Letter from Antonin Artaud to Jean Paulhan

[March 8, 1927]

My dear friend,

I am sending you a note to add to the paper that I had given to you by Robert Aron. I hope you like this paper. For my part, I attach quite great importance to it. I've wanted to write this for a long time.
This paper must appear at all costs, I have a certain number of things in mind and I would be willing to sacrifice everything else, to accept all the changes that you propose to me in order for these things to appear. I think it matters not only to me but to many people that a similar article is published: we need deliverance.
I will spend tomorrow evening Wednesday at the review,
Kind regards,

Antonin Artaud

Following his exclusion from the surrealist movement on November 23, 1926, Artaud addressed Jean Paulhan so that it could appear in the N.R.F. his text The Barbarians, by which he intends to settle his score with surrealism. Paulhan refused publication by replying: “be careful that by being too absolutely rebellious against your friends, you diminish yourself.” The pamphlet will not appear in the N.R.F. nor elsewhere: "I had made of these fragments (of texts on the surrealists) the material for an article which was successively refused to me by two or three magazines, including the N.R.F. as too compromising", he will remember. He will publish _ À la grande nuit ou Le Bluff Surrealiste _ on his own in June 1927.
(R. Loureau, "An author-publisher couple: Antonin Artaud and the N.R.F.", in L'Homme et la Société, 1984, vol. 73, n° 1, p. 191-193.)