master fiend, by Adam Lehrer
In this excerpt from Adam Lehrer's 2021 book Communions, poet Jacques Prevel procures morphine for Antonin Artaud, and learns lessons from his mentor's opiated madness
Prevel woke up stressed, while his wife Rolande and two small children slept. He had spent the evening trying to write in silence. The words would not come. He wasn’t able to write in a single-minded and industrious way, but at the end of the night he had at least put some words on the paper. They were words of frustration and stasis. His was a poetry of the inability to write poetry. He needed new direction. His family’s second floor walk-up was unusually peaceful in the small hours of the morning. Taking advantage of the stillness, Prevel smoked and violently coughed while hunched over his dinner table, his wrist cramping. The baby started crying at around 3am. He didn’t get up, and toned out Rolande’s pleas for his attention. Her rage shifted from his poor parenting towards his shameless philandering with the woman who lived downstairs. Avoiding a physical altercation, he went down to his mistress Jany’s room.
Reaching for the cigarettes on his nightstand as a streak of light pierced through a crack in the window shades, he considered the difficulties of the day ahead. Jany, who was nude save for her panties, was holding her breasts, pushing them upwards. Her tangled blond locks, white and fair skin, the sinews that ran down the arch of her back and the drugs that deadened her mind - all this gave her an ethereal quality that the poet could not resist. She was Millais’ Ophelia lost in the city. Prevel was aware that his desire for her was separate from love. He loved his wife, and he slept with her on occasion - but he desired Jany. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t have both. Artaud had nothing but love for Rolande, he respected her motherhood and her tenderness. He had warned him that Jany was an evil presence in his life, but Prevel didn’t know what to make of it. Most people didn’t understand that Artaud was an ardent moralist. Prevel often had to endure Artaud’s screes against frivolous sexual promiscuity. Prevel cracked his neck, and finished the cigarette whilst looking out the window onto the bright sunlit streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Having to pick up Artaud made his mornings stressful. At the very least, it meant discomfort and inconvenience. He’d have to haggle with doctors and their stinginess with morphine, walking all around the city to get Artaud whatever he needed. But at the same time, he felt there was something noble in doing the old poet these favors. Artaud had told him early on that he needed “all the opium in Paris so that he could work.” And Artaud was working at a ferocious rate. Prevel, in awe of him and suitably embarrassed by it, felt more purposeful supplying Artaud’s highs than he did writing his own poetry. Artaud seemed genuinely enthusiastic about Prevel’s work. That this was coming from a man who held masterpieces in contempt was a source of hope for Prevel. Since for Artaud art came from (and only from) the body - Prevel believed that he too could harness the requisite corporeal discomfort. But as he put on his black blazer over his rumpled white dress shirt, he remained uncertain.
Prevel left Jany’s apartment without checking on his wife and children upstairs. That would only slow him down, so he left five francs under the door for them to eat – and so that he may assuage his conscience. The air outside was bitterly refreshing - good walking weather. Prevel had told Artaud that he’d have the drugs for him at around noon, which gave him an hour and 45 minutes to get to the pharmacy, hassle the pharmacist, and make the 45 minute trip to the Ivry-Sur-Seine. It was not always a convenient way to spend his days. Prevel thought himself less as a drug pusher and more as a facilitator of escapism, an essential component of Artaud’s creative process. He wasn’t his muse - he knew better than to self-aggrandize in such a vulgar way - but he did procure the element from which Artaud derived inspiration from.
Morphine, laudanum and opium were easier to get for Prevel than for Artaud, but it wasn’t exactly easy either. As a psychiatric patient, Artaud wasn’t legally able to purchase controlled substances. Prevel suffered routine humiliation as doctors grilled him with questions about his “ailments” and what his specific need for these drugs was. The neighborhood pharmacist stood behind the counter. His obscenely engorged frame was the width of the two fully stocked shelves behind him. His pre-diabetic breath was as putrid as a river in the early springtime. There was a whiff of the Croix de feu in this rotund tyrant’s comportment. He demanded to be put in touch with Prevel’s généraliste at the dispensary. This would be an unnecessary nuisance for Prevel as his doctor was in on the score – and in any case would be too blind drunk to answer the telephone. Losing his patience, Prevel eventually declared that he was happy to take his money elsewhere. The slug’s eyes widened, his lips pursed as he huffed, and turning towards the shelves – grabbed two bottles of10mg laudanum tincture and handed them across the counter to Prevel. As Prevel hopped off the train, he saw some labor protests outside the station. He found it amusing that Artaud, who was dismissive and contemptuous of such things, ended up in this communist stronghold. He seemed happiest amongst the things that made him unhappy; anger was what made him feel alive, it was what he survived on – pure antagonism, not mere contrarianism. Still, everyone was enraptured by him. Prevel himself was totally in his thrall. Even Artaud’s greatest enemies and critics felt small in his presence. He filled every room with an air of menace and splendor.
As Prevel arrived at the hospital a chill ran down his spine. He always felt like this before meeting Artaud. As he approached the writer’s room, he heard screaming and hissing behind the door:
the superiority of American products,
and the fruits of American sweat in all fields of activity and of the superiority of the possible dynamism of force. Because one must produce
Prevel thought he heard these words but couldn’t tell in this noise...the sounds of a paranoiac demon worshipper whose power over reality was waning...or growing...a blend of abject weakness and unbridled strength. The strength was derived from this peculiar subjectivity; the weakness in that this subjectivity was irremediably embodied. The unity of these two competing forces brought his art to life.
It must have been less than a second after knocking on the door, when Artaud’s skeletal head peeked through the window and looked over Prevel.
“Monsieur Prevel,” Artaud said, “It’s wonderful to see you. Please, enter, enter, of course!” Prevel smirked, and walked into Artaud’s apartment. The apartment was sparsely furnished; just
a small dining table with four chairs lining it, a mattress, an easel board and a wall of portraits. Across the floor were crumpled pages Artaud had written and frantically discarded. He wasted no time. Artaud wore a rumpled blazer jacket over an off-white fisherman sweater and a fashionable loose neck-tie. His hair, thinning back towards the middle of his scalp, was tousled. He was, not and forever, the image of the artist he created.
“Were you successful?”
Prevel nodded and handed Artaud the two bottles. Without hesitation, Artaud grabbed them and rushed them over to the kitchen table. He opened one tincture, inserted an eye dropper and sucked an alarming amount of the opiated fluid before dropping it directly onto his tongue. Artaud looked like a feral lizard with his tongue extended, manically focused on absorbing every drop of the acidic tasting drug.
In moments like these, Prevel had cause to contemplate the ways in which Artaud’s body and appearance had radically mutated over the past twenty years. This was once a strikingly beautiful man. Artaud’s body now looked deformed and depleted. His movements were fractured and tangled, like his joints had lost every flexibility. In a sense, Artaud’s body had become a testament to the chaotic forces that flowed through him, subject to years and years of alchemical torture and occult experiments at the hands of some evil sorcerer. Artaud had been victimized by a beastly regime of electroshock therapy for years, a modern sorcery. His withered body now stood in testament to the liminal space between two worlds; through him we could see that which lies beyond. He was, like Aumvor the Undying, a necromancer who lived beyond his natural age by feeding on the souls of those around him. Artaud subsisted on the humiliation and degradation of his flock. He was animated by his own cruelty and their trauma. Physically, he looked dead. And yet, he lived.
Prevel was unsure if Artaud was even aware of the unseen magic that coursed through his being or if he knew the difference between the reality that they could both see and the one solely available to Artaud. Although, Prevel suspected, that his writing, his words, were his attempts to give it some definable form. Being subject to these forces left Artaud looking like a Giacometti figure, attenuated and suffering. When you looked at Artaud in this manner, Prevel thought, his need for opium was glaringly apparent. His aim was for the body to transcend itself, but the body was fragile and transcendence exerted a supernatural stress upon it. In opium, Artaud found a substance that kept him temporarily whole whilst caught between two worlds.
Prevel sat across the table from Artaud, who was slinking back into his chair as the relief washed away the sickness in his body. Prevel realized that after all these afternoon rituals together, he had never once seen Artaud nod out in the way that junkies have a tendency to. Nor had he seen him appear noticeably high. For one, Artaud’s innate “strangeness” — his deific quality — would have made it hard for the onlooker to distinguish between his sobriety and intoxication, but Prevel thought it was also something else. Artaud told him that he needed, not wanted, but needed these drugs — and Prevel believed him. When the opium took effect, Artaud’s soul wormed its way back into his body. If the transcendental was Artaud’s natural habitat, opium was his way of reentering the body. Without the drug, Artaud might have never gotten a word on the page. The opium was like a sealant; it briefly trapped Artaud in his corporeal form so that he could transmute the energy of beyond back through his body and onto the page. In this regard, Prevel thought, we owe opium a great deal. Getting Artaud his fix was heroic work, and this made Prevel happy.
“Thank you for this. Would you care for something?”
Prevel nodded. “Some coffee would be pleasant.”
Artaud got up and attended to the coffee. Prevel waited eagerly for Artaud to start sermonizing. He felt that Artaud’s raw language, his conversational prose, was more insightful than his writing. Something was always lost when Artaud was forced to transmit energies through the written word, like they were dulled with every passing moment that they remained trapped in his mind. Drugs and conversation, though, made him into a transmitter to the gods. The idea emerged in his head like it was sent from beyond and then immediately released through his mouth. But the longer he held onto that idea, like during writing, the longer the idea eroded. In conversation, Artaud was unadulterated by art and literature.
“You know, Prevel,” said Artaud, “I must do all the work that I can now, before the pornographer doctor zaps me to steal my power and I no longer exist.”
“Which doctor is this?”
“Ferdiére. I would like to strangle him, to feel his soul exit his body so I can devour it, before ripping open his dead insides and throwing them against the wall. There are people who wish to do me great harm, but they don’t know what I am capable of.”
Prevel considered this for a moment. Artaud poured him a cup of coffee, to which Prevel added two sugar cubes. Artaud drank more opium and closed his beady eyes, slumping back into his chair. Prevel looked over Artaud’s drawings, many of which were completed while Artaud was under Ferdiére at the Rodez mental institution.
“Have you been drawing at all lately?” asked Prevel.
“My drawings are spells that I cast upon my subjects. They are revenge. Revenge against the evil people that are trying to destroy me. They’ll destroy you too, Jacques!” He screamed the last sentence with his fists clenched and chest raised up.
Artaud took periodic sips of the laudanum throughout the conversation, he didn’t use opium like most people did. The average opium user dosed, enjoyed the dose, and then waited until it wore off to take another one. Artaud dosed repeatedly until the bottle was gone, never demonstrating signs of intoxication. He enjoyed opium like most people enjoyed water. It hydrated him. Nourished him. It was impossible to tell if the drug was making him higher or more lucid. Prevel was perplexed by Artaud’s excess, knowing this meant more future procurement errands.
Artaud was almost always in a state of prophetic paranoia, declaring the destruction of his enemies while scratching his nose, or screaming to the heavens about all the myriad ways they have wronged him. Prevel, in all truth, tired of Artaud quickly, because it was exhausting to be so deeply in his thrall. He could never tell what took precedence in Artaud’s association with him; his literary worth or the drugs he brought him. Before getting up to politely make his exit, Artaud stopped Prevel by putting his palm to his chest.
“Let’s go for a walk. If I don’t walk it’s possible that my enemies will unleash the demons upon my soul, or what’s left of it.”
Prevel, knowing he hadn’t much choice in the matter, stood up to put his pea coat back on. Artaud took one gulping swig of laudanum, and then violently shook his head with a feral glee as the harsh fluid stuck to his tongue. Artaud, in his crumpled dirty overcoat reminded Prevel of a lonesome scarecrow, perfectly still yet full of terrifying potential. Walking along, he’d chain smoke while Artaud dallied. He’d take about 10 steps, stop, tilt his head like a wild mongoose, and make some macabre observation about the state of humanity or a paranoid accusation about his perceived enemies. Across the courtyard Prevel and Artaud walked through, there were children playing hopscotch. Artaud was displeased.
“Every child born is a knife in the belly of my lifeless body,” he said. “All sexual intercourse is an attempt to drain me of my power. This is clear to me. But perhaps there should be an Artaud baby, to protect my essence.”
Prevel, by now accustomed to overlook the occasional bizarre statements, listened intently to this remark. If he could annotate everything that Artaud said, he’d have material for a powerful work indeed.
They stopped at a picnic table in an unusually lush patch of greenery sealed away from the city. Despite how volatile Artaud must have seemed to most people, especially after decades spent in mental institutions, Prevel felt comfortable around him. They had now been cavorting for a year, since Artaud’s release from Rodez in 1946. And although their friendship must have appeared peculiar to onlookers, the two men shared am unhappy bond. Prevel, suffering a horrific cough that he knew in his bones spelled doom, had lived a life of artistic rejection and failure. Artaud too felt slighted. His expulsion from the Surrealists had prefigured his subsequent banishment from polite society. Artaud believed that his madness fulfilled the Surrealist promise, the ultimate conclusion of which could only be to suffer at the hands of the state.
“When did you start using the opium”, Prevel asked, emboldened by his curiosity after all this time.
Artaud huffed, hacked, and spat a thick membrane of mucus onto the grass. For a man who could never stop talking, he hated being addressed directly.
“The poet, the artist, Monsieur, is all too aware of the decay of his own body. His body is a dying matter, a husk of death, and he knows this all too well. Quite simply, Prevel, if I had not discovered opium, I would have been compelled to commit suicide. It was suicide or it was opium, that was the choice I was given.”
Prevel had used all manner of opium, heroin, and laudanum, but he never ascribed it the importance that Artaud did. It made him feel pleasant, but it was nothing like what Artaud was describing. For Artaud, it was a sacrament. To consume opium is to thwart death.
“Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to stop?” “Damn you!” he exclaimed, standing up and gesticulating wildly. “Do you not listen? I told you, opium is life, not death! Without opium I would be resigned to oblivion, an oblivion of blackness, but with opium I can inhabit this oblivion, the oblivion of the living!”
“ All the secret agencies, all these centers of power that seek to control the flow of opium to Artaud! They deny me the right to opium because they want me dead! They want me to cross over to the black in the hospital, that’s why the hospital wouldn’t give me opium! I had to wait them out or I would die, and the only reason I waited them out was so I could have opium once more and communicate the darkness that beckons me back and spews me forth! Let Artaud self-destruct, because destruction is an act of life, and opium is the piece that puts me back together again. You see, Prevel, I exist in all space and all time at once. Most people have one place, one dimension, and they are at peace. But the walls between realities crack around me. Opium is the sealant. Without it, I simply deteriorate into nothingness. Do you understand what I am telling you?”
Prevel nodded. He did understand, perhaps even more than Artaud realized.
“Do you prefer that I not work? Because that’s what you ask of me when you ask me to not use opium. Coleridge used the opium, but he lived in shame of it, can you imagine? Being taught to feel shame about the thing that gives you life? Coleridge found the substance that allowed him to be engulfed in the darkness and the occulted forces of the universe and come back unharmed and communicate the devilish things he saw, and he rewarded himself with shame. He was a coward, and from beyond the grave he tries to destroy me! I can’t be destroyed you see, because I have opium, and when I die I will be indestructible because while I lived I feasted on the alchemical tonic of tranquility itself! Coleridge wasn’t killed by opium, he died of shame! And I have no shame about my power, or the force from which my power is harnessed. Artaud is immortal, opium is power, and my enemies will feel the razor’s edge of my sword as I hack deeper and deeper into their souls!”
Artaud put a few more droplets of the drug onto his tongue. He told stories. He spoke of the men that he’d killed. The women that wished him killed. He spoke of the secret knowledge that only he had access to, and boasted that only he and never Prevel would hold it. He told Prevel that a day would come when they clash, and they’d fight to the death. But that they’d do so respectfully, as men, slaves to an ocean of time.
“I’m getting a bit chilly” said Artaud, clenching his stick thin arms together across his chest.
“Let’s go” Prevel said, “We can pay a visit to the junk doctor in Sur de Seine.”
Artaud’s eyes lit up at the suggestion.
Illustration by Antonin Artaud
This is an excerpt from Adam Lehrer’s 2021 book Communions, a work of both fiction and cultural theory that attempts to probe the haunting singularity of opioid addiction. It is available for purchase from the publisher Hyperidean Press’s website, as well as Amazon and other book sellers.