Jean Cocteau was one of those polymaths who are all over the
creative place—poet, writer, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. And he
was good at all of it. He delighted in cocking a snook at bourgeois
sensibilities, and he was very good at that, too.
The crowd he ran with—including Picasso, Dialhigev, Apollinaire,
Modigliani and Diaghilev—was equally wild and crazy. He collaborated with all
sorts of artists to create cutting edge works that outraged the Establishment:
novels, poems, ballets, plays, pictures. Nothing was beyond him.
Cocteau greatly admired Orson Welles, who in many ways resembled
him as Enfant Terrible and creative genius. They met at the 1936 staging of
Welles’ “Voodoo Macbeth”, which moved
the story from Scotland to the Caribbean, featured an all African-American cast
and substituted Haitian voodoo for the Scottish witchcraft. Just exactly the
sort of thing Cocteau loved.
“
At the 1948 Venice Film Festival, the two were in top form,
according to Simon Callow. “[Welles] and the perennially provocative Jean
Cocteau formed a sort of anti-festival clique…Together in Venice, the two men
behaved like two very naughty boys.”
Here’s a photo of the two of them conspiring:
Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is from 1962, not
particularly titled (Cocteau was not the sort to get fussed about titles), on
Welles, to which I’m adding a drawing Cocteau did of Welles as the frontispiece
of a biography by André Bazin:
Orson Welles is a poet
through his violence
and through his grace.
Never does he tumble
from the tightrope
on which he crosses cities
and their dramas.
He is a poet too in the
Loyal friendship he bears
our dreams and our struggles.
Others will know better than I
how to praise his work.
I content myself with sending him
my fraternal greeting.
His handshake is as firm as he is
and I think of it each time my work
obliges me to leap over an obstacle.
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