A genius for friendship

By FREDA BRUCE LOCK HART Jean Cocteau: The Man and the Mirror by Elizabeth Sprigge and Jean-Jacques Kihm (Gollancz 42s.).
%JEAN COCTEAU has been a prominent figure, familiar at a distance for almost all my adult life; During my student days ill Paris he was already th image of an enfant terrible in
the world of arts, theatre and glossy gossip.
So wide was his range over the artistic-intellectual fringe —the prolific poems, ballets in collaboration with Diaghilev and Picasso, Stravinsky and "Les Six," drawings, posters, decor, plays galore from "Orphee" (as long ago as 1927) or "Les Enfants Terribles" to that brilliant solo for an actress "La Voix Humaine"--that it would be tempting to call him a dilettante, were he not such a professional in each.
Cocteau's genius was for poetry, in general even more than in particular, and for friendship: friendships with his proteges, like the brilliant Raymond Radiguet, his peers like Colette or Marcel Proust —or Jean Marais, somewhere between the two. The friends were many and distinguished enough to come near justifying the authors in compiling an index almost sufficient to tell the story. But in the long chronicle of his friendships, the authors bring out generosity as his most human characteristic; they also bring out his lasting obsessions with angels, androgynous beauty, mirrors and death.
One of the liveliest passages in the book records Cocteau's charmed encounter with Charles Chaplin (and Paulette Goddard and Marcel Khill) "on an old Japanese cargo boat plying . • . between Hong Kong and Singapore." In thb second half of World War Two, Cocteau plunged deep into the cinema. He had made his striking first film experiment in "Le Sang d'un Poete in 1932. Then in 1943 with "L'Eternel Retour," the professional dilettante and poet at the same time found, as think, fulfilment in the cinema and in "La Belle et la Me:" "The Eagle has Two Heads," with his acute perception, inspired by an early airplane flight, of the movies' capacity to rise from the ground, he ediinsceonivaered the poetry of thç Films occupy surprisingly small space in the detailed chronicle, although the authors do appreciate the response of Cocteau's many-sided talents to group art: "Not only with the directors, but with the technicians, Cocteau served as the artisan he always rejoiced to be. He had a finger in every pie."
This chronicle in detail rather than in depth does not try to define Cocteau's philosophy of art or indeed of life. The question of his religious attitude is touched on and left unanswered. "Brought up conventionally as a Catholic," the indications suggest he was not much interested until a limited period of close friendship with the Maritains. After this socalled "conversion" which he pointed out was "absurd since he was already a Catholic" he appeared to relapse.
When he later took to decorating chapels (culminating in his decoration of the Church of Notre Dame, Leicester Square) he could protest : "People take me for a religious painter because I have decorated a chapel. Always the same mania for labelling people." Later still he is said to have been anxious to please Catholic opinion; and when he died in 1963, the priest — and the doctor — arrived too late.
A characteristic story is his own about his friend the beautiful and garrulous Countess of Needles. Mourning her death, he said "After his own death he would go to see Anna de Noailles. He would open the door and hear her discursive voice: 'You see, my dea4 there is nothing afterwards, nothing. You remember I told you so!' And to his eternal joy everything would begin again. The Countess was talking."