Orpheus

Aníbal Fernandes, translator of almost everything that is gay and French, says (the italics are his) that in 1919, then aged 30, Jean Cocteau meets Raymond Radiguet, aged 16, a talented wildcat, a prodigy of letters, later the author of The Devil in the Flesh. “He pulled faces as if he were in the sun”. At 20, death took him. Faced with the plainly visible consequences of this loss, Lucien Daudet writes: “Cocteau should have gone after his friend”. In 1925, while convalescing from Radiguet, sickness of love and sickness of death, and fallen into the zero of opium, he writes an Orphée (Orpheus) for the theatre.

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells that Eurydice “was strolling in a meadow” when a serpent bites her heel. She dies. “After having long wept for her”, Orpheus dared to descend to the place of those who live no more and there, “plucking the strings, thus he sang”: “The reason for my coming is my wife, whom a serpent” robbed of “her youthful years. I wished to be able to bear it, and I shall not deny that I tried: but Love conquered”. “By these regions filled with dread, by this vast Chaos and the silence of this immense realm, I beg you: weave anew the destiny of Eurydice, hastily cut short. We are all owed to you”, “sooner or later”: “I ask that you grant her to me as a loan”.

In 1932, he makes his first Orpheus-film, Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet), “descent into myself”. And he says: “Do you think it is easy to close the mouth of a wound?”

Thus sang Orpheus, says Ovid: and the dry things wept. Hades and Persephone agree to return Eurydice to the world of the living, “on one condition”: Orpheus may not look back at Eurydice “until he has left the valleys of Avernus”.

In 1937, he meets Jean Marais: Orpheus. In 1938, he writes: “You are my only masterpiece, and I shall work only for you, film or theatre”. And in 1939: “I want our love to be continually excessive”. “Always in blade, in scandal, in force”.

They climb “through the midst of mute silences”, says Ovid, and little was left to go when Orpheus, “fearful that she was not following and longing to see her, turned his gaze, in love. Suddenly”, Eurydice “slips backwards. Stretching out her arms, struggling to grasp and to be grasped, the wretched woman caught nothing but the fleeting air”.

In 1947 (Marais needed more), he meets Édouard Dermit, painter: his adopted son, lover, heir. He reserved for him here the role of the angel Heurtebise, but Dermit said: “I am not an actor, I would not be able to do it”. He was Cégeste: the new poet, Orpheus’s other love.

In The White Book, a sexual autobiography, full of masks and false doors, Cocteau says that “since childhood he had felt the desire to be those he found beautiful, and not to have them love him”. Radiguet, Marais, Dermit, “boys with the features of beasts, flowers of tall stature”: Cocteau was all of them. Ces gestes. And so many others, whom death took. “I know that I sought the friendship of excessively fast machines”. To love them was to love death, “because death takes care of its statues”.

In 1950, he films this Orphée: fantasy, mystery, farce, romance. All of Cocteau is here: he knows well that the greatest magic, in life and in cinema, is to tell how time runs. And here are Marais; Dermit; François Périer, Heurtebise; and death, María Casares. “I spoke of her, I dreamt of her, I sang her”, death. “I thought I knew her, but no”, says Orpheus. And the angel asks the man: is it Eurydice you seek, or death? The poet replies: both. And he steps into the mirror. “After Orphée”, said Cocteau, “everyone congratulated me on an image I had had the weakness to leave in it”. And Heurtebise, the immortal who wants to die, like the angel of Berlin, tells him (it is the key to the film): “Mirrors are the doors through which death comes and goes. Indeed, spend your life looking at yourself in a mirror and you will see death at work”. That is Cocteau’s sorrow: that Orpheus is condemned to live.

After “his wife’s second death”, says Ovid, Orpheus fled “all sexual pleasure with women, whether because that love had turned out badly, or because he had made a vow”. “It was even he who initiated the peoples of Thrace into transferring love to tender boys”. Rejected, the women attack him: they hurl stones and branches at him. All of it Orpheus holds in the air with his song and the plucking of the strings. “And all the weapons his song would have tamed, had not the immense clamour and the flutes”, “the tambourines and the clapping and the shrieking of the Bacchanal drowned out the sound of the cithara. Only then, at last, were the stones stained” with the blood of Orpheus, “who could no longer make himself heard”.

Because poetry needs silence, “it is a precision instrument”: it is a radio bringing news from the other side. “I would give my œuvre for one of these phrases”, says Orpheus. And Heurtebise replies: “Content yourself with the beauty of your voice”.

Now Orpheus can enchant nothing. The women tear him to pieces: and nature weeps the death of the poet.

Cocteau dies in 1963, three years after his third Orpheus-film: his testament, as poet and as director.

Time passes. Marais, by then old, will be Hades in the Orpheus of Jacques Demy: Parking, 1985.

“The shade” of Orpheus “descends beneath the earth”, says Ovid. There “he finds Eurydice and clasps her in his eager arms. There the two stroll together”. “And now without fear, Orpheus looks back at his Eurydice”.