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Souvenir Portraits; Paris in the Belle Epoque
Cocteau, the renowned French poet, filmmaker and painter recalls his childhood in lyrical fashion. Includes humorous sketches of personalities like Isadora Duncan, Picasso, Marlena Dietrich and Greta Garbo.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1935
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About the author
Jean Cocteau
575 books895 followersJean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright and filmmaker. Along with other Surrealists of his generation (Jean Anouilh and René Char for example) Cocteau grappled with the "algebra" of verbal codes old and new, mise en scène language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Colette, Édith Piaf, whom he cast in one of his one act plays entitled Le Bel Indifferent in 1940, and Raymond Radiguet.
His work was played out in the theatrical world of the Grands Theatres, the Boulevards and beyond during the Parisian epoque he both lived through and helped define and create. His versatile, unconventional approach and enormous output brought him international acclaim.
His work was played out in the theatrical world of the Grands Theatres, the Boulevards and beyond during the Parisian epoque he both lived through and helped define and create. His versatile, unconventional approach and enormous output brought him international acclaim.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 9, 2016
Two weeks ago, I read Enrique Vila-Matas' novel Never Any End to Paris. In it, the Catalan writer is rather adamant about his idea – a borrowed one, at that - that in actuality there is never any end to Paris. To further analyse the true limits of Paris – or rather the idea of Paris, for that is what is at stake here – I started to read the memoirs of Jean Cocteau, which had been collecting dust on my shelves for a few years now. The parallels between the two works turned out to be striking.
Whereas one is a work of fiction and the other a memoir, they are both highly autobiographical. Interestingly, what separates them might be the sea change of postmodernism. What Vila-Matas has set out to do is write a memoir but present it as fiction, and it is precisely this discrepancy which makes his novel interesting. It is not about Paris at all, but about the fictionalisation of self. Paris is simply the perfect setting, for it is a place that is highly fictionalised, that is more art than everyday life. One could argue that moving to Paris is in itself already a fictionalisation of self. In fact, Vila-Matas' whole book is not about the struggle to become a writer but about the struggle to become the idea of a writer: the kind who smokes cigars on Parisian terraces. “I spent a long time convinced that in order to be a good writer you had to be completely desolate,” he writes rather morosely (if comically).
Cocteau, on the other hand, who wrote Souvenir Portraits when he was only in his forties, sets out from the vantage point of truthful reportage only to consequently do all that he can to distance himself from that. We have to look no further than the leading quotation of the book to understand this: “I am a liar who always tells the truth.” They are Cocteau's own words. The quote of course works through positing the existence of two different kinds of truth. One is factual truth as often understood, and this is the one that Cocteau has difficulty with. He is very forthright about this, starting his text with a disclaimer of sorts:
It is factual truth that would raise Cain over getting one's periods confused. But Cocteau, of course, is a surrealist, and therefore more interested in the truth of the unconscious, the truth that arises from precisely such a dim and appalling night. The novelist Cees Nooteboom writes that the “memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases,” and Cocteau derives his truth by analysing the places the dog decides to lie down. That place, unsurprisingly, is Paris, and this might be the real sense in which there is never any end to it: it is the thinking person's be-all-end-all locale, a city built not out of concrete but concepts. Every time someone somewhere in the world conceptualises anything, he extends the never-ending city limits of Paris.
Cocteau here tells a great anecdote about Picasso which might illustrate the two kinds of truth well, and at the same time calls out Vila-Matas' little project. “I do not approve of the mixing of genres,” he starts out to say. Then:
The factual truth of the letter is that it is signed. The spiritual truth, if you will, is that it is anonymous, for that is what it evokes. In this sense we can understand that Vila-Matas and Cocteau are writing in the same genre – though perhaps one of them is a liar who always tells the truth, and the other one an honest man who always lies.
Both books habituate a world in which everyone is a someone. They are set in a Paris in which quotidian day jobs do not exist, and the only rhythm of the city is that of people streaming in and out of the opera house at nighttime. Both books struck me as a kind of gossiping for those who claim to be beyond gossip. They derive much of their appeal from their collection of anecdotes about famous artists of the past, and they mint a kind of symbolic coinage out of their mere adjacency to these other figures of repute. Great as the above anecdote about Picasso is, it is undeniably made even greater by the fact that this is Picasso, and not some unknown schmuck in a moment of great wit.
Personally, I could take or leave the descriptions of Belle Epoque flâneuring, the high-brow parties that were already unreal at the time they were taking place, held in castles and penthouses far removed from the reality its guests discussed. They are certainly unreal now, as we live in an age which has utterly fetishised these artistic movements of yore, but they were already unreal when Cocteau wrote his words, when decades had pressed themselves in between the two Cocteaus: the rememberer and the remembered. “The past is only the future grown old,” Cocteau writes at some point, “and the present a still youthful past.” He writes as if the past is still there, but has simply receded in the distance.
Implied here is the idea that there is an indisputed face and landscape to be “stimulated”. I think once again we have to understand Cocteau's ectoplasm here as one that concerns “spiritual truth”, in which a brunette may be reified as a blonde if her soul just so happened to be blond. Later, he admits as much when he discusses the manner in which he produced the wonderful drawings that accompany this book. “I make no use from contemporary caricatures,” he writes. “[W]hen all that remains of the faces in question is a foggy resemblance, I strive for a line corresponding to my memory.” The drawings are truthful then not to the facts of our common realm, but to the facts of idiosyncratic memory.
To be frank, I've always thought that memoir-writing is an inherently awkward proposition. Perhaps this is why Cocteau has to begin with a disclaimer, and has to remain cautious throughout. Perhaps the only way to write a memoir is to write it absolutely subjectively, and to pronounce subjective truth as truth. And it is of course precisely in such a world that Vila-Matas and Hemingway are vindicated: it turns out that here there is indeed never any end to Paris.
Whereas one is a work of fiction and the other a memoir, they are both highly autobiographical. Interestingly, what separates them might be the sea change of postmodernism. What Vila-Matas has set out to do is write a memoir but present it as fiction, and it is precisely this discrepancy which makes his novel interesting. It is not about Paris at all, but about the fictionalisation of self. Paris is simply the perfect setting, for it is a place that is highly fictionalised, that is more art than everyday life. One could argue that moving to Paris is in itself already a fictionalisation of self. In fact, Vila-Matas' whole book is not about the struggle to become a writer but about the struggle to become the idea of a writer: the kind who smokes cigars on Parisian terraces. “I spent a long time convinced that in order to be a good writer you had to be completely desolate,” he writes rather morosely (if comically).
Cocteau, on the other hand, who wrote Souvenir Portraits when he was only in his forties, sets out from the vantage point of truthful reportage only to consequently do all that he can to distance himself from that. We have to look no further than the leading quotation of the book to understand this: “I am a liar who always tells the truth.” They are Cocteau's own words. The quote of course works through positing the existence of two different kinds of truth. One is factual truth as often understood, and this is the one that Cocteau has difficulty with. He is very forthright about this, starting his text with a disclaimer of sorts:
Writing memoirs seems to me to be an impossible task. First of all, I get my periods confused. I sometimes leap ten years forward and place people in surroundings that belong to others. Memory is a dim and appalling night. I would fear to venture into it at the risk of incurring the punishment of those archaeologists who desecrate Egyptian sepulchers.
It is factual truth that would raise Cain over getting one's periods confused. But Cocteau, of course, is a surrealist, and therefore more interested in the truth of the unconscious, the truth that arises from precisely such a dim and appalling night. The novelist Cees Nooteboom writes that the “memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases,” and Cocteau derives his truth by analysing the places the dog decides to lie down. That place, unsurprisingly, is Paris, and this might be the real sense in which there is never any end to it: it is the thinking person's be-all-end-all locale, a city built not out of concrete but concepts. Every time someone somewhere in the world conceptualises anything, he extends the never-ending city limits of Paris.
Cocteau here tells a great anecdote about Picasso which might illustrate the two kinds of truth well, and at the same time calls out Vila-Matas' little project. “I do not approve of the mixing of genres,” he starts out to say. Then:
One day, as I was reading a poison-pen letter to Picasso, he said: “it's an anonymous letter,” and when I showed him that it was signed, he added: “That makes no difference. The anonymous letter is a genre.”
The factual truth of the letter is that it is signed. The spiritual truth, if you will, is that it is anonymous, for that is what it evokes. In this sense we can understand that Vila-Matas and Cocteau are writing in the same genre – though perhaps one of them is a liar who always tells the truth, and the other one an honest man who always lies.
Both books habituate a world in which everyone is a someone. They are set in a Paris in which quotidian day jobs do not exist, and the only rhythm of the city is that of people streaming in and out of the opera house at nighttime. Both books struck me as a kind of gossiping for those who claim to be beyond gossip. They derive much of their appeal from their collection of anecdotes about famous artists of the past, and they mint a kind of symbolic coinage out of their mere adjacency to these other figures of repute. Great as the above anecdote about Picasso is, it is undeniably made even greater by the fact that this is Picasso, and not some unknown schmuck in a moment of great wit.
Personally, I could take or leave the descriptions of Belle Epoque flâneuring, the high-brow parties that were already unreal at the time they were taking place, held in castles and penthouses far removed from the reality its guests discussed. They are certainly unreal now, as we live in an age which has utterly fetishised these artistic movements of yore, but they were already unreal when Cocteau wrote his words, when decades had pressed themselves in between the two Cocteaus: the rememberer and the remembered. “The past is only the future grown old,” Cocteau writes at some point, “and the present a still youthful past.” He writes as if the past is still there, but has simply receded in the distance.
Instead of writing my memoirs, I intend to solicit my memory, to stimulate it, wait for the result and, through a kind of guided freedom, a semi-trance, to see the formation of such-and-such face or such-and-such landscape, flowing from my pen like ectoplasm from the mouth of a medium.
Implied here is the idea that there is an indisputed face and landscape to be “stimulated”. I think once again we have to understand Cocteau's ectoplasm here as one that concerns “spiritual truth”, in which a brunette may be reified as a blonde if her soul just so happened to be blond. Later, he admits as much when he discusses the manner in which he produced the wonderful drawings that accompany this book. “I make no use from contemporary caricatures,” he writes. “[W]hen all that remains of the faces in question is a foggy resemblance, I strive for a line corresponding to my memory.” The drawings are truthful then not to the facts of our common realm, but to the facts of idiosyncratic memory.
To be frank, I've always thought that memoir-writing is an inherently awkward proposition. Perhaps this is why Cocteau has to begin with a disclaimer, and has to remain cautious throughout. Perhaps the only way to write a memoir is to write it absolutely subjectively, and to pronounce subjective truth as truth. And it is of course precisely in such a world that Vila-Matas and Hemingway are vindicated: it turns out that here there is indeed never any end to Paris.
July 14, 2025
True to the title, this is an ode to a time past written by Cocteau for his contemporaries and predecessors. For a 2025 reader, nearly all of the characters go over my head, which makes me miss the punchline of why their actions during lavish dinner parties not only matter, but how they are emblematic of a time. Parts on Cocteau's childhood are sweet and his prose, while dense, is very rich and fitting for an author describing the decadence of French society. Having only half of Les Enfants Terribles in my Cocteau repertoire, and some of his museums scattered around the Southern French coast, I didn't see how these stories were an actual reflection of Cocteau's life. These are also poorly organized and while he thematically sets up his souvenirs to be hazy, in a poetic ode to how all memories are, some structure and purpose to each story would be appreciated. Cocteau sells, but there are better pieces to recall the heights of the French nobleness.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews