by Anais Nin
"The best attack is to continue to work. To do better and better work, that is where to put my energy. I cannot make Trilling more subtle or more understanding."
Gonzalo and I still walk along the streets together. We still sit at coffee shops. But we are no longer walking the streets of the present but those of the past. These are echoes of a deep association, its human echoes. We are sitting at extensions in time of our Paris cafés. It is the old friendship which guides our steps, which orders the drinks, guides our talk. It is the old friendship which makes pale gestures with familiar warmth. The spark is no longer there. Lingering echoes. The streets of a nine-year-old devotion are still richly peopled. He still has lusty stories to tell me, even if I do not hear them as vividly or record them in the diary; he is still full of Indian humor, malice, roguishness. But they are all tributaries from the past, echoes, reverberations, mellow and evaporating before more vivid moments with other friends.
Gore has such a desperate need to assert himself.
His first novel is dedicated to his mother, Nina. His play is dedicated to me.
I can tell him what I was once told by Otto Rank: "Be careful not to enter the world with any need to seduce, charm, conquer what you do not really want only for the sake of approval. This is what causes the frozen moment before people, and cuts all naturalness and trust."
I am aware that what I love and seek is illusive, tricky, spritelike. What ought to be, and not what is, interests me. Ideas, experiences, and ideals reflected yet distorted by dreams. Also created by dreams.
In between, an all-consuming loneliness. The dreamlike quality of experience both cheats one of reality and yet creates a world of wonder.
I work not by explosion but by infiltration.
The character of luminosity is what is most appealing in adolescence. The Hindus call this a something by which we can become invisible or shine with light.
But when I speak with Gore about the elations, the high moods, he tells me: "I never feel the high moments, only the depressions." Do they really live with less intensity than I do, less color, less feeling? Muted instruments. I was right when I described neurosis as a form of deafness, nearsightedness, a partial atrophy of the senses.
The homosexual fears totality, the absolute in love. So he divides the physical from the love. But now I find that because of my sympathy, and because I see in the homosexual the same hostilities and rebellions toward the willful or possessive or dominant parent, I am in sympathy with their perverse way of circumventing the man-and-woman relationship. I may be destructive or rebellious in such an indirect and subtle way that it is practically undetectable and greatly suppressed, almost imperceptible. I let the young do it. I let the young strike at the assertive elders. I let Miller be aggressive in his writing, and I was able then to continue to be gentle and guiltless, a pacifier rather than a revolutionary element. All my so-called "children" were rebels. They expressed wants and angers of which I was ashamed, and which I repudiated.
We project the unbearable self onto others, so that we can hate it in others and destroy it. These condemned elements are necessary to life. When you kill them, you kill life. But the ideal in me denied them. Everything in me is circuitous, controlled. I see it now. Was that why I protected the destroyers, and those who hurt themselves in their destructiveness, like Henry, June, Gonzalo, Helba?
Because it was Gore who presented me to Dutton, because he watched over the writing of Ladders to Fire, encouraged me, I said I would dedicate the book to him.
I do not know if it comes from knowing so many artists, who were defined by Baudelaire as being man, woman, and child in one, or as adults who never destroyed in themselves the fresh vision of the child, but what I see in the homosexual is different from what others see. I never see perversion, but rather a childlike quality, a pause in childhood or adolescence when one hesitates to enter the adult world. The relationship based on identification, on twinship, or "the double," on narcissism, is a choice more facile and less exigent than that between men and women. It is almost incestuous, like a family kinship. True, there may be in one more masculine traits and in another more feminine traits, so that they may balance each other, or mesh; but whenever I came close to a homosexual, what I found was childishness. There was often a parody, too, of parents or grandparents, an attachment to the past (love of antiques), always a fixation on preadolescence, when our sexual inclinations are not yet crystallized, and always some traumatic event which caused fear of woman, hence the hatred of her.
This hatred of woman I had never experienced until I came to America. The Spanish homosexual or the French homosexual loved men but did not hate women. Paradoxically, they romanticized her. My first love was a homosexual. If his desires went to men, his poems, flowers, homages, dreams came to me.
Pablo was completely at ease with women. He romanticized his mother, and his first mistress. The other world seemed like a joyous, facile, promiscuous world, natural, and without permanence. It had (and I always maintained that) an innocence.
In the American homosexual it was the hatred of woman which was a perversity, for it distorted reality, and made expansion impossible. The constant presence of an enemy makes for the opposite of innocence. The homosexuality took on an air of defiance, of surreptitiousness, of treachery in its own eyes. It may have been for this reason that there were no romantic love stories. Homosexual novels were stories of promiscuity, not love. I knew a few loving couples, but one never found them in literature. Did the guilt the culture had bred in them prevent them from acknowledging a love? I always threatened them, that if they did not do it, I would write the first homosexual novel about love, not whoring.
Why is it the young take on this quality of light, and when the friendship ends, this light is withdrawn? Is it that I enhance and light them where there is a vital warmth exchanged? Or when I see into their potentialities? The light has withdrawn from Leonard. Is it that by his writing, his subdued and lifeless statement, he destroyed my illusion of his being alive? When I find not enough life in them, do I turn away? It is the quality of life which illuminates a person for me.
My friendships, instead of being concentrated on a very few, as in Paris, have become fragmented into many. I find only partial relationships. It is totality the homosexual fears. He separates love and sexuality.
Over and over again I discover the diary is an effort against loss, the passing, the deaths, the uprootings, the witherings, the unrealities. I feel that when I enclose something, I save it. It is alive here. When anyone left, I felt I retained his presence in these pages.
Character is timeless. Ageless. We live back and forth in the past, or in the present, or in the future. With the young, one lives in the future. I prefer that. Changes occur constantly according to the vision, image, or myth which possesses one. We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. We never discard our childhood. We never escape it completely. We relive fragments of it through others. We live buried layers through others. We live through others' projections of the unlived selves.
I refuse to live out my flaws. I bury them and condemn and deny them. Unable to manifest themselves, they inhabit others. In others I accept uncombed hair, a hole in the shoes, a not-too-clean dress, temper, lies, cowardices, treacheries, jealousies. Allowing others to become mad for you, allowing others to complain for you. The guilt involved in this secret participation leads to responsibility for others' lives. If you lack beauty, you live this beauty out in the other. But it is the same with ugliness. The young's attraction for the old is for protection of their future. The need of faith and the elder's vision into the future.
There is a game and play in the children's world which is a training ground for fantasy and imagi
nation. When this is not killed in childhood it creates the artist and the inventor. You become a Martha Graham, the greatest and most meaningful of our dancers. Every gesture illuminated with meaning. Nothing is lost. Magic powers are in art. To create and transform.
Note from Henry:
The baby seems to have hands like yours and uses them like you do, in Hindu ritualistic gestures. All indications are that it has a high intelligence and superlative good nature.
Was glad to know of your good luck with publishers.
Stanley Haggart on reading my handwriting:
Great powers of love, a love that is compassionate. The inspirer. A believer. You have great faith, a persistent, persevering faith. The most ordinary people could admire your stability of faith. You work until it happens. You persevere. You won't shift from one faith to another. You break through ordinary morality, but to arrive ultimately at a larger kind of morality. You are trustworthy. Your direction is creative, never destructive. There is a great sadness. Intuition strong, but you can get lost and confused emotionally. You have strong emotional power. It should be used daily in relationships. If not it will come out in intensity and unbalance other relationships. I see you as the sun. Your warmth like the sun in Van Gogh's painting. You have achieved poise and confidence, balance. You can do ordinary things like cooking, and you manage to do them more lightly than others, smoothly, magically.
[February, 1946]
Went to lunch with Teresa [Nin] and Ikle, and met Paul Mathiesen. Seventeen years old, of Danish descent, very blond, very charming. His smile is shy, his eyes unblinking and innocent, and yet from his body come waves of young, playful sensuality.
He came to see me. He sat on the floor and told fairy tales. One of them was his own. He paints, he writes. He has a gently caressing voice. He is in a state of reverie. He pursues his reveries in the middle of a restaurant, crowded rooms. He is a boy in a fairy tale.
Jacqueline Ford wrote of Winter of Artifice: "It hurts too much. In life there are interruptions, pauses. To take you away and distract you from your deep feelings. But you live only in them. It's rarified. It's unbearable."
Theme of America is gigantism, grandiosity. Enlarging self and surroundings and objects to cover helplessness. Anger is a prelude to power. It can become creative. I have always considered it negative. To be controlled. Evil. But it can become necessary to self-assertion, and to creation. Fear of self-assertion due to guilt: guilt in relation to weaker ones, fear of injuring them. But even more, fear of being alone, separated from others, losing relationships, fear of standing alone. Having to find relationships in equality, which is more difficult than in the dependent-protector or protector-independent relationships. What a relief it will be, the day I do not feel the compulsion, the obligation, to protect and to make myself smaller and weaker in order not to overpower the very young. The gentleness of those crippled by overpowering parents. My mother was overpowering, had an indomitable will, and both parents left their anger free, so that they crippled my anger with fear of consequences (divorce). If you rebel, you lose your loves.
***
My world is so large, so full, I get lost in it. My vision is hard to sustain. Last night I felt alone in what I am writing. I have no twin to my writing. It is a big burden for a woman.
Gore returns. He wants to meet Christopher Isherwood, because their writings resemble each other. "I would like to have written Prater Violet."
Stanley is adept at making homes with very few means. His own cold-water flat is an example of his skill. Like a stage set, everything is made inexpensively, faked. The couch going around the room is of ordinary boards. He brings materials from the television studios where he builds sets for commercials. I loaned him a Japanese doll for a television series. I took it to him and saw him at work. On one set there were four different rooms: one a kitchen, in which the model advertised a vacuum cleaner; another a parlor, in which the model pointed to the rich carpet; and so on. Stanley has a presence, generous, warm, protective. He has the homemaking instinct. And flashes of poetry. When he reads handwriting he is inventive with his intuitions and his own language. At first, Gore had thought of letting him fix up a brownstone on the East Side, where we would all live together. But this plan was not carried out. I saw Stanley create many interiors. His belief was that by creating a certain interior he could change the lives of those living in it, affect them.
Once, on Christmas night, when he invited us, he had cooled the champagne in snow taken from the window sill. Another time, he served couscous in a large flat dish on a low, round oriental table. He is gifted, and struggling to keep afloat. He has ways and solutions for doing things with hardly any money.
It is a way of dreaming beauty, as stage designers do, with flimsy or makeshift material, a quality I admire and have often practiced when means were limited.
Today I finished rewriting Part Two of Ladders to Fire. I reduced two hundred pages to eighty pages. I like the party section. It is like one of Martha Graham's ballets; it was inspired by them. It is full of rhythm and color. It is like a mobile, a modern painting. It satisfies me. I am exhausted and nervous.
In the sun, yesterday, Gore's eyes were green and gold. I see only his sincerity with me. I know he acts, pretends, and is insincere outside, but I do not see this or wish to know him in the world. He gives me his best self. His open sweetness, his courage.
Party at Maya Deren's. The artifacts on the walls, the dim lights, the photographs and mobiles, African ornaments, furs, drums, always give a sense of primitive tent life. Paul Mathiesen and I danced together. He said: "It's not a dance, it's a spell." Usually it is I who dream. In this case, he is the dreamer, and I stand watching him and seeking to divine what he is dreaming. He is as mute as a statue. He leaves no phrases in your memory. He smiles. Only his face remains in your memory. A half-smile. Another sexual angel?
A wealthy old man is taking him to Yucatán. He brought me his paintings and writings to take care of. He is an elfin boy. He talks as if he were in a trance. And all the time he is sensing everything, far more than he says. He uses very few words. It is a transmission one feels, as if he had another way of communicating. One of the paintings is a self-portrait, in which he sees himself not as a boy but as a faun. Now and then he utters a profound statement, like those made by children, unexpectedly. At other times he seems disoriented in the world, childlike and lost. As if he were the rightful inhabitant and we, clumsy trespassers, not aware of the rituals. He is slim, very fair, with almost white-blond hair, sensitive hands, a slow speech. He might have been born in the North Pole, where men use few words, but he was born in California. He discovered Under a Glass Bell when he was in school. His teacher did not approve of the book and he quit school in protest.
The pages on the party conquered Frances. This time the abstraction was successful. She was completely won, as she said, by the humor, the concreteness of the images, the clarity, the impact. Strange that the highest peak of faith I achieved while I wrote those pages was accompanied by the most acute doubts. Am I mad? Do I see what others do not see? Is it possible to see through a party at the inner reality, as if people were transparent, and discover that for one reason or another they were not there, but only pretending to be there? I wept. I am breaking through another shell. It is painful.
I write to Leonard every day because he is in hell, his head shaved, his girl's skin spoiled by the hardest training among the coarsest men, living in barracks, never alone. He, the shy one, always folded in upon himself, filled with inarticulate secrets. What will this do to his already atrophied feelings, the atrophy caused by his environment? Where will his feelings hide now, they who are already lying beneath hundreds of layers of defenses, and fears? I write to him because he is lost, trapped, and I do not know if he will survive this. His mother was cold. The army is brutal.
Gore has at times the tense appearance of anxiety. He then appears to move with difficulty into life. His face loses its softness and is s
et into a mask. (Already!) At those moments I know he is bound by the webs of neurosis. At other times, he is natural. Pleasure and elation are rare in him. He is vulnerable, but has more defenses than Leonard. He can be cynical, sarcastic, and see the weaknesses of others in a cold, harsh light.
Charles Duits tells me I am the only one he feels close to. He tells me about his love for the Chilean girl Luchita. He behaved ambivalently toward her. Her very beauty frightens him. So he is elusive.
I give a Party.
Guests: Luise Rainer and her husband, Robert Knittel; Maya Deren and Sasha Hammid; Stanley Haggart; Woody Parrish-Martin; Kim Hoffman; Sherry Martinelli and Enrique Zanarte; Charles Duits; Louise and Edgar Var£se; John Stroup; Gore Vidal; Claude Fredericks; James Agee.
Took the mattresses of! the beds and made a lot of low oriental divans. Invited a flamenco guitarist. Kim played his accordion. Steve, a handsome, suave, elegant Austrian, danced extremely well.
Gore asked me what I put in my nail polish that gives the color a warm gleam.
"Gold," I said.
"As in your writing?"
Enrique Zanarte's somber Spanish beauty, Stanley's intuitive analysis of people, Woody's fantasies, Steve's grace, Kim's music, Maya's films, all bloomed that night. Even Agee, who so often looks a sad Lincoln, and rather dramatic, smiled.
[March, 1946]
Lectured and read at Amherst. Success. Signed books. Tension and elation. I read the party scene. I made friends with James Merrill, twenty-year-old poet. I answered the mathematicians, who questioned me on the fluctuating point of view, before an audience of sixty people. I was surrounded by young men.
