by Jean Cocteau
Make sense of it if you can. Try to break the chain. Imagine you can cut it short other than by dying at the end of it.
Far be it from me to complain. I accept this penal servitude. No doubt it suits me so well that, if I were to escape from it, I would reconstruct it somewhere else.
I have been ill now for a year. It seems that in the neutral state I am now in, the disease is less interested in injuring me. It wants me whole, attentive. What can the doctors do? What do they know of these cells, indifferent to the individual they constitute? These cells think, without any regard for my interests. They construe them in their own way and show a knowledge of psychology.
If I tried to unravel this skein, where should I be? Far better—this is my theory and I stick to it—to daydream.
You are daydreaming, I say to myself. You are foretelling the future. I boast. In fact, I am returning to the forsaken places of my loves. Under the pretext of analysis I pay a call on myself. It is the Tristesse d’Olympio. Here is the path where the merchant sees the Beast spring out of the thicket, here is the ruined gateway that Beauty pushes open and through which she sees the Beast drinking. Here are the candelabra that light themselves, the arms of living stone that move them and come out of the walls. Voices pursue me: ‘Beauty, will you be my wife?—No, Beast.—Farewell then, Beauty. Until tomorrow.’ Or: ‘Does it not disgust you to give me a drink?’ or ‘Beauty, if I were a man, I would assuredly do the things you bid me, but poor beasts who wish to prove their love can only lie down on the ground and die.’ And I can see the Beast. His poor eyes, one larger than the other, swimming, drowning. They roll, showing their whites. Beauty will love him and lose him. Out of this great caterpillar springs the Prince Charming. And the prince asks: ‘Are you happy?’ and Beauty replies: ‘I shall have to get used to it.’
Will the film rolled up in its boxes at Saint-Maurice let go of me? Doubtless the children of our minds are dependent upon us until their marriage with the public. Must I drag on until September, when this marriage will take place?
One ghost expels the other. My play which should be staged in October is so far away from me, so foreign, that it reproaches me. It looks coldly into my eyes. It poisons me. It will surely take its revenge in its own time. It increases my discomfort with the anxiety it holds for me. It hates me but it humours me. It still has need of me.
Thus I mix the paste in which I get stuck. In so doing I am in danger of getting more stuck than ever. The spectacle of nature which should distract me plants me more firmly in it. Moreover my refuge is a park where I once planned to make my actors move. And without my thinking about it, this plan that I had forgotten had something to do with my choice of a dwelling where I hoped to find peace. Its setting superimposes itself on those I used. Their trees grow entangled. Their brambles overlap. Their thickets part. The Beast appears. He devours me. I am lost.
The legs of my soul being stuck deep in this mire, I sometimes envy those writers who use a table and put up a barricade. They do not allow their ink to treat them with familiarity. If they involve themselves in writing, they behave with great caution and only involve a part of themselves in what they write.
The part that they keep for themselves has legs, so that it is apt to inspire respect, indeed withdrawal if necessary.
Woe to him who has not kept a plot of ground on which to live, a small piece of himself within himself, and is open to hazards that take advantage of the smallest rail to grow brambles on. For if no rule is observed, they will creep in both from without and from within. That is why this vacancy, to which I give myself up, bound hand and foot, is dangerous, and why I should be more strict than anybody in guarding my doors. This is what paralyses me. They enter who will, the quick and the dead. I said, earlier, that images and words passed through me with impunity. That is easily said. I stated later that nothing goes through us without leaving imprints on the sand where the eighteen feet of the Muses will only walk if it is virgin.
Who can daydream and pay enough attention to his fences to forbid any access to his domain? One knows what notices warning people of savage dogs and wolf-traps are worth. One must therefore accept the inextricable and submit to it to the point when a certain charm arises from it and the jungle becomes endowed, through its wild innocence, with the attractions of virginity.
The truth is I am lost in it. The last recourse left to me is in moral progress. For all that, however, the jungle must not become an untidy heap of rubbish and nettles.
That is the only battle that I wage against myself, in which I am able to remain in command.
* Verrières.
ON GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
INSTEAD OF TORMENTING MYSELF WITH ANY pretentious quest, since the powers that drive me must have a view quite other than my own about the use to which my capacities should be put—and if they know nothing about me, which is likely—they must be as alien to them as electricity is to a box and to the tunes of a radio—I would do better to use my sick pen to portray the splendid people I have known. People are always asking me to do this and wanting me to add a sequel to Portraits-Souvenir. I am reluctant to do so for the good reason that I have recorded in this events of my youth in which I was a mere spectator, without being in the least implicated. Later I come in to play. It is a tournament. I am wounded and I wound. And I shall wound much more severely if I dig into the scars. It is very seldom that one does not displease those one describes, and even if we do not twist their actions to our advantage but to our disadvantage, the optics and the perspective of the fixed point where we stand are at variance with the angle from which they observe them. They make us appear dishonest.
To this is added the fact that memory is distorting (concave or convex); that the smallest anecdote becomes distorted from mouth to mouth; that if we tell one, it returns to us in travelling kit; that the most realistic person is susceptible to the seduction of legends and believes them loyally; that by a phenomenon of inverted perspective, memory has a tendency to see things growing larger as they move further away, to get them out of proportion, to remove their bases; in short that nothing is more suspect than evidence.* I have known eyewitnesses whose evidence, based on error of vision, would without demur have sent an honest man to the guillotine, and who, when their inaccuracy was proved, would embroil themselves further rather than feel any shame. It is certain that the flight of time casts a spell because in it reality twists itself in a manner that shocks a mind untutored in the realm of art, but fascinates it when the events are romanticized.
Hence the success of collected letters, memoirs and other direct testimony in which we can touch the myth as we read an interview, an article, the paragraph of the Larousse dictionary which concern us.
A cult of speed does away with craftsmen to such an extent that the patience, the manual dexterity essential for the creation of the best, is no longer found except in those who adapt mechanics to such a purpose. Reading was once a craft. It is falling into disuse. People rush. They skip lines. They look at the end of the story. It is therefore normal for the hasty to prefer memories of facts that give rise to works to the works themselves, and absent-mindedly to swallow the tools, through weariness at having to chew what they carve. This is also why people prefer conversation to the written word, because it can be listened to with half an ear and demands no effort.
Conversation thus becomes dangerous. I have never known good ones in which people showed any concern for one another. Whatever is said, faulty listening distorts it. A new haste prevents those to whom it is recounted from telling themselves that this is not our syntax. The signature blinds them. They believe in it. They retort. The retort goes off on its travels. It is travestied en route. Confusion without end.
Misunderstandings of this kind are innumerable. This is why I should like to note down a few memories of a man with whom, because he was considerate to the point of mania, I never had any disagreement.
I mean Guillaume Apollinaire.
I knew him in a pa
le blue uniform, his head shaven, one temple marked by a scar like a starfish. An arrangement of bandages and leather made him a kind of turban or little helmet. One might have thought that this little helmet hid a microphone by means of which he heard what others cannot hear and secretly surveyed an exquisite world. He would transcribe its messages. Some of his poems do not even translate its code. We would often see him listening in. He would lower his eyelids, hum, dip his pen. A drop of ink hung upon it. This drop would tremble and fall. It would star the paper. Alcools, Calligrammes—so many cyphers of a secret code.
François Villon and Guillaume Apollinaire are the only two I know of who steer a steady course through the limping measures of which poetry is made, and which is not suspected even by those who think they are producing poetry because they write verse.
The rare word (and he certainly used it) lost, between Apollinaire’s fingers, its picturesqueness. The commonplace word became unusual. And he would set those amethysts, moonstones, emeralds, cornelians, agates which he uses, wherever they came from, like a basket-maker plaiting a chair on the pavement. One cannot imagine a craftsman more modest, more alert than this soldier in blue.
He was fat without being obese, his face pale and Roman, a little moustache above a mouth that uttered words in a staccato voice, with a slightly pedantic grace and a kind of breathlessness.
His eyes laughed out of his solemn face. His priest’s hands accompanied his speech with gestures recalling those used by sailors when drinking a glass and then pissing.
His laugh did not come from his mouth. It came from the four corners of his being. It would invade him, shake him, set him jerking. Then this silent laughter would drain away through his eyes and his body would regain its poise.
In socks, without his leather leggings, his short breeches clinging to his leg, he would cross his little room on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, climb a few steps to the minute study where we made the acquaintance of the edition de luxe of Serres-Chaudes and of the brass bird from Bénin.
The walls were covered with his friends’ canvases. Besides the portrait of Rousseau with the hedge of carnations and Laurencin’s angular young girls, there were fauves, cubists, expressionists, orphists and a Larionov of the machine period of which he used to say: ‘It’s the gas meter.’
He was mad about ‘schools’ and had known, since the days of Moréas at the Closerie des Lilas, the true source of the names they bear and that people cryptically repeat.
His wife’s face was like one of those pretty bowls of goldfish in the little shops on the quay, opposite the bookstalls with which, he once wrote, the Seine is shored up.
The morning of the armistice of 1918, Picasso and Max Jacob had come to 10 rue d’Anjou. I was living there with my mother. They told me that they were anxious about Guillaume, that fat had developed round his heart and that we must telephone Capmas, my friend’s doctor. We called Capmas. It was too late. Capmas begged the invalid to help him, to help himself, to exert his will to live. He no longer had the strength. The charming breathlessness became tragic. He was suffocated. That evening, when I joined Picasso, Max and André Salmon in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, they told me that Guillaume was dead.
His little room was full of shades and shadows: those of his wife, of his mother, of ourselves, of others, who drifted around, gathered together and whom I did not recognize. His dead face lighted up the linen surrounding it. Of a laureate beauty, so radiant that we felt we were looking at the young Virgil. Death, in Dante’s robe, was leading him, like a child, by the hand.
While he was alive his corpulence was not noticeable. The same was true of his breathlessness which was not really breathlessness. He seemed to move among very delicate objects, on ground mined with goodness knows what precious explosives. A strange gait, almost as if he were walking under water, which I was to find a trace of once more in Jean Paulhan.
This air of a captive balloon gave him a certain resemblance to the character Sunday in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday and to the Roi Lune in Le Poète Assassiné.
This could still be seen in his remains which, though un-moving, soared. This essence of elder trees, of birds, of dolphins, of everything that repudiates weight, was freeing itself from his corpse, raising it, making in contact with the air a phosphorescent combustion, a halo.
Once more I saw him sauntering through the streets of Montparnasse, dotted with the white markings of hopscotch, carrying about him that store of fragile things of which I have spoken, avoiding breakages and uttering learned remarks. For instance that the Bretons were originally Negroes, that the Gauls did not wear moustaches, that groom was a corruption of gros homme, as pronounced in London, where the Swiss doormen, emulating France, were later replaced by little boys.
Sometimes he would stop, lift a finger of a marquis and say (for instance): ‘I have been rereading Maldoror. Youth owes far more to Lautréamont than to Rimbaud.’ I quote this remark among a thousand others, because it reminds me of what Picasso described to me: Picasso, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, all young, rambling about Montmartre, running down its steps, and shouting: ‘Long live Rimbaud! Down with Laforgue!’ a ‘meeting’ a thousand times more significant in my opinion than those which precede plebiscites.
One morning in 1917 (Picasso, Satie and I having just weathered the scandal of Parade), Blaise Cendrars rang me up to say that he had read in the revue Sic a poem signed with my name, which he was surprised that he did not know, that this poem was not in my style and that he was going to read it to me over the telephone, so that I might confirm that it was not by me. The poem was a fake. Over this fake Apollinaire made quite a rumpus. He exercised a jurisdiction in the world of letters and attached importance to his position. From café to café in Montmartre, from newspaper office to newspaper office he interrogated, suspected and accused everybody, except the guilty party who, much later, confessed his hoax to us. This had consisted in sending a poem to Birot, the editor of the review Sic, and baiting it with my signature, in such a way that he would print it without checking it, for this poem was an acrostic; its capital letters spelled the words: PAUVRE BIROT.
Here am I sliding down the very slope that I deplore. So I will describe, as this can offend no one, the evening which ended the first performance of Mamelles de Tirésias at the Renée Maubel theatre.
Apollinaire had asked me for a poem for the programme. This poem, the title of which was Zèbre (Zebra), used the word rue in the sense of ruer (to kick). The cubists, headed by Juan Gris, thought that this rue was a street and, that evening after the show, demanded an explanation of what this street was doing there. It did not fit in.
At this tribunal, where we appeared side by side, Apollinaire changed over from the role of judge to that of culprit. For having entrusted Serge Férat with his sets and costumes, he was accused of having compromised the dogma by a flavour of caricature. I was fond of Gris and he of me. Everyone was fond of Apollinaire. But if I record this incident it is because it shows on what pinpoints we were balancing. The last prank was suspect, led to inquests and ended in convictions. It was ‘I’—Gris would say—‘who introduced the siphon into painting.’ (Only bottles of anis del Oso were allowed.) And Marcoussis, coming out of the exhibition of Picasso’s Fenêtres at Paul Rosenberg’s, declared: ‘He has solved the problem of window fastenings.’
Do not laugh. It is a great period and a noble one, in which in saying that a government that would punish a painter for such niceties can absorb the mind. And Picasso is quite right making mistakes in colour and in line would be a great government.
To come back to our poet. The penal session of Les Mamelles de Tirésias left him somewhat bitter. For a long time he remained attached to it by a kite-string. He became a kite. Light, struggling, shaking this string, hollowing himself out, weaving from right to left. He’d tell me he was ‘fed up with painters’. And he would add: ‘they are beginning to bore me with their architectural diagrams.’ Amazing words in the mouth of one who was th
e originator of a victory over realism. But in this he wanted the sweep of Uccello and for painters to browse in that field poisoned with autumn crocus.
Except for Picasso, that eagle with ten heads, sovereign master in his kingdom, the cubists went as far as measuring the object. Yardstick in hand they compelled it in a humdrum way to serve them. Others brandished tracings, figures, the Golden Mean. Others erected mere scaffoldings.
Apollinaire went round their groups and was exhausted by them.
No doubt this weariness was the beginning of the decline that led him towards death. Nothing pleased him but exquisite surprises. He would complain. He pitied his generation, sacrificed, he said, falling between two stools. He would take refuge with Picasso, who never exhausts himself. He did not suspect for a moment, so true it is that genuineness is unconscious of itself, that he would soar away and become a constellation.
This constellation takes the shape of his wound, wound that a canvas of Giorgio de Chirico prophesied for him.
That is how things happen in our sphere. Everything unfolds according to a mathematical formula unacknowledged by mathematicians, which is our own. There is no stumbling at the last. Yet everything stumbles from end to end.
On that rock where soon only a few of us, escaped from shipwreck, will be left, Apollinaire sings. Beware, commercial traveller! It is the Lorelei.
There can be no question here of a study. That is not what I have undertaken. I limit myself to a few lines which trace an outline, catch a pose, pin down the living insect, like that profile of Georges Auric in which I produced the likeness by the position of the eye, which is nothing but a dot. Others will analyse Apollinaire, his magic, based as it should be, on the virtue of herbs. He used to collect herbs from the Seine to the Rhine. The concoctions he made, stirring them with a spoon in a mess-tin on a spirit lamp, bear witness to the attraction exercised upon his episcopal self by sacrileges of every kind. One can imagine him equally well on his knees, serving the mass of the regimental chaplain, as presiding at some black mass, removing shell splinters from a wound, as sticking needles into a wax figure. On the Spanish Inquisitor’s seat as at the stake. He is both Duke Alexander and Lorenzaccio.