Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5

by Anais Nin

  Of the fragments I did in San Francisco only a few survived. Nothing of what I wrote in Acapulco. Out of one hundred pages only twenty are good. I am only beginning now to work seriously.

  To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.

  Humanity and art were always opposites for me. When will they integrate? I see that when I want to be human, I have to slacken the tension which I always feel in my dealings with the world, in my work, and not in my diary or in my love.

  I can feel it now, how I have to loosen the overcharged tensions which created a kind of precious stone, and petrified the blood. It was the Petrified Forest of Fear, always. Now when I strike in writing, I say: too high, too high, and I try to lower my tone. Even if I am inventive, creative, innovative, I still feel I have to rid myself of the influence of the beliefs of the men I knew. I was influenced by Henry's anarchy and amoralities. I was influenced by Gonzalo's dogmatism and prejudices, his blind acceptance of Communism. I was influenced by others' admiration of classical literature and music and their suspicion of modern contemporary writing.

  The feminine desire to espouse the faith of those you love as I espoused my father's and then my mother's. I only swerved from each as my love changed. I swerved from admiration of my father's values to that of my mother's. But I am slowly finding my own. In my life today there is a freedom of emotion, a keenness of sensation, an explorative, adventurous attitude which is mine.

  Jerry Kaiser, a warm and clever friend, who works now for the Telephone Company in Chicago, invited me to lecture. As the workmen are there all day, and it is a large city in itself, at their lunch hour they have programs: concerts, films, lectures. Jerry asked me to come and read from my books, and to bring the copper plates by Ian Hugo from which we had pulled the engravings that illustrate the books. He thought it would be interesting for the workmen who handled copper to see how an artist uses it.

  First I was invited to watch the making of copper wires, from an ingot the size of a tree, being fed by the men into the furnace. When this large piece becomes red-hot, the men in hip-high boots carrying giant tongs have to catch the red-hot snake and slip it into a smaller furnace. It is dangerous work requiring great skill. At each furnace the snake becomes thinner, until it comes out as wire and is rolled into a bobbinlike thread. The scene in the cellar, with furnaces spewing fire, tall men like strong Wagnerian giants in the flaming caves of the earth, was like a Dantesque scene in hell. One whip blow from the red-hot snake of copper spells death.

  In another part of this hell huge vats filled with acid were used to dissolve the scraps. The copper in the acid acquires a beautiful moss green through which the copper color still shows.

  It was strange and fascinating to see the workmen arrive at the recreation hall to look at the exhibit of copper plates, at the needle-thin designs. They listened attentively to the reading. The women responded particularly to my passage on sewing from Ladders to Fire.

  Later I went to a bookshop party to sign books at the Red Door Bookshop run by Ward and Lolajean Sherbak.

  ***

  In New York I wear a wool dress of winter white.

  I see Lila Rosenblum again.

  Talking with her I am reminded of things I did not write about because they were too painful. Lila was crippled by an unusual illness. Half of the time she was bedridden. But in contrast to Helba her spirit is undefeated. She helped me even before we met.

  When House of Incest was out of print and we were collecting money to reprint it, Lawrence Maxwell borrowed money from her. He owned a bookshop and was a mutual friend. When we finally met we talked like sisters, though Lila was much younger. She worked, how I do not know. Her place was filled with books. We talked analysis and life. When she was in Los Angeles she was going through a dark period. She was on dangerous drugs like Nembutal. She would be half unconscious and then call Jim Herlihy. She had a slight tremor, which gave her talk and even her laughter a tremulous quality.

  October 281 gave a lecture at Dartmouth College.

  Sunami, the famous Japanese photographer, took photographs of me.

  I had a book-signing party at Lawrence Maxwell's Village shop.

  November 51 lectured at Bennington College.

  November g I lectured at Washington Art School.

  November îa I lectured at Chicago University, presented by Wallace Fowlie as one of the surrealist writers.

  At the art school, a student kept repeating stubbornly and obsessively: "Literature does not help us to live." He prevented all discussion and had not even read my work.

  I cannot find in American literature the metaphysical and poetic qualities of a Bernanos, a Pierre Jean Jouve, a Léon-Paul Fargue, a Giraudoux of the novels.

  A Frenchman who knew him well describes Jean Giraudoux:

  He was outstanding in every way, even physically, six feet tall, thin, distinguished in bearing; a thoroughbred face, Tather ascetic, head held high. Everything about him spoke of an exceptional human being. Wit, finesse, a total lack of vulgarity emanated from him. Few people pleased him, but he was so gentle and kind he did not show his antipathies. He had to keep above platitudes, mediocrities of life not to be shocked constantly. He avoided them. For this reason he preferred the companyof women. With men he had to feel that they respected his talent before he came out of his shell. He was a dazzling storyteller, his imagination was constantly surprising you. He liked to improvise a story, embroidering as he went along, knowing only vaguely what the climax would be. He loved tennis, billiards, and Ping-Pong. He could have been an excellent chess player due to his power of analysis, but he did not have the concentration.

  Simenon. The pattern is the same in every book. It is the fall of man. Simenon is aware that this fall is caused by the fatality of an impulse of self-destruction more often than by external fatality. He is aware of the germ which may or may not develop, may grow and kill the other or the self.

  He is a past master at tracing the early formation of this germ, the conditions which led to its growth, the slow germination, development, and climax of its destructiveness. He is perhaps our best psychologist in the novel.

  [Spring, 1949]

  San Francisco.

  At six o'clock the electric clock buzzes and makes me jump. In the long, wide bed I turn from my left side to see through the slit of the Venetian blind a little garden stretching up, filled with flowers, the reflection of a ceiling of fog. On these cold mornings duty tears me out of the warmth, cuts the sleep, sending me out of bed to wash my face and comb my hair and button on my dress and sweater. I start the coffee and light the oven for the rolls. I turn on the button which gives heat. I open the Venetian blinds. The fog has lifted and I see the bay, the bridges, the ships, the other white houses, children starting off for school, garages opening like the jaws of monsters to let out the cars of people going to work. I see women waiting for the bus. The clouds of San Francisco are not airy like those of France; even when cotton-colored, they seem charged with future rain and storms. When the sun's rays pierce through them it is like the aura of God in ancient paintings, a shaft of illumination transcending darkness. It will hit a group of houses which look as white as Mediterranean houses, but leave the rest gray and rather ominous. The sun gives no assurance.

  Then I go to work.

  At eleven o'clock the postman comes. I await news from Dutton. I sent them a few weeks ago my new book, The Four-Chambered Heart, the story of Gonzalo, fictionalized, without the sordid ending, for Gonzalo, like June, had the power to descend to the greatest vulgarities when he poisoned and degraded in one instant of destructiveness all the romance and idealism he built up over the years. In one moment of anger he could corrode nine years of poetry and romanticism.

  The belongings I left stored in France when the war broke out finally arrived. I was happy to see my books. But when I saw the furniture, I realized it did not belong in my new life. It harmonized with Louveciennes, with the houseboat, it was catalogued in the diary,
described in Under a Glass Bell stories, but it did not belong in a modern, white, San Francisco apartment. Objects die when they are no longer illumined by certain experiences and heightened moments of one's life. My attachment to them died, and they lost their glow as soon as I stopped loving them. When they arrived from France, after years of storage, I saw that they were dead. Wreckage from a great emotional journey. I had moved away from them. I sold them.

  I telephoned the antique dealers: "Will you come and see some antiques I have? A Spanish Moorish headboard, an Indian lamp, an Arabian mirror, a Turkish coffee set of silver, a Kali goddess, a Venetian vase."

  (If you had seen how beautiful these objects looked in the houseboat, the shadows and patterns designed by the carved copper lamp, the encrustations of ivory and mother of pearl and copper arabesques on the headboard gleaming in the light of passing boats. If you could have seen what was reflected in the tall Arabian mirror.)

  But the antique shops were not interested and I ended by disposing of them among my friends. The Arabian fairy-tale bed was bought by the painter Zev and taken to his Monterey house.

  The front room is flooded in sunlight. I wash dishes, I clean the apartment, I market. I never minded the monotony of housework as long as my life has its lyrical climaxes, its high moments, the certitude of full living.

  A night of fog. Music on the radio. Leave the past alone except to fictionalize and transform, and turn sorrows into tales.

  My collection of Japanese dolls on the shelves, princesses of a lavish glitter of gestures and clothes, like a Christmas tree of light, tinsel, satin, jewels. Elaborate and iridescent. I love their porcelain faces, delicate hands, the sway and grace, the stylized gestures. One carries a birdcage, another a musical instrument, the third a fan.

  They are not the dolls of a child, which I never liked, but dolls of a highly sophisticated beauty.

  I am not refusing to grow and mature in the so-called mature world, but I cannot grow in arrogance, in a hard finish, in a gold-plated irony, in the impertinence and cynicism of the wealthy.

  Brahms' Double Concerto on the phonograph.

  When I need drugs, when the present is unacceptable, I reread all my French books, saturate myself with the delectable Giraudoux, with the poetic analysis of Jouve. Above all, with the certitudes of people who never refused or eluded experience, for whom experience of life was the primary motivation, who were unafraid of love, sex, even madness or evil.

  The backyard is wistful with the persistence of the drizzle. The flowers hang their heads. Some of them adopt the raindrops like dazzling bastard children and make them look like flowers. I saw an unusual flower, bent over it, it melted in my fingers. It was raindrops pretending, expanding in bridal costume reflected from the clouds, spreading false, illusory tentacles of white lace on the heart of the leaves.

  The ballet of Japanese dolls dancing on the shelves looks down at me.

  When I was ten years old I started out writing adventure stories. In reading Simenon I remembered this. He is my favorite storyteller. He has a good story to tell, and he works subtly at characterization. His characters are beautifully wrought, his details significant. He is primarily a psychologist, for whom action has to be analyzed and understood. Each detail counts because it is related to the drama, and the drama happens because of the character and childhood, et cetera. He keeps the design of the adventure story (suspense) and embroiders upon this a psychological drama with care and skill. People do not appreciate his novels as they should because he made his reputation writing detective stories. His latest book, Le Passage Clandestin, is wonderful. I forgot my bronchitis, my foggy head. I am in Tahiti, I am inside of others' lives. I feel as if I had been there. His knowledge of the workmen, trades, professions, of humble crafts and occupations is far deeper than Zola or Balzac. He truly knows the life of the poor, the workmen, the most ignored of little men.

  With all their emphasis on plot and narrative, no American writers have ever told as good a tale because Simenon tells it in depth. Everything is indicated, outer and inner equally. The psychological drama is there too. The little people with their miseries are the ones he likes to bring out of the shadows, but the origin of his compassion is the knowledge of what makes them cruel, desperate, alcoholics or murderers, so that even his most repulsive character, Felix in Le Cheval Blanc, became so because he was accused of a crime he did not commit. In his adventure stories, such as Le Passage Clandestin, the suspense and drama is tremendous but based on a subtle study of self-destruction. In Le Touriste de Banane he studies the adventurer better than any writer I know, delves into his desire for isolation and the fear of solitude.

  ***

  No rest for me anywhere. No rest from writing, awareness, insights, memories, fantasies, analogies, free associations. Writing becomes imperative for a surcharged head.

  Occasionally I think of death. I can easily believe in the disintegration of the body, but cannot believe that all I have learned, experienced, accumulated, can disappear and be wasted. Like a river, it must flow somewhere. Proust's life flowed into me, became a part of my life. His thoughts, his discoveries, his visions, each year visit me, each year bring me deeper messages. There must be continuity.

  The mocking birds of California sing intermittently but sumptuously.

  Once in Paris I had a record I loved, music by Erik Satie, poem by Paul Éluard. I searched for it in New York. I could not remember the title. I never found it again. It was the ever recurrent song of remoteness, the same one which appears in Debussy's Sonata for Piano and Violin, in the Chansons d'Auvergne, in Carillo's Cristóbal Colón. It is the theme of distance from human life, of a lament in space, the sorrow of a separation which can only be conquered by love.

  The other day, driving from Berkeley, I heard the Debussy Sonata and again I wept as I have always wept at this music, experiencing the wildest and fullest sorrow. It always depicted for me the duel between earth and spirit, the conflict between isolation and connection with the earth, the need to fly, and the need of earth, the struggle between the solitary chant of the violin and the heavier, stronger piano.

  Varda no longer lives in the barn at Monterey. He has moved to a big loft, a vast space in which he both paints and lives. He has arranged in one corner a shower like those in the army. When I arrive he is pulling the string which will cause the pail hung above his head to spill water over him. In another corner he fries huge pans of potatoes, and serves them with red wine.

  I visit him with Paul Mathiesen.

  Another time he invited me to go sailing on a boat he repaired himself after finding it in a junkyard. He made a colorful Greek sail for it. San Francisco is cold and I dressed like an Eskimo, with a hooded parka over my head, and everybody laughed at me. Because the weather was rough we could not visit the half-sunken shipwreck as he had promised me. In rough weather it might sink altogether.

  [Summer, 1949]

  New York.

  In the Village I heard the One-Man Band. He is a Negro and he has an outfit made of:

  one gasoline tin

  one hot-water bag

  one rubber mouse with a squeak

  one frying pan

  one doorbell

  one whistle.

  With a pair of sticks he manages to sound like a jazz band. When he gets wild he ends up drumming on parked automobiles, on the sidewalk, on the fire hydrant.

  Because £. P. Dutton said that they could not publish The Four-Chambered Heart for several years, I made a contract with Duell, Sloan and Pearce.

  I made friends with William Kennedy, who tells me all the magnificent things he will do for The Four-Chambered Heart.

  Changes in Acapulco. There is now a long walk along the Bay, and a two-way road divided by acacia trees so cars won't collide. No more dust roads, no potholes, even the little road by the small restaurant is macadamized. Bad changes are that the Mexicans now bring radios as well as guitars to the beach, and they chew Chiclets while they dance. But they kep
t the little cabanas where one eats fish, and merely brought the sand right up to them, so cars are parked behind and out of sight and the beach is prettier. They planted flowers everywhere.

  Spent Sunday on Varda's ferryboat, and sailing on his sailboat. So beautiful. A newspaperman entitled his book on San Francisco Baghdad-by-the-Bay, and it was not so far-fetched an image. It was a day of utter peace. The intense brilliance of the light, which Varda compares to the light of Greece, is what makes this Western life so joyous. And even when the fog comes, and you sometimes drive right through it, and it envelops you on the bridge, suddenly you will be out of it, struck by the sunlight like lightning.

  I am working intensely and writing a great deal.

  [October 20, 1949]

  San Francisco.

  My father died this morning, in Cuba. The hurt was so deep, the shock so deep, the sense of loss so deep, it was as if I died with him. I felt myself breaking, falling. I wept not to have seen him since Paris, not to have forgiven him, not to have been there when he died alone and poor in a hospital.

  Joaquin sent me a telegram. I wept and felt the loss in my body, this terrible unfulfilled love. Never to have come close to him, never to have fused with him. The cursed distance which is the greatest sorrow which can befall a human being. I saw him asleep, as I saw him when he fainted after a concert. The death is there inside of you. Certainly a part of one dies with those we love. You feel it but you cannot believe it. The pain attacks the body. I should have overlooked his immense selfishness. I should have sacrificed my life to him as he wanted me to. I fought not to be as he was, disconnected from human beings. I fought to reach all those who were like him disconnected from human beings. That was the mystery of my relationship to the closed, the cold, the remote ones. I fought to be near, to fuse, to achieve the opposite, communion with others. I cannot accept his death. It will never heal. Because it was an incomplete, an aborted, an unfulfillable relationship. One can accept death when it comes as a culmination, a natural death. But something here, this failure, was like an artificial surgery. Amputation, not natural death.