvenir I drew on the spot. The articles appeared in Le Figaro, and articles and drawings of that kind can be done with the same ink.

  Still less could I direct theatre and cinema as a team, for they turn their backs on one another. While I was making my film La Belle et la Bête, the Gymnase was rehearsing my play Les Parents Terribles. The cast accused me of being inattentive. Even though I was no longer actually filming, I was the slave of a task in which the language is visual and is not cr
ammed into a frame. I own I had the greatest trouble on earth in listening to an immobile text and giving it all my attention. Once a work is completed, I have to wait before undertaking another. The completed work does not release me quickly. It moves its chattels slowly. The wise thing then is a change of air and of room. The new material comes to me on my walks. Whatever happens I mustn’t notice it. If I interfere, it doesn’t come any more. One fine day the work demands my help. I give myself up to it in one fell swoop. My pauses are its own. If it falls asleep my pen skids. As soon as it wakes, it gives me a shake. It couldn’t care less if I am asleep. Get up, it says, so that I can dictate. And it is not easy to follow. Its vocabulary is not of words.

  In Opium I describe a liberty I took during Les Enfants Terribles. Seduced by the flow of my pen, I believed I was free to invent for myself. Everything stood still. I had to await its good pleasure.

  La Machine Infernale used another mood. It would desert me for very long periods. It would wait for other fevers to cease distracting me. It wanted me for itself. If my mind wandered at all, it turned its back on me. La Machine à Ecrire is a disaster. From the first, when I thought myself ready to write it, another inspiration took over and dictated La Fin du Potomak. I wanted to return to it. I took the dictation badly. After the first act I just wrote it my own way. Once the play was written, I persistently rewrote it. And after all that I listened to advice and ruined the end. May that play be an example to me! I shall never be my own master. I am made for obedience. And these lines that I am writing, a week ago I did not know I had to write.

  Of all the problems that confuse us, that of fate and of free will is the most obscure. What? The thing is written in advance and we can write it, we can change the end? The truth is different. Time does not exist. It is what enfolds us. What we believe we carry out later is done all in one piece. Time reels it off for us. Our work is already done. However we still have to discover it. It is this passive participation which is so astounding. And with reason. It leaves the public incredulous. I decide and I do not decide. I obey and I direct. It’s a great mystery. La Machine à Ecrire was not a bad play to begin with.† The juice left me high and dry. I was free. But I am no longer free to remove the blot I made. It is there.