« …. the
fervor without which youth is hardly worth being lived….” – in this phrase, Maurice Sachs sums
up what he felt for Jean Cocteau in the twenties. It is a phrase that could be
applied to the twenties itself. It was the decade in which the modern opened
up, and everything came out.
Maurice Sachs is one of the great wretches of literature –
one of the purest products of the twenties mix of the demi-monde and literary
culture. That culture, in all its mediums – movies, gramophone discs,
dancehalls, newspapers – had more of an effect on the lifestyles of the
population at large than any of the policies of the political parties at the
helm in France – or for that matter Britain or the U.S. It continues to have an
effect – the internet builds on the media of the twenties, obvy.
Sachs’ life has fascinated a number of writers, most
especially Modiano, who has traced, in his imagination, the perfervid atmosphere
of the Occupation and all of its dealers. Sachs was there. He was born Jewish.
He was an outfront gay man. He also married a woman, converted to Catholicism,
wrote a famous article praising Thorez, the French communist leader, changed
his life during the occupation, volunteered to work in Germany for the money (a
common enough move, but a strangely dangerous one for a man whose Jewish roots
were no secret), became an informer for the Gestapo, and, legend has it, was
murdered by outraged worker-slaves in a Hamburg prison before the end of the
war.
When Sachs fell out of love with Cocteau in the twenties,
he famously did this: forged a letter from Cocteau allowing him to clean out
Cocteau’s objects from the apartment on Rue D’anjou that Cocteau shared with
his mother. Then Sachs sold them and
pocketed the money.
Cocteau at this time was in some financial straits. Yet he
forgave Sachs, to the appalled disapproval of his friends. Sachs gave out a
louche vibe, and Cocteau liked it.
Sachs is a puzzle for those who go to aesthetics hoping to
find empathy, or some answer to the question, how shall I live? Art is long,
though, and both villains and saints have made it.
Sachs, that immoral shambles, cast a spider’s eye over his
life and acquaintances in a number of books, including the fragmentary journal,
published posthumously as In the Time of the Boeuf sur le toit. It is a reworked diary. The first
encounter with Cocteau is beautifully done.
“Been to see
Raquel Meller at the Olympia… Cocteau was in the concert hall. Alias introduced
me: an angular figure, a black toupee on the top of his head, hands everywhere,
a coat that fell to his knees, lined with red flannel. “You understand,” he
said, “ she is an angel, an angel of purity, she sings in the way one writes.
You never know where she is. One might think she has changed her skin, that she
has left her old one on the stage like a molting snake – she is behind you, in
you, you don’t know where, she’s an angel.” “Ah, my dear!” he said, leaving us
and throwing himself into the arms of a very beautiful, very elegant woman, “I’ve
been dying to see you but I never ever get out, ask Raymond, never, ask Mama, I live like a prisoner;
besides, I died, I nearly died two days ago, you see. I positively do not know
what I had. Dalimier who treated me said it was an illness one sees in Paris
only one case every ten years. It seems they treated the ambassador of China
for it in 1912, without being able to heal him, and beside, they don’t know
what it is. And if Coco hadn’t sent me a very very sympathetic masseur who
unknotted my muscles with his feet, I would have positively died. It is a
miracle that I am here!”
This is the
true twenties note, caught, as well, in Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh. I love it
that Sachs saw his hands: “hands everywhere”. Frederic Gaussen, in The lost children of the
Twentieth Century, has a nice article on Cocteau and Sachs. Sachs lost his
respect for Cocteau as an artist, in the end. He thought that he was something
else:
« Cocteau,
he said, was not a creator but the animator of parisian life. The Monsieur Loyal of the avant-garde. It was as a recuperator, an advertiser, that he
worked, serving others for his own glory. Of his work, Sachs estimated, there
will remain in the end almost nothing. Everything in him
was artifice, counterfeit. »
In
this judgment, Sachs showed that he had not purged the nineteenth century from
his veins. In fact, post-Wagner, the art of the animator and art in general
merge: Duchamp and Cocteau, Cage and Warhol, the performance as form, this is
where art moved. Sachs himself survives not in his novels, which I must say I’ve
never read, but in his hallucinatory autobiographies – and in the biographies
and memoirs of others.
But
what I really love, in Sachs’ spiderglance, is the noticing of the hands. The
handiness. The wanting, separated from the Capitol of the brain, of the hands
to hand, to mold, to pick. Picasso had this – in the Picasso museum there is displayed
some doodles Picasso added to torn out pages from fashion magazines that show
the incorrigible eleven year old school boy. The hand has its own intelligence,
its own paths, its own sphere. And it is an eery thing.
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