The Difficulty of Being

by Jean Cocteau

  This makes me think that elegant prose takes on the function of the burden which the writer carries in his head and that all the rest derives from some kind of choreography.

  Once I used to try to share the liking I had for a certain kind of prose with people who claimed to be insensitive to it. Read aloud, with the fear of not convincing them, such prose exhibited its blemishes.

  Failures of this kind have put me on my guard. I came to distrust what had at first charmed me. Little by little, I trained myself not to get enamoured of any but the writers in whom beauty dwells without their being aware of it and who are not obsessed by it.

  Although the words of a vocabulary may not tally with our own, I sometimes come across a professional term and adopt it. I will quote one which is found in text-books: ‘in my estimation’. This says perfectly what it means to say and I adopt it, not knowing any other that suits me better.

  The French language is difficult. It rejects certain douceurs. It is this that Gide described so wonderfully when he calls it a piano without pedals. One cannot blur its chords. It functions unaided. Its music is addressed more to the soul than to the ear.

  What you consider to be musical in the classics is often only an ornament belonging to their times. The great do not escape this, although they rise above it. In minor ones the artifice is apparent. Célimène and Alceste* seem to us to speak the same language.

  It is likely that the most diverse languages we write in our epoch will be indistinguishable in another. They will appear almost similar in style. Nothing will stand out but the difference between what they express and the accuracy with which they express it.

  Beyond the fact that words have meaning, they are endowed with a magical virtue, a spell-binding power, a hypnotic quality, a fluid that works apart from the meaning they possess. But it only works when they are grouped together and ceases to work if the group they constitute is merely verbal. The act of writing is therefore subject to many compulsions: to intrigue, to express, to bewitch. Bewitchment, that none can teach us, since it is our own and since it is necessary for the chain of words to resemble us in order for them to be effective. They take our place when all is said and done, and must make up for the absence of our looks, our gestures, our progress. They can therefore only act on people open to such things. For the others it is a dead letter and will remain for them a dead letter away from us and after our death.

  The magical power of such word-grouping makes me able to converse with a writer of any period. For they bring me into his presence. I question him. Their internal framework enables me to understand what he would have replied to me. Unless I find the answer all written out, as does sometimes happen.

  My book has no other object than to engage in conversation with those who read it. It is the opposite of a lecture. My guess is that it would teach little to those around me. It only wishes to meet unknown people who would have liked to know me, and to discuss with me those enigmas in which Europe is uninterested and which will become the murmurings of a few rare Chinese mandarins.

  The grouping of words is so effective that philosophers, whose world order is driven out by the next one (and so on), are not remembered for what they said but for their way of saying it. Which one among them does not owe his fame to his writing or at least to the particular light that he throws upon some error? We know now that Descartes is mistaken and we read him all the same. It is the word therefore that endures, by a presence it encloses, by a flesh it perpetuates.

  Let me be clearly understood. I am not speaking of the word that decorates a thought. I am speaking of a word-architecture so individual, so robust, so perfectly true to the architect, that it preserves its efficacy even through a translation.

  The phenomenon of Pushkin is that he cannot communicate in any language but his own. His spell works on the Russians, whatever their opinions. Such a cult cannot depend only on a certain kind of music, and since the sense reaches us without savour there must be magic in it somewhere. I ascribe it to a drop of black blood he had in his veins. Pushkin’s drum speaks. Change the beat, the drum alone remains.

  True, with poets the part played by words is more active than in prose. But I consider that some intention passes from one language to another if the knot of the words is strong enough. Shakespeare proves it. That is why the case of Pushkin seems to me unique. Twenty times I have had him translated for me. Twenty times the Russian who was doing it would give up, telling me that the word meat, used by Pushkin, no longer meant meat, but put its taste into one’s mouth, and that this belonged to him alone. Now the word meat is just the word meat. It cannot transcend itself except through the words that surround it and make it stand out so strangely.

  Vanity counsels us to send our pollen to the stars. But, come to think of it, a poet’s luxury should be to belong to none but his fellow countrymen. Doubtless what seemed to me to tell against Pushkin is, on the contrary, what protects him and makes him worthy of the Russian cult of which he is the object.

  Prose is less subject than poetry to recipes for spells. True, the further it moves away from the anecdote, the more hazardous it becomes to transfer it to another idiom. Unless there were to occur the providential meeting between a Charles Baudelaire and an Edgar Allan Poe. That is to say between two men equally versed in the use of herbs, spices, drugs, doses, brews, mixtures and in the effect that these produce in the human system.

  * From Le Misanthrope by Molière. E.S.

  ON YOUTH

  I LIKE TO CONSORT WITH YOUTH. I LEARN FROM IT far more than from age. Its insolence and its severity subject us to cold douches. It keeps us healthy. Besides, the obligation to have to set an example to it forces us to walk straight. I understand how many of our contemporaries shun this contact which I seek. It is tiring because it is always at the ready and does not seem to know what it wants.

  Childhood knows what it wants. It wants to emerge from childhood. The trouble starts when it does emerge. For youth knows what it does not want before it knows what it does want. But what it does not want is what we do want. It consorts with us to enjoy the contrast. When it does actually want something, it often happens that I know about it sooner than it does itself. My ears—like those of a circus horse—recognize the music. I score a point.

  I remember how Radiguet used to pull out of his pockets weapons to fight us with. I turned them against myself. This is what happens with the young people I come across. I am supposed to be giving to them and it is they who give to me. I owe them everything.

  Nothing more idiotic than the motives imputed to my liking for youth. Their faces attract me for what they express. This kind of beauty inspires nothing but respect.

  I ask no respect in exchange. In my home youth is at home. I may say that there it forgets my age, which surprises me as much as if I were received as an equal by the Hierophants of Memphis.

  Erik Satie, Max Jacob shared this privilege. I was always meeting them arm in arm with young people.

  The youth of which I speak is that of capital cities, already clear-sighted. It does not mistake its ground. It finds itself a family with a tradition of anarchy. It adopts it. It digs itself in. Then it shows its ingratitude. It waits to be strong enough to assassinate the family and set fire to the house.

  Provincial youths use other methods. They write to us. They complain. They call for help. They want to escape from one social circle to another able to understand them and to help them. If they arrive on foot from Charlesville (because they are still influenced by Rimbaud-ism) they soon find their place.

  It would therefore be absurd to expect gratitude from young people and to take pride in the fact that they seek refuge with us. They like us to the extent that they learn from our faults, that our weaknesses excuse their own, that our weariness puts us at their mercy. It is up to us to profit from this medley of reactions and to gain as much from them as they gain from us. Our work is but a slipper for them. They only use it to cut their teeth on.

  It is ridicu
lous to regard youth as a myth and as all of a piece. Conversely, it is ridiculous to fear it, to address it from behind a table, to slam the door in its face, to flee at its approach.

  Of course it is mythomaniac. Of course it takes liberties. Of course it eats up our time. So what?

  Naturally it ties us up in a network of lies. Naturally it puts on a mask as soon as it comes near us. Naturally it disparages us right and left, and if it takes a false step holds us responsible.

  We have to run these risks for the simple reason that young people of this kind reassure us by proving that they are innocent of guile and are passing on the secret of their fire.

  Many young people have confessed to me, after a long time, that they came to see me, either as the result of a wager, or because they had read my name on a placard, or in order to disobey their families.

  Their silence demoralized me. I embroidered it with a thousand reasons. It was merely due to their fear of talking nonsense.

  This does not prevent me from falling into the trap again. For youth intimidates us because we imagine it to be secretive. This is the strength of its silence. We furnish it out of our own pocket. It soon realizes this, and uses it as a weapon. Its silence becomes systematic. Its aim is to put us out of countenance.

  It is important to be on one’s guard. When the young people have gone, this deathly silence sinks deep into us and works havoc. We, its victims, find in it a criticism of what we are doing. We weigh it up. We agree. We are disgusted. We grow paralysed. We fall from the tree, open-beaked.

  I see some artists who are exposed to this adventure losing their footing, incapable of regaining their balance and unable to do without their tormentors.

  I am sometimes much astonished at the solitude of our young monsters. When they leave our homes they loaf about in the streets. They complain of not meeting anyone of their own age who suits them. Some of them come to us from the countryside where they live. They do not admit this. They linger. They miss their train. We see them to the door without realizing their position, and that they can neither pay for a hotel nor return home. They then look so peculiar that I sometimes fear they will drown themselves. What is to be done? They are silent. Impossible to rescue them from a hole they are digging for themselves, from a fall to which their terrible strength of inertia would drag us too.

  But they know that all doors are not closed to them, that I am aware of their anguish, that I listen to them, that I talk to them if they do not talk, that I give them little hints. In short, it is an evening snatched from the void in which they are searching for themselves. That moment between childhood and youth is the worst. I have said so before.

  Let each of us remember our own drama. Mine was belated and no laughing matter. My dice were loaded. I was proudly leading in my game of snakes and ladders. I had to return to my point of departure and tag along behind.

  Encounters that we might have made and did not make might have saved us our stake. We are for youth, perhaps, one of such encounters.

  Alas, to reply to all the letters of appeal, to receive all the callers in despair is impossible. That would amount to being chairman of the Suicide Club. Let us beware of the drowning who cling to us and who drown us.

  To reply is to attract a letter which demands an answer and so it goes on. To cut this short is to appear contemptuous. It is better not to reply and, if we open our doors, only to allow those whose faces bear a sign of some kind to come again.

  This is not the least of the dangers.

  Why do young students fail in their duty and what is this duty? I will tell them. They should be the army of the mind’s great adventure. How could they understand this? Their conformity blinds them. What conceals it from them is a bogus anarchy, a superficial anarchy, without the shadow of a policy, and which they do not hesitate to put into action against the noblest enterprises. Their ignorance, coupled with the pride they take in it—for they deem themselves infallible—the pleasure too of creating a rumpus (the only word for it) sets them at loggerheads with themselves without their noticing it. By booing at courage they boo at themselves and side with their families, whose judgments they disdain.

  Moreover the past disgusts them. Classical works only mean for them hours of detention, soiled books, impositions. No young person thinks of rubbing off the dust to rediscover the living work beneath. In that case he would be amazed to find that Racine (among others) under cover of his conventions conceals a terrifying intensity. Instead of going in a gang to the theatre to sneer at his tragedies, the young would set about the actors who distort them. It is the opposite that happens. A bad tragedian can make youth forget its mocking attitude. It acclaims his faults.

  Here then are the deaf young, blind to what used to be done, to what is being done, to what is about to be done. What have they got left? A disorder. A hiatus which they fill by organizing demonstrations, marching in file, parading placards, shouting their slogans. So now we are alone if we have to fight. We are without our shock troops. And they even turn against us.

  The Abbé Morel told me about his lecture on Picasso at the Sorbonne. He was showing lantern slides of some of his work. The young students, who were packing the hall, kept on sneering, stamping, hooting. Without any break the Abbé showed some masterpieces of Romanesque sculpture. His audience thought they were Picasso’s. They hooted, stamped, jeered. The Abbé bided his time and rubbed their noses in the mire. Now these young people, adept at hoaxing and who credit artists with that same skill, greatly appreciated the trap they had been caught in and applauded their hoaxer.

  Not one of these young people was capable of taking the floor, of conquering Picasso with new weapons, that is to say of countering him with a living force more living still, of running faster than the Abbé Morel, of turning round and making a frontal attack on him.

  I hasten to say that it is not in my power to measure the capacity of each Faculty to come to our aid. I suppose that the Faculty of Science is more localized in the matter of problems, keener on accurate research than the Faculty of Letters. Richer in research than in teaching. I suppose too that the professors of the Faculty of Letters must be to blame, save for the excuse that if they try to stimulate the mind of a class, they give up in the face of its slackness in getting out of the rut.

  In any case I am continually struck, although I am aware that politics are their main interest, by how little the students react—or how badly.

  I do not ask the impossible. It is not a matter of long research outside the curriculum, nor the nuances of a political system to which we are inured. I ask of the students an untutored impulse towards the unusual and that they shall reflect what Jacques Rivière said: ‘there is a time for laughing at others and a time for others to laugh at you.’

  M. Bergeret was a wise man when, after the reading of M. Roux’s symbolist poem, he held his hand silently between his own for a long time. He was afraid of wounding beauty as yet unknown.

  It is not such parliamentary caution that I wish for in the students. I should like them to show a lack of caution and to extol what shocks them. I know professors more youthful than they are.

  Once when I was to speak at the Collège de France, I first paid a visit to the Dean. I went up to his office, slowed down by the memory of innumerable rebukes. I found a charming and very young old man. ‘Beware of our students,’ he said to me. ‘They only like to note down dates and not to be disturbed.’

  So I shook them up. It is a good method. They remember nothing but a jolt. But this jolt does daunt them for a moment.

  To sum up. I am not so mad as to expect a crowd of students to know, by magic, what cannot be taught. I would like them to abstain from proudly cutting off their antennae, like the hairs of a first beard. They would be the gainers were they attuned to the electrifying waves that beauty propagates. Even at random.

  ON BEAUTY

  BEAUTY IS ONE OF THE WILES THAT NATURE USES to attract beings towards one another and ensure their support.

&
nbsp; She* makes use of it in the most disordered manner. What man calls vice is common to all species whose mechanism works blindly. Nature attains its ends at any cost.†

  We can hardly imagine the springs of such a mechanism among the stars, since the light which exposes them to us is the result either of reflection or, like all light, of decomposition. Man imagines that they serve him as so many chandeliers, but he sees them only waning or in extinction.

  It is certain that the rhythm of this great machine is a cruel one.

  The most tender of lovers collaborate in it. The suck of the vampire lingers corrupted in their kiss, a rite representing the appropriation of the blood of the person loved, the making of an exchange.

  This desire for the blood of others is even more strongly expressed when the lips suck the skin to the point of becoming, as it were, a cupping-glass, and attracting the blood to it and leaving a bruise, a mark that adds exhibitionism to vampirism. This mark proclaims that the one bearing it, usually on the neck, is the prey of somebody who loves him to the point of wanting to tear out his very essence.

  As for flowers, they remain the simple snare they were from the beginning. I study them in a testing garden where species are crossed. The glory with which we invest them, for them does not exist, since their colour and scent serve only to make their presence known to the carriers of love.

  If we forget our size, we can picture these knights (the insects) in the vast, cool, fragrant rooms of a translucent palace.

  The arum maculatum holds the knight captive, thanks to a kind of portcullis arrangement, until he is daubed with sperm and the women’s quarters are opened to him.

  I would have a splendid time spreading myself on this subject. But have I not already said that this book would not become a course of lectures?

  I am rather more interested in the similarity of these erotic displays. The world is simpler than our ignorance gives it credit for. It becomes more and more apparent to me that the mechanism works rather crudely, here and there and everywhere.