Free Longer Views by Samuel R. Delany Page B

decision to withdraw the piece had been reached a few days before, but it was only communicated to the sickly Artaud on the first.
    Throughout February, letters were written back and forth over the banning. There was a minor Parisian press war. In his outraged letter of February 4th to Porché, Artaud claimed that, after reviewing the tapehimself back in January along with the rest of the show’s technicians (Artaud’s letter during his last two years were frequently broken up like poems), he had conscientiously let nothing “pass / that might infringe on / taste, / morals, / good manners, /
honorable intentions
, / or furthermore that might / exude / boredom, / familiarity, / routine, / I wanted a fresh work, one that would make contact with certain organic points of life, / a work / in which one feels one’s whole nervous system / illuminated as if by a miner’s cap-lamp / with vibrations / consonances / which invite / man / TO EMERGE / WITH / his body / to follow in the sky this new, unusual, and radiant Epiphany. . . .”
    Fernand Pouey (who had commissioned the piece) scheduled a private studio broadcast, for the evening of February 5. The audience of fifty invited to the studio that night were to act as a jury and decide whether the piece merited rescheduling. Their names read like a Who’s Who of the arts in ’40s Paris: Raymond Queneau, Louis Jouvet, Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, Georges Braque, Jean-Louis Barrault . . . That night the voices of the actors, whom, three months before, Artaud had rehearsed for over two weeks in almost daily trips from Ivry into Paris—Maria Casarés, who had played Death in Cocteau’s film
Orphé;
Roger Blin, who a double handful of years before had played one of the two mute assassins in
The Cenci
(Blin had also been
The Cenci’s
production assistant; besides writing the play, Artaud had in 1935 starred in and directed it as well), and whose productions of Genet a handful of years hence would galvanize the French theater; Paule Thévenin; and Artaud himself—went through the howls, screams, roarings, and sobs which Artaud had interlarded throughout this agonized work. Needless to say, the audience unanimously supported the broadcast. But even the most auspicious fifty supporters, when a work has been promised to a public of thousands, must still have been distressing for the writer—who was now dying from advanced rectal cancer.
    In a letter to Pouey, written from Ivry two days after the private performance, Artaud declared: “. . . I do not understand how an incompetent, scarcely out of university, like Wladimir Porché, can take it upon himself to cancel the broadcast of a document that was ANNOUNCED several weeks ago / and consequently / listened to / by dozens of technicians who judged its value / and DECIDED / that it should be broadcast. . . .” There are other letters to the press. In response to some serious comment on the piece, in still another letter to Pouey and to the technical director René Guignard, in expectation of an eventual airing, on February 17 Artaud asked for a few more cuts in the tape from the introductory section: “I think that what certain people like Georges Braque found so overwhelming and exciting about the RadioBroadcast
To Have Done with the Judgment of God
are the parts where sound effects and xylophonics accompany the poems read by Roger Blin and Paule Thévenin. We must not spoil the effect of the xylophonics by the logical, dialectical, and argumentative quality of the opening section . . . / I beg you to make these cuts, / I beg you /
both of you
/ to MAKE SURE that these cuts are carefully made. / There must be nothing left in this Radio Broadcast that might disappoint, / tire, / or bore / an enthusiastic audience which was struck by the freshness of the sound effects and xylophonics / which even Balinese, Chinese, Japanese, and Singhalese theater do not have. . .