by Anais Nin
There is no doubt that we flow as individuals through a non-individual world to which we are connected, the world of writing.
I felt that Larry and Nancy were a little uneasy, a little lost, a little ready for flight, after ten days at the Villa Seurat and the Dôme circus. I felt their loneliness. I asked them to come and see me last night We sat on the floor, by the large window. We had coffee in the dark, sitting on pillows. All the lights came from the river. And we talked intimately. They recoil from what I recoil from. They wanted Greece again, after walking through the greasy, slippery, putrid world of Montparnasse. "It is not a moral repulsion," said Larry, "it is heraldic." The love of the "heraldic" world in Larry excludes the other. Not in Henry.
Afterwards, Henry laments that he does not live on the level of his creation. He does not even live on a level with himself. Enjoyed Larry and Nancy's contempt. I enjoyed Larry saying as I so often do: "I get impatient. I can't stand idiots very long. One should not have contempt, but this chap..." I felt less alone. In the dark we seemed able to say everything. Larry exposed his fear of going mad if he continued writing. He said I was unique and he did not want to lose me. He danced around when I showed him my diary and his letters pasted in it. "You are important," I said. He did not know it. He is afraid of what I will write about him but I said: "So am I of what you will write, yet I can't stop talking, because you know me anyway." We shared a malaise in disintegrated, dissolute surroundings, a nostalgia for wholeness, a need of wholeness. We shared the conviction that certain experiences are not necessary.
I remembered Larry's first mention of his "heraldic universe," which caught my attention. Nancy and Larry were contemplating evasion, escape from Paris. I dispelled their fears by naming them.
I conjured up the demons and we exorcised them. We had a moment of wholeness, of repose, of Oriental serenity.
Helba talks for hours about Gonzalo's paralysis. She is obsessed with his procrastination, his blocking himself, defeating himself. He builds up a thing and just before it materializes he stops. The press, all ready, is not used because he won't call the workman who will teach him, because there might be days when he has no work for him. And all the orders his friends have given him are waiting. Everything at a standstill. He says: "I will do the work," but he does not do it because the paper has not come. Why has it not come? "I don't know. I was to call up the man yesterday about it." "Shall I get it Gonzalo?" "No, it will be delivered tomorrow."
"I will work with you tomorrow, Gonzalo."
"No, not tomorrow. Tomorrow I have to see Neruda about his poems."
Helba nags: "Gonzalo, you're so awkward, you're stupid, you break everything, you can't do anything well."
I say: "Gonzalo you are so adroit with the press. Why are you timid about getting a workman to help you the first week?" Destruction. Creation. Destruction. Creation. Infernal duel. Continuous. If I had kept the press for myself I would be producing, printing, publishing. When I ask Gonzalo: "How would you like your life to be?" he answers: "A revolution every day."
Nancy says courageously to Larry: "Perhaps you are dissatisfied with me."
Larry answers: "I am, but that does not mean I want to change, or that I want anyone else."
The incredible force of stagnation in Helba and Gonzalo which swept them into starvation, disease, death. Gonzalo uses rags for handkerchiefs. I gave him some handkerchiefs. He said: "But I have dozens of them at home. For a year I have piled them up to take them to the laundry. I can't bring myself to wash them. The package is still there."
Larry says: "I hate Bohemianism."
Henry was having dinner with some nondescript character.
The Dôme at nine in the morning. Antonin Artaud passes by. He is waving his magic Mexican cane and shouting.
"I don't want this rotting-away while I am alive," said Gonzalo.
I said to Gonzalo: "Do you know what it means, desiring and not desiring, acting and then stopping yourself? You are afraid of realization, materialization. You want power and yet you are ashamed to take the lead. You want to serve communism but you reject discipline. You want a freedom which in the end results in the greatest slavery, the greatest helplessness and humiliation. You would rather die than risk defeat. You would rather starve than sacrifice an hour's sleep."
I worked for an hour and a half at the press, to help Gonzalo. Elation at seeing the printed words appear.
We work in a small, low-ceilinged room with two windows on a very old French garden on the Rue de Lille. It is the abode of Paix et Démocratie. There are two enormous tables, one with the press on it. I printed two thousand strips for pamphlets. Cut them. Gonzalo was writing letters. It was pride and possessiveness which prevented him from getting the workman. He wants to be in control of everything. A personal universe. When the work becomes too heavy then we will run into trouble.
DEAR DJUNA BARNES,
I have to tell you of the great, deep beauty of your book Nightwood. The last half above all, moved me so much that I am almost afraid to write you. The true poet in you who isolated the Doctor, Nora, Robin in a world surcharged with meaning, and makes them talk with a clairvoyance and humanity, a depth I have rarely seen touched, how that moved me. The relationship between Nora and Robin, which you not only describe in reality, in the world we see, in the street, in the house, the city, the café, but which you enter through the most mysterious of all penetrations, to reveal its most elusive, its most poetic, its most symbolic and human significance. Blinding. While I read I felt: she knows too much, she sees too much, it is intolerable. It was intolerable. It was unforgettable. The language, the knowingness, the beauty, the tragic quality, the transparent power of touching depths ... The most beautiful thing I have read about woman, and women in love. I am very much afraid to write you. You will know why. I would like you to know what your book has touched, illumined, awakened. But it is not in a letter, to someone I only know in her created world, that I can say it. I would like to install myself in your created world, which I feel so keenly, and from there address you. I would like to break through the barrier of the exterior you. It is strange, several years ago our names were on the same page, I heard about you, one of your books and mine on D. H. Lawrence were announced by a "barker" called Drake. Once you were pointed out to me in a café. I saw a beautiful woman. But had I known then you were the woman of Nightwood... I have been truly haunted by Nightwood. Haunted really by the emotional power, the passionate expression. A woman rarely writes as a woman, as she feels, but you have.
Even today when I am most deeply installed inside of life, I cannot hear music and gaiety from a neighbor's house without sadness, without feeling outside. To be inside or outside was my nightmare. I feel born on the rim of an eternally elusive world. When I was poor, when I was at an awkward age, when I was combing my long hair before the mirror of the pantry in the brownstone in New York, I can understand why the music that came from the house in front of us filled me with yearning, jealousy, envy, despair. It seemed to me inaccessible. It seemed to me to come from a forbidden, an impossible world. I thought it was because I was poor, because our life was not beautiful, because I was not beautiful. I thought it was because as I stood there in my nightgown with my hairbrush in hand, brushing my long hair, I was aware of the timidity of this body which only danced in the dark, of the fragility of this hair which seemed to shine only in the dark, the paleness of this face which seemed to shine better in solitude. I shone in solitude, that was the mystery. And I could not reconcile this black self shining to the brilliancy of the day, the day brilliancy of the neighbor's room on a gay evening and the music. It was not poverty, it was not the awkward age. The day came when I shone in daylight, when I wore the dress and danced in daylight, and the glow, the smile, the familiarity and the triumphs. The gaiety was mine and for me. But the moment of insideness, of participation, of belonging, was swift and left me outside as much as when I stood as a girl watching the neighbor's window. There was always this bei
ng outside at some moment or other, alone. I could not remain inside, I did not live inside. The glow, the familiarity inside of music, with people and gaiety, was there, but so was the moon-glow of solitude, the pale-faced watcher. At first I was altogether the lonely girl watching and feeling unfamiliar, dépaysée. Afterwards, I was both. Now I am often inside and I dread the moment when I will see the pale face at the window watching from another world. I do not want to be robbed of the present. Was not this yearning girl finally buried in the woman fulfilled? Why should the moment of music ever stop? Why must it come, the moment when I am thrust out on the periphery again, separated, and I hear the neighbor's music, I hear festivities, I hear dancing of which I am not a part, and I am sad, still yearning as someone doomed to feel this edge, this rim, this distance. Everything will not happen in my own home. There is always music coming from elsewhere, always a yearning, always something imagined to be lovelier and warmer. Always a color that is inaccessible, a room that makes me feel poor and ragged, a music that makes me dance in the dark. Always a music that makes me glow in the dark, a different glow than the color of the neighbor's gaiety. This violent desire to be inside of all warm, live, breathing pleasures, to sleep in them, to be always a part of them, never to be alone, to break the apartness forever, a mad desire.*
[Fall, 1937]
My tragedy is that I love deeply but I cannot yield my integrity or live wholly in anyone else's world. I cannot yield. Part of me remains always Anaïs Nin. The desire to be with others, to amalgamate, to make concessions, compromises, kills me. I want to be at one with political work and I cannot. The work at the press done wastefully, erratically. For example, next to Gonzalo's apartment there is a big printing-shop where Gonzalo was to buy the tray for the type. He planned to get up early, get the tray, and asked me to come and help distribute the type. I came. But Gonzalo got up at eleven, did not get the tray, came to the office, forgot the wrapping paper, so I had no work to do. Then in the middle of the afternoon he takes an hour's trip by bus to go and get the tray while the office fills up with people waiting for him by engagement. He cannot organize, plan, and creates a vast confusion, wasted efforts. The immediate thing he cannot do. He has to circumvent. That is Gonzalo. But I cannot work that way. So I run away.
Someday I must have a press of my own.
It is symbolic that all Gonzalo does is lopsided, even to cutting paper. Henry is useless with his hands. I turn out work as if magically, quickly, merely because I don't want to be submerged, drowned in details. I don't take pride in this. Gonzalo cannot construct anything. If he went to war he would fight wildly, like a maniac, and probably die uselessly, blindly, out of an error.
The sculptor Henghes says to me: "When I was poor and worked in restaurants, I thought and felt like those I worked with." I envy him. When I was poor and worked as a model and as a mannequin, I never became like the others. I remained myself. I played roles, but I remained myself.
This incapacity to alter myself, remaining myself, deep down, is painful to a woman. Woman should be born blind so that she may serve blindly. Unquestioningly.
For this reason I had to give up my association with the Booster. Too much slapstick. Reichel, who was being praised by Henry, did not sleep for several nights wondering how he could tell Henry that he was ashamed to be so crudely "boosted."
When I said to Gonzalo: "I wrote all those letters this morning because I want to feel free and light," he said: "And I postponed making those packages I have to make for days, knowing it will weigh on my mind, preoccupy me for days, as if I sought not to feel free."
At times, by contagion, he does the immediate thing, is happy, but I know in an hour he will find another way to tangle himself up, botch himself, bind and enslave himself.
Why do I ally myself to destructive forces? And combat them? When I met Henry and June, it was the same. I walked into an inferno of dark destruction. And why, if I am drawn to them, do I not yield to their ways, become destructive, abandon the struggle to change them?
Hans Henghes sends me a letter with a rock crystal. "It is the first time I live something pure, Anaïs. I feel I can see something new in my work. I was nauseated by the world, and weak, and lost. But not any longer."
He went from his visit to me to the Princess de San Faustino, with my House of Incest under his arm. She read the book, bought it, wrote me a letter: "I want to know you." She is coming tomorrow.
Meanwhile all my time is given to the press.
The Princess de San Faustino turned out to be an American woman. She came to see me because she has known much anxiety and a sense of displacement. These she recognized in the book. Anxiety. No one writes about it. Yet it is today's drama. Not events. The suffering about incidents which never take place, sufferings of the imagination. By removing concrete identifications and X-raying the state itself, anyone, even Princess San Faustino from Illinois, can recognize how she feels, in no matter what place, country, time.
So many imaginary relationships, so many imagined scenes which never take place.
Henry's growing celebrity has created an inflation, an expansion and effusiveness which is followed by bad humor, fatigue, irritability. His week with the Durrells, a week of intoxication, sleeplessness, was followed by depression.
H. H. brings me a green beetle with a gold-rust stomach. Two poems. We were sitting at a café. A group of workmen came in on a picnic. A huge woman unloaded her basket beside us, on our table. I said to H. H., laughing: "Why didn't you tell me you had invited another woman for lunch? I feel de trop."
"There is nothing between us," said H. H. "She is just a very old friend."
Talk with Henry. I feel he is created now, as a writer. He is published, accepted, known.
I can now work for myself.
With writing it is this way. One says: "I feel good, too good. I don't need to write. I want to live." One is inside, enjoying life, living without formulation. No echoes, no registering. Then one day, without reason, life is split into two channels: being, and formulating. An activity resembling a motion picture starts to run inside of one's head. (One can hear the purring of the machine.)
I am writing. It is not analyzing, or meditating, or a monologue, it is writing. It is living in terms of immediate phraseology, with great excitement as before, a discovery of appropriate words, an anxiety to capture, retain, to be precise, felicitous. It comes on unexpectedly, like a fever, and goes away, like a fever. It is distinct from all other activities.
All this month I have been writing in my head, I am coming nearer to the realization of what I must do.
But I don't want to begin yet, because life is sweet, laziness is sweet. I am writing in my head about New York, Otto Rank, Henry's writing, the death of a dress. I am not detached enough to begin my big work.
Humorous, ironic things are happening with the publication of Henry's Scenario, which he had printed in a limited edition of two hundred copies with his first royalties.
We had started out by wanting to write a scenario together around House of Incest, which was not yet in its final form. I had shown Henry all my material. As soon as we began to work I realized Henry was obeying his own imagination, that House of Incest was becoming something entirely different, that our styles could not fuse. The very atmosphere, texture, contents altered. To me it seemed more like a parody of the original. I did not want to tell Henry I did not like what came out of our talks. I quietly left out of my final version the themes Henry had developed in his own way and in his own language. Henry felt he had been stimulated by House of Incest material and insisted on saying it was inspired by it.
In its present form, as Henry's Scenario, it will be read and liked by thousands who will never read House of Incest, or understand it.*
Helene gives me a fierce description of her husband's jealousy. "He was like Othello. He seemed to take a perverse pleasure in these scenes, and I tried to learn from him, but I must confess I have learned nothing. If there is any pleasure in the
m, I have not found it. It always began when we were most happy, lying in the dark. After caressing me he would lie silent and withdrawn. I would say: 'What is it, querido?' He would strike his head with closed fists. 'That image of you talking with the sculptor at the party, I have that image nailed into my brain, I cannot get rid of it.'
"'But it was a casual conversation.'
"'Then why were you so interested, so animated?' At such injustice, I would always become angry, and say things to hurt him, unconsciously, arriving always at what hurt him most deeply: 'Why don't you let me study painting?' knowing that this unhinged him completely, the idea of my going to an art school with other art students, and painting naked figures. His emphasis on physical jealousy also incensed me. Why was he not jealous of my thoughts, of my love of painting, of my emotional and artistic life? We would fall into inchoate arguments. To reassure him I said I knew that I could never feel any sensual attraction without love. 'How do you know?' he asked, violently. 'How did you find out?' He reproaches me for appearing so lax, and free in my speech. I explained this was because I was ashamed of my intransigence, it seemed so outdated even among our circle of friends. Then he insisted that he had seen the sculptor kiss me during the dancing. All the time I felt so ashamed of the petty quarrel we had fallen into. The air became heavy, our feelings confused. We would say false things, mean things, we didn't know what we were saying, we would dig knives into each other, there was hostility, pain, confusion, blindness. I hated it all. I hated it because it was like a poison, it drowned our uniqueness, what I believed to be the uniqueness of our love, it separated us. I felt shattered, lacerated, wounded. Was this love, this digging of knives into the flesh, cruel phrases, a love that had no faith in love? Poison. Our caresses after that were like life after death. I didn't know if love had grown a new root, or a poison that would hasten its death. I didn't know whether this exposure of the animal awakened the senses, excited desire. Not in me. When he says: 'There is a corner of your being into which I have been unable to penetrate,' I felt like saying: 'The only thing I hide from you is my hatred of your jealousy.' And it was his jealousy which drove me away. One evening we had a scene in a restaurant. He became violent. I walked out. I walked in the rain, sobbing, because I feared his jealousy, it would separate us, and I could still hear his desperate words: 'There are those who are born to lose, I was born to lose.' But I could not tell him it was he who was pushing me away. I sobbed for him, for his pain and frustration. He came running after me. He pulled me into a doorway so I would not get soaked by the rain. He kissed my tears, my wet hair, my mouth. I will never forget these kisses. We went home. We fought. I held my ground. Will I ever find such a passion again? Here in Paris, it seems so light and cheerful and carefree. No madness. No penetration by knives."
