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Excerpts from
"Images de Louis Jouvet"
By Jean-Louis Barrault
The other night, I had a dream about Jouvet. It often happens that I dream of the people I have truly loved. We were standing very close to each other, he was taller than me by half a head like he was when he was alive, and we were both crying in this particularly heart-wrenching way one cries when one is dreaming. High-pitched sobs, like two children.
The cause of this sorrow was that they wanted to take his Ath�n�e away from him; they wanted to throw him out of his theatre. As I was waking up, but still half asleep, I wondered if that sorrow wasn't still very real and if, in some unimaginable place, Jouvet wasn't still crying because he had been evicted from his theatre. To comfort him, I talked to him and the things I had tried so painfully to tell him at his funeral vaguely came back to my mind. I told him:
"You know very well that you keep on living within us, you know very well that the world of the theatre is like a family, a chosen family. You know that we can't live so interwoven with one another without some fibers being formed that prevent us from becoming apart. The pain, the joy, the feelings created that we use up in a single breath, bind us together, create a kinship among us. This mysterious and sublime profession that takes its source in love: love shared with the public, love exchanged on the stage, still increases our capacity for love, still tightens the bonds between you and us. Since you left us, each one of us, I know it, is nurturing within himself a feeling of love for you.
"That's because in our community, you were the head of our family, you were the true representative of our profession, the very symbol of the theatre, the most beautiful, the most noble, the most intelligent, the most captivating human representation that can be attained in the dramatic art in our country and, without a doubt, in the whole world.
[...]
"It was something to see you take hold of a text. How you would slowly suck word after word, how you'd assimilate it, penetrate it, force it. Then you would ruminate it for a long time, instinctively, amorously. Suddenly, you'd take it apart, you'd spread it in front of you, piece by piece, you'd impregnate yourself with it and very slowly you'd finally be able to breathe it: and it was only after many years, when you felt you were able to literally recreate it, that you allowed yourself to present it. Didn't your "School for Wives" have a fifteen years' incubation?
It's by this elimination process, by this constant decision making, that you were able to give to your shows an exceptional richness and radiance. It's with such an amount of work, such varied research, so much strictness in the dissection and in the invention, that you could 'electrically' charge your performances. That's why each of your new creations projected such an unusual strength.
"[...] We will also remember the very great actor that you were: as Knock, of course, as Arnolphe especially, as Dom Juan and recently as a mesmerizing Tartuffe. But we will also remember the lighter Jouvet, the charming 'tightrope artiste' that you were in "le Prof d'Anglais". Within ourselves, your presence will never fade from our memory. Like the man of the theatre, the actor was complete.
"[...] But we will remember you above all because as Art attains its perfection when we no longer know if it really is art, likewise you went beyond the limits of theatre to attain humanity itself. Because you were essentially a being of love: faithful love, fierce love, agonizing, tormented, devouring, ruling your conduct, your impulses, your retreats, your biting remarks, your jealousies, your kindnesses, your loneliness as well, your anxiety. All this was dictated only by love.[...]"
[...]
Thus, as I was waking up, it seemed that I was speaking to him to comfort him; but soon in my mind appeared a different answer that Jouvet probably would have given me. "Theatre, he would have said, I now consider it a mere puppet show for children, all this had no importance and I have found at last complete serenity..."
All our youth was formed, strengthened and protected by three men: Jacques Copeau, Charles Dullin and Louis Jouvet. Each of these men brought his own particular teaching that corresponded to his own nature. Copeau taught us the rules, Dullin injected us the passion, Jouvet constantly tested its resistance.
[...]
What Jouvet was teaching us was faith through doubt, invention through scruple, the joy of doing our profession through anxiety. And what made Jouvet's teaching so strong, it's that Jouvet worked on himself as he did on others. Jouvet paid cash. Jouvet spent his whole life testing himself.[...]
[...] It's true that he liked to demolish the weak, and it was an excellent method. For him, the weak had no business in this profession that he had chosen. The theatre craft, if it serves one of the greatest arts in the world, is often carried out in the most absurd profession. And it was good that a master like Jouvet would teach us that degree of scruple. He chose not to look the poet and artist that he really was.[...]
[...] Jouvet suffered all his life. We often could feel he was lonely, even though he was surrounded by the most faithful and exceptionally devoted affections. He was jealous, he imagined himself cheated, betrayed, abandoned. His criticisms were affective, brutal, but they always had the tone of wounded love so we understood them, so they were always for us constructive criticisms. All this came from the fact that, deep within himself, there always was a persistent child and I believe that this child, that Jouvet had remained, lived almost all his life in fear.
Fear is a very valid feeling. The more sensitive you are, and the more intelligent, the more you penetrate in the darkness of things, the more it is normal to be afraid. Jouvet lived in the fear of death and in the fear of being wrong. And what courage it takes, and what passion also, to constantly expose yourself when, because of this exceptional sensitivity, you constantly live in fear. It's this fear, this doubt, this anxiety that consumed Jouvet.
[...]
Jouvet's death has made of our profession a kind of family of orphans. We would have wanted so much that he lived many more years, not only because we loved him and because he was one of the most engaging people in the world, but also because as long as he lived we had the mentality of sons, we could believe we still had the time to learn a lot of things. Now that he's gone, we have the painful impression that we are too young for the responsibility of carrying out a task that is too great for us.[...]
Excerpts from
Images de Louis Jouvet
Foreword by Jean-Louis Barrault
Editions Emile-Paul Fr�res
1952
Translation SylvieL
