The Difficulty of Being

by Jean Cocteau

  What irritates me is the person whom everyone expects in advance will please me because he is a fantaisiste. Phantasy and frivolity are wedded, I repeat. The fantaisiste incapable of originality, find this in the annoyance he causes you by the lack of coordination in his behaviour. He wants to astonish. He is a hindrance. He thinks himself a marvel. He does not move any of the pawns that are the opening of a game. He contents himself with mixing up the dominoes and the cards, placing the chessmen in positions unsuited to the mechanics of the game, but suited to catch out the players at first glance. He treats times, places, conventions with an insolence which is not even that of the dandy and without ever interrupting his course for the sake of anyone else. He numbs and bludgeons, like the drunkard when he imposes upon us the superiority he feels, from the height of which he despises what he takes for our conventionality, and which is merely our embarrassment.

  I have known fantaisistes in whom phantasy was as it were organic and who died of it. I felt in them a kind of mild madness very dangerous both for themselves and for their friends. Despite the respect which all existence that does not spare itself inspires in us, none the less they fill us with uneasiness. For these fantaisistes are usually mythomaniacs, and sometimes their aim is to hold not our attention but our hearts. If they succeed in this, it means that they are neither frivolous nor given to phantasy, but that they appear so because of their clumsiness in convincing us, from a modesty of spirit which impels them to try to appear exceptional, from a desire to enter into our scheme of things from their remorse at having thought themselves indiscreet. This remorse inveigles them into flights, into total eclipses, into punishments which they inflict upon themselves and of which I could quote appalling instances.

  The world in which they live makes contact with them very difficult for us, since the least word, the least gesture on our part (and which we thought of no significance) sets in motion in them incredible deviations which may lead them even to suicide.

  One must therefore shun them from the beginning, however much they may beguile us in a world where fire is rare and never fails to attract us.

  I have not observed this caution often enough. I considered it unworthy and belonging to a self-indulgence I do not allow myself. Some scruple would make me afraid to slam my door in the face of an unknown guest. I would open it and dare not afterwards change my attitude, so great was my shame at appearing pusillanimous. And that is what is so serious. Instead of swiftly foreseeing the effects of a weakness prejudicial to my surroundings and to my work, I prided myself on defying the traps and jumping into them with both feet. So I behaved in this way more from pride than from natural generosity. And for this I blame myself.

  I mentioned the dandy. One must not be misled by those who saw in his attitude, taken as a means to an end, a visible image of their own haughty spirit and of their rebellion. I understand how Baudelaire would feel the attraction. He goes the other way round. This dramatist is himself a drama. He is drama, theatre, actors, audience, the red curtain, the chandelier. A Brummel is, on the other hand, the perfect male counterpart of the tragedian without a theatre. He will act his part in a void, until he ends up in the final void of a garret where he dies while having all the great names of England announced to him. His comment: ‘I cannot have been well dressed at the Derby, since you remarked on it,’ takes on its full meaning when Baudelaire is reduced to depending upon an article in which Sainte-Beuve admires in his work only a sonnet to the moon. ‘His head hot and his hand cold,’ says Goethe somewhere. The dandy has a cold head and a cold hand. I advise ships to avoid this insolent iceberg. Nothing will change his course. He would commit murder for the sake of tying his cravat. Moreover, his imperialism has no foundation. He is only anointed by himself. One fine day Brummel asks King George to rise and pull the bell-cord. This bell is enough to wake the rightful king from his brief hypnosis, and he shows the king of fashion the door.

  When kings show poets the door, the poets win. When the King of England shows Brummel the door, Brummel is lost.

  Our era is very sick. It has invented ‘escapism’. The horrors afflicting the victims of the frivolity of a war amply provide it with certain outlets. It dopes itself through the medium of its newspapers, and even the atomic bomb is the occasion for a kind of Jules Verne lyricism—until the moment when a practical joker pulls their leg over the radio. Orson Welles announces the arrival of the Martians. A French broadcast, that of a fireball. Whereupon our supermen no longer think of escaping with their minds but with their legs. They wear them out. They take to flight. They faint. They abort. They call for help. To such a degree that the government is disturbed and forbids the fictitious broadcast. One would think that poetry would soothe them and carry them right away from the hideous reality. This is what they do think and what is exploited by a vast number of magazines, whose smallest advertisement sets ajar the doors to dreams.

  The poet was alone in the midst of an industrial world. Now he is alone in the midst of a poetic world. Thanks to this world, as generously equipped for escapism as it is for winter sports, by the theatres, the cinematograph, the glossy magazines, the poet at last regains his invisibility.

  * It is said that the mind of Pascal was affected as the result of this accident. E.S.

  † I know very well it’s a matter of dying in a state of grace or not. But then how I like the following story. At dinner with Stravinsky, his son Theodore told us that at a luncheon party of free thinkers in New York, a guest had died while insulting the Blessed Virgin. ‘He is lucky,’ said Stravinsky, ‘for he went straight to heaven.’ His son asked him why. And Stravinsky replied: ‘Because he died of shame.’

  ON THE PALAIS-ROYAL

  THE DISORDER AGAINST WHICH I AM FIGHTING recreates itself slyly around me bit by bit. Probably my internal and external crop—soul, hair, eye-teeth, all pointing in every direction, does not end with my person but continues to the extreme limits of its carapace, which limits must extend far beyond my view.

  This carapace is so conditioned to live upon our essence that it is the victim of the afflictions that torment us and grows sick with our skin. The ill from which I suffer, in face of which medicine admits itself powerless, communicates itself to the objects and paraphernalia in my room, maddens them and makes their bric-à-brac assume the strange postures of insomnia and of pain.

  These pains are like stigmata responding to certain needs of my work. Whether it be La Belle et la Bête assailing me in those places where the film compels me to torment an actor with hair and spirit-gum, whether it be an arrow shot at this same actor becoming a shot from the projectors onto my eyes, whether it be the recasting of the script of Le Sang d’un Poète resulting in an intolerable attack on my right hand. Last night, at the end of my resources against this attack, I kept shaking my hand as hard as I could, and I perceived that this was what the poet does when he is trying to rid himself of his wound which is a mouth.

  Here am I then in a bed, itself tortured with rucks and bumps, for in tossing from eve till morning I cause a turmoil.

  From this bed of sorry state I gaze upon my room, a narrow cabin opening onto the arcade of the Palais-Royal, framed by the sound of footsteps. This room has so often been described by journalists, magnified by photographers, that I ask myself if this is really it, so little does it resemble what they portray. That is to say that the journey of what is seen, between the eye through which it enters and the hand through which it emerges, must change the breath into a strange sound, as happens with a hunting-horn. About the red it is difficult not to agree. For the rest I suppose that the objects that are only mine in some haphazard way must have taken on, in the eyes of the journalists, the appearance of what they expected to find, rather than what they really were. They were looking for the store of stage properties for my legends. In fact these objects, the only ones to succeed in remaining in a house from which everything goes, have nothing in common but a peculiar intensity distinguishing them from thousands of other fin
er ones the collectors possess. The most engaging bits of such wreckage, thrown up on this little red beach, is without doubt the Gustave Doré group of which the Charles de Noailles gave me a plaster cast from which I had a bronze made. In it Perseus is to be seen mounted on the hippogryph, held in the air by means of a long spear planted in the gullet of the dragon, which dragon is winding its death throes round Andromeda. This group is on a column standing between the so-called castor window and a tall piece of slate that can be moved aside and that conceals a small room which is too cold to be used in winter. It was there that I wrote Renaud et Armide, away from everything, set free from telephone and door bells, in the summer of 1941, on an architect’s table above which one sees, saved from my room in the rue Vignon where it adorned the wall-paper, Christian Bérard’s large drawing in charcoal and red chalk representing the meeting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.

  The slate door and several others in the hall enable me to jot down in chalk addresses and work to be done, for I have a memory like a sieve. Visitors of a romantic disposition think they are looking at hieroglyphics, rather than at an aid to memory which I sponge out every week.

  On the right of my bed are two heads, one Roman, in marble, of a faun (this belonged to my Lecomte grandfather), the other of Antinoüs, under a glass dome, a painted terracotta, so fragile that only the steadiness of its enamel eyes can have led it here from the depths of centuries like a blind man’s white stick.

  A third head adorns that of my bed: the terracotta of Raymond Radiguet, done by Lipschitz, in the year of his death.

  Here is a list of the pictures hanging on the walls above the flood of disorder: Lithographs for Faust by Eugène Delacroix. Photographs of Rimbaud by Carjat, taken on the day of the sword-stick scandal. Collage by Picasso in a butterfly box. Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by Clairin (she is a sculptress). Original by Bérard for the cover of Opéra. Large figure of a woman by Picasso in Indian ink. Photograph of Mallarmé with his shawl. Picasso’s die (see the end of Potomak). Sketch by Ingres for Tu Marcellus eris. Profile of Baudelaire, dry point by Manet. My portrait done in Rome by Picasso in 1917 and dated Easter Day. Two pen drawings by Victor Hugo. One of Gavroche. Victor Hugo wrote under it: ‘Watching the guillotine.’ The other is a finicky attempt at his monogram. A graceful watercolour of my mother by Wencker.

  The rest smothered under the paraphernalia, the books, the unanswered letters, the bottles of medicine and jars of ointment with which they smear me, is nothing but the seaweed from my storm, the remains of the innumerable apartments and hotels where I lost those treasures they stole from me and of which nothing remains.

  I rented this tiny cellar, wedged between the Palais-Royal Theatre and the block of houses ending in the Comédie-Française, in 1940, when the German army was marching on Paris. I was then living at the Hotel Beaujolais, next door to Colette, and was not to settle in at 36 rue de Montpensier until 1941, after the exodus. The friends to be near whom I had somewhat rashly rented this odd tunnel had had to flee from the premises. The Berls, the Milles and the Lazareffs. I lived here for four years, subjected to insults, aimed at my work and my person. I tend myself there for the moment through weariness, because of the impossibility of finding a suitable dwelling and also because of a charm (in the exact meaning of the word) which the Palais-Royal casts on certain spirits. This charm is made up of the ghosts of the revolutionaries who haunt it, of a silence adorned with birds, following the fêtes of the Directoire, of an almost Chinese setting, as of a dead city between the ramparts of very old squalid houses, bending like the palaces of Venice where Delphine de Nucingen would lead Rastignac to the gaming rooms.*

  There I know everyone, their habits, their cats, their dogs. There I walk among the smiles and the news we get from one another. There I eat in those little cellars to which one descends by four steps. There I meet my friends and the ghost of Giraudoux, who came from elsewhere but was one of us. From my window I gossip with Colette, as she walks across the garden with her cane, her silken cravat, her flat felt hat, her fine eyes, her bare feet, her sandals.

  I shall not like to leave this room and yet I shall have to. A harsh wind is driving me to this. I shall miss, wherever I go into the sunshine, my twilight. I shall miss the theatre lights which the winter snows reflect to me from below. And the sight I saw the other day (among a thousand others): the hairdresser near the Galerie de Chartres had put out his wigs to dry in the sunshine. These wigs were stuck on waxen heads and those heads on the points of the spikes of the railings which at night enclose the ghosts of Thermidor.

  The gates, opening in the morning onto crossroads, passages, vaulted ways, lamps, colonnades, arches, dovecots, perspectives of Russian squares, Roman cities, cellars, kiosks selling postage stamps, books about flagellation, the Légion d’honneur, it is there one plays boules under the trees, it is from there that heads used to roll into the gutters, heads that were the boules of a popular game, and it is there that the processions of ragged ruffians used to file past, brandishing them like fists at the stone-framed sky.

  * From La Comédie humaine by Balzac. E.S.

  ON THE RULE OF THE SOUL

  WE CANNOT RUN FROM PLACE TO PLACE WITHOUT losing something, suddenly move all our goods from one place to another and change our work all in a moment just as we please. Nothing takes so long over its journeys as the soul, and it is slowly, if it detaches itself, that it rejoins the body. Hence those who think themselves speedy are thrown into confusion, badly reassembled, since the soul, joining them little by little and having rejoined them when they departed, is found by them to perform the same exercise in reverse. In the end they come to believe that they are, and are no longer.

  The same thing applies to the discomfort of passing from one work to another, since the finished work goes on living in us and only leaves a very confused place for the new work. It is important, in regard to a journey, to wait for the body to reassemble itself and not to rely on an appearance in which only those who do not know us well can have any faith.

  In regard to one’s works, it is important to wait after each one, and let the body free itself of the vapours which remain in it and which may take a long time to disperse.

  Hence the danger of a work for the cinematograph like the one I have just finished, for the hypnosis it subjects us to is such that it is difficult to tell where it ends. Even when the film detaches itself from us and, having consumed us, circulates with an unconcerned life of its own, more remote than that of the stars, our machine remains subject to it and will not shake it off.

  I have fled from a house, driven away by doorbells and telephone bells. I am living in a countryside where silence, birds, plants, flowers take the place of domestic disorder.* But I do not flatter myself that I am yet where I am or that I am free there. Only a small part of me profits from it. Not only have I had to conquer, in order to move from prison into fresh air, the same disgust as if the opposite were happening, for our habits, whatever they are, have a hold on us, but also one half of me decided to flee and the other half to stay where it was. With the result that I have to wait for myself and be patient until the moment when I shall have rejoined myself. In my estimation it takes a month, after a work or a journey, to regain control of one’s individuality. Until then it is in limbo. Only just enough of me is left to loaf about the garden, contemplating the absurd genius of flowers and recalling certain remarks about them, for instance that of Guez de Balzac, when he tells how a Norwegian peasant, who had never seen roses, was astonished that shrubs should bear fire.

  Such sights pass through me without leaving any imprint. They enter, they leave, I eat, I go to bed, I sleep.

  Each time I find myself in this intermediate state, I wonder if it is permanent. It upsets me to the point of making me exaggerate the void it creates and convinces me that it will never be filled. It is then that exercises would work marvels. A whole course of gymnastics calculated to get a lazy mechanism going again. But I dare not aspire to that. There things
remain a riddle for us as much as animal, vegetable, seed or egg.

  Here I am then between two rhythms, unbalanced, weak in body and lame in mind. Woe to him who rebels against this. An attempt to bypass it would only make things worse. And do not tell me that it is of little importance, that if this task of setting things in motion again is madness, you will destroy it. Nothing that is done can be destroyed. Even if one burns it and nothing of it remains but ashes.

  For if the detailed execution of our labours gives us the illusion that we are free, the completed work gives the lie to such freedom. It is the whole that gives it its inevitable form, like a plant putting forth its flower.

  This is why I spoke of ‘absurd genius’, genius that man, whether he likes it or not, has in common with the plants—and willy-nilly, unless he throws himself into confusion by his own act, the man who has it must in some way be absurd—and without the pride of flowering.

  This is my method of waiting, and my anguish disgusts me, since it is hardly likely that plants set themselves such problems as would exhaust and etiolate them.

  What is one to do against this fear of emptiness? It dries me up. One must forget it. I practise doing so. I go to the point of reading children’s books. I avoid any contact which might make me aware of the passing of time. I vegetate. I talk to dogs.

  To be aware that within oneself are such mysteries is not conducive to comfort. Therefore one’s discomfort, the uneasiness it causes and the resulting wear and tear do not by any means cease with the work. A new kind of torture begins and not a minor one, the torture of the desert, of mirages and other cruel phantasmagoria of thirst and lingering echoes. Until the good fortune of a new discharge that consents to make use of our machine again, to take advantage of it, to set it going once more, bringing in its train a whole apparatus of ferocious egotism and total indifference to pain.