The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks Read Free Book Online Page A

Garros had solved the problem by watching an electric fan in Cocteau’s mother’s flat in the rue d’Anjou. Garros was killed on a mission in 1918 and Cocteau dedicated his book of poems Le Cap de Bonne Esperance (The Cape of Good Hope) to him. The figure of the airman had caught his imagination, just as it had appealed to Proust, who visited the aerodrome and in Albertine Disparue compared somewheeling, looping angels in a Giotto fresco to ‘the young pupils of Roland Garros’.
    The best and worst of the period, the brilliant and the cheap, the beautiful and the spurious, met in the person of Jean Cocteau. He appropriated a bar called Le Gaya, initially as a snub to the Dada movement, but then found he liked being a nightclub manager. It was succeeded by Le Boeuf sur le Toit, the definitive bar for visiting Americans.
    When Wood met him in 1924 Cocteau was in mourning for his lover, Raymond Radiguet, a boy comet he had met at Max Jacob’s house when Radiguet was only sixteen. Radiguet produced a novel called he Diable au Corps , which was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, but died of typhoid, apparently contracted from bad oysters, in December 1923, still only twenty years old.
    Cocteau’s ostentatious mourning led Parisians to apply to him the word ‘veuf’ (widower), usually in the vicious sobriquet ‘le veuf sur le toit’. A friend called Louis Laloy suggested his grief might be assuaged by opium and Cocteau took to the drug so readily that he smoked it for the rest of his life. He was shrewd enough to buy only the best and to treat it with the respect it required. He went through two cures for smoking, though the literary benefits that accrued, both in the books he wrote about it and in the quiet that the sanatorium gave him to consider other projects, led Stravinsky to comment that ‘the chief purpose of the drug-taking came to be book-making’.
    The impressionable Christopher Wood sat in Cocteau’s first-floor room watching him at work. From Picasso he had learned the trick of making a drawing with a single line, without taking the pencil from the page. Wood, who often struggled with his line, was suitably awed. Cocteau talked to Wood about opium and shared his delight in the ritual aspect of smoking. The pipes were best prepared by Chinese ‘boys’ while the smokers lay back and awaited their pleasure. ‘People talk about the “enslavement” of opium,’ Cocteau wrote; ‘but taking it at regular hours is in fact not only a discipline but a liberation … It reassures by virtue of its air of luxury, its rites, the elegance of its non-medicallamps, flames, pipes and by the secular ritual of its exquisite communion.’
    Most of what Cocteau said was true, but with the weighty provisos that the smoker should be rich enough to buy the best drug, self-disciplined enough not to abuse it, and should come to it in a state of mind that was not vulnerable or unbalanced. None of these serious reservations would have counted with Wood, who was in the first rapturous glow of hero-worship. Under Cocteau’s influence, Wood’s use of opium, which had been an occasional indulgence with Gandarillas, became a regular habit.
    Cocteau left Villefranche at the end of November 1924 to travel to London with Diaghilev’s ballet for the opening of Milhaud’s Le Train Bleu , decorated by Henri Laurens with a curtain by Picasso, for which he had written the libretto. By December he was back in Paris, smoking heavily, and seeing Christopher Wood. He encouraged him in his painting and promised to bring Picasso to come and look at it. In return Wood offered to share his studio with him. Cocteau accepted, and the arrangement worked well because Wood was a morning worker and Cocteau seldom left his mother’s house before noon.
    Wood was thrilled by his own life and confused by public events. He believed that there was panic in Paris because everyone was expecting a revolution, but he was too absorbed by his work to find out