The Difficulty of Being (6 page)

That’s how I am, ensnared by charms. Swiftly dazzled. I belong to the moment. It falsifies my perspective. It puts a stopper on diversity. I give way to anyone who knows how to
get round me. I take on responsibilities. I dawdle over them and miss the mark right and left. That is why solitude is good for me. It reunites my quicksilver.

The sun which had been shining is veiled in mist. The motley families depart. The hotel empties and I can do my holiday tasks. Between two pages of writing I search for the title of my play. Now that it is finished the title eludes me. And the title
La Reine Morte
, which would suit it, troubles me greatly. My queen has no name. The pseudonym of Stanislas: Azraël, is suitable, but they tell me that this would be remembered as Israël. One title alone exists. It will be, so it is. Time conceals it from me. How discover it, covered by a hundred others? I have to avoid
the
this,
the
that. Avoid the image. Avoid the descriptive and the undescriptive. Avoid the exact meaning and the inexact. The soft, the hard. Neither long nor short. Right to catch the eye, the ear, the mind. Simple to read and to remember. I had announced several. I had to repeat them twice and the journalists still got them wrong. My real title defies me. It enjoys its hiding-place, like a child one keeps calling, and whom one believes drowned in the pond.
^*

The theatre is a furnace. Whoever does not suspect this is consumed in the long run or else burns out at once. It damps one’s zeal. It attacks by fire and by water.

The audience is a surging sea. It gives one nausea. This is called stage fright. It’s all very well to say to oneself: it’s the theatre, it’s the audience. It makes no difference. One makes up one’s mind not to be caught again. One returns. It’s the
Casino. One stakes all one has. It’s exquisite torture. Anyone but a conceited ass goes through it. There is no cure.

When I rehearse I become a spectator. I am bad at correcting faults. I love actors and they take me in. I listen to something other than myself. The night before the show my weaknesses stare me in the face. It is too late. Consequently, overcome by something very like sea-sickness, I stride up and down the ship, the bunkers, the cabins, the alleyways to the cabins. I dare not look at the sea. Still less dip into it. It seems to me that if I were to enter the auditorium I would sink the ship.

Here am I then in the wings, straining my ears. Behind the set a play is no longer painted; it draws its own outline. It shows me its flaws in draughtsmanship. I go out. I go and lie down in the dressing-rooms. What my actresses leave there, when changing souls, creates an inevitable vacuum. I suffocate. I get up. I listen. Where have they got to? I listen at doors. Yet I know this sea is subject to rules. Its waves roll in and roll out at my command. A new house reacts to the same effects. But let one of those effects be unduly prolonged and the actor falls into the trap. With difficulty he refuses the rescuing hand of laughter. Such cruel laughter should wound him; it flatters him. ‘I suffer and I make them laugh,’ he tells himself, ‘at this game I win.’ The rescuing hand is quickly offered and quickly grasped, the author forgotten. The boat drifts and you will soon be wrecked. If the actors listen to these sirens, the drama becomes melodrama, the thread connecting the scenes is broken. The rhythm is lost.

From afar I supervise my crew badly. The ‘imponderables’ escape me. What am I to change? Here are the interpreters who check over and perfect the machine. Here are those who live on the stage and try to conquer the machinery. Diderot speaks lightly. He was not born on the boards.

I know authors who supervise the actors and write them notes. They achieve discipline. They paralyse. They lock the door that might have suddenly blown open.

Two great schools of acting confront each other on the stage. They, the authors, prevent the one from embellishing its straight line with some inspired invention, they wake the other from its hypnosis. I prefer to risk the chemistry. Either red or black will come up.

Writing this paragraph I seem to be in the dressing-room of my actor Marcel André, with whom I like to discuss such things. Yvonne de Bray and Jean Marais are on the stage. Their temperaments harmonize. One wonders by what mechanism they respect the dialogue they are living, forgetting that one wall of the room they are in is missing. Marcel André is speaking. I listen to him. I also listen to the silence of the house. He, for his part, is listening for the call-bell that will bring him into the play. We are only half alive.

Delicious moments of suffering that I would not exchange for anything.

Why do you write plays? I am asked by the novelist. Why do you write novels? I am asked by the dramatist. Why do you make films? I am asked by the poet. Why do you draw? I am asked by the critic. Why do you write? I am asked by the draughtsman. Yes, why? I wonder. Doubtless so that my seed may be blown all over the place. I know little about this breath within me, but it is not gentle. It cares not a jot for the sick. It is unmoved by fatigue. It takes advantage of my gifts. It wants to do its part. It is not inspiration, it’s expiration one should say. For this breath comes from a zone in man into which man cannot descend, even if Virgil were to lead him there, for Virgil himself did not descend into it.

What have I to do with genius? It only seeks an accomplice in me. What it wants is an excuse to succeed in its evil deeds.

The main thing, if our action is divided, is not to fuse our efforts. I never settle for one of its branches without amputating others. I prune myself. It is even pretty rare for me to draw in the margins of a piece of writing. That is why I have published albums of drawings relating to my writings but not together. If I did publish them together, the drawings were made a long time afterwards. In
Portraits-Souvenir
I drew on the spot. The articles appeared in
Le Figaro
, and articles and drawings of that kind can be done with the same ink.

Still less could I direct theatre and cinema as a team, for they turn their backs on one another. While I was making my film
La Belle et la Bête
, the Gymnase was rehearsing my play
Les Parents Terribles
. The cast accused me of being inattentive. Even though I was no longer actually filming, I was the slave of a task in which the language is visual and is not crammed into a frame. I own I had the greatest trouble on earth in listening to an immobile text and giving it all my attention. Once a work is completed, I have to wait before undertaking another. The completed work does not release me quickly. It moves its chattels slowly. The wise thing then is a change of air and of room. The new material comes to me on my walks. Whatever happens I mustn’t notice it. If I interfere, it doesn’t come any more. One fine day the work demands my help. I give myself up to it in one fell swoop. My pauses are its own. If it falls asleep my pen skids. As soon as it wakes, it gives me a shake. It couldn’t care less if I am asleep. Get up, it says, so that I can dictate. And it is not easy to follow. Its vocabulary is not of words.

In
Opium
I describe a liberty I took during
Les Enfants Terribles
. Seduced by the flow of my pen, I believed I was free
to invent for myself. Everything stood still. I had to await its
good pleasure
.

La Machine Infernale
used another mood. It would desert me for very long periods. It would wait for other fevers to cease distracting me. It wanted me for itself. If my mind wandered at all, it turned its back on me.
La Machine à Ecrire
is a disaster. From the first, when I thought myself ready to write it, another inspiration took over and dictated
La Fin du Potomak
. I wanted to return to it. I took the dictation badly. After the first act I just wrote it my own way. Once the play was written, I persistently rewrote it. And after all that I listened to advice and ruined the end. May that play be an example to me! I shall never be my own master. I am made for obedience. And these lines that I am writing, a week ago I did not know I had to write.

Of all the problems that confuse us, that of fate and of free will is the most obscure. What? The thing is written in advance and we can write it, we can change the end? The truth is different. Time does not exist. It is what enfolds us. What we believe we carry out later is done all in one piece. Time reels it off for us. Our work is already done. However we still have to discover it. It is this passive participation which is so astounding. And with reason. It leaves the public incredulous. I decide and I do not decide. I obey and I direct. It’s a great mystery.
La Machine à Ecrire
was not a bad play to begin with.
^†
The juice left me high and dry. I was free. But I am no longer free to remove the blot I made. It is there.

IN A BOOK IN WHICH I BEAR WITNESS TO THE
Socratic proceedings that society institutes against us, I must express my gratitude to two free men who lived to cry their cries.

Nijinsky was of less than average height. In soul and in body he was just a professional deformity.

His face, of Mongol type, was joined to his body by a very long and very thick neck. The muscles of his thighs and those of his calves stretched the fabric of his trousers and gave him the appearance of having legs bent backwards. His fingers were short, as if cut off at the knuckles. In short, one would never have believed that this little monkey with sparse hair, wearing a skirted overcoat and a hat balanced on the top of his head, was the idol of the public.

Yet he was, and with good reason. Everything about him was designed to be seen at a distance, in the limelight. On the stage his over-developed muscles became slim. His figure lengthened (his heels never touching the ground), his hands became the fluttering leaves of his gestures, and as for his face, it was radiant.

Such a metamorphosis is almost unimaginable for those who never witnessed it.

In
Le Spectre de la Rose
, in which he epitomized himself from 1913 onwards, he performed with a bad grace. Because the choreography of
Le Sacre
shocked people, and he could not bear it that the one should be applauded and the other booed. Gravity is a part of our being. He tried endlessly to find some trick to get the better of it.

He had become aware that half of the leap which ends
Le Spectre de la Rose
was lost when seen from the auditorium. He invented a double leap, twisting himself in mid-air and falling vertically into the wings. There they received him like a prize fighter, with hot towels, slaps, and water which his servant Dimitri spat in his face.

Before the opening of
Le Faune
, at supper at Larue’s, he astonished us for several days by moving his head as if he had a stiff neck. Diaghilev and Bakst were anxious, questioned him and got no answer. We learned later that he had been training himself to stand the weight of the horns. I could quote a thousand instances of this perpetual rehearsing which made him sullen and moody.

At the Hôtel Crillon (Diaghilev and he used to migrate from hotel to hotel, chased by fear of having their belongings distrained), he would put on a bath wrap, pull the hood over his head and make notes for his choreographies.

I saw him create all his roles. His deaths were poignant. That of
Pétrouchka
, in which the puppet becomes human enough to move us to tears. That of
Schéhérazade
in which he drummed the boards like a fish in the bottom of a boat.

Serge de Diaghilev appeared to wear the smallest hat in the world. If you put this hat on, it came right down to your ears. For his head was so large that any head-covering was too small for him.

His dancers nicknamed him
Chinchilla
because of one lock kept white in his dyed and very black hair. He stuffed himself into a coat with a collar of opossum, and sometimes fastened it with the help of safety-pins. His face was that of a mastiff, his smile that of a very young crocodile, one tooth sticking over his lip. Sucking at his teeth was with him a sign of pleasure, of fear, of anger. He chewed his lips, topped by a little moustache, in the back of some stage-box from which he kept an eye on his artists in whom he let nothing pass. And his watery eye was cast down with the curve of a Portuguese oyster. This man led across the globe a company of dancers as confused and motley as the fair at Nijni-Novgorod. The only luxury for him was to discover a star. And we saw him bring us out of the Russian ghetto the thin, long, glaucous Madame Rubinstein. She did not dance. She entered, she showed herself, she mimed, she walked, she went out, and sometimes (as in
Schéhérazade
) she ventured on a sketch of a dance.

One of Diaghilev’s triumphs was to present her to Paris audiences in the role of Cleopatra. That is to say to present her to Antony. A bale of material was brought on. It was set in the middle of the stage. It was unrolled, unpacked. And Madame Ida Rubinstein appeared, so thin-legged that you thought you were seeing an ibis from the Nile.

I am drawing these figures in the margin of the programmes of great occasions that played a decisive part in my love of the theatre. Indeed a reference to Vestris, to Talma whets my appetite. I should like to read more about them.

THE WORD MARVELLOUS IS IN CONSTANT USE. BUT
we need to agree on its meaning none the less. If I had to define it, I should say that it is what removes us from the confines within which we have to live, and is like a ‘fatigue’ which is drawn outwards at our birth and at our death.

There is a fallacy that gives rise to the belief that the cinematograph is a suitable art to bring this faculty of the spirit into play. This fallacy is due to a hasty confusion of marvels with conjuring tricks. It is no great marvel to produce a dove from a hat. The proof is that this sort of trick can be bought, can be taught, and that such miracles at two a penny follow fashion. They are no more marvellous than is algebra, but present a frivolous and pleasing appearance, less of a strain on the intelligence. Does this mean that the cinematograph cannot put in our hands a weapon able to out-distance the target? No. But if it can do so, it is on the same basis as the other arts, from which people try to exclude it because its youth makes it suspect in a country (France) where, except when it is a matter of defending the soil, youth is not taken into consideration.