Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5

by Anais Nin

  I would like to have the portrait of myself in your diary. It is the best I have. Not only because it is beautiful, but because it is also the way I want to be, and feel that at my best I am. And I would like to have the part which has to do with the evening at the White Horse, a wonderful evening for me.

  At the risk of repeating, I must say again that Solar Barque is inside of me as no other book has been. I know that I have personalized this experience, but I have not exalted it. It exalts itself. It is that power. And I talk about it, and think about it. Not the power itself but a sense of what you did. There are sentences I am able to quote, and would like to, even now, but I won't because they are not a total but a partial view; and the book's great virtue is its perfect balance of life and death, the barque and the sunning. The sensual beauty of the earth combined with the beauty of flight. Death as it is used in this book (and in reality, I believe) charges life with meaning and significance and force. The senses of man, the most beautiful animal of them all, require such urgency; it stalks him into life. I think that if you said nothing else in your life, this alone qualifies you as a great woman and a great artist. And it has a stunning effect on a reader, an awakening, empowering effect.

  "Now get with it, honey, get with it."

  Kay Dart, looking like a Hawaiian queen, and John dressed in a dark suit like a missionary (his father was a missionary in Africa) were sitting at Zardi's while Shorty Rogers played on his horn a poliphony never to be imitated in life and which I would give my life to equal in writing. John was saying: "We need roots. We want a home, a garden, a job, all of which our American culture has developed in us, and neither Kay nor I have had it."

  I flipped my eyelids and my billowy Italian dress and said: "My roots are portable."

  Sierra Madre.

  Dream: Atmosphere of gloom and sorrow. I have learned that my mother did not die a natural death but took her own life. Joaquin and I are desperate. She left a valise like a salesman's valise, in which are neatly placed all the parts of a lunch box, Thermos bottles, plastic spoons, sandwiches, et cetera. My mother had written under each one: "More picnic boxes to fill. Another lunch box to fill. Everyday more lunch boxes. Lunch boxes again. Nothing but lunch boxes."

  The implication to me was that my mother had filled too many lunch boxes and had finally gone mad and committed suicide.

  I have always felt the role of woman as half-servant or total servant with keen rebellion. Yesterday Christie gave all her clothes to her mother to carry from the pool, saying: "You make a good servant."

  I have taken up first aid because I was called upon three times to give first aid and felt helpless. Monday I went from eight A.M. to twelve. I faced one of my greatest fears, the fear of looking upon physical wounds. I never feared psychological horrors. But I dreaded to witness an automobile accident. I was always impressed with Thurema Sokol's courage. She rescued a man in an automobile accident who had been cut by glass. His head was open. Thurema closed the wound with her hand and stopped the blood.

  I love to take care of Chris, Kitty, and Mollie Campion to relieve their parents. They are fairy-tale children, sensitive, delicate, and poetic. I genuinely love them.

  But the children on the other side of my house seem made of badly cooked oatmeal. But when the mother went to the hospital to await the third oatmeal baby, I took care of the other two and cooked dinner for the whole family. Awaiting news of the baby I felt excited, even without a personal love. For a moment I was reintegrated into the fraternity of a community life, la vie de famille, which I spent my life evading. Acceptance of the human in place of the marvelous.

  Lecture at Pomona College.

  The Paris Review, I introduced Jim to, accepted his story "A Summer for the Dead." Jim celebrates. He was the center of attention.

  In Caresse Crosby's copy of an old Transition, in which a fragment of House of Incest appeared, there was mention of me as included in the "heroic period of surrealism."

  Caresse, author of The Passionate Years in a passionless era, appears. Her dress is airy, winged. It is of black but transparent material, it is inflated and crisp by new chemistries, as organdy once was by starch and ironing. It gives her the silhouette of a young woman. Her hair, though gray, is glossy, and brushed and also starched and the opposite of limp, because the spirit in Caresse is airy and alive, serving the Citizens of the World, traveling to her land in Delphi, which will become the center of her project, its symbol. Age can wrinkle her face, freckle her hands, ruthlessly drop the eyelids over opened eyes, can tire her, but it cannot kill her laughter, her enthusiasm, her mobility.

  Her second husband, Harry Crosby, committed suicide at the side of another woman (but Caresse had been invited first to share the suicide pact). Her adored son Bill died asphyxiated by a faulty gas heater in Paris. She lost two fortunes, but she wears at her neck a huge bow because dress and body and hair reflect the alertness and the discipline of her spirit.

  "I went to a cocktail party in Washington at Huntington Cairns', and I was appalled at how little interest people had in each other."

  Perhaps she did not live on the deepest levels, but the level on which she situated herself, that of an elegant grain of pollen, a smiling international serpentine, a chargée d'affaires of the heart, a public-relations expert among lovers and artists, a personal representative of the artists, a publisher who played the writers as others of her set played the horses, the purest example of the mouvement perpetuel oi the fervors. Certainly a woman like this is worth more than those who are deaf, dumb, and blind to other human beings.

  At another party there was a lady who, unlike Caresse, aged without illusory fiesta dress, without the blessings of cosmetics, and without skillful reconstructions. It may have been that she decided from the beginning that no art and no charm could reduce the prominence of her nose. At this moment, with her memory almost gone, with her hair like an accidental pile of hay, her skin dry and coarse, she seemed partly animal and partly mummy. But she told a story:

  "When I went to Nairobi, and went out lion hunting in a jeep, one African was driving, and the other carried my gun. The rule in this kind of hunting is to remain in the jeep and to keep driving. Well, when we reached a particularly deep gully, the jeep got stuck and while they were working to get it going, I left them and went for a walk along the gully. I was walking back peacefully when I saw, across the gully, an enormous lion walking parallel to me. I was calm. I continued to walk toward the jeep. So did the lion. Then where the gully turned to the left, the lion went in the opposite direction to mine but before the parting of the ways he looked back at me as if to say goodbye."

  I felt that the lion had determined Mrs. X did not belong to the human race. That furthermore, there was an affinity between her hair, skin, bones, and some aged animal. Or that perhaps there was nothing there to stimulate his appetite. The friendship, in any case, the peaceful walk, was understandable. If I had been walking along the gully, and I spotted Mrs. X, I would also have walked in the other direction.

  American writing poses as realism. John Goodwin writes about Haiti. He mentions politics, economics, prices, costs, size, aspect, and establishes the realism so dear to America. To all appearances it is an objective novel (in contrast to mine), but soon the characters appear and they are thoroughly distorted and absolutely impervious to Haiti, never having grown any closer to it than to each other. However, the realism has been established. Their madness is never perceived. The book, they say, is a documentary. It deals with the white and black problem. With magic on the black side, and alcoholism on the white side. It never revealed either Haiti or its parasitic inhabitants.

  At Millicent's birthday party, her granddaughter, now six years old, asked the Reverend: "When you baptized me, was God there?"

  What I see around me is that the disillusioned Communist is more bitter than a disillusioned lover. Because politics are so narrow and demand such single-mindedness, the rest of the personality is atrophied. When disillusion
comes, there is nothing left to renew faith. In the disillusions of love, there is still the habit of love left, and faith in love itself. It is a personal failure, not the total ideology.

  Talk with Dr. Bogner. Discussing the three things I failed in: to make money, to drive a car, to run a camera. The three were symbols of man's prerogatives: leadership and excellence. I was afraid to take over masculine activities. The man was in the driver's seat. As soon as this was clear (which means actually to separate the pure from the impure motive), I felt free. Dr. Bogner added: "When you took a job to help your mother, it was seemingly a pure motivation, but you felt guilt not because you stepped in to help in a crisis, but because originally you had wanted to take your mother's place in your father's affection, because originally (original sin!) you were angry with her for driving away your father, angry with her for bringing you to America, so far away from him, when you were happy in Spain, nearer to him. So these hidden angers, covered as they were by good reasons for taking a job, became in the dream your moving into your mother's place when she drove badly."

  This may even explain why I repudiated music (my father's prerogative), why I never entered politics (Gonzalo's attribute). But writing? Why did I not fear to write, when that was Henry's profession and vocation? Perhaps because I felt he was so strong a writer, I could never surpass him.

  The pure and the impure motives mix. The conscience is aware of its deeper intentions, and becomes uneasy.

  ***

  My earliest memory is of sociability. In Neuilly when I was four or five years old, I went out and invited everyone who lived on our street for tea.

  From my childhood diary, age eleven: "I have decided it is better not to love anybody. As soon as you begin to love, it is time to leave. Look at my grandmother. I love her, and I love Barcelona, and now we have to leave. The best thing is not to love and then going away will not hurt any more."

  Advice that fortunately I did not follow.

  Note from Geismar:

  Just a line in haste to say that your Xmas card was sweet and touching and nice to get; yes you showed your fangs or claws or the tips of your anxiety when your last book appeared and I was hurt; but all authors go through this period when their progeny are born, and fight with all the critics, even when the critic is trying to do his best for the author, whom he sincerely admires and respects, and even loves in a sociological way; but the critic knows this mood, being himself an author more than a critic, God knows, and he felt the artist would get over this mood, as she did, but it was just as well she was a lady artist, because that is a great thing, and he can always blame it on being a woman at heart, which is a great thing, and there is no reason that both of them now cannot look forward to such years of amity, of mutual admiration, and, I think, a rather touching affection for each other. You are nice.

  [Spring, 1955]

  Yesterday I asked myself whether I had lost my power to create because of the many humiliations America had inflicted upon me and the commercial failure of Spy in the House of Love. Am I defeated by the coldness of the critics?

  The answer came this morning. The inner music started again. I reread what I had done on Solar Barque, and liked it. Tonight I hear the music and all my feelings are awake.

  My greatest problem is one inherent in the experiment itself. Because I follow the pattern of free association the design is sometimes chaotic, even to me.

  The attempt to construct a novel in this way is difficult.

  I wanted to show how the adventurer does not forget his past or escape it when he goes to the paradises. The doctor gave the drug of remembrance and refused the drug of forgetfulness. He is killed for that, because people want to forget. Lillian does not escape. She returns to remember and liquidate the past.

  Lecture at Evanston. Felix Pollak was at the station, after driving through flooded roads in a taxi, poor Felix, an extravagance for his modest budget. He looked like his handwriting, small, delicate, with big, sad Spanish eyes, a gentle smile, the hands of a violinist. In the taxi he kissed my hand like a true Viennese, and during the drive we had a long talk. He had been nervous, he was not nervous any more. As I found out later he was being metamorphosed from a man of forty to a man of eighteen. A metamorphosis not without inconvenience, for with it were reawakened his adolescent romantic longings for other lives.

  All of Chicago's sky rained angrily upon such lyrical states. They tried to drown the Curator of Special Collections as he rushed to meet a "famous writer," a character who confirmed his inner world. It made him dissatisfied with the present, with Evanston, the library, the small daily routine of an eight-hour office day, the unfulfilled potentials of life, la vie triviale.

  His violin is there, his beautiful chess pieces, the piano, Sara's cello, many books, and once more Europe and America trying to live together.

  His great love is Hermann Hesse. He has written about him. He wants me to write him a letter. He has not received his due. Felix wrote to me:

  Hesse's writings are vivid and vital and immediate enough to be understood by themselves, but to be really appreciated he should be seen against the background of Jakob Boehme and Novalis, of £. T. A. Hoffmann, and Jean Paul.... None of his novels have what is called "social significance," they are concerned with the individual.

  Felix Pollak had quietly and gently manipulated the whole situation. The library's purchase of forty-three manuscripts, the exhibit in glass cases, originals of books, engravings, records, publicity on the campus. But so quietly, so subtly nobody knows it, has noticed it. So he is overlooked, not invited to lunch and dinner, invisible. He was, however, asked to introduce me, which he did.

  When you give someone a flavor of other worlds, you also give the poison of discontent. Life is dull at Evanston. I took a walk. The lake was bilious. The wind cold. The houses big and without charm. An atmosphere of a hospital, school, factory. I know what Felix feels. People live here as if disconnected from each other. There are no relationships because they have denied the self. The students stand about, glued to each other, saying good night, but, I am sure, like puppies in a warm nest, still blind, not seeing each other. Felix struggles to make them read Hesse.

  The hall for reading was a cold, wind-swept place. Always the massive podium I try to avoid, to face the public with all of myself. There was noise from other rooms, and the light was bare and violent, as in a cafeteria. I was frozen physically and emotionally. Afterward Professor Douglas had a gathering at his apartment People talk but it is in a void. It could be me. I felt a stranger. No one said anything I could remember, though I listened with all my attention. They talked about their little daily business. The rain. Examinations. The effect of spring upon the students.

  Dream of a revolution. Men, many men, in a place like Mexico. They have just finished a revolution and are surreptitiously returning to work. The leader does not want me to hear about the details, but I say with exaggerated detachment: "Oh, don't be concerned over me. I understand revolutions require violence and terrible acts. But the end justifies the means." Then I am drafted too. My job is dangerous. I have to push some earth into a pit and I'm in danger of sliding down into the pit with the moving earth.

  The dream of the lake that cures everything. I am swimming in it. But other people take boats and these boats endanger the swimmers. The boats are like carnival floats. They ride over the swimmers and I get angry and I bang on them.

  This month came the great discovery that I could never learn to make money because of my father's disdain for money. He always proclaimed contempt for it, and, toward the end of his life in Cuba, it is said that when the gasman came to collect his bill my father handed him his wallet and said: "Take what I owe you. I refuse to handle such dirt."

  The paradox was that while he disdained money he was protected from disaster first by my mother's inheritance, and then by his wealthy second wife.

  In analysis one studies the constant displacements. The habits you cannot bear in others are those you f
ight against in yourself. I made superhuman efforts to discipline a dreamy and chaotic childhood. I succeeded. And so I hate absent-mindedness above all things. My father's absent-mindedness. Thinking of other things. Not paying any attention to us. He did not know we were there. Absent. And I developed its opposite. I try to be ever alert and rarely absent for anyone.

  Did AA discover that people could more easily fight alcoholism in others than in themselves, fighting on two levels?