Volume 16, Number 1 · January 28, 1971
Eternal Cocteau
By Robert Mazzocco
Cocteau
by Francis Steegmuller
Little, Brown, 583 pp., $12.50
Jean Cocteau: Lettres à André Gide (avec quelques réponses d'André Gide)
La Table Ronde, 217 pp., 35 F.
Professional Secrets
edited by Robert Phelps
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 331 pp., $8.50
Cocteau led a fabled life, full of signs and wonders, some comic, some tragic. Of course he was very modern and very perverse, but he was, I think, a sort of Galahad, a Galahad, perhaps, of opéra bouffe. What made him a Galahad was his desire to be driven by 'unknown forces,' 'to make a report,' as he says, 'for an Intelligence Service that is difficult to place,' to plague, at the court of the Ballets Russes, Serge de Diaghilev, he with his 'watery eye cast down with the curve of a Portuguese oyster,' and no doubt his King Arthur—to plague the impresario until he gave him the clarion call: Etonne-moi, 'the first notes of a period that were struck in 1912, and would only end with my death.'
Review, 4914 words
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