COCTEAU

by Francis Steegmuller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 1970

He was variously described as a fox terrier, an imp, un ange. Somewhat unwittingly, Apollinaire greeted him as l'esprit nouveau, Gide called him ""a squirrel."" He had a cravat, a cane, a spindly, pulsating, dandified figure, a heraldic nose. Lamenting never having been graced with ""a beautiful face,"" he consoled himself with glamorous young men, from Radiquet to Jean Marais. His extravagant monologues seduced bohemia and the salon, Bernhardt and Isadora Duncan and princesses on the Right Bank. He was a devastating mimic, a quicksilver narcissist. Enthralled by legend-making, he lived on his nerve-ends. He always kept one foot above the footlights and one foot on the Acropolis. Steegmuller, in his brilliant biography, vivid and judicial, attempting to christen the dazzling clutter of Jean Cocteau's extraordinary career with an encompassing symbol, comes up with ""transformations de Fregoli,"" in memory of the Italian prestidigitator. Hated or adored, he touched everything and everyone -- Picasso and the cubists, Chanel and the smart set, jazz and opium, Maritain and the Catholic revival, the nouvelle vague of the Sixties. Yet, as Cocteau tells us, in one way or another, in his fabulous, if fragmentary, creations, he was always setting off fireworks to illuminate a dark world. Many of his lovers went to early graves or came to bad ends; death was as much a theme in his life as in his poems. Like Wilde, he summed up existence in an epigram, an image, a scandal; like Dorian Gray, he was forever whispered about. Beneath the prince frivole, one senses a fantasy-ridden, guilt-ridden bourgeois, dreaming of the Academic Francaise (which he finally entered in the Fifties), of classicism and respectability. A man of staggering contradictions, his spangled, sad, amusing, singular life is the sort out of which myths are made. Steegmuller's study, bound for popular acclaim, is a fitting tribute, no doubt the first significant step in establishing in Anglo-Saxon circles the importance and interest Jean Cocteau has had for generations on the continent.

Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown--A.M.P.

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION