by Anais Nin
Driving home the radio in the taxi continues the jazz mood. New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essentially a city of rhythm.
Rank could not forget Harlem. He was eager to return to it. He could hardly wait to come to the end of his hard day's work. He said: "I am tempted to prescribe it to my patients. Go to Harlem! But they would have to go with you."
My room at the "Hotel Chaotica" is as wide as the bed is long, with a tiny desk, a bureau, all in russet brown. Rank had selected it because it advertised a "Continental" breakfast. The "Continental" breakfast was slipped through a slot in the door with the sound of a revolver shot, at seven in the morning. It was a carton which contained a thermos full of watery, lukewarm coffee, a quarter of an inch butter patty in silver paper and a tough roll a day old. But there was a radio at the head of the bed.
When Rank has a formal dinner or other invitations, I either stay in my room and write in my diary or go out with my own friends.
Rank told me that women practiced deception very badly, that many of the women he had analyzed, when involved in any kind of intrigue, love or politics, always left a "clue," wanted to be discovered, mastered, wanted to lose. It was almost as if they continued to re-enact the old primitive forms of love-making, in which woman was overpowered by the strength of the man. To feel themselves conquered, in a more abstract situation, they enjoyed losing.
In Gilbert and Sullivan's musical the soldier gets a cramp trying to play the role of the poet. Rank says everyone gets a cramp, physical or mental, when playing roles. Cramps of the soul, cramps of the body, arthritis of the emotions.
The radio plays blues. Paris, New York, the two magnetic poles of the world. Paris a sensual city which seduced the body, enlivened the senses, New York unnatural, synthetic; Paris-New York, the two high tension magnetic poles between life, life of the senses, of the spirit in Paris, and life in action in New York.
Rank working magic all day, magic with pain, words which heal like the hands of the old religious healers, and in the evenings entering into my realm in which I rule, life and the present.
We sat in a restaurant and I began to ask him questions about his childhood. He suddenly launched into endless stories. Then he stopped suddenly and his eyes filled with tears. "Nobody ever asked me about myself and my life before. I have to listen to others all the time. Nobody ever asked me what I was like as a child."
I now understood why he loved Huckleberry Finn so deeply. He must have been like him as a boy, freckled, homely, tattered, rough-hewn, mischievous, adventurous, inventive. He liked to remember catching fish with his bare hands in a shallow river, proud to have been swifter than the fish. He must have been spirited and humorous.
The next day I caught him staring at the children skating in Central Park. They wore bright-red wool caps, red, white or blue coats. They screamed and laughed against the white snow. "I would like to be out there with them, laughing."
But he was locked up with the desperate and distressed, with people trapped in tragedies, and peculiar tragedies for which the rest of the world had very little compassion. Rank, that morning, the bowed, heavy way he stood by the window, looked like a prisoner of his work, his profession and his vocation. The sick came endlessly, each one who was cured brought father, mother, sister, brother, friend. They multiplied in an alarming degree. Was this a new illness, born of our own times? No time for love, no time for friendship, no time for confidences.
Rank touches all things with the magic of meaning. Those who come to him are like the blind, the dumb, the deaf. When he discovers the "plot" of their life, they become interested. This interest saves them. This plot created by the unconscious slowly reveals itself to be more interesting than any detective story. Rank uncovers the links, webs, patterns. It is endlessly interesting, full of surprises.
He writes his lectures on the train, on his way to Philadelphia or Hartford.
He insists psychologists know little about woman. "Because she has not created enough, she is not articulate, she imitates man." So he insists that when he is dictating a lecture I should make my own comments on the margin, in red ink. "That way we will hear both sides of the story."
Every other phrase uttered by Rank begins with: "I have an idea." The discovery of significance is what deepens and embellishes experience. No object, no gesture, no action which is not illumined with meaning.
We were standing in front of the brownstone house, 158 West Seventy-fifth Street, where I lived several years of my childhood, where I had known the greatest difficulties, humiliations, poverty.
There was always some member of our huge Cuban family staying there. When none came, my mother rented the top floor and the second floor to artists we knew. The daughter of Teresa Carreño, the great pianist, lived in the basement. We lived on the first floor. in what was once a parlor and dining room. Enrique Madriguera (the violinist who later became a famous conductor but was then a sixteen-year-old prodigy) lived on the top floor. The house was full of gaiety, music, distinguished visitors. José Mardones came to sing, Miguel Jovet played the guitar, my mother sang, my brother Joaquin studied his piano, Enrique practiced his violin.
Whenever there was a revolution in Cuba (and there were many) some uncle would be exiled and would come to stay with us. While the relatives stayed with us they took us on automobile rides, to the theatre, and we had a taste of luxury. And when they were gone we went back to housework, and public school. An eventful, picturesque, dramatic and comic life for us, but we were always in debt.
The house, at that time, was only in the second cycle of its history. Its first owners had lived sumptuously, with a kitchen in the basement, a pantry for the butler, maids' rooms on the top floor, a formal dining room overlooking a garden, a parlor full of mirrors, bedrooms with dressing rooms and luxurious bathrooms on the second floor. Past bourgeois comfort was still visible in the elaborate lamps, rugs, and mirrors. But when they sold it, it was partitioned into separate rooms with a bathroom to each floor. My mother and my two brothers and I all slept in what was once the dining room. We washed our faces in what was once the pantry, and used what was once the servants' shower next to the kitchen in the basement. We had two folding beds which became sedate bureaus by day, when we turned the room back into a dining room. The big bay window overlooked a backyard which I promptly turned into a garden. The desk was in front of this window. The heavy woodwork, the scallops, the friezes, made the house seem like the home of a family who had once been wealthy and had fallen into poverty with distinction.
It was there I first invented the theatre of improvisation. Though a writer, I insisted that we act out of our imagination, without script, premeditation or plan. I would merely give a theme. We would get into costumes in one of the unrented rooms, and then I would wait for my brothers or my cousins to start acting. But none of them would collaborate. They would stand paralyzed on the improvised stage in their improvised costumes of mosquito netting, Christmas ornaments, curtains and shawls, look at me and say: "Tell us what to do, what to say."
I had more success with my storytelling. We would turn off the lights, and I told stories until we terrified ourselves (Grand Guignol stories, horror stories, ghost stories). When we were all frightened enough to turn on the lights I knew I had achieved a good theatrical performance.
Rank knew about this period of my life, and he wanted to see where it had taken place. But after a while he began to talk about himself.
He was rebelling against his profession. He talked about his own imprisonment.
"I have always been a prisoner of people's need to confess. I do not want to receive confessions any more. I am tired of giving myself, of being used by others. I want to begin to live for myself. I am rebelling against sitting all day in an armchair listening to people's confessions. I want to be free, Anaïs. I am never permitted to be a human being, except with you. When people do not deify, idealize me, they make me a demon, or a father, a mother, or a grandmother! Whatever they n
eed to love or revenge themselves against. I am tired of sitting in an armchair when I feel so full of unused life, and I have so much to give in life."
I had awakened in Rank a hunger for life and freedom, as Henry [Miller] and his wife June had awakened it in me! What ironies!
He had become aware that he had not lived enough. He was rebelling against the pattern of his life, against all the giving, the annihilation, the immolation of a doctor's life. Even at night, he tells me, when he is asleep, they call him up. Cries of distress, threats of suicide, runaways.
That was why he had wanted me to become a dancer rather than an analyst.
I helped him through this crisis. I suggested merely a better balance between his work and pleasure, between work and leisure. He began to control the flow of his patients, to give more time to the theatre, to book-collecting, to his own writing.
To unburden himself, he also sent me my first patients.
***
Meanwhile, in Paris, Henry met Blaise Cendrars and writes me about their encounter.* Blaise Cendrars wanted to be the first man to fly to the moon, and if he had, how magnificently he would have described it.
Henry heard about his daughter, that she was studying music.
He came to New York, arrived late, delayed by fog. He took a room in the district where he once worked in his father's tailor shop.
[January, 1935]
I went to visit Theodore Dreiser at the Hotel Ansonia. It was an impersonal place, with a big window overlooking Broadway. There were many books about, and a desk covered with papers.
Dreiser was pink-skinned, tall, like a farmer. He had a slow voice, and a chuckling laughter, faded blue eyes and freckled hands.
Dinner was served by hotel waiters. We talked about many things, writers, books. He told me that so many people write to him as to a confessor, to tell him all their troubles, and ask for advice, believing that a novelist should know how to direct their destiny. He received so many letters that he had to have a secretary.
"And you, you have nothing to ask of me, you mean you just came to see me, not to ask anything of me?"
"I have nothing to ask of you. I respect you as a writer and I wanted to know you, that is all."
He seemed enormously relieved. He chuckled with pleasure. He told me a story: "There was a legend about a king who could turn anything he touched into gold. More and more people came bringing objects for him to turn into gold. More and more people heard about his power and they came from everywhere, crowded into his palace, crowded around him, pressed around him, begging, pleading, pushing, and finally by their massive pressure, suffocating him. That is how I feel sometimes, about all these letters of confused and begging people writing me: 'What shall I do?' Why should they think a writer can guide their life?"
Dreiser does not believe in the soul. He is a materialist.
The lights of Broadway danced up and down while we talked. Even in a hotel room he managed to create the same down-to-earth atmosphere of his books.
He asked me how I managed to have an individuality and yet retain my femininity and be unobtrusive.
After dinner he sat in his rocking chair, as if he were in his country house, and he admired my hands which he compared to celery stalks.
I almost laughed at this barnyard poetry but then I thought it was a very Dreiserian phrase. He looked so comfortable in his rocking chair.
When it was time to go, he did not get up, he kept rocking back and forth, smiling. I slipped my coat on and stood by the door.
"You mean you're not spending the night with me?"
"No," I said politely, as if he were offering me a glass of wine. "Thank you."
"Too bad, too bad," he murmured, chuckling, and then got up and accompanied me to the door, laughing merrily.
At a studio party I met some of Henry's friends: Conason, a doctor, Sylvia Salmi, a photographer, and Emil Schnellock, a painter. In Paris, Henry was always writing letters to Emil.
Rank is leaving for a three-week lecture tour of California. He will also lecture in New Orleans, on his way back.
Rank is just as preoccupied with evil as Henry is. After a day with his patients he made the following note:
Woke up with a full realization that I had never been human in all my life. By that I mean I never reacted naturally according to my emotions. Of course, it wa., self-protection, which I rationalized as human: not to hurt others. Cruelty, cheapness, meanness, that is human. Human is evil. Being jealous, indiscreet, possessive, lazy and dependent, exploiting others, that is human. Having compassion and understanding, patience and helping others, all of which is considered human, is ideological goodness. Faithfulness in love is unnatural. Not only god and religion, immortality and morality, is man-made ideology, but love too. The man who acts in reality like a woman—who is a woman following her instincts, he alone is human. It is not because he is evil that the woman likes the "bad man" but because he is natural. It would be more human to throw away all therapy and to be free, not to be bad but to be human, natural. The self-denial which is necessary in order to be good, human, is denial of the bad natural self and is therefore not a sacrifice at all but self-protection, and it is the most selfish thing of all. On the other hand the seeming sacrifice for others is really domination, protection against being too human, and is still giving in to badness by still pretending one is good.
***
Went with Henry to see "the street of early sorrows," where he played as a boy. A snowy night in Brooklyn. Small red brick houses as in small towns in Germany. Henry's school. The window of his room, so bare, with an old window shade. The tin factory he described in Black Spring. The street which led to the ferry, the one he walked through with his mother. His mother was wearing a fur muff and he never forgot the pleasure of slipping his cold hands into the warm fur. From his talk I would guess that was the only kind of warmth his mother could give him, against snow and cold, animal fur and no human warmth. It was so strange to see now the places and memories which had come to life in Louveciennes in the warmth of my interest, and which became the poetry of Black Spring.
Then we walked to the Brooklyn cellar-apartment where Henry had lived with June and Jean. It was now a chop suey restaurant. It was barren and sterile, and without beauty or charm, but no worse than some of the streets and houses where my artist friends lived in Paris, dark dank places without heat or light.
For a long time I have sought the justification for Henry's angers, hostilities and revenges. I believed it was a reaction to unusual suffering. So many American writers show this bitterness and hatred.
But when I compare their lives and suffering with the lives of European writers (Dostoevsky, or Kafka) I find that Europeans suffered far more, and all knew greater poverty, greater misery, yet they never turned into angry, hostile men like Edward Dahlberg, or Henry. Suffering became transmuted into works of literature, and into compassion. The asthma of Proust, the Siberia of Dostoevsky, contributed to their compassion for humanity. In some American writers any deprivation, any suffering, turns into mutiny, criminal anger and revenge upon others. There is an almost total absence of emotion. They hold society responsible and writing becomes an act of vengeance.
It seems to me that the answer lay in the attitude towards suffering. To some American writers anything but paradise was inacceptable. To the European it was part of the human condition, and something shared with other human beings.
It is interesting to read D. H. Lawrence's preface to Edward Dahlberg's Bottom Dogs.
The real pioneer in America fought like hell and suffered till the soul was ground out of him ... The spirit and will survived; but something in the soul perished: the softness, the flowering, the natural tenderness ... you get an inward individual retraction, an isolation, an amorphous separateness like grains of sand, each grain isolated upon its own will ... man is so nervously repulsive to man, so screamingly, nerve-rackingly repulsive! This novel goes one further. Man just smells, offensively and unbearably,
not to be borne. Nothing I have ever read has astonished me more than the Orphanage chapters of this book. There I realized with amazement how rapidly the human psyche can strip itself of its awareness and its emotional contacts, and reduce itself to a sub-brutal condition of simple gross persistence. It is not animality—far from it. These boys are much less than animals. They are cold wills functioning with a minimum of consciousness. They have a strange, stony will to persist, that is all. I don't want to read any more books like this one. Just to know what is the last word in repulsive consciousness, consciousness in a state of repulsion. It helps one to understand the world, and saves one the necessity of having to follow out the phenomenon of physical repulsion any further, for the time being.
For the soul to have been ground out of existence so easily, it cannot have been very powerful in the first place. For the snarling animal to be called out of his lair so easily, he must have been inclined to snarl at the slightest provocation.
Why didn't D. H. Lawrence's ordeals make him hate other human beings? A human writer realizes that other human beings may be victims like himself and he should unite with them against the aggressor, not become one.
Rank had the same conflict I had, wanting to be good, and becoming unnaturally good, not human. I was not natural with Henry, I played the role of the ideal confidante he needed for his writing.
When Rank saved people they were his creation. He had to continue to be the figure which saved them, the ideal wise man. He was not permitted to be human, or even to love them. The life of an analyst is tragic. A country doctor, a physical doctor, can be human, fallible. He can be loved for what he is outside of his profession. An analyst does not exist in the mind of his patient except as a figure in his own drama.
