ARTAUD: BLOWS AND BOMBS: The Biography Of Antonin Artaud Read online

  These private ‘rest cures’ were both prolonged and expensive. They lasted five years, with a break of two months, June and July 1916, when Artaud was conscripted into the army. He spent his brief army career with an infantry regiment stationed at Digne, an isolated town in northern Provence, and was discharged due to his self-induced habit of sleepwalking. The sanatorium stays were then resumed, taking the form of a kind of bourgeois internment of the ‘difficult’ son. They prefigure the longer and more gruelling internments of 1937-46. The writer Pierre Guyotat wrote of these first internments that Artaud’s family ‘had him locked up for simple ‘‘troubles’’ due to the force of his thought’.

  Certainly, Artaud wasted no time during this luxurious incarceration. He was occupied with reading Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Poe. At the last sanatorium, at Neuchâtel in Switzerland, Artaud did a great amount of drawing and painting. Photographs from the period show a morose but attractive young man with flowing dark hair, adopting intricate and theatrical postures with evident self-involvement. In May 1919, the director of the sanatorium, Dr Dardel, prescribed opium for Artaud, precipitating a lifelong addiction to that and other drugs. At the end of 1919, Artaud formulated the project of travelling to Paris in order to attempt a career in literature, film and theatre. His parents, in desperation, assented; Dr Dardel arranged for Artaud to be transferred into the care of a colleague in Paris, Dr Édouard Toulouse, who was engaged in a study and categorization of artistic genius. In March 1920, at the age of twenty-three, Artaud made his first independent journey, to Paris.

  The Paris in which Artaud spent his first creative years witnessed the flaring-up and subsequent self-willed disintegration of Dada, the disordered anti-art movement which had its origins in Zurich and Berlin during World War One. It had converged on Paris at the end of the war, led by Tristan Tzara. Dada made an initial alliance with the nascent Surrealist group of André Breton, which was involved with developing a chance poetry of the unconscious mind. Artaud was aware of the early Surrealist magazine Littérature. Over the three years from his arrival in Paris, the Surrealist and Dada groups would move into bitter and often violent confrontation, with Breton eventually assuming an authoritarian control over the raging momentum which Dada had generated. The Dada leader, Tristan Tzara, would become a Marxist in the mid-1930s, and would continue to berate the Surrealists for their political vacillations. While Breton channelled the turmoil of Dada and began formulating manifestoes for the Surrealist movement out of material fluctuating between automatism, idealism and obsession, Artaud pursued an erratic career as a theatre actor and art critic. Dr Toulouse had given Artaud the co-editorship of his part-artistic, part-scientific periodical Demain, and it was in that capacity that Artaud began to develop the critical power which would still be at work twenty-five years later, when he wrote his texts on Van Gogh, Coleridge and Lautréamont.

  Toulouse was the head psychiatrist at the Villejuif asylum in south-east Paris, where he was pioneering humane treatments for his patients. For his first six months in Paris, Artaud lodged with the Toulouse family. He then began to live an itinerant life, mostly within the eighth and ninth arrondisements (or districts) of Paris, moving rapidly between cheap hotel rooms, occasionally destitute and dependent upon friends for a place to sleep. This restlessness would continue throughout Artaud’s life in Paris, until his departure for Ireland in 1937. It was only during his final period in Paris, from 1946 to 1948, that Artaud found a stable home and working space, at his pavilion in the convalescence clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine.

  It was one of Artaud’s original intentions to become a successful film actor. His maternal cousin, Louis Nalpas, was one of the leading producers of French commercial cinema during the 1920s and 1930s. But before Nalpas would give him film roles, Artaud needed to obtain some acting experience, and so he turned to the theatre. For four years, and in numerous roles and companies, he acted in the Paris theatres. He usually played minor parts, but attracted considerable attention through the exaggerated, gestural acting style which he developed during this period. A factor in the anti-naturalistic expressivity of this stage technique was Artaud’s witnessing of a performance by a troupe of Cambodian dancers at the Marseilles Colonial Exhibition in June 1922, during a visit to his parents. This experience prefigured the great impact which a performance by Balinese dancers exerted on his proposals for a Theatre of Cruelty, nine years later. Of the many productions in which Artaud acted, certainly the most exceptional was that of Sophocles’ Antigone in December 1922. This version, directed by Charles Dullin at the Atelier theatre in Montmartre, was adapted by Jean Cocteau and condensed to thirty minutes; the sets were by Pablo Picasso, the costumes by Coco Chanel, and the music by Arthur Honegger. It was a great success, despite a demonstration on the opening night by the Surrealists, who despised Cocteau for his contacts with Parisian high society. Artaud had the part of Tiresias, and Antigone was played by a strange and compellingly beautiful young Romanian actress, Génica Athanasiou.

  It was with Génica Athanasiou, in 1922, that Artaud had his first sexual relationship. Previously, he had formed attachments to the sickly, tubercular girls he had met during his sanatorium years. Génica, by contrast, was robustly attractive and sexually experienced; her family had originated in Albania, and her complexion was dark. During this period, Artaud was himself alarmingly beautiful, with dark eyes, prominent cheekbones, and lips stained purple by the laudanum he had begun to take. A great passion developed between the two colleagues in Dullin’s theatre company; Artaud was twenty-five and Génica twenty-three. Artaud’s letters to Génica Athanasiou demonstrate an enveloping, wild adoration. He projects their relationship onto global, even infinite levels, while his response to the sexual charge of their liaison is more guarded. (Later in life, at Rodez, he would write of being ‘de-virginalized by Génica’.)[3] Génica’s own passion was apparently more reserved; she was ambitious, having travelled from Bucharest with the intention of pursuing a successful acting career in Paris, and it may have been that the attraction she felt for Artaud was ultimately aimed towards his film-producer cousin. For the first two or three years of their relationship, they were contented. When Artaud had to return temporarily to his parents in July 1923, through lack of money, Génica went to stay nearby and they met secretly. But their acting careers were not progressing well. Génica’s strong Romanian accent and her mediocre command of French limited the number of roles she could take; similarly, Artaud’s distinctive acting style alienated him even from some of the more adventurous and amenable theatre directors, such as Dullin. But the crucial flaw in their relationship was Artaud’s growing drug addiction. Génica was looking for a successful, metropolitan career and a hectic, cafe-based social life with regular sex; she became exasperated with Artaud’s increasing dependence on opium and his futile, unsupervised attempts at detoxification. Their letters agonize relentlessly over the problem. Artaud wrote: ‘I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this – I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.’[4]

  Though the relationship lasted for six years, until 1928, it became more difficult with each failed drug-withdrawal and subsequent reproach from Génica. They each had outside affairs: Génica with another actor from Dullin’s company, and Artaud with Janine Kahn, who later married the writer Raymond Queneau. Towards the end of their relationship, Artaud wrote to Génica: ‘When you have managed to penetrate a certain kind of hatred, it’s then that you truly feel love.’[5] In 1924, Génica began a minor career in silent cinema.

  She appears in the Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, taken from a scenario by Artaud, and also in films by G.W. Pabst and Jean Grémillon. Finally, in 1928, Génica left Artaud for Grémillon. Artaud wrote that he felt ‘multiply alone’, and continued to write to Génica until 1940, when he was interned at the asylum of Ville-Évrard. He pleaded for heroin and declared: ‘Génica, we must leave this world, but
for that, the Reign of the Other World must arrive, and I need many armed soldiers…’.[6] Génica Athanasiou was in many ways the most important woman in Artaud’s life. Even after his release from Rodez, in May 1946, he tried unsuccessfully to locate her at an address in the rue de Clignancourt where she had been living in poverty, her acting career having utterly collapsed.

  During the latter part of Artaud’s period of theatre acting, towards 1923-4, his writing developed from art criticism and conventionally structured poetry into a mobile substance of extraordinary self-exposition and incision. It was a time of great flux in his life. The initial ecstasy of his relationship with Génica Athanasiou was being submerged in his anxiety over his drug intake, and over the voids and fractures which he perceived in his emergent poetry. He was beginning to be able to publish his work; his first book, Backgammon of Heaven, a collection of early poems, was published in May 1923 by the art dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, in an edition of 112 copies. Later in life, Artaud rejected this first book and refused to include it in his planned Collected Works, claiming that the poems it contained, rhymed and in stanza form, were hopelessly redundant and anachronistic. They had been produced to ingratiate themselves within a particular cultural climate, and that was a source of horror to the Artaud of the 1940s with his uncompromising attitude towards his work and individuality. But, in 1923, the publication of his work was a source of great jubilation to him. Artaud also published his own writings in the slight magazine Bilboquet, of which he edited and financed the only two issues in February and December 1923. The magazine solely comprised texts by Artaud, and forms a bridge between the art and literary criticism of the kind he had undertaken for Dr Toulouse (and which he would do again for his psychiatrist Dr Ferdière at Rodez), and the raw-nerved poetry which he would work through to its full impact over the years of his collaboration with the Surrealists. It was a magazine with a minute circulation, and Artaud gave as his editorial address that of the cheap hotel near the place de Clichy where he was staying at the time. His contacts in the artistic and literary life of Paris began to grow as his output increased. He met several painters associated with the Surrealist group during this period – André Masson, Joan Miró and Jean Dubuffet.

  The most exciting development in Artaud’s life at this time was the beginning of his career in films. In the experimental first film of Claude Autant-Lara, Faits Divers, he played the role of a lover who is strangled to death in slow motion. Autant-Lara remembered Artaud as highly enthusiastic, but prone to outlandish gestural convulsions in his performance.

  After that, Louis Nalpas was sufficiently convinced by his nephew’s acting experience and by the exceptional facial beauty he had demonstrated on screen in Faits Divers, and he began to use his influence to secure parts in the commercial cinema for Artaud. The first of these was in an energetic film, Surcouf, directed by Luitz Morat on location in Brittany from July to September 1924. Artaud played a traitor who falls over the edge of a cliff in this spectacular adventure film, in a genre that was riotously successful in the pre-sound era. The audiences’ response to Artaud’s vigorous performance was good, and he briefly believed that he could become a film star. And to some extent this would happen, with his appearances in two of the greatest films of the 1920s, Abel Gance’s Napoleon and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. But the cinema would also become a source of anguish and bitter failure for Artaud during his erratic engagement with it over the next ten years.

  The event that initiated Artaud’s literary career was his 1923-4 correspondence with Jacques Rivière, the young editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française. The prestige of the magazine attracted Artaud as a young poet, but his work was manifestly inappropriate for its conservative pages under Rivière’s editorship. Its next editor, Jean Paulhan, was to be a great supporter of Artaud and to publish a great deal of his work. Rivière, however, approached Artaud’s jagged poetry as a literary problem to be examined, discussed and solved.

  The correspondence concerns Artaud’s view of the fragment – the ‘failed’ text – as being more vital and exploratory than the ‘whole’ or ‘successful’ poem. In writing fragments, Artaud articulated his independence from and refusal of the coherent, unified aesthetic object. His fragments failed to incorporate themselves within a specific poetic culture; this intentional failure ensured that they would be banished into the territory of the self which was Artaud’s only subject matter. While they exist within a tradition of fragmentation which includes much Romantic poetry, and the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Nietzsche, among others, Artaud’s fragments are exceptional in their willed upheaval and contraction of the language of poetry and the imagery of the self. Artaud’s letters to Rivière form a correspondence about communication whose axis is silence, erosion and abandonment. The one poem which Artaud inserted in the published version of the correspondence is entitled Cry. In his letters, Artaud anatomizes the creative process of fragmentation. He deals with his incapacity to write a poem, and with the crystalline paralysis and pain of his mental apparatus as it tries to seize and formulate poetic imagery, failing abjectly to do so. What Artaud does not grasp, in writing a lucid self-criticism which meshes with his poetry, is the substance of fragmentation. Confronting a poetic language that has been shattered by the exertion of writing at all, Artaud structures deep and disciplined insights into the emergence of the creative act.

  In his initial letters to Rivière, Artaud declares his intention of transforming his ‘shreds’ into literary poems. He will write through feelings of loss, absence and desperation, in order to do this. Rivière gives Artaud blank encouragement in the project. He asserts that with due effort and concentration, Artaud will soon be able to produce poems that are ‘perfectly coherent and harmonious’, in the way that poems published in La Nouvelle Revue Française had to be. Artaud attempts this and fails. He brings back that fragment of failure as the material to be submitted to Rivière, and asks for it to be sanctioned, given ‘authenticity’ and literary existence.

  Rivière has no direct answer to this, but he proposes that their correspondence on Artaud’s poetry should be published instead of the poems themselves – the framework rather than the substance. He wants to present the correspondence as a unique document of poetic struggle: unique, and therefore universal. For this reason, he proposes to suppress his and Artaud’s names. Artaud furiously refuses this. He wants his own intentions to be apparent: ‘Why lie, why attempt to put on a literary level a thing which is the scream of life itself, why give an appearance of fiction to what is the ineradicable substance of the soul, which is the groan of life?’.[7] For Artaud, the incoherent, inherently wild and vocal material of poetry must be exposed in all of its independent and explicit pain, so that its fragmented sounds can be given breath and life. In that way, it will express itself. Artaud’s feeling of separation is the only thing which is whole, and not fragmented: ‘I can say, truthfully, that I am not in the world, and that is not just an attitude of the mind.’[8]

  Over twenty years later, in the August 1946 introduction to his Collected Works, Artaud recreated his relationship with Jacques Rivière (who died shortly after their correspondence closed), and with the ‘sacrosanct’ magazine which he edited.

  The absences and erosions which had formerly saturated Artaud’s language had long since disappeared, and he now wrote fluently of his language as being dangerous and volatile. It is the inverse of the ‘failed’ language which had been at stake in the Rivière correspondence: ‘If I drive in a violent word like a nail, I want it to suppurate in the sentence like a hundred-holed ecchymosis.’[9] He now attributes Rivière’s premature death to a virulent contact with Artaud’s language:

  …there is the corpse of a dead man. This man was called Jacques Rivière towards the beginning of a strange life: my own.

  So, Jacques Rivière refused my poems, but he did not refuse the letters by which I destroyed them. It has always seemed very strange to me that he died shortly after pub
lishing these letters.

  What happened was that I went to see him one day and told him what there was at the heart of these letters, at the heart of the bonemarrow of Antonin Artaud.

  And I asked him if he had understood.

  I felt his heart rise up and split apart in the face of the problem and he told me he had not understood.

  And I will not be surprised that the black pocket which opened up in him that day diverted him away from life much more than his illness…[10]

  The issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française containing Artaud’s correspondence with Rivière appeared on 1 September 1924. Artaud’s letters attracted great interest through their resolutely physical imagery of devastated cerebral processes of creation. For Breton, now directing the Surrealist movement as the leading avant-garde and anti-bourgeois group in Paris, the correspondence was vivid imagery from an insurgent unconscious mind, and he proposed a meeting with Artaud. On 7 September, Artaud’s father died in Marseilles at the age of sixty. At a lecture given during his stay in Mexico, twelve years later, Artaud spoke of that moment: