ISBN 978 0 7206 1252 3
Fiction
Paperback
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Thomas the Impostor

Jean Cocteau

With a new introduction by Gilbert Adair

Translated from the French by Dorothy Williams

Thomas the Impostor is set at the outbreak of the First World War. It is not, however, your typical WW1 narrative but a fascinating example of war writing from a quintessentially artistic imagination: Guillaume Thomas is a boy too young to join the army but determined to get to the front at any cost. He is aided by the magnificent Princesse de Borme, who uses her energy, influence and allure to put together a chaotic ambulance convoy to help wounded soldiers. Together they travel all over France until Guillaume finally gets his wish and joins a company of soldiers . . .

It may come a surprise to some that Jean Cocteau actually fought in the First World War but Thomas the Impostor is his idiosyncratic response to the author’s own experiences at the front. Illustrated by Cocteau’s piercing ink drawings, the narrative is punctuated by typically Cocteauesque flights of fancy that make the book an intriguing mix of realism and fantasy and also an excellent introduction to the writing of Jean Cocteau.

As Gilbert Adair says in his enlightening new foreword:

‘It is precisely because the author dares to shock us by poeticizing (war) that its horror is brought home to us with a starkness that a more superficially ‘realistic’ novelist would be unlikely to generate. Cocteau was a dandy, yes, but a naked dandy.’

PRAISE FOR THOMAS THE IMPOSTOR:

'Many readers will recall Armistice Days of old when it took a good half an hour for the veterans of the First World War to march past the poppy wreaths. Now, the few that remain are very old men. Soon, they will all be gone. Even so, when the hundredth anniversary of September 1914 comes around in eight years’ time, we will remember them.
Jean Cocteau, born in 1889, was in his twenties when he served at the Front. He witnessed the chaos and the carnage. He came out of the army to make a career as a poet, novelist, designer, choreographer and film-maker. His techniques are consistently described as “avant-garde” , but when I was reading Thomas the Impostor, I found myself wondering how much of Cocteau’s famously skewed stylised method came out of those early experiences.
Guillaume Thomas is an accidental impostor. Dr Verne asks “Who are you?” and he replies “Guillaume Thomas de Fontenoy” because he was born in Fontenoy near Auxerre. Verne thinks of the well-known General de Fontenoy and asks if they are related. “Yes”, says Thomas, “his nephew”. So it is that young Thomas becomes the mascot for a motley collection of variously sad, mad and desperate characters who set off from Verne’s ex-nursing- home-cum-Red-Cross-
Hospital to help the wounded at the Front.
Thomas’s talent – and his tragedy – is to believe. “His sort are a race apart. They live halfway between reality and make-believe. They are distinguished, not lowered, by the deception which they practise. Guillaume took people in without malice. The story will show that he took himself in . . . he forgot what he really was.”
On his tombstone at Milly-la-Forêt the words “Je reste avec vous” are inscribed. In the same way, Cocteau’s devastating vision of the First World War is also with us still.' – The Times

‘Exciting in its mixture of fantasy, horror and hilarity.’ – Daily Telegraph

‘At once the mind turns to Diaghilev and those frenzied days when the Cocteau talents took their first springtime leap. It is in the manner of a macabre ballet that the battle scenes emerge. We feel as we feel in the theatre, and not the less deeply for that.’ – Norman Shrapnel, The Guardian

‘Words are used as if with a thrusting palette knife, and the effect is at once queerly powerful and striking.’ – The Scotsman

JEAN COCTEAU, born in 1889, he was the owner of a prodigious talent whose oeuvre spanned almost every branch of the arts. An outsider who was involved in many of the great art movements of his era, the unapologetically flamboyant Cocteau achieved a genuine originality as a poet, novelist, painter, choreographer and a film-maker whose work continues to reverberate in avant-garde cinema today. A recipient of the Legion d’honneur in 1963, Jean Cocteau died the same year. The anniversary of his death was marked by a major retrospective held at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2003.