Jean Cocteau

born , July
5, 1889, Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris,
France
died October 11, 1963, Milly-la-Forêt, near
Paris
French poet, librettist, novelist, actor,
film director, and painter. Some of his most
important works include the poem L’Ange
Heurtebise (1925; “The Angel Heurtebise”);
the play Orphée (1926; Orpheus); the novels
Les Enfants terribles (1929; “The
Incorrigible Children”; Eng. trans. Children
of the Game or The Holy Terrors) and La
Machine infernale (1934; The Infernal
Machine); and his surrealistic motion
pictures Le Sang d’un poète (1930; The Blood
of a Poet) and La Belle et la bête (1946;
Beauty and the Beast).
Heritage
and youth
Cocteau grew up in Paris and always
considered himself Parisian by speech,
education, ideas, and habits. His family was
of the solid Parisian
bourgeoisie—cultivated, wealthy, and
interested in music, painting, and
literature.
Cocteau’s
earliest memories had to do with the
theatre, in popular forms, such as the
circus and the ice palace, as well as
serious theatre, such as the tragedies
performed at the Comédie-Française. At age
19 he published his first volume of poems,
La Lampe d’Aladin (“Aladdin’s Lamp”).
Cocteau was
the product of the years immediately
preceding World War I, years of refined
artistic taste that were devoid of political
turmoil. His real exploration of the world
of the theatre began when he encountered the
Ballets Russes, then under the direction of
Sergey Diaghilev. When Cocteau expressed a
desire to create ballets, Diaghilev
challenged him to “étonne-moi” (“surprise
me”). This famous remark seems to have
guided the poet not only in his ballets,
such as Parade (1917), with music by Erik
Satie, and Le Boeuf sur le toit (1920; “The
Ox on the Roof”), with music by Darius
Milhaud, but also in his other works; and it
is sometimes quoted in his plays and films.
During
World War I, Cocteau served as an ambulance
driver on the Belgian front. The landscape
he observed there was later used in his
novel Thomas l’imposteur (1923; Thomas the
Imposter or The Imposter). He became a
friend of the aviator Roland Garros and
dedicated to him the early poems inspired by
aviation, Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (1919;
The Cape of Good Hope). At intervals during
the years 1916 and 1917, Cocteau entered the
world of modern art, then being born in
Paris; in the bohemian Montparnasse section
of the city, he met painters such as Pablo
Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani and writers
such as Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire.

Portrait of Jean Cocteau by Amedeo
Modigliani.
Influence of Radiguet
Soon after the war, Max Jacob introduced
Cocteau to the future poet and novelist
Raymond Radiguet. The 16-year-old Radiguet,
who appeared to be a prodigy, advocated an
aesthetic of simplicity and of classical
clarity, qualities that would become
characteristic of Cocteau’s own work. The
example of Radiguet counted tremendously for
Cocteau; and when Radiguet died in 1923, at
age 21, the older man felt bereft of a
friendship that had been based upon a
constant interchange of ideas,
encouragement, and enthusiasms.
An
addiction to opium, brought on by Cocteau’s
grief over his lover’s death, necessitated a
period of cure. Jacques Maritain, a French
Thomist philosopher, paid his first visit to
Cocteau in the sanatorium. Through Maritain,
Cocteau returned briefly to religious
practice. These complex experiences
initiated a new period in his life, during
which he produced some of his most important
works. In the long poem L’Ange Heurtebise
the poet engages in a violent combat with an
angel that was to reappear continually in
his works. His play Orphée, first performed
in 1926, was destined to play a part in the
resurrection of tragedy in contemporary
theatre; in it, Cocteau deepened his
interpretation of the nature of the poet.
The novel Les Enfants terribles, written in
the space of three weeks in March 1929, is
the study of the inviolability of the
character of two adolescents, the brother
and sister Paul and Elisabeth. In 1950
Cocteau prepared the screenplay for a film
of this work, and he was also the film’s
narrator.
Cocteau had
enlarged the scope of his work by the
creation of his first film, Le Sang d’un
poète, a commentary on his own private
mythology; the themes that then seemed
obscure or shocking seem today less private
and more universal because they have
appeared in other works. Also in the early
1930s Cocteau wrote what is usually thought
to be his greatest play, La Machine
infernale, a treatment of the Oedipus theme
that is very much his own. In these two
works he moved into closer contact with the
great myths of humanity.
Filmmaking in the 1940s
In the 1940s Cocteau returned to
filmmaking, first as a screenwriter and then
also as a director in La Belle et la bête, a
fantasy based on the children’s tale, and
Orphée (1949), a re-creation of the themes
of poetry and death that he had dealt with
in his play.
Also a
visual artist of significance, Cocteau in
1950 decorated the Villa Santo Sospir in
Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and began a series of
important graphic works: frescoes on the
City Hall in Menton, the Chapel of
Saint-Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer, and
the Church of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples in
Milly-la-Forêt. His adopted son, the painter
Édouard Dermit, who also appears in his
later films, continued the decoration of a
chapel at Fréjus, a work Cocteau had not
completed at his death at age 74.
Wallace Fowlie