Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5

by Anais Nin

  But when I imagine the kind of life I like best, it was my bohemian life on the houseboat in Paris. The boat cost ten dollars a month. I could have lived there for one hundred a month. Or Varda's life.

  Malraux says art is our rebellion against man's fate.

  La condition humaine is what I have never accepted. That is why I tried to create my own world.

  Today I discussed with Dr. Bogner the increase in my courage to be myself rather than disguise myself.

  How wrong it is for woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than set out to create it herself. It is the source of woman's rebellions, her helplessness and dependency. I am setting out to create my own world, not to expect man to create it for me.

  Dr. Bogner said: "You have always lived for and through others. You placed your angers upon Gonzalo, he acted them out, lived them out. You placed your own withdrawn shy self onto Leonard, the parts of you that freeze with vulnerability. You always forget it is you, you who are either frozen, withdrawn, or angry, or rebellious. You displace all you feel onto others. Long ago you became convinced that if you were yourself as you feel in reality, it would be destructive. You would not be loved. Now at last you are asserting what you are."

  For this, woman must achieve economic independence. She cannot live and act vicariously in the world.

  Talk with Dr. Bogner.

  America is cold and hard, and has treated me badly.

  I remember my life in Spain after my father left. This brought a flood of tears. It seemed all warmth, affection. Enrique Granados was protecting us, and my mother taught at his Academy of Music. The maid, Carmen, sang all day, the nuns were always leaning over and embracing me. At night before going to sleep, I heard the sereno, an old man with the keys of all the houses, carrying a lantern, who sang a reassuring little couplet: "Go to sleep, all is well, I am watching."

  I waited for his song and then went to sleep in utter trust.

  Dr. Bogner thought this was a projection. Spain was a continuation of my relationship to my father. We were near him, staying with his parents, seeing his sister, his nephews. I may not have believed in the loss. But coming to America was the break, and the fatherless child looked for an exteriorized warmth which is not typical of America.

  I try to explain my feeling. In Spain everybody seemed connected to everybody else. Here I feel there is no contact, between people, with their inner selves, or with people from other countries.

  I remember individual acts of kindness. My American uncle, a Navy man, helped us. Having seen me sweep the rug with an ordinary broom, he came one day with a carpet sweeper. The Irish doctor who took care of us never sent a bill.

  [July, 1951]

  In Sierra Madre I hear the train whistle at night and the coyotes in a pack with their thin wailing cries answering the train, mistaking it for the cry of another animal in the night. The first night I thought it was a woman in labor pains. Train whistles, like foghorns and ship's whistles, give me a feeling of distance between places, and the loneliness and void in between. Nature in Acapulco was mixed with smiling people, it was the background for people, people at work in the fields, selling their wares, fishing, planting, carrying wood, washing clothes. Walking and swimming and dancing at night. In America the vast spaces accentuate the vast spaces between people, deserts which stretch between human beings. It is a void which has to be spanned by the automobile. It takes an hour to reach a movie, two hours to reach a friend. So the coyotes howl and wail at the awful emptiness of mountains, deserts, hills.

  The art of writing. Will it become obsolete? Libraries are getting rid of books to make room for films. Publishers are failing. The paperbacks are succeeding, but because they only deal in second-rate writers, people throw them away, like magazines. It is not like the French paperbacks which offered the best writers and if one wished to keep them one could have them bound. I find a danger in watching films. It is like passive dreaming. It requires no participation, no effort. It induces passivity. It is baby food; no need to masticate, no need to carve. There is no need to learn to play an instrument, to learn to read a book. People stretch on specially inclined chairs and receive the images in utter, infantile passivity. Speech, already inadequate in America, will soon disappear together with the ability to derive significance from the printed word. This is as radical a change as from monkey to man, it is an evolution from man into automaton.

  Because my father was an erudite musician I believed he would understand my particular form of music, but he did not. Because Lloyd is an original and imaginative architect, I believed he would understand the architecture of my writing, but he does not.

  [Fall, 1951]

  £1 Mirador Hotel, Acapulco, Mexico.

  At La Perla now they have a gypsy violinist married to a home-loving Swiss girl, who is so homesick she talks to me by the hour about Swiss butter, Swiss landscapes, Swiss snow. She is hysterically afraid of scorpions. It is so comical, this longing for Switzerland in the heart of the tropical beauty of Acapulco. If it were Christmas she would be singing "Jingle Bells" on a tropical night.

  I met Dolores Del Rio, so beautiful, with her enormous slanted eyes. She is simple and direct. Was wearing shorts and a checkered shirt like her lover's. She was off to work on a film in Yucatán. Her bodyguards and retinue were mostly bald and wealthy.

  The church is not yet reconstructed and repainted. The corner where the Post Office once was is still being torn down. The electric lights still go out just as you are making up your face for dinner or while you are in the shower. The stamps still don't have any glue on them.

  Letter from Max Pfeffer:

  I just spoke to Charles Duell who told me that he received Sabina [ASpy in the House of Love] about a week ago, read it and thinks it is a wonderful script. He personally likes it very much. He thinks it is grand and was much impressed with it. He really loves it, but there are plenty of problems involved. It will take another fifteen to twenty days for the other people in the firm to read it because the commercial possibilities are an important factor to be considered and practical points of view may not be ignored nowadays.

  To me Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep. It has something to do with the presence of millions of anonymous faces, anonymous people, and the desperate ways of achieving distinction.

  Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses, and so the nerves are still, the mind is quiet, the nights are lullabies, the days are like gentle ovens in which infinitely wise sculptor's hands re-form the lost contours, the lost sensations of the body. The body comes to life. Quests, pursuits of concrete securities of one kind or another lose all their importance.

  As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances.

  The healing process is complete. I am ready for the indecisions of Duell, Sloan and Pearce, for negative decisions.

  Only in the language of astronomy can one describe the beauty of the tropics. Every evening it seems to me I see the Celestial Equator, an "imaginary line in the sky directly above the earth's equator."

  And every night I see "aberrations of light, an apparent displacement of a star in the direction of the earth's motion."

  Jim Herlihy took a bus to Pasadena, walked from Pasadena to Sierra Madre, took a taxi from Sierra Madre to m
y house in the foothills and said on arriving: "You live in the sticks."

  He brings me a mobile of golden angels turning around a candle, and as they turn, small bells ring. I told him that was a symbolic gift, an inspiration to work, and that it would set the mobiles inside of my head turning again.

  At the age of seventeen I loved the ordinary poplars which stood as sentinels on the path of our house in Richmond Hill. I addressed them as friends, conversed and sustained a whispering relationship, noted all the changes caused by the season. There was at that time an Anaïs who could love an ordinary tree which was neither symbolic, nor exotic, nor rare, nor historic, nor unique. This Anaïs led a timid life under the protection and control of her mother, absolutely incapable of building anything in life at all except one in writing, between the covers of a diary, nurtured on fantasy derived from literature and entirely separate from her life on earth, which consisted of playing the role of substitute mother for her two brothers, lighting the fire in the furnace with orange crates, planting seeds in the cellar for a lamentable bit of garden, cleaning and washing and mending a house so old that nothing one did to it made it look any better, for the wooden frame was gray and needed painting, the banister was shaky, the windows let in wind and rain. It was too big for me, two floors, three bedrooms, living room and dining room and enclosed porch, to clean. There was snow to shovel, and mud on the stairs to sweep.

  Is this the Anaïs I am trying to find again among the simple, unadorned, unsymbolic trees of Sierra Madre? In San Francisco I spent weekends visiting the giant redwoods. In Mexico we took photographs of a juniper, one of the oldest trees in the world, two thousand years old. I learned about cotton trees, orange trees, Jacarandas, palms, dead trees, burnt trees; I laughed at the obscenities of Latin names (Pinus contorta) for flowers and trees. I became acquainted with redwood trees, pepper trees.

  Did I recover this Anaïs once lost among the symbolic trees and swamps of Max Ernst, the skeletal trees of Tanguy, the trees of Utrillo, Suzanne Valadon, Matisse, Rousseau?

  I am surrounded now by men who risk their lives to save trees from fires which devastate the forest. Men who give up lucrative professions and accept less money than a postman, to fight fires and prevent them, to defend the trees from fire and human abuse.

  Item in the newspaper: A drunk firebug at a bar repeating: "So you think those trees are beautiful, do you? Look at them well. They won't be there tomorrow."

  When I look at trees which belong to a community which has no history, a community of faceless, anonymous, standardized people, look out at cypresses which do not orchestrate the lights of Fiesole, which have no history, no aura conferred by the soul's convolutions, I wonder what I am seeking in a nature which is not the landscape to great feats in art or culture, but simply a spectator to monotonous simplicity.

  I wanted to return to simplicity after the infernal life of New York, the interviews, the pressures.

  I dream of writing the final book which will break my ostracism from the world. I carry in my bag another rejection of A Spy in the House of Love from Pellegrini and Cudahy, this time insulting. Farrar and Straus rejected it. "A Tiffany jewel, not for everybody."

  Letter from the Viking Press, from Mr. Pascal Covici: "I enjoyed, as always, your sensitive lyric writing but I am quite convinced that your romantic fantasy is not for us. Because of its erotic subject matter and the possible difficulties with the censors, it would be best, I think, to have some small private press bring it out in a limited edition."

  Houghton Mifflin turned it down, and Doubleday (where I was once introduced by Edmund Wilson himself). Scribner, Bobbs-Merrill Company, Hiram Haydn. Mr. Theodore Purdy of G. P. Putnam's Sons wrote:

  We have had several readings of the new manuscript by Anaïs Nin. It is, as usual, an extraordinary and unusual piece of work and I can't think of any other writer who might have produced it. However, it seems less substantial than her earlier books and some of the passages are of course almost pornographic. Altogether, the consensus of opinion here is not in favor of our bringing it out, much as we admire the author's vivid writing abilities.

  The interesting fact was that, accustomed to hearing only about the neurosis of the artist, I was not prepared for the shocking discoveries I made among the simple people. Among the foresters, those who had practical training and no college training were jealous of the "college" foresters. One old forester I heard grumbling once after many cans of beer turned out to be the leader of a group of young men; and whenever he led them into fire fighting, there were accidents. No one thought of attributing this to-his jealousy, quite openly expressed.

  Others entered the Forest Service already distorted; some were firebugs, setting fires to be able to put them out and get extra pay. Some were autistic, in quest of utter solitude among the mountains. Living close to nature, modest, accepting a limited life for a romantic profession, they brought the same neurotic flaws I had seen in the artists around me, and in myself.

  I stopped at San Francisco for my mother's eightieth birthday. Each year she seems smaller, and her hair somehow whiter and lighter. Joaquin delivered a witty lecture on Weber and Brahms. His symphony will be played by the San Francisco Orchestra.

  Frances Keene is doing everything for Spy in the House of Love. I am waiting for an answer from Random House.

  ***

  I am in touch with the whole world, and by a strange irony, all the friends I nourished with descriptions of Europe are there now, Frances Brown, Woody Parrish-Martin, James Broughton, Kenneth Anger, Kermit Sheets. But not me! I connect with the ballet through George Amberg, I hear echoes of Tennessee Williams' neurosis and creation, I meet Alice de Bouverie of the Astor family, who made their fortune stealing furs from the Indians and killing them after they delivered their stock. Flavors and scents from many worlds.

  [Winter, 1951–1952]

  Mrs. Arabel Porter, of the New American Library, after considering Spy began to quibble about the lie detector. She said at a conference there was an objection to the lie detector as puzzling. What did it mean?

  I had lunch with Victor Weybright, a very literary man. I explained to him humorously that far from being a mystery, the lie detector was a personification of conscience dressed in modern clothes and quite real as he followed Sabina about. Mr. Weybright laughed and said: "I'll be damned, I didn't get that. Maybe if you made that a little clearer at the beginning we might reconsider it."

  In the face of so much rejection of my work should I abdicate?

  When I was in New York Jim Herlihy telephoned me from Detroit, his home. He was in great distress. His father wanted him to deliver telephone books for fifty dollars a week.

  I said: "Come to New York. We will find a way."

  He came. My friends adopted him. He found a job. He met producers, and publishers and magazine editors. His play was produced. Stanley taught him how to arrange an apartment with very little money. Everyone likes him. He sold a short play to television.

  Jim is twenty-six. He has the Irish gift of the tongue, the laughing blue eyes. Between love affairs, between jobs, he makes crash landings at his home and then yearns to get away.

  He works for a paper-plate company, and so all of us are eating from paper plates he brings us.

  His atmosphere is playful, but he has a serious core.

  He fixed a cold-water flat with all of Stanley's prestidigitations. Even a closet lined with egg cartons. He gives parties.

  Jim is a grave host. His finely drawn features and his lean body give him an elegance contradicted by his slang. The young man born poor in a tough neighborhood (his father was a policeman and his mother a show girl; at fifteen his nose was broken by a gang of boys) has by speed and smoothness made his slang a thing of style no longer resembling the speech of uneducated people but something born of agility, quick wits, great accuracy, and reminds me of jazz. It is the fast-moving rhythm that gives it character and vitality, it has style while bearing no relation to cultured speech. Instea
d of refinement it has slickness, clear-cut edges, it is streamlined. There is no slurring, no limpness, no drawling. He tightens his belt around a neat, slender waist, and has an equally neat and slender delivery. This nimbleness permits him to enter any world at all, and handle it with dexterity. Tension is part of his style. It becomes an attribute. He is as tense as a magician would be. You sense he will dodge disaster deftly, that he has erased all traces of doubt, hesitation, or bewilderment.

  He is spiritually and emotionally an aerialist. He is agile and knows how to leap. It is agility which enables him to live, write, without any preparation for either. He is the self-made man. Will achieve a prominent place through prestidigitation. He is the superior, the talented, creative, self-created man.

  Jim's party. A tenement apartment transformed by tremendous work of papering, painting, plastering, wall making, fireplace making, closet making into a place of beauty. Stanley, with all his experience of home making, helped Jim. His ingenuity in working with little money, his gifts for substitutes and effects.

  David Man, a little man, face smudged, not sculptured but like clay worked by thick fingers, occupied in translating Genêt, condemned in the homosexual world to be unloved because he looks like a little French shoe salesman, when drunk became a lyrical Irishman: "I don't mean to be maudlin ... believe me ... but, Anaïs, I hate women.... But you ... you who are the essence of femininity ... I love you. And I will love you all my life and right now, when I see how you listen to me, never paying attention to anyone else, or anything else happening in the party ... well, I feel like weeping. Give me your hand."