Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  Dr. Rank opposes the concept that all struggle in the neurotic is merely a perverse resistance to an infallible teacher. He apparently diminishes the supreme oracular role of the analyst in order to equalize the relationship. He encourages the individual creation which sustains the power of self-creation. The act of self-creation which the neurotic must make with the analyst is only possible if he is convinced that the invention of his illness is a symptom of the power to create, and not a symptom of impotence.

  It is in the realm of imagination that the disease lies, and it is with imagination that it can be reached. It is this imagination which the scientist regards as a purely negative, destructive, illusory element.

  Dr. Rank differs, too, in his concept of adaptation. The cause of discord in the personality is usually the tragic disparity between the ideal goal of the individual, the image he creates of himself, and his actual self. It is this which he projects on the world, on his relationships with others. Most analysts immediately seek to reconcile the individual to the world without realizing the deeper, inner discord, or considering what world it is the individual should be adapted to.

  It is only when the disparities between his desires and his capacity to fulfill them are removed that a harmony becomes possible. Rank does not offer the ordinary solution of adaptation to the outer reality, but rather a power to create an inner reality which will mold the outer one to one's needs, which will act upon the outer one (creating a climate, a language, a level of life one is in harmony with), and so will make fulfillment possible.

  The creative activity becomes the true channel of redemption for the neurotic who is paralyzed by analysis, or by his obsessions with perfection or the absolute. It is when he applies to human life those obsessions which should only be applied to creation that he fails. It is not adaptation he is taught by Rank, but transmutation and mobility. That element in human life which he cannot adjust himself to if he is intent on the fulfillment of a mental pattern, caprice, paradox, contradiction, treachery, evanescence, he will accept when he begins to live by the mobility of his own emotions and not by premeditation or intentions.

  Deprived of religious beliefs, and of the power to create, man finds himself projecting into relationships his need of God, and his need for perfection. There is, in reality, nothing wrong with his nature except a great confusion. That is why the real doctor today must be the philosopher, and Rank is among those who know most deeply man's needs and the origin of his suffering today.

  A sorrow made me create a protective cave, the journal. And now I am preparing to abandon this sorrow, this cave. I can stand without crutches (or without my snail shell). I face the world without the diary. I am losing my great, dissolving, disintegrating pity for others, in which I saw deflected the compassion I wanted for myself. I no longer give compassion, which means I no longer need to receive it.

  I think of a self-portrait today in order to disengage the self from dissolution. But I am not interested in it, or perhaps the old selves are beyond resuscitation. It is the old selves Rank is scattering, and I feel strange without them. I feel spent, lost, given, empty. I wrote the portrait of Rank and I gave it to him.

  [February, 1934]

  Turmoil. I regretted the diary which held my body and soul together, and held together all of my many selves. But it is dead.

  The dependence on Rank, learning from Rank, became the desire to give Rank a gift. More important, the moment of his understanding of me was the moment when he said: "I like what you wrote about me immensely, immensely." And his expression was full of gratitude, the eyes seemed almost as if about to dissolve in tears. He ruled the empty space between my first visit to him and these notes on him ... November 8th, when the journal died, and today.

  Rank wanted to free me of the compulsion to write everything in the diary, and so little in the novels. He encouraged an intermittent notebook, not the need of describing everything. Yet when I gave him what I wrote about him, he was pleased. As Henry was. Kill the diary, they say; write novels; but when they look at their portrait, they say: "That is wonderful."

  Rank wanted me to describe the present, enter the present, never look back. So I enter the present and I find Henry at work upon his book on Lawrence. He is completely drowned in his notebooks, sketches, plans, schemas, projects, lists; and so I suggested: "Let us draw a tree." A struggle against chaos. Henry adds details, details, a massive construction, thick with substance, solidities, facts, but chaotic, dense and without clarity. He drowns in gigantism. I try to throw the unessentials overboard, to travel light. So things will become transparent. Henry said, "I will dedicate it to you. I will say, 'To Anaïs, who opened the world of Lawrence to me.'"

  And I am happy. My novel lies gathering dust. I am reading Knut Hamsun's Mysteries, and I am filled with the hushed, mute beauty of mystery, of no explanations. Henry thinks he is like Knut Hamsun. But he is not as pure or as simple. He is tainted with intellectualism.

  To be in Paris during the cold winter, nearer to Rank, I rented a pompous, furnished apartment on the Avenue Victor Hugo, belonging to an old-fashioned painter. It is full of fireplaces, coal stoves, cold studio windows, furniture. I thought the tall, high-ceilinged studio would be beautiful, but it is so cold we can never stay in it. As Emilia got married, I have no maid, and I thought this would be easier to take care of. Teresa comes with her husband, and takes one of the small rooms. At night the stove, like old Russian stoves in Dostoevskian novels, goes out. I freeze. I get up and do not want to awaken Teresa, so I am always carrying coal and shaking the fire. Then Teresa has to leave, and I rescue a starving Spaniard with a pregnant wife. He waits on me devotedly, but as she is pregnant, I end up by taking care of her while he takes care of the stoves, the window cleaning, etc.

  Life. Literature. I am sitting here with a fever, and a desire not to explain. Has this notebook a new accent? Has the diary truly died? I am like an opium addict, lost without my drug. Donald, the young Scotchman Elsie loved and betrayed, is staying here too. I have to watch him every moment, for he gets up out of bed to jump out of the window. Fortunately, the French windows are rusty, creaky, and take time to open, and I hear him and hold him back.

  He raves and rants. "It is not the betrayal which I can't take, Anaïs. I expected that from Elsie, somehow. In our most passionate moments, she would say: 'Donald, you are too young, too young.' I knew there was another man because she would never stay with me all night. But why did she not tell me? She came to Paris with me, we were very happy together, she gave herself with such abandon, and then when I became suspicious of her life in London, and when she refused to marry me, I went to London and I found out about Justin, and that they were planning to marry. But none of this really matters, none of this would make me want to die."

  He sobbed for a while. I held his hand. He was so young, about twenty, dark-haired and violent, with burning eyes.

  "What made you want to die, Donald?"

  "I will tell you what, if I can, if I can. I am not sure I can describe it. But when I went to London and found out ... found out that Elsie was about to marry Justin and not me, and when I faced her with my discovery, and begged her to tell me the truth, and to free me, to let me go, not to hang on to me, and tell me lies, when I wept and pleaded, and made a scene, she stood there, and instead of showing some feeling, even a little pity for me who loved her with my body and soul, instead of being warm, and helping me, consoling me, saying something, asking for forgiveness, explaining, justifying herself, she smiled. She gave me a long, cool, satanic smile."

  As he told me this, he made one wild leap out of bed and rushed to the studio. I called the Spaniard and ran after Donald. He fumbled with the heavy and rusty studio windows, and I pulled him away with the help of the Spaniard.

  Elsie broke the only law, the only law I respect: don't inflict unnecessary pain. That smile!

  The fever gives a strange rhythm to my thoughts. Now, at last, I understand the plain chant of the neurotics. When I h
ear the laments of the neurotic-romantic, I recognize the tone. It is not a complaint born of what is happening; it is born of what they had imagined, expected, dreamed; and the lament seems out of proportion. Elsie's smile! To Donald it was the smile of cruelty. Donald had dreamed of a woman feeling with him, with him against the cruelties of life, of destiny; he had not dreamed cruelties of her own doing. She signed the cruelty with her own name. Did she enjoy it? Was it a smile of triumph at her power to hurt? Donald's accusing tone, reproaches. One thinks: he is a coward. He cannot take the blows. But consider for a moment what Donald had "imagined." The greatest love of the century! Passion an absolute. He was a full-fledged romantic, who had been dashed from the top of the highest mountain, Olympus. So call the doctor and ask for a sedative, and explain to the French doctor why he wants to die, and watch him shrug philosophical shoulders. "One does not die of love."

  "I am going to kill her," said Donald, with fists clenched, as he awakened from the effects of the sedative.

  He has to abolish that smile.

  So I coax him into dressing, into a taxi, and I take him to Allendy, who had been analyzing Elsie.

  There is an end to my giving. A point at which I feel I must rescue myself. I reached this point today. Henry is immersed in a work I admire. We have talked over every page. Today he brought me twenty-five pages of an apotheosis of his philosophy. He said, "People will say I could formulate such a philosophy (quietism, non-willing, being, passivity) because you took care of me."

  I close my eyes to the immense web of ideologies. They weary me, this gigantic juggling of systems, orders, prophecies. I am a woman. I let my vision fall short. I understand everything, Spengler, Rank, Lawrence, Henry; but I get tired of those glacial regions. I feel their coldness, too high, too far from life. I am not happy there. I think of myself: I am tired of ideas. I feel myself pulling downward, growing more and more earthy. Yet I owe some of my greatest joys to that world, joys almost akin to the joys of love.

  Other demands pull on me, the house in Louveciennes, repairs, care, Elsie's tragedies and conflicts, servants' lives and problems, family, my father. A litany of weariness. To the lost self.

  My father, when he returned to Paris, was no longer the father of the south of France. He became once more a dandy, a man of the world and of the salon, a public figure, a virtuoso, a concert pianist, a frequenter of countesses. He was on stage. I would not have minded this, but he wanted to mold me into it. He wanted Maruca to take me to her dressmaker, to conventionalize me; he wanted me to go to all the soirees, concerts, to share in his frivolities, to shop with him for a special cane, to use the most expensive perfumes; and I am at an austere self-sacrificing moment of my life, seeking the dépouillé (bare) life of the artist, seeking to strip myself of externals.

  I was far now from my symbolic dress, my inventions. Father Momus, I called him. Momus, in Greek fables, was the god of mockery and censure, and delighted in finding fault with gods and men. When Neptune, Minerva, and Vulcan strove to prove which was the most skillful artist, Momus was chosen as judge to decide among them. Neptune made a bull; Minerva, a house; and Vulcan, a man. Momus declared that Neptune should have put the horns of the bull nearer the front, that he might fight better; Minerva should have made her house movable, so that she could remove it in case she had troublesome neighbors; Vulcan should have made a window in the man's breast, so that his thoughts could be seen. All were so disgusted with his criticism that they turned him out of heaven; and he died of grief because he could find no imperfection in Venus.

  The artificiality of his life repelled me.

  There is no objectivity. There is only instinct.

  Blind instinct.

  I have changed, but nothing around me has changed. I became more woman.

  I am full of bitterness to see that my father, Henry, D. H. Lawrence, and other men gave the best of themselves to primitive women, endured them, while I, being the woman whom men associate with their creation, I get treated in a superior, elevated, mature way and so much is expected of me that I cannot always live up to.

  I seek more truthfulness. I told the truth to Allendy, but I send him relatives and friends to analyze so he does not feel I lost faith in him as an analyst, only that his analysis of me is now impossible.

  I would like to live in the realm of Knut Hamsun's books, that which lies either deep in the earth, homeliness, work, coarseness and simplicity of living, or at night, in dreams, madness and fantasy and mystery. No awareness. No explanations.

  Clocks ticking. It is an apartment of clocks: chiming, swinging, ringing, cuckooing, cooing. Red-hot stoves, cold drafts. Waiting. Waiting for what? Rank is waiting to see how I live without him, without crutches.

  Could write a comedy about psychoanalysis, beginning with Allendy's remark about his kissing Elsie: "I kissed her so she would not have a feeling of inferiority." The magic of Allendy has died. He has failed. Elsie does not face herself, but escapes into marriage to an older man, very much like her father. Marguerite did not get well. She escaped into astrology. I escaped to Rank, who could help the writer to be born.

  Allendy said wistfully, "I have been too soft. J'ai été trop mou."

  You have to take into account the human element.

  Quietism always reached by immolation. That was always my cure for anxiety. I have rejoiced inwardly when I have taken my revenge, but for myself only. I have no need to exteriorize or celebrate my cruelties. It is a game for myself only, for a secret, inner equilibrium. It is my own private, little, malicious world, with secret laughter and ironies, no need of spectacular manifestations. The pain I give is only like homeopathy, to heal the pain given me, but it is not a blow to be given. Insidious and subtle.

  Each time I return from a visit to my father, I add a few pages to the novel (Winter of Artifice).

  The inner hatreds of men are now projected outside. There are fights in the streets. Revolution in France, they say. Men did not seek to resolve their own personal revolutions, so now they act them out collectively.

  Henry's keeping of a dream book for me became a small book (fifty pages) which he rewrote in a particularly chaotic style.* We arrived at a new conclusion about the dream language. One night we clarified it well. If the films are the most successful expression of surrealism, then the scenario is what suits the surrealist stories and the dreams best. Henry sensed this when he suggested a scenario be made out of House of Incest. Now I advised him to do the same for his dreams, because they were, as yet, too explicit. (I did not object to obscenity or realism but to explicitness.) It all needed to be blurred, the outline must be less definite, one image must run into another like water colors.

  We argued over the question of the dialogue. I said talk in the dream was only a phrase issuing from a million thoughts and feelings, only a phrase, now and then, formed out of a swift and enormous flow of ideas. Henry agreed that the verbalization of thought in dreams was short and rare. Therefore, we agreed, there must be a telescoping, a condensation in words. (Psychoanalysis describes the great condensation in dreams.)

  I said there was a need of giving scenes without logical, conscious explanations. I questioned, in his dream book, the discussion in the café before the operation of the child. I gave as an example of the silent mystery, the feeling of the dream scenes from the Chien Andalou, where nothing is mentioned or verbalized. A hand is lying in the street. The woman leans out of the window. The bicycle falls on the sidewalk. There is a wound in the hand. The eyes are sliced by a razor. There is no dialogue. It is a silent movie of images, as in a dream. One phrase now and then, out of a sea of sensation.

  We analyzed the feeling one has in a dream of having made a long and wonderful speech, yet only a few phrases remain. It is like the state described by drug addicts. They imagine themselves utterly eloquent, and say very little. It is like the process of creation, when, for a whole day, we carry in us a tumultuous sea of ideas, and when we reach home it can be stated in one page.

/>   The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I wanted my diary as one wants opium. I wanted nothing else but the diary, to rest upon, to confide in. But I also wanted to write a novel. I went to my typewriter and I worked on House of Incest and Winter of Artifice. A deep struggle. A month later I began the portrait of Rank in a diary volume, and Rank did not feel it was the diary I had resuscitated but a notebook, perhaps.

  The difference is subtle and difficult to seize. But I sense it. The difference may be that I poured everything into the diary. It channeled away from invention and creation and fiction. Rank also wanted me to be free of it, to write when I felt like it, but not compulsively. "Get out in the world!" Rank said. "Leave your house at Louveciennes! That is isolation, too. Leave the diary; that is withdrawing from the world."

  How to separate from my father without hurting him? Rank said, "Hurt him. You will deliver him of his sense of guilt for leaving you as a child. He will feel delivered because he will have been punished. Abandon him as he abandoned you. Revenge is necessary. To re-establish equilibrium in the emotional life. It rules us, deep down. It is at the root of Greek tragedies."

  "But I have to do this in my own way."

  My own way is always to do so very gradually, drop by drop, so that the abandonment is hardly felt, as I did with Allendy. My father's attitude is: "Let us live this external life, and next summer we will have a real intimate feast of talk in Valescure."

  Rank asked, "How did you talk to your father?"

  I answered, "As you talk to me. I analyzed him subtly. I imitated you."