by Anais Nin
When I told him again the dream of the tarantula he corrected me: "The first time you said they were pomegranate seeds."
"I'm just trying to be folksy."
[Spring, 1952]
Saw Tennessee Williams'Summer and Smoke. Met the whole cast. José Quintero, the director, told me my work, which he read five years ago in Woodstock, was an initiation to his new life. Geraldine Page is so beautiful and interesting an actress, fully sensitive and aware, full of shadings and delicacies.
In the larger world I am not yet at ease. I find it a strain to meet the Geismars because they are brilliant and ironic. It is a strain to meet Anthony Tudor, to go to Charles Rollo's parties and talk with Luise Rainer, with representatives of Knopf. In myself, deep down, there is a great insecurity and an inclination to withdraw into a simpler, more innocent life.
When I returned to New York I had gained detachment from neglect as a writer, from financial restrictions, from relationships which had betrayed me (the transparent children).
Saw Martha Graham dance. In the dancing of Martha Graham I see the same interior world, interior tragedy which her body and face occasionally reveal directly, but more often obliquely in such mysterious, devious ways that when she dies her meaning will vanish with her. But not her greatness; her greatness achieved by depth and tragic intensity will be revered.
I read Truman Capote's Grass Harp. Will his sensitivity and lyricism survive the American life?
Martha Graham. This is one friendship I wanted and could not have. Because of the close relationship between her work and mine, I sent her books, a letter, met her socially at Dorothy Norman's, but she showed no interest. It is a mystery to me, except that I know how tragic her life is. I could have helped her, loved her.
One of the strongest examples I ever had of the influence of the past upon the present was my association with Max Pfeffer. Years ago he wrote me a letter offering to be my literary agent. Russell and Volkening had just returned my manuscripts, saying they could do nothing for me. I accepted Pfeffer's offer. He was authoritarian but I thought this would be good for my work.
Years later, on the occasion of the death of his wife, I kissed him on the cheek. I did not kiss the real Mr. Pfeffer, but a personage created out of the resonances of the past. He was a European (like my father) ; he was authoritarian (like my father) ; he lost his wife (as my father did, twice) ; he lost his daughter (as my father did) ; his daughter had just told him she would not work for him any more. He made mistakes, and I knew he was not the right person for my work, but he was devoted. He was grateful because I had invited his fragile wife to a party, and it was the last pleasure she had before her illness and death. I knew that he would look upon a professional break as a personal desertion (the third). For me he was another version of the father to be rebelled against, and ultimately deserted. I feared his anger as much as his sorrowfulness, which had the power to arouse my guilt. I would be adding one more crime to my Ledger of Guilts. I also put myself in his place, losing first his wife by death, then his daughter, who was his helper in the office, because of her marriage, and now me. The transposition born of a few points of similarities creates these illusory bonds between people. Everybody advised me to change agents, and I was paralyzed. I was bound to Pfeffer by a design which might be described as the original sin against the father. I rebelled and deserted once. Every rebellion and every desertion from then on bore the stigma, without consideration of whether or not it was justified. The first one was. So was the one of Mr. Pfeffer. I confronted in myself the unreality of the bond, the points of similarities as echoes. It is with this echo we have a relationship. In reality did I have to suffer as a writer just to console Pfeffer for the loss of wife and daughter (as I would have liked to console my father for the loss of his second wife and children) ?
Pfeffer quarreled with Mondadori because Mondadori had been a fascist. He quarreled with other publishers for other reasons.
My friends forced me into a break. I was introduced to René de Chochor, who was in partnership with James Brown. René was French, exceedingly charming, and had become interested in my work through his wife. I decided to make him my literary agent.
Letter to Jim Herlihy, who complained of restlessness:
Restlessness is no offense to the loved one except that the loved one considers it a matter of personal pride. He feels he should be the Sea, the Mountain, the Exotic Islands, the Religion, the Food, the Stimulant, the Inspiration, the Provider, the TOTAL UNIVERSE to his love. Actually restlessness, you could explain to your love, is an outcome of being in love. Having the love one wants, one wants to roam, taste, enjoy, discover, explore. It is an extension and continuation of the love. Love is at the roots. We choose our jailers. Thou shalt be my safety brakes, my hand brake, my foot brake, my automatic brake, my BRAKE. Some of these brakes are very attractive to touch and to hold. Otherwise you would fall in love with wilder and looser characters. Nurture your restlessness. It is a compass pointing to mirages.
Quotation from an unknown source:
"The adventurer is within us, and he contests for our favor with the social man we are obliged to be. These two sorts of life are incompatible; one we hanker for, the other we are obliged to. There is no other conflict so bitter as this, whatever the pious say, for it derives from the very constitution of human life which so painfully separates us from all other human beings. We, like the eagle, were born to be free. Yet we are obliged, in order to live at all, to make a cage of laws for ourselves and to stand on the perch. We are born as wasteful, and unremorseful as tigers; we are obliged to be thrifty, or starve, or freeze. We are born to wander, and cursed to stay and dig. We are born adventurers. It is this double-mindedness of humanity that prevents a clear social excommunication of the adventurers. If he fails he is a mere criminal. One third of all criminals are nothing but failed adventurers. Society's benefactors as well as pests. These are men betrayed by contradictions inside themselves, a social man at war with a free man."
Up to date the diary comprises eighty volumes in handwriting.
The library at Evanston is buying, for an absurdly low sum, the original manuscripts of my first novel, my second novel, and the short stories.
Dr. Bogner understands that the diary saved me: it was my truth and my reality.
[Summer, 1952]
In Sierra Madre I rewrite Spy, because Victor Weybright, my agent René de Chochor, and Geismar were against the lie detector. Then I found out that it was wrong, that he was a part of my vision, absolutely necessary.
I kept him, knowing it meant no publication and no money. Worked con allegro and vivace on a simplified but still poetic version. Poetry is a mystery, and if you want to draw close to human beings you cannot speak in parables. I pondered on mystery and suggestion, on all that Djuna Barnes did not tell us, all that Proust did not tell us, and on what Henry James did not tell us. In poetry and the myth you avoid explicitness, but only to reveal another aspect, another life.
When Sabina telephones at random to the lie detector to invite him to track her down, inviting pursuit (as the criminal does sometimes), the lie detector becomes a reality for her.
I was shocked, shocked by the unanimous dislike for the lie detector. René de Chochor said: "He should not be a personage, even mythical. It is her guilt and should be inside of her."
But I know how often we project our guilt outside of us, to the policeman, father, confessor, husband, doctor, analyst, critical friend, or art critic! The projection creates the hallucination of condemnation in the eyes of others. Sabina being neurotic and primitive, or subjective, would see this outside of herself, personified.
Last night after much housework, much revising, much ordinary life, streams of cars passing because of the Fourth of July, empty faces, the usual fireworks, a visit from drunken friends, I fixed my eyes on the Varda collage. It was as if I had stepped out of my life into a region of sand composed of crystals, of transparent women dancing in airy dresses, figures w
hich no obstacle could stop, who could pass through walls, beings designed like sieves to allow the breeze through. Through these floating figures with openings like windows, life could flow. Even the air and sand were mobile. The houses they lived in were only façades, with flags waving and windows open facilitating evasions.
I escaped from the confinement of four brown walls, small screened windows, duties, restrictions, into a world of sand-colored earth shining as the grains of sand shone on Mexican beaches, of women lightly dressed for continuous fiestas, flags waving for perpetual celebrations, transportable houses, the entire scene one of freedom, crystallized, so that I ceased to think of myself as a caged animal pacing in a fever against limitations and wanting the impossible, for I acquired in these moments of contemplation of Varda's collage the certainty that such a state of life was attainable, everything that man creates being attainable, for he has invented nothing, he has transcribed his moods and visions and vistas, experiences and images. Varda reached freedom and I did not, but only because his image, being visible to the human eye, was stronger than the moments I describe and enclose in a book.
Next door to me in Sierra Madre lives a six-year-old girl who stands behind the closed gate looking out with round, wistful eyes. She has a tiny, delicate face, big eyes. We made friends. I swim in her parents' pool. Christie said: "Today I will be your little girl."
She comes to look at the Japanese dolls. We opened my costume trunk and I gave her my Spanish dancing dresses. So colorful and comic to see her trailing the vivid dresses along the green lawn.
Another neighbor, a forester, comes to tell me his wife is expecting a baby. Would I take care of the two children, and cook dinner for all of them? At dinner I heard about the foresters' life, their training. The drama centers on fires, devastating, terrifying fires. When someone rushed in saying the baby was born, I was as happy as if I were a part of the family.
Simple pleasures, away from malice.
Here where I am surrounded by real trees, I learn that the abstract tree is equally necessary to man, as nourishing as the tree in the forest of human life, as necessary as the human tree. The artist paints the lookout tower, the oasis, the hidden treasures so that we may find them. Otherwise we cease to believe in them and then lose heart.
In Varda's collages I find a life which the actual sand, the actual trees, houses, and people cannot give me, because they only contain the present, and do not have the long-range vision of the artist, which throws a light on hidden treasures.
For the same reason, my companion is Proust. I immerse myself in his world. He is more alive through his senses, his passion for every detail of his life, than a thousand so-called realists, because it is passion which re-creates a flower, a leaf, a cathedral spire, a sunset, a meal. And how he struggles to give each object its meaning in the pattern. The colors of the bathroom rug in the Balbec Hotel are not only the colors of a rug, they are vision into color, the discovery of color, the awakening of the senses to color. And how lifelike is his cellular development of themes, organic as life, one cell leading to the next, cumulatively, until the entire organism is there.
I saw a film on the theme of a parabola. Ice designs, snowy vaults, evolving glass spires, fan openings of feathery meshes. The great mathematicians lose themselves in intricate calculus, the astronomers in observing space, the scientists in chemical discoveries, all the inventors can take flight with permission from the world because they will bring back visible boons to humanity, a discovery, knowledge, a cure, but the artist who brings us the deployment and flowering of a parabola teaches us to deploy and flower.
Letter to René de Chochor:
I tried to remove the lie detector but it ruined the whole concept. Sabina cannot return to her husband with a confession because he only loves one aspect of her and would not accept all of her. Her talk with Djuna (whose presence I explain clearly, they had met before in Paris) is the only way to reveal the kind of truth I want to point up. Any other ending such as the classical return to the husband you suggest would mean the refusal to solve the problem of a new kind of sincerity: which is to recognize the roles people play in regard to each other and how rigid these roles become. I cannot change a word of that ending. I cannot at this point pretend to be a naturalist. I am exploring the psyche, and here both plots and resolutions are quite different. If the novel fails now, tant pis. There is no place for the poetic novel anyway. I would rather sink with it as it is and with my feeling of integrity. I am being true to a new form which will evolve out of the new relativity of psychological reality.
Old Joe Clark walks down from Big Santa Anita Canyon to visit. He lives, probably on a small pension, in a shack in the canyon bottom, far from the road. He just sits in the kitchen to get warmth and comfort and a cup of coffee.
Everyone in the town wants to put him in a home. They think he is too old to live alone. But like the Mexicans who refused to be locked up in hospitals, he prefers his log cabin, and even though he needs care, he prefers his independence.
He talks about his life. He was not educated enough to join the forest service, so he became a private ranger: he watched for fires, he lived by selling honey, he took care of as many trees as he could, in his own way. He gave first aid to picnickers. He cleaned up after them. The foresters knew him. He visited the woman on the lookout tower who spent hours looking through binoculars for signs of fire. One day he came in, bleeding from a fall on his way down. The people who bandaged his wound managed to keep him. I never saw him again. Joe Clark was a character from the old West, the nature lover never seen in Western films.
At my feet a fuchsia rug from Chinatown in San Francisco. The windows frame trees. My Japanese dolls on the dressing table. Sprinklers are my only fountains of the Alhambra.
Christie gives me ten of her watercolors.
Letter from Henry:
Dear Anaïs:
Was glad to hear from you. Heard about library business from someone at the library.
Things are quite different for me now. Schatz's sister has come to live with me, the children are back (I hope for good) and we have a real, full, happy life daily. After sixteen months of no work I've just begun to write again—Nexus. If you ever pass by this way do stop in. I think you'll like Eve. I expect to get a divorce soon in Mexico. We would like to go to France, all over, in fact, but there is no extra cash. I earn just enough to get by.
The Books in My Life is out in England but not yet here. Is your present address a good one to mail books to?Plexus came out in France (Correa, Paris) but no English edition in sight yet. Have you tried Denoel or Correa or Gallimard with your books? Girodias is out of the picture now—firm taken over by Hachette.
I still have a job squeezing in a couple of hours a day writing. So very much to do around here. All the best
Henry
P.S. June is still ill and broke always. But shows more desire now to get well. I've improved this place considerably since you were here. I really feel at home here.
The French radio (Paris) made a transcription of Scenario [from House of Incest] and it made a sensation, I am told. I sent the tape recordings to Powell to get changed to our speed. Cendrars gave it an "introduction" on the air. His last six books I find marvelous.
[Fall, 1952]
A high moment listening to Ima Sumac. The voice has all the richness, beauty, and range of a mythical woman. It does not seem humanly credible. She sings like a siren, a bird, an angel, some seductive chant never heard before, high and low, fragile and strong. With all that, she has the exotic beauty of a legendary figure. I could imagine her in Peru, but not accept that she is married to a composer and now sings his Hollywood-type arrangements in a night club.
New York.
Jim came, very pale, tense, waiting to finish a play for television.
He has the Irish gift for talk, nimble. I am baffled by the difference of levels between his writing for the world and his diary. His diary is like his talk, uncontrolled and revelato
ry. In his diary he has a fulgurant beat. It is phosphorescent and elliptical, but his writing for publication is conventional.
He is reading certain portions of my diary. His enthusiasm sustains me, keeps me from suffering from my ostracism from the American writing scene. I am left out of every anthology, every poetry reading, every magazine. The world is silent.
As a result of my effort, Jim's first story is accepted by Richard Aldridge's Discovery, a book which will reach millions in paperback. Such celebrations! Jim's delight. He has been writing for only five or six years.
Jim wrote a story called "Jazz of Angels." I say over the telephone: "Jim, write me some more jazz of angels." We talk in writer's language. I say "rhythm" and it means as much to him as it does to me: contemporary rhythms. He is the first who tried to describe my way of writing in terms of jazz: I state a phrase and then restate it in another key, reaching out for still another, like the horn player. Jim's understanding of improvisation. There is a jazz rhythm in my writing and Jim of the future heard it.
Last night at Downbeat, Candido, the Cuban drummer drumming himself into an orgiastic frenzy, his legs around the drum, occasionally lifting it from the ground as if they would both fly off, propelled by the violence.
Max Geismar listening to jazz. A timid smile. He has not been feted, he does not live in the present. He is a serious historian of literature and it carries him constantly backward. His work does not give him joy. He and Anne convert their unhappiness into wit and satire.
