by Anais Nin
I am reading Psycho-Analysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing by Ehrenzweig. It helped to confirm me in my pursuit of the inarticulate and in-depth visions and sensations.
It stresses the comparison between the psychoanalyst's method of selecting apparently unimportant details, the irrelevant detail, rather than the one which seems on the surface to be important; similar to the modern artist who selects what appears to be irrelevant or negative or unimportant, in contrast with traditional painters. James Merrill accused me of "meandering," which corresponds to the word "roving," which is connected with all processes of free association. In Picasso's painting the body outline is also a guitar and the guitar something else.
What irony that Proust, who selected the most shallow of all people, the wealthy and the aristocratic, should have reached the greatest depths which a novelist has reached into the unconscious, and that he was accused of depicting only decadents. He created the best portrait of a servant, Françoise, better than that of any social realist, like Zola or Balzac. I can't remember any of Zola's or Balzac's characters, yet I know all of Proust's intimately.
Paul Mathiesen braved the distance and came to Sierra Madre. He talked about Renate, a Viennese painter, and her son by her first marriage, Peter.
He had changed a great deal, and I wondered how much Renate had to do with the change in him. He talked, he was expansive. The adolescent dissonances, like those of the adolescent voice before it settles, had disappeared. He was incarnated. He was physically present.
In this double exposure I saw what Dr. Bogner had tried to show me: that my duality and conflict were not with others, relationships, but within myself. It was not Gonzalo or Henry who were rebels, but I who did not acknowledge my rebellions. When Gonzalo's fires ceased to consume me and to consume him, I find my own fires consuming me.
In Paris I gave a beautiful Tahitian party, with real Tahitians playing and dancing, in the orange rooms decorated with lanterns, the windows open on the glittering Seine, my friends kicking off their shoes to dance in the soft summer night.
Renate and Paul, however, could have installed themselves in that moment with ease. They would have understood Moricand and Gonzalo, and easily become "characters" in the diary.
I blamed Henry, Gonzalo, and Helba for the destructive elements in my life, but when the three disappeared, I accomplished their roles alone. I acted out my own destructiveness. The image of myself struggling against Helba's and Gonzalo's destructiveness (an image I admired) was not entirely accurate. When they left, I enacted my own. In each case we fight the others when they are living out the role assigned to them.
How beautiful it would be if we recognized the hidden wish and when handing others the keys to the city we were not able to conquer, we also consented, adhered to the division we ourselves created.
I fought Henry's physical and mental promiscuity, when gregariousness was a fantasy I acted out at the age of five, inviting everyone in the street for tea.
I fought Gonzalo's irresponsibility when my own exaggerated responsibility stifled me. I entrust others with "safety measures," so I can live out my transgressions.
We fight this part of ourselves which is unknown, which we instinctively fear. Because it was feared we stifled it. Because it was stifled we must breathe it through others. (The June in myself? In other women? The Henry in myself, friendly to the whole world? The Gonzalo in myself, rebel and untamed?)
But the revelation of this aspect in those we love becomes the threatening enemy. We cannot come to terms with it. The proof of this truth is the reversals which take place. Henry and I are estranged, and I have to do my own living and writing. Gonzalo returns to France, and I have to achieve my own violence.
[Fall, 1953]
At Lillian Libman's party I met Cyrille Arnavon, a most sensitive and cultured man of letters, who translates American novels into French. His father was a close friend of Giraudoux. He was amazed that I knew Giraudoux's novels so deeply and said wistfully: "No one reads him any more in France. We are all in reaction against fantasy."
John Humphrey, professor at Columbia University, includes Under a Glass Bell on the reading list.
John Merrill, poet, finds Four-Chambered Heart not good at all, a "fairy tale, too naked," whereas a novel by his friend Bruchner has a "lovely texture" and Chateau d'Argol is enchanting. He invites me to tell me this, delivering these assertions as if he were handing me flowers.
I gave a party for Maxwell Geismar's Rebels and Ancestors. Thomas Ginsberg, James Herlihy, René de Chochor, Lillian Libman, Miriam Kreiselman, Miranda d'Ancona, Tony Richardson, Pepe Zayas, Larry Maxwell, William and Letha Nims.
I had his book on display all around the room.
Someone said to the painter Rousseau: "Why did you place a sofa in the middle of the jungle?"
Rousseau answered: "One has a right to paint one's dreams."
Max is struggling with his concept of poetry as artifice, my poetry in life as artificiality. What is natural to me, confuses him. Henry also once confused art and artifice.
But when I read Rebels and Ancestors I felt a genuine respect for what Max has done. I sent a telegram from Sierra Madre, in total acceptance of the task he set himself:
YOUR BOOK A UNIQUE BLENDING OF DEEP PSYCHOLOGICAL INSIGHT AND HISTORICAL EVALUATION WITH THE NOVELIST'S POWER TO DRAMATIZE, HUMANIZE, REVIVIFY SO THAT IT READS MOVINGLY, CAPTIVATINGLY, LIKE THE BEST NOVEL OF OUR TIME. MOST CRITICISM IS VIVISECTION. YOURS BRINGS AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CHARACTER INTO WARM, VIVID LIFE. RECEIVED IT ONLY TODAY. PLEASE MAIL THIS TO HOUGHTON MIFFLIN WITH MY DEEPEST ADMIRATION.
I do not agree with the basis of Maxwell Geismar's criticism. He never asks: "How is it written?" He considers only the contents. He approves the contents of Dreiser's novels, and does not see that the man is a clumsy, heavy, journalistic writer. He gives us a social document, a card index, annotations, marginal notes, a photograph, and none of these is writing. There is in Geismar's historical point of view a complete lack of the aesthetics of writing.
The liberation of a free association accomplished by Joyce gives us the content of a scholarly, explorative mind. It was Joyce's private inner comedy, the limitless expansion of a vast imagination. Can we seek to enter another's mind as fully? Joyce attempted to distribute inner monologue among his characters, but in the end it is his voice we hear. If each one of us were truthful about the content of one mind, our own, the only one we know in totality, we would achieve a unity of knowledge. Other minds we only know by flashes, intermittently, and having won our consciousness, we can only descend into the subterranean chambers of our own unconscious.
Jim's play will be given at the Theatre de Lys. Jim flies in and out. His black withdrawn moods concern me because I cannot reach him then. Lila explains why on one side of himself he writes like all the sons of Hemingway and James Cain and in his diary and in his talks with me he manifests a more subtle, poetic self. But this side he will not give to the world. He thinks of it as his vulnerable side, to be protected from the world.
We went to see Beauford Delaney's studio, which Jim may want to rent. Beauford is going to France to live. It was a vast loft, with his paintings turned against the wall. It was here I came to see him years ago at Henry's suggestion, and had a very strange visit. He had covered (in my honor, it appeared later) everything with white sheets, which gave the studio a funeral quality. He spoke with slowness, and gave such formality to the occasion that I was frozen. He sat down at the piano, lit two candles, and sang a religious song. I felt oppressed.
This time the visit was lighter. I feel a painter should live with his paintings around him, visible, part of the air he breathes.
***
Letter to Max Geismar about Rebels and Ancestors:
The first time I read the book for pure enjoyment, quickly, and to give you a general impression of my feeling about it. Now I read it again more carefully, and I still have the feeling that I am reading a work of fiction because you have made such
an interesting drama of the conflict between the writer and his work and the world and his relationships. It is the complete dynamic analysis which gives it that living quality of a drama. I am amazed how fully you can evoke the times, the atmosphere, the history, the intimately personal environment, so that both the work and the man are balanced, fully known. I have learned in the process the history of America as well as all the psychological quirks of its individuals, the deformations and what caused them. The history is beautifully told. About your language I repeat myself, because I have said that about the other books. In fact, it is unfortunate, for your novelists, that your own language is so accurate and varied that when you quote them, they sound poverty-stricken and bare like twigs. That is the creative part of your work, to enhance, and glitterize ... I That is the captivating quality of the book. Actually, I never would have read all that history of repression, of greed, etc. except told by you. In other hands it would be rather awful.
About the psychology, here I know what I am praising. I believe it is exceedingly accurate, the personal and the relation to the world and other individuals. Also the exact knowledge of the power of each, the ability to measure the chemistry that took place, that I think you do like an analyst of the first quality. Cause and effect on the writer, and then as it is manifested in his work, etc.
You fulfill the role of illuminator, so rarely carried out by the critic, which is to reveal what others have not seen. Here is where the critic plays a role similar in value and very much needed by the world, in revealing what others cannot see or feel, in expanding our vision of the world and of character. Your statement on the problem of the life of the passions in the United States was also very startling and well said. Personally I like best the Stephen Crane section, but that is purely personal. Probably because you could allow yourself more personal and individual lyrical flights in writing about him, and it showed your understanding of the more subtle, more intricate and difficult evolutions in this "odd halfway house of modern realism." Your understanding of the "wounded, lyrical and humble." For that it is more moving perhaps. But while this one was studied with utmost delicacy, you managed to give a fine portrait of the brutes too, with the necessary strong brush strokes, the Jack Londons and the Norrises ... incredible people, but how well you handled them, all that blood and thunder and blind actions, and the false pioneers ... the ones who did not create the country but who plundered and quarreled.
I admire and respect your core, the fixed core from which you operate, evaluating all fairly and equably. The core of values never oscillates, yet the human sympathy does, toward values you do not truly admire but do understand, which is as it should be. I would say (that is the way I see it) that you achieve the full painting of the large mural, the universal one, like the immense Orozco paintings, while being able to focus with gentleness on the smallest detail, the fallacies, the failures.
Above all the sense of truth. The summary in "Years of Gain" is truly profound, in the exact weighing of the spiritual values gained and lost. "And don't the ultimate insights about human behaviour proceed most surely from the submerged portion of human activity? The hidden life of the great artists is probably their truest life—if we could only discover it." Well, Mr. Geismar, by implication, divination, interpretation of outward facts, you have certainly done just that, as well as exposed the secret life of American letters and American character. So many novel themes, the study of the virility complex through the violence, the study of the implications of a break from the "cultural heritage," the final emphasis on Whole Vision, a plea for it. I do think you have achieved a beautiful structure of synthesis of a most difficult and unstable material, that you have lighted up a massive chaos, and established values in a moment when all values are nonexistent. It's a valuable work, which took great care and skill and thought. I see now how right it is that you should work at this and nothing else, because in remaining out of the ugly and deafening currents of present activities, you have conserved your energy for the very clarification and guidances most deeply needed. In a moment of great confusions in all values, to write about literature as you do is actually applicable to all the other activities and should influence and seep into all the realms of darkness in which most people live. I tell you, what is most needed is not more murky novels, but more understanding, more wisdom, more humanity like yours.
The value of any individual development, research, or experiment is regarded here as antisocial, but I believe that until the individual is developed he is useless to society. His function in the whole may not be immediately apparent but it is essential. I know that I am contributing to our awareness, not mine alone.
In Spy, I am not sure I did the right thing in presenting the men only at the moment they passed through the intense searchlight of Sabina's desire or vision of them. I purposely chose to intensify both the limitations of passion and its quality, intensity instead of completeness in relationship. I reproach Sabina at the end for loving only one aspect created by illusion. I feel this might have been lost if I had done the men more fully. And anyway, this is a novel from the point of view of a woman. In this realm I am exploring; I may make errors due to the search for other truths, other than the obvious ones. One may gain one truth at the expense of another. I was being true to Sabina's inner screen and inner lighting.So that one might know her intimately.
For the same reason, I leave out many of the minor characters that usually pad other novels. If I do this, it is for the sake of concentration, not because I do not value them. I do feel that this terrible standardization of character by which Americans reach economic security is dangerous to whoever seeks individual patterns. When doctors or scientists go far out in offbeat research, no one troubles them or tampers with them because they believe they will benefit from them. But they think they have a right to tamper with the artist because they are not convinced that he is necessary to them, unlike primitive societies far more civilized than ours, where the prophet, poet, and singer were exempt from fishing or hunting because they had other contributions to make.
Of course, I could say that what is left undone now in the novels may no longer seem to be so when the novels are completed. Sabina is not finished, nor Djuna. I'm working on completing them all.
I stressed the neurosis as the impediment to growth, then at the end of the tunnel change and freedom from it, I hope.
René de Chochor returns from France and tells me of changes. "There is too much suffering, too much tyranny, too much tension between Russia and America. The youth spend their time jazzing and they read Mickey Spillane. The people who grew up with me, who were students with me, before the war, I have seen them every year, I have seen them change. They are bad-tempered and bitter."
Usually he is light-hearted and witty. He is dark and handsome, with soft eyes and a shy smile but with poise, and we have charming business lunches. He throws publishers' letters in the scrap basket before my eyes. He treats me like the Queen of Writing, but he cannot help me.Spy was turned down many times. He tells me about a publisher who accepted a beautiful book, was wildly enthusiastic, but when he discovered the author was forty years old he canceled the contract.Paris Review does not want Maxwell Geismar on their editorial board because he is forty years old. Yet Geismar is responsible for the discovery of William Styron, who is one of the editors.
***
I went to San Francisco to stay with my mother while Joaquin took a three-day trip for the University. My mother sits in the house with the shades down shutting out the sun (a Cuban habit), rushes out to scold dogs and children for making noise, works on lacemaking, reads detective stories, observes her swollen legs and feet, and waits. The horror of aging, the deafness, the false teeth, the more and more restricted areas of life. She can no longer enjoy films.
I condemned my father once more for being vain and proud of qualities which are not humanly valuable. Why be proud of being a Spanish aristocrat, for example? At the same time I became aware of the irony of this
situation, for I have been more identified with my father than with my mother because he was the artist, and my mother's human qualities (generosity, motherliness, devotion, sacrifice) seemed to me then to be a submission to the condition humaine rather than a re-creation of it. For every day I rile at the human condition, which means domestic life, chores, nursing the sick, marketing, mothering of others, and I have a secret inner religion of art, a wish to transcend the human, to be able to bear the human. I associated human with slavery, and the artist with the one who escapes slavery through another life. It happens that my father fits into this image of the artist: his music, his musical friends; music in the house was the only joy of my childhood. It was not the cold aristocrat I loved, but the aesthete who enhanced and transformed reality. "Your father," said my mother, "had such a power of illusion that I could never love anyone else, they all seemed so prosaic and plain and homely beside him."
My father, by deception, lies, inventions and a gift for illusion improved upon reality. It was my mother's acceptance and resignation to the human condition which I feared to espouse.
From taking care of my mother, I returned to caring for Reginald after his operation.
Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you market, but then comes the moment of solace and flight. I sit and write and summon other friends, other forms of life, other experiences, and the voyage and the exploration, the delving into character, the vast expanse of life's possibilities and potentialities, contemplation of future travels, of dazzling friendships, all this then makes the chores and the sacrifices beautiful because they are diverted toward some beautiful aim, they become part of the structure of a work of art.
