A Dissection of Cocteau & Proust's Friendship's Unraveling at Literary Hub

Claude Arnaud illuminates Jean Cocteau and Marcel Proust's friendship's slow fade in the latest edition of Literary Hub AND in his new book Jean Cocteau: A Life, recently published in translation (by Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell) by Yale University Press. (Apparently frenemies are not a recent fad.)

Throughout 1913, Jean Cocteau had done everything to find a publisher for Proust. Not content with intervening himself at Fasquelle, which had published Zola, he urged Edmond Rostand, who had real influence over that publisher, to push for publication of the complete manuscript, while also putting pressure on the young Maurice Rostand, who desperately wanted to meet Proust. But Fasquelle rejected the manuscript, as did Ollendorff, and since the hostility of the Nouvelle revue française had led to rejection by Gaston Gallimard, whose publishing house was only two years old, Proust had to wait until the end of 1913 for Bernard Grasset to agree to publish Du côté de chez Swann at the author’s expense, and only with cuts. With the book finally sent off to press, Proust determined which critics would report on it: Lucien Daudet for Le Figaro, Jacques-Émile Blanche for L’écho de Paris, Cocteau for L’excelsior, and, through Cocteau, Maurice Rostand for Comoedia. All of the critics were gay. A coherent campaign and aggressive distribution would create quite a stir about the great work, largely thanks to the unexpected, if somewhat reserved, reinforcement of the influential Paul Souday in Le temps, predecessor to Le monde.

Cocteau had already come to Proust’s apartment on the boulevard Haussmann to read him the “paper” that had praised his novel and placed it in the company of masterpieces, stressing “the multiplied mirrors of this prodigious open-air labyrinth.” The author of À la recherche du temps perdu felt moved to write to Cocteau again, nine days after the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, when the article appeared in L’excelsior praising his “vast miniature, full of mirages, hanging gardens, plays between space and time, and sweeping, fresh gestures à la Manet”:

Your marvel, gone beyond the sonorous manner in which I first experienced it to a graphic, ornamental silence, seemed new to me in this way, and in the silent astonishment of the letters persisting beyond the gazes that read them (Mallarmé would have expressed this in a line of impenetrable simplicity), seemed to me even more delightful, and how proud I was of it, and touched.

No doubt Proust would have rather been the one to launch Cocteau on the literary scene, but the slowness of Proust’s maturation, the precocity of the prince frivole, and the chances of life led to Cocteau’s helping to make famous his elder by 20 years.

In private, Cocteau was just as enthusiastic. To the Abbé Mugnier, he expressed his admiration for a novel in which everything was placed on the same level, from actions to descriptions, as in the marvelous canvases by Uccello: “a book by an insect with tentacular sensitivity,” a “cross-section of the brain,” he proclaimed. One has only to compare Cocteau’s reaction to that of Reynaldo Hahn, who after just the first line of Swann’s Way asked his friends to get used to the idea that a great genius was at work, or to compare Cocteau’s article to Lucien Daudet’s, to sense that Cocteau might not have taken the full measure of Proust’s genius.

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