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 hadContinue reading “From Book 3: The Spanish Civil War, Part 1”

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,Continue reading “From Book 4: The Prisoner”

From Book 4: Resistance

This section presented in its entirety. Let us never forget those who fought so others could be free.             In the protection of a dry creek bed we gobbled our tepid rations and leaned against the embankment in shifts to nap. “How’s your ankle, soldier?” Raymond asked me for the hundredth time as he lappedContinue reading “From Book 4: Resistance”

From Book 3: Cécile and Sacrifice

NOTE: This scene is based on a section of Cecile Schramme’s memoirs, Souvenirs familiers sur Antonin Artaud, Messidor, 1980             Rene Thomas’s studio was a workshop with a skylight and wooden stairs leading to a loft with bedrooms and a bathroom. He and Sonia shared the workshop, although she also had a small working spaceContinue reading “From Book 3: Cécile and Sacrifice”