Jean COCTEAU. L.A.S., St Jean Cap-Ferrat October 29, 1958, t - Lot 417

Jean COCTEAU. L.A.S., St Jean Cap-Ferrat October 29, 1958, to Louis Aragon; 18 pages in-8, printed Santo-Sospir letterhead, stamped envelope. Beautiful, long letter of friendship and admiration for Aragon's novel La Semaine sainte. "Your book is admirable and completely new, for it makes no use of artifice [...] In addition to the marvel of an exact and casual language that slaps the sad band of intellectuals in the face, I remain stunned by your knowledge"... And Cocteau returns to the state of their relationship: "Seventeen lost years of friendship. Ten years in which André Breton's bourgeois dryness erected a wall between us, between our considerable 'waves of dream' [...] La Semaine Sainte is the height of this unreal realism, of this perspective of space-time regained, of this vivid jet of learned ink - of this truer-than-true which would be the true sign of an era in which people become famous before they are known, and wade in a cold mud. [...] Nothing could add to the affection I have for you, but all the same, I bow to one of those forces that we think died with Balzac or Hugo. Your river flows and two mechanisms marry [...] a torrential poetry married to the realistic calm of forms"... He knows that "the problem of 'written' time and told time - the artificial time of the anecdote - preoccupies you. [...] This time you've achieved the tour de force of being slow and dizzying. On horseback, on foot, in a horse-drawn carriage, and on rue de la Sourdière, building a block whose facets decompose the light in the form of a rainbow"... He recalls a line that Aragon once recited to him "'The unheard-of prestige of mint alcohol' [...] This line is the whole of childhood and what enchants it in the shadow of grown-ups"... He repeats his admiration that "suppresses the reader, and metamorphoses him into what he reads. I was your book"... In a long postscript, Cocteau launches into a comparison with Proust: "Your book shows a genius far more winged than Proust's, and never, like Proust, documented by the office. It seems, I repeat, that your work has been blown to you by some aristocrat incapable of writing a line, but like some of Proust's young social comrades, capable of judging his milieu. [...] Proust tried to transcend this elegance of manner, but with the bitterness of not being able to lay claim to it and the sickness of snobbery that rotted his heart". Aragon's style "transcends this small beauty and, like Picasso the bric-a-brac of the garbage, raises it to great beauty, to the dignity of service". Cocteau fears that this will not be understood, as with Debussy's music, of which he recalls an audition at the home of the Princesse de Polignac... "Your book is a formidable solitude, a monumental silence through which you escape from the conspiracy of noise, as once the din of a scandal took us out of the conspiracy of silence. I'm proud to be your friend"...