Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5

by Anais Nin

  ***

  How we love people after their death. In the same way we love certain artists after their death.

  The traits which were in opposition to our own, which threatened to alter us, to infringe upon our ordered universe, are forgotten. It was not that the dead disappeared, which created in us the capacity to love their qualities; it was that their disappearance caused the death of our ego, our ego died, and in the absence of danger to its needs, wishes, left in its place a human being not concerned with his own survival but with the recognition of other's values. Conceding with love and admiration to my mother meant an acceptance of traits inherent in me which I considered a threat to my existence, as, for example, my maternal qualities, and I had to fight them in her. She sought to make of me the woman I did not want to be, who capitulated to wifehood and motherhood, and while she lived she threatened all my aspirations to escape the servitude of woman. When she died I was forced to take into myself this conflict, and I realized I had long ago lost the battle. I am a woman who takes care of others on the same level my mother did. As soon as she died this rebellion collapsed. I loved my mother, who had visited upon us her own angers and rebellions, who had not known how to escape from feminine servanthood and had not achieved her first wish to be a loved and pampered concert singer, a wish which her marriage to my father had seemed to make possible (he trained her as a singer) but which ultimately was destroyed by the burden of motherhood and an egocentric husband. Mother's singing did not survive. She had to surrender all hope of a career in order to raise and later support her three children.

  The loveliest, the most carefree aspects of those we love we are rarely given, because of the conflict we engage in, each one, in each family, to assert our individual existence against the clan's rules and taboos.

  "The Paris you loved is dead!"

  It was René de Chochor who said this to me while we were having lunch in a luxurious restaurant in New York, and I wept right then and there. He had just come back from Paris, where he had been a student. I had not been there since 1940.

  "I want to prepare you for the changes. I don't want you to have a shock. I am sure that people engrave an image of others in their memory and keep seeing them unchanged, and they do the same with cities. I knew the Paris you loved. And it is not there any more. My friends have changed, those I went to college with. America has changed them, and I know the Paris you remember and wrote about."

  His words shocked me so much that as I was preparing to leave for Paris I also tried to prepare my mind. The first image his words brought to me was that of a cemetery. I tried to turn my face away, but all I could see at that moment were tombs. In Paris I had once lived overlooking the tombs of the Montparnasse Cemetery. Now I saw tombs. The tomb of my father, once the pampered concert pianist of Paris, the tomb of Antonin Artaud, of René Allendy, of Otto Rank, of Conrad Moricand, of Hans Reichel, Pierre Chareau, and then I saw a list of those who had disappeared during the war, emigrated, moved, died in concentration camps or in Spain. And I felt like dressing in black, and wearing widow's veils, and postponed the packing of my valises.

  Then I reread the stories in Under a Glass Bell and wondered what had become of the characters I had described, what had become of the houseboat, of the family who gave Under a Glass Bell its title, of Villa Seurat.

  Then I conquered my depression, and dressed my mind and my body for the present. I wore warm colors, and thought about a new Paris, an unknown Paris.

  I left Europe in a hydroplane in 1939 and returned in a jet. I drove along a speedway and not through overcrowded poor quarters. But as I passed I saw a café, a café on the street, with an open door, and one small round table outside, just big enough for two persons, two glasses of wine, two small iron chairs, a diminutive café like the cafés in Utrillo streets, shabby, with a faded sign, a dull window, lopsided walls, uneven roof. The smallness of it, the intimacy of it, the humanity of its proportion, the absence of American arrogance, the absence of gloss and glitter touched me and once again opened me to tenderness as Paris had always done. A human being feels one can sit in such a café even if one's hair is not perfectly in place and one's shoes are not shined, and even with a run in one's stocking. One could sit there and feel unique, feel in tune with the world, or out of tune, feel human and open to human emotion and wanting to weep. One could sit there if one felt the world too big and too barbaric, and feel once more in a human setting, a proper setting for a human being who does not feel arrogant, glossy, powerful. The small café and tenderness were not gone, the patina of much living, the worn and the tired and the wistful, my café, my Paris, where a soul can be a little worn and does not have to be shop-new, shop-glossy, hard and brittle.

  So the small café was there as I sped to the Hotel Crillon. The Square was planted with United Nations flags waving for famous visitors.

  The room was again, like the café, not new. It was softly, gently, touchingly imperfect. It was not new, the bedspreads were not new, the rug was not new, the chandelier was not new, the paint was not new. But mysteriously, this room which would not have seemed beautiful to an American, had a glow. I could not find its origin.

  I lay on the bed for a few moments and looked at the crystal chandelier. I felt distinctly that this room was not empty, as most rooms in American hotels seem empty and new, as if never inhabited by anyone, spotless, new, and virginal. There are no traces of other visitors in American hotel rooms. Whereas here the soft mild-yellow wallpaper, the slightly faded rug, the heavy velvet portières, the telephone and the bells all exuded a presence, many presences. I had the feeling that I had taken a drug. That the room was full of erotic brilliance, and of past visitors. Names came to my lips, Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Madame Du Barry, Ninon de Léñelos, Marcel Proust, Jean Giraudoux, Colette. Lovers, aristocrats, generals, men of the world, whoever they were, had been alive. Words had been said, expressive, articulate, eloquent, emotions had been displayed, gestures had been made, talented and inspired love made, wine had been drunk, dreams cradled, and the warmth came from the bodies, and from delicate suppers. All the life of Paris like an exquisite intoxication crowded in this room without need of steam heat, of electric gadgets, of anything but people who had lived richly, that the past could not erase. They remained like a perfume in the air, in rooms that had been lived in, enjoyed, loved, leaving psychic, voluptuous secretions.

  First the diminutive café, one which could be carried in the heart, and then the softly lighted rooms, the window open on the gray slate roof and a softly lighted city, the mist and the fogs serving as deflectors, diffusers of light. Diffusion. When one laughs or weeps too hard, the world is thus diffused, the hard boundaries are melted, and a hundred other persons lean with you to look out on the square.

  Why did I feel warmed by imperfections, discomfort, and patina? Because intense living leaves scars, and I could not find such scars anywhere in America. Inner scars, softened, human wear and tear.

  I felt a human relaxation, a slipping into a more human city, a place where, everyone being so busy living, there were no voyeurs, no journalists, bystanders, groomed, unruffled judges standing on the edge.

  As I walked I found the hobos by the Seine I once knew so well when I lived on the houseboat. They were not angry, they were not dour or frightening, as on the Bowery. They were comical, humorous, and their delirious speeches at the corners were ironic and witty.

  And there by the Seine was the bookshop, not the same, but similar to others I had known. An Utrillo house, not too steady on its foundations, small windows, wrinkled shutters. And there was George Whitman, undernourished, bearded, a saint among his books, lending them, housing penniless friends upstairs, not eager to sell, in the back of the store, in a small overcrowded room, with a desk, a small gas stove. All those who come for books remain to talk, while George tries to write letters, to open his mail, order books. A tiny, unbelievable staircase, circular, leads to his bedroom, or the communal bedroom, where he expected Henry Mil
ler and other visitors to stay. There is a toilet three floors below, in the cellar. There is another room, full of books, and in the hall, a small stove on which he cooks for everyone.

  How did George come to have this small bookshop by the Seine? He had read the "Houseboat" story years ago. He had come to Paris to search for a houseboat. He started his bookshop there, and was happy, but the books mildewed, and he had to move. He moved as near to the river as possible, and often from his window, watching the river, he had the illusion he was living on a houseboat.

  On Sundays he made ice cream, which he felt homesick Americans needed. He had fixed the guest room, the front room, expecting all of us would stay there, books and authors offered communally to those passing by, printed words and their voices in unison. He forgot that these writers from old Paris now had wives, children, mistresses, homes in America, fame, and hotel reservations. He forgot they could not always give themselves as freely or there would be no books to give, no books written.

  George could not understand why they did not stay there, by a fireplace often without wood to burn, in a room without a door. In the hallway there is a hole in the floor with an iron grille through which one could see what was happening in the bookshop below. A spy window on the floor, and those from below, if they had looked up, could have seen George as he stood by his dusty stove baking American pies for his expatriates, who were looking for a drink.

  So it is no longer Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company visited by André Gide, François Mauriac, Pierre Jean Jouve, Léon-Paul Fargue, Caresse Crosby, James Joyce, and Henry Miller. It is The Mistral, visited by James Jones, Styron, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, the beatniks and the new bohemians. The difference is that where there was a warm, hospitable, friendly, demonstrative, affectionate fraternity between writers and artists now there was often a sullen silence, a disinterested attitude, and the young bohemian lying on the couch reading a book would not stop reading when another writer came in. I marveled at their insulation. Unlike Miller, when they had cadged a meal, they did not rush to their room to write twenty pages in exultation. They sought drugs to help them dream, they had no appetite for life, no lust for women. They read like people waiting for a train. They are spectators. Xerox artists, perhaps obsolete in a world of science. To Paris they brought expectations, but they contributed no fervor, no curiosity, no excitement of the blood. The visitors were different.

  From The Mistral 1 went on a quest of the houseboat, La Belle Aurore, which I knew would not be in Paris, but it was not in Neuilly where I left it. I was told there was a cemetery of houseboats in Bougival.

  The taxi took me up the Seine, close to the banks. In Bougival I found a place with hundreds of discarded houseboats. Some were being repaired and repainted. Some were lived in as they were, by hobos, or by families with numerous children. They had been dragged to shore and dumped on the mire. Even then, the occupants had flowerpots on the window sills, and made gardens of sea shells or oyster shells. There were all kinds of barges. Most of them were the very long, flat barges used for the transportation of coal, bricks, and wood up and down the Seine. A few were corroded yachts which had once been white and glossy.

  But there was no La Belle Aurore among them. Had she disintegrated from old age? When I lived in her she was already unsafe, taking in water and having to be pumped. I felt melancholy not to be able to catch a glimpse of what had been a deep and rich adventure.

  I returned to Paris. I walked the streets as I always did, for hours. Looking at art shops, bookshops, antique shops, all of them unchanged. The bookstalls still there. With their erotic books wrapped in cellophane. With pornographic postcards, and rare books for the connoisseurs.

  Around Saint-Germain I noticed a bookshop where they were having a gathering for book-signing. Through the window I saw Louise de Vilmorin, the heroine of Under a Glass Bell. I entered and bought her new book. I took my place in the line waiting for autographs. She was sharing honors with a motorcyclist who had written about his life. He was all in black leather and kept his jacket on. When I faced Louise she recognized me, and I recognized the eyes sparkling with irony, the smile of superiority, shaped for wit, the face which reminded one of all the paintings of French history when they depicted aristocracy and pride. And to see her standing beside the motorcyclist was the most incongruous, comical, modern fable. She signed my book, said she wanted to see me, always fresh and cool as a flower, the quick intelligence speeding up time, while the big-handed motorcyclist signed his books laboriously.

  I went to see Zadkine in his old home again, the two small houses with a garden in between on the Rue d'Assas, one his home and one his studio full of sculptures. His face is still ruddy and his eyes sharp, but his limbs tremble a little.

  On the doorstep of his studio stand two wooden sculptures of women.

  The Germans did not take any sculptures away.

  The two women, full-bellied, undulating, long-necked, had, during the war, and during the time he spent in New York, sprouted a vine and flowers, which half covered them, and grew at the top of their heads. Zadkine looking at them wistfully said: "You see, even in death there is beauty."

  The next day he was at a vast exhibit of modern art. Some of his own sculptures and murals were on exhibit. But as he walked into the vast building, once a palace, at the very entrance, where the winter cold rushed in, he saw an abstract birdcage built like an intricate and convoluted spiral, in which two bewildered parakeets had been placed and could not find their way to food and water, and remained in one corner baffled by the maze. Zadkine thundered in his loudest voice: "What are these birds doing here in this draft? They will die of cold, and if they do not die of cold they will die insane locked in such an abstract cage. One should not experiment with live birds in a dead cage; let the designers try this on their own children, and then they'll know if a human being can live in an abstraction." Moricand was part of the cemetery. But Jean Carteret was alive, and his apartment which I described minutely in "The All-Seeing" in Under a Glass Bell was absolutely unchanged. It seemed darker and dustier, that was all. I could not tell whether it was time which had layered dust on the objects from Lapland, from Africa, from South America, from all the places he visited, or whether my own vision of them had lost the sparkle of poetry I once saw. He still seemed like an astrologer, a fortuneteller, a mysterious character whose constant activity did not manifest itself in a body of work. He had found writing difficult, laborious. Now he was enthusiastic about the idea that writing was disappearing, and that he could talk into a tape recorder. He wanted a tape recorder. Then all this profuse, imagistic talk he spent so lavishly in cafés would become a work, there would be a record of his endless dissertations on esoteric subjects. At the café he talked abstractions. He made drawings. He seemed more than ever removed from the present and from humanity. He was dealing in abstractions so esoteric and obscure that we could only listen. When you know someone well, and have once followed the traceries of his fantasies, been familiar with them, you do not recognize as easily the signs of schizophrenia, but this time I felt it. He had gone too far into space. He spoke a language which could not be shared. It was far beyond astrology. It was like a vast web in which he entangled himself. His eyes were unseeing. I once described them as all-seeing because he was then a visionary, and he guided his course by psychology and astrology. But now he was spinning, spinning words, concepts, so far removed from our reach that I wanted to grasp him physically and rescue him. It was an evening which dissolved in a long monologue, unanswerable, unreachable.

  I felt chilled, desolate. What had kept him bound to earth and human beings, and permitted him to lose gravity, and be pulled into a void?

  ***

  I visited Richard Wright. We spoke of our first meeting at Canada Lee's apartment, at the time Native Son was being produced on Broadway with Canada Lee in the star role. This was in the 1940's. We both lived in the Village. He came several times to the studio on Thirteenth Street for dinner. Then Geor
ge Davis, hearing of his difficulties, invited him to stay in his house in Brooklyn. An amazing house, we remembered. Filled with old American furniture, oil lamps, brass beds, little coffee tables, grandfather's clocks. He liked antiques. Many famous people stayed there. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee. George Davis was born in February and so were Auden and Carson McCullers so I called it the "February house." My Haitian friends, Josephine Premice, and a Russian poet friend all went to serenade Richard Wright with drums and songs and dances. He did not respond fully, and I did not know then that he was mistrustful of our friendship. He did not believe in it. He admitted this later and told me so on one of his trips back to the States. And asked forgiveness. Living in France, he had learned that such friendships were possible. He had re-covered his faith.

  He is a handsome man, quiet, simple, direct, his speech is soft and modulated, his ideas clear.

  He was happier in France. He could go anywhere, to the theater, restaurants, his children were going to good schools.

  He described again the void in which the American writer works, with nothing to support or enrich him, and how this void, for the Negro writer, became a real danger, an aggressive threat. How the response to Native Son had been mostly cheers like those given to a baseball player. He objected to such phrases by a critic as: "Richard Wright hit the jackpot."

  "What kind of a response is that?" he had said bitterly.

  He also talked against the New York hostesses who were willing to invite him because he was a best-selling author but who objected when he arrived with a Negro friend.

  When George Davis invited him to stay in his house in Brooklyn there were difficulties. The Negro who tended the furnace resigned because he would not tend the furnace for another Negro. To mark their disapproval of his marriage to a white woman, Helen, people threw stones at the windows.