“To fairyland as people usually see it, I would bring a kind of realism to banish the vague and misty nonsense now so completely outworn. My story would concern itself mainly with the unconscious obstinacy with which women pursue the same type of man, and expose the naiveté of the old fairy tales that would have us believe that this type reaches its ideal in conventional good looks. My aim would be to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to men, that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty, condemning her to a humdrum marriage and a future that I summed up in that last sentence of all fairy tales: “And they had many children.”
I was therefore obliged to deceive both the public and Beauty herself. Slyly, and with much effort, I persuaded my cameraman Alekan to shoot Jean Marais, as the Prince in as saccharine a style as possible. The trick worked. When the picture was released, letters poured in from matrons, teen-age girls and children, complaining to me and Marais about the transformation. They mourned the disappearance of the Beast—the same Beast who terrified them so at the time when Madame Leprince de Beaumont wrote the tale.
When Madame de Beaumont published Beauty and the Beast, she was an impoverished teacher in England, and I suppose that the story is of Scotch origin. Anglo-Saxons manage the horror story, the weird tale, better than anybody else. In fact, in England one still hears tales of lords, the eldest sons of noble families, heirs to the title, hidden away in barred rooms of old castles.
There are three reasons why I have high hopes that Americans will readily grasp my intention. First, America is the home of Edgar Allen Poe, secret societies, mystics, ghosts, and a wonderful lyricism in the very streets. Second, childhood remains longer within the soul than it does here in France, where we try to suppress it as a weakness….”
Comment:
How right Cocteau is to mention Poe here. And how wrong T. S. Eliot – Boston Brahmin and scholar of Sanskrit – to see interest in Poe as the mark of a second-rate mind.
Poe – like Mencken, also a Baltimorean – haunts the urban landscape of the Midwest, not simply because of his Amity street house in Baltimore, or his birth in Richmond, but in a more elusive way, captured accurately in this fine analysis:
“Poe is not un-American, despite his aristocratic disgust with democracy, preference for the exotic, and themes of dehumanization. On the contrary, he is almost a textbook example of Tocqueville’s prediction that American democracy would produce works that lay bare the deepest, hidden parts of the psyche. Deep anxiety and psychic insecurity seem to have occurred earlier in America than in Europe, for Europeans at least had a firm, complex social structure that gave them psychological security. In America, there was no compensating security; it was every man for himself. Poe accurately described the underside of the American dream of the self-made man and showed the price of materialism and excessive competition — loneliness, alienation, and images of death-in-life.
Poe’s “decadence” also reflects the devaluation of symbols that occurred in the 19th century — the tendency to mix art objects promiscuously from many eras and places, in the process stripping them of their identity and reducing them to merely decorative items in a collection. The resulting chaos of styles was particularly noticeable in the United States, which often lacked traditional styles of its own. The jumble reflects the loss of coherent systems of thought as immigration, urbanization, and industrialization uprooted families and traditional ways. In art, this confusion of symbols fueled the grotesque, an idea that Poe explicitly made his theme in his classic collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).”