Letter to the Americans

by Jean Cocteau, Alex Wermer-Colan (Translator)

Overview

Like Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier, Jean Cocteau offers a powerful reminder to Americans of their own potential—and issues

In 1949, Jean Cocteau spent twenty days in New York, and began composing on the plane ride home this essay filled with the vivid impressions of his trip. With his unmistakable prose and graceful wit, he compares and contrasts French and American culture: the different values they place on art, literature, liberty, psychology, and dreams. Cocteau sees the incredibly buoyant hopes in America’s promise, while at the same time warning of the many ills that the nation will have to confront—its hypocrisy, sexism, racism, and hegemonic aspirations—in order to realize this potential. Never before translated into English, Letter to the Americans remains as timely and urgent as when it was first published in France over seventy years ago.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811231596
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Pages:	64
Sales rank:	634,387
Product dimensions:	4.40(w) x 7.20(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was a French writer, poet, designer, draftsman, sculptor, filmmaker, and boxing manager. His list of friends—including New Directions’ founder James Laughlin—would read like a catalog of the stars of the twentieth-century avant-garde. He died of a heart attack after being informed of the death of his friend, the singer Edith Piaf.

Alex Wermer-Colan is a writer, editor, dramaturg, and translator living in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Harpers, New Criterion, Ill Will, L’Esprit Createur, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Twentieth Century Literature, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, American Book Review, Bloomsbury Press, Indiana University Press, and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

 

Editorial Reviews

05/23/2022

A brief 1949 trip to New York City serves as the inspiration for an enjoyable series of letters from French novelist and filmmaker Cocteau (The Holy Terrors) (1889–1963) to “Americans,” first published in France more than 70 years ago, but appearing for the first time in English. “You’ll tell me that one can’t judge a country by a city... But in some cases the first look you cast over a face reveals more than a prolonged study,” Cocteau writes, and clarifies that the “you” he’s writing to is “the world of easy money and instantaneous gratification.” He puts to paper his thoughts on literature (“Your book sales are in crisis. So be it”), France (where “everyone thinks”), and New York City (where “everything is paradoxical. One needs the new but wants nothing to change”). Cocteau recounts some anecdotes from his stay, as when he describes seeing a group of young girls making their own painting at the Museum of Modern Art, and spotting a woman asleep, “face caught in a beard of orchids.” On a line level, his sentences are a joy to read: “But the mind has robust teeth. Chew things with its robust teeth. Don’t let them only serve as the ornamental smiles of the stars.” Cocteau’s fans won’t regret making room for this short but sweet outing on their shelves. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"In our current moment of distrust and anger and suspicion, Cocteau’s reminder is a welcome tonic."

New York Journal of Books

"One of the master craftsmen."

Tennessee Williams

"The lasting feeling that his work leaves is one of happiness; not of course in the sense that it excludes suffering, but because, in it, nothing is rejected, resented, or regretted."

W.H. Auden

"A man to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City."

Edith Wharton

"That is how Jean Cocteau’s work seems to us, like a light, aerial, stormy civilization hanging from the heavy heart of our own. The very person of the poet adds to it, thin, knotted, silvery as olive trees"

Jean Genet