Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2

by Anais Nin

  I am profoundly disturbed by the condition of the world, the suffering. I cannot shut my eyes as Henry does.

  Gonzalo brings me his conflicts. Should he sign a document prepared by Paix et Démocratie exposing capitalist investments in Spain? Signing his name exposes him to assassination. Not signing it makes it the work of a group. I thought attacks should come from a group, because the loss of one man, as a scapegoat, is a loss to the strength of the revolution. Coming from Paix et Démocratie, I felt, the attack would worry the exposed ones. They will not know how much documentation, how much proof they have. Will there be more exposures? It gave greater strength to the attack, I felt. Not one person can be disposed of. It will be more effective, unnamed.

  I came out of this talk depressed.

  I saw Durrell. His book is coming out. Havelock Ellis is interested in both Henry and Durrell. Durrell urges me to publish excerpts of the diary. He says: "I am altogether an actor, I am all mimetism." He was born in February, as I was, and very close to my own date.

  With the Durrells I relive my discovery of Henry, my conflicts, my acceptances. Durrell is mature, he seems older than Henry. He understands why I protect Henry's work.

  Nancy and I hunt for an apartment in Montmartre for herself and Larry.

  André Breton came to visit me. I expected he would be poetically and sensitively alert to the atmosphere of my life, to my inarticulate intuitions. He was not. He was intellectual. He talked about ideas, not impressions or sensations. And he told me a story which was the opposite of what I had expected.

  He had been talking about the surrealist game of getting together and then engaging in an unplanned action. They will take a train and get off anywhere, a place they do not know, and wait for surprises, things to happen. Or get on a bus, and suddenly decide to stay in a small town, and wait for the unexpected. He tells this with solemnity, more like a King speaking at an audience than a fellow artist talking to other artists. He did not expect comments, only listeners.

  Then he said: "The other day I received a letter from a woman. She wrote a beautiful letter. She commented on my emphasis on 'surprise,' on coincidences, and said she would like to meet me alone under the Pont Royal one evening at midnight. She would not identify herself in any way."

  I waited for the rest of the story. Breton added: "I did not go, of course."

  "Why 'of course'?" I asked.

  "Because I have many enemies, and it could have been a trap."

  When he saw how disappointed I was at his lack of adventurousness, he added: "I went the second time, though, after she wrote to me. But I was careful to post two loyal friends on the bridge where I could call out to them in case of danger."

  This story, added to his dislike of music, betrayed what I suspected in surrealism, the part of it that is conscious, premeditated and an intellectual technique; it betrayed the man of the laboratory. It was this which prevented me from espousing surrealism, from becoming a totally committed disciple.

  As soon as Hélène returned to Paris she became ill again. She said: "Nothing keeps me here but you. Please come with me to the doctor, he is taking an X-ray. I have a lump in my stomach and I am afraid of cancer." She added that my understanding of her was all she had. Her illness is the emptiness of her life and I cannot fill it for her. She studied painting with Leger. Leger wanted her to write a book about him in Spanish for South America. She does not want to meet Henry. "He is all taken up with himself and his work."

  With Henry and the Durrells we talk about sainthood, wholeness, nature, disease, vigorously and marvelously. The universe expands. We reached the certitude that the artist is not whole. Only his work is whole. Henry says about himself all I have written about him, that he is all there, in the moment, and that it is tragic for human life. He says that whoever reaches an absolute and dies for it, sainthood, or Rimbaud's madness, is right. The artist does not die. Henry touched the bottom of suffering with June, but he did not kill himself. I touched the heights of mystical religious exaltation at fourteen, but I did not become a saint. I plead for nature now, against disease, because the surrealists have encouraged the aggravation of mental disturbances for the sake of the revelations of unknown worlds.

  I love the tree in full bloom, not the tree bearing only one branch. I argue in favor of Henry's life, wide, expanded against the life of the cloister and retreat. For there is something beyond giving ourselves to one absolute. Perhaps, I said, wholeness for us is a different thing from the wholeness of the simple man. We may have a core, an absolute which is an equilibrium in space and motion, whereas the unity of a simple life consists of a static choice. No further growth. The artist refuses to die. Perhaps our wholeness is different, vaster, beyond personal wholeness. There is no progress of the personality like a pyramid converging to a point of perfection. Fulfillment is the completion of a circle. All aspects of the self have to be lived out, like the twelve houses of the zodiac. A personality is one who has unrolled the ribbon, unfolded the petals, exposed all the layers. It does not matter where one begins: with instinct or wisdom, with nature or spirit. The fulfillment means the experience of all parts of the self, all the elements, all the planes. It means each cell of the body comes alive, awakened. It is a process of nature, and not of the ideal. One dies when the cells are exhausted, one reaches plenitude when they all function, the dream, desire, instinct, appetite. One awakens the other. It is like contagion. The order does not matter. All the errors are necessary, the stutterings, the blunders, the blindnesses. The end is to cover all the terrain, all the routes. No spaces to skip. Any skipping of a phase only retards the branchlike unfolding. Growth, expansion, plenitude of the potential self. To live only one aspect or one side of the personality is like using only one sense, and the others become atrophied. There is greatness only in fulfillment, in the fullness of awakening. Completion means the symphony. Sublimation means to condemn to immobility certain members of the body for the sake of the monstrous development of others. Like the abnormal sensitivity of the blind, the unusually keen hearing of the mute. It is monstrous. Psychologically, a great personality is a circle touching something at every point. A circle with a core. A process of nature, growth, not the ideal. The ideal is an error. Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.

  ***

  First talk alone with Larry. He takes my arm as we walk. He feels that I do not treat him as if he were twenty-six, and that pleases him. I say: "At times I feel that you are older than Henry. Henry is never aware of the other, only of himself. I can see that you are aware of the other." Larry had noticed Henry's impersonality, as if detached from all. His relationships are mostly on a false basis. Larry understands this, sees this. Henry exemplifies separateness. He has many areas of insensitiveness, even of hardness. Henry is often not human. Larry could be Henry's son but he has a sensitivity to the other which Henry does not have. Henry says: "I believe in friendship, not in the friend. People are interchangeable."

  Larry's young, rosy face, but old eyes. He is young in his games, humor, sense of wonder, but old in awareness, as I am. Larry spoke of his own drama. He wants nearness. He feels for the woman, he feels my difficulties. I talk with him and I wonder. Larry understands my acceptance of the artist and my human rebellion against their sacrifice of the human relationships.

  Helene like a windmill, changing her plans every day. I suggest she go and talk to Jung to find out why she cannot find a deep relationship. She is so interesting and beautiful that it is hard to believe she cannot find a love. Too many contraries, cross-currents, rebellions. She cannot give herself. Why?

  She says: "Henry's eyes are so innocent."

  She adds: "When he bows his head one feels like taking care of him."

  But she does not seek him out. "I am too selfish. I do not want to serve anyone."

  Larry is fully aware of those moments when Henry becomes unreal, nothing warm or vital there. The artist. Transmutation. The inhuman transposition of
life into remembrance. He is not living in the present. He is always remembering.

  Larry said: "I don't want to disappoint you, destroy your idea of me."

  "You can't," I said. "I carry an X-ray, as Proust did."

  "Don't get run over, Anaïs."

  ***

  The differences of attitudes between Henry and myself are becoming more marked. Differences of character, habits, tastes, friends, way of living, philosophy, books, even attitude towards writing.

  I slide so quickly between contrasting atmospheres, I find myself in one day in such different places. One moment I am in a cheap movie house with Henry and his friends, a movie near Alésia, with people who smell bad, and look ugly, where the water closets all have holes in the doors for the "voyeurs," another moment I am having tea with friends in the most stylish place, at another I am sitting at the Deux Maggots with André Breton and Henghes. Now I am in my mother's bourgeois apartment, with bric-a-brac from the past, photographs, lace doilies over the armchairs. Later in the office on the Rue de Lille where members of Paix et Démocratie are studying a plan to expose the capitalists.

  The office is an old apartment overlooking a garden. It makes the room tinted green. It is next to a hotel. And at times, when all is very quiet, and I am addressing envelopes, I can hear what is happening in the hotel rooms through walls or open windows. Once, on a cold day, I heard a man coughing, stirring. He sounded very old. I asked Gonzalo about him. Gonzalo knew him. He said: "He is not old. He is only forty years old. But he has fought in the Spanish war, and was wounded several times, once in die chest. He has lost all his family. He is all alone, and half crippled." From then on I felt a connection with this man. His coughing fits hurt me. I could hear the rustle of the newspapers when he lay in bed, reading them. His loneliness. His tragedy. It was like an exhortation to work harder.

  I will never be able to describe the states of dazzlement, the trances, the ecstasies produced in me by love-making. More than communion, more than any joy in writing, more than the infinite, lies in the unity achieved by passion. It is the only moment when I am at rest, that is the summit, the grace, the miracle.

  In all people concerned with creation there is an order. In Henry, Durrell, and in me, there is order. In June, Hélène, Gonzalo, the uncreative ones, there is chaos.

  Larry says that my concept of a wholeness attained by an equilibrium between duality is not true wholeness. All I do is not break the final cord.

  I won't stop living to write. I can only fill the diary.

  Larry says that I am more of a chameleon than he is, even after seeing me once in my "fragile" role, a day when I felt utterly drained, weak, and in need of protection.

  These moments of utter loss of strength I never knew to be either physical or emotional. But I do feel helpless. As he had seen me supporting, consoling, arguing, on my strong days, he was stunned by the contrast, said he would put me in a play, a labyrinthian idea he had. I said that if he put me in a play I would probably stop acting in life. The truth is that when I laugh at my transformations, I am at the same time a little tired of them. It seems to me that I traverse a hundred quarters a day, breathe a hundred different airs, am so sensitive to changes, suffer from my dualities and triplicities, ask myself what is it that I can discuss with Larry which I cannot discuss with Henry or Gonzalo.

  I am not indifferent to the greater dramas over our heads, but drama is everywhere the same, microcosm or macrocosm, and it is not my destiny to live the drama of Spain, the one of death, war, agony, hunger. It is my destiny to live the drama of feeling and imagination, reality and unreality, a drama underlying the other, a drama without guns, dynamite, without explosions, but it is the same one, it is from this one that the other is born: conflict, cruelty, jealousy, envy. Now in me it all happens in another world, in myself, and myself as an artist who remembers each day more what each day of my life touches in the past. I do not live beyond war, the drama that hastens death, accelerates the end. Perhaps it is a greater agony to live this life in which my awareness makes a thousand revolutions while others make only one, my span may seem smaller and it is really greater because it covers all the obscure routes of the soul and a body seeking truth and never receiving medals for its courage. It is my thousand years of womanhood I am recording, a thousand women. It would be simpler, shorter, swifter not to seek this deepening perspective to my life and lose myself in the simple world drama of war, hunger, death.

  ***

  From the window of Paix et Démocratie, I also see passing the skeletonic figure of Nancy Cunard. Gonzalo tells me that she prefers Negro lovers. She came to the office with a batch of handmade paper on which to print some poems for Spain. The bracelets and necklaces dangled on her drupaceous skin, her over-ripe wrinkled olive skin. I could not imagine her in bed, alive, but only lying like a mummy, all skin and bones. But at least she is to be respected for she has fought for the Negroes, has sought to improve their situation in America, has lived in Harlem and taken up their struggles.

  I am puzzling over the meaning of things which do not perplex Gonzalo, I am gnawed by feelings unknown to Henry, troubled by questions neither Rank nor Allendy could answer, writing only in a diary which Henry says should be nailed with a big nail on the wall of his studio and muted forever, and I ask myself is it fear on the part of man, fear of a woman unveiling her own truths? Is there another reason for everyone being against it, one not purely ideological? Larry came today. Larry divided between Henry and me, sharing Henry's hardness, laughter, masculine objective world, and yet better able than Henry to put himself in the place of a woman with a sensitiveness Henry does not have. After the big talk about or against the diary (the night which made me write on the creation of woman) he felt: "Perhaps Anaïs is right and we are wrong." Henry never doubts. Larry said: "Henry achieved the happy-rock feeling for himself but he likes to hack away at others' foundations. As I go home and hack away at Nancy with a little hatchet after respecting you and accepting you for several hours."

  "That is why," I said, "friendship in general is such a difficult thing. I feel that Henry undermines my self-confidence, sows nothing but doubts in me. He does not ever give me the feeling that I might be right for myself, as much as he is for himself. He cannot accept my differences, as I accept his. If I hack away at him it is in the diary, never in life. In life I created his faith."

  Larry said: "Did you ever write down what you said the other day? That was the most marvelous thing I ever heard a woman say. If you didn't put that down I will."

  We had been talking gayly about money matters and I had ended with: "It is very important that Henry should be permitted to play. Only one of us can play."

  Larry began to look over the volumes I took out of the tin box. But I began to feel uneasy, agitated, and we talked first. His first remark was: "Why, that is as terrifying as Nijinsky." We had all been reading Nijinsky's diary.

  Larry went away with an armful of volumes after saying: "You are a strange person, sitting there, surrounded by your black notebooks."

  I feel right about the diary. I will not stop. It is a necessity. But why does Henry attack it? He says I give good justifications for it each time but that he does not believe them.

  Nijinsky, writing just before all connections broke with human beings...

  Larry with his keen eyes, saying: "I have only smelled the diary writing, just read a page here and there. You have done it, the real female writing. It is a tragic work. You restore tragedy which the world has lost. Go on. Don't stop. I'm sick of hearing about art. What you have done nobody has done. It is amazing. It is new."

  All this warmed me and I asked him: "Do you think Henry wants it to end for personal reasons?"

  "Yes," said Larry.

  When he spoke, and even more deeply than I have noted down, he was afraid again, as he is of his own Black Book born out of the deeps. He got up and ended with: "Just a twenty-six-year-old infant speaking."

  I do not consider him so. He i
s in terror of this powerful spontaneous creation in him. The healthy English boy, impersonal, witty, with the protective shell of the conventional, startled by the "monster" in him whom Henry and I treat as an equally mature man. He is unsure of himself, but we are sure of him, both of his genius and his understanding.

  He asked me as they all do: "Please do not write about this or about me in the diary." I answered, as I always do: "I won't..."

  The point of Larry's speech was that it answered my question: "All I would like to hear you say is go on with the diary." Larry said he could say this wholeheartedly, without hesitation. That the novel did not compare with the diary.