by Anais Nin
Coincidence, or effect of analysis? I have handled my life so well this month.
"Get a load of this," says Jim over the telephone when he has a story to tell: "Get a load of this," I said to Jim. "I met a man who has a publishing house downtown. He is a poet. His whole family works for him. He gave me one hundred dollars for the right to reprint six short stories. He makes his money on pornography, a nude magazine, and an anthology for subscribers only, where classical and trash mix under the sign of the Planet Sex. The same formula as Girodias and the Olympia Press. He is in and out of jail constantly. Should I give him the diaries to publish anonymously, in a limited edition?"
Jim was excited. "Because Anaïs, I have just read volume 46 and I almost called you up at two A.M. That volume 46. It contains the most beautiful writing ever done in the English language. I was ready to explore."
To balance the indifference of the big critics, I have this personal, intimate fervor.
From Jim's diary:
Anaïs' journal is having a powerful effect; her power to breathe life through writing, into even the most difficult periods of her neurosis. I cannot help but be inspired by this, and strengthened: the spectacle of beauty from ashes, the phoenix rising from flames; something sur-really fundamental, the great indefatigable life. Life drawing one through the thickness and the mud, giving one survival power against the death rays everywhere. Anaïs, who is at this very moment in bed with bronchitis, suffering from low energy, is the strongest woman alive. If at times there are manifestations of weakness it is only because her sensibilities are greater. She needs desperately all the staying power and resilience which she definitely possesses because she enjoys the curse and the privilege of a kind of sainthood, sainthood being the name for high sensitivity and awareness and an inhuman or rather superhuman sort of vision. Laugh loud, weep deep.
A telephone talk with Anaïs: blues chaser. I can't write any more tonight but yet I would like to capture the quality that is constant in her: her way of raising, without effort, one's view of life; and without dissemblance, making it more exciting.
Yesterday Anaïs between the sun and me in the room. The hair illuminated, the cigarette smoke rising all around, gray and then blue like a dream. I wanted to get up and walk through the smoke and investigate, touch her hand. I see from her journal that I am not the only one who has found her illusive: everyone has seen her that way, as if one dare not blink one's eye for fear that ... poof! It is part of her beauty, this quality of being not quite there, dreamlike. I see it less often now because our friendship is a human one, stronger, and has a fiber in reality, but at moments like these I see the essentially spiritual appearance.
Anaïs will never be a mistress of artistic forms. This flaw is the price her novels pay for the perfect integration of art and life achieved in the diary. Where is the form in the diary? The life. The life is the great work. Its consistency is in the person, not the artist. The unity of the diary is created by the person, not the artist. There is a brilliant, super-electronic light, the person, born blind, and working at only one thing, to remove the walls and veils and films and layers that stand between the light and her vision of it.
The art of Anaïs Nin is the art of improvisation, its glow and beauty the result of jazz moments in the world of perfect vision.
Jim is the twin in writing I had wished for. Copying this from his diary and reading about his moods, struggles with writing, dreams, refurnished the loneliness and barrenness of my writing world. Working blindly on Solar Barque, with Jim's faith.
Made my peace with Max Geismar. He had said: "I hurt easy."
I explained that I did an unrealistic thing. I set him up as a symbol of the critic. He was going to make an absolute statement, the voice of America, to say what no other American critic would say, total allegiance. But I see now that I was wrong. He could not do that, because he had his own integrity.
"I could show allegiance to the diary," he said.
"1 believe that."
"But I do admit I let you down about Spy. I did not write what I felt but what I thought would sell the book."
"Yes, that was wrong. I didn't want that. I wanted you to write what you said over the telephone: 'the book is alive.' But I am sorry I hurt you. I felt you were my only link with America. After you failed me, I broke away. I accepted America's rejection. Then when I resign myself, and give a lecture, I discover a small and fervent following."
The need to clarify one's projections. What we project onto others, and they onto us is bound to be destructive because it is a fantasy. Whether they are ideal or critical images, they are not an understanding of each other as individuals (like my placing the critic role onto Max Geismar), and they make for bitter disappointments.
The dream of the Godmother. She invited me to stay with her at the beach. But the weather was dark and we had to stay in the house. I was unable to swim and felt disappointed. The clothes she loaned me did not fit me. We took a plane to leave the place, but a helicopter flew near us, so close that it frightened me. I felt they would collide. I even felt it must be attached to us, the way it followed us about.
This led me to talk to Dr. Bogner about my real godmother, who never gave me presents I liked. Once a dark-haired doll when I had wanted a blond one, and other times real jewelry which I did not like because it was accompanied by long instructions as to its value and the care it required. She and my mother quarreled often. I turned against her. I showed no feeling at her death, which hurt my mother. I had been meditating on my sudden and irrevocable breaks (once there is a break, I cannot feel any more).
I saw an automobile accident in Sierra Madre. One car hitting another caused the gas tank to explode. The fire's violence and my fear of more explosions paralyzed me with terror. Fear of explosions in coal miners' stories, all sudden explosions. My awakening each time during atom-bomb tests although I could not hear them, and in one instance, did not even know it was to take place.
Dr. Bogner asked me if she was the godmother. I smiled because it seemed absurd.
"You never disappointed me."
"But perhaps you wanted to swim in the joyous waters of Acapulco and instead I asked you to examine your angers and your inner explosions. To examine that you are not free."
My fear of my own explosive nature, so often curbed.
Dr. Bogner focuses on my need for independence. It is true that there is a superimposition of my economic status as a child so filled with anxiety. My mother was overoptimistic. She started a purchasing-agent business, to shop mainly for our wealthy relatives who bought everything in New York. She would come home and tell us she had made so much on commissions, but as these purchases were charged by clients, some clients paid very late, and some did not pay at all, and so we accumulated debts and were hounded by creditors. The secretarial work for my mother which I did was overwhelming. The bills from the shops had to be examined and a separate list of items made for each client, charged to a different person.
The house in Richmond Hill needed repairs. The furnace did not work. My mother started to rent rooms again, but here it was a home, not like the separate floors of the brownstone house, and we lost our privacy. My reaction was to take a job. My mother objected to that. She maintained Latin standards, and I had to be sheltered. I was not equipped for any job.
Fortunately an Irishwoman who rented rooms in our house made a suggestion. She sent me to The Model's Club in New York where I began my profession as an artist's model, later as a fashion model. But even then my pay was not enough for four people, or to cover old debts. I went without lunch to pose extra hours (and to write in the diary). All I wanted out of the economic factor in life was a modest, quiet, undisturbing income. I did not want moneymaking to have primary importance. But my work does not bring me this.
Dr. Bogner tries to tell me independence is a feeling not always to be taken literally. My life today does not resemble my childhood and adolescence. I should not feel helpless and overwhelmed by destr
uctive forces.
I am baffled when analysis seems to arouse the need of self-sufficiency, but then it questions one's direct efforts to reach this.
In the life of the soul, the emotions, there are these undertows, these treacherous downward forces.
Yet I feel the sun, the spring, and I go out and I enjoy the Easter windows on Fifth Avenue.
Jim is breaking through a surface writing into a subterranean level. His best writing is still in the diary. Why does one's best writing require secrecy, silence, and darkness?
Neurosis is a "possession." You are possessed by the devils of destruction. They drive you. They make you compulsive. They make you destroy. It is not you, your voice, your true self. But it inhabits your body. It is the spirit of the past. It is the past selves superimposing themselves over the present, blurring it, choking it. An Anaïs of fourteen seeing her mother working so hard, work accumulating and debts, baffled by the bookkeeping, feeling helpless. Later clear-minded and judging her mother's errors, then working for immediate needs, a small salary for four people. And then one day, when I returned from modeling all day at Jaeckel's and posing all evening for a painter, I find my mother has signed a contract for a sidewalk for six hundred dollars, when we do not have a proper heating furnace.
The irrationality of the mother, that was the terror. The impossibility to reason. The illusion I believed that my father was logical, because he was always talking about logic, and so I believed that man was logical, I believed in man's logic And when I met my father, the shock of realizing his fictions, what was later diagnosed by Dr. Bogner as schizophrenia.
I carried from this childhood the conviction of helplessness in the material world and fear of its workings. But a new Anaïs is emerging, proving her capabilities, her practicality, her clear mind.
Talk with Dr. Bogner: she made the subjective metamorphosis very clear. I could see it. I could see also how it all originates in the self and returns to the self. But when she seemed to imply that I use the subjective in my work too, I became very disturbed, because that is used against me by the critics. I am willing to admit errors in my life and relationships, but not in my work. I took her implication as a threat to the integrity of my work. She did not mean that. She meant that all truth lies in the relationship between subjective and objective, not in one or the other.
"But subjective has been used as a judgment against my work..."
I had misunderstood. Although I defend the validity and value of my subjective art, when she expresses a doubt, I feel she is implying a doubt of the validity of this vision. (Neurosis? Psychological blindness?) But she is not. She said that truth was an interplay between subjectivity and objectivity. Hemingway was not an objective writer. He wrote a case history. It was Hemingway's vision of war and bullfights.
The only other time I misunderstood Dr. Bogner was again in reference to writing. To remain objective she has not read my books. She seemed to disagree when I said I used psychoanalytical ways of approaching the truth about character. She meant that this method would only reveal one aspect of the character, the subconscious or the neurotic. She meant that was not all of the character, only the focus on neurosis or the secret or irrational self. I felt she of all people should understand what I was doing, and that if I chose to stress the neurotic or subconscious aspect, it was because this lay at the source, it was the secret origin of the character. We cleared that up. But she questions all extremes, all separations. Nothing is either or, separate. I have separated them. Everything is interrelated. Outside and inside. Body and psyche. In my work I meant to begin in the subconscious and arrive at objectivity. I intended to unite them.
Her emphasis on interrelation is finally becoming clear to me. I feel now that the warring factions inside of me are slowly integrating, fusing. Every fusion puts an end to some warfare. To some loss of energy.
***
Twenty-six years ago in Paris a boy was born to whom I paid little attention. He was the son of Gilbert Chase, my American cousin, famous now for his books on music, his work for the State Department in South America, and his teaching. Twenty-six years later I receive a neat, precise letter from Paul about my books. He wrote from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I sent him the books he did not have, and we corresponded. He announced his marriage. He planned my visit to the college. He was enthusiastically helped by one of my first readers, Kenneth Ness, of the Art Department.
So yesterday I arrived on a small plane, and found waiting a neat, slender young man with a delicate, narrow face and enormous, beautiful eyes. Alert and quick and with finesse. We recognized a genuine bond, not that imposed by families. He drove me to his little house where I met Deirdre, a gentle and beautiful girl. We had barely time to talk together, about Kathleen Chase having wanted all her life to write about my work, when Kenneth Ness appeared. Teacher of painting, dressed negligently, blue eyes distressed. I thought he was nervous at meeting me and I wanted to follow my impulse to ask: "Are you in trouble?" We talked only about the plans for the evening. Later I went to his house for dinner. I met other members of the faculty. I saw a few of Kenneth Ness's paintings, which are bold, alive, and full of charm.
Good attendance. Party. After the party I talked with Paul and Deirdre until one o'clock. To bed exhausted. Awakened aching with fatigue. Stood on my head for five minutes. At ten I saw Kenneth Ness's other paintings, all of them. The paintings are joyous and rich. Yet he did not feel ready for an exhibition. Lunch with Jessie X. Jessie is direct and lusty, and humorous in spite of inner distress. Free from tradition, recovering here, which is her home, from a breakdown. Writing a novel.
The lives of these people touched me, the great distress in such peaceful, relaxed surroundings. The loneliness of college life.
I had a lively discussion with Jessie's class. Jessie told me the following story: Her mother asked her one day: "Jessie, tell me something about this subconscious I've been hearing about."
"But, Mother, I've been talking to you about it for twenty years!"
"Oh, that, but the way you talked I thought it was something you had which I didn't have."
***
For a neurosis such as mine, to take roots means to be rooted to a situation of pain. To have a fixed home, a fireplace to sit by, a view, seemed dangerous (concealing as they do the bars of a cage). To take roots to me means cutting off avenues of escape, avenues of communication with the rest of the world. So that against the wish for repose, there is an impulse to remain mobile, fluid, to change surroundings.
At times I do feel like a snail who has lost his shell. I have to learn to live without it. But when I stand still, I feel claustrophobia of the soul, and must maintain a vast switchboard with an expanded universe, the international life, Paris, Mexico, New York, the United Nations, the artist world. The African jungle seems far less dangerous than complete trust in one love, than a place where one's housework is more important than one's creativity.
I think what I should do is devote the rest of my time to preparing diaries for publication, no more novels. And earn my living some other way like everybody else.
Lawrence Maxwell without his beard would have looked like a small boy who had been inflated with a bicycle pump. He had roseate cheeks, a constant smile and a highly polished style of speech, indulging in the indirect. When I first met him he had a small bookshop at 45 Christopher Street. He handled my books. He gave me autograph parties. He was very fond of young girls, either the pretty ones or the gamins. Larry had been in politics before he had the bookshop. He had been to college. His knowledge of books was general. Politics were still at the center of his interest. But the shop gave him a bohemian life which he liked. He loved to talk and people dropped in and listened. He sold very few books. He loaned books to the attractive young women. He threw beribboned phrases like serpentines on New Year's Eve. When I left and examined what he had said it tore like tissue paper. But through him I met Lila Rosenblum, Marguerite Young, and many other friends.
He lost his wife, and his bookshop.
All the time he was captivated by the whims, the fantasies of the artists, like a child by the glitter of toys, but he never became one. He remained on the periphery. I had never met anyone before who made me feel from the beginning that I was a celebrity and that whatever I did would become the subject of an anecdote. It was distressing. It was artificial. I tried to break through this to a human relationship, but the self-consciousness was there. Certain of his speeches were similar to official receptions, they were reserved for me when I went to the shop. I tried to break down the barrier. But he never abandoned his formal speech or talking about me as if he were writing my biography. "I will never forget the evening at Thirteenth Street when we arrived and you calmly walked to the porch and said: 'Oh, I must take down the laundry.'" I felt everything was being registered for future use, being lived by me for the future anecdote because of the way he commented on the experience while it was happening as if it were the product of a conscious creation of an anecdote. He had no innocence, and could not imagine innocence.
When I had my autograph party at the British Book Center and Isabel Bolton appeared (whose Do I Wake or Sleep I love), I introduced everyone to her, I told everyone who she was, I created a stir around her and Larry immediately commented: "I will remember this, it is your party, we are here to praise you, and you make Isabel Bolton feel it is all for her." Which took all the spontaneity out of the event.
Or: "I shall never forget the time when you were on the eve of going into the hospital for a serious operation and you never dwelt on it, treated it so lightly."
