Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2
Page 39
It changed aspect, as if all the handsome and the young people had been drained away, leaving only cripples, beggars and old people, leaving only a grey city of men and women without magic, or was it that it left only those we were not in love with?
We were given gas masks. Lights in the buses like the pale night-lights in hospitals. You cannot count your change. I saw the outline of military gear against the moonlight. Farewells every night. Taxis traveling slowly as in a deep fog.
When you live closely to individual dramas you marvel that we do not have continuous war, knowing what nightmares human beings conceal, what secret obsessions and hidden cruelties.
I felt I had not shared in the hatreds, angers, and love of destruction, but that I would share in the punishment. But I knew the origin of war, which was in each of us, and 1 knew that our concept of the hero was outdated, that the modern hero was the one who would master his own neurosis so that it would not become universal, who would struggle with his myths, who would know that he himself created them, who would enter the labyrinth and fight the monster. This monster who sleeps at the bottom of his own brain.
The wars we carried within us were projected outside. The world was waiting for France and England to declare war. A general war. I had seen all the private wars, between lovers, husband and wife, brothers, children and parents. I had seen the secret love of destruction now mobilized. And now all of us were waiting, and piling sandbags against our windows, and crating statues, and burying paintings in the cellars.
Destiny was taken out of our hands. But it was the same madness, the same personal fears that were let loose upon the world. While waiting for the ultimate war, which would engulf all of us, I tried to understand all that happened. While waiting for the magnified irrationality, I had already suffered from all the personal irrationalities around me.
You give your faith, your love, your body to someone, year after year, and within this human being lies a self who does not know you, does not understand and is driven by motives even he cannot decipher. In one instant, all that was created between you, every word said in trust, every caress, every link as dear to you as a piece of architecture, an architecture born of feeling, of mutual work, of memories, is swept away by some inner distortion, a twisted vision, a misinterpretation, a myth, a childhood being relived. And this was the madness we were about to enter on a grandiose scale. For war is madness.
Paris at night. I stepped out of a cafe, a restaurant, into darkness. I recognized no one. The person I was going to say good-bye to vanished into darkness. What a profound, total isolation. But then, as I lost my intimate contacts, I entered into contact with the world. A world of gentleness was gone. A world of collective suffering was beginning. I had the illusion that when one loves, just as when we create human children, we create a permanent image of love like an iron statue by a sculptor. I was horrified to discover that the image the other person carried within him bore no resemblance to one's own, or that it could be annihilated by another love, or by a misunderstanding, or a distortion, or a failure of memory. This gave me a foretaste of death. We were not enshrined in the other's heart, and the one we loved was often immured, alone, separate from us. The war destroyed our illusion of a strong, unshatterable intimate world of personal loves.
All my actions were concerned with preserving our small world from death.
At the first air raid, I would not hide. I wanted to encounter war and see its burning face. It is at such moments that one becomes fully aware of life, its preciousness.
Before the war, I asserted through art the eternal against the temporal, I set up individual creativity against the decomposition of our historical world.
I had severed my connection with it, but now nothing was left but to recognize my connection with it and to participate humanly in the error. Henry simply refuses to share sorrows. But I knew I could not separate myself from the world's death, even though I was not one of those who brought it about. I had to make clear the relation of our individual dramas to the larger one, and our responsibility. I was never one with the world, yet I was to be destroyed with it. I always lived seeing beyond it. I was not in harmony with its explosions and collapse. I had, as an artist, another rhythm, another death, another renewal. That was it. I was not at one with the world, I was seeking to create one by other rules. And therefore, how could I die in tune with it? I could only die in my own time, by my own evolutions. I did not belong to any epoch, for I had made my home in man's most active cells, the cells of his dreams. Through love, compassion, desire, you get entangled and confused. But the artist is not there to be at one with the world, he is there to transform it. He cannot belong to it, for then he would not achieve his task, which is to change. The struggle against destruction which I lived out in my intimate relationships had to be transposed and become of use to the whole world.
Foreigners were asked to leave, not to become a burden to France. My husband was ordered back to the United States. It was time to leave for New York. Alone I might have chosen to stay and share the war with France. I was not glad to escape tragedy. There was little time to weep, to say good-bye, no time for regrets, just time enough to pack.
Because Helba and Gonzalo needed winter coats for New York I could not afford the price of excess baggage on the plane for the diaries. I had to leave half of them in the bank vault. I took with me only the recent ones in two briefcases. Few clothes. Left books, trunks, household goods, pictures, in storage in Louveciennes.
We all knew we were parting from a pattern of life we would never see again, from friends we might never see again.
I knew it was the end of our romantic life.
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Index
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* See Henry Miller, Letters to Anaïs Nin (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1965).—Ed.
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* When Brancusi died he bequeathed his studio to the City of Paris asking that it be kept as a Brancusi museum. The City of Paris neglected it, and it remained closed. People broke in through a transom, and stole the smaller sculptures. The rain was allowed to (all into the studio.—A. N.
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* "The schizoid temperament manifests itself either by flight into action or into the dream. Dr. Minkowski proved that one of the clearest symptoms of the loss of contact with reality was the loss of ability to relax."
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* See also Henry Miller, A Devil in Paradise (New York: New American Library, 1956).—Ed.
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* Reprinted by Circle Editions, Berkeley, California, in 1947, without the dedication, together with a ‹tory, "Zero," which Durrell had dedicated to Henry Miller.—Ed.
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* See the story "The Eye's Journey," in Under a Glass Bell.—Ed.
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* See Diary, tçjz-içji, [>] et seq.—Ed.
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* See Henry Miller's story "Via Dieppe-Newhaven," published in Max and the White Phagocytes (Paris: Obelisk Press, 1938).
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* See Henry Miller, Max and the White Phagocytes (Paris: Obelisk Press, 1948).—Ed.
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*It was this mood which inspired the party pages in Ladders to Fire. And one of the strangest incidents of recurrence took place some ten years later, when Ladders to Fire was published. I was invited to read at the University of Chicago by Violet Lang, then the editor of the Chicago Review. It was in the middle of winter and there was much snow on the ground. I gave my reading and talk and then friends took me in their car to the home of Violet Lang, where there was to be a reception. The snow was falling heavily. We arrived at the address given to us. But we could not find the apartment. Someone directed us towards the back of the apartment house. We saw some lighted windows of a basement apartment. We looked in. The party in my hon
or was going on, lively and animated. I knocked on the window. No one heard me. I was wet, cold and tired. The incident brought on the old feeling of being left outside. I would have gone away if I had been alone. Finally someone saw me at the window and came out to guide us through a labyrinth of cellar hallways.—A. N.
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*This prophecy turned out to be accurate. Many years later, Scenario was read over the French radio, acted out, and recorded. It was read in many languages. House of Incest was not translated into French and published in France until 1963.—Ed.
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*She subsequently married Yves Tanguy and painted under the name of Kay Sage.—A. N.
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*See Under a Class Bell.—Ed. 318
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*See "The Mouse" in Under a Glass Bell.—Ed.
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*See "The Mohican," in Under a Glass Bell.—Ed.
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