Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2

by Anais Nin

  I found a new apartment for Helba, overlooking a garden. A week later she has not yet moved from the damp, black, smelly cellar room. Meanwhile I am running into debts. With the Durrells it is all sweet and sane. Henry lives entirely in his own world. Now and then he breaks down and becomes aware of others. He weeps for his family. But that afternoon in his studio, with the Durrells, after he wept over them, he fell asleep. Nancy and I cooked dinner. When he awakened he was ready to go on working and writing as before. He is surrounded by admiring disciples who flatter him and do not question his opinions. He even cowed Larry with: "If you don't understand Picasso there is a limitation in you."

  Larry helps me to keep Henry on an even keel. He has solidity. He yields, at times, because he loves Henry. "I don't want to spoil his enthusiasm. It is worth a thousand francs thrown away."

  I do not like the Booster. It is vulgar and farcical. Strident. Then I feel guilty: "Perhaps I am too austere."

  At the basis of my life lies fear and doubt, yet I give faith to others. Gonzalo said: "When I'm despondent I don't like to see you. I hate to spoil the luminous atmosphere around you." I am alone with my sorrows. My only relief is activity. I see that the press, in Gonzalo's hands, has contributed little to the cause of Spain, in six months, and I could have printed a book on it. I see how Henry's ideas cannot make him sacrifice a whim. So I write. Gonzalo had promised before we bought the press: "I will print all your work."

  A world composed of a severe father, a Gonzalo forever pursuing danger and destruction, a Henry who is only intermittently human, leaves me in an abyss of solitude. Why must I constantly pursue mirages? Why do I struggle against chaos and not wallow in it as others do?

  Hans Reichel's madness. In Henry's studio he monologues: "No one has ever told me: 'I love you.' I am full of anguish and anxiety. Everybody is against me. You are hiding the wine. I am sure there is more wine, but you are hiding it. I see you are making fun of me. I can't find peace anywhere. Take me back chez mes peintures." Chez mes peintures! As if his paintings were his home, his family, his lover. Reichel clutching at people, physically, violently, so they won't leave him. Always drunk, indifferent to his success, to the money he has made, afraid only that "the evening will come to an end, and I will be alone again." Reichel mad. Understanding can no longer bring him back. He no longer believes in anyone.

  Henry sees his women more critical, more condemnatory than they really were. He interprets women's silence as a condemnation. He projects his own guilts on women, not men. He expects to be judged by women, not men. Guilt certainly haunts all the men who seem free of it. Henry, Gonzalo, my father. They are not really free of it.

  Durrell calls the copies of my diary my black children. They are bound in black. I keep them in an Arabian wedding-chest, violet velvet with gold nails. Lovely to see the coffer open, brimming full. And now this one will go to the vault, to be locked up among other people's jewels and testaments.

  Letter to Durrell:

  Was in bed all day so I can't go to the Villa Seurat and will have to wait until tomorrow, Tuesday. Will try to pass by your place for tea instead of dinner. Will bring back the Fontanne. Just another pattern, and for the moment, I do not find these fecund. I think patterns and arrangements are only fecund when we get lost, when we vitally need to be re-oriented, but otherwise they are like intellectual chess games, not vital, they kill experience. I feel we should turn to these books only when we are adrift on a sea of instincts or emotions, choking in a drama, suffocating in subjectivity, or in some other acute crisis which has thrown us off course. Wonder what you will think of my essay on Otto Rank for Eliot's magazine Criterion. Worked all day. I am glad I kidnapped you last night. When I saw Fred there with you I suddenly remembered all we said once about living horizontally or vertically. And with Fred there it would have been a horizontal evening, and so I took you both away, with a vertical, heraldic devotion.

  [November, 1937]

  The day began beautifully with Dorothy Norman, of the American Quarterly, accepting both "Birth" story and "Woman in Creation" essay, and saying she had great admiration for the purity of my work.

  The activity Henry has created is extraordinary. He lives in a whirlpool, drawing everyone to him. I am to edit a number of the Booster containing women's writing. It is out of a discussion with him and Larry one night that my essay on woman's creation was born. Larry has written a voyage through the womb which is un-matchable. We're re-reading Rank's Trauma of Birth.

  Gonzalo's activity is increasing because it is a lost cause, and it is his nature to defend what is weak. I feel the Spanish cause is weakening and I fear for him.

  Gonzalo admires in me qualities Henry is indifferent to. Gonzalo likes my independence, my struggle to maintain my integrity in spite of my human devotions, my slavery to my affections. Gonzalo admires my rebellions. Henry's destiny is his writing, Gonzalo's the revolution. Henry enlarged my world, made me write, made my life rich and also inhuman. Gonzalo brings me turmoil, danger, blood and death, war and destruction. Henry wants peace and philosophy. Gonzalo wants fervor and explosions. Henry admires a film on China in which is revealed great resignation, passivity, a sense of the eternal annihilating personal sorrow. He was impressed because they do not weep at funerals. This is closer to Henry's attitude. It is his solution to life. Resignation, acceptance, indifference. That is not my nature.

  When a desire is blocked most people react with philosophy. But with me a desire defeated is a part of life which is killed.

  Visit from David Gascoyne, only twenty-one, a child prodigy. I don't know his poetry, only his reputation. A mystical, poetic boy, but bound like a dead Arab by multiple tight white bandages. He leaves me his diary, full of reticences and evasions.

  ***

  I remember my first image of the Gonzalo who entered Roger Klein's little room like a giant in a miniature cave—a startling figure—disquieting, dark, fiery, but drunk, dispersed. I aroused him to action. I roused him without knowing the force in him for drama, for rebellion. Is it my fate to inflame revolutionary forces, Henry in literature, Gonzalo in politics?

  Denise Clairouin tells me: "I gave the diaries to Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner. He was interested. Instead of giving them to a reader, he took them home and read them himself. He was thunderstruck. "What a curious, extraordinary woman,' he said. He wants you to make an abridged copy. Go to work, Anaïs."

  Because of Henry's description of the whalelike diary, Larry calls me "the Whale." And signs himself: "your ever-admiring limpet." I had to look up "limpet" in the dictionary. Then I wrote back: "Dear Limpet, the whale wants you to know you have the largest, most luxuriously furnished, the most palatial, pearl-covered cabin on the highest deck (outside cabin) with a view of the entire ocean, on the back of the said whale. In fact, this whale, who seems most independent, who to all mariners' eyes seems willing enough to travel alone, would not travel anywhere without the limpet."

  I will never be able to say as Henry said, weeping: "After all, I am a human being, and as a human being I've done wrong." Someday I will weep and say: "After all, I am an artist, and as an artist I've done wrong. I acted humanly."

  Artist. I want to do Jeanne and her brothers better than Cocteau did the Enfants Terribles. I want to do June better than Djuna Barnes did Nightwood. I want to do Artaud better than Carlo Suarès did the Procession Enchaînée.

  I love Larry. But I have no warmth for Gascoyne. He leaves me cold in spite of his suffering. He is a prisoner. The sound of rattling chains disturbs me, but I have no desire to break his.

  Everything for me divides into warm or cold. Cold people who never act from human spontaneity, but always out of an instinct for self-preservation or acquisition. Warm people who respond to others.

  Have gone to work on abridged edition of the diary.

  Hélène is changing the curtains of her bedroom. Gonzalo is working for the revolution in Peru, underground. Helba is sitting like an inmate in an asylum doing nothing for hou
rs, or sewing and resewing rags. Henry is writing Tropic of Capricorn, and as Larry said: "a new dimension without emotion." Henry's creation at times resembles insanity, because it is experience disconnected from feeling—like an anesthetized soul injected with ether. I ask myself: those who get disconnected from a human world of feeling, for whatever reason, who live in a world of their own, wasn't their human core weak to begin with? Where are the deep sources of feeling in my father and in Henry which life succeeded in atrophying? Why is it that I never get cut off from pity, sympathy, participation, in spite of the fact that I am living out my own dream, my interior vision, my fantasies without any interruptions. I dream, I kiss, I have orgasms, I get exalted, I leave the world, I float, I cook, I sew, have nightmares, write in my head, compose, decompose, improvise, invent, I listen to all, I hear all that is said, I feel Spain, I am aware, I am everywhere, I am open to wounds, open to love, I am rooted to my devotions, I am never separate, never cut off, never blind, deaf, absent. I hold on to the dream which makes life possible, to the creation which transfigures, to the God who sustains, to the crimes which give life, to the illusions which make the marvelous possible. I hold on to the poetry and the human simplicities. I write about the labyrinth, the womb, Fez, and I carry electric bulbs to Gonzalo's home. Larry is sitting cross-legged on the floor like a soft blond Hindu, with a catlike suppleness and writing with a branding iron.

  Old Lantelme, my father's secretary for many years, now retired, comes twice a week to teach me French, saying: "Elle est vivante, je viens me réchauffé." The Joneses arrived from Spain, talking about the terrible suffering of the refugees, but they atefull-course meals with Hemingway, who is taking notes at the front, and when he is not taking notes, he hunts pheasants in abandoned Spanish properties. Jones talks like a somnambulist about politics, in a monotonous voice, without animation, in a funeral oration of facts, sound facts he says, which sound as unsound to me as the hysterical statements made at the revolutionary meetings. Lila Ranson calls me up, in her masculine voice. I have only seen her two times, and she calls me darling, "I must see you, I have left my husband, I am very happy now. I have so much to tell you. When can I see you?"

  Gascoyne comes an hour later to see if he can catch his own narcissistic image in the pool of my understanding. The volume of the diary he read enlarged the space of his prison. While he is there I get a call from the secretary of the Countess Lucie to come to dinner.

  Henry has been collecting subscriptions to publish the first volume of the diary, and the first one he received was from André Maurois, who added that, however, he did not want all of the fifty-four volumes, his house was too full of books. In between these visits I arranged all the diaries I want to edit in one box so I can plunge into them easily.

  I had told Gonzalo that I missed hearing the lonely cough of the Russian captain, friend of Gonzalo's, who had been wounded in Spain, so Gonzalo took me with him when he visited him in his run-down hotel where they do not ask for papers. He was sitting in the waiting room reading the papers. Gonzalo brought him copies of New Masses. He once had a room near Paix et Démocratie and I would hear him cough, and talk to himself. He looked distinguished and frail, smoking a pipe, and Gonzalo told me he was waiting for the gift of a wheelchair so he could get about by himself. He lost both his legs.

  Every time there is talk of Spain there is a tornado in me of emotion and desire to participate. Gonzalo says I would be of no use whatever. And I am thrown back into writing. About my father's games, Helba's packing of her dusty rags and taking a month to move, Carteret luminous and yet appealing to Allendy for help. He says: "I know Allendy is not a poet but he wants to help me." He understands my love of Morocco. "In Morocco one melts into the universal, one loses one's self into others."

  Denise Clairouin: "Make no changes. It is the document they want."

  I sprinkle leaves of patchouli over the lamp bulbs. I number the pages of the diary and wonder what to leave out. The deserts, the empty spaces.

  I don my velvet dress for the Countess Lucie's dinner and sit on her white satin sofa.

  Lila Ranson is a writer, plump, forceful. I first met her at a very conventional evening, and she was chafing against conventions. I eluded her because I am tired of breaking others' chains. After several calls from her, her voice so triumphant, I agreed to come and visit her. She ushered me into the bedroom. And there was a replica of June. June with an aureole of angel hair and a voluptuous Viking body. The dusky voice, heavy arms, the fever in the eyes. And they were living the life I never lived with June. She was ill, and she sat up against the flowered cretonne bedhead. Recklessness and adventure in every expression of her face. Lila nestled against her. They talked about their love for each other. They caressed each other. They said: "You never possess man as you do a woman."

  Lila was clearly the one who would be tormented, jealous. Her friend was clearly the mobile and flowing one. A hardness and passion in her. I had come only for a moment. I stayed all afternoon, fascinated. The wide bed, the purple negligee opening on a sunburnt skin. Lila saying romantic things about "living together for twenty years." Her friend contemptuous of these assertions. "There is no absolute in relationship," she said. And to me later: "You look like a girl of sixteen." The atmosphere unnerved me. I liked sharing the newness of their love, the faith and fire of newness, confidence, that moment when the love seems stronger than anything, the moment before the shocks, the fissures, the irritations, conflicts, the moment before they discovered a world beyond each other which no caresses could solder together.

  It was at this moment that I best understood Don Juan: to be always at the beginning, at the first moment of faith and love, never to witness the gradual deterioration, the gradual weakening of the love, the aging of it, the withering of it. To be always at the first moment, the highest, and to remain there by seeking only beginnings.

  Already Lila's friend was sprouting branches that did not stem from the single trunk of their love. She was saying, "The ideal relationship is between a man and a woman."

  Rebellions of all kinds attract to their activities weaklings who rebel because they cannot master, destroy because they cannot create. I fear that Gonzalo may be part of that lamentable army, those who have always lived negatively. Is it a noble service to the poor, or the hysterical tantrums of firebugs? The firebug being the man who wanted to be a firefighter, but failed. In Helba's and Gonzalo's misery there is no cruelty, but a stubborn self-destruction.

  What lantern slides, from the soiled, thumb-worn life of Helba, due to Helba's own inertia, to the white sarin salon of Countess Lucie. Lucie sitting on the arm of a white satin armchair, slim, evanescent, eyes dark and selective, critical, aware. Face austerely white, an unexpected austerity because the features, the mouth, are made for sensuality. A white cloud of preoccupation. The fairy tale wears cold wings, she drives an airplane, a car, laughs, talks, but she is lost.

  I see Betty Ryan, who is like a delicate Japanese woman, talking about House of Incest. She adds: "When I was a young girl I loved mercury. I carried a little bottle of it. I would pour it in the palm of my hand in school and play with it. I liked how it changed shape, decomposed, separated, took so many forms, yet remained one, magnetically. It was my fétiche. I felt an affinity with it. I could go anywhere with it. It was alive and a part of me. With it I could face people, the world." Her delicacy moved me, her timidity and dreamfulness. Her voice is frail and distant. She did not talk freely to me because she was awed by me. I was the Whale of the black diaries.

  Lucie is too much protected by white-gloved butlers, crystals, brocades. But there is darkness in her. Betty Ryan is drugged with the white sleep of reverie, of unreality. She too is so far away and yearning to be awakened. Lucie has had violent shocks but is still dreaming. She wrote a book, which she sent me. In the book a woman dies from the wounds of a man's caprices and his love of his own freedom above all else.

  Henry says: "I want to live a deeper life, I know my de
fect, I expand too much, I should not, for instance, have done the magazine." The Booster has dispersed his energies.

  I did not talk freely to Lucie because of the white fur, the mirrors in which every motion is reflected several times, the butlers nearby, because I no longer have the right dress to wear for my visit to her, because I am sliding into a life without décor, without illusions, without white gloves and aesthetics.

  Gonzalo volatilizes in cafés.

  My father comes to visit me, with flowers in silver paper, and words in silver paper, flowers with wires running through them to uphold them in formal haughtiness, and his words too, pierced with wires, formal and synthetic, all grown in hothouses. "I am training a Norwegian singer to sing my songs. She wants to sing Spanish songs. She is so cold, I have to inject her with my own warmth."