Fascinating letter from Antonin ARTAUD upon his release from the Rodez asylum. 1946.

Antonin ARTAUD (1896-1948)

Autograph letter signed to Jacques Marie Prevel.

Four pages in-4° on school paper. Autograph envelope.

Espalion. April 6, 1946.

“The administration ended up releasing me on March 19 and I am no longer in the Rodez asylum. » 

Released from the Rodez asylum, Antonin Artaud, in a paranoid breath, describes to the man who would become one of his last faithful the treatment of oppression of which he thinks he is the victim. Referring to his Pèse-nerfs and the recent publication of his Lettres de Rodez , he knows he is being hunted: “ Apparently everything is calm, calm. This is not true. »

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“Dear Sir, no your book of poems has not reached me as I told Arthur Adamov but the one you sent me at the same time as your letter has not yet reached me either. Don't be surprised. The n° des quatre vents [journal created by Henri Molko and directed by Henri Parisot and Gaston Bonheur] where a letter that I wrote from Rodez to Henri Parisot appeared was never given to me either and Dr Ferdière l 'had on his work table. As for my book of letters from Rodez edited by Guy Lévis Mano, the administration of the Rodez asylum claimed to read it to judge its legality before authorizing Guy Lévis Mano to send me even my author's copies.

The administration ended up releasing me on March 19 and I am no longer in the Rodez asylum . I informed Guy Lévis Mano but I still have not received my copies. This tells you that I am sure that the 2 copies of your book which did not reach me were certainly intercepted. Perhaps they contain something vivid which from a political angle shocks the spirit of the church, the police, the laboratory, the sacristy or the anatomy amphitheater and which, thinking that I will react to it as much as possible, They wanted to prevent me from coming into contact with yet another insurgent force.

Although the title is enough, things, dear sir, are a consortium of bastards who want revenge at all costs for everything that is claimed, this cannot be admitted. That's only 2 copies of poetry thrown in the basket but there are people who are waiting for that and although this will to demand becomes iron it should be more obvious to involve the police of asylums, or prisons with the police of poisons. We're not there yet with your book, but here I am in the middle of it all. And apparently everything is calm, calm. This is not true.

Are there still many people in Paris who, when I talk about magic or the police, think I have a delusion of persecution? The Nerve Scale was not written in a chic way, but after a long experience of everything and I am sure that without your book you too must have remembered a kind of death beaten by everyone. I will send you a copy of Rodez's letters if I end up receiving them. To you very sincerely. Antonin Artaud. »

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The poet Jacques Marie Prevel (1915.1951) was one of the last followers of Antonin Artaud. A poet without a publisher, Prevel had to publish his poems on his own, including Les Poèmes mortales (1945) mentioned by Artaud in this letter.

The meeting of the two men took place on May 27, 1946, at the Café de Flore, described as follows by Prevel in his diary: “ It is after noon Artaud must have been at Flore at 11:30 a.m. He suddenly appears, his Basque beret pulled down to his ears, his face ravaged. He looks like my father at the end of his life, his lip like a knife, his words cutting. »

From then on, a deep friendship was born tinged with poetry, bohemianism and artificial paradises. Until Artaud's death in March 1948, Prevel, fascinated by his friend, wrote about their daily life and the intimacy of their relationship: “The intensity of his life made me enter into an absolute, his. I was caught in its whirlwind. I followed him like a sleepwalker. And when I left him in Jussieu or somewhere in the night, I came back drunk, strangely obsessed by his words, by the songs he chanted, by his unique face, by his poignant look. I walked around Paris without thinking, or rather I only thought of him. My life was transformed, illuminated. There was Antonin Artaud. I lived. »

This diary, a valuable testimony to Artaud's last two years, was published posthumously in 1974 under the title En Compagnie d'Antonin Artaud.

Weakened by poverty and drugs, Prevel died of tuberculosis in 1951, five years to the day after his meeting with Artaud.