by Anais Nin
I am collecting notes on writing for a lecture I have to give in the fall.
I prefer Wallace Fowlie to Eliot, because he proceeds by these sudden illuminations, leaving out all the inessentials. When he writes about the poets, I live his illuminated phrases in which so much knowledge is telescoped.
I find Eliot "déséchant." I feel the prime morality of literature should be to teach how to live, expand physically and mentally, how to experience, see, hear, feel, and give birth simultaneously to the soul and the body. I still feel Fowlie is more inspiring, more contagious, vibrant, highlighting deeper realms.
Sold eighteen portfolios to museums and galleries.
First page proofs of This Hunger.
Walking down Thirteenth Street I remembered the French postman so much loved by the surrealists. Just a humble, small, anonymous postman, walking for thirty years along the same route in the South of France, and one day he said to himself: "How can one keep from going mad with monotony, walking the same route for thirty years? By dreaming." And he built this amazing castle, stone by stone, a real fantasy, exteriorized by patient hard labor. There were photographs of it in the old Minotaure. I wondered how many years I would walk between the press and the studio, along the same street. Would I ever walk through the streets of the faraway cities I want to see?
Josephine Premice is becoming quite famous and successful. She is singing at Café Society. I went to hear her. She always embraces me shouting: "My sister!"
Dali appeared at a lecture in a diver's suit. At first I laughed at the absurdity, as everyone did, then I realized the deep significance of it. The artist finds his way into the most secret, the deepest, and most unconscious self, where lies the real source of creation. Often I think of us as the earth itself, full of hidden treasures, gold, precious stones, fire, metals, or of the riches at the bottom of the sea, all subterranean and having to be brought to the surface. We could also wear a miner's suit.
Saw several of Maya Deren's films. Truly unconscious dream material, better in some ways than the early surrealist movies because there are no artificial effects, just a simple following of the threads of fantasy. Good camera finesse. Went with Frances and Tom.
Meshes of the Afternoon: "A film concerned with the inner realities of an individual and with the way in which the subconscious will develop an apparently casual occurrence into a critical emotional experience."
At Land: "A film in the nature of an inverted Odyssey, where the Universe assumes the initiative of movement and confronts the individual with a continuous fluidity toward which, as a constant identity, he seeks to relate himself."
I see the influence of Cocteau, except that she will not resort to any symbolism or artifice to present the dream. The dream resembles realism. The objects are not altered, there is no mystery. There is nothing to indicate that one is dreaming or free-associating. A curious prosaic quality imposed upon the imagination.
[July, 1945]
A Chekhov-play day. Olga drove us to Port Jefferson, on Long Island, where a Russian colony congregates. First we called on Vassily Vassilinoff, then on Tatiana Nabukova, then on Nikolai Vaharoff, then Gregory Psnikov Guriananoff, and we all gathered on a small, placid, Long Island beach. Everybody talking at once about God, death, war, dreams, music, literature, heroism, with the most incredible fantasy and enthusiasm. I remembered Olga's own words once: "In my family we did everything with enthusiasm. We even died with enthusiam." And she mimed someone rising from a death bed and greeting the invisible death with the elation of a lover. In and out of the water we popped, writers, singers. Someone asked when Nabukova was going home; if So-and-So was returning to Paris, to the same old pension; how Tatiana was returning to Moscow; how Olga may go back to Poland.
There are many signs pointing to an accelerated war and a quick ending.
The only one who can open Pandora's box with impunity is the artist. Because when he has emptied the box of one illusion, he can create another and replenish it with new material. He can put back into the box the worlds he created and the discoveries he made. No one can live with only a clinical, psychological, or historical vision of the world. There must be a capacity to recreate, renovate, renew. Martha continues to analyze in place of feeling, analyze instead of living sensually, unconsciously. The same after my talks with Rank: too much lucidity creates a desert, and one has to find water again, to replant, reseed.
Frances seeks to clarify the difference between creative intuition and illusion. She fears that many of my intuitions are illusions, and then later they turn out to be correct. She feels it is my illusions which cause me anguish. But intuition can cause anguish, too, because you have it and cannot prove it to anyone else, and you are alone with it, and everyone else says it is not so. Analysis, too, can disintegrate. It has a dual role. But I see clearly now that both are necessary: to live passionately and blindly, to take risks; and then to interpret later, in order to rescue one's self from disaster if it turns out to be an illusion rather than a. creative intuition.
Baldwin obeys only his fears, ambivalences. He seeks safety. He has been attracted to our world, and he is afraid of it.
I see my writing as an early presentiment of the imprisonment to which human beings are subjected. It was my means of evasion, burrowing my way out to freedom.
The novel is false. I rebel against it while I write it. Composites are false. Sabina, the woman of passion; Lillian, the woman of instinct but inhibited; Djuna, the woman of the psyche; Hejda, the woman of oriental obliqueness and new freedom; Stella, the actress living by osmosis.
Frances said with amazement: "In the end, you always write the truth. People think it is fantasy, but it is psychologically absolutely real. That's what people did not see. You discard realism, but not reality."
A summer night. Windows and the door to the porch open. The noises of the city clear and sharp. The foghorns from the river gay and short. The metal bird is revolving up under the ceiling, the tapestry painted by Leonard and Pablo flowering in the dark. All the lights are out.
A moment of peace.
The rest is work. Work at the press, work on This Hunger, correcting proofs.
Leonard said before leaving: "I will have seventeen months of training and study and then they will send me to Japan."
There is an analogy between the bombardment of the atom and the bombardment of the personality by the method of analysis, the dismemberment, separation of the elements of the psyche which may release new energies. I believe scientific principles can be applied to the life of the psyche.
I must study scientific principles as symbolic ways of making the workings of the psyche clear. The time has come to give the psyche a concrete symbolism. I feel there is a connection between what takes place within us and what takes place outside. Just as scientists stripped away the layers of matter to get at the heart of the atom, the analyst has stripped away the layers of the personality to get at the core of the psyche.
Have I found the secret of joy? I remember reading Georges Bernanos' La Joie. I did not read it as he wished it to be read, for his descriptions of the states of ecstasy experienced by the girl were based on religious ecstasy, and that was not what I was seeking. But the way he described it, being a poet, was such an absolute state of joy invading the senses, possessing the whole body, that I retained that but sought the source of it elsewhere. Joy appears now in little things. The big themes remain tragic. But a leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the taste of the coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked to the press. The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
David Moore. A purity and austerity of face, black wavy hair which he wears in a slightly Spanish fashion. Sudden smiles. Tension. Romanticism. He has recently separated from his wife. And all he found instead is a muse! We have elaborate and intricate talks: he is too aware, too mental. But I recognize the fear, disguised in complexities.
He
does not take the place of Leonard, who was drugged by dreams. But I will no longer practice this insane murder of the present in which the romantic neurotic is so skilled.
The neurotic says: "I will not enjoy, I will not breathe, I will not love, unless I can reach this particular dream, person, state, place..." Henry enjoyed the present, by not caring. I do care, yet I will not die of it. The interchangeable friends, identities have ceased to count fatally. David Moore is a continuation of Leonard, Pablo, Charles Duits, the poets ever present in one form or another, demanding a legendary woman with all her veils and myths to create with.
But last night David Moore the poet was suddenly eclipsed by the preacher. In the course of our talk he revealed that his father was Irish, and loved women and drink. "And I like neither," said David. Aside from his marriage, he has had no experience with women. "I am a Puritan. I think that at bottom, all women are whores." The Irish wit and charm vanished. "You are good for me." I did not say: "But you are not good for me. You kill my naturalness and joy."
"You make me lose a certain order," he said.
"I only had one playmate in my father's house," he said. "It was George. George was an Irish pixie, an invisible personage. He was small, and always laughing, and hiding everywhere. Do you hear him now? He is out on the porch, making rustling sounds. He is a kind of wind blowing all around me." He does not understand the unconscious, and what he does not understand he is against. He also loves a fight. In company he assumes a haughty, pedantic pose. He only has confidence in his intellect. Why do people have confidence in their little conscious world, and such fear of the much deeper and larger one below consciousness? I pretend not to hear his indirect confessions of love.
At the press everything is difficult. Problems created by Gonzalo never keeping his word, never finishing books on time, never paying his bills. But this is balanced by the life in the studio, which has been taken over by Pablo, Charles, Josephine, Marshall. They distract me, cheer me, like a household of adolescents. When I arrive from work there is a mobile hanging from the doorknob. But like children, too, they exert their tyrannies. They have established a court, a form of mock trial, and I have to listen to the reasons why Baldwin and David Moore must be excluded from the circle. Baldwin is too conventional, starchy. He is the man in the business suit with a brief case. True, he has written poetry, but he does not behave like a poet. David is arrogant and pedantic, and if they cannot obtain a banishment from me, then, when the unwanted visitor comes, they act so much as if they owned the studio, were settled there in full possession, by either painting the furniture or changing the arrangements, that the unwanted visitor feels like a stranger.
Leonard writes: "Every dream of mine cast into a story and put on paper and made public is one less dream for myself and of them I have few enough."
I answered him:
Many writers have felt as you do. Maurice de Gulrin carried this dislike of giving his intimate thoughts to such an extreme that he wrote them down in a secret journal which was published only after his death by his sister. Amiel wrote a diary and nothing else. Rilke complains of this in his Letters to a Young Poet, which I will send you later. I will go as far as to say that writing of enigmatic poetry is an expression of this reluctance—here one is clothed in the symbols, protected by the mystery from being completely exposed to the world. But there is another aspect to this. To write means to give all. No withholding is possible. The best writers are those who give all. However, there is the choice of clothing: fiction, symbolism, poetry, etc. I agree with you that a dream given is no longer yours, but it is also true that the more dreams you give, the more you exercise the production of dreams to fill the void, and this faculty grows stronger as you make demands upon it. It is like love. The more you spend of it, the more you stir new sources, new energies. To hold back is an activity which withers, inhibits, and ultimately kills the seeds. When you first surrender your dream, you may feel poor. But the instinct, like that of nature, is to replenish, refecundate. I have found this to be true. The more I write, the more I give, the more 1 love, the stronger grows the source. The writer is exposing himself in any form, ultimately, as we do in love, but it is a risk we must take.
I do remember, at your age, my paralyzing timidity, which prevented me from writing anything but the diary, in which I felt safe from either prying or judging eyes. And then don't forget that dreams beget dreams. If I had not given up my dream of the houseboat, written a story, and thus given up my secret, my own private possession, the story would not have been read by a boy of seventeen at Yale, and he would not have come to present me with a dream of Caspar Hauser. I know you said you would not read it because he died at the end. And you are afraid of death. But Caspar Hauser was no poet, and in the poet, the child, the adolescent, never dies. Remember Fowlie saying in every poet there is a man, a woman, and a child. It is out of the child's unimpaired receptivity, undamaged senses, that the poet receives his constant responsiveness and inspiration. Throw your dream into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
Letter to Leonard:
Wallace Fowlie writes to Miller that his admiration for me was unchanged but that, nevertheless, I was a femme fatale for the poets. That he feared my spell, and particularly for you.
I finally refused to meet Marshall Field. I have a prejudice against people with money. I have known so many, and none have escaped the corruption of power. In this I am a purist. I love people motivated by love and not by power. If you have money and power, and are motivated by love, you give it all away.
I was happy yesterday because Olga sent my books to the French critic Leon Pierre Quint, who wrote the remarkable study of Proust, and who guided my taste when I first arrived in France.
I attended the wedding of Luise Rainer and Robert Knittel. It was very formal and I did not enjoy it, but they seemed very happy and I am glad she is saved from a difficult life as an actress.
[August, 1945]
As I can only write well about what I feel, I have had to find a way to relate what I see and feel to the book, rather than the other way around. The way Otto Rank conducted analysis helped me find a form for the book.
Not easy to achieve freedom without chaos. While Leonard was here I observed and responded to what I called the transparencies and phosphorescences of adolescence, described them, and let them take their place in the book. Rank did not believe in going back. He felt the same drama would manifest itself in the present; all one needed to do was to examine the present. So in the present I was experiencing a conflict between the openness of the young, their curiosity, exploration, receptivity, playfulness, nimbleness, as against the heavy, opaque, solid, immovable mass of maturity I meet at parties. On this theme of hardening of the arteries of feeling I have done forty pages for the new book. In spite of the press, visitors, correspondence.
An atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A horror to stun the world. Unbelievable barbarism.
One summer afternoon in Amagansett, we were all walking back from a long exploration of the beach. It was toward the end of the afternoon.
From afar, we observed what seemed to be a body being rolled by the waves toward the shore. Two men were watching it. When it rolled at their feet, the body would stand up, and soon after run into the waves and begin again. As we came nearer we were puzzled. It was a woman. She had abundant long hair which floated as she let herself be rolled by the waves. She had to do this several times for the young man who was filming. We watched for a while, exchanged smiles, and walked on.
Later we found out this was Maya Deren and her husband, Sasha Hammid. He had worked with John Steinbeck and Herbert Kline on the film The Forgotten Village. She was making another surrealist film. We became friends. Maya invited us to come and see the film when it was finished. We arrived at her studio in the Village, a vast place on the top floor. It was filled with exotic objects: drums, masks, statuettes, recordings, cameras, ligh
ts, screens, costumes. The bathroom and a large bedroom were in the back. The film was original. It was a dream. It had many strange effects which reminded me of Cocteau. Friends had acted in it whom we recognized. And we recognized the scene by the seashore. Maya had a fascinating face. She was a Russian Jewess. Under the wealth of curly, wild hair, which she allowed to frame her face in a halo, she had pale-blue eyes, and a primitive face. The mouth was wide and fleshy, the nose with a touch of South-Sea-islander fullness. When Sasha filmed her, as he loved her and found her beautiful, he caught a moment when Maya appeared behind a glass window, and, softened by the glass, she created a truly Botticelli effect. The round face, the round halo of hair, the eyes wide apart.
