Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5

by Anais Nin

  I spend a great deal of time trying to find the culprit, the origin of my angers. Dr. Bogner said it was because I cannot bear to see myself as a person capable of anger. I always tried to divert it, by understanding, by compassion, by justifying others' behavior. But repression of anger causes intensification of it.

  "You pick up the waves you want to pick up. There is always hostility and cause for anger in the air. But like radio waves, you pick up what confirms you in your anger, what harmonizes with the image you wish to make. In your family everyone was preoccupied with shifting the blame. Your mother blamed your father for everything that went wrong, and your father, in his own way, built up a case against her in his letters, as you told me, a perfect logical and rational brief."

  This is probably the major occupation of most people, this fixing of the blame on others, a projection of a personal drama onto others, onto countries, art, science, philosophy.

  I am trying to find the cause of hostility to my work, so I will not be angry at America.

  My talks with Jim are like jam sessions. Last night in a drizzle, we walked to the White Horse, my favorite café, all in wood, with old-fashioned mirrors, huge mugs, imported May wine. The barman, an old Scotch miner who had been in a mine explosion. Photographs of Munich. Dylan Thomas liked it, and many other artists. A workman in workmen's clothes with a giant poodle, who looked sad and innocent watching his master drinking. Artists in house painters' uniforms. Beards, mustaches, corduroy trousers, soldiers, Negro jazz players, a Chinese girl out of a Chinese print. And the rapid machine-gun talk. Directness like a thousand arrows and utter freedom. We can say anything. There are no pauses, no examinations of what we are going to say, and no effort at sequence. It is elating and invigorating. Euphoria comes from the freedom of improvisation and the fact that we never judge each other. We have set no moral, social, or realistic limits. All we ask is the electric charge of vital life dynamics, and the next day, as after listening to jazz, no hangover, no backtracking, no censorship, no malaise.

  Whereas with Max Geismar, whose friendship I valued, this is what happens. He is a spiritual crab. He is writing about American writers backward in time, starting with the dead ones. He comes to see me for a few minutes when he has business in New York. He is hurt that we all label him a "social critic." But when I invite him to come to New York to meet someone who admires him, or to hear jazz, or to see a Japanese film, or even to read Wallace Fowlie on surrealism so that, as I explained, he may move into the future when he gets tired and bored with [William Dean] Howells (as he tells me he is), he can't come because he is working, and does not want to be sidetracked, so he negates living (he always says I am the only one whose company he enjoys). When, to attenuate the sting of my having accused him of being a social critic, I say: "Let's make an anthology of surrealist elements in American writers such as Nathanael West." He says: "No, you do it, I don't know anything about it."

  "But you say you are bored with Howells" (so bored he wrote a long letter to Edmund Wilson, who answered with a lecture, a sermon, a paternal castration, infuriating Max, who revered him when he was young and was always being disparaged by Wilson). Now Max knows that Wilson is no longer reading exploratively. He is preparing himself for death by studying religions (a map for the next world) and genealogies and ancestor worship to assure his own portrait for posterity. When I remind Max that he is lonely in the past, in the historian's solitary cell, he says (with the coquetry of a woman playing hard to get), "But I am comfortable in the past." He knows I will not follow him there. As I once said to him, "I was born modern, I was born contemporary."

  Reading a few fragments of the diary disturbed him. Conflict? The diary is a blueprint for living, a Baedeker to freedom. So I took it away and gave it to Jim, who nourishes himself on it.

  Dear Max:

  I know you are genuinely concerned about the diary and want me not to feel blocked. And I am grateful for your advice. But I will try to explain something now that will make you happy and improve our friendship on the ideological side (nothing needs improving on the human side). This year 1 finally achieved objectivity, very difficult for a romantic. The divorce from America, as I call it, was painful, but has proved very creative and liberating. It was like breaking with a crabby, puritanical, restrictive, and punitive parent. As soon as I overcame the hurt, I began to write better than ever. America, for me personally, has been oppressive and destructive. But today I am completely free of it. I don't need to go to France, or anywhere. I don't need to be published. I only need to continue my personal life, so beautiful and in full bloom, and to do my major work, which is the diary. I merely forgot for a few years what I had set out to do. To prove that problems are primarily psychological, and that no Marxism, no economic security, and no social obsession will solve them. American history has proved the fallacy of this. You have to begin with the self, the personal and the human being, and then proceed to the community. Psychoanalysis was right. And in that sense it is altruistic. We live in a country which tried to destroy the growth and the development of the self in the name of social growth, and look at the monstrous human beings it has produced, the crime, the tyranny, the corruption, the political horrors. Having settled this in my own mind, I have settled down to fill out, round out the diary. I am at work now on what I call the volume of superimpositions, which means that while I copy out volume 60, I write about the developments and conclusions which took place twenty years later. It all falls into place. It is a valuable contribution to the faith in the Freudian system. It can wait for publication. I feel now that all America's attempts to batter this self into submission have failed, and I am the stronger for having withstood it. So I am doing my life work quietly now. I feel free of the prying eyes, of irrational criticism. I am in a cool, serene laboratory. The self, in the narrow sense, as you know in all creations, in all experiments, in all research, in all exploration and invention, is not important. I have proved something that I believe will be of value to humanity when they get weary of trying to solve everything from the outside. This has to wait far beyond my own existence because the world is in its material phase. It has to see that dialectical materialism is leading it to destruction far more effectively than romanticism or neurosis. It is an interesting stage. And now I understand why I hurt you, but will never do so again. Because this is no longer a hurtful, emotional thing, but history, psychology, philosophy. I also can explain to you why I felt so compelled to take the diaries away from you. It happened after I read your review of Hemingway in which you took him to task for living outside of the United States and for not keeping his nose to the political grindstone. At this moment you were no longer my well-loved friend but a symbol of what I do not believe. How dare anyone go so far in tampering with another's life? How dare anyone pass such judgments of how and where one should live? But now the ideas you have, or the beliefs you have, no longer threaten me./ don't live here any more. I live in the future. And it is anywhere, and it is a lighter and freer and more humorous place. This is quite different from escape (which you would also look down upon as a Marxist). In escape you abandon your life's work. This is more like the scientist going into his laboratory and keeping the uninitiate out merely so they won't break the bottles and shatter the formulas, and spill the precious liquid. It is altitude, and a preparation for a task which may take years. It is good for work.

  Edmund Wilson disturbed and hurt you. I was able, when he telephoned me to meet him for dinner, to say: "I have no desire to see you."

  I feel so strongly about this, that I would add that if the whole world went through the same quest I went through in search of reality and truth, that would be the end of war. Remove the power of what makes you angry; then you are ready to live for bigger aims and better friendships.

  So Max withdraws into the sterile world of Howells (because he is a museum piece) and Max feels the necessity of making a literary history or catalogue (a taste I consider necrophilic when it relates to the truly dead
but a resuscitation when it relates to Léon-Paul Fargue, who will always be alive because he was alive when he was living). Actually, one should only trouble to resuscitate those who were alive, not those who were stillborn.

  So I go to the White Horse with Jim and we have a word jam session, and people ask me why I frequent the young rather than my mature friends.

  I gave Max all of Rank to read. No comment. Possibly he gets overstirred, over stimulated, and feels fear. Anyway he returned to Mr. Howells. As Anne puts it (her wit is magnificent always) : "At this moment Max is Mr. Howells, and I am Mrs. Tolstoy and we are getting on well."

  The contact with the young is contact with the future. But some of the young I have known were amazingly traditional and far from modern; they stratified early.

  With Jim I share a disrespect for Dylan Thomas, for Eliot.

  Last night he gave me an interpretation of the end of Nightwood I had failed to see: the woman, after considering the girl as a human being and being blinded, baffled, destroyed by the nonhuman behavior of the girl, finally sees the girl as a dog, as an animal and not a human being.

  So very well, Dr. Bogner, you awaken angry and you tune your radio to the anger of the world. You pick up on your wavelengths the crimes, the wars, the polemics, the floating insults, the passing curses, the flying bullets. You select your world's composition for the day. It is your choice. There are other events taking place. It is all a private symbolic drama. The anger must be dissolved, it is toxic, and it corrodes the joy of being alive. I am laboring at this. At the antitoxics.

  The diary is like life itself—une oeuvre inachevée, ever incomplete. Sometimes I would like to live long enough to terminate it in every detail, make of it a Proustian work. But to follow the life line is always of greater concern to me than the perfection of detail. I put enough perfection in the novels.

  Dream: Dr. Bogner has a pain in her stomach. She has just finished analyzing me. Then she ceases to be an analyst, expresses her own pain and confesses that she really wants a husband. I respond warmly, feeling happy that she should confide in me. I offer to give a party for her, and to invite every charming man I know. I keep saying: "He must be sensitive and brilliant."

  Dr. Bogner: "Do you think that in your dream you are saying you need no more analysis?"

  "Oh, no, I do know I will not be finished with analysis until I have reached a resolution of my life and work, economic independence, and a better relation with the world. I am fully aware of that. Analysis is one of the powerful elements I have complete faith in to attain harmony and wholeness."

  Dr. Bogner: "There is an identification with me in the dream, for you are the one who has had stomach pains, not I. And even though you are going to take care of finding me a husband, the particular qualities of intelligence and sensitivity are, as you tell me, both those you believe I display in the analysis, and those you personally prize the most."

  On the plane, Flight 5 nonstop New York to Los Angeles, I summed up the month's analysis with Dr. Bogner. I feel so much better, so much less angry, so much lighter and full of energy and buoyancy. I have had anger but no depressions. More humor, more confidence. I am more aware of my fear of the world's cruelty (dreams before facing the public about bats, snakes, leeches, tarantulas) and I understand how the fear has made me hostile. I accomplished a lot this month. Tracked down the French translation of Ladders to Fire lost by my French publisher, repaired my friendship with Geismar, who definitely does not understand my work, was able to speak for Henry, enjoyed my buoyant friendship with Jim. Less guilt and less oppression. Less fear. As I discover the personal drama behind all I did, I also discover the personal reason why people attack me, such as the woman who wrote me angrily: "I lived with a Sabina..."

  Kimon Friar included Djuna Barnes in an anthology of poetry, but not me, when it was he who invited me to Amherst College as a writer of poetic prose.

  I am working well on Lillian's return home. René de Chochor and Felix Morrow keep saying I must abandon the roman fieuve and write a BIG BOOK if I am to continue publishing. My temptation is to give them five hundred pages of fragments from the diary.

  But Jim writes me:

  The important thing is this: nothing you or anyone else has ever written has remained with me so substantially as the first portion of your work in progress—Solar Barque. This is something I wanted to mention all during your stay here but we had much to talk about and this seemed too important to do in conversation that I can't formulate again, as clearly, so I'm trying to do that now. But here is what has transpired: I find that at important moments now, and each night before I go to sleep, my mind brings out for viewing images from this work. In some important ways, I think this experience in reading has possessed me more entirely than anything I've read before, anywhere. The ancient city and the fantasy flight of the solar barque, the girl sunning herself, awakening in horror from death which has lighted on her shoulder, and then the flight of the boat again.

  I think I have a private image that has grown from these; a personal view of the composite that is nearly impossible to describe, except imperfectly, clumsily (perhaps because if it were sayable in direct language, easily translatable, there would be no need for the artist to evoke it as you have done) something that has to do with the soul being the body; mysticism become a physical thing, as if the high moments (art religion love) can, for people, only coexist with real, physical life. By being purely what one is, a living animal with five senses. And the five of these, operating at their top efficiency, create a sixth; and the sixth sense the artist reaches and functions from in his moments of flight. Now perhaps you see why I have been unwilling to launch into this. It comes out flat. I can only hope that these platitudes suggest to you what I'm trying to convey. It is the most difficult writing job for me; this effort to describe the best thing that can happen to one. We have spoken before of the difficulty of describing experiences that are the opposite of painful. Most artists can describe pain exquisitely without much effort; the chore, an almost impossible one for most of us, is to convey the essence of something that has been beautiful. For this reason, I have suspected that your final book in the long tapestry would be a dull one. Health does not make very good reading usually. People who are winning their battles and who remain readable, vital writers are few. Frankly, 1 did not believe you could do it, not because I think you are less than a great artist, but because so few have done it that I felt it would be too much to expect. But as it has developed, you have done this better than any example I can think of; and the book is more readable, exciting on more levels, than any you have done in the past. I think there is a word better than maturity to name what you have reached. It is what you have lived for. It's the reason for all the human risk, the pain, everything you have endured, experienced, enjoyed. The ability to transmute it purely, perfectly. The volumes and volumes of rehearsal. I wish there were some way to shock you, if necessary, into realizing that this is exactly the moment (I refer to the book itself, not to the clock or the day of the week) at which you must demand of life the conditions under which you are able to finish this work. And to tell you the truth, I am disgusted with you as an artist for having permitted De Chochor's words to enter this sacred part of your consciousness—or the publisher's words about bookkeeping, etc. As a human being I am sympathetic to this, because I fall prey to even pettier discouragement myself—but I expect more of your artistry—having seen more distinguished examples of it (the diary, writing under fire, not when the mood strikes, or when the room is warm, or when the coffee is boiling, or when the money is in the pot, or when everyone is crying for more, but writing under fire, personal fire, peril, risk— under fire; this is why I expect more of you than I have reason to expect of myself—at the moment anyway). And I don't mean to shock you when I use the word disgust. The difference between this human reaction and the work itself is almost grotesque. They have nothing to do with one another. I don't mean that you should be at this moment writing in
the book. I only mean that there should be a different reason for not doing so ... more absorption. Or pure repose, like the earth in the winter, the roots and juices working deeply warm under the cold and motionless crust; call it the winter of the heart, the time between. But Jesus, agents may die in the wintertime, publishers may go bankrupt, perish, cities may fall, but the artist, in this winter, has nothing to do with these events; he bears real relationship only to ancient cities, the flights of the solar barque, the memory in the senses, the anticipation of his own springtime. As we know, there are moments at which the artist must victimize the human being he inhabits, and assume his higher life, tell the world to go to hell. And this is not difficult for an artist to do, or, I should say, not nearly as difficult as preserving himself from pressures during gestation periods. The world thinks that when the writer is not at his typewriter, he is ready to talk business, talk anything, because he is not working. So I don't blame the publishers, De Chochor, and I don't blame the part of you that the world sneaks into. And I'm not talking to you now, Anaïs, but to the woman who writes the books.

  And now about the man who writes my books: I haven't a beginning point in my head, and I don't even use the diary (my own) as well as I could. But I have a feeling that something is going on, so I continue pleasantly content on the surface and trust that something is going on in there. During these periods of nothing I usually suspect of myself that I am dry; but now I have a sense that some inner activity is in progress and that pretty soon I'll sit down and begin to make something on this machine. There is a terrible kind of comfort connected with this apart* ment, and walking to work every day, and having dinner and company, and seeing shows, and I would probably be mortally frightened except that there is always that one inside who screams at me, and reminds me that I am not dead. I've stopped being intimidated by the possibility that I am not an artist. I know that I am. I'm not sure how this came about, but I don't question this fact any more. I am, as they say, cocksure. The only trouble is the discomfort of not being actively working on something, but this will end very soon, I think. Your work with me on my diary is more important than any other thing. Of course there are combinations of infinitely varied forces that bring this confidence about; but the most important is probably you. I know damn well I can fool De Chochor, and the Paris Review, and the American theater, but I know perfectly well that I can't fool you. My own private fraud detector. And the way I know is that 1 have tried now and then (unconsciously in my work) and have always been found out.