All biography is both an act of homage and a labour of dissection, and all biographers are jealous of their subjects. Most keep it cool, but some like it hot and have created a distinct category in which jealousy becomes murder followed by necromancy: the one they hug is asphyxiated — but lo! — they breathe their own air back into it. Sartre’s book on Jean Genet is such a work, as are Brigid Brophy’s on Ronald Firbank and Roger Lewis’s on Anthony Burgess.
Claude Arnaud’s on Jean Cocteau is yet another. Its approach is intensely romantic. Everyone is heaving in lurid colours. Arnaud certainly knows his material; and that he carefully references printed sources along the way is adroit, a necessity to the illusion, like the pins which hold a provisional costume together. The result is a mind-boggling excursion through Cocteau’s many milieux: from his teenage beginnings as a poet in Proustian Paris; through the Great War and the Modern movement of the 1920s in collaboration with Diaghilev, Satie, Stravinsky and Picasso; followed by the macabre uncertainties of the 1930s and later in Nazi-occupied Paris; and on to postwar film making and international celebrity. The parade of boyfriends and benefactresses is spectacular, and the near-lifelong opium addiction is paralleled by the manner in which the story moves forward in a kind of peristaltic reverie.
There are many delightful incidentals, the sort of thing biographers can easily overlook. Cocteau’s spelling was poor; he had facelifts; he couldn’t swim; he suffered from eczema; he never picked up the bill in a restaurant because he never had money (his art projects were uncommercial and he lived on handouts). There are numerous analytical hits too, along the lines of Cocteau ‘felt himself slipping into freefall when he failed to please’.
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