A BIOGRAPHY OF JEAN COCTEAU

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31730, 13 July 1968, Page 4

A BIOGRAPHY OF JEAN COCTEAU

Jean Cocteau: The Man And The Mirror. By Elizabeth Sprigge and Jean-Jacques Kihm. Gollancz. 286 pp. Index. Jean Cocteau, who died in 1963, was possessed of a Renaissance-like versatility and energy in his pursuit of the creative arts. Poetry, which he once declared to be “the only one of man’s achievements worthy of the slightest respect," was always his first love; but he also excelled as a craftsman and painter, film-director, dramatist and creator of ballets. Cocteau was born in 1889 into a wealthy and cultured middle-class family. His childhood, which was on the whole a tranquil period, was to provide obsessive themes that recur again and again in his work. One of the most intense

of these experiences was his worship of the aloof and mysterious Dargelos, who was to become a treasured symbol of youthful beauty and saturnine power. To his bourgeois upbringing he attributed his habit of cloaking serious subjects with a sophisticated facade. It was this aspect of the young Cocteau which Marcel Proust drew upon for his portrait of Octave, the “jeune horn me sportif" of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.” As a young man, Cocteau was, indeed, a fashionable dandy, full of an unquenchable gaiety and sheer physical exuberance. At the same time there was an underlying seriousness in his nature that developed as he grew older. After the First World War, in which he lost many close friends, Cocteau was haunted

by the vision of death. “Everything,” he wrote, “that one does in life, even making love, one does in the express-train rolling towards death.” And this journey between life and death, he believed was only made tolerable by encounters of friendship. Of these encounters, one of the most fruitful artistically was that with Jean Marais, whom Cocteau met in 1937. The stimulus of their friendship encouraged Cocteau to* embark on a series of notable films. These culminated in “Orphee,” a paraphrase of the Greek myth, which the authors of this book describe as “a meditation on the mysteries of death and a reaffirmation of the tragedy of love.” In this, as in all that Cocteau did—and his output was prodigious—there can be found a portrait of himself. “Everything,” write the authors “is an indirect autobiography; in every film, play or picture one gets a wellknown or a new and startling vision of the poet.” Cocteau’s biography is absorbing to read. He was at the centre of some of the most intense artistic activity of the first half of the 20th century. He collaborated with Diaghelev and Stravinsky and Eric Satie, crossed swords with the Surrealists, was a close friend of Picasso and Anna de Noailles, and was one of the first to recognise and foster the greatness of Jean Genet. It has not been the aim of the authors to assess the importance of Cocteau’s own contribution to the literature of his time, but they describe in rich detail his eventual life and career, and succeed in communicating some of the extraordinary vitality and engaging gentleness of his personality.