Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2

by Anais Nin

  "The diary goes on, but I need faith. This continuous attack on it, as a disease by Rank, as anti-art by Henry, wears me down."

  When I think of suicide I think of it only as a relief and an end to sensibility. That is my disease, my only disease. That is what isolates me, separates me from collective life. I find happiness in the intimacy of friendships, when it is new, but then comes the world in which the friend lives, his other selves appear in relation to others, a different self, smaller, shabbier, poorer, weaker. I see them in the world, and it is not the same person I love in intimacy. Then comes the death of the friendship. I ask myself: Was it a natural death? Or was it a death hastened by my abnormal sensitiveness, my doubts of which is reality, which is the real person, the one revealed to me, or the one acting in the world? Gonzalo goes from me, from his role of amazing storyteller, romantic revolutionist, devoted sacrificed husband, to the D^me. They drink and knock each other down, fall into the gutter, steal the fishermen's boat and paddle down the Seine and sink it.

  DEAR LARRY:

  I was thinking of all you said the other day. I have two more volumes for you to read. I hope you will call soon. You were so accurate the other day, so exactly as I imagined you to be. A humorous golden young Jupiter descending abruptly into the infernos of Tropic of Cancer, of your own Black Book, of Montparnasse, and my diary. Unfortunately there is no going back, you know, and anyway you cannot deceive me, about never having been there before. You have seen it all, and it shows in your eyes. And I have a sort of prophetic hunch that, without any heavy responsibility you might pull me out of my too dark worlds (do not fear this role, one's effect on others is beyond one's power to alter) and perhaps I will be the one to give you the courage to go on, to explode. You can talk to me all you want about the version of Hamlet you want to write (and now I understand better it was a prescription for sanity and painlessness you were giving me, for the great classical relief from terror and pain), but what I really understood is what you gave me, whatever that is, I don't want to dissect it but I am grateful for it. There are no solutions, there are displacements. Something in you helped me to displace myself and I breathe better. Thank you. Perhaps the old idea of faith.

  Larry and I walked around the Pare de Montsouris. He talked about the diary: "More terrifying than Tropic of Cancer. The collapse of Rank's teachings, incredible. You're like a diamond desiring to be made dust and they all cut away but the diamond is untouched. Henry could have helped you, but you met him too late, when he was burying himself in his work. The diary cannot stop until the quest is over. It is the quest of all of us, only you struggle more. We are all writing about the Womb, but you are the Womb. They all get caught in your femininity, and you looking so innocent. When everybody thinks you're dead, you're killed, and you lie like a fish at the bottom of the pool, and everybody thinks now you're dead but I can see the fins still moving—almost imperceptibly. Henry could be a real man if he were in life and not a writing machine."

  As we walked, I was laughing with pleasure at the diary being evaluated.

  Henry working on Capricorn. Writing about sex, blind to all but sex, writing like a maniac about sex.

  Suddenly, abruptly, I felt God, as I had felt him in the hospital. I felt this god taking me tenderly in his arms, holding me, putting me to sleep. I felt protected. My nerves were unknotted. I felt peace. I fell asleep. My anxiety was dissolved, and I slept. So the next day when Larry said: "Someone ought to hold you and put you to sleep," I remembered the visit from God. I need sleep, I need sleep and rest and peace. I need God.

  [October, 1937]

  The winter came, invading all with grey mists. The city is blackened, smoked, and melancholic I want to flee. That is it. I want to flee somewhere. Larry says: "The more you struggle, of course, the less you liberate yourself." I should have answered: "But don't you see, if I don't struggle then I want to die. Struggle relieves me, gives me hope. As soon as I lie still I get desperate."

  Moricand's talk spherical. He makes enormous ellipses—catching the Turkish bath in Morocco where the beautiful boy massaged him with such effectiveness that Moricand had to run away from him (his whole face expressing that he did not run away, his whole face bathed in the memory of the pleasure he does not wish to acknowledge). If you press him you will discover that he met the boy again, but you will never know more than that. Yet while Moricand tells about all this, his eyes acknowledge perversity, and one can easily imagine the boy and Moricand together because his pleasure in talking was not that of a spectator but of a participator. Yet nothing said to prove that Moricand was more than a spectator except the sensual mist in his eyes, the mist of the memory of pleasure. He talked like a frôleur, a voyeur, his talk was full of imprecisions, unreal excitements, unformulated enjoyments, never once crystallizing into a fact. But the quick, knowing "Ahl" he made at the least indication of an adventure was so expressive that one did not need to continue, one felt that Moricand knew all there was to know or experience. At the same time I felt that it was the expansion, dilation of incidents through his imagination which conveyed the feeling and not the actual bulk of the experiences. Every scene he touched on was immediately inflated, distended, and the implication of mystery, terror, perversity strengthened by the sense of guilt which accompanied them. I thought of the enormous wheels at the Fair carrying little cages traveling spherically, and the illusion of a vast circular voyage. Moricand picked you up on the edge of this wheel, whirled you in space, and deposited you again without for a moment enabling you to stand any closer to the hub of the wheel, to the mechanism or pulse of the wheel, to its axis. Moricand stood at the center throwing serpentines of iron works in circles, and his face was shadowed by the moving wheel. He took care not to expose himself without this wheel of talk swooping around him carrying people up and around him always at the same distance, breaking the laws of human life which permit people to collide, to feel each other's breath or to pass the same street without meeting, breaking the human laws to establish a kind of fixed stellar system, words used only to obscure his tracks rather than to reveal himself, and to prevent anyone from coming nearer to the hub, himself.

  Henry is baffled by what I wrote on the role of woman in creation. I said Marika Norden made herself ridiculous in her Confessions because, when she thought she was proving that she was a woman who could not find a male to match her rhythm, she was merely proving that she had no core for anyone to relate to, to match. She was looking for a mate to a center she did not have in herself.

  I have a center. I never lose sight of those who are on the periphery and those who are at the center of my affections and friendships. But Henry has no core. Man's impersonal world merely masks the personal.

  Henry denies the reality of all this, for him there is no right or wrong, no bad or good, no center or periphery.

  I know it is this constant outward expansion which empties his work of meaning. It is a gallery, a set of types, a crowd. Then he says: "We are freaks." I say: "We are not freaks. We are exaggerated men and women, we represent others, only heightened. One painter can be a symbol of many painters, as in Proust. Many painters, as in your work, may represent less than one painter." Henry is not reaching for depth but for quantity. This dehumanizes experience. It is an enlarged world, but empty of feeling, humanity, drama. It leads nowhere. It is thin. Henry's work is flow—sensual dynamism, instinctual dynamism, nature, impulse, appetite. When I first knew him I thought he was creating a work without the dimension of emotion, but that he himself was a man of feeling. I thought feeling in him was inhibited, perverted, ingrown, and masked. Today I am not sure, because he displays both in life, at times utter callousness, at times sensitivity. He is not concerned with insight or understanding.

  I want to live from a center. Henry's expansion is illusory, superficial. He misunderstands me when I talk about a core, he thinks 1 am talking about ethics, morals, etc. Henry wants to receive a million letters, meet a million people, and I fear that this makes for
crowded books but not for depth.

  I study the Fatalité Intérieure in Hélène. I have watched her reject life, companionship, exchange. 1 have seen her create opposing currents to all forms of attachments, resist all forms of life, assert her independence, not give herself, and then lament her empty life, wail over her loneliness. She creates her loneliness. She waits to be given. She only likes to enter someone else's ready-made life as she entered mine, to satisfy her appetite without contributing anything to it. She asked Moricand to do her horoscope and then not only refused to pay him for it in any way, when she knows he is starving, but she also alienated him, offended him, questioned all he said, argued with him, complained he was not sufficiently interested in her. She sends for me only to tell me all her troubles, and then when she is well and happy again, she disappears for days to enjoy herself. She talked to me for three hours about the necessity of marrying or not marrying, only to throw the whole question overboard the next day. So I elude her now. All those around me who are accustomed to being tenderly treated, served, protected, pampered, turned away from her demands. And I myself am throwing off the chains of her colorful reign. What she envies, she will not work to attain. Her fate is created by her attitude, the nature of her quest. She never says: "I want to give myself." She says: "I want to be protected. I want this or that. I want a life like yours. I want a brilliant life. I want. I want. I want to enjoy life, to have friends like yours."

  "But Hélène," I said, "all this has to be created. It does not just come to one."

  "I want freedom, I want love, I want marriage, I want to travel, I want to be protected, I want to live as I please."

  I glanced over what Henry was writing in Tropic of Capricorn, and there it was, the great anonymous, depersonalized world of sex. Instead of investing each woman with a different face, he takes pleasure in reducing all women to a biological aperture. That is not very interesting. His depersonalization is turning into an obsession with sex itself. It is not enough to take a woman to bed, man was given many other forms of expression and relationship. The only personal, individual experience he had was June, because she tormented him, and was thus finally able to distinguish herself from the ocean of women. The way he focuses on sex is an obsession. He is in danger of becoming an Ego in a crowd. (The ego can only perceive a crowd, it cannot perceive an equal.) The crowd is a malleable thing, it can be dominated, dazzled, it's a public, it is faceless. This is the opposite of relationship.

  If I could only awaken him to the consciousness of the other. One's life as a man is not in relation to the crowd, it is to the friend, the lover, the child.

  He says: "I can have a good time with people who don't mean much to me." But this is not what nourishes our deepest life.

  I need to live in exaltation because otherwise as soon as my life slows down I fall into analysis. Now when I have time I think about Lawrence Durrell, Larry. Larry has an understanding beyond his experience. But I feel that he is fluid. He has more sense of values than Henry, but he too is impersonal. The personal terrifies him.

  Beyond a certain point, expansion destroys the personal. What I find in Henry is a vaster world, like an illusion, like art compared with the constrictions of immediate life. But what makes his world so vast is also what destroys his personal relationships. He is acquisitive. He accumulates, he does not concentrate on what he finds, explore it, hold on to it. Is it impossible to have a vaster world, expansion, and keep the intimate and personal? Gonzalo's world is intimate, personal, and he suffers at times from the explorations of others' worlds I engage in, where he cannot follow me, which lies beyond Gonzalo.

  Pita and Désirée, militant Republicans, Gonzalo's closest friends when I first met Gonzalo, were slowly estranged by jealousy and envy. Désirée never having succeeded in dominating Gonzalo (perhaps win him) and Pita fascinated by me much to Désirée's insane alarm. They resented the change in Helba and Gonzalo's life, what I was able to do to relieve their poverty. Then came Désirée's envy of Gonzalo's ascension in politics, envy of the printing press which enabled him to be useful to Spain. Pita, turned woman, began to scratch and hiss. He looks feminine. Both were given work at the Spanish Embassy. There they started an insidious gossip campaign, culminating in an open attack: Gonzalo is a fascist spy. He is working for the fascists. He receives money for this, that is why his life has become more comfortable. He was given a printing press by Anaïs Nin, the daughter of an aristocrat. The old Professor Langevin of the Sorbonne, the leader of Paix et Démocratie, spoke to Gonzalo, asked questions about me. Gonzalo assured him I was in sympathy with the Republicans and helping him. Fortunately, the professor had intercepted a letter addressed to Gonzalo which said: "I have spoken to your mother about helping you financially as you begged her to. She refuses to send you money knowing it will be used for revolutionary work, and for a printing press for propaganda for Republican Spain." Roger Klein had to testify. I offered to declare myself publicly a Republican, to save Gonzalo. We were both incensed at the injustice and irony. I, who have been helping Gonzalo to help the Republicans, being used as an instrument to destroy Gonzalo's career. The consequences were that I was barred from helping at the press, and from even telephoning Gonzalo.

  I threw myself into writing. I worked on my portrait of Rank. I wrote the pages on Emily's confessions ( Winter of Artifice).

  I spent an evening with Henry and the Durrells. The evening was devoted to the story of the visit Henry paid to a chiropodist where he had gone to get an advertisement for the Booster. Henry was delighting in the humor about corns, dirty feet, etc. Both he and Fred had been there and had their feet done. Henry was hysterical with amusement.

  Gonzalo and Henry both spend evenings out with people I could not bear, and both return saying: "The world gives me nausea, disgusts me. People are foul and dirty." Gonzalo rages, but returns to them, meets them in bars, spends the night drinking and talking. Gonzalo has a Peruvian friend, Manuel, who is an exhibitionist. He tells me endless stories about Manuel's perversions. He is fond of books, a real rat de bibliothèque, and it is there he is inspired to his most daring acts of undressing, in the most solemn and quiet of all places.

  When I arrive at the Durrells', I find Fred drunk, Edgar intellectualizing like a machine without breaks, a runaway horse of abstractions, Nancy rebelliously cooking for them all, Larry enduring it all, and I not enduring them, but tired of holding out against drinking, futile talks.

  Back to work. Rewriting volume 45 (New York, Rank, Henry). There are in the diary so many flowers like the Japanese paper-flowers, which need to be placed in water to achieve their flowering. So I am putting all the closed buds in water. What a bloom. Emily's full, hilarious confessions. Ten pages on Fez. Pages on Rank's clothes, men's clothes. Pages on the moonstorms. Essay on Rank's philosophy.

  I experience the diabolical alchemy so familiar to writers, to man more than to woman. The exaltation spent on awaiting love, on a caress, goes into the pages on Fez. The fire spent on remembering nights of love, the temperature of joy, flowing into a marvelous canto to the streets, a bonfire of words. I sit here alone tonight, detached, in a trance, like the trance of saints, removed from the world, inhabiting and caressing Fez and my mysterious sorrows. I sit on the tip of minarets.

  If Anaïs at age eleven could have foreseen Messieurs Paulhan and Grottiesen of the Nouvelle Revue Française leaning over the child-diary, marveling, exclaiming in their beards, and looking at the Anaïs of today with admiration. Henry had come before me with his "essay" on the diary and his exuberant speeches. Mr. Grottiesen said: "We must study this diary, what it really is, for of course, in Mr. Miller's essay there is a lot of Mr. Miller, all about the whale, for instance."

  A little man who was sitting there, waiting, got up and interrupted everybody to say: "I consider it a privilege to have happened by at this moment. I have heard about the diary and was curious to meet you." Little Anaïs of eleven, sighing to be made a member of the Académie Française.

&
nbsp; Gonzalo is disillusioned with politics, the betrayals and retractions. He is foaming at the mouth. His eloquence and fire at certain moments could lead a country into a revolution. But the French are sitting back and Gonzalo is not placed where he can talk to them, he is locked in his office, writing letters, and if he could talk they would not understand his garbled French. Even in Spanish he talks through closed lips.

  Idiot Anaïs, you are given a spider web and you want to make a sail out of it and sail a boat. Where were you so intent on going yesterday? All your life is like your quest for a boat. Yes, my running through the Exposition to see again a lovely boat I had caught a glimpse of, a Chinese junk. A boat with a fragile spiderweb sail not made for sailing. I was running through the exhibits, it was Sunday, the crowd was strolling, surprised at my speed. I saw nothing, it was like a fast film speeding by me, the crowd, the buildings, the Arabs I bumped into, as I ran blindly on my quest. A boat! A boat!

  The entire mystery of pleasure in a woman's body lies in the intensity of the pulsation just before the orgasm. Sometimes it is slow, one-two-three, three palpitations which then project a fiery and icy liqueur through the body. If the palpitation is feeble, muted, the pleasure is like a gentler wave. The pocket seed of ecstasy bursts with more or less energy, when it is richest it touches every portion of the body, vibrating through every nerve and cell. If the palpitation is intense, the rhythm and beat of it is slower and the pleasure more lasting. Electric flesh-arrows, a second wave of pleasure falls over the first, a third which touches every nerve end, and now the third like an electric current traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm. There are times when a woman feels her body but lightly played on. Others when it reaches such a climax it seems it can never surpass. So many climaxes. Some caused by tenderness, some by desire, some by a word or an image seen during the day. There are times when the day itself demands a climax, days of cumulative sensations and unexploded feelings. There are days which do not end in a climax, when the body is asleep or dreaming other dreams. There are days when the climax is not pleasure but pain, jealousy, terror, anxiety. And there are days when the climax takes place in creation, a white climax. Revolution is another climax. Sainthood another.