The Ballets of Jean Cocteau

The Theatrical Innovations of the "Enfant Terrible" of French Art

EDMUND WILSON, Jr.

JEAN COCTEAU is perhaps best known as the spokesman of the modernist group in France. He has probably done more than anyone else to explain to the French public the work of such people as Picasso, Derain and Braque, Satie and the Groupe des Six, and, within his restricted field, he is an exceedingly brilliant critic. He has a solid and definite idea of the significance of the movement — a reaction of the simple and hard against the tenuous and literary, of the Jazz Band against Debussy—and a gift for hitting off its tenets in terse and witty aphorisms.

But it is not, I think, in his criticism that he has done his most important work: his interest has been too narrowly centered in the activities of this little group. It is true that he pleads their cause with an admirably sane discrimination: he defends them with typical French good sense against their own extremists and charlatans. But he seems to lack the universal curiosity in and sympathy with all groups and ages which distinguishes the genuine critical mind from the proselytizer for a cause.

Nor is it, I believe, in his poems that we find Cocteau at his best: they suggest the matrix of images and phrases which one may find in a poet's note-book and from which he some day will polish and cut the clear lines of the poem, rather than impressions properly prepared to appear before the reader's mind. (He will not even punctuate them.) It is in his strange and revolutionary ballets that he seems most personally to express himself and to attain his most considerable dignity as a creative artist.

The Art of Nonsense in France

PERHAPS the most striking feature of these ballets is their introduction into French of an element which has been almost entirely lacking from modern French literature—I mean the element of nonsense. In England and America we have all been brought up on a great literature of nonsense—Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and W. S. Gilbert—and it is difficult for us to understand why the by no means extravagant nonsense of Cocteau should puzzle and enrage a French audience; but the fact is that the French have no training which would enable them to understand such things as, for example, his idea of decoying wireless dispatches by means of a "dead newspaper" or of his ostrich which comes out of the camera one day when the photographer says "Un oiseau va sortir!" The French are too sophisticated and too reasonable to understand the beauty of the absurd: where we are broken in from childhood to such masterpieces of nonsense as Alice in Wonderland, the French are reading those other masterpieces, the Fairy Tales of Perrault, which, in their clarity and measure, their sophisticated naivete, are as different as possible from the Jabberwock and the Walrus and the Carpenter. In France, the greatest jesters have been extremely serious and logical men. The jokes of Voltaire and Anatole France are funny because they are true. The jokes of Carroll and Lear—and of Shakespeare and Browning and Dickens—are funny, in most instances, because they are simply silly.

It is perhaps chiefly this indulgence in nonsense which has scandalized the French in Cocteau, but this is not the only ingredient which makes his ballets remarkable. For Cocteau has a genuine gift for rendering certain aspects of life. He is in love with all the droll and homely aspects of the Parisian world —the music halls, the revues, and the bals musettes, the Eiffel Tower with its photographer and its post-cards of beautiful bathers, the popular fairs with their side-shows and their jingling merry-go-round tunes. Cocteau has protested repeatedly that he wants to make something real; and it is true that, for all his nonsense, he does make something real. When he turns a bourgeois wedding into a sidesplitting harlequinade, we none the less get the feeling of a vivid reaction to life, of a bodying forth of objects which the artist has seen and felt.

It is precisely this seriousness about his art which, in the last analysis, differentiates Cocteau from an Englishman producing the same sort of thing. The Frenchman theorizes about his art; he formulates an aesthetic doctrine; he relates his own contribution to the body of art of the world. Cocteau's nearest British analogue is, I suppose, J. M. Barrie. In such things as Peter Pan, and the dream act from A Kiss for Cinderella, Barrie duplicates almost exactly the formula of Cocteau. But one cannot imagine Barrie writing elaborate manifestoes and program notes to explain the aesthetic of his fantasies; whereas we find Cocteau expounding, in the following terms, Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel: "La poesie est plus vraie que le vrai. II ne s'agit pas d'envelopper les objets et les sentiments d'un voile, mais au contraire de les montrer si nus, si vite, que l'homme a peine a les reconnoitre. Il lui semble voir et entendre pour la premiere fois . . . . On me demande si le texte est une satire. Des qu'il y a realite, il y a satire, et je ne supporte pas une oeuvre meme transports tres loin dans la realite subjective qui ne prenne pas racine profonde dans la realite de tous." One scarcely knows which to admire the more, the classic-mindedness of a public which requires to have such simple, if fantastic, spectacles explained to it, or the artistic seriousness of a writer who takes a charming harlequinade as a pretext for laying down aesthetic principles in the manner of Aristotle.

Ballet with Phonographs

COMING to the ballets themselves, we find several theatrical novelties. In the first place, the actors wear huge masks which not only cover their heads, but in many cases their whole torsos. This enables the different characters not only to have different faces, but also to have different shapes. Thus the Director of the Eiffel Tower is enormously fat, and quivers and bounces like a balloon; the Photographer is a hunchback (presumably from continual stooping to look under the apron of his camera). The costumes are sometimes painted with crude effects of light and shade, as if the figures had been coarsely drawn—the Groom, for example, as may be seen in the picture, has spokes of light painted on his hat —and the masks and costumes together give the impression of a sort of combination of Italian marionettes with American comic supplement pictures.

In Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel, the action is explained by phonographs (with actors in them, of course) at either side of the stage. They carry on a dialogue, as it were, over the heads of the characters; the dialogue between the characters themselves is explained by a formula like this: one of the phonographs says to the other, "Le photographe parle, Que dit-U?" and the other phonograph replies with whatever it is the Photographer says.—"Mais quel est cet autre tapage?" "Le Directeur de la Tour Eiffel. Que dit-U?" "Un peu de silence, s'il vous plait. Ne faites pas peur aux depeches."

(Continued on page 94)

(Continued from page 48)

Parade, the first of the ballets (1917), represented the outside of a side-show at a fair. Three or four of the performers appear and do their stunts outside the booth (parade, in French, means an act which is performed in this way to attract the crowd). There are two sad and conventional acrobats, a Chinese conjurer who spits fire, and a "petite fille americane," a strange and fabulous figure, conceived by M. Cocteau after a study of our magazines and movies. She is made to do all the things which he gathers, from these sources, that little American girls do. "La petite fille monte en course, se promene a bicyclette, trepide comme I'imagerie des films, imite Charlet, chasse un voleur au revolver, boxc, danse un Rag-Time, s'endort, fait naufrage, se roule sur l'her be un matin d'Avril, prend un Kodak, etc."

The settings and costumes of Parade were designed by Picasso and the music was written by Erik Satie. The former evolved three terrific "managers" (see the photograph), which the public found extremely distasteful, and the latter introduced an accompaniment of typewriters "to evoke a certain American atmosphere." The result was that the audience rebelled with all the bad manners of such occasions. Cocteau claims that they ended by mistaking their own racket for Satie's music and that it was not until the music was played separately in concert that it became clear there was nothing outrageous about it.

Le Bceuf sur le Toit, the second ballet (February, 1920), was a pantomime performed to music by Darius Milhaud. It was supposed to represent an American bar under Prohibition. The action is explained as follows: "The patrons of the bar drink whiskey; the arrival of a policeman is announced; the whiskey is hidden and replaced by milk; the policeman comes in; the customers cut his head off, set his body up on a chair and dance tragic dances about his head." In this "American farce by a Parisian who has never been in America" the gestures and movements of the characters were set to a slower tempo than the music. It is late at night—the sleepy atmosphere of T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Among the Nightingales, where a similar setting is evoked—and the people in the bar "move like divers at the bottom of the sea."

Finally, In the spring of 1921, the Swedish Ballet in Paris presented Cocteau's masterpiece, Les Mariis de la Tour Eiffel, with costumes by Jean Hugo, setting by Irene Lagut, and music by the Groupe des Six. After a delightful overture by Auric—Le Quatorze JuUlet—full of the holiday sounds of bad cornets and dancing in the street, the curtain goes up on the Eiffel Tower in a highly stylized form. The stage is completely deserted; there enters an ostrich, strutting stiffly. The phonographs explain the action (I quote the text, here, from memory) in raucous mechanical voices: "Void la Tour Eiffel." "Void une autruche." "Elle traverse la Seine." "Elle sort." A Hunter appears, tracking the ostrich. He thinks he sees something in the sky; he fires and shoots a wireless dispatch, [the Eiffel Tower has been used for years as a wireless station] which falls to the stage in the form of a great wad of printed matter. The Director of the Tower is enraged and appears, to reproach the Hunter. In a moment the wedding party arrives, Bride, Bridegroom, Maids of Honour and Ushers. There are also the Father-in-Law and Mother-in-Law, and a General, who has been invited to the breakfast. They immediately sit down to table and prepare to have their picture taken. But, the Photographer explains, he is not sure his camera is in order: for years, just before taking a picture, he has encouraged his subject to look at the camera with the words "Un oiseau va sortir!"; this morning a real ostrich came out of the apparatus and it has been out of order ever since. He presses the bulb and a post-card Bathing-Girl leaps out of the enormous camera; she performs a brief pas seul, to the great enthusiasm of the wedding party, and disappears again.

Again and again the Photographer tries, but always with disturbing results. At last, the camera disgorges a Lion, which incontinently eats the General. The party is stricken with grief; a funeral march is performed; the Groom makes an eloquent speech, rehearsing the virtues of the General. Then, as soon as the rites have been performed, they dismiss the subject from their minds and break into a lively quadrille, which they dance with inconceivable clumsiness. I have not space to recount here all the vicissitudes of the wedding. It is enough to say that the ostrich comes back and the picture is finally taken; the Lion regurgitates the General and the party is left in perfect contentment.

It is a great pity that someone will not undertake to produce this ballet over here—or even to get Cocteau over to write a new ballet for America. His fine gift for nonsense and burlesque (though it seems to me he sometimes makes blunders, as is natural in a man of a race which has no tradition of nonsense) should be better appreciated by us, I think, than by the audiences of his own country, who either try to take his absurdities seriously or regard them as mauvaises plaisanteries. And he would bring to our comic stage something which it sadly lacks: a serious artistic interest in the possibilities of burlesque and a daring imagination to deal with the rich materials of the review.