Cocteau's Fixative

OPIUM, THE DIARY of AN ADDICT--Jean Cocteau--Longmans, Green ($2 ).

Cleverest of living French writers, in his own and many others' opinion. Jean Cocteau is an opium smoker. Most good writers have something the matter with them but generally keep it dark. Not so Author Cocteau, who makes no apology for his vice, regards it apparently as an interesting integral part of the most interesting personality he knows. This "diary" is really a series of notes, on any and every subject, made at a clinic in St. Cloud, apparently while Author Cocteau was being, as he calls it, "disintoxicated." The 27 line-drawings, in Cocteau's unmistakable style, give his book a quality of nightmare.

Though he seems to have been "disintoxicated" several times, Cocteau, unlike famed Addict Thomas De Quincey, admits no desire to "reform." He writes: "Do not expect me to be a traitor. Naturally opium remains unique and its well-being superior to that of health. To it I owe my perfect hours." Saying that to lecture an opium addict is like telling Tristan to kill Isolde, he comes nearest to an apology when he writes: "Living is a horizontal fall. But for that fixative, a life completely and continually conscious of its speed would become intolerable. It allows the man condemned to death to sleep. . . . Opium gave me this fixative. Without opium all projects, marriages, travels, seem to me as foolish as if some one falling from a window wished to get into touch with the people in the rooms which he passed."

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