Artaud wanted to give a public reading of his new works — for since his release he was writing incessantly. A reading was arranged at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier for January 13, 1947, as part of a series of poetry readings billed as Têteà-Têtes. The rush on tickets was astonishing — most of them bought just before curtain time, as though the rumor of Artaud’s talk had just gone around in the last hours. There were a hundred standees in the five-hundred-seat theater. The audience waiting for the curtain to open at nine included Gide, Breton, Arthur Adamov, and Albert Camus, as well as Artaud’s close friends Roger Blin and Jean Paulhan — along with a host of actors, producers, directors, journalists, and students.
Shabby, dishevelled, like a zombie with overlong hair, Artaud walked on stage. He began to read from his work. He read from his recent poem “The Return of Artaud, le Mômo” (mômo is Marseillaise slang for fool; Araud had been born in Marseille):
…o kaya
o kaya pontoura
o pontoura
a pena poni
…
Not the membrane of the vault,
not the omitted member of this fuck,
born of devastation,
but meat gone bad,
beyond membrane,
beyond where it’s hard or soft.
…
And if you don’t understand the image,
— and this is what I hear you say
in a circle,
that you don’t understand the image
which is at the bottom
of my cunt’s hole,—
it’s because you don’t know the bottom,
not of things,
but of my cunt
mine,
although from the bottom of time
you all plashed there in a circle
the way one slanders a madman,
plots to death an incarceration
ge re ghi
regheghi
geghena
e reghena
a gegha riri…
He read from another poem that night, “Centre-Mére et Patron- Minet” (“Center-Mother and Boss-Puss”):
… cunta-mite and boss-puss
are the shit vocables
that father and mother
invented
in order to enjoy him to the utmost.
Who is that, him?
Strangled totem.
like a member in a pocket
that life frockets
from so close,
that the walled-in totem will finally
burst the belly to be born…
And from still another, “La Culture Indienne”:
… Caffre of urine from the slope of a hard vagina,
which resists when one takes it.
Urinary camphor from the mound of a dead vagina,
which slaps you when you stretch it…
Which two, and which of the two?
Who, both?
in the time
seventy times accursed
when man
crossing himself
was born son
of his sodomy
on his own ass
grown hard.
Why two of them,
and why born of TWO?…
If the poems were opaque, the night’s performance must have been stunning — in both good and bad ways: Soon, Artaud dropped his prepared papers on the stage and began to extemporize on his treatment by psychiatrists at Rodez, where he had almost died of malnutrition, and on the terrors of the shock treatments he had endured there. By midnight, when he had gone on for more than two hours, finally not to conclude but rather to flee the stage in a state of emotional distress — it was finally over! — the audience was devastated. Here are two many-times-reprinted responses by men who attended that night’s “lecture.” The first is from the journalist Maurice Saillet on the first prepared hour of the performance:
… when his impetuous hands fluttered like a pair of birds around his face; when his raucous voice, broken by sobs and stumbling tragically, began to declaim his splendid — but practically inaudible — poems, it was as if we were drawn into a danger zone, sucked up by that black sun, consumed by the “overall combustion” of a body that was itself a victim of the flames of the spirit.
About the latter impromptu part of the night, we have a letter from André Gide, who felt that Artaud’s exit was among the most moving moments of his life:
Artaud’s lecture was more extraordinary than one could have supposed: it’s something which has never been heard before, never seen, and which one will never again see. My memory of it is indelible — atrocious, painful, almost sublime at moments, revolting also, and quasi-intolerable.
To get some insight into Artaud’s raillery against psychiatrists, note that, in the same month as his “lecture,” one day he left Ivry to see the van Gogh (1853–1890) exhibit at the Orangerie. Returning from the exhibit, Artaud visited his art dealer friend Pierre Loeb (who had arranged the benefit sale of paintings for Artaud’s welfare), excited and exalted by the paintings he’d just seen.
“Why couldn’t you write a book on van Gogh?” Loeb suggested, against the rush of Artaud’s enthusiasm — at which point Artaud marched upstairs to the first floor of Loeb’s house, sat down, and began to write — rapidly, nervously — his impressions.
Following up his eccentric friend’s interest in the exhibition, a few days later Loeb sent Artaud a letter and some newspaper clippings about the exhibit. One of the articles, written by a psychiatrist, referred to van Gogh as a “degenerate of the Magnon type.” Artaud was incensed. Over five or six more days, along with the written impressions of that first afternoon, he produced an impassioned panegyric (and one of his most influential essays), “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society” (1947).
Loeb once wrote that the piece was written over two afternoons, the first of them spent at Loeb’s upstairs writing desk. But this is unlikely, given the essay’s length — thirty printed pages. The essay has six titled sections, which have the feel of at least six sittings about them — and possibly more. One is formed of a mosaic of paragraphs, carefully assembled from van Gogh’s letter to his beloved brother Theo. It is simply not the sort of thing one dashes off in an hour — even under the most manic expressive impulse. Also there is at least one reference in the text to “this month of February, 1947,” which would suggest work on the piece was going on at least two weeks beyond mid-January. Still, most likely, some of what Artaud said the night of the 13th, from the Vieux Columbier stage, about psychiatry, about himself, and/or about van Gogh, became the substance for what he wrote in his essay — if not vice versa.