"The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them." -- Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Along with other avant-garde artists of his generation (Jean Anouilh and René Char for example) Cocteau grappled with the algebra of verbal codes old and new, mise en scène language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María Félix, Édith Piaf (whom he cast in one of his one-act plays entitled Le Bel Indifferent in 1940), and Raymond Radiguet.
His work was played out in the theatrical world of the Grands Theatres, the Boulevards and beyond during the Parisian epoque he both lived through and helped define and create. His versatile, unconventional approach and enormous output brought him international acclaim.
"A film is a petrified fountain of thought.""A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.""After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.""All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.""An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.""An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.""Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.""Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.""Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.""Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.""Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.""Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.""Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.""Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.""Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.""Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.""I am a lie who always speaks the truth.""I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?""I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.""I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.""I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.""If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.""If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.""In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.""It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.""Life is a horizontal fall.""Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.""Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.""One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.""One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.""Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.""Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.""Silence moves faster when it's going backward.""Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.""Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.""Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.""Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.""The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.""The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.""The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.""The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.""The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.""The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.""The poet doesn't invent. He listens.""The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.""The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.""The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.""The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.""There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.""There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.""There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.""True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.""We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?""What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.""Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself.""When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.""You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."
Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, once a small village near Paris to Georges Cocteau and his wife Eugénie Lecomte, a prominent Parisian family. His father was a lawyer and amateur painter, who committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. He left home at age fifteen. Despite his achievements in virtually all literary and artistic fields, Cocteau insisted that he was primarily a poet and that all his work was poetry. He published his first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen. Soon Cocteau became known in the Bohemian artistic circles as 'The Frivolous Prince'—the title of a volume he published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City..."
In his early twenties, Cocteau became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice Barrès. In 1912 he collaborated with Leon Bakst to produce Le Dieu Bleu for the Ballets Russes - the principal dancers being Karsavina and Nijinski. During the Great War Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. This was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, artist Amedeo Modigliani and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated. The Russian ballet-master Sergei Diaghilev challenged Cocteau to write a scenario for the ballet - "Astonish me," he urged. This resulted in Parade which was produced by Diaghilev, designed by Pablo Picasso, and composed by Erik Satie in 1917. An important exponent of Surrealism, he had great influence on the work of others, including the group of composer friends in Montparnasse known as Les Six. The word Surrealism was coined, in fact, by Guillaume Apollinaire in the prologue to Les Mamelles de Tirésias , a work begun in 1903 and completed in 1917 less than a year before he died. "If it had not been for Apollinaire in uniform," wrote Cocteau, "with his skull shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would have gouged our eyes out with hairpins." Cocteau denied being a Surrealist or being in any way attached to the movement.
In 1918 he met the French poet Raymond Radiguet. They collaborated extensively, socialized, and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau also got Radiguet exempted from military service. In admiration of Radiguet's great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend's works in his artistic circle and also arranged for the publication by Grasset of Le Diable au corps (a largely autobiographical story of an adulterous relationship between a married woman and a younger man), exerting his influence to garner the "Nouveau Monde" literary prize for the novel. Some contemporaries and later commentators thought there might have been a romantic component to their friendship. Cocteau himself was aware of this perception, and worked earnestly to dispel the notion that their relationship was sexual in nature.
There is disagreement over Cocteau's reaction to Radiguet's sudden death in 1923, with some claiming that it left him stunned, despondent and prey to opium addiction. Opponents of that interpretation point out that he did not attend the funeral (he generally did not attend funerals) and immediately left Paris with Diaghilev for a performance of Les Noces (The Wedding) by the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. Cocteau himself much later characterised his reaction as one of "stupor and disgust." His opium addiction at the time, Jean Cocteau Biography - Jean Cocteau Website Cocteau said, was only coincidental, due to a chance meeting with Louis Laloy, the administrator of the Monte Carlo Opera. Cocteau's opium use and his efforts to stop profoundly changed his literary style. His most notable book, Les Enfants terribles, was written in a week during a strenuous opium weaning. In Opium, Diary of an Addict, he recounts the experience of his recovery from opium addiction in 1929. His account, which includes vivid pen-and-ink illustrations, alternates between his moment to moment experiences of drug withdrawal and his current thoughts about people and events in his world.
Cocteau's experiments with the human voice peaked with his play La Voix humaine. The story involves one woman on stage speaking on the telephone with her (invisible and inaudible) departing lover, who is leaving her to marry another woman. The telephone proved to be the perfect prop for Cocteau to explore his ideas, feelings, and "algebra" concerning human needs and realities in communication.
Cocteau acknowledged in the introduction to the script that the play was motivated, in part, by complaints from his actresses that his works were too writer/director-dominated and gave the players little opportunity to show off their full range of talents. La Voix humaine was written, in effect, as an extravagant aria for Madame Berthe Bovy. Before came Orphée, later turned into one of his more successful films; after came La Machine infernale, arguably his most fully realized work of art. La Voix humaine is deceptively simple...a woman alone on stage for almost one hour of non-stop theatre speaking on the telephone with her departing lover. It is, in fact, full of theatrical codes harking back to the Dadaists' Vox Humana experiments after World War One, Alphonse de Lamartine's "La Voix humaine", part of his larger work Harmonies poétiques et religieuses and the effect of the creation of the Vox Humana ("voix humaine"), an organ stop of the Regal Class by Church organ masters (late 16th century) that attempted to imitate the human voice but never succeeded in doing better than the sound of a male chorus at a distance.
Reviews varied at the time and since but whatever the critique, the play, in a nutshell, represents Cocteau's state of mind and feelings towards his actors at the time: on the one hand, he desired to spoil and please them; on the other, he was fed up by their diva antics and was ready for revenge. It is also true that none of Cocteau's works has inspired as much imitation: Francis Poulenc's opera La Voix humaine, Gian Carlo Menotti's "opera bouffa" The Telephone and Roberto Rosselini's film version in Italian with Anna Magnani L'Amore (1948). There has also been a long line of interpreters including Simone Signoret, Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann (in the play) and Julia Migenes (in the opera).
According to one theory about how Cocteau was inspired to write La Voix humaine, he was experimenting with an idea by fellow French playwright Henri Bernstein. "When, in 1930, the Comedie-Française produced his La Voix humaine... Cocteau disavowed both literary right and literary left, as if to say, 'I'm standing as far right as Bernstein, in his very place, but it is an optical illusion: the avant-garde is spheroid and I've gone farther left than anyone else.'"
In the 1930s, Cocteau had an affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the beautiful daughter of a Romanov grand duke and herself a sometimes actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong. She became pregnant. To Cocteau's distress and Paley's life-long regret, the fetus was aborted. Cocteau's longest-lasting relationships were with the French actors Jean Marais and Edouard Dermithe, whom Cocteau formally adopted. Cocteau cast Marais in The Eternal Return (1943), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Ruy Blas (1947), and Orpheus (1949).
In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent, Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf, was enormously successful. He also worked with Pablo Picasso on several projects and was friends with most of the European art community. Cocteau's films, most of which he both wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing Surrealism into French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave genre.
Cocteau is best known for his novel Les Enfants terribles (1929), and the films Les Parents terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946), and Orpheus (1949).
Cocteau died of a heart attack at his chateau in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne, France, on 11 October 1963 at the age of 74. It is said that upon hearing of the death of his friend, the French singer Édith Piaf the previous day, he choked so badly that his heart failed. He is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint Blaise Des Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. The epitaph on his gravestone set in the floor of the chapel reads: "I stay with you" ("Je reste avec vous").
In 1955 Cocteau was made a member of the Académie française and The Royal Academy of Belgium.
During his life Cocteau was commander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Mallarmé Academy, German Academy (Berlin), American Academy, Mark Twain (U.S.A) Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes film festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association and President of the Jazz Academy and of the Academy of the Disc.
Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in literature" article, except for poetry and poetry criticism, which link to corresponding "[year] in poetry" articles.
Poetry
1909 La Lampe d'Aladin
1910 Le Prince frivole
1912 La Danse de Sophocle
1919 Ode à Picasso - Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance
1920 Escale. Poésies (1917—1920)
1922 Vocabulaire
1923 La Rose de François - Plain-Chant
1925 Cri écrit
1926 L'Ange Heurtebise
1927 Opéra
1934 Mythologie
1939 Énigmes
1941 Allégories
1945 Léone
1946 La Crucifixion
1948 Poèmes
1952 Le Chiffre sept - La Nappe du Catalan (en collaboration avec Georges Hugnet)
1953 Dentelles d'éternité - Appoggiatures
1954 Clair-obscur
1958 Paraprosodies
1961 Cérémonial espagnol du Phénix - La Partie d'échecs
1962 Le Requiem
1968 Faire-Part (posthume)
Novels
1919: Le Potomak (definitive edition: 1924)
1923: Le Grand Écart - Thomas l'imposteur
1928: Le Livre blanc
1929: Les Enfants terribles
1940: La Fin du Potomak
Theater
1917: Parade, ballet (music by Erik Satie, choreography by Léonide Massine)
1921: Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel (music by Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre)
1922: Antigone
1924: Roméo et Juliette
1925: Orphée
1930: La Voix humaine
1934: La Machine infernale
1936: L'École des veuves
1937: ?dipe-roi. Les Chevaliers de la Table ronde, premiere at the Théâtre Antoine
1938: Les Parents terribles, premiere at the Théâtre Antoine
1940: Les Monstres sacrés
1941: La Machine à écrire
1943: Renaud et Armide. L'Épouse injustement soupçonnée
1944: L'Aigle à deux têtes
1946: Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, ballet by Roland Petit
1948: Théâtre I and II
1951: Bacchus
1960: Nouveau théâtre de poche
1962: L'Impromptu du Palais-Royal
1971: Le Gendarme incompris (posthumous, in collaboration with Raymond Radiguet)
Poetry and criticism
1918 Le Coq et l'Arlequin
1920 Carte blanche
1922 Le Secret professionnel
1926 Le Rappel à l'ordre - Lettre à Jacques Maritain
1930 Opium
1932 Essai de critique indirecte
1935 Portraits-Souvenir
1937 Mon premier voyage (Around the World in 80 Days)
1943 Le Greco
1947 Le Foyer des artistes - La Difficulté d'être
1949 Lettres aux Américains - Reines de la France
1951 Jean Marais - A Discussion about Cinematography (with André Fraigneau)
1952 Gide vivant
1953 Journal d'un inconnu. Démarche d'un poète
1955 Colette (Discourse on the reception at the Royal Academy of Belgium) - Discourse on the reception at the Académie française
1956 Discours d'Oxford
1957 Entretiens sur le musée de Dresde (with Louis Aragon) - La Corrida du 1er mai
1950: Poésie critique I
1960: Poésie critique II
1962 Le Cordon ombilical
1963 La Comtesse de Noailles, oui et non
1964 Portraits-Souvenir (posthumous ; A discussion with Roger Stéphane)
1965 Entretiens avec André Fraigneau (posthumous)
1973 Jean Cocteau par Jean Cocteau (posthumous ; A discussion with William Fielfield)
1973 Du cinématographe (posthumous). Entretiens sur le cinématographe (posthumous)
Journalistic poetry
1935-1938 (posthumous)
Film
Director
1925 : Jean Cocteau fait du cinéma
1930 : Le Sang d'un poète
1946 : La Belle et la Bête
1948 : L'Aigle à deux têtes
1948 : Les Parents terribles
1950 : Orphée
1950 : Coriolan
1952 : La Villa Santo-Sospir
1955 : L'Amour sous l'électrode
1957 : A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements
1960 : Le Testament d'Orphée
Scriptwriter
1943 : L'Éternel Retour directed byJean Delannoy
1948 : Ruy Blas directed by Pierre Billon
1950 : Les Enfants terribles directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, script by Jean Cocteau based on his novel
1951 : La Couronne Noire directed by Luis Saslavsky
1961 : La Princesse de Clèves directed by Jean Delannoy
1965 : Thomas l'imposteur directed by Georges Franju, script by Jean Cocteau based on his novel
Dialogue writer
1943 : Le Baron fantôme (+ actor) directed by Serge de Poligny
1961 : La Princesse de Clèves directed by Jean Delannoy
1965 : Thomas l'imposteur directed by Georges Franju
Director of Photography
1950 : Un chant d'amour réalisé par Jean Genet
Poetry illustrator
1924 : Dessins
1925 : Le Mystère de Jean l'oiseleur
1926 : Maison de santé
1929 : 25 dessins d'un dormeur
1935 : 60 designs for Les Enfants Terribles
1941 : Drawings in the margins of Chevaliers de la Table ronde
1948 : Drôle de ménage
1957 : La Chapelle Saint-Pierre, Villefranche-sur-Mer
1958 : La Salle des mariages, City Hall of Menton - La Chapelle Saint-Pierre (lithographies)
1960 : Windows of the Église Saint-Maximin de Metz
Recordings
Colette par Jean Cocteau, discours de réception à l'Académie Royale de Belgique, Ducretet-Thomson 300 V 078 St.
Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel and Portraits-Souvenir, La Voix de l'Auteur LVA 13
Plain-chant by Jean Marais, extracts from the piece Orphée by Jean-Pierre Aumont, Michel Bouquet, Monique Mélinand, Les Parents terribles by Yvonne de Bray and Jean Marais, L'Aigle à deux têtes par Edwige Feuillère and Jean Marais, L'Encyclopédie Sonore 320 E 874, 1971
Collection of three vinyl recordings of Jean Cocteau including La Voix humaine by Simone Signoret, 18 songs composed by Louis Bessières, Bee Michelin and Renaud Marx, on double-piano Paul Castanier, Le Discours de réception à l'Académie Française, Jacques Canetti JC1, 1984
Derniers propos à bâtons rompus avec Jean Cocteau, 16 September 1963 à Milly-la-Forêt, Bel Air 311035
Les Enfants terribles, radio version with Jean Marais, Josette Day, Silvia Monfort and Jean Cocteau, CD Phonurgia Nova ISBN 2-908325-07-1, 1992
Anthology, 4 CD containing numerous poems and texts read by the author, Anna la bonne, La Dame de Monte-Carlo and Mes s?urs, n'aimez pas les marins by Marianne Oswald, Le Bel Indifférent by Edith Piaf, La Voix humaine by Berthe Bovy, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel with Jean Le Poulain, Jacques Charon and Jean Cocteau, discourse on the reception at the Académie Française, with extracts from Les Parents terribles, La Machine infernale, pieces from Parade on piano with two hands by Georges Auric and Francis Poulenc, Frémeaux & Associés FA 064, 1997
Poems by Jean Cocteau read by the author, CD EMI 8551082, 1997
Hommage à Jean Cocteau, mélodies d'Henri Sauguet, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, Jean Wiener, Max Jacob, Francis Poulenc, Maurice Delage, Georges Auric, Guy Sacre, by Jean-François Gardeil (baryton) and Billy Eidi (piano), CD Adda 581177, 1989
Le Testament d'Orphée, journal sonore, by Roger Pillaudin, 2 CD INA / Radio France 211788, 1998
Cocteau, Jean, Le Coq et l'Arlequin: notes autour de la musique - avec un portrait de l'auteur et deux monogrammes par P. Picasso, Paris, Éditions de la Sirène, 1918
Cocteau, Jean, Le Grand Écart, 1923, his first novel
Cocteau, Jean, Le Numéro Barbette, an influential essay on the nature of art inspired by the performer Barbette, 1926
Cocteau, Jean, The Human Voice, translated by Carl Wildman, Vision Press Ltd., Great Britain, 1947
Cocteau, Jean, The Eagle Has Two Heads, adapted by Ronald Duncan, Vision Press Ltd., Great Britain, 1947
Cocteau, Jean, "Bacchus". Paris: Gallimard, 1952.
Cocteau, Jean, The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants terribles), translated by Rosamond Lehmann, New Directions. New York, 1957
Cocteau, Jean, Opium: The Diary of a Cure, translated by Margaret Crosland and Sinclair Road, Grove Press Inc., New York, 1958
Cocteau, Jean, The Infernal Machine And Other Plays, translated by W.H. Auden, E.E. Cummings, Dudley Fitts, Albert Bermel, Mary C. Hoeck, and John K. Savacool, New Directions Books, New York, 1963
Cocteau, Jean, Toros Muertos, along with Lucien Clergue and Jean Petit, Brussel & Brussel,1966
Cocteau, Jean, The Art of Cinema, edited by André Bernard and Claude Gauteur, translated by Robin Buss, Marion Boyars, London, 1988
Cocteau, Jean, Diary of an Unknown, translated by Jesse Browner, Paragon House Publishers, New York, 1988
Cocteau, Jean, The White Book (Le Livre blanc), sometimes translated as The White Paper, translated by Margaret Crosland, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1989
Cocteau, Jean, Les Parents terribles, new translation by Jeremy Sams, Nick Hern Books, London, 1994
