by Anais Nin
When did I first feel this? When did I repudiate the model of my mother and decide not to be a wife or a mother but a mistress? In spite of this I did inherit from her a strong protective instinct toward human beings. But I also cultivated what would give men not only their down-to-earth needs, but euphoria, ecstasy, pleasure, delight.
When she died I remembered only her courage. Her beautiful voice which was a balm, her care.
During her life she condemned my freedom. She often harked back to the lovely, submissive child I once was, and frowned upon what I had become.
It was not the loss of my mother which reawakened my love for her, it was because my mother's disappearance removed the stigma of her judgments, the dangers and guilt brought about by her influence, and left me a simple human being no longer concerned with my own survival, but able to recognize her qualities.
During her life I fought her influence, and she fought in me the kind of women who had displaced her.
When she died I could recognize our similarities. She did not recognize a form of maternity in my protection of the weak and helpless.
As soon as she died my rebellion collapsed. She left me a sewing machine, a gold thimble, the diaries she had bound by hand in France. I became "possessed" by the spirit of my mother. It was my only way to maintain her alive within myself.
How wise the primitives were who retained their ritual of possession so they would know when it took place and also know how to exorcise it.
My aunt Antolina telephoned me today. She censured the entire family for not being present at the burial of my mother; but during her life they caused her much unhappiness by interfering with her, censured one aunt for being a Christian Scientist, censured all of us for going to live in other countries and not keeping the family together, praised Joaquin only for his goodness, not his music, me for my devotion to my mother, not for my work, upholding the family as a sacred unity which should never be broken, and ending with the reproach I have suffered since childhood, when I rebelled against the succession of family rituals, feast days, birthdays, arrivals and departures, weddings and baptisms, funerals and hospital visits, this huge Cuban clan, proliferating children and endless duties; as soon as I could I freed myself of all of them and became the "indifferent" one in the family.
Joaquin so pale, and this reawakened in me my past role as a substitute mother while my mother was working. I had to control my impulse to enclose, hold, and protect him, had to control acting as my mother. Had to remind myself he is forty-five years old, mature, and fully able to make his own decisions. Do parents never change their vision of us as helpless and inadequate? When I took care of my mother during her illness, and found so many ways to make her comfortable, when I massaged her, she turned to me naively and said: "I did not know you knew so much about caring for others."
Joaquin successfully reversed the roles as my mother grew older and dependent. He imposed his will on the household and assumed great responsibilities as Chairman of the Music Department at Berkeley. He handled her death, the problems of her funeral, his relationship to the whole family, his trip to Cuba, exceedingly well. He respected the taboos, the family customs, the religious rituals with perfect grace.
Joaquin has no anger. He has become a saint, a human and tolerant saint. He is returning to the house two weeks after mother's death. I would have delayed that. Death of a loved one is like a mutilation, a part of your body is torn from you, you die a little. And then following that, the spirit of the dead one enters into you, as if in this way you sustain his life, assure his continuity. I who had refused to iron and wash clothes long ago, washed and ironed Joaquin's shirts and felt myself becoming my mother. I took on her maternal virtues. But I also carry within me her defect, anger, and all my life I had to struggle against this anger.
Better than the cult of objects, better than the keeping of physical reminders is this moment when we cease to struggle against the parent's own image of us and accept our resemblances as part of our being.
In ancient mystic beliefs, the spirit of the dead entered a newborn child. Surely our parents give birth to us twice, the second time when they die, and as they die, in rebellion against death, we accept the legacy of their character traits.
Joaquin inherited my mother's wholeness, I my father's dualities. But Joaquin also proved that the only way to remain close to the parent is to become this ideal figure they desire: the respectful and devoted son, religious, who never loved anyone more than his mother. I tried this when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and almost up to my eighteenth year. I was the perfect daughter; I submerged my personality into the personality of my mother. She chose my dresses, and kept me at home when other young women were out working. I was lost in my submission to her. But my first rebellion came when I decided I could not bear the passive suffering of poverty and I insisted on going to work. My mother opposed that. A friend helped me to find work I could do (being untrained in any profession). I became an artist's model, joined the Model's Club, and began to earn money to help the family. I may have lost her love before that, when at sixteen I rebelled against Catholicism.
I am at work on Lillian's return to her home and children, and in musical terms, Lillian is struggling with the muted tones she had not been able to hear.
I was no longer inhabiting Sierra Madre. I was in Paris with Moricand. Henry Miller had sent me a newspaper clipping of his death. And I remembered all that was not included in the story of the Mohican. I had first read his Miroir Astrologique in which he had, in a beautiful style, drawn astrologic portraits of Picasso, Max Jacob, Louis Jouvet. We were giving a party. I wanted to meet Moricand but was shy of inviting him. I took up the telephone and introduced myself. Later he said he had accepted immediately because the voice inviting him came from another world. He came. We barely talked. He was exceedingly formal, a grand seigneur. And he sent me a horoscope which read like House of Incest. We saw him often after that. I persuaded all my friends to have their horoscopes done. We took them to the hotel where he had a small room.
The room, an attic room, with the roof slanting over his bed, though shabby, was immaculate. He had a new white blotter on his work table and had covered the bedside lamp (probably a whorehouse pink) with white paper. He talked about Max Jacob, Picasso, Jouvet. He was wealthy then and could entertain them. This moment must have been the peak of his life, because he talked of nothing else. We all felt he was not interested in us, but finally both Henry's gaiety and my protectiveness penetrated his isolation and we made a deeper friendship.
One day at the houseboat he brought me a revolver. He thought I would need it. He thought I lived on the houseboat because I took opium and wanted isolation. He inferred this, he said, from reading House of Incest. He expressed desire: "I am so utterly dispossessed of everything." He asked for my love as one begs for life. I was gentle but gave him no hope.
I remember the many farewell dinners we gave him when the war came and he joined the Foreign Legion. He showed us the tin cup and tin set of spoon and knife given him. We sat with [Jean] Carteret and sometimes with other friends. What we all forgot when we looked upon the tragedy of his life was his determination to destroy himself. This impulse was so strong that I marveled he had not succeeded much earlier. His destructiveness was apparent in all he did.
He once found a wealthy patroness who lived in a castle near Paris. She wanted to help him, and all he had to do in return was to "grace" her salon. He enjoyed her world, he enjoyed her company. She helped him discreetly and without damage to his pride. Finally, she offered him a guesthouse on her property (he was literally starving before he met her).
There was a prostitute he saw once or twice a week, a little streetwalker with bangs on her forehead, a cheap fur piece, and a poodle the color of the streets themselves from so much walking and sitting on them. They did not live together. He talked about her unromantically. "She is like a cat to me, a companionable presence." If she had been his beloved mistres
s it would have been understandable. If she had lived with him, and she were indispensable to him, he could have refused the invitation of his patroness, or he could have visited the little prostitute once a week. Instead he asked the patroness to let him bring the girl to live with him on her estate and to be given an allowance directly.
After his failure to live with Henry Miller at Big Sur he began to look for me, but by this time my own self-destructiveness was ended. I could see his suicidal trend, and wondered why I had taken on such desperately hopeless burdens in Paris. Did I really believe I could reverse the negative process? Rescue them? I knew, at the time, Moricand's perversity, and his weights pulling him downward. I knew the origin of them. Because of his homosexuality, his family disinherited him. He lived for years by producing erotic drawings. He and Max Jacob decided the erotic drawings were bringing upon them the punishment of God. Max Jacob destroyed his, and Moricand did not. Max Jacob became a Catholic convert and found other ways of atonement. Moricand did not. Yet I fought desperately to keep him alive in Paris.
To cover up my help I let him translate House of Incest, which he did mostly by intuition with very little knowledge of English, just as Artaud translated Lewis's The Monk.
I knew what vast amounts of secret lore and occult knowledge died with Moricand. His love of playing the mysterious and enigmatic personage, his reticence, his inability to share his knowledge, made it all like the gold of the miser. It sank with him into oblivion. I do not know who inherited his papers. There was silence around his death. He died in the houseboat his rich family had endowed for the hobos of Paris, on the Seine, very near to where mine was anchored. Henry wrote about him in A Devil in Paradise. And what I had skimmed of beauty and poetics I kept in my story "The Mohican."
Felix Morrow says over the telephone: "I have the statements on the sale of Spy in the House of Love. Only 2400 copies were sold in three months. I am disappointed."
René de Chochor says: "I did not expect more. All I expected was to enlarge your circle of readers. I do not delude myself, you are a tough case, but your recognition will come."
"In view of this, in view of the possibility that Morrow may not want my next book, why do you make me work, why do you make me write? After all, I could spend my days at the beach, and save you from a poor financial venture!"
I said this playfully. We always talk playfully. He is good-looking, neat and charming. He answered me quite seriously: "Anaïs, you are one of the great writers of the world. We have plenty of writers who sell, and that is very nice, but I would not be happy just to be handling them. They cover my living expenses. You are my pleasure. I am proud of you. I think we have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. More readers. You are alive. People have seen you. Now the question is your next book must sell better. It may be wiser to give up trying to finish your Proustian work which requires the reading of four books which are out of print, and to write an independent novel. You may have to do that."
He speaks so gently and reasonably that I always listen. I wrote him a humorous letter. I always think I am reaching a dead end in my communication with the world.
Herbert Alexander did not fulfill any of his promises about a paperback edition, but it is not his fault. He does not have power over the system, and the system obeys orders only from the god of commerce.
This should have been the era of deep probings in the novel, the era of Freud, and instead it is the era of Marxism and Mobocracy. It is the era of persecution of individual development that is not of immediate or obvious use to the community.
People think that today the most useful member of the community is the one who sits through the McCarthy hearings, little knowing that the fascination they feel is not that of participating in or altering the course of history but witnessing projections of their own personal dramas. They are watching the drama of their own prejudices, aggressions, hostilities, fears; they feel virtuous because it is clothed in a political form and seems to be part of history.
Letter to Ruth Witt Diamant:
I forgot to write you about the Poetry Center.... I wish you would extend your support to that in-between bastard, son of poetry and prose, the poetic novel, which is much in need of legitimization. The novels of Djuna Barnes, Anna Kavan, Isabel Bolton, Giraudoux, because someday they will inherit the kingdom of Freud.
It is quite possible that each one of us may have a different way of expressing love, that my mother's may have been physical care, and my father's his aesthetic delight in photographing us. Once when I told Dr. Bogner my father did not love us, was not interested in us, she pointed out that his obsession with photographing us was an expression of interest but on another level—aesthetic.
What blocks compassion often is an overestimation of the other's power. Power does not inspire sympathy. But often this power is imagined, such as the power we imagine held by the parents. True, at one time they had power over us, power of life or death, but this did not mean that they themselves did not have fears, doubts, pains, troubles, tragedies, and that at any moment they might need us desperately. Their strength was relative to our childish helplessness, but later they had a claim to our acceptance of their human fallibilities. In fact, I would say that compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.
Irwin Edman: "A study of fine arts is of equal importance with social studies and perhaps more decisive morally."
Adlai Stevenson: "I am most deeply concerned over a trend toward conformity, a growth of anti-intellectualism, which manifests itself in a sneering attitude toward education, science, and the arts. The tendency is to stifle mental freedom, which is the very basis of a democracy's life and growth."
[Fall, 1954]
On one of my trips to New York, I went to visit Dr. Jacobson, now very famous and very much in demand. Powerful patients would send for him on chartered planes. This time I was told "Dr. Jacobson went to Egypt."
He had been called to take care of Cecil B. De Mille, who was filming The Ten Commandments. The set was so large, covered so much ground, that Dr. Jacobson never went outside. His trip to Egypt was on a film lot, with artificial pyramids and streets. People used cars to go from one point of the set to another.
Starting as a refugee from Germany, as a doctor practicing in a modest French apartment, Dr. Jacobson's life had soared. He is still dark-haired, dark-eyed, red-cheeked, vital, running through Central Park on his way to his office. He does not have a doctor's mannerisms, the attentive ear, the habit of elaborate tests, the patient diagnosis, the watching for signs. He seems to proceed from some intuition which functions suddenly, beyond symptoms, reports, tales, descriptions. It is as if he does not want to be enmeshed in the details which the sick conjure. It is as though they interrupt the trend of his perception at work. He is clairvoyant. At times he makes a diagnosis as a person enters the room. When he became famous, he concocted a way to remain in flight. He has several rooms. Each patient is allowed to enter a room and lie down. He arrives brusquely, gives an injection, exchanges a few words and rushes away as to an emergency. When a person pursues him with elaborate details he is already in another room, and thus he maintains a balance in flight, a perpetual motion. But the secret of his power is his very genuine and open duel with death. His face shows such joy at the effect of his injection, that it is part of the cure. He acts as if the patients have brought contagion and he must be like a Japanese sword fighter, constantly on the alert. His dynamic war against illness and his joy when he wins is keen. Whether he hates death and illness or is proud of his skill, I cannot tell. But every celebrity in New York is in his waiting room, performers whose livelihoods depend on being fit for a first night, to sing at an opera, or at a jazz concert, to speak at political meetings. It is always someone playing a major role in the life of New York. He also invites doormen, messengers, postmen, policemen, as well as poor artists and refugees from concentration camps. At one time he kept all his patients busy finding homes for camp refugees. A guest room here or ther
e until they could get on their feet, and his labor consisted of repairing the physical ravages. He was generous when needed, harsh with the spoiled, demanding with rich patients. Death was his enemy, and every triumph over it was his personal triumph.
To a wealthy woman who was weeping over the telephone and who was saying "I cannot stop crying," he answered: "Go ahead, you won't need to urinate as much."
Whatever he uses for medicines, or injections, his attitude has much to do with the efficacy of his treatment. It is his absolute faith in what he is doing, his confidence, his love of life which he transmits. He mocks self-indulgence, is impatient with depression. He holds up his wealthy clients for contributions to his research on hepatitis and cancer.
Once his apartment was broken into, and his radio and cameras stolen. The police came to investigate. Half an hour later the huge burly men lay on his couch and accepted injections.
He comes to parties with his injection needle sticking out of his pocket.
During a period of regular visits when I fought against anemia, I met Maya Deren there, Frederick Kiesler, Eleanor Carrington, singers, actors, producers.
He enjoys playing the magician: "You will sing tonight. You will act tonight." He only resents the investigators, who want to know what the medicine is.
