Angels and Artifacts

By Martha Duffy

PROFESSIONAL SECRETS, An Autobiography of Jean Cocteau, edited by Robert Phelps. Translated by Richard Howard. 331 pages. Farrar, Straus & G/roux. $8.50.

COCTEAU by Francis Sfeegmuller. 583 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $12.50.

He sometimes liked to sign himself Jean 1'Oiseleur--Jean the bird-tamer--and he was indeed rather like a hummingbird darting among the arts. He was a poet and a painter, a novelist and a dramatist, a film director and a ballet scenarist, a designer of posters, pottery, tapestries, neckties, mosaics and jewelry. Most of all he was Cocteau. He considered "invisibility a sine qua non of elegance," but he had a genius for publicity "and his elegant features were among the most photographed in France. That, combined with the versatility that irritated cultural clothespin carvers, caused Cocteau to be taken too lightly far too often.

Now a pair of excellent new books make it easier to evaluate him. Steegmuller has done a meticulous biography that succeeds particularly well in depicting the Paris Cocteau bemused as well as the man himself. But because Cocteau writes the way a water spider skims across a pond, Professional Secrets is more of a delight. Like Phelps' Earthly Paradise about Colette, it is an ersatz autobiography stitched together from Cocteau's work with intelligence and unabashed admiration.

In both portraits Cocteau seems totally contemporary. One feels that if he were to step through a mirror tomorrow, like the characters in Orphee, he could sail on smartly through the '70s. He had a gift for improvisation and clear-eyed enthusiasm for new things. Possibly only Ezra Pound exceeded Cocteau in the ability to recognize what was valuable in novelty. When he began his career in 1908, he was a salon poet to the Belle Epoque society of Faubourg St.-Honore. Discovering that there was a creative revolution going on across the Seine in Montparnasse, he grasped its significance at once and immersed himself in the Fauvists, the Futurists and the Cubists.

When he collaborated on a ballet or an opera, it was with the likes of Picasso, Stravinsky, Dufy or Milhaud --usually before their reputations had set. In films (The Blood of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast) and the ballet (Parade, Le Train Bleu), his work practically defined the avantgarde. But if he rode nearly every nouvelle vague of

French culture for 50 years, he knew when to get off as well as get on. When the Dadaists were blithering their way into oblivion after World War I, he and his adored friend Raymond Radiguet were shrewd enough to realize that "we must write poems and novels like everybody else"--though at the time, traditional forms were what practically nobody else was bothering to use.

Steegmuller reports that Cocteau copied his conversational style from the torrential monologues of Vicomtesse Anna de Noailles, who kept an elegant salon on the Right Bank, but his one-liners are unforgettable. To wit: On Charlie Chaplin: "With his help the Tower of Babel would certainly have been finished."

On Freud: "A modest housebreaker: he absconded with a few mediocre pieces of furniture and some erotic photographs." On Proust: "In that stifling room we watched a toiling hive in which the thousand bees of memory manufactured their honey."

In his rather reticent way, Proust liked Cocteau and understood him. He once told him he wished "for something to happen that would isolate you, so that after a sufficiently long period of fasting you might again really hunger after those beautiful books, beautiful pictures, beautiful countries that you now skim over with the lack of appetite of someone who has spent all New Year's Day making a round of visits, each complete with marrons glaces."

It was never to happen. Cocteau hungered after the friendship of the men whose greatness he recognized. Unfortunately, as he well knew, he was a man who "weeps because the very seals in the zoo aren't crazy about him." Friends tired of his flattery and aggressive bids for attention. Stravinsky called him "an embarrassing young man": Picasso concluded that he was "the tail of my comet."

At least one young genius returned Cocteau's unbridled affection. Raymond Radiguet was 14 when he began his conquest of literary Paris. Cocteau sponsored him, fell in love with him and, as he never tired of boasting, locked him up in a room to make him relinquish alcohol in favor of ink. The result was the minor classic Devil in the Flesh. But shortly after the book's triumphant publication in 1920, Radiguet died of typhoid. He was not yet 21.

Cocteau was never whole again. He tried everything from other boys to the sacraments, but the twin solaces turned out to be opium and work. He puffed on the pipes on and off for the rest of his life. In a befogged period of the '20s, he retired to Villefranche and spent his days staring in the mirror and drawing his own picture. Intermittent cures were painful and ineffectual. During one, he wrote: "In my legs there is a queue of ten thousand people standing waiting for the opening of ticket windows that don't open." Yet he was never idle. As Phelps points out, he published 20 books between 1924 and 1929, perhaps his heaviest addictive years.

He continued as an awesome artistic conglomerate until he died in 1963. His beautifully written bestselling novel Les Enfants Terribles (1930) gave French youngsters the much prized sense of separateness and alienation that Salinger and Dylan gave to later generations. His movies, made as avant-garde experiments, have become art cinema classics.

Despite Cocteau's creative exuberance, there is no one work or art form for which he will be especially remembered. Rilke once said that his work "admits to the realm of myth, and he returns from its radiance aglow, as from the seashore." Cocteau was a mythmaker, retreating again and again to myths and fables--Orpheus, Oedipus, Antigone. Angels abound in his writing and painting. He wanted to enchant his audience rather than move them to pity and terror. "I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost." He would have been delighted with Auden's simple epitaph: "The lasting feeling that his work leaves is one of happiness."

-Martha Duffy

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