The Artist Was the Medium

THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING by Jean Cocteau. 160 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.50.

Tradition has it that it is difficult to be an artist; but it has always been even more difficult to act the artist. Exactly what is his role, and how should he play it? Should he go to great hair lengths and openly flout middle-class convention at every turn? Or should he simply play it cool, all buttoned down on the outside, la vie de boheme beating away on the inside? Each role carries the built-in penalties of repression--the one by society, the other by self.

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) may not have been a great artist, but he was great as an artist. He was a flashing volcano of creation and affectation in many arts, but he was best known for his strange novels (Thomas l'Imposteur, Les Enfants Terribles), his baroque plays (The Infernal Machine, The Human Voice) and, above all, his otherworldly films (The Blood of a Poet, The Eternal Return, Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, Les Enfants Terribles). He was also given to scandalous public poses as an overt homosexual and self-confessed drug user. But unlike Oscar Wilde, who tripped and fell into the gutter of Victorian reality while trying to walk his mystic way, Cocteau, for all of his histrionics and acrobatics, always managed to regain a safe perch. He was somehow able to have his cakewalking, eat his opium, and yet wind up a middle-class immortal, a member of that superrespectable college of venerables, the Academie Franc,aise.

The Method. The Difficulty of Being, a notebook of autobiographical jottings and esthetic musings that Cocteau kept in 1946, and now published in this country, reveals some of the reasons behind the success of his performance. First, Cocteau believed as firmly as any Method actor in the truth of his role as an artist. Romantically convinced that the artist is the medium, he approached the novel, drama, painting, ballet and, finally, cinema, as if each art were merely another form or mold for his personal "poetry," and he did not so much study each new form as pour himself into it.

At the same time, however, Cocteau seems to have known in the marrow of his Paris-burgher bones that the only successful French Revolution was that which had been conducted by the bourgeois, not against them. Although he liked to shock and astonish them on his own terms, he was always careful not to offend or challenge on their terms. Astutely, he wrote: "I know to what extent I can go too far."

In Case of Fire. In this book he is ever a model of discretion. In spite of the jacket's phosphorescent hints of lurid reminiscences about Proust and Picasso, Stravinsky and Nijinsky, the author does not intrude upon their saintly privacies. He also rarely allows the reader to enter into his own. He speaks from a distance, less confessor than professor, looking up from his lectern every few moments to savor appreciative glances.

And often rightly so. Cocteau was a master of the bon mot and the telling aphorism, and these pages teem with samples. Perhaps the best is the anecdotal quip that American Composer Ned Rorem relates in his introduction. A literary monthly once posed a question to several writers: "If your house were burning down and you could take one thing, what would it be?" "I'd take the fire," answered Jean Cocteau.

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