by Anais Nin
Gore made me go to the PEN Club dinner. I went in an effort to face the world. Was shocked by the mediocrity of the talks. A "literary" world so thoroughly political, intriguing, and commercial, but a world Gore intends to conquer. For the first time I saw a contrast in our aims. His interest is like Miller's: to meet everybody, to win the world.
James Merrill on my work:
I have since been thinking a great deal of your books and what I feel about them. As I attempted to say when you were up here, everything that takes place shifts back and forth between two dreams—the familiar dream of the imagination projecting itself into adventures, situations, moving through and beyond the world; and the other, rarer, dream of the world's moving in upon the imagination, objects thrusting themselves through levels of consciousness. Both dreams meet and almost struggle with one another—in a love story like the surrealist one about Artaud, where his vision projects him into the very world that he cannot bear to live in. Somewhere between these dreams of moving out beyond the world, and being violently disturbed by the physical objects in the world (they become, of course, metaphysical), lies what not you but others call "reality," the balance between the magnificent and the tormented dream. It is the way you make these dreams mingle that I feel is so astonishing. You move back and forth, from one to another, so that both sides of this "reality" are disclosed, or would be disclosed if we were quick enough to say: "There it is," before it disappears. The passage in the party scene, for instance, where Lillian destroys herself in a long, very realistic monologue—how completely you replace the surface reality with a surface strangeness by speaking of it in terms of color and form, and indeed develop through this all the inarticulate strangeness that such a situation arouses in anyone aware of it. And what is most admirable, I feel, is the assurance you have in describing, in perceiving. I feel so strongly that you are continually saying: These various dreams, these shuttlings of feeling and vision are real, are all we have to explain what happens to us. And that is a very compelling and beautiful integrity in everything you write. Even when we are most aware of invention, invention is replaced by the honesty of what you are saying.
This commentary, so much more astute than Edmund Wilson's, is a key to my friendship with the young, who understand what I am doing.
Maya is making a film. She wanted all of us for a party scene. The stars are Maya and a Negro girl, Rita. Gore has a prejudice against Negroes, but he joined us anyway. Maya wanted an undirected party in her studio, in which things would happen, unexpectedly, by the very nature of the relationships. She was looking for the spontaneous, the accidental. Gore and I decided to act pretty well as we do when we are together, a mixture of playfulness, key words, seriousness, and connections with what we are writing.
All my friends had been rounded up: Pablo, Westbrook, Sherry, Enrique, Charles Duits, Caron, Steve, Nancy Banks, a lovely blonde girl who is married to Don, a Negro guitar player, and who invited me to visit them. Tei-ko, a Japanese dancer.
The ensemble of acting did not satisfy Maya. We spent hours under the violent lights. But Maya refused to indicate any theme or direct us into any channel. She wanted things to happen. So, under the strong lights, we moved about as if at a party, forming groups, dancing, talking. It was then I noticed the theme of the party I had written about: that nothing happened because there was no connection of thought or feeling between the people acting, and so no tensions, no exchange of dramatic or comic moments. It was empty. I wanted to tell Maya: Use my words to describe what is happening! But of course film-makers have a contempt for words. So we went on acting out emptiness. Gore and I tried to give a feeling of a bond, an exchange, a vital responsiveness. Nothing came out the way Maya wanted. The cameras turned. We did it over and over again. When we all became extremely tired, all our "poses," our attempts at acting, our self-consciousness disappeared. We let go. And the party Maya wanted materialized. She cheered. Go on, go on, go on. Exhausted, almost on the verge of hysteria, we danced, talked, held hands, or withdrew, or came back, wandered, looked for intimacy. We worked for her for twelve hours.
What Maya sought and could not obtain was something happening between the people. It remained empty and disconnected. I know why. It was a dance of shadows, for there was no sensual connection between anyone there. Most of the young men were homosexuals, or else cold toward women, as is Enrique. Rita, the Negro girl, is a Lesbian. Maya is a restless, unsatisfied woman. The men drawn to each other. What is this world without vital relationships between men and women? Where is the passion which overflowed the streets of Paris, every window, every hotel room? Maya was shouting from her director's stool above the lights: "There is a relationship going on I A contact made at the party. Talk as if you were engaged in some relationship."
Oh irony! They couldn't. We couldn't. Out of fatigue, after being under the strong lights, blinding us, from noon until midnight, we became slightly hysterical. We gesticulated wildly to break down the walls. I tried to establish a rapport with Enrique, to stimulate a warmth which might become a fire! It was all warm, but did not spring from a center of passion. It remained, as it is, on the periphery.
Tei-ko, the Japanese dancer, passive, beautiful, and remote. Charles Duits elusive. Nothing strong, assertive, sweeping. And there, under the lights, I saw the drama of our present life: nothing big enough, deep enough, strong enough.
Did the film catch this? How do you catch emptiness, or shallowness, ghostly figures who are erased on the screen as soon as they appear?
***
The greatest suffering does not come from living, from mirages, from the unattainable dreams of Don Quixote, but from awakening. There is no greater pain than awakening from a dream. The deep crying over the dying selves being shed. Giving up the children seems like giving up my own life and youthfulness. The children cannot be companions. Gore cannot be the companion of my writing self, as I had thought. His life is elsewhere. Even if he loves and needs me, he also has other loves and needs. He had a dream of a house in which we would all live together, like the house of George Davis in Brooklyn. There would be guest rooms, and a room for writing, and much life and many friends.
But my efforts at taking him into my life, the life of the artists, and his attempts to take me into his life (wealth, society, famous names, above all the names: So-and-So, and So-and-So) were failures. He did not enjoy the disparate group acting in Maya's film. I did. Meanwhile, Gore introduced me to a renowned international hostess, a wealthy woman with homes in every city. An adventuress who married a wealthy man.
These love-starved children, unsatisfied, are looking, as Otto Rank said, for a return to the womb, for care, faith, love, acceptance, uncritical devotion.
I reread Dr. Esther Harding's book The Way of All Women. She states that in woman there must be a relinquishing of the child before she can mature as one-in-herself.
Paul Valéry: A work is never completed, but merely abandoned.
At the Provincetown Playhouse, we gathered to see three films by Maya Deren. The crowd was dense, and some policeman thought he should investigate. He asked: "Is this a demonstration?" Someone answered: "It is not a demonstration, it is a revolution in film-making."
I found Maya's program note deeply interesting:
Man cannot duplicate the infinite intricacy of the living architecture of the wheat stalk. Nature is best capable of its own forms and of the complex inevitabilities which result in such marvelous phenomena. Man himself is such a phenomenon; and the marvelous in man is his creative intelligence, which transcends nature and creates out of it un-natural forms.
In his art—whether architecture or poem—he does not reproduce a given reality; nor does he simply express his immediate reactions of pleasure and pain. He starts with the elements of that reality—the stone, the city, the other man—and relates them into a new reality which, no sooner achieved, becomes itself an element in his next manipulation. In his effort to achieve form he may produce shapes monstrous or divine; but his
proud ambition is to create, in the image of his own intelligence, a reality man-made.
In cinema such a concept of creative action has been neglected. The analogy between the lens and the eye, based on the physical similarity between them, has led to a recording of the forms of reality and those of literature, drama and painting. But cinema, to be creative, must do more than record. The mechanism behind the lens, like the brain behind the eye, can evaluate the objects before it, can decide them attractive or repulsive, casual or surprising. Above all, the analogy must be extended to understand that the strip of film is the memory of the camera. Just as man is not content to merely reconstruct an original chronology, but in his art, conceives new relationships between remembered elements, so the film-maker can create new realities by the manipulation of the celluloid memories at his disposal. The labor, the achieved, inspired, intelligent form is a single continuity, a work in progress which is eventually interrupted when the dynamic consciousness which it reflects ceases. From time to time one may pause to give integrated shapes to a stage of one's progress in order to best pursue it further. And so these films have each been brought to an end, in order to be the better abandoned.
Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.
[April, 1946]
Suddenly it is spring. The windows open, the sound of bells chiming on Fifth Avenue, the shops full of flowers, the crowds gay.
Gore buys a house in Guatemala. It was once a monastery. It is beautiful. I must visit it when it is ready.
I help others attain what they want. Gore is physically recovered from the consequences of his frostbite in the Aleutians. It is symbolic that he feels less stiffness. His mother said he could not act, and he acted in Maya's film. His mother said he could not dance, and he danced with me in Maya's film.
I hope this is the end of the TRANSPARENT CHILDREN.
The first person I gave myself to, my father, betrayed me, so I split. Ultimate giving is fatal. I split, split, split, into a million small relationships. And I seek split beings. Divided beings.
Gore's father is enthusiastic about me. "He sees that you are destroying my mother's image, and he always said my mother had been the destructive image for me."
On writing: I am not writing case histories, as Diana Trilling thinks. Psychoanalysis is merely the basic philosophy of my work. I accept its premise, that it is the unconscious which rules and shapes our lives. I am making a new art of storytelling, not stories told as case histories, but stories told with a new vision of the unfolding of character. To say I write case histories is like saying that a poet who studies astronomy, and becomes familiar with the planets' evolutions, ceases to be a poet and is an astronomer.
Letter from Leonard:
You must know you put me in a difficult position. For how am I to answer your offering of a way out of foreign service? On one side lies more than freedom from the army, inspiration, love, comfort and friendship. This is what you hold out to me. This and your own desire for what is best for me. But I see more. I have been nurtured until now by a powerful source, and I cannot help but feel obligated to return to the source something of myself which I do not know how to give, and which cannot be taught but must be learned. It now seems best for me to live awhile by myself, absorbing what has been offered and developing whatever seed of ability I possess in the most honest criticism of solitude. It is not enough to be told that a poem is good, one must feel it is good without influence. I spoke of being nurtured from the outside. This is all very well, but it is not enough. In Japan I will learn whether or not I am fertile or barren. If I am fertile I will be happy and shall return in the manner of Ulysses who has had his search and voyage within himself. If not, I shall return and struggle along with external support. For these reasons I have decided to go to Japan.
People tell me Gore is arrogant and boastful. I have never seen that. Only the tenderness, gentleness, the sincerity, and the thoughtfulness. He does believe in the continuity of relationships; telephone calls, letters, an unbroken dialogue. Companions in life.
Worked well this morning. Wrote pages on the adolescence of Stella; the relationship between Michael and Donald; story of the opening of the tulip, connected with first love scene with adolescents (Children of the Albatross).
Monday: Inspired to work. Wrote pages on Sabina and the fire engines. Café life. So much is clear. Writing, too, is a symphony, a ballet, a painting. The arts serve as symbolism for the things which cannot be said in words, only in symbols. The basic orientation and stability is due to psychological reality; analyzed passions, analyzed as they move, not afterward in a static afterthought, as in Proust. All the various women may converge into one because down deep, in the unconscious, there are resemblances.
Also in life women become other women, interchange, identify, and project. Parts of themselves in the other, through the other. There are exchanges, interchanges, and convergences, and parts of ourselves pass into others.
I write about the house in Louveciennes.
A critic on Virginia Woolf:
All of Woolf's characters tend to remain as immensely complex bundles of impressions and sensations. Her values are enclosed in them but for the reader they are not reached through the living experience of which they are the philosophic reflections.
This may be said about my work, too. I wanted to give, in Winter of Artifice, the pure essence of the personality, stripped of national characteristics, time, and place, the better to penetrate the innermost being, the deepest self. I describe states: insomnia, obsession, frigidity.
Lanny Baldwin said that part two of Winter of Artifice was like a volcano. A volcano indeed. Indeed. Volcanoes are safety valves, necessary in asphalt and cement tiles, in cemented lives and asphalted lovers.
A party. Olga and her husband. Bill Ottoway, the Negro writer. William Steig, James Agee. Mrs. Aswell, of Harper's Bazaar, Leo Lerman, the Raydons, the Kahlers, Baldwin, Gore Vidal. Gore talked to Ottoway, overcoming his prejudice.
Nancy Banks is married to a Negro guitarist, Don. We made friends during the making of Maya's film. We met at the Calypso restaurant and listened to her husband play jazz. Nancy told me her life story, and I thought about it. It saddened me. Another day I went to their apartment, in a small house near the Hudson. They told me about their child, how they cannot walk through the Village together. They are insulted, and sometimes almost in danger. The child was beautiful. There was hardly any furniture, but many books and records, and much love in the air.
I see Josephine and Pablo. A joyous walk through the city.
Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge. D. H. Lawrence wrote against merging. But it is this merging I love and seek.
Gore in the world is another Gore. He is insatiable for power. He needs to conquer, to shine, to dominate.
On writing: Writing for me is not an art. There is no separation between my life and my craft, my work. The form of art is the form of art of my life, and my life is the form of the art. I refuse artificial patterns. Stories do not end. A point of view changes every moment. Reality changes. It is relative.
With Wilson it was a matter of bowing to a new regimen, or else seducing, so as to avoid being dominated or overwhelmed or enslaved. Under cover of seduction, one avoids being controlled, influenced, possessed. For this man of power—the father—once overwhelmed me, enslaved me, dominated my life, exerted tyranny, and then betrayed me. He brutalized my childish weakness and dependency. In this father-figure presence, though I am now a woman, I do not feel free or equal, able to continue my growth, my explorations, experiments, adventures. Rather I feel an apprehension that, taking my life in his hands, he may damage me. Impede me, oppress me. In the face of such an attitude, no older man can appear to me in his true light.
Edmund Wilson's opinions, commentaries, and tastes were to be espoused or adhered to as to anot
her dogma. My first experience depersonalized MAN and made him a symbol of someone who misuses his power. A full-powered man was one who misused his power, to dominate woman. The MAN need not be introduced by name. My neurotic vision would pick out the dangerous elements which, incidentally, did not appear in Henry, Gonzalo, or the children. I only saw a man whose will would bend mine, ignore my aspirations, beliefs, deprive me of my liberty, threaten my development.
By his very achievement he was doomed. The very tone in which people spoke of Edmund Wilson, unquestioned respect, doomed him in my eyes. At first I would at times be elated by power: Otto Rank's poetic power gave him the gift of prophecy and drama. But at some point or other, he asserted his prerogative. Le droit du seigneur. Made his claim. And then I used my charm to enslave and abandon first.
While neurosis rules, all life becomes a symbolic play. This is the story I am trying to tell. The childhood creates a set of characters which become myths. Any correlation serves to type them. They are typed and treated according to the pattern. There is no empathy or compassion in neurosis, because the object is seen as a threat, an enemy to be defeated. And from this symbolism (in my case only the power man, never the one who has needs or difficulties in living similar to mine, brothers, sisters, who do not fall into that role) stems the ghostliness, or abstraction, of some of today's relationships. Many couples, many people, are not living with real human beings, but with their ghosts.
