The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks Read Free Book Online

called Maurice Sachs was the subject of frenzied ogling when he danced on the table in cassock and pink socks. Max Jacob, the poet and friend of Picasso, found that his new Catholic faith was not enough to keep him from the terrible draw of the Hotel Welcome and its troupe of handsome young men, most of whom had been brought down for the delectation of Jean Cocteau. One of these youths, called Jean Bourgoint, habitually wore the uniform of the French army. Other regulars were the delicate artist and decorator Christian Bérard, known as Bébé for his cherubic expression, and the writer René Crevel. It was a circus of dubious taste whose clashing elements were united by sexual self-interest.
    It was not Huyton. Even after three years in Paris Christopher Wood seemed gauche. He had brought some watercolours to show Cocteau, and another English visitor, Sir Francis Rose, himself only a teenager at this time, described Wood’s anxiety about his work. To Rose he appeared a ‘lame and timid young man, with his strange, handsome English schoolboy’s face’.
    Wood was overwhelmed by Jean Cocteau. He believed him to be a genius in drawing, writing and conversation: he was simply the arbiter of what was elegant or worthwhile. Wood believed he had made friends with him and was proud to have done so.
    Cocteau was a man of great gifts, many of them on permanent display. He had burst into Paris at the age of sixteen at a ball given by Madame de Chavannes at the Opéra. He appeared dressed as Heliogabolus, the most dissolute of all Roman emperors, carried on a litter by two Nubian wrestlers. It was an entrance to which he had lived up as poet, draughtsman, librettist, talker, impresario and self-publicist with a lifelong passion for what he had to sell.
    Edith Wharton remarked of Jean Cocteau that no one had ever made her understand better the lines of Wordsworth ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven.’ Cocteau was thirty-five when Wood met him in 1924 but hadmade a fetish of his own youth. He ran away to sea at the age of fifteen and published his first poem in 1908 when he was nineteen. The financial support of his mother allowed him to indulge his talents. He brought out a magazine called Schéhérézade in 1908 which belonged in essence to the fin de siècle: its little drawings had a touch of Decadent mascara. When Modernism burst on the world shortly afterwards Cocteau was swift to adapt his ideas; but in the 1920s the fact that he could trace a line back to the old days helped him to rise above the competing manifestos of Dada, Futurism and Surrealism. As well as being a perpetual enfant terrible , he was old enough to know better.
    Cocteau infiltrated himself behind the scenes of the Russian Ballet. He liked everything about it – the snobbery, the glamour, and particularly its principal dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky. Diaghilev hired him to work as a publicist, but forbade him access to the showers. In 1915, Cocteau made up for this by joining an ambulance unit run by his friend Comte Etienne de Beaumont, one of Paris’s greatest party-givers. The unit included shower-baths in which Cocteau took numerous photographs, celebrating the experience in a poem called ‘La Douche. He recalled the bodies with sensual pleasure, particularly the part that fascinated him all his life – ‘Je ne crois guère aux hommes de petite verge’ (‘I can’t really believe in men with a small prick’). Throughout the war he commuted back to Paris, where he struggled to stage a ballet called Parade. When the ballet opened in 1917 he called it ‘the greatest battle of the War’, a tiny provocation to the French army, then in full-scale mutiny over the epic loss of life on the Chemin des Dames.
    Cocteau befriended the aviator Roland Garros and flew with him on several occasions. Garros was involved with trying to develop a machine gun that fired through gaps left as the propeller rotated. Cocteau claimed that