Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 4

by Anais Nin

  I, myself, concentrated so much on my sixth sense that I developed this vision which sees beyond facts, the better to find sensations and divinations. It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.

  [May, 1945]

  Leonard is with his family during the last days before he goes into the army. Put away his belongings, records, the box with the phosphorescent paints, the sheets of copper, scissors, the colored glass, the copper plates, prints, poems, notes, sketches.

  Tom had been telling Leonard that all has been written, that intellectual development has killed literature, but I tell him of all that is left to be done. "If the intellect has killed writing, then let the other kind of writing, emotional, kill the intellect."

  He telephoned: "I'm at the induction office and taking the train for Fort Dix at six." An hour later, he appeared. He had fainted when he was given an injection.

  To send such fragile, not-yet-men into war. His body is vulnerable. It has not yet gained its full strength. He is tall and underweight. He has the neck and ears of a fourteen-year-old.

  Of all the elements which stay in my memory, the most vivid is his curious luminosity. Why does it appear in children and adolescents, and then vanish? Is it the presence of the spirit? Is it that the skin, the flesh, is still transparent, not dense and opaque?

  My concern is that now Leonard will close. I saw him expand and contract, expand and withdraw. To protect his vulnerability.

  Formal German surrender signed. The war in Europe is over. A date to remember: May 8, 1945.

  I correspond with Wolfgang Paalen, editor and publisher of Dyn magazine in Mexico. He accepted a story of mine, "The Eye's Journey," the one based on Hans Reichel. I found a surrealist passage in the magazine I liked and wrote a fan letter to the author, a man called "Givor," care of Paalen. But Paalen had written it himself, under a pen name, and he did not know whether to be pleased or jealous of this other self which had attracted my praise. His wife Alice is a painter.

  I met her today at an exhibition. She is striking in appearance. Tall, dark-haired, sunburned, she looks like a Mexican-Indian woman. But she was born in France, in Brittany.

  Her smile and her expression are dazzling, dazzling with spirit, wit, life.

  She has some trouble with her hip or leg, which makes her limp.

  Her paintings are completely drawn from subterranean worlds, while her descriptions of Mexico are violent with color, drama, and joy.

  Wonderful to hear about the sun, about the jungle and rivers, about the colors, the costumes, the habits, the smile in dark faces, the smell of herbs and the grinding of corn, about Mexico's history, its past, the painters who live there and paint with such power. It is a different Mexico from that of D. H. Lawrence. For him, it was strange. For Alice it is familiar, sparkling with gaiety and life, even in poverty.

  I developed a longing, which was coupled with the fear that by suffering from the coldness and malice of New York, I would become, in the end, like the people who wrote without feeling, all calluses, bitterness, cynicism.

  Added to Alice Paalen's description of Mexico was Pablo's description of Panama. The warmth of climate was wedded to warmth of behavior. The sun was linked to generosity of being.

  Letter from Henry:

  Went to bed last night with an excellent idea about your diary. Suddenly I sat up in bed and asked myself why had we never thought of Maurice Girodias as a publisher for the diary? Why should you have to do this gargantuan task yourself. It's absurd....

  What do you think? Should I write to him at length? I had an idea that when printing each volume he could bring out a small de luxe edition by facsimile process which would establish the authenticity of the work and be a handsome product at the same time. Many of your friends would like to have these.

  Robert Laffont has a review called Magazin du Spectacle in which he published my "Scenario" from House of Incest. Max and the White Phagocites will be out in French any day now with my essay on the diary. That should help you. So do think it over.

  Long ago I had discussed with Dr. Otto Rank what he called "the Double," which is another expression of our need to project a part of ourselves onto others. Dr. Esther Harding talked about this most clearly one evening. I took notes.

  We play a persona role to the world.

  The acceptance of this social role delivers us to the demands of the collective, and makes us a stranger to our own reality.

  The consequent split in the personality may find the ego in agreement with general community expectations, while the re-pressed shadow turns dissenter.

  Failure to acknowledge this dark alter ego creates the tendency to project it onto someone in the immediate environment, the mirror-opposite to one's self.

  This redeems the masked self from total annihilation.

  Dr. Harding dwelt at length upon the need for acceptance of the shadow in human relationships. The denial of evil on the part of the ego becomes heavily compensated by a dark "psychic atmosphere."

  Dr. Harding portrayed this shadow mechanism as a necessary defense against the unknown, since to take up in consciousness the undomesticated patterns of the psyche is to drive one's self into rebellion against society. But one can grow in psychic stature only in proportion as one assimilates the consequences of self-acceptance. The shadow should be a part of the conscious personality.

  I do not remember if Rank and I discussed the haunting problem of my sense of responsibility for Henry and Gonzalo. At least I do not believe I was aware of it until this statement by Dr. Harding made me realize why I felt so utterly responsible for their lives. They acted out for me all that I refused myself the freedom to act out. They were both totally irresponsible, rebellious, anarchic, and lived only for their own freedom of action. As all their freedoms were unacceptable to me, and I felt overresponsible for the care of others (beginning with my deserted mother, my abandoned brothers, and so on), I lived this out through them. And I was there to prevent them from suffering the consequences.

  Frances and I spent an hour trying to detect and disentangle when the analyst Martha Jaeger is objective and when not. Now that she has shown that she confuses her personal feelings with analysis, I am afraid she will not do us any good. Frances will now have to be watching for mistakes.

  Frances visited and I showed her Leonard's water colors. She thought them very fine technically, and beautiful, but withdrawn.

  When Leonard complains he cannot express feeling, I write him:

  Expressing feeling is linked directly with creation. My telling all to the diary helped me in this. You find yourself in a barren environment and tend to withdraw. This will be bad for you as an artist, writer, or painter. In this ability to tap the sources of feeling and imagination lies the secret of abundance. In withdrawing there is danger of sterility or withering. Try to write in your diary to keep that little flame burning. Expand, open, speak, name, describe, exclaim, paint, caricature, dance, jump in your writing. We are here as writers to say everything. Speak for your moods, make your muteness and silence eloquent. The drawings you sent are a closed face upon the world.

  Alice Paalen came, Charles Duits, Pablo, and a young man who had been at Michigan University studying Japanese. He told me how intensive the studying was, how intensive the training. Duits and Pablo tried to put on the same comic dueling with the metal tape measure, but, symbolically, it has become limp and without any electrical stiffening. As if this quality came from Leonard himself. Alice Paalen smells of sandalwood and wears a Hind
u shawl. She talks interestingly about Picasso, whose mistress she was at one time, and who delighted in withholding pleasure from women.

  Madame Chareau is translating the stories from Under a Glass Bell. I relearn my vanishing French. She commented on how indirectly and subtly I said things. She realized only much later all that I had implied by describing the way Moricand held himself, with a young girl's shy gesture of covering her sex with her hand.

  I am pulling the woodcuts in color by hand, not by machine. I tack the rice paper to a wooden frame, and press by hand on the hand-inked block, as in the old Chinese method.

  Edmund Wilson writes from England, rather wistfully, referring to a possible divorce from Mary McCarthy. The first time I read The Company She Keeps I felt it was a feat of intellectual hardness, a true piece of granite and self-hatred, and hatred of sensuality.

  Caresse was here last night and explained that she received too many poems and needed short stories, or articles of substantial length, for her "Portfolio." She came with the mulatto painter Beardon, who showed us his latest colored drawings it la Rouault—heavy black lines, intense colors, but with a very personal mobility and dynamism. She is exhibiting his paintings in her Washington gallery.

  Letter to Henry:

  The copy of Pierre Mabille's Miroir du Merveilleux was loaned to me by Tanguy, or Yves qui Tangent, as I call him, so I cannot send it to you. I tried to find a copy and if I ever do I will let you know.

  David Moore came, a tall, pale, tubercular young man, interesting, difficult, and I believe on a quest of a discovery of you. I was amazed that Michael Fraenkel spent an afternoon convincing him that Tropic of Cancer would not have been written but for Michael Fraenkel's books and influence. I was amazed at the falsity of this (and I could not take it seriously) knowing Fraenkel, but even more when I heard that Fraenkel wrote an essay on this to which you wholly assented. I can hardly believe this when I think of Fraenkel's ideology as the very opposite of yours, his small stature as a writer, and his overintellectualizations which you never espoused. Is this true? Incidentally, he told Moore that after my book on Lawrence my talent became perverted and that I did nothing ever since.

  I have seen Fraenkel around the Village, and once when I was at the movies, watching Eisenstein's film on Mexico, he put his cadaverous hand on my shoulder, like the very hand of death itself. I have carefully avoided him. Moore I believe is worth your interest and I hope his work on you will satisfy you. I know you are overloaded with mail so I will not forward his thirteen-page letter, mostly about you.

  You ask about the press. I am still and always on the verge of losing it, and after I print this new book I will be forced to give it up.

  Charles Duits and other friends whom Leonard has subtly driven away, gather around me again. My friendship with Frances had deepened because we share the friendship of Leonard.

  This week I was battered. First by Martha Jaeger not understanding the novel; then by Frances seeking to develop the realist in me, after admitting my intense focusing on the inner life uncovered an imaginative, inventive, dream-rich world; then by Leonard writing me that my letters were elusive, evanescent, almost invisible, like the Chinese paper I write them on.

  This is an example of what happens to me constantly and depresses me: C. L. Baldwin read Under a Glass Bell before meeting me, was fascinated, and wanted to meet me. Then immediately, as if I were a balloon or a kite, he started pulling at the string to bring me down to reality. Baldwin said the stories were intoxicating, then he adds: "I want to see you write simply and directly, as when you describe Jay. Writing that can be smelled and touched, warm and human. Not fantasy. Your fantasy in Under a Glass Bell makes me uneasy. When I yield to it I feel I am losing my sanity. I feel secure in reality, in the country, working in my garden."

  The great beauty of my life is that I live out what others only dream about, talk about, analyze. I want to go on living the uncensored dream, the free unconscious.

  I make my concession to reality. I work at the press for eight hours. Then I come home and work on the novel.

  Perhaps my illusion (that Leonard will become what I imagined) is not illusion, but intuition. Intuition of potentials, of the future, of the not-yet-born.

  What my friends do mind is that I relate to one side of themselves (their intimate, secret self) and I flee from the other. Frances and I have marvelous interchanges, but I run away when her friends come to play poker, or argue harshly about writers and politics. I take the best of Martha's wisdom, and elude her "real" life.

  [June, 1945]

  Work. Work. Work. Pasting the beautiful series of five of Ian Hugo's colored woodblocks for This Hunger into a special portfolio with a preface written by hand by me forty times. We turned out a beautiful limited edition of forty copies and it is selling quickly. Now we can pay for the linotype, and buy paper. Work. The press. Talks with Frances. Light dinners because of the heat.

  Poor Pablo, starved for love, not lucky, overabundant in his warmth, and pitted against paltry natures. He is so alive.

  Frances says: "You are Leonard's anima."

  "You would have been a better one. Leonard said you were more of a happy medium than I, more intellectual."

  "But you release the creative imagination."

  Pablo's place is a small room with two windows opening on an old elm tree. The room is so small that it seems to be built as part of the tree, a tree house. The tree fills the room with its greenness, with its whispers of silk.

  The story of Caspar Hauser is a story far more beautiful than that of Christ. It is the story of innocence, of a dreamer destroyed by the world. First the child is imprisoned. Then he is abandoned to strangers. Power, intrigue, evil cynicism join to murder him. Never was the ugliness of the world more clearly depicted. Caspar Hauser died at seventeen. Leonard could die at seventeen, eighteen, killed in battle in the Far East.

  I read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. "An emotion is pure whenever it takes up your whole being."

  What is it that attracts me to the young? When I am with mature people I feel their rigidities, their tight crystallizations. They have become, at least in my eyes, like the statues of the famous. Achieved. Final.

  Leonard is concerned about how little he has to give me.

  I write him:

  I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love. How was this world made which you enjoyed, the friends around me you loved? They came because I first gave away my stories. They came to respond, and to replenish the source. Pablo heard Under a Glass Bell tolling for the fiesta and arrived with his own stories. You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in
a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

  Frances and I play psychological chess games. Frances would like me to be more of a realist. She is the one who incited me to print the Under a Glass Bell stories. What I leave out of my work I leave out, discard, and overlook in life as well, because I do not think it is important. It weighs people down, and kills vision and spiritual perceptions. Too much upholstery. We are limited enough as it is without weighing ourselves down with facts which do not inspire, nourish, or liberate us. Frances admits that by being almost exclusively interested in her inner voyages, which are immensely rich, fecund, that particular inner world gained in vividness. Everything else to me are obstacles, interferences, clutterings, inessentials. America suffers from too much realism, too much Dreiserism, too many Hemingways and Thomas Wolfes. My passion is for freedom from contingencies, from statistics, from literalness, from photographic descriptions. After this talk, Frances dreamed of me as a gypsy, a nomad, but one driven by a spiritual quest.

  I read Eliot to please Frances. He has an orderly and formal mind. I do not like his Victorian morality. A new philosophy will come out of our psychological development. We will know that good and evil are not separate elements, but are interactive in the same person, dialectically, at different periods, and in different circumstances, changing aspects. Therefore, when Eliot speaks against Lawrence's characters, he speaks as a Puritan of this "amorality." Lawrence brought to the surface the entire unconscious, without selectivity or control, showing the contradictory impulses as such. Of course, admitting the strong power of guilt, psychoanalysis admits conscience and a religious censorship within ourselves. The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility. There was a book written on how Puritanism destroyed the universal grandeur of American literature for the world, blighting Emerson, Whitman, and others as incomplete forces. The value of Henry Miller is not at all in spiritual or moral qualities, but in his shattering of Puritan crystallizations. He was a liberating force. There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.