Author’s note: I really, really mourn Nusch Éluard, too. She was Marvelous. Writing this novel series about Artaud and Desnos has led me to love – and to mourn – so many other people: André Breton (though I’m conflicted about him), Benjamin Péret, Paul Éluard, Picasso, Cocteau, Jacques Prével, Paule Thévenin, Jean Paulhan who alsoContinue reading “From Book 4: Trotsky and Nusch”
Category Archives: Book 4 – Ebony Life
From Book 4: Blackmailing Fouks
That evening at dinner—not after it as most people would but during it as Desnos would—we read through The New Revelations of Being, the work I hated and felt was the least like Artaud’s voice. In reading it again of course I changed my mind. Artaud certainly believed his apocalyptic visions. According to RenéContinue reading “From Book 4: Blackmailing Fouks”
From Book 4: Sainte-Anne
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,Continue reading “From Book 4: Sainte-Anne”
From Book 4: Another Way
It was at the Dôme, Artaud’s favorite haunt, that a ghost caught up with me. I was already in a particularly wretched mood that evening when my gaze suddenly lifted from the table to lock with a twin pair of eyes, with familiar but never-before-seen blue-green accusation from the face of Marie-Ange Mallausséna. IContinue reading “From Book 4: Another Way”
From Book 4: Someone is Imitating Artaud
The Sins of Nin, Part One. The Sins of Nin, Part Two. NOTE: While I use Anaïs Nin’s Diary as a source for events, after years of studying Artaud’s letters to both men and women I find her conclusion that Artaud was gay and attracted to Nin’s husband Hugh Guiler to be a load ofContinue reading “From Book 4: Someone is Imitating Artaud”
Excerpt from Book 4: Jacques Prevel
Someone sat down on the bench next to me and I whirled, thinking it was Artaud, who I feared and hoped had it in for me after all my spying. However, it was only that young friend of his, Jacques Prével, the impoverished poet with the bony, useless mistress and the new baby byContinue reading “Excerpt from Book 4: Jacques Prevel”
The Double 