THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING

by Jean Cocteau ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 1967

No one denies Cocteau his mystique, his legend, but verdicts differ as to its meaning. Mary McCarthy, for the bitchy opposition: ""...the attic of Cocteau's mind was never as smart as the downstairs: a schoolgirl was there all along reading romances and trying on costumes."" For the defense, Ned Rorem in the hallelujah Introduction to this volume: ""But three generations...hailed Cocteau as a prophet. Are not his initials, after all, those of Jesus?"" Midway between these extremes, truth lies, and Cocteau's cautionary essays in the Montaigne mode, The DifficuLty of Being. now excellently translated after a twenty years' wait, seems the ideal browsing ground for reaching some dispassionate judgment. Written when he was in his mid-fifties, with his exotic hurly-burly youth behind him and the remaining decades of grey eminence ahead, Cocteau's tart, neo-classic reveries, pithily shaped and ""hitting the bull's eye at whatever cost,"" comment on everything from frivolity to death, from ""my physique"" to haunted houses, fleshing out a double portrait, that of his tastes and temperament and the atmosphere of the times in which they were nurtured, including glowingly epigrammatic glimpses of celebrity-land: Radiguet, Satie, Picasso, Proust, Nijinsky, Gide. The evidence is in, and it makes a sparkling, wise and mysterious testament.

Pub Date: June 7, 1967

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Coward-McCann

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1967

Categories: NONFICTION