Art and Faith: Letters between Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau

By Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau

The meaning of poetry and the sociological and political significance of art are dealt with in these letters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philosophical Library Open Road
• Release date: Nov 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497675858

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Art and Faith

Letters between Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau

Contents

Preface to the English Translation

Letter to Jacques Maritain

Answer to Jean Cocteau

Notes

Footnotes

Preface to the English Translation

This exchange of letters took place at a time in the history of French poetry of which the young men of today can have no idea, and whose painful beauty, laden with fragile hope, remains in the hearts of those who knew it as a resplendent breaking forth of the sun ¹ through stormclouds during one of those fall mornings in which the earth shines with freshness and impalpable lightness.

A short period of freedom was still left for poetry. While the world’s structures were being shaken and the foreboding of woe weighed on it, poetry was entering deeper than ever into its own mystery, dazzled by the revelations that taking consciousness of itself brought to it, and astonished at seeing that insofar as it came to know itself it became involved in the supreme battle of the spirit—there where the good and bad angels fight each other, where poetic knowledge confronts metaphysics and theology, and where the pursuit of magical powers pulls in the direction of the Devil, whereas the savor of a foretaste of the contemplative intuition pulls in the direction of God. The poets had to choose. On the one hand Claudel, on the other the Surrealist poets invoked the name of Rimbaud. Apollinaire had announced an age more pure in which brothers who did not know one another would recognize one another. After our dear Max Jacob, whose death as a consenting and self-denuded victim in the concentration camp of Drancy was to reveal his greatness to those who had been unable to divine it; after Henri Ghéon; after Pierre Reverdy, Jean Cocteau had known the miracle of Faith. He entered a freedom which is the only true one, but which is more demanding and more difficult than he perhaps suspected. He was to give us Orphée.

Less than ever was he renouncing to be at the forward tip of the art of his times, and to playing his bird-catcher’s flute. It was to inform his friends of the change in his life that he wrote me the letter whose English translation is appearing today.

He discussed in it his problems of a poet, and even of the effort he had to make to wean himself from that artificial paradise whose mirage leads astray the traveler removed from the paths of God. I answered him by discussing my problems of a philosopher. We were careful not to mix up our ways, but we were tending toward the same goal and were trying to awaken to the poetry for God a period in which the Prince of the World was the master of Dreams. If our dialogue has been interrupted since then, the vicissitudes of life have not cut into the friendship that gave birth to it.

In different historical circumstances the deliverance we were hoping for might have occurred; the new poetry we presaged might have found its poets. To tell the truth, I do not wonder that this was not the case, and that after a moment of surprise the habits of literature went on as before. Even and especially in the harsh world of today, I have not given up the hope I was then expressing on the basis of frail signs. I know the poets in whom I have my confidence.

Moreover, the temporary failures have only a secondary importance. It is the testimony that matters, in the perishable day in which it has been borne. However it may be with the future of poetry, those who love poetry, and who are not indifferent to the mysterious and ambiguous relations it entertains with religion, may perhaps find in the letters exchanged between a poet and a philosopher something to give them a few moments’ thought.

J. M.

Rome, January 1947

In this new edition I have modified my own text only in two places, concerning questions subordinate to the central theme. Two notes have been suppressed, two others corrected.

Letter to Jacques Maritain

Prologue

Rome, in 1917, around Easter.

After fifteen days of work on

PARADE

which has not left us free to see anything, we are taking a walk, Picasso and I.

P

ICASSO

: Let us visit this church. (The church is filled with the faithful, with chandeliers, tunes, prayer. Impossible to visit it.)

M

YSELF

: Let us visit another one. (Same scene. Long walk in silence.)

P

ICASSO

: We are living like dogs.

This letter closes a loop that begins with

LE COQ ET L’ARLEQUIN

.

My dear Jacques,

You are a deep sea fish. Luminous and blind. Your element is prayer. Once outside of prayer you run into everything. Awkwardness, that is our ground of understanding. The Thomistic apparatus deceives the world on your awkwardness; a mass of misapprehensions makes mine pass for cleverness. We are not shrewd. The Shrewd One would find traitors in us.

I myself am a bad student. At school I used to win the dunce’s prizes: drawing prize, gymnastics prize. Now you are a philosopher. I should be ashamed. But we are countrymen; that is to say, we are two fish out of water of the same kind.

Imagine this, that I must constantly keep myself in the air and practise flying. That is how I manage to take people in, and imitate liveliness of mind. For unless I fall on things directly I am unable to reach them by the normal windings. But you do not cheat; you do not avoid any of the turns. You rise when you please, from where you please. You do not rise by means of a machine. You rise like cork toward the regions which call you. I myself fly with a machine, and I progress by a series of falls. One of the reasons for my reserve in the face of insults is not arrogance, but the fear of not playing my part well in a controversy (I).²

Before I knew you, you used to quote me in your books. You had met George Auric at Bloy’s; he must have been fifteen. When, some years later, I understood his budding genius and dedicated Le Coq et l’Arlequin to him, he read you Le Cap de Bonne Espérance, and secretly told you of my enterprise. For Auric pushes discretion to its extreme limits through a kind of defensive reflex. You were his friends of Versailles, but I did not know which. When you liked my work, your group was so surprised that it believed the work was liked out of kindness. Your friend Cocteau, one of your intimates used to say to you, one of those I knew long before I knew you. He could not understand then that, quoting me, you did not know me.

The distorting thickness of conceited prejudices prevents a man from seeing clearly. Nothing comes between the eye of a child and what he looks at. But a child, like a Negro, needs correctives. What is so wonderful about your glance is that it is pure and skillful.

A mind like mine gets tangled up