Artaud's meningitis diagnosis at five was probably wrong
Born in Marseille on 4 September 1896 to first-cousin parents with Smyrna roots, Antonin Artaud became a cross-media French artist of page and stage. Biographer David Shafer doubts the childhood meningitis label, noting how often such calls were mistaken when no cure existed.
Antoine Maria Joseph Paul Artaud (1896–1948), known as Antonin, worked across writing, theatre, and film. He was born to Euphrasie Nalpas and Antoine-Roi Artaud; the parents were first cousins whose grandmothers were sisters from Smyrna, today's Izmir. A childhood diagnosis of meningitis came at age five; Shafer argues the symptoms and near-zero untreated survival make true meningitis unlikely. From 1907 to 1914 he attended Collège Sacré-Coeur, founding a small magazine at fourteen and publishing Rimbaud- and Mallarmé-inspired poems.
Conscription in 1916 interrupted treatment; he was discharged early for an unspecified health reason—he later blamed sleepwalking, his mother a nervous condition. In May 1919 a sanatorium director prescribed laudanum, beginning lifelong opiate dependence. By March 1921 he lived in Paris under psychiatrist Édouard Toulouse. He trained with teacher-directors including Copeau, Antoine, the Pitoëffs, Dullin, Gémier, and Lugné-Poe, who gave him a first professional role.
Core training came in Dullin's Théâtre de l'Atelier from 1921, with ten-to-twelve-hour days and shared interest in Asian theatre forms, before a year with the Pitoëffs and a turn toward cinema. In 1923 the NRF rejected his poems, yet editor Jacques Rivière opened a correspondence that became a literary event. From dubious diagnosis to disciplined rehearsal rooms, Artaud's body and the stage stayed entangled—the raw material of later Theatre of Cruelty myths. On screen he played Marat in Abel Gance's Napoléon in 1927 and a year later, in 1928, the monk Massieu for director Carl Theodor Dreyer in The Passion of Joan of Arc, and his scenario The Seashell and the Clergyman, directed by Germaine Dulac, is often called the first surrealist film. André Breton expelled him from the surrealists in 1927, partly over their drift toward Communism. His one staging of a Theatre of Cruelty production was Shelley's The Cenci in 1935, with sets by Balthus.
Source: Antonin Artaud
