Professional Secrets by Jean Cocteau..For over half a century, Jean Cocteau was the master bricoleur—Jack-of-all-trades—in the arts of Western Europe. His trademark—handwritten name with a tailpiece star—became as famous as his name, and his collected works, as Auden said, would require "not a bookshelf, but a warehouse." Besides some fifty volumes of poems, plays, novels, memoirs, diaries, and criticism, he also made drawings, paintings, tapestries, pottery,
movies, murals, stage sets, ballets, opera libretti, cabaret songs (music as well as words), and one season he designed a line of Christmas cards. He was a tireless performer, onstage and off: a dazzling talker (monologues a specialty); an opium addict; a scandalous lover (who wore a whole suit of hearts up his sleeve as well as on it); and always a winning but haunted child, whose obsessive need was to outrage and be loved by all the grownups. If Cocteau did not invent the phrase enfant terrible, he certainly gave it household currency. The future will decide his place in world literature, but meantime we have his personal legend, his emblematic private life as he himself recorded it.
Professional Secrets is not the biography outsiders will attempt, not Orpheus as reconstructed by Bulfinch, but Orpheus as he saw himself, remembering his past form his own point of view. Drawing upon some thirty of Cocteau's books, as well as memoirs by friends and confreres, Professional Secrets follows the trajectory of a living myth. From a bewitched and stage-struck childhood, with Bernhardt and Mistinguett and Proust and Rilke in the wings; to the turning point in 1913 when Diaghilev smiled at the young Cocteau and said, "Etonne-moi. . . Do something that will surprise me. . .", it moves through a series of events and encounters that stand like so many heraldic signs: the opium cures, the love for Raymond Radiguet, the religious crises, the psychosomatic illnesses, the world travels, the friendships with Picasso and Stravinsky, Satie and Chaplin, Colette and Gide; and the incessant, inspired work in theatres, film studios, and alone at a writing table, in the middle of the night, using paper and ink as "the only means I have to forget my ugliness and to become beautiful. . ."
Like so much today, literature too is changing. One we asked books to amuse or distract us; now we explicitly ask for secrets, for testaments, for one man's truth. Cocteau knew this. It was his root conviction that if a man wants to share his truth, he must be not only honest but courageous. He must begin by accepting himself as he is and by remembering what his weaknesses as well as his strengths have taught him. "Every morning I tell myself," he once said, "'you can do nothing about it: submit. . .'" Not the least of the professional secrets embodied in this autobiography is one that Cocteau discovered as a very young man. "Ce que le public te reproche, cultive-le. C'est toi. . . Cultivate whatever the public reproaches you for. That's you."
