The Difficulty of Being by Jean Cocteau Read Free Book Online Page A

wise thing then is a change of air and of room. The new material comes to me on my walks. Whatever happens I mustn’t notice it. If I interfere, it doesn’t come any more. One fine day the work demands my help. I give myself up to it in one fell swoop. My pauses are its own. If it falls asleep my pen skids. As soon as it wakes, it gives me a shake. It couldn’t care less if I am asleep. Get up, it says, so that I can dictate. And it is not easy to follow. Its vocabulary is not of words.
    In
Opium
I describe a liberty I took during
Les Enfants Terribles
. Seduced by the flow of my pen, I believed I was freeto invent for myself. Everything stood still. I had to await its
good pleasure
.
    La Machine Infernale
used another mood. It would desert me for very long periods. It would wait for other fevers to cease distracting me. It wanted me for itself. If my mind wandered at all, it turned its back on me.
La Machine à Ecrire
is a disaster. From the first, when I thought myself ready to write it, another inspiration took over and dictated
La Fin du Potomak
. I wanted to return to it. I took the dictation badly. After the first act I just wrote it my own way. Once the play was written, I persistently rewrote it. And after all that I listened to advice and ruined the end. May that play be an example to me! I shall never be my own master. I am made for obedience. And these lines that I am writing, a week ago I did not know I had to write.
    Of all the problems that confuse us, that of fate and of free will is the most obscure. What? The thing is written in advance and we can write it, we can change the end? The truth is different. Time does not exist. It is what enfolds us. What we believe we carry out later is done all in one piece. Time reels it off for us. Our work is already done. However we still have to discover it. It is this passive participation which is so astounding. And with reason. It leaves the public incredulous. I decide and I do not decide. I obey and I direct. It’s a great mystery.
La Machine à Ecrire
was not a bad play to begin with. † The juice left me high and dry. I was free. But I am no longer free to remove the blot I made. It is there.
    * This was
L’Aigle à Deux Têtes
(
The Eagle with Two Heads
).
    † This play is now included in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française in a new version.

ON DIAGHILEV AND NIJINSKY
    IN A BOOK IN WHICH I BEAR WITNESS TO THE Socratic proceedings that society institutes against us, I must express my gratitude to two free men who lived to cry their cries.
    Nijinsky was of less than average height. In soul and in body he was just a professional deformity.
    His face, of Mongol type, was joined to his body by a very long and very thick neck. The muscles of his thighs and those of his calves stretched the fabric of his trousers and gave him the appearance of having legs bent backwards. His fingers were short, as if cut off at the knuckles. In short, one would never have believed that this little monkey with sparse hair, wearing a skirted overcoat and a hat balanced on the top of his head, was the idol of the public.
    Yet he was, and with good reason. Everything about him was designed to be seen at a distance, in the limelight. On the stage his over-developed muscles became slim. His figure lengthened (his heels never touching the ground), his hands became the fluttering leaves of his gestures, and as for his face, it was radiant.
    Such a metamorphosis is almost unimaginable for those who never witnessed it.
    In
Le Spectre de la Rose
, in which he epitomized himself from 1913 onwards, he performed with a bad grace. Because the choreography of
Le Sacre
shocked people, and he could not bear it that the one should be applauded and the other booed. Gravity is a part of our being. He tried endlessly to find some trick to get the better of it.
    He had become aware that half of the leap which ends
Le Spectre de la Rose
was lost when seen from the auditorium. He invented a double