Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  He stresses harmony, beauty, love. I am overjoyed at our coming meeting, meeting the one I called my double, my twin. Which one, in this case, is the conscience of the other, the haunting double of the unfulfilled ideal? I have found my father again, lost many years ago when my mother took us first to Spain to our grandparents, to my father's mother and father. The father was an old general and a teacher, director of the first non-Catholic school in Spain, a man who wrote pamphlets against bullfighting; the mother an angelic, sacrificing, sad wife, the one who had spoiled my father as much as she could (sewing all night to pay for his rental of a bicycle). She was the model for the wife he wanted, abnegation, adoration, respect, selflessness.

  There, in a typically Spanish apartment opening on a courtyard, all tiles, with short swinging doors between the rooms to allow the air to blow through, to keep the place fresh, with shutters closed against the sun, pictures of the Virgin, rubber plants in the corners, lace doilies on the chairs, we stayed, where my father felt he could raise us by remote control, and where letters began to arrive telling my mother how to bring us up.

  We did not stay with them very long. Grandfather was a tyrant, and a miser. He counted the garbanzos (the big yellow beans which were our daily fare) and worried about us and my mother's independence.

  We moved to a small apartment of our own, clean and new. Barcelona was gay and lively. From the balcony I could look at the sea and at people walking by, hear the music from the cafés. I began to write, poems, memories. I went to a convent and learned Catalan. Letters of instructions came. In Barcelona I did not feel my father's absence as final. He might come any moment, and we saw his family, his parents, his sister, my cousins. It was his native land. I was learning his language.

  I never knew whether it was my mother who wanted to leave, whether she wanted to take us far away from his influence. The story told was that my aunts came to visit and, with a Cuban prejudice against Spain, criticized everything and said my mother would be better off in America where they could watch over her and she would be near her sisters. America was a better country for a woman alone with three children. She could obtain free schooling for us. And soon we were off, uprooted from a place I liked, friends, family, school, a smiling happy city of sun and sea and music and cafés open all night.

  The diary began as a diary of a journey, to record everything for my father. It was written for him, and I had intended to send it to him. It was really a letter, so he could follow us into a strange land, know about us. It was also to be an island, in which I could take refuge in an alien land, write French, think my thoughts, hold on to my soul, to myself.

  I find my father again when I am a woman. When he comes to me, he who marked my childhood so deeply, I am a full-blown woman. I understand my father as a human being. He is again the man who is also a child.

  The father I imagined cruel, strong, hero, famous musician, lover of women, triumphant, is soft, feminine, vulnerable, imperfect. I lose my terror and my pain. I meet him again when I know that there is no possibility of fusion between father and daughter, only between man and woman.

  Henry says this will reconcile me to God.

  My father comes when I no longer need a father.

  I am walking into a Coney Island trick house. The ground gives way under my feet. It is the ironies which swallow the ground and leave one dizzy and stranded. Irony of loves never properly timed, of tragedies that should not be tragedies, of passions which miss each other as if aimed by blind men, of blind cruelties and even blinder loves, of incongruities and deceptive fulfillments. Every realization is not a culmination but a delusion. The pattern seems to come to an end and it is only another knot.

  My father comes when I have gone beyond him; he is given to me when I no longer need him, when I am free of him. In every fulfillment there is a mockery which runs ahead of me like a gust of wind, always ahead. My father comes when I have an artist writer to write with, a guide I wept for in Allendy, a protector, brother, symbolic children, friends, a world, books written. Yet the child in me could not die as it should have died, because according to legends it must find its father again. The old legends knew, perhaps, that in absence the father becomes glorified, deified, eroticized, and this outrage against God the Father has to be atoned for. The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as a man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless. The absurd disorder in time, in answering of needs, in fulfillment, must not be revealed to human beings except in this book, intended to be hidden, on a night when a child died from the excess of its expectancies and the circuitous, delayed, mortally mistimed way life has of answering its demands.

  Allendy once said: "Each book I write is a compensation for something I have not had, and I am so keen on the achievement, pour arriver au but, that when the book is written I do not enjoy the victory, I do not stop to enjoy my victory. I have never enjoyed my achievement."

  Allendy, with his watch chain across his dark grey vest, his noble bearing, looking tall and impressive among his books, talking wisely, restored to his atmosphere, his kingdom.

  His words affect me, and I felt they applied to me on the eve of my father's return. My life has been one long strain to create, to make myself interesting, to develop my gifts, to make my father proud of me, a desperate and anxious ascension to efface and destroy a haunting insecurity created by the conviction that my father left because he was disappointed in me, because he did not love me; and that the woman he loved was Maruca. Always aiming higher, accumulating loves to compensate for the first loss. Loves, books, creations. Shedding yesterday's woman to pursue a new vision.

  I forget to enjoy all I have—incredible treasures. I am traveling again, emotionally, restless while there is land to discover, lives unlived, men not known. What madness. I want to enjoy. I want to stop and enjoy. This will be the journal of my enjoyment.

  Letter to Henry:

  Long talk with Bradley. The secret of Bradley is that when he was young, he wrote a book of poems (thought daring at the time) and that behind his work lies a wistful interest in writing. He loves to help, direct, criticize and influence writers. He is really fine. Dreams of playing the role X played with Conrad. Supported and sustained Conrad. That is his vision of his role. He loves to handle and work on manuscripts and really participates in all that is done with a great secret satisfaction. The type of man that every non-artist should aspire to become if he has enough humility and the power to abdicate and serve. I admire Bradley for that....

  Bradley was curious about my life. Imagines me sheltered, preciously unknown, discovered by him. His face fell when I said my life was eventful. He did not want it to be so. Nobody wants me to live, to get known. Like a guitar for chamber music only. You are the only one who said: "Get out, get a little tougher." You dared me. It is you who are right. The damned journal should end Wednesday when my father comes to Louveciennes. But my life is only beginning. I love the idea of anonymity for the journal. It fits my earlier desire to remain unknown. It is wonderful, the secrecy again and always.

  It is all so incredible, this interest in my journal, the presentation to Alfred Knopf (who rejected my book on Lawrence). Bradley concerned about my health because of the mention of handicaps in the early journals. Asking if his visit tired me. The concern of the world. I am frightened by his praise, and highly nervous. Moved by his kindness, generosity, thoughtfulness. Bradley looked at June's face in the photograph and said she looked fictitious, unreal, false. Her personality was all acting and pretending and empty of core. "I'm against moral make-up," he said, cannily.

  Before such people as Bradley, I begin to imagine that I am also a fake—that maybe all my journals, books, and personality are fakes. When I'm admired I think I am duping the world. I begin to add my lies and to tremble. I have to say to myself: "Either I am just a cleverer liar and actress than June, or I'm real." So many people believe in me instinctively, suspicious and intuitive peop
le. Simple people who hate artificiality above all, severe, moral people. And now Bradley.

  And I see the question of my sincerity could easily drive me insane if I studied it continuously. My imagination entangles me hopelessly. I lose myself. What distresses me is that I seem to play on the feelings of people. June reproached Henry for playing the role of the "victim" in their relationship. I have often wondered whether June was not the sincerest one of all because so easily discovered.

  [May, 1933]

  My father came.

  I expected the man of the photographs, a more transparent face. A face less furrowed, less carved, less masklike, and at the same time I liked the new face, the depth of the lines, the firmness of the jaw, the femininity and charm of the smile, all the more startling in contrast to the tanned, almost parchment-toned skin. A smile with a forceful dimple which was not a dimple but a scar from sliding down a stairway banister and piercing his cheek with an ornament when he was a child. The neatness and compactness of the figure, grace, vital gestures, ease, youthfulness. A gust of imponderable charm. A supreme, open egotism. Webs of talk, defenses against unuttered accusations, justifying his life, his love of the sun, of the south of France, of luxury, preoccupation with the opinion of others, fear of criticism, susceptibility, continuous play-acting, wit and articulateness, violence of images, the lusty and vivid imagery of the Spanish language transposed into French.

  He had come to France, had studied with Vincent d'Indy, had been made the youngest professor at the Schola Cantorum, when I was born. A childlike, disarming smile. Always charm. The predominance of charm. Undercurrents of puerility, unreality. A man who had pampered himself (or been pampered by women?), cottoned himself against the deep pains of living by luxury, by salon life, by aesthetics, yet preoccupied with the fear of destructiveness, compelled to expand, obeying his quest of sensuality, of pleasure, having found no other way to obtain his desires but by deception. A passion for aesthetics and for creation. Concerts, composition, books, articles. Research into lost and rare music, discovery of talented people, introducing them to the public (The Aguilar Quartet, La Argentina).

  Was the source of feeling dried up by pretenses, play-acting, by egotism? Would my double be my evil double? He incarnated all the dangers of my illusory life, my inventing of situations, my deceptions, my faults. In some way they seemed a caricature of me, because mine seemed motivated by deep feelings, and his by more superficial and worldly aims. The public played a major role in his life, the concert stage, the critics, fashionable and titled friends, salons, and manners. Something very human and warm in me (my mother?) lived by truer values in people. He cared about display, dress, money. There was an unawareness of others. Almost a cynicism.

  "And now you write and speak a language I do not know. I don't know what life in America has done to you. Your mother was very clever in taking you so far away, trying to estrange us. She knew I did not like America, feared it, even. That I did not know English. Le pays du 'bluff'."

  "But you could have come to see us, you could have come on a concert tour. Many people told me that you had been invited."

  "Yes, it is true, I could have come when you were still children. America intimidated me. Too different from all I cared about."

  I know that he is looking for resemblances.

  "Do you like to dress well?"

  "I like to dress with originality, to suit myself, not the fashion."

  "Do you like gardening?"

  "With gloves on!" We laughed.

  When he describes himself, I see that he draws an idealized image. He wants to believe himself kind, altruistic, charitable, generous. Yet so many people have commented on his selfishness, his not sending money to his mother in Spain, and talking about not being able to send it, while smoking gold-tipped cigarettes, wearing silk shirts, driving an American de luxe car, and living in the fashionable quarter of Paris in a private house.

  We are both looking into mirrors, to catch reflections of blood twinship.

  We are punctual, a stressed, marked characteristic. We need order around us, in the house, in the life, although we live by irresistible impulses, as if the order in the closets, in our papers, in our books, in our photographs, in our souvenirs, in our clothes could preserve us from chaos in our feelings, loves, in our work.

  Indifference to food, sobriety; but this, we admit, is part of the war against a threatening fragility.

  "Will," says my father, drawing himself up. The will to counter-balance the sudden abandonment to sensations, lyrical flights and fantasies. He, too, suffers from romanticism, quixotism, cynicism, naïveté, cruelty, schizophrenia, multiplicity of selves, dé-doublement, and is bewildered as to how to make a synthesis.

  We smile with sympathy at each other.

  As a Spanish man, demanding of women only blind devotion, submission, warmth, love, protection, he is amazed to find in a woman a spirit like his own, adventurous, rebellious, explorative, unconventional. Amazed, and at first delighted, for every narcissist dreams of a twin. No Dorian Gray in a painting, but a father like myself, a daughter like myself. The double who will answer questions. Do you feel this way, or that way? You too? Well, we are not so strange, or so lonely. There are two of us. The fragments of our life which do not fit into a desired image, we discard. But I cull them in the diary, and I cannot forget them. My father forgets them.

  My father clings to the woman who holds him together by her faith—innocent and wholehearted Maruca.

  But he is not guiltless. He spent an hour explaining why he had had to go to the south of France for four months. I had not asked him to justify his trip! Long explanations on the state of his health, the hard Paris winter, the exhaustion. Why should he not go to the south of France if he wishes to? There must be something else behind this which he is covering up. He probably went to meet a mistress.

  When he walked up to me, talking and laughing, he does not seem like a father, but a youthful man of infinite charm and fascination, labyrinthian, fluid, uncapturable as water.

  "We must always tell each other the truth."

  What an unusual request, my dear Father.

  "We are both very proud," he says.

  We are gay, playful. We do not reveal our anxieties, our fears, our weaknesses.

  "I wondered which side won in you, before I saw you, the French or the Spanish. You have never looked more Spanish than right now."

  Why did he seem so severe to me as a child? To his children, at home, he showed an over-critical, ever-dissatisfied self. Displeased, discontented. No sign of feeling, no demonstrations of tenderness. This smiling, radiant, charming father was for visitors. So I am a visitor now. I see no sign of the criticalness which seemed always at work to detect and underline the flaw, the error, the weakness.

  I had always lived not to be my father.

  Through the years I had made a portrait of him which I had sought to destroy in myself. On the basis of a few resemblances, one fears total resemblance. I did not want to be him. That may be why I sought a more sincere life, real values, disregarded the outer forms, took flight from society, wealthy or aristocratic people.

  We love music.

  We love the sea.

  We dread squalor. (But I never pursued money to avoid it.) I was unflinchingly poor many times. I can make real sacrifices. I never calculated. I am capable of immense devotions. I set about scrupulously to destroy in myself any over-attachment to luxury, beauty. Frivolity. Grand hotels. Cars. Salons.

  My father is a dandy. When we were children, his cologne, and his luxurious shirts, were more important than a toy for us, or clothes for my mother.

  When he left, I felt as if I had seen the Anaïs I never wanted to be.

  Antonin Artaud. We talked with passion about our habit of condensation, rigorous sifting, our quest of the essential, love of essence, and distillations, in life, in literature. And not a premeditated effort, simply faithfulness to our way of thought and feeling. We do not consciously try to
condense. It is a natural tendency. When we condense and extract essences, we are approximating the true and normal functioning of our minds. I never saw as clearly as with Artaud what the meaning of poetry is: it is an abstraction, to match allegorical patterns.

  We discussed analysis. Artaud was bitter about the pragmatic use of it, said it only serves to liberate people sexually; whereas it should be used only as a metaphysical discipline, to reach wholeness, etc.

  Artaud said, "I have never needed it because I have never entirely lost my equilibrium. I can remain lucid and objective about my states of being, describe them. We are born in the same sign, but I feel you are more elusive. I do not believe you are good, in the strict sense of the word. I think you do good out of a voluptuous joy in creation."

  He talked fluently, easily. He had lost some of that hard, taut bitterness, his suspicion, his persecution mania. He has a deep lack of self-confidence. He always thinks people do not want him, that he is interrupting my work when he calls me. He was touched by my interest.

  When Henry the prose writer says, "Expand," it is because he is not writing, as a poet, the pattern of symbolism: he is giving the entire substance. Poetry is the description of an intangible state.

  I sit waiting for my father, fully aware of his superficiality. The gate bell tinkles, as in the cow fields of Switzerland. The big green iron gate is opened by Emilia. My father's American car, the one he wanted all his life, rolls in. My father is loaded with flowers which hide his face, and with a box containing a Lalique vase. He is in a sincere mood, and no longer performing.

  He is still trying to discover our sameness. We create harmony, security, a shelter, a home, and then we chafe for adventure, like restless tigers. Restless, vital, fearing to hurt others, to destroy others, but avid for life, renewals, evolutions. We are cowards before the goodness or loyalty of others. People think we are tyrants, but my father and I know how enslaved we are by tenderness, devotion, pity, the goodness of others. Enchained. Renewal, said my father, could come from anyone, from a nobody.