Jean Cocteau’s Apples Grove Koger

Grove Koger

Les pommes des Hespérides: Notes pour un film / The Apples of the Hesperides: Notes for a Film By Jean Cocteau; ed. by Bosquet Équarrisseur; trans. by Anthony Coleman Éditions Villefranche 47,50 € / $52.95

Shortly before his death in 1963 at the age of 74, Jean Cocteau began working on a new project, a film based on the Greek myth of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. Thanks to Cocteau’s adopted son, Edouard Dermit, we have known for some time that Cocteau made rough drafts of several scenes for the film, as well as a number of pen-and-ink sketches, but, until now, that has been virtually all we knew. The project was fated to remain unfinished, and, with the passage of time, interest in Cocteau’s multitudinous artistic productions has faded. Students still watch Orphée in film school, but does anyone else, anywhere? Therefore, it’s all the more surprising, if highly welcome, to have this final testament from the man who spent his life meeting Serge Diaghilev’s famous challenge, “Astonish me!” Fragmentary as it is, it exhibits Cocteau’s lifelong fascination with myth, the wellsprings of art, and the inadequacy of ordinary human perception. As to the first, he once remarked that “I do nothing but follow the rhythm of fables,” and regarding the last, “To see within, turn your eyes to the horizon.” Even if, it seems, you have no eyes with which to see. According to the Greeks, the Hesperides were the “daughters of the evening,” maidens who guarded the golden apples that grew on a tree in the far west and that gave the sunset its colors. For his eleventh labor, Héraclès was required to steal them. In Cocteau’s ironic version, this myth is subsumed into the story of a petty thief also named Héraclès. It seems that he has seen a painting in a Marseilles gallery that depicts the apples and that, he knows, a wealthy businessman will pay a high price for. He steals it, but in making his getaway by car, he runs over a young boy in the street. The boy dies and Héraclès is arrested a few days later in a bar. Cocteau apparently completed only a few rudimentary

scenes of Les pommes, and there’s no indication of how he would have dramatized Héraclès’ years of imprisonment. What we do get, after the scenes involving the theft and its immediate aftermath, is a glimpse of Héraclès’ latter days. Having been released from prison two decades later, blind and apparently destitute, he lives in a dingy apartment that holds little more than a narrow bed and a wooden table and chair. Its single window faces directly into an alleyway. We realize that the child (identified in Cocteau’s stage directions as Erichthonius) we see delivering a flagon of wine to his door is the very boy he ran over so many years before, unaged and unchanged aside from a horrible gash running down his face. Next, Héraclès’ addresses a woman— “élégante,” Cocteau describes her—cleaning his room as Athena. Consulting a guide to Greek mythology, we learn that the goddess Athena retrieved the precious fruit and returned them to the Hesperides … and that Erichthonius was her adopted son. Has the goddess already fulfilled her obligation? Is she waiting to discover the painting’s whereabouts? Or has she something else in mind entirely? We never learn. Blind though he is, Héraclès nevertheless is able to sense the warmth of the setting sun that reaches him through his window, and, in what we can guess would have been one of the final scenes of the film, holds up his hands to catch its warmth. What he doesn’t realize, of course, can’t realize, presumably, is that his window doesn’t face west. The heat he senses (and the light producing it) is a fortuitous reflection off a window across the alley—in Shakespeare’s phrase, a “pale fire.” (The great novelist Vladimir Nabokov would later borrow the phrase for his 1962 novel.) Or—has he grasped the essence of the situation after all? Other, more mundane questions also come to mind. Cocteau’s films are so mesmerizing that, as we watch them, we don’t question their surface logic. But reading is a different experience. We can assume that Cocteau would have accounted in some way for the fate of the painting, but how can the apparently impoverished Héraclès afford an apartment, however bare? Pay for wine? I’m not familiar with Éditions Villefranche, whose name appears to be signaling a connection with Cocteau’s favorite retreat, the little fishing town of Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur. Nor do I know of Bosquet Équarrisseur, although the scholarly apparatus he provides for Les pommes is ample. The 113

book’s text is made up of crisp photographic reproductions of Cocteau’s sprawling handwriting matched on facing pages with an English translation by another unfamiliar individual, Anthony Coleman. What might the stolen painting have looked like? We get an idea from one of the sketches Équarrisseur includes. It shows a footed dish piled with oculi—eyeballs—whose pupils are unnervingly dilated. And who might have played the thief? Cocteau seems to have realized that he would not live long enough to make the decision. His protagonist may have been blind, but he himself saw clearly. In Les pommes’ last entry, he wrote, nearly illegibly, “Dans trois jours, je vais être fusillé par les soldats de Dieu.” As one of Équarrisseur’s notes explains, Cocteau was remembering what he had been told some forty years before, on December 9, 1923, by his young lover Raymond Radiguet, who had contracted tuberculosis: “In three days, I am going to be shot by the soldiers of God.” Sure enough, Radiguet died three days later.

Author’s Note Aside from the quotation regarding sight, the conceit that Cocteau was working on a final film, and the existence of the book under review, everything in “Jean Cocteau’s Apples” is authentic, including the details of the myth and the anecdote about Raymond Radiguet. Likewise, there is nothing about the film that is not in accord with Cocteau’s well-known preoccupations.