Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  The comedy of all this is that Miss Millett prints, at one point, a footnote quoting from a book by Joseph Folsom. “The Nazis have always wanted to strengthen the family as an instrument of the state. State interest is always paramount. Germany does not hesitate to turn a husband against a wife or children against parents when political loyalty is involved.” (Emphasis added.) Miss Millett prints this footnote but clearly does not understand it: otherwise she would recognize how completely it undermines her claim that in the totalitarian countries the “sexual counterrevolution” consisted in the reinforcement of the family.

  This passage would make a good test question for a class in logic. Find where Howe misses or distorts the point to the Folsom footnote. Point one: the Nazis strengthened the family yet put the state first. All agreed? What does this mean? It means that, on occasion, Nazis would try to turn members of a family against one another “when political loyalty is involved.” (Emphasis added.) O.K.? Well, class, how many people are politically subversive in any country at any time? Not many, alas; therefore Millett’s point still stands that the Nazis celebrated old-time family virtues except in cases of suspected subversion.

  Howe’s piece is full of this sort of thing and I can only assume that his usually logical mind has been unhinged by all these unnatural girls. Howe ends with a celebration of the values of his immigrant parents in the Depression years. Apparently his mother was no more a drudge than his father (but why in a good society should either be a drudge?), and they were happy in the old-time Mosaic, St. Pauline, Freudian way, and…well, this hymn to tribal values was rather better sung by the judge in the movie version of Little Murders.

  Those who have been treated cruelly will treat others cruelly. This seems to be a fact of our condition. M3 has every reason to be fearful of woman’s revenge should she achieve equality. He is also faced with the nightmare (for him) of being used as a sexual object or, worse, being ignored (the menacing cloud in the middle distance is presently no larger than a vibrator). He is fighting back on every front.

  Take pornography. Though female nudes have been usually acceptable in our Puritan culture, until recently the male rude was unacceptable to the Patriarchs. After all, the male—any male—is a stand-in for God, and God wears a suit at all times, or at least jockey shorts. Now, thanks to randy Lilith, the male can be shown entirely nude but, say the American censors, never with an erection. The holy of holies, the totem of our race, the symbol of the Patriarchs’ victory over the Great Mother must be respected. Also, as psychologists point out, though women are not as prone to stimulus through looking at pictures as men (is this innate or the result of conditioning?), they are more excited by pictures of the male erect than of the male at ease. And excitement of course is bad for them, gives them ideas, makes them insatiable; even the ancient Greeks, though freer in sexual matters than we, took marriage seriously. As a result, only unmarried girls could watch naked young men play because young girls ought to be able to look over a field which married women had better not know about.

  Today we are witnessing the breakup of patterns thousands of years old. M3’s response is predictable: if man on top of woman has been the pattern for all our known history, it must be right. This of course was the same argument he made when the institution of slavery was challenged. After all, slavery was quite as old an institution as marriage. With the rejection of the idea of ownership of one person by another at the time of our Civil War, Women’s Lib truly began. If you could not own a black man, you could not own a woman either. So the war began. Needless to say, the forces of reaction are very much in the saddle (in every sense), and women must fight for their equality in a system which wants to keep them in manageable family groups, buying consumer goods, raising future consumers, until the end of time—or of the world’s raw resources, which is rather closer at hand.

  Curiously enough, hot even Figes senses what is behind this new restiveness, this new desire to exist not as male or female but as human. It is very simple: we are breeding ourselves into extinction. We cannot feed the people now alive. In thirty-seven years the world’s population will double unless we have the “good luck” to experience on the grandest scale famine, plague, war. To survive we must stop making babies at the current rate, and this can only be accomplished by breaking the ancient stereotypes of man the warrior, woman the breeder. M3’s roar is that of our tribal past, quite unsuitable, as the old Stalinists used to say, to new necessities.

  Figes feels that a change in the economic system will free women (and men) from unwanted roles. I have another idea. Free the sexes first and the system will have to change because there will be no housewife to be conned into buying things she does not need. But all this is in the future. The present is the battleground, and the next voice you hear will be that of a patriarch, defending his attitudes—on a stack of Bibles.

  The New York Review of Books, July 22, 1971

  THE FOURTH DIARY OF ANAÏS NIN

  Last year, Anaïs Nin cabled me in Rome: Volume Four of her diaries (1944–47) was to be published. She needed my permission to print what she had written about me. Into the time machine, I thought, as I entered the bar of the Pont Royal in Paris—to find Anaïs, at sixty-seven, as beautiful as ever. “I’ve been on television all day. West German television, with Jeanne Moreau. In the park.” She gave me a hard look. (I had been told that she thought the character of Marietta Donegal in Two Sisters was based on her).

  “I’ve marked the pages where you appear. It’s very systematic. Edmund Wilson was wonderful about his portrait.” Fifteen-love, Vidal’s serve. “Now, anything you want cut, I’ll take out. But if there is too much to cut, then the whole thing comes out.” I was torn. I believe nothing should be suppressed; yet I knew all about Anaïs’s “portraits.” Once she had copied out in a red notebook everything she had written about me over the years. I kept the notebook for some months, unopened (I had read parts of the diary before); not pleased, she took it back.

  Now, drinking tea, I read dutifully the pages that she showed me (not, incidentally, the entire portrait—several fine warts were withheld for the current exhibition). I suggested that she cut a line or two involving a third person. She agreed, obviously relieved that I, too, was intent on being wonderful. Then I was reproached for Two Sisters.

  “I didn’t read it, of course—I don’t read that sort of book—but I was told it was a hideous caricature.” I explained that neither the character of Marietta Donegal (a racketing, boisterous American lady of letters) nor the Relationship (with Anaïs one feels that the word “relationship” deserves a capital “R”—at least to start with) between her and me in the novel-memoir was at all like ours in life; in fact, rather the reverse. But I did admit that Marietta’s “philosophy” (“We must flow deeply from the core of our inner being”) was very much like hers and I thought that in an age when mind was under fire and feeling worshiped, a playful travesty was in order. She took that well enough. She was aware that we no longer felt the same way about things. “Anyway, you said—I was told—that I wrote well.”

  Who then is Anaïs Nin? Born in 1903; daughter of a Spanish composer-pianist; brought up in France; unhappily transplanted to New York as a child, where she began to keep a diary in order to win her absent father’s love—a tall order and, consequently, a vast diary running now to many millions of words.

  In the early thirties Anaïs returned to France, married a wealthy businessman (not mentioned in her earlier volumes), played at being a poor artist (“Never understood until now—1945—why I had to make myself poor enough in Paris to go to the pawnshop. It was because all my friends went there, and I wanted to reach the same level of poverty and denial”), met and helped to launch Henry Miller. She also began to write poetic monologues like House of Incest and Winter of Artifice.

  At the start of the war, she came back to New York, with a second wealthy husband who makes—at his request—no appearance in the di
aries. Together they created a romantic Bohemian atmosphere in a five-floor walk-up apartment in the Village. Again she played at poverty (I was shocked when she told me one day that I should let her husband pay for dinner because he was not a poor artist, as they had pretended, but a banker). Failing to get her books published commercially, she printed them herself.

  One of the books was a volume of short stories, “Under a Glass Bell.” Edmund Wilson praised it in The New Yorker. She was overnight a celebrity, and the present diary begins.

  Right off, we meet her life-force companion of earlier days, Gonzalo. He is working at the press she has financed, and helped him, physically, to set up. “Gonzalo has assumed leadership. He is proud of his place, his machine, his independence. I am very tired, but content. I am proud of my human creation.” She is not unlike the Feiffer heroine who wants “a strong man that I can mould.” Her persistent fantasy is that she is Joan of Arc forever putting Dauphins on the throne. Unfortunately, whenever Dauphin becomes King, she becomes regicide—that is, when she does not try to seize the throne herself—a normal human power drive, as Women’s Lib has taught us, but for a Latin woman of her generation, a source of shame and guilt.

  As the months pass, Gonzalo does not keep his word, is destructive, must be sent to Peru—and she worries about how much of herself she gives to others: “Did my faith in Henry [Miller] make him strong enough to go on without me? Does one really create strength in others, or does one merely become that strength?” Each Relationship begins on a high note, and ends with recriminations.

  Meanwhile, Edmund Wilson has fallen in love with Anaïs but she prefers the companionship of several young men (“the transparent children”) who shield her from the grossness of the harsh, competitive New York world. Incidentally, although she resolutely invades the privacy of others, her own is respected. We never know whom she goes to bed with. But certain emotional patterns do keep recurring and one can work out, up to a point, her Relationships.

  It is fun to watch Anaïs as she becomes a figure in the High Bohemia of New York, the world of surrealist emigrés like Breton, of such native ground figures as James Agee, Richard Wright, Maya Deren (another relationship—small “r”—which starts magically and ends with recriminations: Maya made Anaïs look old in her film “Ritual and Ordeal”). Then, 1945, we meet the twenty-year-old author of the novel Williwaw, Warrant Officer (still in uniform) Gore Vidal, recently returned from the Aleutians, more recently hired as an editor by E. P. Dutton—where I lasted six months in order to get them to publish, Anaïs’s Ladders to Fire and Children of the Albatross. Incidentally, the photograph of me in the book is labeled “Gore Vidal at seventeen.” It is actually Gore Vidal at twenty-one, looking glum as a result of a dose of clap picked up the week before in Guatemala City.

  Volume Four is most interesting when it deals with Anaïs’s career and the way she went about promoting it. She is forever conferring with book publishers, with editors of Harper’s Bazaar and Town and Country, posing for photographs, meeting helpful people, lecturing. At Harvard “I wore a black dress and a shocking pink scarf. I won many people, even some who were openly prejudiced….” She frets about bad reviews, presides eventually over the dissolution of her court of young men. Like everyone else, the children fail her, too.

  She strikes a “death blow” at me, ending Phase One of a long, long Relationship. Then, with a friend, she drives across America. This is much the pleasantest part of the journal, for she responds with an uncharacteristic directness and delight to landscape. In Big Sur she meets Miller again, and his new wife. Next she moves on to Acapulco—a fishing village in those days, and there the diary ends.

  Over the years defenders of Anaïs Nin—myself included—have maintained that whatever the shortcomings of her books, the diaries, their primal source, would one day establish her as a great sensibility. Now here they are, and I am not so certain. Admittedly, she has left out a great deal. Of the two analysts she was going to (1944–47), only one is mentioned. And at least two Meaningful Relationships are entirely omitted. What she has done is shrewdly excerpt those pages which deal with people well known to readers today. The result is not the whole truth but an interesting tour d’horizon of her works and days, loves and hates among the celebrated of lost time, and for me reading her is like a feast of madeleines awash with tea.

  The commonest complaint about Anaïs’s work is its (her) narcissism. Since I cannot think of any modern writer who is not a narcissist (if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love anyone), it seems to me unfair to accuse her of a fault common to our monkey race. Yet her self-absorption does put people off and I think it has to do with what Wilson calls her “solemn, hieratic style.” Not only does she write an inflated, oracular prose, but she is never able to get outside her characters. This would be tolerable if she were able to illuminate their interiors; something she seldom does, and for an odd reason.

  There are two kinds of narcissist: objective and subjective. The objective looks into the mirror and sees the lines, sees death upon the brow, and records it. The subjective stares with rapture into the mirror, sees a vision no one else can see and, if he lacks great art, fails entirely to communicate it. At her best, Anaïs Nin can write very beautifully indeed. Suddenly a phrase gleams upon the page: she does notice things, one decides, looking forward to the next line but then the dread flow of adjectives begins and one realizes that she is not seeing but writing. Since she is not a fool, she is aware of her limitations, yet, like the rest of us, she rather treasures them. “What had happened is that I have touched off such a deep level of unconscious life that the women” (in Ladders to Fire) “lose their separate and instinctive traits and flow into one another. As if I were writing about the night life of woman and it all became one.” Not able to deal with other women, she can only write of herself apostrophized. People exist for her only as pairs of eyes in which to catch her own reflection. No wonder their owners so often disappoint her. They want mirrors, too.

  The diaries present a real problem. Anaïs is dealing with actual people. Yet I would not recognize any of them (including myself) had she not carefully labeled each specimen. She is particularly devastating in her portrait of Edmund Wilson. She disliked him almost from the beginning. But since he was the most important critic of the day, she saw a good deal of him, played at loving friendship. At lunch, “I felt his distress, received his confession. He tells me about his sufferings with Mary McCarthy.”

  Later Anaïs writes to a young friend, Leonard, assuring him that she prefers his company to that of Wilson “who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity.” Then she gives us a fine description of an evening at Wilson’s empty house (“Mary took away all the furniture”). But “when he talked about my work, he had more to say about the flaws of ‘Winter of Artifice’ and little about the achievements.” The evening ends with Wilson in the street, crying after her, “Don’t desert me! Don’t leave me alone!” Like Georges Sand, Anaïs Nin is no gentleman. She meditates on going to bed with him, but decides “if he ever tastes of me, [he] will be eating a substance not good for him, some phosphorescent matter which illuminates the soul and does not answer to lust.” The Relationship ends when he offers to teach her how to write, and presents her with a complete set of Jane Austen, the perfect insult. She responds furiously, “I am not an imitator of past styles.” This is splendid comedy of the Meredithean sort; made all the finer by the fact that at no point is she aware of having been in the presence of America’s best mind. But then Wilson represents all that she hates: history, politics, literature. To her, mind and feeling must be forever at war. Thus has she systematically unbalanced both art and life.

  If there is one theme to Volume Four, it is Anaïs’s formidable will to power. Yet she is able to write, apropos my own, “For the first time I saw a contrast in our aims. [Gore’s] interest is like Miller’s, to meet everybody, to win the world.” She is even able to rec
ord with a straight pen, “Writing in a diary developed several habits: a habit of honesty (because no one imagines the diary will ever be read).” This was written in June 1946, when, at her insistence, I was trying to get Dutton to publish the childhood diary. The diary was always meant to be read, for it was her vindication, her victory over the unloving father.

  Anaïs Nin has been, literally, avant-garde. In her contempt for intellect, her mystical belief in Love (the record of human disaster in the journals is not the whole story), in her wholehearted acceptance of psychoanalysis and astrology, she was a precursor of that generation which now grooves along emotional lines she helped engineer. For them, too, there is no history, no literature, no mind. Feeling is everything and astrology, like man, is heavy. But then mind has never had more than a fragile foothold in the United States, a society where intelligence is always on sufferance, as D. H. Lawrence observed, and subject to the majority’s will.

  Warning to literary historians. Deal warily with Anaïs’s “facts.” Small example: at our first meeting, she says, I introduced myself as Lieutenant Vidal. First, I would never have used a military title; second, I was plainly a Warrant Officer, in uniform. When I pointed this out to her in the bar of the Pont Royal, she laughed gaily. “You know, I never get those things right.” Nor does she correct them. Best of the lines I was not shown (and the one most apt to give pleasure to the employees at Time), “Gore has a prejudice against Negroes.” Oh, dear. Well, I was brought up by my grandfather, a Mississippi-born senator. I have since matured. I now have a prejudice against whites.

  Finally, I do not really recognize Anaïs—or myself—in these bitter pages. Yet when I think of her and the splendid times we had so many years ago, I find myself smiling, recalling with pleasure her soft voice, her French accent, and the way she always said “yatch” instead of “yacht.” That makes up for a lot.