by Anais Nin
I thought Acapulco had anaesthetized me against all this. But the anaesthetic wore off as soon as I landed in New York.
Nobody lifted a finger, not Edmund Wilson, not Wallace Fowlie, not Charles Rollo, to defend me against such obvious prejudice.
Peggy Glanvilie-Hicks, music critic for the Herald Tribune, is the only one who evaluates the book. She says: "It is the only new writing. It is what writing will be. It is a perfect work of the intuitive intellect."
She believes it is the intellectual who blocks the way by his subjection to tradition. But I feel it is also the anti-poets, the moralists, the anti-emotional and the anti-human.
Peggy also feels I cannot return to the European source of my work because I have gone beyond it.
What is so strange is that I have faith in my work. I reread Spy in the House of Love with severity, and become aware that it is a piece of music, and that it is full of awareness. I am proud of it. It may be that Peggy hears it because she is a musician.
So I have to learn to live and work not only as an outsider, but in opposition to the trend.
Peggy's voice is like the small finger cymbals used by the gypsies, like the tinkle of gold-piece necklaces worn by the women of Tehuantepec. It is aerial too. A filigree of a child's laughter, a jeune fille's smothered laugh. The thorns are visible too. The frail body and the powerful incisive mind. But the scars I can guess. Her prestige is great. But her compositions are not performed widely. The bias against a woman composer?
Letter to Maxwell Geismar after his review of Spy in the House of Love:
You're right, of course, that friendship does not break down because one does not understand the other's work. There is a lot in your work that I may have failed to get too. But now that time has passed and we are both more objective, 1 do want to explain what bothered me, in spite of the fact that I know you meant well. It was not what is called a rave review I wanted from you. But I felt you did not understand the novel. Faced with a theme in which the problem was to go deeper into the motivations of Don Juanism, to go beyond the usual story, to go deep into its meaning, dissociation of the personality, the break into the wholeness of love, to rewrite, in our modern terms, Madame Bovary. You, I felt, are embarrassed by open sexual themes, and so were flippant, in the use of [a phrase like] "amorous exploits," taking away the gravity of the neurotic conflict. That was one point. Another is that Sabina sought man's liberation in separating the pleasures of sensuality from the pains of love but failed to do so. To win your heart and your respect one has to write a novel against [Joseph] McCarthy, even a bad one such as the one you reviewed so favorably. And that makes me sad and divorced from America, that literature as an art has nothing to do with themes, actuality as the only mainstream of life (which we quarreled about before); but that is your sociological point of view, irreconcilable with the point of view which builds for eternity, not the small circle of family, country. That is why I no longer want to talk this over, because they are opposite points of view. I am continuing the work of Freud, which I believe more valuable than the work of Marx. If we had gone deeper into Freud we might have emerged wiser and nobler politically than we are. Freud knew what lay behind all these wars and concentration camps and cruelties and was attacking the very source of the evil at its inception, whereas sociologists are merely trying to remedy the hostilities of human beings. Freud, well understood, would have cured us of hostilities and prejudices. We are always tackling the evil from the outside and not tackling the source of it. That is what I believe. Our failures (wars, racial prejudice, greed, corruption) prove the error of Marxism. But in the end you have to go on with your work and I with mine. I want to change human beings at the source. That means psychological deep-sea diving. Sometimes one option such as mine may seem out of time and out of pace with the present, but it may be because I see further. I see the dismal failure of literature here (because of its purely functional, journalistic point of view) and the failure of sociologists to get us out of hell, and I put my faith in Freud and those who developed and expanded beyond him. It is puritanism which has delayed the effects of psychology. There is in the work of Freud, Rank, and Jung an understanding of symbolism which is basic and vital, not mere poetry. In Sabina it is not passion for its own sake, it is passion for the sake of wholeness through intensity. She does not "turn to another woman for comfort and wisdom," but for more than that. Djuna is a symbol of the woman who is aware rather than blindly impulsive, as Sabina is. The disregard of symbolism (of the split atoms in music, split atoms in painting, fragmentation of all feelings), which was intended to emphasize neurosis, makes you consider the story as a banal plot of a woman who has lovers. That is due to your disregard for the art of writing as a transposition from realism to emotional reality, which you do not believe in. We talked about this in your garden once, referring to Miller who you thought had lost by his surrealism the realist he might have been. The time will come when we will learn to balance true psychological realism with external realism. Meanwhile you, who are the best and sincerest exponent of the latter, still represent what I have to deny in favor of psychological research into the motivations of human beings, experimentation and exploration of new frontiers. Of course, you win. I am the loser in the present scene, the failure, until we weary of Huxley's Brave New World, its automatic and functional writing, its one-dimensional writing. American writing is committed to its false realism, and until neurosis is recognized as a negative proof of the presence of a powerful unconscious which can be converted into positive use, we will continue to refuse the inner voyage I believe essential to the wholeness and whole vision which will humanize us faster than new systems. I am sure of my faith, but lonely. You are lucky, you think with the majority. Your point of view is shared. Frances Keene did her best to complete the onslaught on the concern with growth of the self. I don't believe that social awareness will destroy the McCarthys but psychological awareness of our leader's characters. I'm workng from the other end, and it's a damned lonely one, with everyone feeling virtuous when they write about political themes and disregard individual hostilities which are projected onto the vaster issues. It is like waiting for the world to realize that instead of more jails they should create psychological help for children before they become delinquents.
I have a long wait. But I will inherit the kingdom of Freud, and Freud's wiser and deeper contemporary kingdoms too.
Annette's dream was to build a house in Acapulco. She did, on a hill behind the Mirador.
No sooner was the house built than she came to New York with a journalist and took an apartment on Third Avenue. I met her in the street. I could not understand finding her there.
She took me to the apartment. We walked up the stairs. Instead of a plain outside door like those of the other apartments, she had erected a trellis covered with vines and hung with birdcages and singing birds. The gate was painted bright yellow. She had transported Mexico to Third Avenue. She had her serapes, her Orozco and Diego Rivera paintings, her ethnic jewelry, her bright woolen scarves, her ribbons and colored wool for the hair, more cages with singing birds, gay bottles and pottery bells.
She wore an orange dress. Beautiful figurines and heads from Mexican ruins were set on stands, textiles from Oaxaca on the windows.
We shared a passion for Acapulco, and the same dream of having a home there. But before I had a chance to ask her what had made her give it up, Charles appeared. He had turned up in Acapulco to report on fishing and on the boat races. He was a childhood sweetheart. Annette had made a wide circle into sophistication, internationalism, exotic lives, to return to New York where she was born and had gone to school.
With much Mexican panache she had returned bravely and gaily to a smaller, less romantic life. She did not surrender the beauty she had found in Mexico, beauty of background, and dress. By now her jewelry was very successful and was exhibited in museums. Her gaiety was irrepressible, and her magic transportable and effective anywhere.
Feli
x Pollak writes:
A Spy in the House of Love is deeply, almost desperately serious, and the reviewers' plea of unintelligibility seems quite intelligible to me as a rationalization of their subconscious resistance to it. For being solely and exclusively concerned with the individual (and not even a typical and certainly not a conventional one), being, moreover, concerned solely with the most secret and disturbing aspects of life, the subterranean territory, "living as others live only in their dreams at night, confessing openly what others only confess to doctors under guarantee of professional secrecy..." it runs head on against all the taboos of a middlebrow mass civilization that can view man only from a sociological point of view and find on its scanty scale of values good and evil determined only by what is beneficial or bad for "society." The novel's whole theme must be anathema in a country that, despite its hectic overcompensations, is still laboring under the Puritan strain; for even in the sexiest novels produced here, sex is always treated functionally; a recurrent need, leading to recurrent acts, to concessions, whether deplored or affirmed, to natural functions that must be fulfilled so that they can be forgotten and make room for higher things. While in your books, and most clearly in the Spy, sex is exposed as the ever-present life force, the life of the senses as all-pervading. Eros, sensuality are shown as the spark plugs that set the whole machinery in motion, as the source, the spring, the key, the Mother in the Goethe sense. Unity in manifoldness, no tortuous and artificial duality, no Christian rift between mind and body, no sterile divorce of emotion from reason, but reason and emotion as inseparably mated and molded together as effect and cause; instincts, drives, seen as what they are: the wire pullers of even our most rational thought processes. The tremendous hidden portion of the tiny iceberg visible above the waters.
Such a concept brings with it the inescapable problem: the exposed, the confessed schizophrenia of the internally rich and honest and complex personality, the immorality of the ethical, the agonizing search of the possessor of a self for the selves that comprise it; the lust and torment of the compulsion of living each of these selves; the fears and flights from superegos and lie detectors; the deceits necessary for being true to one's being; the clashes of the outer and inner reality. The novel's essential theme seems to be the deeper variations of a sentence from Hamlet: "This above all, to thine own self be true." And the quest for the recognition of these selves, the old question: Who am I? altered with deeper insight into: Who are I? Only he who has selves, has self, and only in being true to one's selves can one be true to one's self.
Let me say again how captivated I am with your forte: your language. Its lucidity is all the more astounding as you are setting out to express the almost inexpressible and thus have to prestidigitate more in between the lines than into them. This makes for difficult and exciting reading within simple sentences. Your rhythm and your music, your probing for meaning and nuances, the blood-beat and the tart sweetness of your prose cast again the old spell over me. You have the foreigner's prerogative of seeing and hearing and sensing every word as if it occurred for the first time, you know and use expressions I seldom encounter in native prose, you taste their sounds and shadings with a sensitive and sensuous passion, a nervous aliveness that is superb. The erotic fluid emanating from all your books stems not in the least from your erotic relation to words.
Musical delicacies like the juxtaposition of moulted and moulded in two closely welded sentences, passages like "who can never reach termination as ordinary people reach peaceful terminals..." and many other poetic excursions into the depth of language parallel to deep-sea diving into the unconscious of the soul leave me time and again with one adjective which to me best characterizes your writing: exquisite.
These are the letters which have kept my writing alive.
Felix Pollak was a librarian at Northwestern when my early manuscripts were sold to them. He became interested and began to write me. He is an Austrian poet, literary, a fine letter writer, and we corresponded fully and richly. He asked me to read [Herman] Hesse. He had known him.
When A Spy in the House of Love came out, Mary Green was employed by the British Book Center to help with publicity. The only thing she did for me was to accept a malicious review in the magazine she edited and to take me for an interview with Barry Gray. This took place late at night, about 11:30, and I was to be thankful for that. She admired him because he had once been beaten severely in a fight for the unions. As if this equipped him for discussing a literary book!
I was waiting for my turn and watched him interview a beautiful, dignified Swedish woman, the head of the Society for the Protection of Unmarried Mothers. His crudeness was revolting but there was worse to come. He asked about her father (a minister with thirteen children) and commented: "I wonder when he had time to pray." She talked about her work. He was not interested. He repeatedly asked her why she had given up her career as a pianist to open this shelter for unmarried mothers. She evaded the question. He persisted. He asked her what was the matter with her hands. Finally, in desperation, she said bitterly: "My hands were burned in a fire, that is why I had to give up my career as a pianist." She was humiliated. I was angry. I said to Mary Green: "I'm leaving."
Mary Green said: "He won't do that with you. We are friends." His first phrase was: "You wrote a novel. I fell asleep at the first page. So you tell me what it was all about."
I do not remember the rest. I went home at midnight, hoping no one had heard the interview. I felt immensely lonely in an ugly, hostile world. These were the people who judged bullfighting barbaric and outlawed it.
He is still on the radio. Why does no one rebel? Why didn't I walk out?
***
To me people with intuition are like wall-less rooms, like ballets, like abstract painting, like music. They are transparent, and you are never in danger of breaking your head against a brick wall. With intellectuals there is an interference with penetrative or absorbent activities. They cannot receive, feel directly. Herlihy, with little literary training, is more absorbent, has more natural antennae. He has an alert agility of mind which I compared to Lippold's mobile. Jim's lyrical improvisation about my writing comes closer to what I want to hear: it is the response in equivalent terms, it has to do with freedom, the freedom similar to that in jazz, in the unconscious, in the poet, in children. So that without the equipment of maturity they seize upon the evolutions of experience better than the Edmund Wilsons and the Maxwell Geismars.
Mary Green felt bad about the episode with Barry Gray. "I have felt uneasy, unhappy even, about getting you in the hands of such people, wondering if it was not a kind of crime to expose you to that, whether it would not be best to leave you in your literary world."
But in the first place, my literary world has not treated me any better.Partisan Review allowed Diana Trilling and Elizabeth Hardwick to tear me to pieces.Kenyan Review published one short story in fourteen years, and that was all. I was not asked to contribute to Perspective. I am not included in New Writing or in Discovery, The intellectual critics have not even read me. I am left out of magazines and anthologies. So what I feel is this: naturally I do not expect to be a popular writer, but there is a world in between, of people I want to find, who are not intellectual or political snobs, those who have feeling and intuition. I know they exist because they are the ones who write me letters, simple emotional letters. I want to find them, make my bridge with them. The literary poets have betrayed me. Auden asked Ruth Witt Diamant after hearing me read: "What's with Anaïs Nin?" and Ruth answered: "She is a poet." Auden should have known this. Dylan Thomas, Tennessee, Truman Capote ... what support did they give me?
[Summer, 1954]
Sierra Madre.
Mourning days for failed friendships are over. I am not victimized by neglect, less prone to earthquakes of the soul, to tidal waves of anguish. Quarrels at one time were prophetic of separation, loss (since the largest quarrel of all led to the separation of my parents and the loss of the father, country, a
musical world). Jealousy was once a messenger of divorce (my mother's jealousy of my father). Today I can live for months without the strangulation of anxiety. I have occasional minor attacks of nervousness, or panic; no nightmares, less guilt for living my own life according to my own nature. Very little of that excruciating fatigue which tightens my neck like a vice until I do not rest, nor eat nor sleep well.
