by Anais Nin
He suffers the consequences of his wartime frostbite, great malaises and neuritis. He suffers from black depressions. He is nearsighted. A boy without age, who talks like an old man. My other children do not accept him, understand him.
While all the society mothers are looking for him for their cocktails, dances, we may be talking quietly somewhere in a restaurant, a night club. A debutante wrote him: "Why are you so detached?" Gore attends the functions, bows, dances, leaves. Dear mothers and debutantes, can you give this boy back his childhood, his mother, his security, the warmth and understanding he needed then? Can you answer his thoughts, dialogue with his brightness, keep pace with his intelligence?
He came at four and left at midnight. He made me laugh with the most amazingly well acted pastiches of Roosevelt, Churchill, a southern senator, a petition at the House of Commons. He has a sense of satire.
He is very much concerned with establishing a contrast between Pablo, Marshall, and Charles, as adolescents not yet successful, not yet matured, and himself, already mature in his roles as writer, editor, etc.
"I give you the true Gore."
And then: "I'm coming Wednesday. Send the children away."
Wednesday I met Gore at a restaurant. He had news for me. Dutton had had an editorial conference, was offering an advance of one thousand dollars, and a contract for all the novels. We celebrated. He tells me I must finish the new book, Ladders to Fire, in two months. I am not sure I can do it, with the work at the press, the visitors.
Gore thinks I live a fantasy, that I see things that are not there, that I am inventing a world.
Gore's visits on Sunday now a habit. He brings his dreams written out, his early novel to show me: the one he wrote at seventeen, Williwaw.
I enjoy his quick responses. He never eludes. He holds his ground, answers, responds. He is firm and quick-witted. He has an intelligent awareness, is attentive and alert, and observant.
Part of the great fascination of Gore's age, and the children's, is the mystery of what they will become. One is watching growth. Unlike Wilson, who sits determined and formed, with opinions, judgments.
Already set, in these young men one sees the ambivalences and conflicts. Is the illumination which surrounds them that of hope? They are still tender, still vulnerable, still struggling.
Gore said: "I belong nowhere. I do not feel American. I do not feel at home in any world. I pass casually through all of them. I take no sides."
The writing I do has created a world which draws into it the people I want to live with, who want to live in my world. One can make a world out of paper and ink and words. They make good constructions, habitable refuges, with overdoses of oxygen.
"I think, dear Gore, that you choose to write about ordinary people in an ordinary world to mask the extraordinary you and the out-of-the-ordinary world in which you live, which is like mine. I feel in you imagination, poetry, intuition of worlds you do not trust because they are linked with your emotions and sensibilities. And you have to work far removed from that territory of feeling where danger lies."
To find the poet in Gore was more difficult. Leonard looked like a poet and a dreamer. Gore looks warm, near and realistic. But there it is, another inarticulate poet, a secret dreamer.
The direction of Gore's writing distresses me. But at twenty did I know my direction? At twenty I imitated D. H. Lawrence.
My never glorifying the famous, the achieved, powerful figures restores to Gore a sense of his individual value. I am not awed by success.
I do respond when he tells me about his worship of Amelia Earhart, and how shocked he was by her death. She was a friend of the family. Gore's father financed her fatal trip.
Gore has a feeling of power. He feels he can accomplish whatever he wishes. He has clarity and decisiveness. He is capable of leadership. This on the conscious, willful level. In the emotional realm, imagination and intuition are there, but not trusted. It may be that he associates them with softer and more feminine qualities he does not wish to develop in himself.
Gore's three evenings. One with a writer: a drinking bout. One escorting a debutante to the Victory Ball, and feeling stifled and bored. The third evening with me. He brings me a poem, two pages of childhood recollections, the fourth chapter of his novel, his physical troubles from the war, talks about his mother, his father, his childhood. Complains of a feeling of split, of unreality. Talks of death. Reveals the mystic. Obsessed, as Leonard was, by the circles.
Sunday. Midnight. Gore is sitting at the foot of the couch writing his play on the werewolf.
He said: "We met just at the right moment."
He reads my new book and likes it. He tells me his father read This Hunger and saw himself in Jay.
"But I won't let you meet him. He would like you too well, and you might like him too well. You might get along too well."
"Not better than you and I."
"It is so good to be oneself without poses," he said.
Why do I not have this trust in Wilson? Why did I never talk with Wilson like this? Because Wilson is the critic, and would pass judgment on me as he did on my work? Because he would not understand? Why did I never trust him, and yet trust Gore?
In the world of Wilson there was no magic and no poetry. No sweet delights of intimacy, admission of doubts. The mystifications and surprises of the young. The mysteries. Always a shadowy labyrinth. There was in Wilson a harsh absolutism and literalness. A spade is a spade is a spade. Oh no, a spade can be a symbol of something other than what it was built for, can carry a message, represent a hundred other things.
Gore says about my continuation of This Hunger into Ladders to Fire: "You have expanded in depth, now expand in width."
He finished his play and brought it as a Christmas present. It was intense and strong. "I've never written this way, impulsively, directly, and without plan." He was pale. Worn. I let him read my pages on adolescence and snow and the timidities of adolescent love.
Gore wanted to know when I would make his portrait. "I made it in the diary when you gave me permission."
"I gave you permission because I knew you would do it anyway."
He asked if he could read it.
I let him.
I was uneasy, anxious about unmasking him.
"I didn't mind being unmasked by you," said Gore.
The end of Ladders to Fire brings two worlds into opposition: nature and neurosis. The external world, the salon, the garden, the mirrors, and the reflections of them in the mirror. The sense of unreality in the neurotic comes when he is looking at the reflections of his life, when he is not at one with it.
Gore says his feeling about writing is changing. He wants color, magic. He is aware of the conventional mask of his first novel.
His hidden self is emerging. His imagination is manifesting itself in the play. He is no longer dying. There is a warm flush on his cheeks, and warmth in his voice. The frown has vanished.
He mocks his world, but draws strength from being in the Social Register, from his friends' high positions, from the power of his father and mother. He needs his class privileges. I was saddened by his vanity, his display of position. He was partly dependent on wordly attributes. Terribly in need of glorification. I saw his persona in the world. It was another Gore.
In one of his letters, Leonard quoted Eliot: "A shadow falls between my feelings and fulfilment."
He came for a short visit. We visited Noguchi together. We went to the Museum of Modern Art. Air and light between the interstices of his fears. Fire and light, magic, distance, loss, shadows. I understand the adolescents and their perfect dance around the rim of their own dreams and desires. They play on the rim of my life.
***
Horoscope of Gore:
Neptune, making for high illusions, upsets his Venusian life. He is not satisfied with power. He does not trust Neptune, because of childhood experiences. He is the kind of person who responds to softness by aggressiveness. Might be stimulated, disturbed
, by a Piscean-Neptune type of person. Could be the deepest experience for him, because it reaches a deeper level of consciousness. What balances him is the power to rebel against authority. Without this it would be a one-sided horoscope. Emotional rebellions offset the power-loving side. Mystical unconscious. Through the emotions depth will be in proportion to his yielding to his emotions, not through brilliancy of the intellect.
[January, 1946]
Gore dispersed the group around me, and then asked if he could bring his friends down. I imagined them slick, hard, cynical, and I was uneasy. But when they came, they were not as I had feared. Elizabeth Talbot-Martin, a talented diseuse, charming, clever, and direct. The TV producer Stanley Haggart, big, handsome, warm, giving a feeling of generosity and intuition. Woody Parrish-Martin, imaginative, a dark, smiling raconteur from the South.
They knew and admired my stories. Stanley read my handwriting: "You are a kind of heroine, struggling against the ordinary, struggling to transcend your pattern. You seek to live on a higher plane. You seek the extraordinary. By great lovingness you transform everything. At the moment there is a deep depression which may affect your writing. You seek to tell the truth, but enveloped in magic."
These were the friends with whom Gore had planned to buy a brownstone on Eighty-fifth Street, which Stanley would rebuild and decorate.
Edmund Wilson said: "I've given up the idea of absorbing you. You're too strong a personality."
"Why should you want to absorb anyone?"
I began to space our meetings. I did not enjoy them; they were a strain. I was not natural with him. He grew resentful. I knew that as a critic he would punish me sooner or later, either by destructive faultfinding or by silence.
I always maintained to Olga that a change of system would not cure mankind of war and greed. That the only solution was each man working upon himself, his individual discipline against hostility, prejudice and distortion of others, where the evil begins. We often argued about this. Now she is disillusioned by the political turn of events, the work to which she has given twenty-seven years of her life. She said: "Anai's, you were born with a deeper vision. You went into deeper worlds, and they have not failed you. You have found fundamental truths. I went into external worlds of action, and was betrayed by them. I have lost my faith. I have built nothing. All because of my fear of the inner world. You had the great courage to seek the truth and to write the truth. I want to do something deeper, and I can't. I'm afraid."
This came after she had attacked This Hunger for being merely a study in pathology, saying she could not review it for the magazine Soviet Russia because it was not constructive but decadent.
After she had said all this to me, she wept for two hours. "I knew I had attacked my own conscience, my own soul. Oh, Anais, how you have gone about quietly and with such courage, saying things I would fear to say."
Each system begins pure and is corrupted by human nature, and there is no cure but to confront human nature itself, by knowledge of it. The psychologists are doing the only constructive work in the world.
I denied having been born with a bigger vision:
"We are all born with a bigger vision, with a knowledge of two worlds. A shock threw me back into interior worlds, where I found strength and depth. But you were courageous in the exterior world. You faced it, and I feared it: the political, international life of wealth and power. I do not feel at home in it. I flee from it. I am not sure whether it was courage which sent me exploring underground, or fear."
Friday I wrote at one sitting the first ten pages of the party scene in the new book, Ladders to Fire. I found a new way to deal with neurotic vision, a symbolic theater representation of what takes place in our vision. It is an interior party, the one I describe as the most unattended because each guest experienced only interferences with the reality of it. I fused symbols and externals. I was inspired by the dance style of Martha Graham. The placing of the characters, the symbolic enacting, the suggestiveness.
Saturday I wrote five more pages.
Yesterday five more, on Djuna's absence from the party. It is a study of absence. Realistic parties are always described as if everyone were there, but neurosis and dreaming remove one from the present. It was not an easy thing to describe.
My greatest inspiration comes from the work of other artists: the subtle, suggestive, mysterious world of Martha Graham; the modern painters; modern music, which accepts discordance; sculpture; and dress design.
Five minutes after returning to New York, Gore telephoned me to meet him at Charles Restaurant. He disregards my other engagements. It was to celebrate his coming out of the army. He was in civilian clothes, looking more slender, more youthful, and more vulnerable.
He said: "I feel as if I were coming home. In Washington I felt lost. You have cast a spell on me. What I once accepted, I now do not like. I found my grandfather, the senator, boring."
We sat at the Ruban Bleu. We drank and talked. He told me his mother said to him: "No one will ever love you as I do."
He had wanted his mother to die.
I was moved at the change in Gore, a young man who lived in the most external and superficial of all worlds—that he should be capable of giving himself to a dream, an unusual friendship.
I wrote on Djuna's flight from the party. The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.
When Diana Trilling complains that Lillian and her husband and children are unreal, and not thoroughly or substantially treated, she does not understand that if I spent four hundred pages building the house, the everyday life, the details which would make it "realistic," I would meanwhile fail to describe how Lillian felt, the unreality to her of her marriage, home, and children. How can one spend the length of a novel making something real which appears unreal to the central character? I made it plain that Lillian did not feel them; that when she went first of all to the kitchen to see Nanny, the servant for whom the home was real, she sought to come closer to her home and children through Nanny, because for Lillian the connections were broken. When Nanny leaves, the home collapses.
Diana Trilling failed to understand that.
How easy it is to do what Steinbeck does, to take people suffering physical hunger, physical poverty, whose troubles are direct, concrete, simple. His world is simple to tell. I take a far more unexplored world, that of neurosis, and I want to picture the drama which the psychologist struggles with every day: a world of diffused vision, broken connections, symbolic dramas in which the psychic vision creates totally different and elusive problems. To picture Lillian's family as she experiences, feels, and sees it. To dramatize vividly the inner drama, as clearly as Martha Graham pictures jealousy, torment, fear.
I am writing not about objective reality, which is photographic, but as people see and feel reality, their reality. I can bring clarity to these feelings. All the world, alas, cannot be analyzed, which it needs to be, but modern literature has a task to fulfill. Novels of the past dealt either with classic objectivity, or accepted the subjective irrational but never clarified it. To write about human beings struggling for food is wonderful. But it is also necessary to become aware of our collective neurosis, to explore it, to seek to bring back into the world the one who has detached himself from it and is suffering from alienation. The neurotic is deprived of his human world. It can be restored to him. Without this work no history will ever progress. Everything which stemmed and developed and grew from Freud, or even in opposition to him, would have been more useful than Marx. For the world cannot feel the poverty or hunger of others when it is neurotic, self-centered, or self-contained. Those who have a vision into the neurotic world are those who are getting at the roots of aggression, war, hostilities, and prejudice. So in the end, a neurotic restored to his human life may become a true humanist.
***
I introduced Gore to Harper's Bazaar with a portion of his new novel
. Also to Town and Country.
Marshall came one day with a costume he had bought in a thrift shop. Leo Lerman was giving a party in which the women were to go dressed in the fashion of the twenties. Marshall had a stringy, weepy, flat-chested, waistless beaded dress, a cloche hat which sank to my ears like a chamber pot, make-up for a clown, a circle of red on the cheek. I put on the outfit, took one look in the mirror, and refused to wear it. Marshall had spent thirty-five dollars (there was also a red feather boa) and was very hurt by my refusal. I explained to him as well as I could: "When my father told me I was homely, I spent the rest of my life repairing that as well as I could, worked at improving myself. Why should I go to a party looking like an awkward clown?"
Marshall did not agree. I told Leo Lerman I would not go in costume. He pleaded I should come anyway. The women looked freakish, as they were intended to. I could not even recognize them I
But Marshall and I are still estranged.
Gore fights battles with threatening forces, faces critics, is vulnerable. Like all writers, he dreams of total acceptance, unanimous love. A dream. Someone said they preferred his first novel, Williwaw, to the second, In a Yellow Wood. When he hears this over the telephone, he comes out pale. It matters to him what others think.
I remind him that first one has to ask: Who is the person who made the statement? Why? Is it someone whose opinion is valuable?
He urges me to battle Diana Trilling.
