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According to legend, Jean Cocteau
took to opium in 1923 to assuage his grief at the early
death of his protégé, the novelist Raymond
Radiguet. Written during last months of a detoxification
process in 1930, Opium is
paradoxically a work by Cocteau at the height of his powers
and trademarked by his unabashed egocentricity and brio.
Preceding much of the work for which
he is best known, Opium is
now regarded as one of Cocteau’s most important works
and a major document in the literature of drug addiction in
its own right. An extraordinary mélange of fact and fantasy,
Opium describes his extraordinary hallucinations and the price
his ‘perfect
hours’ came to exact. There are also reminiscences of
some of Cocteau’s closest friends, including the dancer
Nijinsky and Marcel Proust, as well as revealing insights behind
the creation of masterpieces such as Orphée and Les
Enfants Terrible.
Opium is
illustrated with twenty-eight of Cocteau’s own disturbing
drawings.
‘Such diamond precision of utterance
has seldom been combined with so wide an aesthetic range.’– Kenneth
Tynan
‘Of all Cocteau’s notebooks this
is the most striking, and it gains much from his harrowing drawings.’– The
Times
‘His contribution to the great literature
of drug addiction is distinguished by the flashes of insight, the
capacity to remember, the observation of the miraculous.’— Daily Telegraph
More about Jean
Cocteau |
