Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5

by Anais Nin

  He considered his own life an anecdote and played the roles assigned to him in a manner which indicated they were roles: consoler, shelterer, helper, confidant, ambassador, entremetteur, companion.

  He gave to everything the air of a performance.

  He returned to his deepest love, politics. The political life of Mexico, of the birth trauma, of the bottom of the sea.

  And concluded that art was not a useful or beneficial contribution to the life of the masses.

  And so Larry passed on into another world.

  Reading the diary of Virginia Woolf. It seems so confined, so narrow and dry in the conveying of experience, that it drove me not to suicide but to write in my own.

  My last entries were of the kind known as the Stagnant Cycle. I was ruminating old, worn material. But I managed to re-enter the present.

  Jim's fascination with the diary warms me. He is my only link with the future. His reading me makes me feel that even if America succeeds in destroying literature (which is what it is doing actively), it cannot afford to destroy life, and it is the life in the diary which Jim is drinking up in contrast to the writing of contemporaries, which he finds dead.

  Yesterday he called me exaltedly: "There is no relation between the best of the writing being published today and yours. They simply do not meet on any common ground. I feel I am getting your secret in my diary, there at least I feel I can reach something deep, sincere."

  [Summer, 1955]

  Dream: I am in a carriage, dressed in a fantasy costume, a veil around my head like the veil over the head of the Japanese woman in Gate of Hell. The men in the carriage are curious, and want to unveil me. I get angry, get out of the carriage and take another one. I am on the way to a festival at which I am to play a part. On the way I stop at a small village. My mother and Joaquin are there. Joaquin is weeping quietly at being imprisoned in this out-of-the-way place.

  The first time I heard the music of Harry Partch was during the film-making of Kenneth Anger's Pleasure Dome. It was the music Kenneth wanted, but Harry Partch disliked his music being used as background for a film. But when I heard the recording I had the same sensation as when listening to Balinese music (I had heard so much of it through Colin McFee). I recognized the sensation of fluidity. It was as if this music and his was an entirely novel and modern expression, had the power to dissolve the senses, to multiply their receptivity, to expand the range of receptivity, to involve the senses completely.

  It was a delight, it was as if one had drunk the music instead of accepting it through the ears.

  Then I heard about him from Kenneth. He was an unusually handsome man, a man preoccupied with metaphysics, born in San Francisco and exposed to its Oriental influences. He had designed his own instruments. He lived a difficult, independent, individualistic life. He had to sell his own records. I saw a photograph of him with his Cloud-Chamber Bowls. "Played on the edges with soft small mallets, also on the flat tops. The bowls give a bell-like tone, and each has at least one inharmonic overtone."

  The instruments themselves had wonderful names:

  Marimba Eroica

  Bass Marimba

  Boo

  Diamond Marimba

  Spoils of War

  Kithara 1

  Kithara 2

  Harmonic Canon One

  Harmonic 2 (Castor and Pollux)

  Surrogate Kithara

  Chromelodeon 1

  The recordings came from "Gate Five," Sausalito. In New York I saw a film showing him at work, the instruments being played, and Harry packing and mailing his own records as I had packed and mailed my own books. He explained "Gate Five" in a pamphlet: "Beyond the prosaic fact that Partch lived, wrote music, built instruments, organized and rehearsed ensembles, and manufactured records here, there is the more intriguing circumstance that 'Gate Five' carries an occult meaning in sundry ancient mythology. In ancient pictographs, the city, the center of culture, has four pedestrian gates. These are tangible; they can be seen; physical entrance can be shown. But the city also has a fifth gate, which cannot be shown because it is not tangible, and can be entered only in a metaphysical way. This is the gate to illusion."

  Janko Varda, too, lived at "Gate Five." His ferryboat was moored there.

  I saw Harry Partch's instruments in San Francisco. I played his records. I loved the color of his music, the fluidity and the new combinations of sounds.

  He has extremely blue and candid eyes, a spiritual face, and arouses great devotion in his students.

  At the beginning of his career, Harry found that the extremely subtle tones he wished for his music (he devised his own scale with forty-three tones to the octave) could not be reproduced by conventional Western instruments. To solve this, he not only designed his own instruments but constructed them as well, often using exotic materials like glass carboys or Plexiglas. But he said: "I am not an instrument builder but a philosophic musicman seduced into carpentry."

  He had to train gifted and devoted students to play each instrument. And again, because conventional music notation could not encompass the tremendous range of notes or the very complex rhythms, he devised his own system of notation.

  The affinity of his music with water, with the poetry of space, with fusion appealed to me.

  The affinity with nature, the sounds coming out of Sitka spruce, Philippine bamboo, Brazilian rosewood, redwood, Pernambuco reeds, played with picks, fingers, mallets, and felted sticks. The affinity with Oriental music, which has a (lowing, enveloping, oceanic rhythm. Rhythm was an essential part of Partch's music, a native, contemporary rhythm. The richness of it gave to contemporary compositions the depth and dimensions which so far existed only in the music of the East.

  When I go to the laundry in Sierra Madre I see the man who runs it and who mystifies me. He is tall, dark-skinned, dark-eyed. He wears a red shirt which sets off his foreign handsomeness. But it is not this which makes his presence here so unexpected. It is the pride of his carriage, and his delicate way of handling the laundry. He greets me with colorful modulations of his voice, trained to charm. He bows as he greets me. His hands are long-fingered and deft.

  He folds the dry sheets as if he is handling lace tablecloths. He is aloof, polite, as if laundry were a country gentleman's natural occupation. He takes money as if it were a bouquet, and returns the change as if he were offering flowers too.

  He never comments on the weather, as if it were a plebeian interest. He piles up the laundry as if he were merely checking the contents of his own closets. He is proud and gracious. He, like a high-born valet who overlooks his master's lapse in manners, pretends not to notice the women who come in with hair curlers looking like Medusas with plastic snakes.

  For me he has a full smile. His teeth are strong and even, except for one milk tooth protruding, which gives his smile a touch of humor.

  I never mention the weather either, as if we both understand weather is a mere background to more important themes. We agree that if human beings have to attend to soiled laundry, we are given at the same time a faculty for detaching ourselves, for not noticing, and for forgetting certain duties and focusing on how to enhance, heighten, add charm to daily living.

  I tell him about my life, friends, the masquerades. As his fine-bred hand rests on my package, I notice for the first time a signet ring on his finger. It is a gold coat of arms.

  I bend over it to examine the symbols. The ring is divided into four sections. One is engraved with a lion's head, the second square with a small castle, the third with a four-leaf clover, and the fourth with a Maltese cross.

  "I have seen this design somewhere. Could it be on one of the shields of Austrian titles?"

  "Yes, it could be. I have ancestors in Austria. My family has a castle forty miles from Vienna. My parents still live there. The coat of arms is that of Count Osterling."

  He brought out his wallet. Instead of photographs of round-faced babies I saw a turreted castle. Two dignified old people stood on the terrace. The
man wore a beard. The woman carried an umbrella. One could see lace around her throat. Her hand rested on the head of a small boy.

  "That is me."

  "How did you come here?"

  "After the war we were land poor. I felt our whole life growing static and difficult. Tradition prevented me from working at any job. I came to America where any job was honorable. I went to Chicago. I was only seventeen and it was all new and exciting. I felt like a pioneer. I liked forgetting the past and being able to work without feeling I was humiliating a whole set of relatives. I did all kinds of jobs. I liked the freedom of it. Then I met the Rheingold Beauty Queen. She was unbelievably beautiful. I married her. Her father owned a chain of laundromats. He put me to work as an inspector. At first we traveled a lot, but when he died my wife wanted to stay in one place and raise children. So we came to Sierra Madre."

  "You never went home again?"

  "We did once, but my wife did not like it. She thought the castle was sad. She was cold, and the plumbing was not efficient. She didn't like so much politeness, moth-eaten brocades, yellowed silks, dust on the wine bottles."

  I call him Count Laundromat, as I watch the gold signet ring flashing through detergents.

  I study the style of Simenon because he is a master in the physical world. But in an interview he claimed to be a poet, the one thing he is not. He is a realist, a recorder, a psychologist, accurate and profound, but not a poet, because a poet transfigures all that he touches and he discards the appearance to penetrate beyond. Simenon has always selected the characters who submitted to destiny, a destiny formed by their character This character they could not change, it had no power except to sink into destruction. Not one of his characters had passion, heroism, or the power to transform his life, his character, his destiny. Not one of them had the power to break through the isolation, the nonlove. It is one vast novel of failure, of frustration and revenge. The tone is always fatalistic, joyless, and the characters are victims of their own suicidal destructiveness. He has described all possible variations on destruction and self-destruction.

  All my recent meditations have been on the aspects of life I leave out of my writing, because I am so intent on the heightened moments, on the living moment. The story of Henry begins with my fiery enthusiasm for his work and his first visit to Louveciennes. It could have begun with Henry spending the night in an empty motion-picture theater, with the detritus, and having to get up and move when the cleaning woman arrived and prodded him with her broom. It could have begun with Henry not believing in himself and I believing, with Henry angry and I not angry. But always I would write a story different from Simenon's, different from the story everyone expects. Now I realize that my physical world is subject to such intense emotional lighting that it becomes for most people invisible. It is a world of psychic transcendence. And it is this realm of the material world I want to complete now, as you clothe a revelation.

  That is not the world of the poet, Mr. Simenon. The poet lives in the transfigured night, the night of symbols.

  Even when he mentions dreams, and interweaves them, Simenon reveals but a part of the blind unconscious patterns and compulsions. And he never mentions the battle against them, only the passive yielding, the submission to them. He does have a knowledge of the inner structure (he refers to the time when Mallard seeks a certain sordid café even though he is now rich and successful, because it smelled the same way as the scene of his early childhood). He knows all the inner fatalities but never conceives of defiance, of mastering, of changing, of altering, of escaping these fatalities. No victories and no rebellions against these invisible tyrants. And none of the flights by way of art, and fantasy and love, only flights to Tahiti, to Africa.

  [Fall, 1955]

  In New York I received a telephone call. The voice was deep and rich. "I am Father Michael, of the Greek Orthodox Church. I would like a set of your books and a photograph, autographed. I will send a messenger."

  The messenger came. He was about twenty years old, pimply and diffident. I gave him a set of books, a photograph, and because he seemed so admiring and worshipful, I gave him one book for himself.

  A month later I received a letter from jail.

  Here I am in jail. They caught me at the Doubleday office, when I was picking up books for Father Michael of the Greek Orthodox Church. There was no Father Michael. It was my way of earning a living. I don't mind about the big publishers, but I do mind about you because I truly loved your books and hated to sell them. Will you forgive me? As soon as I get out I intend to work and pay you back. It really upset me when you gave me a book for myself. Do please write me.

  I had to write to him and deliver him of guilt. Who was the person with the deep rich voice who did the telephoning? I meant to ask him. For the young Michael in prison did not have such a voice, a voice you believed in.

  Because I described once the delights of the birds and tropical plants department at Sears Roebuck in Pasadena, Peggy asked to be taken to the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx. We arrived too late. The huge glasshouses with domes were closed. We could see from the outside the giant palm tree pushing against the glass ceiling. We could see the cactus, the flowers, but not smell the pungent earth and feel the odorous heat.

  To think we were reduced to looking through glass at what could be touched, felt, and smelled in Acapulco.

  The relativity, the shifting quality of character becomes more and more apparent. As people disappear from your life by estrangement or death, you take on the traits they symbolize.

  My mother's death caused a shift in my character.

  I wonder if she felt the humiliation, the enslavement, the submissive role of woman and expressed the anger not directly at her mother role, but displaced onto other causes. The role was thrust on her when her eight brothers and sisters were left without a mother. It was thrust on her by my father's flightiness and by three children. She never spoke against this role of woman. She was not cast for it. She had qualities of leadership and power. My father needed her courage, yet glamorous mistresses occupied all his attention. Untrained to earn a living, she felt the helplessness of a woman with three young children. Her rebellion could only assume a negative form: anger.

  To trust the world with the diaries. Nothing the world has done so far will convince me that it can be trusted with the truth. The world to me has been like a jungle, full of fierceness, meanness, and malice.

  America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul.

  Jim and I were walking down Fourth Street when a woman (or I should say many women) sprang toward me and said in a chanting tone as if she were singing a theme: "You are Anaïs Nin," giving to Nin all the overtones and musical resonances it contains, and adding with perfect lyrical logic: "I am Nina," as if a woman called Nina must of course address a woman called Nin, and I hesitated because I felt I must know her, yet I did not, and murmured: "I do not remember...." But as I said this I realized it was not exact; no one could ever remember Nina because she was simultaneously a thousand women: a beautiful Medea, without jealousy, long, luxuriant hair that had never known repose, like the black hair of Martha Graham, a patrician carriage of the head, a Balinese expressiveness of the hands, shoulders, and eyes. Ophelia, I thought, too, Ophelia and other Graces. No sadness, no weight. Her words flew fast and winged and Jim and I, alert as we are, could not follow her. We stood there bewildered by her rapidity, by the enchantment of her words, voice, smile, and total incoherence. Her recitation informed us immediately about Manfred, a name she separated into two syllables as she separated all her words to examine the philological roots and to wander off into her own associations. Man Fred. "Who is Manfred?" asked Jim after a few minutes. "The man I am going to love."

  Nina Gitana de la Primavera, as she introduced herself, saying Gitana as if she had been born in Spain of Spanish gypsies, and Primavera as if she had been born in Italy, was utterly delirious and threw her head so far back I thought h
er very slender neck would break. Jim and I wanted to run away. The thread, the fine thread by which we held on to ordinary life, was in danger of being broken by this trapeze artist of words and gestures who made such perilous jumps between images and thoughts. She did have to account to a man who works with stones, the jeweler, when we asked her if she would come with us and have a coffee.

  We sat at a bar. Nina never ceased talking except to stare into our faces, or to touch our faces as if she were blind, and seeking to find the contour of our features, or to gesture like a Hindu dancer loosely jointed, or to say: "I talk too much." When Jim asked her: "Do you know Anaïs?" she seemed surprised at this question and answered: "I live with the Becks. I acted in Gertrude Stein's play and Rexroth's." And then I remembered an evening where the whole cast had been overtaken by hysterical laughter and the play was almost ruined. Could it have been she? Of course she never ceased acting, but I wondered how they had succeeded in placing others' words in her mouth when she had her own overflow and profusion, but she did quote Shakespeare and Stein, and mentioned Mozart and sang a tune, mentioned other musicians, and sang a German song.

  Jim asked her: "Say something I will always remember." She meditated, was silent, and then gracefully and calmly made five gestures which paralleled but did not imitate the gestures of Balinese dancers. With her small, delicate, fragile hand she touched the center of her throat, her shoulder, her wrist, then placed one hand under her elbow and held it there and said: "Remember this."

  Having answered the question whether she knew me, she recapitulated our encounter. She had been standing with a group of people and one of them said to her: "Do you know who that is? That is Anaïs Nin." She answered: "I see only two very beautiful people. What beautiful people you are."