by Anais Nin
She had a strong will and influence, which we all felt. We were also hypnotized by film-making. Although that first day we did not agree with her "theories," we were captivated by the images. She denied all symbolic meaning (the knife, the faceless figure, the flower, etc.). Her father was a psychiatrist and she had developed a rebellion against all psychological interpretations. She did not acknowledge any link with the surrealists or with Cocteau. We did not insist. That evening, after the film, we danced, we played records. Maya was enchanted with Pablo, with Marshall, with David. She was planning her next film and looking at all of us through the eyes of a director.
Second bomb dropped on Nagasaki. This is savagery on such a scale that I cannot believe it.
Japan surrendered. It seems unbelievable that we can go on living, loving, working, in a world so monstrous, and this because we do not know how to curb the savagery of war, how to control history. That is why I hate history, because it makes man feel helpless in the strangle hold of hatred. More wars. More wars. More destruction. More horrible ways to destroy human beings. What can we do? Because we feel we have no say in all this, we turn away. Those who talk politics all day and all night have not solved anything.
Wrote pages on attributes of a lover (Ladders to Fire), Sabina and the fire ladder ("from the very first Jay hated her"), began Djuna and her city (pawnshop, whorehouse for the blind in Paris, Rue Dolent), and the chapter I call "Bread and the Wafer."
I am still extracting essences, not giving the experience itself, the incident, because I am distilling the diary. What was once told directly and humanly has to be transformed into the myth. One sees the transformation of reality, but not the reality. Ten years ago I was already writing about emotional algebra.
When writing fiction, in contrast to the diary, I may start slowly at the beginning, intending to tell the whole story. The first thing that happens is that my pace becomes rapid, my rhythm breathless, and I skip the obvious, the solid, to produce this condensation, this quintessence, and emotional relativity. Whenever I hear an explanation of relativity, I feel there is an equivalent in psychological reality. Why does the poet use symbolism in his tales? Why does the natural storyteller take his time and deal in a direct way with untransformed events?
I cannot answer this yet, except that untransformed reality weighs heavily and oppresses the spirit, kills our hope that we may transform, alter, change, evolve. That it is the proof of what the imagination can do which gives us our love of life, hope, joy. Truth and reality are at the basis of all I write. I can always bring forth proofs of the incident which inspired the character or place, but in order to capture emotion, the reality of how we feel or see the world, I have to go beyond appearance, and then it takes on the quality of a dream; but it is not a dream, it is the way our interior life is lived. For example, the interior monologue we all practice never resembles the way we talk. Will everything I write have to be translated, as when one reads a dream and seeks its meaning? That is why I never get this immediate response I need so much to sustain my work. The poet gets it. The fact that something is called a poem seems to establish a certain way of reading it. If I do get a response, it is a delayed one. The writing has an aftereffect. It penetrates in a more mysterious way, and gets retranslated into action, or familiar life. The abstract is restored to naturalism.
David Moore inspired the page on the black moth at the end of the book. He appears at the party as a zombi, dead in life. Two or three times when he was visiting me, a black moth took up its abode in the studio.
Begin printing This Hunger,
As a diversion, Marshall took me to see On the Town, which I loved. The only musical I ever really enjoyed. Modern, witty, fast tempo, airy dancing.
Under a Glass Bell is being translated for Cuba's avant-garde review Origines.
Today, after printing heavily and hard, I felt the machine giving me back strength. I felt the lead, so heavy to carry, giving me back power. I left the work elated.
A fabulous week in our history, a new world beginning, the end of the war! Tremendous changes. So much rejoicing. Clamors and celebrations.
Yet we all know war is the cancerous disease of power. I think it was Cocteau who said: "I am not interested in history. I am interested in civilization." History and politics are merely the record of the power-evil. We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there. We do not pay attention, because we only pay attention to headlines and the press.
***
Edmund Wilson is back from Europe. He is separated from Mary McCarthy. He seems lonely. He portrays himself as a man who has suffered because he loves clever women and "clever women are impossibly neurotic."
As I sat waiting for him at Longchamps, the most banal of all restaurants, I felt that the orange walls were as beautiful as fruit, and the noises and the lights of the summer gay and wonderful.
David I am safe from, from his death-dealing rays. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.
Neurosis is a kind of death by absence. One bitter man can infect the whole community. Those who suffer from inner disturbances are contagious.
[September, 1945]
Marshall was one of the young men who was there when Leonard dominated the group, so he was never described. He is twenty-two, Russian-Jewish, has large green eyes, a skin which appears slightly sunburned; his dark hair is alive and shining. He is talented in several fields, designing, writing lyrics for songs, and he is working for Esquire. He is soft, lax, expressive, warm. He entered into and contributed to all the imaginative, lyric evenings we had: Haitian evenings; an evening with an Irish harp-player, at which his friend sang movingly; another evening with a banjo-player singing humorous American folk songs. Each visitor bringing something new.
I received a letter from Marshall:
It is the deepest time of night. I have been sending you all my dreams. Don't you begin to suspect all this mystery? The labyrinth in which I enclose each idea. I simply love you in a terrible way. Terrible in a cockeyed reversal of all moralities, yet it makes the average morality an embodiment of the seven cardinal virtues. As a consequence, we must not see each other for a long time. If you feel you have something to say write to me care of Esquire.
A letter from Leonard:
I have made a discovery about myself. When anyone expresses feeling toward me I can accept it but I cannot give it back. I cannot respond to it. I am better able to have friendships with cold people. I am really like Tom. Perhaps it is because of my father who never expresses emotion. He always said one must keep feelings locked inside of one's heart. I am a roman à clef.
Edmund Wilson gave me the manuscript of Memoirs of Hecate County to read. The publisher expects trouble and is not very happy. Wilson may have to come out in the open and fight against censorship for all of us.
The tragic aspect of love appears only when one tries to fit a boundless love into a limited one. All around me I find that one love is not enough, two are not enough. The women I know seek to add one love to another, and then when that does not fill their needs, they become the grandes amoureuses of the world.
Now we enter the night of woman's life, chaos and the mystery of woman. We enter the deepest, most hidden realm of all, a region unacknowledged, where all women melt into one, and only in that moment of hopeless struggle to free one's self of one absolute love are all women melted into one. At one moment in the novel this happens, too. It is in the night life, in the unconscious, that this resemblance takes place; often, as in Lillian, not lived out; denied, as in Djuna, abstracted by insight; in Sabina lived out blindly.
Yesterday I printed the one hundred and eighty-fourth page, the last of the de luxe edition of This Hunger. Then I came home, rested, bathed, and dressed for Marshall, descendant of the famous Rabbi Barer. He is intelligent, imaginative, and quick-witt
ed. We went dancing with Estelle and another young man.
Somehow all the young men began to be woven together while I wrote "Bread and the Wafer." The title also came from Frances' saying I had no respect for bread. Then the contrast between daily bread and the symbolic wafer dispensed at Mass, which has a purely symbolic nourishment, appeared to me as descriptive of these gifted, often brilliant, imaginative, and magical young men, who are not nourishing to the woman, only to the artist.
I react against the plain, the one-dimensional men. I will not name them. I meet them everywhere, prosaic, down-to-earth, always talking of politics, never for one moment in the world of music or pleasure, never free of the weight of daily problems, never joyous, never elated, made of either concrete and steel or like work horses, indifferent to their bodies, obsessed with power.
In reacting away from their lugubrious and enslaved world, I fall into a magic world of illusion. In "Bread and the Wafer" I describe it as a ballet. It is a study of the evasive, elusive, unsubstantial adolescents. Because of fear, they proceed by oscillation. I was caught in their charm, their tenderness, their games. They peopled the world with delight, and were helpless when the mature world dictated to them: "Go to war. Earn your living." I see the demands of reality corrupting their dream and Caspar Hauser's innocence. Soon they will be heavy, joyless, obsessed men, like their fathers.
A tragic sense of life means one's obsession with an ideal, not a primitive, natural life. When was it I set such ideals for myself and made my life so difficult? Why did I struggle against the chaos and destructiveness of Henry's life, rather than participate joyously in his irresponsibilities, his using of others? Why did I struggle against Gonzalo's inertia, fatalism, destructiveness, rather than follow along and become equally lazy, casual, free? I never yielded to their way of life. I withdrew into my own. I have withstood the obsession with politics because I do not believe any system will make man less cruel or less greedy. He has to do this himself, individually.
We finished printing the regular edition of This Hunger. I fell into a suicidal depression. Had to face criticism of my book. Diana Trilling assumed because I had studied psychology I was writing case histories. The best way I can describe this criticism is that they only see what I have left out, but not what I have put in.
"Stella is not real. We never see her going to the icebox for a snack."
"How can you dwell on such neurotic characters at a time like this when only war and politics really matter?"
***
Edmund Wilson took me out to dinner. Then he wanted me to see his house. He drove me to an impasse in the East Nineties. A street lined with old-fashioned English brick houses. Pointed slate roofs, ivy and trees, but all of them so narrow and bleak; the windows long and narrow. He had forgotten his key, so we entered through the basement. The place had an air of devastation. "Mary took away all the furniture." We entered the parlor, a deep and narrow room. In the middle of the empty room stood two rocking chairs. On the walls, a series of Hogarth prints. I was chilled by the barrenness and the homeliness of everything. His description of Mary McCarthy sounds like mine of Lillian in This Hunger.
We sat on the rocking chairs (the surrealists would have appreciated that) and talked about Mary, about Hogarth, about Greek art. There is a paradox in Edmund Wilson which interested me. Contrary to his academic, formal, classical work, and the cold intellectual criticism, he himself is fervent, irrational, lustful, violent.
His house, his books, his pictures, were like those of my father. The bourgeois and the classical formal world.
He wanted me to help him reconstruct his life, to help him choose a couch, wanted to talk with me. But I wanted to leave.
When he talked about my work he had more to say about the flaws of Winter of Artifice and little about the achievement. Yet in the same breath he admitted the book had guided him in his relationship with his daughter! He also admitted that although my character Lillian never drank or went to the icebox, she did remind him of Mary McCarthy. "I marked many passages which describe Mary. I must be severe with you. This Hunger has no form. It is not concrete enough. But what amazing insights! Marvelous insights!"
His was a world of power and certitudes, solidities and aggressiveness. Strength and willfulness.
A break in the world of subtleties, muteness, evasions of adolescence. The young, who do not court, seize, who melt into you and away, like mirages. Toward Wilson I act as they do. Elusive.
The inadequacies of my children leave me at the mercy of the father. They abandon me to the father! The words they cannot say, the acts they cannot do, the page they cannot write, the book they cannot grasp—children of silence, delinquent children, luminous children, will I be overwhelmed by the power of the father?
Wilson, if he ever tastes of me, will be eating a substance not good for him, some phosphorescent matter which illuminates the soul and does not answer to lust. Unpossessable, for we are children of the albatross and our luminosity is a poison!
Strange, the world he cannot possess, the woman he cannot possess, because he has no real access to her. I have more affinities with those adolescents with no surplus of flesh around their soul, with their eclipses. Edmund Wilson's reality holds terror for me, nameless dangers.
But Wilson clings. He has a book for me. He has a review of This Hunger.
Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker:
There is not much expert craftsmanship in This Hunger by Anai's Nin but it is a more important book than either Marquand or Isherwood because it explores a new realm of material. Even Isherwood can do little more than add to an already long series another lucid and well-turned irony of the bourgeois world on the eve of war. But Anai's Nin is one of those women writers who have lately been trying to put into words a new feminine point of view, who deal with the conflicts created for women by living half in a man-controlled world against which they cannot help rebelling, half in a world which they have made for themselves but which they cannot find completely satisfactory. This Hunger is the first installment of what is evidently to be a long novel. It deals particularly, says the author in her foreword, "with the aspect of destruction in woman.... Man appears only partially in this first volume, because for the woman at war with herself, he can only appear thus, not as an entity."
This volume is, therefore, quite different from the author's last book, Under a Glass Bell, which was a collection of prose poems and poetic character sketches, each of which limited itself to presenting an image or a mood. The episodes of This Hunger are somewhat less satisfactory as writing than the pieces in Under a Glass Bell, but Anais Nin is attempting something more original and more complex. The new book consists of three sections, each of which presents a woman in her closest emotional relationship with men and with other women. These three groups have as yet no interconnections, and it is impossible to judge the author's project on the basis of this beginning. It is probable that when the various sets of characters shall have been made to react on one another, a larger design will appear and give these earlier chapters new value.
In the meantime, it does seem, however, as if Anais Nin, not yet expert in fiction, has not fully been able to exploit her material, which is constantly suggesting possibilities for dramatic contrast and surprise that the author has done little to realize—though the first section, the simplest and shortest, does complete a dramatic cycle. There is, for example, a movie actress, a masochistic and tied-up girl, who becomes envious and resentful of her screen personality because it represents a woman who is free, and always loved and in love. It is impossible to say that someone else would have handled this theme more effectively, because it is probably the kind of thing only Anais Nin would have thought of, but one feels that it is a brilliant idea which ought to have had a more striking presentation. The narrative, too, a little lacks movement. The influence of D. H. Lawrence, about whom Anais Nin wrote her first book, has perhaps been impeding her here. Like Sherwood Anderson, she seems to have caught from Lawrenc
e a repetitious and a solemn hieratic tone which though a natural enough contagion for Anderson, should not be inevitable in the case of Anai's Nin. She has, at her best, a very personal and human voice, and is instinctively, I do believe, the kind of writer who does not rely upon the impact of verbiage but cares about the right word, and who has no business blurring, as she sometimes does, the climaxes of her paragraphs.
The surface of This Hunger is thus a little uneven. There are passages where the psychological insights find their appropriate expression in clear language and vivid images, as in the pages that describe the self-doubt that is always compelling the movie actress to make more and more exacting demands of her lovers; and there are moments when little set pieces, as fragile and strange as those in Under a Glass Bell partly emerge from the background of psychological exposition—such as the golden salon with crystal lamps from which one of the heroines walks out into a garden where a light rain has washed the faces of the leaves and where she finds herself confronted by three full-length mirrors placed as casually as in a boudoir. But these pieces are not planted or prepared for so that they function in a general theme. They stand out with special life and color from a background where the outline of the characters seems rather dim, and where the description of relationships—when it falls into the Lawrence formula—seems sometimes a little abstract. Yet behind the whole thing is a vision of the vicissitudes of passion and friendship in a world in which men and women have become semi-independent of one another that makes This Hunger always a revelatory document.
