The debacle with Maritain reignited Cocteau’s appetite for work. He produced illustrations for a new edition of Thomas the Impostor; a libretto for Stravinsky’s new work Oedipus Rex, adapted from Sophocles (over which the two again fell out due to mutual suspicion); and a number of poems that would eventually form the collection Opéra, 1925–7, presented as the work of a self-confessed opium-eater. Cocteau considered Opéra as the first set of poems to capture his real essence, and we get a sense of just how far Radiguet’s death has transformed his imaginary universe. The poet is now a visionary and his poetry a mystical activity with existential stakes. If poetry had always been for Cocteau a matter of showing the existence of a reality hidden behind the appearances of daily life and thus rendering the invisible visible, he now provided clear theoretical lines to justify the idea, as in the opening poem ‘Par lui-même’: ‘Accidents of mystery and errors of celestial/Calculation, I’ve profited from them, I admit./ All my poetry is there: I trace the invisible (invisible to you)’. The atmosphere in which all this is generated is theatrical and tragic, for poetry is now a dangerous activity, a ‘boulevard of crime’, drawing together both the detective and the criminal. Cocteau introduced here a motley crew of ancient and mythological characters that would nourish all his future work, including the Sphinx, the pharaohs, a man in Oedipus costume surrounded by laughter, Orpheus, Titus and Berenice, and a myopic Venus de Milo. Some poems pursue opium fantasies with a certain light giddiness, others convey grief with detachment and restraint. In ‘Le Paquet rouge’, however, which turns leprosy into a metaphor to depict self-disintegration, and in which Cocteau suggests once again that he is not simply different and alien but an impostor and artistic fraud, there is a violent sense of shame:
I am leprous … I am uneducated, a dunce. I know no figures, no dates, no names of rivers, no language living or dead … Moreover, I stole the id of a certain J. C. born in M. L. on the … dead at 18 after a brilliant career in poetry … Let me be locked away and lynched.
Another poem, ‘La Mort du Poète’, shows the narrator dying because ‘you, France, you’ve insulted, ridiculed, ruined me … I’m dead’. But there will be revenge: ‘I’ll strangle you with delights. I will not die alone.’ The title of another poem says it all: ‘No man’s land’. Needless to say, such dramatic and tortuous self-examination was not particularly well understood or appreciated by critics, who also berated Cocteau’s excessive word play.
A far more accessible and positive result of the immediate post-Maritain period, however, and one that harks back to the previous summer that Cocteau spent at Villefranche, was the play Orpheus (Orphée), produced by the famous acting/directing pair the Pitoëffs in June 1926 at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris, with sets by Jean Hugo and costumes again by Chanel. A short ‘tragedy in one act and one interval’ (essentially thirteen short scenes), Orpheus was Cocteau’s first really serious dramatic work containing both comic and tragic elements, and he was meticulous in his notes for the decor and staging. Set in a modern apartment where common objects like mirrors become ritualistic symbols, the play retained several of the major episodes of the ancient myth of Orpheus (notably the double death of Eurydice and the crossing of the Underworld that gives rise to an ellipsis – the interval of the title). Cocteau, however, transformed the Thracian poet into an irritable, indecisive writer beset not by fabulous monsters but by inner demons, producing a major crisis of inspiration. Orpheus begins to rely on a strange, inverted form of Centaur played on stage by an actor with a horse’s head. In appearance a pantomime animal performing the familiar music-hall routine of nodding its head and tapping its hoof to spell out messages, it becomes Orpheus’ hobby horse or ‘dada’, and thus a caustic visual pun on Dada. Because of the horse’s evil influence, Orpheus is ‘petrified’ (médusé) and decapitated by the Bacchantes for being a disrespectful poet. When finally reunited with Eurydice and the benign winged angel Heurtebise, Orpheus addresses a prayer to God, declaring that inspiration is ‘the devil in the form of a horse’. As the set rises into the sky reflecting their experience of personal change, the three figures form an ostensibly chaste and touching ménage à trois. This religious and rather conservative conclusion reflects Cocteau’s brief reversion to Catholicism, and indeed the transformation of a Surrealist poet into an eloquent and seemingly ‘normal’ believer delighted Maritain. Cocteau himself spoke of the play as containing many miracles and trucs (Heurtebise, for example, is suspended one moment in mid-air), but it also features other elements of his own recent personal experience: the diabolical horse recalls the portentous table-tapping with Radiguet at the Hugos, while the tribunal of the Bacchantes has its origins in Dada’s attempted censure of Cocteau.
Orpheus was manifestly a gay author’s imaginative deformation of a classical legend, and Cocteau even claimed that the very beautiful woman he found to play Death had been inspired by the transvestite performer Barbette. Does the guardian angel figure of Heurtebise perpetuate Radiguet? Possibly. He is, after all, love and salvation and can suddenly vanish (as when accused of murdering the poet). He is also clearly linked to the Heurtebise of ‘L’ange Heurtebise’, one of the longest and most successful poems of Opéra, which described the at once spiritual and violent homoerotic fantasy of possession by a ‘heavy male sceptre’, both a violent creative spirit and a young male lover. (It included the arresting lines: ‘The angel Heurtebise, with an unbelievable/brutality jumps on to me. Out of grace/Do not jump so hard/Bestial boy, flower of high/Stature’, and: ‘How ugly is the happiness one desires’.) Perhaps, too, Heurtebise loves – and is loved by – Orpheus through the intermediary of Eurydice. On this point the play remains less than clear, as if Cocteau were still searching in the dark for some kind of spiritual unity. Certainly with the high-profile and lavish production of Orpheus, which trades in innuendo, verbal razzle-dazzle and irreverent jokes for a knowing in-crowd (one of the horse’s aphorisms is ‘Madame Eurydice reviendra des enfers’, the first letters of each word spelling ‘MERDE’ [SHIT]), Cocteau was catering very much now to a gay audience and laying claim to a new status as a popular gay artist. When the police inspector questions the disembodied head of the dead Orpheus, he even flaunts his own birthplace and Paris address like a calling card. Cocteau’s apartment in the rue d’Anjou duly became overrun by young men who each wanted a piece of this ‘new’ Cocteau, compelling him at one point to detail the loss of certain possessions, such as inscribed editions in a letter to the publisher Roland Saucier. Cocteau, of course, provided lustre for this roving gay milieu that traded in intrigue and half-open secrets, although he was caught a trap of his own making on one occasion when he launched a campaign against one of Diaghilev’s regular composers, Vladimir Dukelsky. When Dukelsky ranted one night against ‘decadent Parisian musiquette’, Cocteau, a past master at one-upmanship and ever impulsive, retorted: ‘Dima, we Parisians send you a load of shit.’ When Cocteau proceeded to deliver a blatantly anti-Russian harangue, Dukelsky immediately challenged him to a duel and slapped him humiliatingly in his own home. In typical style Cocteau wrote to Diaghilev the next day to excuse himself, suggesting that it was Dukelsky who was the coward.
It was during the following Christmas, shortly after a major exhibition in Paris of his unusual hybrid sculptures and collage constructions (objets-poèmes) called Poésie plastique, that Cocteau met a young man who ushered in a completely new phase of his life. Wearing naval uniform because he was on military service as a land-based sailor in the Naval Ministry on the Place de la Concorde, Jean Desbordes was a softly spoken youth of twenty with classic high cheekbones and feline, sensual looks reminiscent of Radiguet. There was nothing especially distinctive about him (from one angle his short, slight build even lent him the demeanour of a bank clerk), and he may have lacked real intelligence or personality. Yet he was manifestly kind and gentle, emotional without being in any way effeminate, and, as he would later prove, fundamentally decent and honest. For Cocteau their meeting was of the order of a miracle. Was Desbordes, who had also brought with him that day a typewritten manuscript, a reincarnation of Radiguet? Cocteau chose to believe so, although he quickly revised that opinion when he read the manuscript, which was really a mass of formless utterances with periodic dream sequences about another world. Cocteau detected in it, however, odd signs of genius and decided to teach Desbordes how to exploit his reveries rather than leave them to chance. He soon became infatuated by Desbordes, re-naming him ‘Jean-Jean’ to differentiate him from Bourgoint (now in barracks in the Ruhr). He also installed him in the nearby Hôtel de la Madeleine (in the very room once occupied by Radiguet) and together they settled into a routine of opium.
It was a measure of Cocteau’s influence and standing that he was able to secure Desbordes’ early release from military service. Hence Desbordes continued to write as well as produce eulogies of Cocteau’s works, such as Lettre à Jacques Maritain. Yet for many the relationship could not be taken seriously. The very name Desbordes, pronounced like the second-person singular of the present tense of the verb déborder (to overflow), epitomized this playboy writer whose prose poured forth in a way Cocteau found so refreshing. The overall effect was a virtual parody of Cocteau’s ideal collaboration with the severe Radiguet, and it is symptomatic that Desbordes, unlike his predecessor, was on extremely good terms with Cocteau’s mother and would often write to her expressing his gratitude to her son for teaching him ‘the necessary things’. Eventually, there were enough of Desbordes’ pieces for a volume, and J’adore, a collection of intense effusions, was launched in June 1928 with a major advertising campaign conceived by Cocteau. Posters of Desbordes in his sailor costume were posted up in bookstores carrying Cocteau’s imprimatur. Cocteau also wrote a fulsome preface to the novel in which he addressed the youth of France and presented Desbordes as Antigone’s little brother, describing also in frank terms his own personal and professional involvement with Desbordes. The novel itself was a no-holds-barred pantheistic paean to universal love, a series of pagan Georgics written by a Protestant clearly influenced by Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth. It offered raw sexual and emotive phrases of the kind: ‘My heart is full of love, my limbs are filled with sap’, and, even more graphically:
When I think of nothing, I listen to love rising. I sense my sex at the lightest touch of a hand … I take love from everything. I can sense every drop of sperm in the air, and I never fail to transform it. Everything fertilizes me.
Cocteau praised J’adore for its ‘limpid streams’ and ‘burning ejaculations’, presenting Desbordes as an incarnation of the innocent and primitive. For Cocteau, such physical love governed by the heart constituted a new anarchy, that of loving God without limits, and through typical identification he began to fancy himself now as a kind of noble savage.
For Maritain, who was explicitly invoked in the novel only to be negated, J’adore was a flagrantly false Christian monologue intended to provoke him. Along with many other Catholics he immediately denounced Desbordes as the devil in disguise, writing in Le Roseau d’or of a total betrayal of Christ: ‘They [i.e. Desbordes and Cocteau, but perhaps all gay writers] adore, do they! God, and the genitals (and the printed page)’. By way of response Cocteau declared simply: ‘No, Jean is love.’ Cocteau, of course, had already pre-empted such criticism with a statement in his preface: ‘I judge only from the heart.’ He knew that he was putting himself on the line, but it could not be any other way: the personal and artistic were inextricably linked, and the natural risk for an out-gay writer was always public confusion and misunderstanding, if not scandal. He now conducted a campaign to try to influence every gay Catholic he knew, as well as every sympathetic literary journalist and critic, although with little effect.
Cocteau and Desbordes spent the summer of 1927 together first at Chantilly then Nice, and finally, towards the end of the year, in Chablis, where Cocteau wrote The White Book. This short autobiographical novel incorporates elements of his boyhood escapade to Marseilles (here Toulon), as well as the more recent stories of Radiguet’s death (the mysterious writer ‘H’, who dies early from tuberculosis), the Bourgoints’ and Sachs’ conversion. It was his first avowedly gay work, conceived of as a kind of companion piece to J’adore. Yet while it reproduces Desbordes’ peculiar mix of sensual confidences and religiosity, it also reveals considerable pudeur in its accounts of gay love as a natural component of the general disarray of youth and innocence. The anti-heroic narrator tells of his love for boys and young men, relays a few incidents from his childhood, mentions his father’s latent homosexuality and then describes his own unhappy affairs, one with a girl’s pimp and another with the girl’s brother. Each episode ends in death or painful separation: the wondrously endowed school vamp Dargelos dies from angina in hospital; the pimp Alfred is abandoned sobbing on the pavement; ‘Pas de Chance’ is deserted in a hotel bedroom; and Mademoiselle de S’s brother shoots himself. That gay love is doomed to failure and disappointment, even death, is inescapable, yet there is no sense here of this being a social punishment for sinful sexuality, although by the end the narrator feels that even the monastery has rejected him and attempts to drown himself.
The White Book was published first anonymously and clandestinely through Sachs in 1928, then two years later by the Editions du Signe with ‘illustrations by the author’. The manner of the book’s publication has always dictated its critical reception. Indeed, far too much ink has been spilt on questioning Cocteau’s desire not to acknowledge authorship, even though the book contains unmistakable proof of its creator’s hand. Certainly, Cocteau stretches the levels of coyness and obfuscation when he states at the start of the second edition that he is happy to ‘approve’ by means of such images ‘this anonymous effort towards clearing a terrain [i.e. homosexuality] that has remained too long uncultivated’ (the title The White Book refers in both French and English to an official parliamentary document or white paper. Yet the text’s further value is that of a fiction articulating some of Cocteau’s deepest feelings and character traits. Through the narrator’s account of his ‘tortures’, Cocteau offers a brilliantly concise breakdown of his own psychological and emotional condition and the sad fact that he is doomed always to lose in matters of the heart:
I am ravaged by love. Even when I am at peace I shrink with fear that this peace will cease, and this anxiety prevents me from taking any pleasure in it … Waiting is torture; possession is another, for fear of losing what I have.1
In one of the most potent identifications between narrator and creator – the graphic scene in the bathhouse where a man makes love to his own reflection unaware of the onlooker behind the mirror – we see vividly how Cocteau can transform pure erotic fantasy into poetic reality. For this reason, The White Book may be viewed as a belated artistic response to Gide’s Corydon, a major defence of homosexuality also first published anonymously in 1911. Unlike Corydon, however, Cocteau’s self-consciously ludic and libidinous text celebrating gay sexuality as ‘the fair sex’ harbours no major claims to influence social or sexual mores. Nevertheless, its final defiant message of refusing mere tolerance opens out on to the more general question of the relations between life and art and thus leads the way in ethico-erotic terms. Troping on Rimbaud, the narrator states powerfully that ‘the young would have done better to retain the phrase: Love is to be reinvented. Society accepts dangerous experiences in the realm of art because it doesn’t take art seriously, but it condemns them in real life’ (emphasis original).2 Like all Cocteau’s best work, The White Book bespeaks the translation of the gay real into art and actively contests the lazy and ultimately homophobic assertion that gay life and gay art should be kept separate and smoothed out clean.
By the spring of 1928 Cocteau had became Coco Chanel’s official houseguest at her private mansion in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. She was now effectively sponsoring his smoking habits, although things went typically awry when Sachs misused funds intended by Chanel for assembling her new library. As for Desbordes, he was beginning now to withdraw from circulation and would soon undergo treatment for opium addiction under the care of his sister. In December, claiming he wanted to set a good example to Desbordes, Cocteau checked himself into a fashionable clinic run by a certain Dr Sollier in the wealthy suburb of Saint-Cloud in order to begin his second major cure. This would last more than three months and constitute one of the most formative and productive stages of his life-project.