The Great Avant-Garde Swindle (2): Opiated Gnossiennes

Breton threatened a literary critic who had dared to praise his poetry at the same time as Cocteau’s: “Monsieur, I am not a cock sucker!” -Arnaud Claude, Jean Cocteau: A Life

This is the story of a whore with a golden heart, and her name is Paris. We begin traveling through plumes of factory smoke that encroach on the decaying capital of the world, we enter a cloud of opium. When we remerge, we find ourselves in Room 25 of the famous Welcome Hotel. Rotting away on a Japanese couch, barely holding on to his pipe, we may observe an artist. He has spent days in trance without lifting a finger. Tanned skin and wild eyes tamed by the holy drug, his hair is disheveled and his chest is exposed to the soft caress of a younger lover. One can hear the cheers of American sailors dancing entwined with young French boys in the bar below. The scene is sublimely Persian. This enchanted poet-prince of the Orient goes by the name of Jean Cocteau.

A much different scene. This time we descend to the underbelly of the city, and the shroud of smoke is simple tobacco and nicotine. We rest in a cramped apartment in the rue Fontaine, in the magnificent 9th Arrondissement. It's not a quiet scene. A high priest, eyes like electric wildfire, preaches of the coming Revolution to his adepts and apostles. There's the distinct figure of a certain Robert Desnos. This gawky shadow of a man, so hideous he is mockingly dubbed a "sleepy clown", is nonetheless a true Boanegre. His master is declaiming a well-prepared harangue, and he is the histrionic and grandiose André Breton.

Between these men, at this very moment, there contends a war much higher than the pride of nations and much more honorable than the greed of politicians. It is the War for Surrealism. With Guillaume Apollinaire's death in the trenches years prior, intestine conflict has torn apart the French arts and a thousandfold petty kings dispute the claim as the true heirs of the movement. André Breton is the most powerful of these pretenders, having just bested in combat Yvan Goll's clique. Jean Cocteau is, indeed, a stranger in Breton's fiefdom, and the battle was unavoidable and expected.

We have covered simple traits of André Breton's character in the previous entry to this log, so the attention may go to the newer guest instead. Jean Cocteau is, simply put, all the things that Breton abhors: homosexual, Catholic, and, despite his talent, independent from the Surrealist's clutches. Back when he arrived in Paris in the early 20's he was the center of attention in all artistic circles of the city: loved and hated by Marcel Proust, admired by the heterodox composer Erik Satie, personal friends with Pablo Picasso, Christian Dior, Igor Stravinsky, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, he left a strong impression on all that surrounded him. Although his sexuality was never a secret, his "confession" in the infamous Le Livre Blanc caused stupor and amazement in Parisian society, which inevitably makes one a target of hatred and gossip. In the making of his own literary court, he found a good friend in the ever-mystically depressive Max Jacob, who would never leave his side. Cocteau also stumbled upon a genuine jewel: a poet in the true Rimbaudian sense and preeminent enfant-terrible Raymond Radiguet. Their short affair and professional relationship is by now legendary, as Cocteau treated the writer of Le Diable au corps with such reverence and love that when Radiguet died of typhoid, the writer's entire career became a tragic mixture of worship of the dead friend and a desperate attempt to fill his place with someone else. Depression quickly took hold — he was only twenty years old, for God's sake! — and so did a lifelong opium addiction.

In a moment of abject desperation and spiritual malaise, Cocteau increasingly approached Catholicism. Never a man of faith but always fascinated by its aesthetics and relationship with Grecorroman paganism, he began consulting priests and monks until finding a certain tower of piety: Jacques Maritain. Although never ordained there was no man closer to God and to Rome in all of France, enjoying even a reputation as a mystic and a philosopher. Their first contact auspicious, the erratic and passionate Cocteau made a leap of faith and, in frenzy, wrote the then-shocking Lettre à Jacques Maritain, an ode to Cocteau's Catholicism: a mixture of opium worship, vague Christianity, orientalizing obliteration of the self, and a call to take on the streets and be standard-bearers of a new religious beauty. Its publication and the controversial public response would stir the waters enough that the Surrealists of Breton decided Cocteau was to be their enemy unto death.

The Lettre was a declaration of war as far as Breton and his companions were concerned. Cocteau's faction recruited Giorgio de Chirico, Max Jacob, Picasso, and worse, many Catholics, some even men of the Action Française. Appropriate enemies for an André that was so anti-clerical that whenever he encountered a priest in public, he'd loudly heckle "Have you not had enough fondling me? Bastard! Dirty pig!", but his religious concerns ran much deeper. The Surrealists sought to access the deeper mysteries through alchemy and black magic, and the group's task was, in High Priest Breton's own words, to create links between mankind and the occult powers that ordered the cosmos. Walter Benjamin understood this aspect of the avant-garde. The movement was essentially initaic in nature and Desnos would go as far as to claim his mentor was simply trying to restore meaning to the word "religion". In this, he was much like Cocteau, although the latter instead turned towards the divine and angelic of Mediterranean paganism and the superb excesses of Oriental mystery cults, even if they even shared a fascination for Greek myths, especially the story of Theseus and the Minotaur (Minotaure went on to become the Surrealists' semi-official magazine). Breton was at heart a true Romantic, a Romantic of thunder and ghostly wails, a Romantic of pentagrams and deals with the devil. This is then, not only disputes between artists but also a metaphysical war of urban proportions. Neutrality was not an option, and the undecided, like the angelic Ganymede that was René Crevel, were physically beaten and humiliated for it.

While roving gangs of youths clashed in Paris in the names of their artistic idols and graffiti with "Vive Breton!" and other slogans covered every street, in private, a complex series of magickal attacks and counterattacks succeeded each other rapidly. Breton, convinced Cocteau was using a sort of Catholic magic against him, bought a series of his works in an exposition and stuck them with needles to curse them in the Voodoo tradition. Cocteau was convinced certain letters he received were hexed and burnt many of his correspondence to ward off devils. Max Jacob came to genuinely believe the Surrealists were demonically possessed and attempted to exorcise them from his flat. Breton had certainly restored religion to be the center of Parisian life, even if unorthodoxly. The affair became so heated that the Surrealists, never less radical than the day before, prepared a ploy to murder Cocteau in cold blood. Like the Lamb of God, so would the poet be murdered by disciplines of the Antichrist in a Black Mass. To kill a Catholic and an abject sodomite was a higher calling. The sacrificer, the cold-blooded murderer, would be none other than the fellow homosexual Robert Desnos. Desnos, that Desnos so horrible who could never fuck without paying beforehand, who had fantasies of an eternal Reign of Terror and processions of castrated priests heading to Madame Guillotine, was more than appropriate as executioner. He was also a man of supreme violence, delighting in beating up a young man who was declaiming Cocteau's poems with a cane, breaking his left arm.

The plan was set. In a celebration in honor of Ezra Pound's recent successes, Desnos was to enact the vengeance of the Hundred-Armed God. A swift movement. Up, then down, and deep between the shoulders. A knife recently bought, sticking out off that pederast Cocteau's back. Desnos would be a hero of the Surrealist Revolution, and a martyr if prosecuted. However, fortune was on Cocteau's side that day, as he was indisposed and did not attend the celebration. He just so happened to avoid certain brutal death. Divine favor? Perhaps whichever Supreme Being reigns the universe delights in Desnos's misery more than in Cocteau's death? Whatever the case is, Robert Desnos did attend the ceremony. He did not see his sacrifice in the bar. In a rage, in frustration, in hatred, he went instead for the American poet, who also narrowly escaped death thanks to the intervention of several passersby. Desnos would go unpunished and live many years more, in cowardice and resentment. He would also face Cocteau many times more, in the backrooms of cabarets. None of the raw aggression and of his murderous plans was ever revealed in his wide, tired eyes. Desnos was broken.

However, this is not to say the Surrealists were defeated. If they couldn't tear at his flesh like vultures, they would move on to the worst killing, the murder of his image. A fake interview published by a Surrealist newspaper presented Picasso, one of his closest friends, insulting Cocteau for his flamboyant sexuality and erratic behavior. And another, this time with Max Jacob, much of the same. If Cocteau had the unique human warmth and charm that attracted as many friends as enemies, Breton had an ironclad organized party of fierce militants and strong influence in the world of arts. Cocteau's fate was sealed. His youths began to be afraid of going out at night in fear of being confronted by Surrealists, and then the Catholics began to waver in their support. Jacques Maritain had published a response in which he demanded Cocteau retract his heterodox statements and cease his Uranian concupiscence at once. Cocteau declined. Slowly but surely, he grew isolated, ever more addicted to opium. He barely wrote anymore. His attempts to find love found him confused and jealous in the small world of homosexuals in Paris. His attempts to write a new masterpiece fell flat, too intoxicated and depressive to do much of anything. His attempts to forge a new Radiguet from a talented admirer failed and only brought on sickly obsessiveness from his many fans, causing many more controversies. Jean Cocteau had lost. He was dead in life. This Christ would not resurrect.

It would be many years, many failed love affairs, many tears, and many entries into rehabilitation clinics before he could write as he did before. And it was a glorious, kingly entrance. Les Enfants terribles was a bombastic proof that Cocteau, though defeated on the battlefield, had transcended the literary disputes of the avant-garde cliques. The era of strife was over, and for the next years, Cocteau was prolific yet erratic as always. Before anyone really knew it, the '30s came, and in their passing France had surrendered to Germany quickly and swiftly. The prince who was doomed to forever roam the world searching for a court finally found what he was looking for. The noblest of courts, a new Round Table of the Arts, was born under the auspices of Otto Abetz: there was the Achillean classicist Henri de Montherlant, the always witty Ernst Jünger, the rhapsode of misery Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the sculptor of Aryans Arno Breker.

Andre and Jean are long dead, and so much time has passed one couldn't even take a piece of their body for a reliquary without it crumbling to dust. Their friends and legacy are dead, or worse, pure commodities for historical curiosity. Perhaps their names are still written in academic controversies over the former's homophobia and the latter's collaborationism. A lifetime, a wartime, reduced to museum pieces. However, one must remember. In the streets of Paris, in the stillness of the air, in the cold wind, there is the soft rumination of static. An electric pulse reverberates in every Arrondissement. You can feel it in the Champs Élysées, in the theatres and operas, in the bars, and even in the damp underground. Once upon a time, this city was the entire world. Convolved within it sublime ritualism of passionate hate and love, in which ancient and recent prayers were uttered for an instant that has become eternal. The air of Paris is blessed and cursed, enchanted and bewitched, and we must not forget. Their insults and their promises of everlasting affection, their cries, and their screams have traveled the world, sanctifying the face of the Earth and irrevocably binding it to Paris. We are bound to a whore with a heart of gold.