I've been reading his Journal entries which I couldn't get enough of since yesterday. He lived at such an exciting time, Paris at the turn of the century--the birth of ists and isms.
And his character sketches of artists and writers who were his friends just floored me, they were so visceral, so personal--it made me want to gouge my heart out in envy.
He talks of how Rilke sent him a telegram (praising him) after his play Orphée was shown in Germany | how Thomas Mann sent him a letter when he was sick in a sanatorium wishing him to get well | how he walked the streets where Modigliani and de Chirico live!
But the most poignant narratives for me were when he talked about his close friends Picasso, Apollinaire and Radiguet. Yeah Picasso!
ON PICASSO
"Picasso often said that painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen that conveys to his canvases an implorable imaginative power."
--this is powerful. This is now my philosophy of art!
Cocteau also tells this story about how he immediately recovered from an illness when Picasso sent him a paper dog sculpted from a piece of cardboard (I want to be his friend too!).
ON PROUST
I was at the edge of my seat when he related his meetings with Proust. He said that he knew him during the time when he wasn't famous yet--when he was just writing his monumental masterpiece, "In Search of Lost Time". Cocteau said that he used to call on Proust during the evenings and he would read to him passages from "Swann's Way" (Can I faint now?). But that's not the most interesting part, he talked of the awkward and self-deprecating manner in which Proust read to him:
"Those sessions added a new chaos to the pestilential disorder of the room, because Proust would read at any point in his manuscript, would miss a page and join two passages, would begin over, would stop to explain that a gentleman's bow in the first chapter would be elucidated in the last volume, and behind his gloved hand he would burst out laughing and drool over his beard and cheeks. "This is too stupid," he would say. "No I won't read any further. It's too stupid." Then his speech would again become a confused lamentation, a tearful threnody of excuse, politeness, and remorse. "It was too stupid. He was ashamed to force me to listen to such stupid things. It was his fault. Besides, he could never reread anything. He should never have begun the reading...." And when I had convinced him to continue, he stretched out his arm, took the first sheet from the magician's book, and we fell smack into Guermantes or the Verdurins. At the end of fifty lines, the same scene began over again. He groaned, laughed, excused, his bad reading."
Simply. Awesome.
I love Proust even more...
(I love when people talk about how artists were like. It makes their work, especially if you admire them, much profound--don't you agree?)
And as I thought I couldn't admire Cocteau even more,
he shares his view of the love of reading
--which further solidifies my profession of literary faith:
"We are all sick and can read only those books which treat our disease."
Wonderful.
______
If I ever get to Paris, I'll pay my respects to Cocteau and to all of the French masters who--NO shit--saved my life.
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