Claude Arnaud pits Proust against Cocteau in a literary match

Claude Arnaud’s essay "Proust contre Cocteau" (Grasset) stages an improbable literary duel between Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau, two French writers with intertwined yet antagonistic careers. Arnaud, author of a 2003 Cocteau biography, acts as organizer, referee, and judge, weaving psychology, sociology, history, and literature into a novel-like narrative. The book explores their twelve-year relationship, beginning when Cocteau was twenty and Proust forty, highlighting how their social and literary ambitions clashed. Proust, the tortoise, saw Cocteau, the hare, published early and celebrated in aristocratic salons, while Cocteau struggled for recognition from the NRF. Key figures populate their world: the comtesse de Chevigné (model for the duchesse de Guermantes), Anna de Noailles, Robert de Montesquiou, and others. Arnaud examines their shared bourgeois origins, domineering mothers, and mutual jealousy, but also their divergent literary paths: Proust’s monumental "Recherche" versus Cocteau’s fragmented oeuvre. Cocteau accused Proust of hiding his homosexuality behind a narrator, while Proust dismissed Cocteau as a lightweight. Arnaud concludes that Proust is a "killer" who overshadows his rival, yet Cocteau’s reputation has revived since 1970, with a Pléiade edition and a Centre Pompidou exhibition. The essay ends with a provocative prediction of waning interest in Proust, but Arnaud admits his own affinity for Cocteau, who made room for him as a writer.