Jean Cocteau reflects on the United States and writes his letter to the Americans.

Jean Cocteau (1889.1963)

Autograph manuscript signed – Americans.

Two and a half pages in quarto.

Autograph notes in pencil on the back of the 3rd ^sheet .

No place or date. [1949]

"Everywhere in America, a minority is throbring with anticipation and surrendering itself to a sham freedom."

Jean Cocteau addresses Americans as a proselytizing poet of old Europe.

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"Americans.".

What is the nightmare of your city that sleeps standing up, I ask you? The atomic bomb. It exists, and you don't want it to. There's no more talk at your table than there is talk of the rope at the hanged man's table. And because you need excuses for its existence, you unconsciously increase this modern slope toward dead thought [this is the reason for the success of ballets in New York where gesture seeks to replace words], because if thought were dead, explosives would only destroy emptiness and would kill nothing.

I do not admire a race as a race. A race is neither good nor bad. I only love a race if it is oppressed. For, however numerous, if it is oppressed, a race represents a minority. And a minority will always prevail in my heart over a majority, since a majority oppresses a minority because of some superiority over it and the remorse that this minority causes it.

A race that oppresses another is detestable. If the oppressed race oppresses in turn, it will become detestable to me. Don't you know that we, the minorities of old Europe, are eternally on the wrong side of the barricade, and that this wrong side will ultimately prevail, in this time that disturbs you, you who want to live in the present moment, enamored of achievement and success?.

You will be saved neither by arms nor by fortune.  You will be saved by the minority of those who think. By your secret souls, not your little [?], by your madness that Edgar Allan Poe sums up, in short, by your poets, whatever ink they use, and your cinematograph is not the least of these inks, an ink of light that false morals fill with water and prevent from blossoming.

Limited companies are ultimately less powerful than a hidden name that gradually rises to prominence. Throughout America, a minority throbs and imprisons itself in a sham freedom, almost worse than the imperialism of dictators.

Let me sum up. All it would take is a stroke of luck for your complexes, your Protestant reserve, your anxiety, your fears to vanish, for your mind to bud, teem, explore under control with the gigantic eroticism of spring in your southern countryside.

A chemistry governs the universe, a chemistry indifferent to and superior to our actions : but, do not forget, the rhythm of the world is that it breathes like your chest, its lungs expanding and contracting in turn. We are victims of a period when the lungs are emptying. The world exhales . It no longer thinks. It expends . Its breath destroys its harvests. Wait until it fills its lungs again.

Since it is disintegrating, wait until it becomes whole again and concentrates until it is nothing more than the lamp in an attic room that thinks and might save humanity. Jean Cocteau

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After spending nearly a month in New York in 1949, Cocteau wrote – as soon as he returned by plane – a letter to his hosts which would be published by Grasset under the title "Letter to the Americans"