Jean Cocteau - Letter to the Americans

Also by jean cocteau from ND

The Holy Terrors

The Infernal Machine

Copyright 1949 by ditions Grasset

Translation copyright 2022 by Alex Wermer-Colan

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Originally published in French as Lettre aux Amricains

This edition is published with the kind authorization
of Comit Jean Cocteau

First published as New Directions Paperbook 1529 in 2022

Manufactured in the United States of America

Design by Erik Rieselbach

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cocteau, Jean, 18891963, author. | Wermer-Colan, Alex, translator.

Title: Letter to the Americans / Jean Cocteau ; translated from the French by Alex Wermer-Colan.

Other titles: Lettre aux Amricains. English

Description: New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, [2022] | A New Directions Paperbook original.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021054381 | ISBN 9780811231596 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: United StatesCivilization. | National characteristics, American. | New York (N.Y.)Civilization.

Classification: LCC E169.1 .C613 2022 | DDC 973dc23/eng/20211108

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054381

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

Americans,

Im writing you from the plane thats bringing me back to France. I spent twenty days in New York and I did so much and saw so many people that I cant tell if I visited your home for twenty days or twenty years. Youll tell me that one cant judge a country by a city, America by New York, and that my stay was too brief for me to dare permit myself. But in some cases the first look you cast over a face reveals more than prolonged study. Sometimes you stare so long at a person that you revise your first impression, only for the judgment you make on a second glance to trick you further. The third look and all the following allow you to tolerate a person and, thereby, to become a bad judge, since sound judgments can only be made from the outside. If you live with people, you come to feel a groggy confusion where the contours of personalities blend. Sometimes a city thinks it bears little resemblance to other cities, reflecting immense territories whose clocks dont correspond, where the night of some is the day of others, where some are awake while others sleep. I mean that some are preoccupied by the absurd magnificence of a dream while others act without dreaming. This provokes, without anyone suspecting, a circulation of waves that the soul registers but that the mind cant decipher. Its no less true that these waves spread out and give themselves to an obscure labor. Its also likely that New Yorkers appetite for a world that wrests them from their own arises from this considerable tide of dreams, and that the perpetual cross-examination to which New Yorkers subject this dream represents their defensive weapon, the wall, the dam that prevents them from becoming completely engulfed.

For this attraction that enigmas exert and this horror of enigmas is the grand affair of the American spirit.

In New York, everything is paradoxical. You need the new but want nothing to change. The provisional failure at the beginning of all great enterprises remains incomprehensible to you; instead you take it to be the irrevocable outcome. Success to you is compulsoryits the tragedy of the movie industry, since all the muses know how to wait, must be painted and represented in the attitude of waiting, and grow younger in the long run instead of older. Even if painting, sculpture, music, and poetry can wait, only triumphing after the death of the person that they convey, a film cant wait, costs too much to wait, and must succeed monstrously on the very first shot.

Ill speak again about these things. For the moment, I release myself to the rhythm of the propellers and to this strange realm of memories that dwell within us. They move like underwater plants and, each time they touch each other, they disperse in different directions.

New York isnt a sitting city. Its not a reclining city. New York is a standing city, and not because of the skyscrapers where numbers (which devour New York) established their anthill. I speak of a standing city because, if she sat down, she would repose and reflect, and because, if she lay down, she would sleep and dream. Since she wants neither to reflect nor to dream, she stands divided between the two breasts of her mother, one flowing with alcohol and the other with milk. She wants to remain standing, to forget (what?), to forget herself, to wear herself out, to exhaust herself, to escape, by fatigue and the imperceptible swaying of drunks and of skyscrapers with immobile foundations and wobbling pinnacles, to escape, I say, the interrogation that you give to yourself, that you fear to give to yourself, and to which you subject others continually.

Humanity is occupied by a darkness, by monsters from profound zones. We cant descend the depths, but sometimes, through the intercessions of poets, this darkness dispatches ambassadors terrible enough. These ambassadors intrigue you. They attract and repulse you. You try to understand their language, and being incapable, you ask the poets to translate for you. Alas! the poets dont understand it any better and content themselves to act as the humble servants of these ambassadors, the mediums for these individualistic phantoms that haunt you, that disturb you, that you would love to unionize.

New York detests the secret. She pries into those of others. She disavows her own, like the Ennui she exorcises with methodical optimism.

New York is open, a wide-open city. Her arms are open, her faces are open, her hearts are open, open streets, doors, windows. This creates a euphoria for the visitor, a current of air where ideas cant ripen and whirl instead like dead leaves.

I repeat: You refuse to wait and to keep waiting. In New York, everyone arrives ahead of time to the meeting. Tradition revolts you, as does the new. Your ideal would be an instantaneous tradition . The new is immediately canonized. From this minute it ceases to exist. You classify it, you label it, and, since you dont permit artists to experiment, you demand that they repeat themselves and you replace them when they bore you. This is how you kill flies.

I saw, at the Museum of Modern Art, an unforgettable spectacle. In a spotless nursery, fifty little girls paint on tables piled high with brushes, inks, tubes, and gouache. They paint while looking elsewhere and sticking out their tongues in the manner of performing animals that ring a bell, tongue lolling and eyes vague. Nannies survey these young creatures of abstract art, and give them a slap on the hand if, by accident, their paintings begin to represent something, teetering dangerously towards realism. The mothers (who stay by Picasso) arent admitted. In the galleries, next to masterpieces by Rousseau, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Bonnard, Vuillard, they hang the dirty laundry of our adolescence, our stains of ink and wine on old napkins from the Rotonde and the Dome. For New York is a tall giraffe, spotted with windows, loaded with relics.