Upsoaring wings: Through violence and grace

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.

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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.