Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  Allendy took pains to delineate my character, my true nature, my human attitudes, but it was by a process of oversimplification. The mold into which he tried to fit me came to a climax the day he suggested I should take love more lightly, give it less importance, to evade tragedy. That I should take a playful attitude towards it. It should be sweet and casual, easygoing and interchangeable. "I will teach you to play, not to take it tragically, not to pay too heavy a price for it, to make it pleasant."

  This was the natural conclusion to the formation of my human self, to normalcy; and if he was right about overcoming tragedy, par contre, he overlooked the deeper cravings of an artist, for whom deep full love is the only possible form, no simmering life but a boiling one, no small compromise with reality. He saw me as a Creole in a white negligee, New Orleans style, sitting on a rocking chair with a fan, feminine, awaiting light-footed lovers.

  This conclusion put an end to my faith in Allendy. Whatever magic I had been able to find in analysis, whatever beneficial influence, was defeated by the kind of Anaïs this naturalness was leading me into. Rather than enter this ordinary life, which was death to my imagination (my grandmother's life!) and my creativity, I chose to retrogress into my neurosis and obsessions. Disease was, in this case, more inspiring and more fertile to poetry.

  Dr. Rank agreed with me.

  "You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. But the torments of Artaud, or the hells of Rimbaud, are not for you."

  "As an ordinary woman I might have been serenely happy with such a miniature life, but I am not that woman."

  It was in this vast, amorphous, restless realm that Dr. Rank sought the key. A human being lies there at the center, but the core of this human being is an artist, not just a human being. This revelation of the artist and the creative process runs through all of Dr. Rank's questionings, and it is by being able to lay his hands on the invisible, the "soul," that he travels so much further than Allendy.

  It is by the expansion of his imagination that he can penetrate the artist, and it was in the realm of the imagination that the disease concealed itself, and alone could be reached and operated upon. And it was this imagination which Allendy discarded as "delusion."

  Allendy would say: "You must separate these games of your fantasy. They are just games." But in the fantasy lay the secret desires and the seed of positive creation. Allendy was trying to peel them away. Rank was trying to bring on a transition from game to art. Art began in play. Allendy did not consider some of my games as creations.

  Rank spoke of the influence of dreams, literature, and myths upon life:

  "In other words, one must learn the language of the other and not force upon him a familiar idiom. Allendy separated you from your diary, your early stories, your novels. He thought he could cure you by prying you away from them. I admit the tragic end to all absolutism, and I do fight the tendency to extremes; extremes in life, debauchery because it defeats its own quest for pleasure; extremes of love because they defeat love; extremes of pain which defeat aliveness.

  "But there is a vast difference between the solution offered by Allendy, and mine. He was trying to replace your love of the absolute, and your search for the marvelous, by an adaptation to ordinary life. I place the emphasis on adaptation to an individual world. I want to increase your power of creation in order to sustain and balance the power of emotion which you have. The flow of life and the flow of writing must be simultaneous so that they may nourish each other. It is the revelation of creative activity which becomes a channel of redemption for the neurotic obsessions. Life alone cannot satisfy the imagination.

  "In Allendy's analysis he tried to adapt you to the social ideal. Not enough emphasis has been put on the differentiations, because the object of the 'cure' has been adaptation. The error here is that there is an individual solution for each case, a varied and individual form of adaptation, and that it is the adaptation to the self that is important, not the adaptation to the average. To bring about, as he tried to do, the possibility of happiness through ordinary definitions of happiness can never satisfy you because your desires are not on the average level. The identification with the WHOLE can only come when the individual has lived out the utmost of his aspirations and is at peace with himself."

  The happiness described by Rank, then, is the one of positive, creative assertion of the will through the consciousness of creation; and that, by this highest of efforts, I can arrive at a self-abnegation or forgetting of myself to a greater whole. An artistic enthusiasm for a variety of manifestations is the basis of creative exuberance.

  I had thought I would have to endure his compassion for an illness, but when I spread before him the rich events of my life, he said, "The new hero, still unknown, is the one who can live and love in spite of our mal du siècle. The romantics accelerated their suicide. The neurotic is the modern romantic who refuses to die because his illusions and fantasies prevent him from living. He enters a combat to live. We once admired those who did not compromise, who destroyed themselves. We will come to admire those who fight the enemies of life.

  "What did you feel when I asked you to leave your diary?"

  "First of all, I was afraid of what you would think of the lies I was going to tell. Then I felt a feminine elation, like that of a woman who is asked to give all her possessions, all of herself. You demanded everything in one blow. I felt an elation due to a recognition of power, of mastery. Was it not power and mastery I was looking for? Did I not come to you because I felt lost, confused, disturbed. You realized that the diary was the key. I always kept an island, inviolate, to analyze the analyst. I had never submitted. If I did look for a leader in Henry, a man of experience, he very soon became like a child, or at least an artist I must take care of, and who could not guide me."

  "The diary is your last defense against analysis. It is like a traffic island you want to stand on. If I am going to help you, I do not want you to have a traffic island from which you will survey the analysis, keep control of it. I do not want you to analyze the analysis. Do you understand?"

  I felt I had chosen a wise and courageous guide.

  "Did you make arrangements to live alone for a few weeks? I can't help you unless you break away from all of them, until you are calm and integrated again. There is too much pressure on you."

  This was even more difficult than giving up the diary. Rank's eyes were shining. He sounded so certain, and I said I would try.

  I felt deprived of my opium. In the evenings when I would be habitually writing in the diary, I paced back and forth in my bedroom.

  I chose a very well-known hotel near Rank, which seemed cheerful, a studio room they called it, with kitchenette and bathroom and a bedroom which had the appearance of a living room. It was all in cream-whites and orange, and modern. It turned out to be a very well-known hotel for temporary alliances, well-kept mistresses, weekend lovers, intended to give an "illusion" of home! My choice was right for the situation, but it shocked my father (who had, possibly, very good reasons for being familiar with the place).

  All this I have had to write in retrospect. From sketchy notes. Memory.

  Dr. Rank would talk, at times, about the evenings in Vienna cafés where he and other young writers discussed Freud, and the motivation of character, fully and endlessly. Rank wanted to write plays. They dissected Bruckner's plays. Because his friends laughed at Rank's divergences of opinion with Freud, he wrote an article about his ideas; but he was certain then that Freud would never hear of it.

  I feel equal now to writing a sketchbook with only the human essences which are always evaporating, with the material left out of novels, with that which the woman in me sees, not what the artist must wrestle with. A sketchbook, without compulsion, or continuity.

  I will never write anything here which can be situated in either House of Incest or Winte
r of Artifice. I will not give my all to the sketchbook. Is this what Rank wanted, to throw me into my novels, books, out of the intimacy of the diary?

  Yet, in no other book can I situate the portrait of Dr. Rank, and this portrait haunts me, disturbs me while I am working on the novel. This portrait of Rank must be written.

  Background: Books, shining and colorful books, many of them bound, in many languages. They form the wall against which I see him. Impression of keenness, alertness, curiosity. The opposite of the automatic, ready formula and filing-away. The fire he brings to it, as if he felt a great exhilaration in these adventures and explorations. He gets a joy from it. It is no wonder he has evolved what he calls a dynamic analysis, swift, like an emotional shock treatment. Direct, short-cut, and outrageous, according to the old methods. His joyousness and activity immediately relieve one's pain, the neurotic knot which ties up one's faculties in a vicious circle of conflict, paralysis, more conflict, guilt, atonement, punishment, and more guilt. Immediately I felt air and space, movement, vitality, joy of detecting, divining. The spaciousness of his mind. The fine dexterity and muscular power. The swift-changing colors of his own moods. The swiftness of his rhythm, because intuitive and subtle.

  I trust him.

  We are far from the banalities and clichés of orthodox psychoanalysis.

  I sense an intelligence rendered clairvoyant by feeling. I sense an artist.

  I tell him everything. He does not separate me from my work. He seizes me through my work.

  He has understood the role of the diary. Playing so many roles, dutiful daughter, devoted sister, mistress, protector, my father's newfound illusion, Henry's needed all-purpose friend, I had to find one place of truth, one dialogue without falsity.

  When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with. I was convinced of people's need of illusion. My father had to believe that, after rediscovering each other, we would abandon all our other relationships and devote our lives to each other. When he returned to Paris after the relaxation of the summer, his social life began, and he began to try and fit me into it. He wanted me to dress conventionally and discreetly, at the best of the couturiers, as Maruca did ... neutral colors, English tailored suits in the morning, neatly cut and trimmed hair, every hair in place ... and appear at his house, where the life resembled that of Jeanne, completely artificial, insincere, snobbish. My artist life was just the opposite. My artist friends liked slovenliness, even shabbiness. They were at ease, and would have been more so if I could have dressed indifferenly, sloppily, casually, if my hair had been in disorder, my skirt pinned up, etc.

  Somewhere in between lies Anaïs, who wants a free life but not a shabby one.

  Rank immediately touched upon a vital point, the connection between the diary and my father. He had always been interested in the Double. He wrote a book about it. Don Juan and his valet. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. (Henry and clown Fred.) The need of the Double.

  "Isn't this a narcissistic fantasy, that the Double is one's twin?" I asked.

  "Not always. The Double, or the shadow, was often the self one did not want to live out, the twin, but in the sense of the dark self, and the self which one repudiated. If Don Quixote was a dreamer, why did he annex to himself his opposite, the good, earthy Sancho Panza; and if Don Juan liked to mirror himself in the eyes of adoring women, why did he need a valet-servant-disciple-devotee-shadow?

  "You are right when you feel your father was trying to stress and reinforce the resemblances so that you would become duplicates, and then he could love his feminine self in you as you could love your male self in him. He was also the one who dared to be Don Juan. Didn't you tell me that he set out to possess more women than Don Juan, to surpass the legendary figure of a thousand mistresses? This, your double was doing for you, while you were loved by the men he might have wanted to be loved by, and so you could have been the perfect Androgyne.

  "There is so much more in all this than the simple fact of incestuous longings. It is only one of the many variations upon the effort we make to unite with others; and when, for one reason or another, fusion with others has become difficult, one falls back again into the easiest one, the ready-made one, of blood affinities. It is only one of the millions of ways to palliate loneliness."

  A scientific formula acts as a reduction of the experience. With Allendy I became aware that each thing I did fell into its expected place; I became aware of the monotony of the design. I experienced a kind of discouragement with the banality of life and character, the logical chain reaction of clichés. He discovered only the skeleton which resembled other skeletons. He left out the quality of the personages, the intricacies, complexities, surprises, which Rank uncovers.

  Rank said, "A man can never have the indulgence for a woman's behavior which a woman has towards man's behavior, because a woman's maternal instinct makes her perceive the child within the man. And it is when she becomes aware of this that she cannot judge. It may be that a paternal man may get the same protective perception about a woman. And this may explain these excessive indulgences no one from the outside can find a justification for."

  I was trying to find the root of my indulgence towards Henry. I was trying to explain to Rank that I did not see him as a mature man who is aware of what he is doing. He did not deny this possibility.

  I could not go on. I felt Rank's influence, his sureness that the diary was bad for me. I knew immediately that I would show him all this, that everything is transparent to him because I wish it to be so. This is my fourth attempt at a truthful relationship. It failed with Henry because there is so much he does not understand; it failed with my father because he wants a world of illusion; it failed with Allendy because he lost his objectivity. Rank explained to me today that the reason why I had written about him was because the analysis was coming to an end, and I felt I was going to lose him. I felt impelled to recreate Rank for myself, by making a portrait of him.

  As soon as I knew I was going to see Rank Monday, I had no more desire to write.

  At the same time, I am still a romantic. Not that I am contemplating Werther's suicide. No. I have outgrown the religion of suffering fatally. But I still need the personal expression, the direct personal expression. When I have finished ten pages of the very human, simple, sincere novel, when I have written a few pages of the corrosive House of Incest, my season in hell, when I have done ten pages of the painstaking, minute "Double" (Winter of Artifice), I am not yet satisfied. I still have something to say.

  And what I have to say is really distinct from the artist and art. It is the woman who has to speak. And it is not only the woman Anaïs who has to speak, but I who have to speak for many women. As I discover myself, I feel I am merely one of many, a symbol. I begin to understand June, Jeanne, and many others. George Sand, Georgette Leblanc, Eleonora Duse, women of yesterday and today. The mute ones of the past, the inarticulate, who took refuge behind wordless intuitions; and the women of today, all action, and copies of men. And I, in between. Here lies the personal overflow, the personal and feminine overfulness. Feelings that are not for books, not for fiction, not for art. All that I want to enjoy, not transform. My life has been one long series of efforts, self-discipline, will. Here I can sketch, improvise, be free, and myself.

  Rank wants to see if I can keep a sketchbook, instead of being kept by a diary. It is the compulsion of the diary he fights. I began with a portrait of Rank because it did not fit anywhere else. Let us try again.

  Rank. I have a blurred memory of vigorousness, of muscular talks. Of sharpness. The contents alone are indistinct. Impossible to analyze his way of analyzing, because of its spontaneity, its unexpectedness, its darting, nimble opportunism. I have no feeling that he knows what I will say next, nor that he awaits this statement. There is no "suggestion" or guidance. He does not put any ideas in my mind as the priests in the confessional put sin in my mind by their devious questions: "You have n
ot been impure, my daughter? You have not enjoyed the sight of your own body? You have not touched your body with intent to enjoy, my daughter?"

  Rank waits, free, ready to leap, but not holding a little trap door in readiness which will click at the cliché phrase. He awaits free. You are a new human being. Unique. He detours the obvious, and begins a vast expansion into the greater, the vaster, the beyond. Art and imagination. With joyousness and alertness.

  I stopped for a moment to search for the order and progression of our talks, but these talks follow a capricious, associative pattern which is elusive. The order made in reality, chronological, is another matter entirely. Rank does not believe in that "construction" by logic and reason. The truth lies elsewhere. In what one connects to one's self, by emotion (as in Proust). I began to perceive a new order which lies in the choice of events made by memory. This selection is made by the power of the emotion. No more calendars!

  That also meant a death blow to the rigorous sequences of the diary calendars.

  A nonchalant perspective.

  Yes, everything is changed. There is a pre-Rank vision, and there is an after-Rank perspective. Perhaps he has the secret of mobility and change. Other patterns, such as my father's, bring on a static "frieze" or "freeze."

  And so we go on. There is courage in these disorders, these skips of memory, these seemingly erratic or devious explorations.

  I do remember the day he discovered two important facts: one, my love of exact truth; and two, my lies in life, my artistic and imaginative deformations.

  There was a great change in me, but no change around me. Beyond a certain limit, there was little I could do for my father or with him. Maruca was his wife, devoted and complete; and she was also secretary, music-copier, letter-writer, social assistant, manager, accountant, etc. Henry, beyond a certain point, needs independence, and no care. Rank divined that this would happen: the woman could not find a total role for all her energies. But then Rank began to show me how my concept of woman was mother. To protect, serve, mother, care for. So it was the mother in me which found uses for her talents, but the woman? It was being such a mother that made me feel I was a woman.