Recovery from Opium Addiction in Text and Image
COCTEAU, Jean. Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication. Dessins de l’auteur. Paris: Librairie Stock, Delamain et Boutelleau. 1930.
8vo. Original cream printed wrappers, spine and upper cover lettered in black and gold, partially uncut; pp. 264, [2], with 40 plates after line drawings by Cocteau (included in pagination) and a further 3 plates after collages by Cocteau; very slight lean, creasing, and spotting to spine, spine ends a little worn, very light toning and dust-soiling to covers; internally clean; overall a very good copy.
First edition, number 14 of 28 copies printed on Japon Impérial, of Cocteau’s extraordinary account of the physical and mental anguish of his withdrawal from opium addiction, extensively illustrated by the author.
Cocteau had largely been introduced to opium by the French musicologist and sinologist Louis Laloy (1874–1944) in 1924, during a period of profound depression following the unexpected death of the writer Raymond Radiguet. ‘Cocteau shut himself away with the amateur Sinologist and the musicians in a room in their hotel … A hundred times he tried to absorb [opium], more bitter than bromide; a hundred times he complained about not feeling any benefit from it. Finally, after three months, the anguish fell away’ (Arnaud, pp. 351–2). Cocteau wrote and illustrated Opium between 16 December 1928 and April 1929, while undergoing treatment at a clinic in Saint-Cloud, and it was during this time that he wrote Les Enfants terribles (1929) – arguably his most famous work – over the course of three weeks, his illustration to p. 241 bearing the same title.
His haunting illustrations from the early stages of his recovery – featuring a screaming figure with his eyes scratched out, a limbless man, a nude figure holding his four-faced head in his hands, and a weeping sun, inter alia – give way to eerie figures composed of tubular structures, and finally to images of freedom and hope. The third collage, Je quitte Saint-Cloud (I Am Leaving Saint-Cloud) shows a classical statue fleeing on horseback through a star-studded sky, and the final illustration, La Destinée de l’oiseleur (The Fate of the Bird-Catcher) shows an outstretched hand, allowing Cocteau himself (the self-portrait on p. 27 titled Oiseau) to fly away at last. ‘The drawings done under the influence of opium are a marvel. They allow us a glimpse into the life of a tortured soul who cries out in lines that excite the senses and cause us to wonder about the daily nightmare of addiction’ (Emboden, p. 36).
Addressed to ‘opium smokers, the sick, and those unknown friends found through books who are the only excuse for writing’ (trans.), Opium was perhaps unsurprisingly taken up by the American Beat poets. The book featured on the shelves of William S. Burroughs’s library, which so impressed Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the mid-1940s. Although Burroughs does not name Cocteau’s Opium in his preface to Junkie (1953), he would later explicitly acknowledge its importance: ‘I always had a romantic literary relationship to drugs, like you find in De Quincey or in Cocteau’s Opium’ (Lane, p. 106).
Crosland, p. 229; not in Carteret (cf. vol III, p. 107). See Arnaud, Jean Cocteau: a Life (2016); Emboden, The Visual Art of Jean Cocteau (1989); Lane, The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation (2017).
SKU: 2122802