Poem 394
I got interested in Cocteau through studying Film in 1984 and wrote an essay about him … Albert Camus said an artist’s life work is to rediscover those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened … a recurring image in Cocteau’s work, taken from his childhood, was of a boy felled unconscious by a snowball … this symbolised many things to Cocteau but especially being struck down by the power and purity of art and equally being poleaxed by the power and purity of the snowball thrower, a charismatic (in Cocteau’s eyes) bully named Dargelos … this became such a recognised motif in Cocteau’s work and accounts of his life that someone eventually went to the trouble of finding the real Dargelos who claimed to have no memory of any of this and was also a very ordinary man living a mundane life … Cocteau declined to have anything to do with this earthbound Dargelos, preferring to hold onto his image of the magnetic boy …
… Cocteau was fascinated by the process of artistic creation and this poem is about the artist’s need to fictionalise, transmute the raw (autobiographical) material of life in order to give it metaphysical heft and meaning … it also speaks to Graham Greene’s observation that there is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer – ie. that Cocteau would have liked his heart to melt, to open in the presence of this image, he would love to have been the boy felled by beauty but in fact he is too much the dispassionate observer for that to happen … in this retelling the stone represents the fact of the story, the snowball the glittering fiction built up pearl-like around it …
… 26 years after I first saw Orphée I was given the keys to the Katherine Mansfield Room at a ceremony in Menton in the Salle des Mariages decorated by murals painted by Cocteau … I have wandered up and down that coast looking at buildings that he similarly painted and created mosaics on … culminating on my last day in Menton in 2014 when I was able to tour the Villa Santo Sospir that he occupied at the tip of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat with its astonishing artwork, I was beside myself with excitement …
( I like how the first words are also the last words of the poem, how it circles back to the central image, and I very much like the description of Dargelos in the middle section … )
Cocteau: The Liar As Poet
The snowball didn't melt his heart
he lied
the reason he wouldn't write the letter
when the boy Dargelos grew into a man
an ordinary man
who remembered nothing
rien
the child stretched on the snow
necessarily not Cocteau
necessary for him to see the scarlet
run through the white
and write about it
but galling
that he could not be the one shocked
into a faint by
beauty
there was a stone or there was not a stone
in the snowball
opinions differ
Cocteau's being that snow was marble
in Dargelos's hand the ugly thick-lipped
boy glowering in the photograph
thunderous and sweet
to petit Jean making him cry
either way
torment or neglect
cruel
loved
and arrogant
nothing
of the man to come
who worked 'in figures'
and we are to believe
crept upon the brute child
like a shadow
the vital clue
Dargelos did well in school
where Cocteau had set him as the savage
raw and resistant to language
then
he was found
simply to say
rien
and the
proud unearthers
no doubt disappointed
when Cocteau wouldn't
write to him
would never present his chest
to the unedifying stone
the gritty heart
of the snowball