In Memoriam: Antonin Artaud By Maurice Saillet Summary and Analysis

This last chapter, written by a friend of the author after his death in 1948, recounts the literary and artistic path of Antonin Artaud. Artaud's first poetry was published in 1922. At the time, he was the actor who played a murdered angel in "Faits Divers," a movie by Claude Autant-Lara. That same year, he wrote that "[a]ction is the very principle of life," which, according to Saillet, defines Artaud's "vocation." His addiction problems (to morphine) were reflected in his later correspondence with Jacques Rivière, when he complained that his ideas were abandoning him "at every stage" and that he was consequently "in constant pursuit of [his] intellectual being."

Saillet says that Artaud was greatly worried about his state of mind and sought both literary and intellectual advice from...