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Featured
From Book 3: Portrait of Antonin Artaud
This is based on research of course, but it’s eerie how much I guessed before it was confirmed by research. He was not what I expected, even after all these years. I discovered there was always more to learn about Antonin Artaud. Like me he experienced sudden vertigo, especially at high places but also… Read more
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Featured
All Excerpts
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From Book 3: Guernica
In April the German air force, commanded by Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, bombed the town of Guernica in Spain which was the center of Basque culture and also the northern bastion of the Republican resistance movement. The two-hour assault by a squadron of Junkers warplanes leveled the town. The young men were away fighting… Read more
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From Book 3: The Spanish Civil War, Part 2
The spring unwound under slow fingers. Franz and Catherine left for the Pyrenees, taking Aleron with them; he had been ill and Franz thought the mountains would help him. Desnos was working with André Masson on a new book, Les sans cou. Youki and Louis both worked on their art galleries and most of… Read more
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From Book 3: The Spanish Civil War, Part 1
The next morning, my brother and I agreed to spend a day apart. I showed my photograph to shopkeepers, to hotel clerks, to women in the street. No one had seen Justine. I ended up in a graveyard, sitting on a toppled gravestone and staring at her photograph. Now I doubted Justine had… Read more
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From Book 4: Meeting with Dr. Toulouse
But what shall become of him? —Letter, Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe to Dr. Edouard Toulouse Dr. Edouard Toulouse was a dapper, pleasant gentleman of average height who had an oval face, a strong chin and twinkling, startling eyes behind round glasses. He left his hat with Catherine and walked right up to me to shake my hand, unintentionally… Read more
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From Book 3: Artaud, Anais Nin and Henry Miller
Previous scene here (the lecture at the Sorbonne). Hulkish Allendy appeared in the doorway, eyes glowering from beneath his brows. His own drooping beard barely moved when he spoke. “Get him out of here.” He and the blushing man seized my arms and dragged me to the entrance. My laughter bounced over the heads… Read more
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From Book 3: I Love You, Part Three
Previous scene here. I walked to the end of rue Blomet and turned right onto the rue de Javel where I found a weather-battered movie house advertising Abel Gance’s Lucrezia Borgia. I went in. The film was simply dreadful. It had none of the scope or deftness of Gance’s grand epic, Napoléon. I found… Read more
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From Book 2: I Love You, Part Two
The cold wood of the table felt good against my cheek, and I let my arms dangle as the walls bent themselves around me in crazy angles. Suddenly Artaud’s face was level with mine, and his face showed so much concern that I immediately forgave him for being such a cold fish sometimes. “What… Read more
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From Book 3: Smuggling Artaud
The Sainte-Anne hospital was a walled compound like a mini-medieval city. It stood not far from the studios of René Thomas and Sonia Mossé. Desnos told us about it after we met. Sainte-Anne had been constructed in the thirteenth century and was named after, of all people, the patron saint Anne of Austria, that… Read more
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From Book 2: I Love You, Part One
The great Desnos, scrawler of surreal graffiti. One thing for sure, that man was drinking too much lately. It worried me. When he drank his mood-swings became even worse. He would stay drunk for days. Yvonne George, herself drowning in the laudanum bottle, was now ignoring him completely while Breton yelled in the man’s… Read more
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From Book 4: The Prisoner
In early 1938, at the urging of Artaud’s family and with the intercession of Jean Paulhan, Antonin Artaud was finally transferred from the Quatre-Mares asylum at Rouen to Sainte-Anne, an asylum south of Montparnasse, that mini-walled city near the studios of Sonia Mossé and René Thomas. First Artaud’s mother, now almost seventy years old,… Read more
I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality. —Antonin Artaud
