Art and Faith: Letters between Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau
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Art and Faith: Letters between Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497675858 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Philosophical Library/Open Road |
| Publication date: | 11/04/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 140 |
| File size: | 927 KB |
About the Author
Jean Maurice Eugéne Clément Cocteau (5 July 1889-11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Along with other Surrealists of his generation (Jean Anouilh and René Char, for example) Cocteau grappled with the “algebra” of verbal codes old and new, mise en scéne language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Pablo Picasso, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Édith Piaf, whom he cast on one of his one act plays entitled Le Bel Indifferent in 1940, and Raymond Radiguet.
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Art and Faith
Letters between Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau
By Jacques Maritain, Jean Cocteau, John Coleman
Philosophical Library
Copyright © 1948 Philosophical Library, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7585-8
CHAPTER 1
Letter to Jacques Maritain
Prologue
Rome, in 1917, around Easter.
After fifteen days of work on PARADE which has not left us free to see anything, we are taking a walk, Picasso and I.
Picasso: "Let us visit this church." (The church is filled with the faithful, with chandeliers, tunes, prayer. Impossible to visit it.)
Myself: "Let us visit another one." (Same scene. Long walk in silence.)
Picasso: "We are living like dogs."
This letter closes a loop that begins with LE COQ ET L'ARLEQUIN.
My dear Jacques,
You are a deep sea fish. Luminous and blind. Your element is prayer. Once outside of prayer you run into everything. Awkwardness, that is our ground of understanding. The Thomistic apparatus deceives the world on your awkwardness; a mass of misapprehensions makes mine pass for cleverness. We are not shrewd. The Shrewd One would find traitors in us.
I myself am a bad student. At school I used to win the dunce's prizes: drawing prize, gymnastics prize. Now you are a philosopher. I should be ashamed. But we are countrymen; that is to say, we are two fish out of water of the same kind.
Imagine this, that I must constantly keep myself in the air and practise flying. That is how I manage to take people in, and imitate liveliness of mind. For unless I fall on things directly I am unable to reach them by the normal windings. But you do not cheat; you do not avoid any of the turns. You rise when you please, from where you please. You do not rise by means of a machine. You rise like cork toward the regions which call you. I myself fly with a machine, and I progress by a series of falls. One of the reasons for my reserve in the face of insults is not arrogance, but the fear of not playing my part well in a controversy (I).
Before I knew you, you used to quote me in your books. You had met George Auric at Bloy's; he must have been fifteen. When, some years later, I understood his budding genius and dedicated Le Coq et l'Arlequin to him, he read you Le Cap de Bonne Espérance, and secretly told you of my enterprise. For Auric pushes discretion to its extreme limits through a kind of defensive reflex. You were "his friends of Versailles," but I did not know which. When you liked my work, your group was so surprised that it believed the work was liked out of kindness. "Your friend Cocteau," one of your intimates used to say to you, one of those I knew long before I knew you. He could not understand then that, quoting me, you did not know me.
The distorting thickness of conceited prejudices prevents a man from seeing clearly. Nothing comes between the eye of a child and what he looks at. But a child, like a Negro, needs correctives. What is so wonderful about your glance is that it is pure and skillful.
A mind like mine gets tangled up in calculations, and gets lost ten times in an hour when it tries to read a map. I could take only one method, and I took it: sincerity. Tell all, spread all out, live naked. I was counting on our paltry limitations to make up for those that a strong man decides on himself. I feel also that mystery begins only after the avowals have been made. The hypocrisy, the secretiveness people are used to taking for mystery—these do not cast a fine shadow.
Now the sincere man is not believed, and since he never contradicts himself, since he maneuvers without any difficulty, he passes for a skillful player. This method presents the advantage of doing away with all strategy, and—with everyone seeking truth far away from truth—a legend is formed around the poet who is systematically sincere that pretense could not bring about.
My own legend was mad at the time we met. It protected me. Public opinion tears apart the character it invents. Instead of burning us it burns us in effigy.
For the worldly spectator the gesticulation of a tightrope-walker must seem funny. You who divine, you who feel pity, you saw at once that the step was a sickening struggle, eye to eye, with death.
After the scandal of Parade at the Chatelet in 1917 two remarks flattered me greatly. First a theater manager crying: "We're passed the Guignol age"; then a man that Picasso and I heard saying to his wife: "If I'd known it was so silly I would have brought the children."
I maintain it was the child in you who saw me. The child saw the child. Thus children devour each other with their eyes from one end to the other of a table of grownups.
Yes, my dear Jacques, long afterwards, dining for the first time in your dining room at Meudon, I found again the odor of Maisons-Laffitte where I was born—the same chairs, the same plates that I morbidly used to turn about so the blue designs would coincide with the foot of the glass.
It was under the sign of childhood that we got to know each other. I must repeat this to myself to feel worthy of your welcome, you about whom one wonders whether your body is not a formula of politeness, a garment thrown quickly over the soul to receive your friends.
The Peasants of Heaven
Paris wears me out and buckles my wheel; for thirteen years I have gone into society; I am a man of solitude and wild pleasures.
At Piquey I lived in a shack; after eight days of walking barefoot you get a horny sole. You can walk on seashells, on broken bottles without hurting yourself. White skin is intimidating. No sooner tanned than you blend with the trees, with the animals; you no longer dare dress. I would go off with a gun (this being with me an atavism; I do not kill, I shoot pine cones) and I would cross the brush. The soft sand burns your feet like embers. The ocean thunders behind three dunes without footprints save those I left the day before ; it heaves into sight. You could hear its waves many miles away. They break on the beach and shoulder each other, grinding a pearly powder that marks out the water's bottom from right to left. My dogs bathe, I bathe. Lying in the sun, with not one detail to betray the epoch, I float on my back over the ages.
New scene: Ahusky. A village which is an inn. What is a Basque village? A church, a handball court, an inn. At the Ahusky inn an ancient barn has become a chapel; a wall, a handball court. I had to build my table out of boards. There is not a single tree. You meet only the bones of dead cattle. Vultures swim in a lake of air at the bottom of which you descry the valleys. Sheep flocks stand out on the rocky mountainside and bleat. These lamentations, these pale profiles, this wool, those eyes—it all makes you think of the Jewish people. The shepherds do not speak any language, they bark. Ahusky's spring is renowned; its water gets rid of bile. People come from the four corners of the earth to gather it in jugs. Since it flows drop by drop, the women wait. People talk, camp out, sleep around it. The spring becomes a shrine.
Right here in Villefranche, every evening, I sit alone in the harbor. The routine is sweet. A star lights up on the right, another will light up above Saint-Jean. I well know the order in which the stars light up; between the first and the second an old man passes with a goat on a leash. The rowboats knock against one another, the lighthouse moves its megaphone about over the sea. As fishermen talk to me without seeing the death that hems me in, I have the illusion of living.
Such things put at case my spirit decked in Sunday garb by my intelligence. In Paris I seem as if I know; this role kills me. I think of nothing but fleeing public places.
What has brought me into contact with certain luxuries and certain sensational doings is the fact that it is folly to want to have country nerves in the city. The city—this neuropath—forces me quickly to leave; it leaves the heart out of account. This is what Max Jacob meant when, sending a young poet to me, he advised me: "Make him into a peasant like us." The more I think of it, the more I feel that this earth, tilled by the peasants he speaks of, by the fish out of water I spoke of, is Heaven. Yes, we are the clumsy ones of Heaven. Poetry is just the country accent of where we hail from.
Is weakness a defect? It remains that yours looks like alabaster lit up from the inside. Your soul transforms defects into beauty. You who are transparent, a soul disguised in a body, a face imprinted in a cloth, your weakness is a fearful strength, the strength of a plowman. I have just had the proof of it. Do not deny it. Like a fool I was hesitating on the brink of Heaven. Max Jacob was praying that I fall in; Reverdy was getting angry. And you pushed me—pushed me like a man who kills. You knew I could not swim, but you knew what the instinct of conservation was capable of, especially when it goes beyond the desire to live and it is a question of saving your soul instead of your skin.
I shall speak again later of this assault.
God Wants Me
I lost my seven best friends. This is as much as to say that God, seven times, bestowed graces on me without my noticing. He would send me a friendship, take it from me, send me another, and so on. Seven times He threw His line and drew it out without catching me. I would let go of the bait and fall stupidly back in again. Don't go and think He was sacrificing youth; He was dressing up angels. An illness or war serves them with a pretext to undress.
You know what I call "gloves of Heaven." To touch us without soiling itself Heaven sometimes puts on gloves. Raymond Radiguet was a glove of Heaven. His form fitted Heaven like a glove. When Heaven takes out its hand, it is death. To take this death for a real death would be to confuse an empty glove with a cut-off hand.
I was therefore on my guard. I had seen at once that Radiguet was lent, that he would have to be returned. But I wanted to play dumb, to steer him away at any cost from his vocation for death.
It was a useless ruse. Thinking I was weighing him down by taking books away from him, I was making him lighter. With every book removed I would see him float far out, sink down, go toward a mystery with which he visibly had rendez-vous.
In the summer I would take him to the country (2); he became a good child, he wrote in school copybooks. Sometimes he would rebel against his work, as a schoolboy rebels against his holiday homework. I would have to scold him, to lock him up. Then he would angrily throw a chapter together. After that he did it over again.
Winter in the city was frightful. Why did I beg him, alter my life, try to set an example for him? Debts, alcohol, insomnia, piles of soiled clothing and flights from hotel to hotel, from scene of crime to scene of crime, made up the principle of his metamorphosis. This metamorphosis took place in the sanatorium in the rue Piccini, on December 12, 1923.
This time God's line was pulling me out. I let go half way up, letting a mere half of myself be raised up. It was in this state that you came to know me. My transparency was far from resembling yours; yet it took from me the thicknesses that demoralize you. We mingled without effort.
This misfortune brings to a close a long period during which, with a group of musicians, and under the patronage of Erik Satie, I unbewitched French music. It had been dying under magic spells. Satie set an example of a musical saint. (Thanks to you, Maritain, he died a Christian death.) This unbelievable man used to make faces at himself. He was afraid of falling into the fault of the masters: of finding his works beautiful and being stirred by it. We saw him substitute form for the reflection of forms, and teach us that what is great cannot look great, what is new cannot look news, what is naive cannot look naive. He taught us that true artists were amateurs, that is to say, men—according to the perfect definition of the Larousse—"who love poetry without making a profession out of it." With his finger he would point, as an old guide points to the peaks in the Alps, to the chain of amateurs bound together by the chaos of the professionals. He would give us the key to dreams and the program for our task. Radiguet came to my aid. We had to make some forms lose their stiffness and greenness 10: the comic, gracefulness, tragedy, the novel, the theater. To this Radiguet added advertising. He saw in it a new way of putting in a bad light works that might please too quickly.
At our weekly Saturday dinners (they took place for four years: 1919–20–21–22), Radiguet would play the part of a young chess prodigy. Without opening his mouth, solely with the contempt of his near-sighted eyes, of his ill-cut hair, of his chapped lips, he beat us all. Shall I call to mind that the greatest players sat down around that table (3)?
Each of his movements indicated one of those profound successes that are come by through neglecting the recipes for power.
He was hard; diamond was necessary to take hold of his heart. He was accused of dryness as they accused Madame de la Fayette. Excuse me if I keep coming back to it, but as you know, it is one of my sorrows that you never knew him.
The title of my address to the College de France in 1923, d'Un Ordre Considéré Comme Une Anarchie, sums up the spirit of a meteor of laughs, scandals, pamphlets, weekly dinners, drums, strong drinks, tears, mournings, births and dreams that amazed Paris between 1918 and 1923.
Romeo
Radiguet's death operated on me without chloroform. I was taken away to Monte-Carlo, where I witnessed the success of the Biches of Poulenc, and the Fâcheux of Auric. On my return the Count of Beaumont, with a view to getting my mind off my sorrow, made me start the production of Roméo et Juliette. The text had existed since 1916. I tried on it, before doing as much for Antigone, an operation to rejuvenate great works, to piece them together, to make them taut again, to remove their patina, the dead matter; in short, according to Stravinsky's answer, who was being reproached for his disrespect for Pergolesi: "You respect, I love," I wanted to marry them (4).
What a dazzling nightmare, those shows at the Cigale! Backstage, even during a play that gives an impression of calm, it is a sinking ship. Madness and nerves inhabit the shadows where the crew of comedians, scene-shifters, dressers press together in silence. I had the part of Mercutio. My dressing-room was separated from the stage by just a corridor. The bagpipe orchestra stressing certain passages would reach my ears and agitated me. I wept with weariness. I slept standing. My friends pushed me onto the stage like an animal.
My dresser had the habit of saying: "Before the death of Monsieur Jean" or "After the death of Monsieur Jean," and true it is, I have never played the duel scene without hoping my pantomime would deceive death, and would decide it to take me.
Thus, two months of labor day and night, sadness, medicines swallowed pell-mell made me into an insect whose shell was the costume of Jean Hugo. Had I been cut in two like a wasp, I would have kept on living, shaking my painted collarette and my legs. For I am hard to kill. I've got to be—to stand such things.
I begged for mercy. It was so simple to ask for Grace. Like the people of Nice, whose shutters are a part of the great letters of a billboard advertisement, I lived in God and had never come out to see my window from the outside.
An evil force kept on ruining me. Before me I would see dryness, memories. I announced my silence until further notice, thinking to give to the word order its supernatural meaning. In short, I found myself in the anguish of a runner who does not distribute his strength well, and breaks down half way.
Opium
"Confess and commune," Max Jacob said to me. "What?" I wrote to him in Saint-Benoît, "you are recommending the Host to me as you would an aspirin," and he answered: "The Host must be taken like an aspirin."
I call forth the angel of one of his poems, angry to see him so silly. It is Max's turn to be the angel and to get angry with me. Is it possible I have not recognized, applied to souls, the regimen I recommend to minds? 14 There I was Wagnerian. I was being offered the snow that flies, altar bread, the enchanted bread. But I, who always balk at Orientalism, chose the flying carpet.
My dear Jacques, your patience is without limits. It allows that a man, worn out by tasks that submerge him, and by mourning, let himself go off to sleep. For a long time slumber was my refuge. The prospect of waking up prevented me from sleeping well, and influenced my dreams. In the morning I no longer had the courage to unfold life. Reality and dreams became confused, making an unclean stain. I would get up, shave, dress with people in my room, and I would let myself be dragged off anywhere.
Oh, those mornings! You are pitched into dirty water and you must swim. In that state the reading of a newspaper is unbearable. This testimony of universal activity, and of those who write it up, kills you. My flight into opium was Freud's Flucht in die Krankheit.
Opium must not be confused with drugs. Never have I smoked it in the company of those who compromise it. A real smoker, seeing me suffer too much, handed me his pipe.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Art and Faith by Jacques Maritain, Jean Cocteau, John Coleman. Copyright © 1948 Philosophical Library, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Philosophical Library.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface to the English Translation,Letter to Jacques Maritain,
Answer to Jean Cocteau,
Notes,
Footnotes,