by Anais Nin
DEAR PATRICK EVANS:
Your letter pleased me immensely, really. You are a writer and you know what happens when one writes. It is an arithmetic that takes place in the dark. It only becomes valuable, illumined with a sort of glow, a life glow, vital, when it creates a current, when there is someone at the receiving end, when there is an echo, an answer. Everything else is a sad affair, sitting alone, writing. The pleasure comes when Patrick Evans sitting before the Ionian writes back what he felt, saw, heard. Then the manuscript begins to breathe, really. We were talking about this the other night, with Henry, Larry and Nancy Larry was rebelling against writing. Henry said: "It does not take you away from life, it brings it to you, that is how we met." When I wrote my book on D. H. Lawrence I met Henry. House of Incest brought me the Durrells. My father manuscript brought me a letter from you. Those are the pleasures. You should send me something of your work. One is repaid for the moment spent alone with paper, which Larry so much resents at times. I was repaid for the moments when I felt all the warm currents of life ebbing away, I, like a ghost, pale with absorption, far away from everything, out of contact, cut off, because the father manuscript was devouring me. Nancy, Larry, Henry and I are now enjoying the compensations. We like them in the present, we don't think much about immortality, we are sensual and human and we like it right now. When one gets a letter such as yours one feels one gets one's dues in the present, and it is humanly satisfying. I think all of us are lucky. I liked what you said about the sea, the sea is there but one never gets to it. Henry thought what you said about the drama, the forward movement, was very good. I am glad you thought the father MS. naive, real and frank. I was a little anxious. Through timidity at times I get a little artificial. Instead of stuttering, I stylize. I thought that now and then in the father MS. I was artificial. I am glad you did not feel this. Seeing Larry has been a real joy. I value him greatly. For the softness and the ferocity and the clear vision, and the human quality he has. We talk a great deal, yet we don't need to. Last night we sat overlooking the Seine, and we talked in the dark, quite nakedly. We finally landed in the Heraldic Universe, installed ourselves there, rested, became whole again. For one evening. Do you live in Corfu? Do you make a copy of your novel as you go along? Do you like it to be read while it is being written, or only after it is finished?
Someday ... Meanwhile, while we talk, we look at the Seine under my window, at the papier-mâché exposition, and the heat makes us a little lethargic....
I am not sure what Lawrence Durrell means by his "heraldic universe." A poetic island? A place of nobility, a wholeness, a sign, a fraternity?
Curious that it should be Lawrence Durrell when Lawrence, the other D. H., was my first love as a writer.
Coincidences. That I should pass by the Café Zeyer and see standing there the proprietor of Louveciennes, and it was also at the Café Zeyer where I met Otto Rank, before Henry moved to the Villa Seurat. Gonzalo lives a few doors away from my first studio on the Rue Schoelcher. I once wrote about the Rue Jean-Dolent, which affected me mysteriously. I imagined myself living there looking into the Prison de la Santé and communicating with the prisoners by signs. Emile has taken a room on that street and is communicating with one of the prisoners by messages written on a folded-paper bird which they throw from window to window. The prisoners wanted to know who had won the bicycle tour de France. When the entire city of Paris will have been worn out by my experiences a day will come when I will have lived in every room in Paris, walked every street, sat in every café, eaten in all its restaurants.
The transposition of emotion made by the sincerest people when they are not aware of their subconscious feelings. This transposition of emotion women practice more than men.
Most women are unaware of this. I often become aware of it as I do it, and sometimes I do it consciously when I have a secret I cannot share, and yet my emotional state cannot be controlled or disguised, so I attribute it to another cause.
With me my unconscious is so vast, so tremendous, like a vast ocean which is constantly manifesting its presence, threatening to drown me, but which I can clarify and control as I live it out. It is very rare when I am not aware of what is happening to me, very rare when I live blindly. Chaos, storms, furies, anguish, they come as fiercely as in all women but very quickly I swim to the surface, and I can see with human eyes, and control the damage of primitive floods and eruptions.
The evening I spent with the Durrells and Henry seemed like a long voyage because we talked about so many things, stirred up so many feelings, awakened so many ideas. I had been in Greece, in their house, licked by the waves. I had been in the Himalayas, and in England. I had been in a new Paris with Larry visiting the Exposition as a playground of whimsical possibilities. His humor is poetic, delicate. He does not use Henry's language. I had dust on my feet, the song of Ravel's bird of paradise in my head, joy in Durrell's understanding of my writing, and of me. If he adopts Henry's dimension without emotion, and being impersonal he may, he will grow away from what I am doing. Even now he says one cannot write well without having written Hamlet once, as painters are supposed to have made copies of Rembrandt. I do not believe this. Not for modern writing.
An impersonal world. A glacier. So personal about himself, Henry, ruled indeed by the moon in him, but so impersonal about others. Yes, he never penetrates others, experiences empathy only if it is someone he can identify with. He observes. He does not penetrate. He cuts human beings open and exposes their vitals, but he does not feel for them. He can do this because he does not care.
And Lawrence Durrell, where does he stand? At times I feel he could have been, symbolically speaking, the writer child of Henry and myself. He likes Henry's ruthlessness. He calls it anti-romantic. He calls it the truth. He himself writes without feeling, impersonally. But there is something else there. I think he is a romantic seeking to repudiate or deny this. I think he is a poet and a painter, and that he will never open human beings in the way Henry does. But he will not go into them either, into their feelings as I do. He is too English for that.
I think he does not know yet where he stands.
Beautiful flow between Durrell, Henry, Nancy and me. It is while we talk together that I discover how we mutually nourish each other, stimulate each other. I discover my own strength as an artist, for Henry and Durrell often ally themselves against me. Henry's respect is also reawakened by Durrell's admiration for me. My feeling for woman's inarticulateness is reawakened by Nancy's stutterings and stumblings, and her loyalty to me as the one who does not betray woman but seeks to speak for her. A marvelous talk, in which Henry unmasked Durrell and me, and when Durrell said: "And now we must unmask Henry," I answered: "We can't, because he has done it himself." Henry is the strongest because he is not afraid of being alone. Larry is afraid. I am afraid. And we confessed it.
They suddenly attacked my personal relation to all things, by personification of ideas. I defended myself by saying that relating was an act of life. To make history or psychology alive I personify it. Also everything depends on the nature of the personal relationship. My self is like the self of Proust. It is an instrument to connect life and the myth. I quoted Spengler, who said that all historical patterns are reproduced in individual man, entire historical evolutions are reproduced in one man in one lifetime. A man could experience, in a personal way, a Gothic, a Roman, or a Western period. Man is cheating when he sits for a whole evening talking about Lao-tze, Goethe, Rousseau, Spengler. It would be closer to the truth if he said, instead of Lao-tze, Henry—instead of Goethe, some poet we know now—instead of Rousseau, his contemporary equivalent. It would be more honest if Larry said that it is Larry who feels irritation because symbolical wine does not taste as good as plain wine.
When they discussed the problem of my diary, all the art theories were involved. They talked about the geological changes undergone with time, and that it was the product of this change we called art. I asserted that such a process could take place ins
tantaneously.
Henry said: "But that would upset all the art theories."
I said: "I can give you an example. I can feel the potentialities of our talk tonight while it is happening as well as six months later. Look at the birth story. It varies very little in its polished form from the way I told it in the diary immediately after it happened. The new version was written three years later. Objectivity may bring a more rounded picture, but the absence of it, empathy, feeling with it, immersion in it, may bring some other kind of connection with it."
Henry asked: "But then, why did you feel the need of rewriting it?"
"For a greater technical perfection. Not to re-create it."
Larry, who before had praised me for writing as a woman, for not breaking the umbilical connection, said: "You must rewrite Hamlet."
"Why should I, if that is not the kind of writing I wish to do?"
Larry said: "You must make the leap outside of the womb, destroy your connections."
"I know," I said, "that this is an important talk, and that it will be at this moment that we each go different ways. Perhaps Henry and Larry will go the same way, but I will have to go another, the woman's way."
At the end of the conversation they both said: "We have a real woman artist before us, the first one, and we ought not to put her down."
I know Henry is the artist because he does exactly what I do not do. He waits. He gets outside of himself. Until it becomes fiction. It is all fiction.
I am not interested in fiction. I want faithfulness.
All I know is that I am right, right for me. If today I can talk both woman's and man's language, if I can translate woman to man and man to woman, it is because I do not believe in man's objectivity. In all his ideas, systems, philosophies, arts come from a personal source he does not wish to admit. Henry and Larry are pretending to be impersonal. Larry has the English complex. But it is a disguise.
Poor woman, how difficult it is to make her instinctive knowledge clear!
"Shut up," says Larry to Nancy. She looks at me strangely, as if expecting me to defend her, explain her. Nancy, I won't shut up. I have a great deal to say, for June, for you, for other women.
As to all that nonsense Henry and Larry talked about, the necessity of "I am God" in order to create (I suppose they mean "I am God, I am not a woman"). Woman never had direct communication with God anyway, but only through man, the priest. She never created directly except through man, was never able to create as a woman. But what neither Larry nor Henry understands is that woman's creation far from being like man's must be exactly like her creation of children, that is it must come out of her own blood, englobed by her womb, nourished with her own milk. It must be a human creation, of flesh, it must be different from man's abstractions. As to this "I am God," which makes creation an act of solitude and pride, this image of God alone making sky, earth, sea, it is this image which has confused woman. (Man too, because he thinks God did it all alone, and he thinks he did it all alone. And behind every achievement of man lies a woman, and I am sure God was helped too but never acknowledged it.)
Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her. If she forgets this she is lost. What will be marvelous to contemplate will not be her solitude but this image of woman being visited at night by man and the marvelous things she will give birth to in the morning. God alone, creating, may be a beautiful spectacle. I don't know. Man's objectivity may be an imitation of this God so detached from us and human emotion. But a woman alone creating is not a beautiful spectacle. The woman was born mother, mistress, wife, sister, she was born to represent union, communion, communication, she was born to give birth to life, and not to insanity. It is man's separateness, his so-called objectivity, which has made him lose contact, and then his reason. Woman was born to be the connecting link between man and his human self. Between abstract ideas and the personal pattern which creates them. Man, to create, must become man.
Woman has this life-role, but the woman artist has to fuse creation and life in her own way, or in her own womb if you prefer. She has to create something different from man. Man created a world cut off from nature. Woman has to create within the mystery, storms, terrors, the infernos of sex, the battle against abstractions and art. She has to sever herself from the myth man creates, from being created by him, she has to struggle with her own cycles, storms, terrors which man does not understand. Woman wants to destroy aloneness, recover the original paradise. The art of woman must be born in the womb-cells of the mind. She must be the link between the synthetic products of man's mind and the elements.
I do not delude myself as man does, that I create in proud isolation. I say we are bound, interdependent. Woman is not deluded. She must create without these proud delusions of man, without megalomania, without schizophrenia, without madness. She must create that unity which man first destroyed by his proud consciousness.
Henry and Larry tried to lure me out of the womb. They call it objectivity. No woman died the kind of death Rimbaud died. I have never seen in a woman a skeleton like Fraenkel, killed by the dissections of analysis, the leprosy of egotism, the black pest of the brain cells.
Man today is like a tree that is withering at the roots. And most women painted and wrote nothing but imitations of phalluses. The world was filled with phalluses, like totem poles, and no womb anywhere. I must go the opposite way from Proust who found eternal moments in creation. I must find them in life. My work must be the closest to the life flow. I must install myself inside of the seed, growth, mysteries. I must prove the possibility of instantaneous, immediate, spontaneous art. My art must be like a miracle. Before it goes through the conduits of the brain and becomes an abstraction, a fiction, a lie. It must be for woman, more like a personified ancient ritual, where every spiritual thought was made visible, enacted, represented.
A sense of the infinite in the present, as the child has.
Woman's role in creation should be parallel to her role in life. I don't mean the good earth. I mean the bad earth too, the demon, the instincts, the storms of nature. Tragedies, conflicts, mysteries are personal. Man fabricated a detachment which became fatal. Woman must not fabricate. She must descend into the real womb and expose its secrets and its labyrinths. She must describe it as the city of Fez, with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquility and mystery. She must describe the voracious moods, the desires, the worlds contained in each cell of it. For the womb has dreams. It is not as simple as the good earth. I believe at times that man created art out of fear of exploring woman. I believe woman stuttered about herself out of fear of what she had to say. She covered herself with taboos and veils. Man invented a woman to suit his needs. He disposed of her by identifying her with nature and then paraded his contemptuous domination of nature. But woman is not nature only.
She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious. Her creation will be to make articulate this obscure world which dominates man, which he denies being dominated by, but which asserts its domination in destructive proofs of its presence, madness.
Note by Durrell: "Anaïs is unanswerable. Completely unanswerable. I fold up and give in. What she says is biologically true from the very navel strings."
The birth of the magazine the Booster, inherited by Fred and dominated by Henry, reawakened my rebellion against Henry's atmosphere of begging, stealing, cajoling, school-boy pranks, slapstick humor, burlesque.
Gonzalo is working hard at the press, will begin to earn a living from it soon. He has plenty of orders.
Durrell writes me: "You are sweet the way you spread your wings and we all climb under them for help. I don't know how you do it. You must have the wing span of an albatross." This note came after we had a sparkling talk together, mainly on what seems to be irresponsibility in the artist is deeper down a responsibility towards his work, first of all.
Henry, Nancy, Larry and I. A soft summer evening. The illuminated city. Larry's m
ovements slower than his awareness. His eyes arrive quickly, transcend, possess in a flash. His body lags behind, natural, indolent, easy-going, but a little bound. He has written with despair about the spontaneous act. He makes his double, Gregory, an Englishman. This may be the secret of his fascination with Henry. The new Larry emerges, animated by a creation that is not entirely in harmony with his athletic body, his love of sailing, his laughter, his pranks. "Let's get on a bus and then ask for a cup of coffee. Let's walk into this Indo-China restaurant, order food, and ask for the 'indo' in it." He is a little amazed at himself, as someone who discovers a disease in himself. Under the golden tanned skin, the blond hair, the sea-bottom eyes, behind the poetic gestures, mellow and human, he has found a cataract of words, a universe of nuances, shadows, quarter tones. Not by way of neurosis did he discover the imagination he has. He is like a sailor, a mountaineer who has been visited by revelations. There is a miracle about his creation. He is a bit amazed. He walks the familiar streets with a vague uneasiness. The wine bottle has become symbolical. This expresses all he is fighting against. He does not want to lose the warmth, the flesh, the odor, the reality.
