Before returning to the Front in May 1916, Cocteau had given the maverick composer Erik Satie a sheaf of notes containing some jumbled-up ideas for a provocative new spectacle called Parade. For Cocteau, who had met Satie through Valentine, the composer was not only a shy, complex genius but also a totally committed professional who trained – and even retrained – himself with the discipline of a schoolmaster.1 Cocteau was drawn to Satie because his music, with its crisp, pure lines, appeared timeless, unlike that of Stravinsky, say, which was defiantly of the moment. Hence, a little later Cocteau followed up his notes with a libretto scored for two voices. This excited and inspired Satie, since his own style, combining music hall and counterpoint, seemed to complement Cocteau’s perfectly with its alternating humour and pathos. Cocteau would have to wait a while for Satie’s reaction and input, however, since the composer was notoriously slow to deliver.
The other great master of the time for Cocteau was Picasso. After initial scepticism towards him on account of his perceived high-society worldliness and theatricality, Picasso was suddenly very keen to make contact with Cocteau. They met in Paris in the autumn of 1915 between Cocteau’s periods at the Front. The painter Edgar Varèse brought Picasso to 10, rue d’Anjou, where Cocteau lay in bed with a heavy cold. As so often, Cocteau would later reinvent the event, even claiming that Varèse had conducted him in the spring of 1916 to Picasso’s studio on the Rue Schoelcher, where he had taken part in ‘a meeting written in the stars’, despite his fear of the ‘black arrow’ of Picasso’s eye. This reads, of course, like a retroactive coup de foudre with an Oedipal twist, and indeed Cocteau courted Picasso as much as Picasso had himself courted Braque between 1908 and 1914, that is, like a virtual lover. Picasso was soon totally charmed by Cocteau, although the power relations were established from the beginning heavily in the painter’s favour. Picasso was a man of few words who liked to dominate and impress, while Cocteau was a man of too many words who liked to admire. Hence, Cocteau’s many meetings with the super-virile Picasso came to resemble so many glorious castrations, each commemorating afresh the original (‘The way Picasso contemplates me with a moist eye’, he rhapsodized). Cocteau described Picasso’s movements as ‘the twists of a matador’, but in truth the artist often behaved more like an unpredictable bull.
So it was that Cocteau invited Picasso to collaborate with him and Satie on Parade, even though Picasso had not executed work for the stage before. During the course of 1916 the project began to take shape. The obvious producer was Diaghilev, who duly proposed that all involved, including the choreographer Léonide Massine, decamp to Rome, where his troupe was currently engaged. All the components for the ballet were thus first assembled in Paris then transported in February 1917 to Rome. Before Cocteau and Picasso left for Italy however (minus Satie, who never strayed far from his home of Arcueil-Cachan just south of Paris), there were scenes of rivalry, chicanery and general ego-bruising, the ‘dog fights of great art’ as Cocteau later called them. Indeed, the three-way process of collaboration was at times paranoia-inducing for Cocteau, for as the work progressed Picasso began inexorably to wrest the project out of his hands. Satie had initially been very happy to accept Cocteau’s ideas for sound, because at that point he regarded Cocteau as ‘the man of ideas’ as well as an ‘adorable maniac’. Yet Satie was equally intimidated by Picasso, whom he recognized as his own new master. Under Picasso’s command there was to be no dialogue or cinema-style captions, and the accumulated noises of trains, planes, gongs, sirens and futurist-style Morse-code signals (what Cocteau called his ‘trompe l’oreille’) were to be eliminated, although Cocteau managed at least to retain a trace of his bruitages with a typewriter clicking out imitations of a dynamo.
Once in Rome Cocteau proceeded to woo Picasso and, to employ again an ocular metaphor, admitted he saw nothing of the Eternal City because his eyes were only for his new artistic model. The two were almost like a newly married couple, staying in adjoining rooms at the Hôtel de Russie in the Spanish Piazza. Because the master had a liaison with the dancer Olga Koklova (whom he would later marry in July 1918), so Cocteau pretended in an elaborate charade to court the young Maria Chabelska, who was to play the role of the Little American Girl. During the daytime the choreography of Parade came alive in a basement studio in the Piazza Venezia, where Cocteau was utterly captivated by the machine-like application of Picasso, in particular the way in which he could fuse elements of Futurism with classical art. He admired above all Picasso’s wish not always to complete a work and the fact that his art was always changing form. Indeed, faced with the fast and furious productivity of Picasso, Cocteau felt increasingly insecure about his own progress. He saw his original libretto literally frittered away and his very words elided in favour of a metronome ticking to and fro as the Managers shuffled about portentously. All he could do during a trip to Naples in the spring and summer of 1917 was to take photographs of Picasso in the company of Diaghilev and Massine, even producing a Cubist-style portrait of the master. Yet Cocteau, who lived collaboration at an intense and even erotic level of fusion, would invariably end up justifying and rationalizing the process, later declaring: ‘Since these mysteries escape me, I shall pretend to be their organizer’.
Cocteau had deliberately called Parade ‘realist’ to distinguish it from Cubism and also to emphasize that his ballet referred to something quite ordinary rather than any arcane theory. He intended it to be a self-consciously ‘minor’ spectacle, like a street-fair theatre of discontinuous visual surprises. The major visual inspiration for the aesthetic was again the quintessentially French images d’Epinal that he had tapped into for Le Mot. Indeed, the spectacle would be a magically transformed page of the Cris de Paris (1858), wherein the Parisian vendors become artists, critics and dealers trying to catch the public’s attention (the verb crier (to shout) recurs throughout Parade). It was also manifestly a dialogue between Cubism and Futurism: on the one hand Cocteau’s scaled-down Futurist bruitages, on the other Picasso’s somewhat fragmented cityscape and skewed proscenium arch for the setting, plus his two Cubist constructions for the gesticulating Managers. Yet ironically, while Cocteau sought to make exaggerated interpretations of everyday gestures, Picasso edged rather conservatively towards the abstract. In fact, his designs for the characters and the overture curtain resurrected the earlier themes and symbolism of his Pink Period. Cocteau had really wanted Picasso to produce a drop-curtain echoing the mechanical style of film captions. Instead, based on a nineteenth-century Neapolitan gouache, it looked already distinctly old-fashioned and even a touch sentimental with its saltimbanques and buffoons in blue, white, red and green.
Cocteau returned to Paris alone in April 1917 to resume his work at the Maison de la Presse. The final preparations for Parade became a frantic rush to meet the date of the premiere, yet in what would become a familiar move Cocteau was keen to present it ahead of time on his own terms in order to frame its reception and perhaps in the process reappropriate the work. On the day of the first performance he published a short but brilliant piece in the newspaper L’Excelsior to justify his production, where he analysed the nature of realism in the theatre and argued that real objects lose their reality the moment they are placed in unreal surroundings. Parade, he proposed, concealed poetry beneath its course guignol skin. Cocteau was soon bitterly disappointed to discover that the preface to the programme, which Cocteau had personally asked Apollinaire to write, barely mentioned him. Indeed, Cocteau’s unique role as originator, inventor and animateur of Parade was completely ignored in favour of Picasso’s contribution. Apollinaire’s actions can be put down in large measure to artistic rivalry, for he did not wish to appear less ‘modern’ than Cocteau, especially with his own play The Breasts of Tiresias soon to be produced. His preface had the virtue at least of introducing an exciting new term, sur-réalisme, a troping on Cocteau’s réalisme, by which Apollinaire sought to promote a ‘more complex art’ as the starting point for a new manifestation of the esprit nouveau incorporating painting, dance, plastic elements and mime.
When the premiere of Parade finally took place on the night of 18 May 1917 at the Théâtre du Châtelet it was far from being the great scandal Cocteau later claimed. True, well before the end of the twenty-minute performance many were already angrily yelling out ‘Boche!’. The Front, after all, was just 90 miles away and modernism was still viewed as a foul German import. Moreover, the show had been advertised by the theatre as a benefit performance for charities to help ill and wounded soldiers. Apollinaire, his head bandaged up from recent combat and wearing military uniform, was obliged personally to calm outraged patrons. Yet the brouhaha was not at all on the scale of that which greeted The Rite of Spring, precisely because many in the sophisticated audience emanating from both banks of the Seine had been hand-picked by Cocteau and they half expected a showdown of some kind. There were scattered catcalls and jeers but no major confrontations or demonstrations, certainly no stampede of women armed with hatpins as Cocteau later wrote (Paul Morand catalogued it simply as: ‘Much applause and a few boos’). If Parade caused any genuine confusion and incomprehension at all it was because of its competing aesthetic elements and styles. Was there in all this an oblique critique of the mess and barbarism of war, the more sympathetic members of the audience wondered. Most failed to appreciate the show’s realism, however, because they were all but dazzled by Picasso’s great burlesque Cubist sculptures, even if not all the stage effects came off successfully due to mechanical difficulties. As for the press reaction, it was mixed to poor to plain condescending. Critics dismissed Satie’s score as at once naive and over-intricate (it included a one-step derived from music hall and a Ragtime) and denigrated his Senegalese tams-tams, a charge that particularly upset the composer since Cocteau had imposed this on him. In Le Carnet de la semaine Jean Poueigh slated Satie for his lack of wit, skill and inventiveness, a move that precipitated a real scandal when Satie wrote Poueigh a vitriolic and scatological postcard calling him ‘an unmusical asshole’, as a result of which Poueigh took him to court and sued him for libel (ever the scene-stealer Cocteau became involved himself when he raised his cane at Poueigh’s lawyer and was ushered away by the police, roughed up and fined). The press lambasted above all the sottises of Cocteau, casting him as a ‘hysterical’ librettist. Diaghilev was forced to withdraw the ballet after less than two weeks.
Parade stands now, of course, as one of the most important and influential works of the early twentieth-century French avant-garde. It was the first truly modern ballet and spawned a whole new tradition of ballet on commonplace themes with contemporary music and sets. There were revivals, first in London in November 1919, then in Paris in December 1920, with Cocteau’s original ideas, notably for sound, fully restored. Although Satie and Picasso both boycotted the show, Cocteau felt totally vindicated. In personal terms, and putting aside the fact that he never really forgave Diaghilev for aiding and abetting Picasso’s amputation of his original score (relations between Cocteau and Diaghilev were forever strained thereafter), he had finally delivered on his personal promise to astonish Diaghilev. The dancer Serge Lifar later went even further, claiming that everything new and current in ballet was invented by Cocteau in Parade. He had finally crossed the Rubicon and entered the Paris avant-garde. Just a few weeks after opening night, at a concert in homage first to Apollinaire then to Picasso at one of the essential ‘Lyre et Palette’ evenings at the Salle Huyghens gallery in Montparnasse, Cocteau’s poems were read out aloud with those of Apollinaire, Cendrars and Jacob. The proprietors of the Nouvelle Revue française even started to warm towards him and treat him as a bona fide artist to be reckoned with, as did the poet Paul Reverdy, who opened the doors of his journal Nord–Sud. In subsequent critical writings Cocteau would return again and again to Parade as the decisive step in his artistic development, for with its multiple self-reflexive elements, its focus on the male body in performance and its cross-fertilizing ambition to marshal different artists and artistic forms, it served as a template for all his future work. Crucially, Cocteau had conceived and overseen every stage of the project, from scenario and score to decor and choreography. Yet the long and protracted episode of Parade also revealed other important aspects of Cocteau’s personality: his need for complete control over the production and reception of his work, his wish to forge his own artistic self-image, and his unrelenting desire to see projects through on his own terms. Despite his new-found success, however, Cocteau still felt distinctly underrated and misunderstood. Fortunately, the war was almost over, and even before the last shot had officially been fired a new concatenation of circumstances ensured, if only temporarily, that time and history were on his side.