As I hinted in my review of “Letter to the Americans” earlier in the month, there was every chance of me returning to another Jean Cocteau book before too long; and truth be told, I have been planning to read “Les Enfants Terribles” since we decided on the #1929 Club six months ago. I first read the book in my early twenties and it was one of those pivotal books of my life, leading me to a lifelong love of the man and his art. I was a tiny bit nervous about revisiting a book which had meant so much to me after so long a gap, but I needn’t have been – it’s just wonderful!

“Enfants”, here in a wonderful translation by the esteemed novelist Rosamund Lehmann, was one of only a handful of novels Cocteau published; and in fact he only published one more novel during his lifetime. To be honest, it’s a novella rather than a novel, and it tells the story of the titular children, siblings Elisabeth and Paul. They have no father; their mother is ill and bedridden, with the eldest of the two, Elisabeth, taking care of her. Paul attends school, where he is obsessed with the powerful figure of another schoolboy, Dargelos; and completing the set-up is Gerard, another of Paul’s school friends, who is obsessed with the siblings.

There was snow that evening. The snow had gone on falling steadily since yesterday, thereby radically altering the original design. The Cité had withdrawn in Time; the snow seemed no longer to be impartially distributed over the whole warm living earth, but to be dropping, piling only upon this one isolated spot.

The book opens with snow descending on Paris, and the schoolboys have a snowball fight; an iconic moment, as I’ll mention later. Paul is wounded by a snowball thrown by Dargelos, and carried home; and from then on Elisabeth cares for him as well. The siblings have an unnaturally strong bond, still sharing a bedroom and retreating into their own world, symbolised by the Room, which is their refuge, a haven they’re created as a form of survival. Often they quarrel, but underneath the bond is unbreakable. Gerard is gradually allowed access to their world, although more as an audience than anything else. As the siblings grow older, things change around them – their mother dies, Gerard’s uncle steps in to support them financially, and there is even a marriage. Nothing, however, seems to change the structure of the siblings’ life. But the introduction into their circle of Agathe, who so closely resembles Dargelos, will change the Room forever with catastrophic consequences.

Elisabeth crossed the dining-room and went into the drawing-room. Here too the snow had been about its magic work. The room hung in mid-air, miraculously suspended, changed, unfamiliar to the child who stood there, stock still, staring, behind one of the armchairs. The lamplit brightness of the opposite pavement had printed on the ceiling several windows made of squares of shadow and half-shadow curtained with arabesques of light; upon this groundwork the silhouetted forms of passers-by circled diminished as in a moving fresco.

For a book of its length (my Folio Society edition runs to 117 pages), “Enfants” is a powerful and memorable piece of writing, and I understand why it affected me so strongly when I first read it. Cocteau’s writing is stunning and lyrical, and despite the darkness of the subject matter, it has great beauty. Cocteau was a visual artist, and his writings have a filmic quality, with vivid set pieces ready to be transferred to a movie setting. It’s not surprising, therefore, that “Enfants” was indeed filmed in 1950 by Jean-Pierre Meville, starring Nicole Stephane and Edouard Dermithe, and you can either find it on DVD or track down a copy online. However, a pivotal scene from the book, that of the snowball fight with Dargelos, features in one of Cocteau’s earliest films, “The Blood of a Poet”, and that whole moving picture is itself a surreal treat, featuring many tropes which would end up in Cocteau’s later cinematic works.

Paul marvelled at the fact of their encounter; but his sudden clairvoyance was confined to one sole area, that of love. Otherwise a greater marvel might have felled him utterly: namely, Fate the lacemaker implacably at work, holding upon her knees the cushion of our lives, and stuffing it with pins.

What I loved most about “Enfants”, I think, was the way the narrative simply sucked me into its world and took me along with it. I empathised completely with the siblings and their wish to build their own world, with their own heroes and villains, and ignore the sordidness of the outside world. I was very much of that mindset myself when I first read the book, creating a world for myself filled with books and art and clothes and design from the past which appealed to me, pulling it all together into a kind of personal mythology. “Enfants” spoke to me very strongly at the time as the siblings were doing much the same thing; and I still relate to it nowadays, as I try to fill my everyday existence with literature and paintings and creativity and things which make me happy in the face of the relentness nastiness of real life. Whether it’s an obsession with fountain pens or nature or books or mid-century modern design, these things help to keep me happy, and I saw this in the lives of the siblings; because the bleakness of their background and the forces around them hit me more this time round.

Hollow, leaden, buoyant, Elisabeth advanced along the corridor, her white wrap, billowing round her ankles, seeming to float her onward like a cloud: one of those foamy cloud-cushions devised by primitive painters to bear some Being of the angelic order. Only a faint humming persisted in her head; and in her breast nothing any more but an axe thudding out its mortal strokes.

Impoverished, cooking and cleaning and caring for a sick mother, with no father figure for support, the siblings live in a precarious world, which is why I guess they constructed the Room around them, for support and survival. Their life is full of the potential for tragedy, and indeed events do lead inexorably to a dramatic climax; but it’s hard to see that they would ever have been able to live a normal existence. Life throws them a few chances and they take them; but the unnaturally strong bond between the two will eventually bring their downfall.

They lived their dream, their Room, fancying they loathed what they adored.

I’ve wanted to re-read “Enfants” for many years, and I’m so glad the #1929Club gave me the courage to do so, because it was a wonderful and hypnotic experience. Cocteau apparently wrote the book in the midst of a phase of opium addiction, and there are indeed some beautifully written, hallucinatory sequences. Yet it’s also a book about how we cope with life and the world around us, about the strength of sibling relations and about the structures we build around us for self-preservation. “Les Enfants Terribles” is a dark and stunning and beautiful book which has haunted me from the time I first read it – and it still does!

*****

I wanted to say also a little about the edition I read, which was a beautiful copy from the Folio Society. My original read, all those years ago, was a lovely vintage Penguin Modern Class, which as you can see from the photo below I still have!

But I didn’t want to risk any damage, as older Penguins can be fragile, so I chose to revisit the book with the Folio copy I picked up some years back – and that was a lovely experience too. The Folio is a gorgeous hardback with a stunning cover design, and has an extra treat inside. The Penguin contains many illustrations by Cocteau for the book (I haven’t counted them…) but the Folio instead gathers all the illustrations together at the end, and this is the complete set of drawings for the book, originally published by Cocteau together in 1934.

These are just wonderful – a real treat – and so if you are planning to read “Enfants” I do recommend tracking down a copy of the Folio – it can be found online at remarkably reasonable prices….

*****

Without wanting to make this post interminable, you can find some interesting uploads of Cocteau’s films online to give you a taste of his work – here are some clips from “Blood of a Poet”:

and here is “Les Enfants Terribles”:

And finally, in the 1980s, when I was first discovering French art and literature, the wonderful David Sylvian released a song which is still one of my favourites and which references many of the artworks I love!