Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2

by Anais Nin

  A need for a stoical attitude. So I keep working, housekeeping, writing, copying, while everyone sits in cafés and suffers anxieties, fears, disintegration.

  Everyone has quit working, loving, living.

  Ideas are a separating element. Love is a communion with others. Mental worlds are isolators. Love makes one embrace all races, the whole world, all forms of creation. The artist really seeks a universal language, and artists from all parts of the world can understand each other.

  When women rush up to Henry today and say: "Who's your latest cunt?" Henry blushes and moves brusquely away from them.

  Gonzalo wants to burn Tropic of Cancer.

  "All that ugliness is in him, in his mind."

  "But ugliness has character, Gonzalo, it is like George Grosz caricatures, like Goya."

  Everyone is full of fissures, dualities, contradictions. Gonzalo's drawings of prostitutes are like Henry's descriptions, Helba herself is wallowing in ugliness. In all of us, flashes of understanding, flashes of lucidity, and blind spots. Gonzalo's blind spot is the idea that all art is an ivory tower. When it is art which made tolerable a condition of the world for which the artist is certainly not responsible.

  "Gonzalo, if you want me to come out of my art world, then to me that means action. Your own conflict between your individual and your collective life is not solved. You are hesitating to act."

  "I'll tell you honestly, Anaïs, I don't know what to do. I have a feeling of responsibility towards you as an artist, towards your work. I hesitate to drag you out of your art world, your creative world, into chaos and the making of a new world. At times I feel I should serve you, that you are doing something important, and I should help you."

  "It seems to me that the real issue is of what use I can be in the making of a new world. I can see how you can be of use, you are strong, you are trained in Marxism, you can talk to workmen, they like you, listen to you, but what can I do?"

  Gonzalo knows that once my faith is aroused, I act. I will not lie back and write books.

  We are sitting in the café at Denfert-Rochereau. We are having coffee. We buy a newspaper. Blood. Massacres. Blood. Tortures. Cruelty. Fanaticism. People burned with gasoline. Stomachs ripped open in the shape of a cross. Nuns stripped naked. French surrealists have gone to Spain to fight. Gonzalo, at three in the afternoon, is sketching at Colarossis. I call for him. I watch him work, showing the grave side of his nature. A minute later he may be drunk and laughing at the Dôme.

  Only you, my diary, know that it is here I show my fears, weaknesses, my complaints, my disillusions. I feel I cannot be weak outside because others depend on me. I rest my head here and weep. Henry asked me to help him with his work. Gonzalo asks me to join political revolutions. I live in a period of dissolution and disintegration. Even art today is not considered a vocation, a profession, a religion, but a neurosis, a disease, an "escape." I titled this diary "drifting." I thought I too would dissolve. But my diary seems to keep me whole. I can only dissolve for a little while, but ultimately I become whole again.

  "Henry's corruption," says Gonzalo, "is a fleur de peau."

  Mine is deeper. I am not shattered by a city, history, or outer events, but by the one I love. I now understand the anguish I feel in certain places where there is laxness, drunkenness, abandon, corruption. It is not my kind. I dissolve into relationships, empathy, sympathy, projections, identifications with others, but do not lose myself, do not descend into failure, masochism, defeat, death.

  Henry is writing now in Tropic of Capricorn the very best descriptions of void, disintegration, corruption. He symbolizes and represents the disease of modern man. He is at one with the chaos of the world, of cities, of streets. His anonymity is collective, the loss of the self. I do not lose myself. His dispersion seems more dangerous to me than mine. When I pass from one life into another, from one life into many lives, it is an expanded life, but not dissolution, although I skirt dissolution every instant.

  Henry admires the Chinese lack of sympathy.

  Gonzalo sings softly at the café table: "España, que te mueres. No has sabido que te quiero." (Spain, you are dying without knowing I cherished you.)

  Roger Klein has been in Spain. He came back last night. We sat in his room and talked. Gonzalo had stolen a little construction lantern which gave off a dim yellow oil flame.

  Roger talks about Spain and what he has to tell is so terrible that I went into his bathroom and broke into hysterical weeping.

  Roger is not staying. He was bringing back a young Spanish girl he married, who was left alone by the war. He wanted to leave her in someone's care. She wanted to return to Spain with him.

  The Chinese say the future is only the shadow of the past.

  There is a shadow lying on my path, and it is the recurrence of the moment when I am asked to give up my life (first to my father, then my mother, then my brothers, then others, Henry's work, Rank's work, Spain).

  And each time I enter fully into the giving, giving up, the selflessness, until I feel that something is being destroyed (me, as a woman, or the writer?). I don't know. Then I am forced to stop. I do feel I have something to accomplish, a destiny to fulfill, but, like Proust, I am not sure that what I am doing is important.

  The two pulls are there. Selflessness, and work.

  Gonzalo attacks the world I live in. Henry destroyed my bourgeois virtues, Gonzalo my art world.

  Yet what has Gonzalo made of his life, while he preaches Marxism?

  How is he living out his Marxism?

  It is true he is fighting off his drinking, and keeping away from his alcoholic friends.

  It hurts Gonzalo when I confront him with his life. He said: "With cruelty you can make me create."

  But I do not wish to exert cruelty. And if this will be another duel with destruction, against destruction, as with Henry's world, then I cannot really bear it. I want unity, wholeness.

  Gonzalo says: "I want to make you class-conscious!"

  And all my life I tried to erase class barriers, admitting only qualities of mind, or feeling, or courage, or talent.

  "I only believe in poetry," I said. "I want to live beyond the temporal, outside of the organizations of the world."

  "But the mystique of Marx..."

  "Marx is no mystic."

  "You have no religious mysticism."

  "Art is my religion."

  "We are talking Chinese." We always say this, when arguments become meaningless.

  "Yes, you talked Chinese, we talked Chinese, you and I talked Chinese." He laughed. "And everything is Chinese and meaningless." We were sitting on a bench, and looking down at the shadows of the branches. I told him what the Chinese said about the future.

  Gonzalo sneered at Cocteau's trip around the world because no one should be writing about Greece, Egypt, India, and China, while Spain is on fire.

  When I meet Henry, the news of this trip is the only item he has read in the newspapers.

  Gonzalo took me to visit the rag-pickers' village. They live just beyond one of the gates of Paris, close to the gypsies, on a vast expanse of bare earth in shacks made of tin, cardboard, newspapers. The gypsies live in their own colorful carts.

  After the rag-pickers have searched the garbage cans and filled their hemp bags with odds and ends, they come here to sort it all out and arrange their wares for the flea market.

  The paths are a yard wide, with fences on both sides made of black rotted wood from the railroad tracks. Shaky, lopsided shacks, open to cold and wind. Men and women living in the mud, sleeping on piles of rags. Babies sleeping on potato sacks. All the discarded objects of the city lying about in piles, rags, broken dolls, broken pipes, bottles, objects without shape or color, detritus, fragments of furniture, of clothes. The women are feeding their babies from withered breasts. Children fetch water from the fountain in leaky pails. When they come back the pails are nearly empty. Between the shacks are gypsy carts overflowing with big families.

  Among them
was a pretty red-and-black house, a toy-size house with a miniature garden, enclosed by a fence. In the garden grew giant sunflowers, and it was filled with pigeons, birds in cages, doves. This was the house of Django, the guitarist, whom Gonzalo knows well. He plays magnificently with hands crippled in a fire. Gonzalo had stayed with him, eaten and talked all night with the gypsies. We rang the bunch of cowbells but there was no answer. In the back of the house stood Django's gypsy cart. We found him there, playing. The cart was red outside, inside it had an orange ceiling and dark leather walls. They looked like the walls of an ancient frigate. Django's bed was hung at the back of the cart, like a ship's berth. The cart had small Arabian windows. Gonzalo could not stand up so he sat on the floor. It was so dark I could not see Django's face. One oil lamp burnt in the corner, covered by a red lampshade with gold tassels.

  One of the gypsies had covered his shack with sea shells. Another had a gypsy cart, green on the outside, and inside also lined with Cordova leather. The dark, blood-red leather, worn, its carved surface smoothed by the touch of hands, was soft and sensuous. The curtains had gold tassels. The gypsy had a dark beard and fierce eyes, but soft white hands, well manicured. He never worked. The gypsy women do all the work, bartering, cheating, stealing. The men play the guitar or sit in cafés. Gonzalo and I wanted to buy a gypsy cart. We talked it over with the gypsy and his soft hands were still. "I know a cart you might have bought, but it is now occupied by a mutilé de guerre who has no arms and no legs. And I would not put him out for anyone, not even for you, Gonzalo."

  We went to visit the man without arms or legs. He had difficulty maneuvering the ladder which led into the cart. Gonzalo offered a solution. We went to the empty lot beyond, the one which skirted the railroad tracks. Gonzalo found two planks and carried them back. He placed them over the ladder steps, secured them to the ground. Now the war cripple could easily and smoothly slide down to the ground. This cart had red curtains. No beds. Just mattresses which were rolled up during the day. It was laundry day, and the multiple skirts and petticoats of the women hung on a wire. They danced in the wind, red, yellow, white, orange, purple and blue. One gypsy was brushing her long black hair. She gave Gonzalo an inviting glance, but he murmured: "If I responded I would soon get a knife in my back."

  The merchandise collected by the rag-pickers was strewn on the ground, every conceivable object from pins to automobile tires, bird cages, broken records, and most touching of all, mismated and unmated objects, a single glove, a single earring, a cup without saucer, a basket without a handle, eyeglasses with only one glass, etc. Cigarette butts and holy medals, feathers and torn lace. Clocks without hands, shoes without laces, half a toy, half a book, family photograph albums (an orphan could find ancestors there), pincushions, buttons, shoelaces, dolls without heads.

  "I could write here," I said.

  Gonzalo said: "I could draw here."

  We stayed until dark. Watching the oil lamps being lit, the food being cooked on open fires, watching some of the carts preparing to travel, watching the fortunetellers counting their earnings, watching the children playing with fragments of toys, in fragments of clothes. One child wore a coat which was completely ripped in the back, so he was only protected in the front.

  ***

  "In Peru," said Gonzalo, "they cure madness by placing the madman next to a flowing river. The water flows, he throws stones into it, his feelings begin to flow again, and he is cured."

  So I look at the Seine flowing, but the madness continues. I hear the cries of the people: "De La Rocque au poteau!" (To the guillotine!)

  From the train window, on my way to an innocuous dinner, I had a vision of trees uprooted, with their heads in the ground, and roots gesticulating in space. A vision of war?

  Hilaire Hiler wrote me from New York: "House of Incest is very sad, at the same time comforting, in the way some drug stimulates and calms at the same time..."

  I say to people that I am not writing, but I keep on writing in the diary, subterraneously, secretly, a writing which is not writing but breathing.

  "De La Rocque au poteau!" they shout in the streets.

  Denise Clairouin. Her classic face does not seem to belong to her small stature. It gives her the appearance of a Greek head placed upon the body of a pudgy child. She has an expression of innocence and lucidity, a straightforwardness unusual in a Frenchwoman. She is Breton. There is something mystical, or fanatical, about her, though no fire shows in her clear features, in her large blue eyes.

  She lives near the Étoile, in a beautiful, old-fashioned but comfortable apartment. High ceilings, fireplaces, bric-a-brac, silver and crystal, gold and tapestries, fine wood, and many books. Her mother sits like a queen in a high-backed armchair.

  She wants all the diaries to be published. "A Proustian work without disguises, a relief from literature, from the boredom of other manuscripts," she says.

  [Denise Clairouin worked for the Resistance during the war. She was caught by the Gestapo and tortured to death. In her honor a fellowship for writers was set up bearing her name.—A. N.]

  ***

  Moricand says: "You are in a state of grace. The fairy tale is possible for you. You make it happen."

  He understands me. He understands the larger wave lengths of my life, what he calls "les ondes," like some divine radio, with special antennae.

  At night, in front of my window, workmen are laying the foundations for the 1937 Exposition, a mosque from Timbuktu, Algerian palaces, Indo-Chinese pagodas, a Moroccan desert fortress, and around the piles will be moored Chinese junks, Malayan proas, sampans.

  Quai de Passy is on the edge of the aristocratic quarter, near a bridge which carries me to the Left Bank, to Montparnasse where Gonzalo lives, to Denfert-Rochereau where Henry lives. The subway carries us back and forth across the river, the poor, the rich, at all hours of the day. Gonzalo stands at night on that bridge after he has left me and watches my window and waits for the light to go out.

  The wide window of the living room is open before me, leading to the balcony. I see the lights on the Seine, the illuminated Tour Eiffel, the red moon, and across the river the communists are holding a meeting to hear La Pasionaria, the woman communist. Gonzalo is there. In a little while he will come and get me. He wants me to see, to hear. My heart tightens. I heard them singing an hour ago, as they marched in. Taxicabs passed by, filled with people singing, waving red flags.

  I try to understand. I went to the communist meeting. I heard La Pasionaria. I heard André Malraux. I was sitting in the front row. She with her ardent face and powerful voice, he with a nervous intensity, another kind of fire, his hair fell over his eyes, he was perspiring, the crowd like one voice, one heart, singing, shouting, stamping, applauding. I wanted to respond, and I couldn't. It was fierce and angry.

  I was reading in the Cabala about crystal-gazing. All forms of trances, it did not matter which one, produced the same magical effect of unity. The whole being drawn together, fused, entranced, and capable then of ecstasy. Ecstasy is a moment of exaltation, of wholeness.

  I am like the crystal in which people find their mystic unity. Because of my obsession with essentials, my disregard of details, trivialities, interferences, contingencies, appearances, façades, disguises, gazing into me is like crystal-gazing. They see their fate, their potential self, secrets, their secret self.

  I do not yield to small talk. I am silent. I skip so much. I turn away. I am always absorbed by the core of people, looking at it, interested only when it speaks. The miracle I await, the miracle of clarity, always happens.

  Was the meeting to help Republican Spain another kind of unity? A faith in revolution, in change? A willingness to kill for it, to annihilate those who do not believe? The words which were uttered, strangely, were meaningless. Clichés. Banalities. But the feeling...

  A day and a night. Opened my eyes with the usual desire to sing and dance without ever knowing why, but there is already the dancing of light from the river on my ce
iling, walls and bed. It is the refracted sunlight on the Seine.

  After the meeting I walked with Gonzalo until dawn, talking, dreaming, sitting by the river, eating at the market, watching the rag-pickers searching garbage cans and the hoboes still asleep on the doorsteps and benches, clutching empty wine bottles.

  Janine comes softly with the breakfast. With the newspaper and with the mail. Letters from my "children": "I am soon to give a concert. I am writing my book. I have written a story. I am writing about my childhood. I am lonely. I have no friends. Do not abandon me. I am getting married, thanks to you. I did not break down this time. I wish I could be in your little room at the hotel talking to you. You have freed me. I feel stronger."

  Toward them I feel an impersonal love. I have no personal tie with them. I love the moment of the miracle, the instant Sasha sobbed on Fifth Avenue at the revelation of the meaning of his life; Dorrey weeping at her deliverance from the nightmare; Emily falling on her knees because she could believe again; Will's first pages of writing and the first flash of joy and life in his eyes.

  To keep Moricand alive, all of us go about selling horoscopes. I talked about him to Denise Clairouin.

  I have dust on my feet when I arrive at Villa Seurat. Henry has been writing feverishly and he says he is afraid of going mad.

  He went so far and wide, into a new way of using language, into whirlings, turning worlds, to give the flavor of Broadway, that he felt lost. He was dazed and lonely.

  "Women," he said, "have not liked my books as you thought they would. You were wrong in that."

  It is true. Women do not like to be de-poetized, naturalized, treated unromantically, as purely sexual objects. I thought that they would, that they were tired of idealization. I thought I was, and yet Gonzalo's troubadour romanticism out of the Middle Ages revived me after the blight of Henry's absence of romanticism.