©Kristine Harley No part of this excerpt may be reproduced without written permission from the author.
“I’ve landed another film role,” Artaud finally murmured as we walked up the stairs from the Metro to the street, “a significant part. I mean, really significant. I’m nervous about it. This is the role, the opportunity.”
“That’s fantastic,” I said. “What’s the role?”
“Do you know of the director Carl Theodor Dreyer?”
The name clanged in my head like a distant bell. “I’ve heard of him,” I said. Dreyer—oh yes, I remembered him. I had every reason to know who he was. He was the director of my very favorite film, and Marianne’s as well: “The Parson’s Widow.” The story, about a young couple frustrated by the youth’s forced marriage to an old widow, had been so close to our own situation that, after watching the hero and heroine on the screen fail at every ridiculous scheme they could invent to get rid of his elderly wife, including an attempt to scare her to death with a silly vampire costume, Marianne and I had put our heads down and glanced fearfully around the theatre, certain that my father was as all-seeing as that wise old woman, and that our attempts to conceal our romance from him as transparent as that blundering couple’s plans. How tightly Marianne had clutched my hand when finally the young man and girl on the screen went crawling to the parson’s widow for forgiveness! And when the old woman put aside convention and blessed their love, I was emboldened to propose to Marianne just days later, sure that my father would similarly cast aside the last of his own ambitious dreams about my future.
I smiled now as I remembered my naiveté, for instead my father had raged at the news, circling the room and laying his hands on various objects, ready but not quite willing to throw them at me, whirling around my curt answers like an erratic planet knocked off its axis because he refused to believe that I had actually married that penniless, orphaned, uneducated girl. But now it was no longer the bitter memory it had been. Two silly children, both frustrated by the expectations of their respective classes, she with her buckets and me with my books, finding a common bond in a cinematic illusion. Identifying with actors and actresses, living through the cinema as if it were literature, literature brought to life.
Franz had laughed at my love for films, and still did. He had always thought the cinema too vulgar to ever be a true art form. But to me, cinema was the great leveler. Everyone, rich or poor, could watch films and share the same experience. Films were almost dreams, as Desnos liked to say—collective dreams shared by collective dreamers. Seeing “The Parson’s Widow” with Marianne had been one of the defining moments of my life.
How wonderful that Artaud should now work with the same director.
Artaud pointed down a cobblestoned alley and we turned to follow it. “I am to have the part of Father Massieu Krassien.”
“No joke?” I gasped. Krassien, the priest who had accompanied Joan of Arc to the stake, who had heard her last confession and led her in her final prayer, and who had loved the saint as she died in the pyre, his soul swollen with the horror of seeing her die, and the ecstasy of his discovery of his desire, and the hopelessness of that longing. Unique love. Celestial love. “That role is perfect for you, Artaud!” Artaud beamed back at me with pure pride. “You know, it’s even more appropriate than—“ I said pointedly to him, “—the role of Usher.”
“You think so?” he asked in a shy voice.
I nodded. “Definitely.” Artaud as the mystic who converses with a living saint; Artaud as the counselor. Artaud as the paradox, the chaste lover, the sensual priest, reconciler of opposites, a human angel—not as Roderick Usher, the fragmented, sick man, the lunatic.
“Thurmon thought the role of Usher more appropriate. Thurmon thinks I’m insane,” Artaud said now, in the coldest, most crestfallen voice. I was furious to hear his how enthusiasm broke apart beneath the glare of Roger Thurmon’s view of him. “He’s truly convinced that I am mad. I can tell because he’s stopped being sarcastic with me; now he’s dreadfully polite. I don’t mind it so much, but there was a time when he really was a friend. Although he is an American, you know,” he went on. “Yanks are recklessly forward with strangers: ‘Howdy, Hiya, just call me Jeremiah,’ everyone on a first-name basis, so casual, but as time goes by one doesn’t get to know more about them. Americans have surface friendliness, but you cannot know their true feelings, because half the time they themselves are not sure what their feelings are. To call an American shallow isn’t fair, really—he’s too closed against his own passions to be shallow. Americans aren’t deep enough to be shallow. So I won’t call Thurmon shallow now.” His mouth was set in a thin line.
“For him to label you insane is shallow,” I replied. “I do think that a friendship with an American can be deep, Artaud, and what’s more, I think there is just something deeply wrong with Roger.” We were crossing a long grassy mall toward a soot-darkened stone edifice, very square and squat, with dull beige tracery. A dilapidated iron balcony overlooked the long rows of steps to the entrance, where two huge oak doors were propped open. I swore out loud when I saw Youki Foujita disengage herself from the embrace of a man I’d never seen before, some slick hoodlum who was leaning against one of the stone lions that flanked the entry. He swatted her rump as she turned away and skittered up the steps in her high heels. “Goddammit, she’s on the prowl again,” I muttered. “I don’t begrudge Desnos any fun but frankly, I credit him with more taste.”
“Desnos never falls in love with women who love him in return,” Artaud told me acidly. “For some reason, he is turned off by decent women.” We mounted the stairs, and the latest dalliance of Foujita’s wife gave us a sneering smile and a wave. Neither of us acknowledged him, and as we passed I heard the man mutter a vile word about Germans.
“I suppose Youki’s being here means that Bernice is here as well,” I groaned.
Ever since our unsatisfactory—to say the least—night together, Bernice had begun to act very strangely. She started phoning the house when I was not at home, insisting that she speak to me. Yet she never called in the evenings when I was there, and her demands became so vehement and her manner so rude that Catherine had Franz come home early from work one day to handle her. I did not know about any of this until Franz came to my room that night and asked me who Bernice was. I was angry that Catherine hadn’t informed me instead, especially in light of the anonymous prank calls we were receiving from that mysterious man, but she told Franz only part of the story as well. “That woman said something about a letter,” Catherine whispered to me out of Franz’s hearing, “and I thought—well, perhaps she meant—”
I told Franz that Bernice was just a jealous girl who was pressuring me to help her win Roger back. The truth was, I didn’t know what it was that she wanted, for she never volunteered a reason, but I couldn’t dismiss the idea that she and my tormentor were in cahoots. It was too much of a coincidence.
I was telling Artaud about Bernice when we entered the theatre and crossed the threadbare carpet of its dingy foyer. A narrow hallway led to the theatre proper. Artaud surprised me by saying that before I came to Paris, Bernice had repeatedly launched herself at Desnos without success. Desnos rebuffed her, but still he allowed her to hang around, and Artaud was concerned that he’d fall into her lap some day. “Desnos is going to kill himself,” Artaud added, “by working so hard. Writing so much and sleeping so little, associating with loose women, and drinking too much. All on account of Yvonne George, and that expensive little—wife—of Foujita’s. There’s something in Robert Desnos that has a death wish.” He placed his hand on the handle of the heavy oak door that led to the auditorium and opened it.
Aghast, I turned to Artaud, putting an arm out to stop him from entering. The theatre was already packed, its seats full, and men and women crowded against each other in the aisles. “I don’t believe that for an instant!” I told him, but Artaud’s reply was only the tensed line of his lip. “You can’t say that; you’ve no right to, Artaud. People don’t know what’s in other people’s hearts. That doctor who wrote to you doesn’t really know you, and you don’t really know Desnos.” Artaud gave me a dry laugh that said clearly, I’ve known Desnos longer than you have!
“A few days ago,” I added, “Thurmon told me the same thing about you, that when you first arrived in Paris you wanted to die.” Artaud’s laugh died away, and his eyes widened in shock. “Yes, that’s exactly what he said. Was he right? Was he being truthful when he said that your family committed you because you had attempted suicide, and that when Roger first met you in Paris he prevented you from killing yourself then, too? Because that’s what he told me.”
We stood there looking at each other. From the auditorium, a roar of clapping and boos accompanied the appearance of a man onstage, a genteel-looking old man obviously accustomed to more civilized public gatherings, and who now had the thankless task of introducing André Breton. His tremulous voice was volleyed between incoherent phrases and inaudible mouthing by the shrill whistles and catcalls from the crowd. Artaud hadn’t moved, and his normally smooth face had fallen and spread into the perfect picture of surprise. He actually paled as he stood there, his gaze locked with mine, the hand that clutched the door handle trembling slightly. It withdrew and curled into a useless fist pressed beneath his chin. Then he began to shake his head slowly. “It’s a lie,” he whispered, and the skin of his face drew itself taut over the bones, stretching into an angry mask. “A damned lie. Thurmon said that? He actually said that?”
Then I wished I hadn’t opened my mouth. “Let’s go in,” I murmured guiltily, placing a hand on his shoulder and urging him through the door. The stooped old thespian was still trying to finish his monologue. Whistling cut the air. There was practically no room left to stand, but Artaud and I shouldered our way through the mob to where Justine was jumping up and down and waving to us. We caught up with her in the group of people blocking the view from the seats at stage right, and I took her arm to pull her close to me, because the insults being hurled between those sitting and those standing were escalating into threats. The bewildered old man on-stage finished his introduction, made a terrified bow, and hobbled off.
“It’s not true, what Thurmon told you,” Artaud insisted into my ear. “Yes, I destroyed my poems and gave all my possessions away, and yes, my family feared for me, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to die. I’ve never attempted suicide. Never!”
The lights went down. In the silence André Breton ascended the stage, found the spotlight, turned to face the audience, and with exaggerated ceremony lifted from its dangling chain his monocle—an eyepiece I knew to be merely a prop—blew on it, polished it with his handkerchief, and stuck it over his right eye. Then he glared at all of us and, shoving his hands into his pockets and thrusting out his chest, he announced: “France is at this very moment at war with Morocco, against a colonized people who want only to coexist peacefully with us as equals, and to have as much say in their own lives as we do in ours.”
He paused. There was an appreciative silence from his allies. Among his many enemies an angry rumble was already circulating, and he let it build a little before continuing. “This unjust war is all the more a travesty for being garlanded in praise from the nation’s intelligentsia, who write poems and sing battle songs, and otherwise contribute to the distractions of cultivated, overcultivated men, gimps who have dutifully studied their humanities—” he spat the word, “—but who, through all the advantages of ‘culture,’ have misplaced their humanity, and cheaply sold their childhood dreams.”
Dreams again, I thought. But this was definitely not the speech I heard in that cramped storefront on that May evening almost a year ago. The Breton I saw now was animated, his eyes bright, his cheeks flushed. “The poet that you can be must not be abandoned to gasp in the stink of celebrated assholes!” His forceful baritone easily hammered down all the stray objections that were sticking up here and there in the audience. “A Revolution of the Mind means nothing if it changes nothing in the physical order of things,” he went on. “Utopianism is mere prayer, mere pleading, against the storm. New sensations are filling the atmosphere, and the youth—we same original talents on which our mediocre elders placed so much trust—are turning away from the shabby goal of literary achievement, pursued by our teachers with such servility!”
Never before had I heard a man speak as André Breton did that night, and it was as if that dull ideologue who had bored me sore in that old storefront on the rue de Grenelle had been replaced by a twin, a double of himself. There he was, the same face, the same eyes sparkling with humor, the same genial voice, and the same russet waves rising up and back, like his ideas... But this was a different speaker altogether, and I stood absolutely rapt before him, held there by his words. His words lifted me out of myself so far that I felt almost lost. There was no fear in it; but all that I was, and all that I had been, was being lifted away.
Breton’s speech was a clarion call to the world, to all young people everywhere. For too long, he insisted, our lives had been shaped by the sickly hands of tradition. Christianity, professed by long-gowned priests to be a faith, was an elaborate system of cynicism, a denial of the world. We, the youth of the world, were no longer willing to trade our world or to renounce our world, to sacrifice our bodies for an idea, or our ideas for some nobleman’s fat body. Aristocracy was dead, and in its place Breton demanded a new elite: the enlightened mob. All men had the ability and the right to seize their unconscious—yes, men everywhere, in Africa too, and in Asia where the unconscious was an integral part of life—and women as well. “These are our teachers,” he thundered, “these ‘savages’ and these ‘whores,’ not the old and decaying pillars of civilization!”
Breton towered above us, quarreling with our reluctance, pleading with us. Why should we, the youth of the world, our numbers decimated because of a quarrel between old kings, our bodies violated and our minds caged, consent to listen to impotent dilettantes and abominable old hags yap about culture? One could not tear the world apart with the latest in military inventions, and then try to paste the ruins back together with literary teas. What hope was there for our future, when our elders had strewn the bodies and brains of an entire generation about the battlefield? What was our culture, when its primary achievement so far in this century had been mass murder?
And poetry! Breton extended a hand to me, imploring me like a drowning man, or like a man who was trying to save me from drowning. I was on the verge of tears listening to him. Poetry, life’s mistress, life’s other, life’s lover was withering in the hands of dried-up old men who had lost their potency, poets who were of no more use to anyone than castrati without voices. Once, man had lived on poetry—he’d had breathed it, thought it, eaten it long before manna, drunk it long before wine. Poetry had been ambrosia, the food of the gods.
We, the youth of the world, were tired of trying to grow in our alloted sunlight that only managed to cast a few weak beams through all the layers of stained glass. We wanted—we demanded—the real world and the resurrection of our natural powers. We were not going to tolerate any more grotesque displays of “art” and “talent” in which we performed like circus animals dressed in human outfits, making ourselves into our own pets. We, the youth of the world, demanded reality—raw visceral, lacerated reality. Poetry had to be lived. Culture was lived or it was just a lie, a weak strain passed down from one generation to another, making the human race into freaks.
Poetry was flesh. Poetry was blood. And in our new century, for our new generation, which was on the verge of discovering a new world, new blood was needed: Surrealism!
I was cheering now, cheering along with Breton’s allies; at that moment, I worshipped André Breton.
“Surrealism is a menace!” cried out a man in the crowd, and there was both applause and boos in response. “Why, there are Surrealist groups all over the world now—even in Africa. And what kind of ‘poets’ can they have in Africa? They’re barbarians, poisoning our country, infecting our children with rebellion, and weakening our dominance overseas.” Wild applause, accompanied by angry shouts, followed his words.
Rolling his eyes to the ceiling, Desnos had already climbed up onto the stage to challenge this interruption. “Mon cher monsieur, you are absolutely correct,” he simpered with the most smarmy baring of teeth, and won the crowd’s instant attention. There was an anticipatory pause. Justine and I smiled at each other as he threw his next words across their respectful silence like a painted obscenity on a fence. “We are interested in words that fornicate, images that invade, and actions that corrupt. Poison your civilization is exactly what we mean to do! Then you and everyone like you can die off and leave the world to those of us who still have balls. Think of it as my generation’s form of mustard gas.”
The auditorium erupted in cries of outrage from the old, and shouts of approval from the young. Some people were clapping while some of the seasoned hecklers tried to push forward in order to clamp their hands on Desnos. He ducked tomatoes and shoes with great aplomb as screamed responses filled the air: “Communist!” “Satanist!” “Sensualist!” “That’s an insult?” Desnos shouted back, genuinely surprised.
But the outrage had escalated too quickly. We were violently jostled by the crowd and I struggled to shield Justine. Shrieks of, “Long live France!” and “Crush Morocco!” were overtaking the chants of “Up the Riffs!” and sending the auditorium into a frenzy of violence. The crowd surged forward, and without warning Desnos was knocked against the proscenium by a rock that bloodied his forehead. Justine screamed.
The doors to the lobby were flung open and policemen poured onto the scene. On the stage, Desnos and Breton were scrambling on their hands and knees, trying to simultaneously dodge the rocks being thrown at them and to kick out at the hands tearing their clothes. The cops did nothing to stop the stone-throwing, but they struggled toward the stage with their handcuffs out while the others formed a line at the exit to allow Desnos’s attackers a safe getaway. “It’s a set-up, someone’s planted troublemakers here to start a riot and then sent the cops in!” I shouted into Justine’s ear. I cast a wild look around, but I could not locate Artaud in the panic. “Justine, just go for the door. Get out of here, quick.” She wobbled obediently up the aisle, and I clawed my way through the ring of hecklers at the foot of the stage.
Hands tore at me, and I threw my fists out blindly, making contact with eyes and cheeks. The air cleared and I crawled onto the stage. Breton was nowhere to be seen. Holding his handkerchief against the flow of blood, Desnos stumbled in the direction that I shoved him, along the narrow side stage to the box seats. I gave him a boost to the railing of the lowest box, then grabbed on myself and tugged desperately while swinging my legs out of the reach of the hands that reached for me. Desnos slipped a finger in my belt loop and pulled me up and over the side, and we collapsed briefly on the empty chairs. Then I stood up to look for Justine and saw her smiling at the line of cops along the aisle, and innocently shrugging her way past them toward Artaud’s outstretched arm. Having spotted us, the police let her through and rushed the stage.