With Artaud

Journal, May 1946 to March 1948

by Jacques Prevel

In 1946, the legendary theorist and writer Antonin Artaud was released from the last of the insane asylums in which he had spent nearly a decade - starving, beaten, electroshocked, abandoned - since making his apocalyptic journey to western Ireland in 1937. He then returned to Paris, perceiving himself as a dead man, who somehow still lived. For the next two years, he wrote incessantly, created extraordinary drawings, made three public performances of screams and curses, and spat-out a recording for radio transmission that had to be banned - until his abrupt death aged 51 in 1948.

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There existed only one intimate eye-witness to that final moment of Artaud’s life: the young poet Jacques Prevel, who met Artaud almost every day, walked with him through the Paris streets, screamed with him, was cursed by him, supplied him with ever-increasing amounts of drugs - up to the moment when a tubercular haemorrhage ended that life with Artaud. Prevel’s journal is by turns attentive, crazed, bewildered, desperate, passionate, funny, obsessional. He is skin-to-skin with Artaud, bone-to-bone, watching him sleep, always accompanying him at speed.

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This is the first English-language translation of Prevel’s seminal, revelatory document of Artaud at his life’s incendiary end.

Translated by Stephen Barber Photographs by Karolina Urbaniak