by Anais Nin
Who has not followed for years the spell of a particular tone of voice, from voice to voice, as the fetishist follows a beautiful foot, scarcely seeing the woman herself? A voice, a mouth, an eye, all stemming from the original fountain of our first desire, directing it, enslaving us, until we choose to unravel the fatal web and free ourselves. The story of complete freedom does not appear yet in this volume. I am still in the labyrinth, and I must be willing to get lost before I am saved. It is only when I abandon myself that I am saved. The unreality we are suffering from is what I want to make clear, to dispel. Who knows what shadows from the past dictated to Edmund Wilson his next attraction? The hero of this book is the malady which makes our lives a drama of compulsion instead of freedom.
While I was writing yesterday, the bell rang. Leonard stood at the door. A Leonard who had lost his dewiness, opalescence, transparence, by his life in the army. With rougher hands and skin, and now a lieutenant. A Leonard less shy, with a richer voice. He had chosen to go to Japan.
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A party at Maya Deren's. Robert Lowry, very fat, like an inflated child, all flesh and small eyes, says: "I expected someone austere, because of the purity of the writing, but you are soft." Griffith says: "There is a quality in your writing which moves me terribly, a kind of courage of the heart."
I sit with Enrique Zanarte, a black-velvet-eyed Velâsquez, but he only notes what there is to hate, to feed his detachment. He points to the big woman whose suit does not fit her body, whose hat and veil sit grotesquely on her ugliness. He stares only at the absurd, the black-toothed Willard Maas, the stiff and the incongruous. He observes those who wear façades: mondaine façades, deteriorated or in need of paint. I move away from him because, as I told him, I know all that is there, but what I cannot love and what does not fit into my world, I do not want to see. I talk with Nancy, tied by threads of a many-colored tenderness to her Negro musician, flowing in tenderness of touch with all, because their personal tenderness overflows and spills onto the others. I talk with Sherry. Half of her body is heavy and animal, and the upper half is childlike and fragile, tied by threads of sensuality to many. I seek Pablo's exuberance and physical passion for life and motion. He is always dancing. When he comes up the five flights of my stairs, he leaps like a gazelle, wide leaps, two stairs at a time. I seek Robert Lowry because he gave his energy, years ago, to a printing press, printing and writing, designing attractive small books. I seek James Merrill because his poetry is beautiful.
When I kissed Pablo because of his spontaneous gaiety, others stood in line to be kissed. I abandoned the detached ones, sought only the amorous ones.
Gore was not there, because he was ill. When he came the next day to take me to dinner, he was pale. He brought me poetry he had written at sixteen. He showed me stories he wrote then. One humorous, the other ironic. "In school they made fun of emotion."
And here is the beginning of the shell. The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.
Charles Duits understands the shell. He has a more sophisticated one. It is in his intellectual detachment and analysis. It is in his subtle poetry.
I see Gonzalo every day, but he is dark and heavy, and weighs so heavily on my spirit that I turn to the future. What will Leonard become? What will Gore become? He wants power. Leonard does not even know what he wants. Gore may enter politics. It is in the family.
The game now is between violent and unsubtle men and gentle, tender young ones.
Gonzalo's violence. Out of jealousy, he took down the painting of Paul Mathiesen and destroyed it.
I went to see Nancy, the Negro guitarist, and their child. Their life touched me so much I sat down and wrote a story, "The Child Born Out of the Fog."* I also had in mind Richard Wright and Helen, and their child.
Spent the day at Yonkers, working for Maya's film. Dancing among imitation-Greek columns and statues. Someone bought Cokes and hot dogs. When I ate the hot dogs someone said: "It does not seem right to see you eat hot dogs." Damn the legend! I was having a carefree time and the remark annoyed me. Maya, Sasha, Rita, Nancy, and Sherry would not let me carry anything. Sherry said: "You're a legendary character. I keep thinking that in the future I will look back and say: 'I was here in Yonkers Park with the legendary Anaïs!'" I fell into despondency. Has my writing created this distance? I felt locked out. Locked out of every natural and ordinary life.
But with Gore, whenever I want to act lightly, he does not want it. "You taught me to be happy in the depths."
[May, 1946]
The work on Maya's new film was not without its dark moments. Maya, with a true director's domineering power, would telephone and say: "Tomorrow morning at seven be at Central Park, at the Fifty-ninth Street entrance. We have to film before the public gets there. Take a taxi. I will pay for it."
Of course poor Maya never did or could pay. For some of the group this was a heavy burden. At other times we would meet downtown at Grand Street, in front of the shops selling wedding dresses. A surrealist setting, amidst grim, tall, inhuman buildings, dirty streets filled with broken bottles and garbage, with alcoholics sleeping in the doorways, in attitudes which seemed more like those of death.
All gray, brown, black, shabby colors. But in the windows, a world of white satin, lace, white flowers, and airy mannequins floating in clouds of tulle. The most romantic of long trailing dresses, unbelievable survival of periods where beauty and poetry were essential. The ritual of marriage as yet not modernized into ordinary dress. Costumes inspired by the Middle Ages, by days of royal pageants. The high bosom line of Madame Récamier; the Empire dress of Joséphine; the bouffant dress of the eighteen hundreds; the square, low necklines of Queen Elizabeth; the hairdos, ornaments, and veils of Edgar Allan Poe's heroines; the ladies of the castles; the ladies at Spanish court or at bull fights; the Roman matrons at the games. Every graceful, gracious, floating, poetic costume in those windows of Grand Street. A surrealist dream in a poor and shabby neighborhood. A spectacle for dim eyes, hungry faces, shabby bodies. A dream.
We danced among the brides, between reflections of hundreds of brides.
Another time, in Central Park, we suffered a dramatic scene which turned us against Maya. Frank Westbrook is a ballet dancer. His entire life and career depend on his body. Maya planned a scene among the rocks which required Frank to leap from rock to rock. We all felt it was too dangerous. We felt it was too much to ask. A ballet leap on stage, well planned, on an even floor, is one thing; it is quite another to leap from rock to rock and risk breaking a leg. We protested. We said no film was worth that risk. We encouraged him to refuse. I, who had introduced Frank to Maya, felt more responsible than the others; more indignant, too. She imposed her will. She said if he did not do it, he would be out of the film. We laid our coats on the rocks. We watched with fear and anger. He made the leap. But our feeling toward Maya changed. She had a film to make, but we were volunteers. We gave our time, our energy, even our money, and she should be more human. We believed in her as a film-maker, we had faith in her, but we began to feel she was not human. The power of her personality, the unblinking of her blue eyes, the sturdy curled hair growing gypsylike in an aureole around her face; her face square and strong, like a Botticelli, round eyes, full mouth, but far stronger; her determined voice, the assertiveness and sensuality of her peasant body, her dancing, drumming: all haunted us. We spent a great deal of time talking about her. We were manipulated in our life. We had a mixture of admiration for her energy and obstinacy, and rebellion against her dominant presence.
She is the one who gives all the parties. We meet at her house. Sometimes when I arrive with my entourage, my children, my young men, she attempts to hold one of them, and starts what we called her "courtship dance." Once, Charles Duits telephoned me: "I am here alone with Maya. She is doing her courtship dance. Please come and rescue me."
Later he confessed that what frightened him was that she had hair on her chest.<
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We were influenced, dominated by her, and did not know how to free ourselves. Her film-making fascinated us.
What I like in my adolescents is that they have not yet hardened. We all confuse hardening and strength. Strength we must achieve, but not callousness.
Waking from a dream, the dream of the press, destroyed by Gonzalo. When I do not work there, he spends his time talking with his friends. He is drowned in debts.
I have not been going to the press. I have been writing.
Faced with Edmund Wilson, I felt myself an adolescent. Why? I don't know. But there it was. I felt without authority, vulnerable, stripped of power. I felt that perhaps only by making myself smaller could I avert the storm, or the critical phrase which would fall on me, strike me down. Had I thought of defiance?
Defiance meant war, war meant wounds, and no certainty of conquering. It was the same war I had once waged, with unequal arms, against the overcritical father. Wilson's tyranny and dogmatism, his academic learning, subdued me. It is an error to believe that gentleness is a lightning conductor. On the contrary. He felt my evasions. And the critical phrase came. He read an entire book of mine and could only say: "You've made a mistake in English." With his interest in Henry James he could not read me nor reach me. With his dissertation on Greek art he could not move me. With his new shoes, too polished and formal, he could not touch me. They were too solid and too heavy. His house was not only his house, but the formal house of my father, in Passy. It had the same brown austerity and the same conventional elegance. The same narrowness of windows. He is my father's age. Therefore it ceased to be the house of Edmund Wilson in the present. It became a symbol of the past, to be destroyed and forgotten.
There is a way of living which makes for greater airiness, space, ease, freedom. It is like an airplane's rise above the storms. It is a way of looking at obstacles as something to overcome; of looking at what defeats us as a monster created by ourselves, within ourselves, by our fears, and therefore dissolvable and transformable.
The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters. meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked. This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.
Maya said she did not want to use professionals, because they were empty and without personality. Yet when she gathered together such varied personalities as those I described in the diary, she did not regard them as individuals, and therefore they became meaningless. The meaninglessness part of the film—the party—is empty because the people in it are nonexistent as individuals. Maya did not seek to bring out their personalities. Tei-ko, for example, has an eloquent silence. When she talks it is meaningless and without design because our language is not hers. The themes of pursuit and the chase are never developed. Almost everyone becomes grotesque, rather than significant. It does not add anything to the film that we see magnified the wart on Frank's neck. It alienates us from him as a dancer. He becomes a caricature of himself. In Meshes of the Afternoon Maya poetized herself, respected the aura, increased the effect of atmosphere. In this film [Ritual in Transfigured Time] there is no such miracle, except at the end, with the white, vaporous figure. Maya's ruthlessness with people rendered her vision cruel and rather distorted. The first part, the statue sequences, is the best. The party is the weakest. The theme is lost. The sense of quest is gone. There is an emptiness. The theme of interchangeable personalities is not clear, and I might even say that in destroying the characters, Maya destroyed the film. When gestures are broken at the party, heads cut off, it is not human beings who lose arms and heads but the film which loses its meaning. I feel this film is a failure.
[June, 1946]
Notes for lecture tour:
My basic theme is that of relationship. To explore all the variations, the subtleties of relationships. As it is in moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most deeply, I choose to write more often about such moments. I choose the heightened moments, because they bring to bear all the forces of intuition. For this I choose moods, states of being, states of exaltation, to accentuate the reality of feeling and the senses. It is this that I contribute to a feminine concept; the language of emotion, altogether different from that of the intellect. Since I urge spontaneity, improvisation, free association, it would be a contradiction to say I have a plan, a conscious structure. My only structure is based on three forms of art—painting, dancing, music—because they correspond to the senses I find atrophied in literature today; and these forms are those most directly connected with life: the eyes, body, emotions.
It is life I am writing about, at its moments of greatest intensity, because it is then that the meaning shines strongest. I write continually in the mood we are told would be produced if we could know the moment of our death: the intensification of memory. This developed from the use of the diary. Writing in a diary developed several habits: a habit of honesty (because no one imagines the diary will ever be read); a habit of writing about what most closely concerns one; a habit of improvisation on any theme one wishes; habits of spontaneity, enthusiasm, naturalness. The emotional reality of the present. A respect for the present mood. Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. I have been able to make these transitions. I have passed from one to the other.
What the poet has to say is as fragile as snow but as powerful as the Deluge. Shall it be the power of feeling which will fecundate the great concrete cities of tomorrow with the necessary water? Feeling will nourish the roots and cause an ultimate flowering, fecundate the million cells revealed by the microscope.
The dismemberment of man, from Joyce to Proust, the breaking down of the cells under the eye of analysis, the fission of uranium atoms, produce chain reactions. Man has to be made whole again by passion and faith. Our faith has been displaced from something outside of ourselves to the inner self. In Winter of Artifice I wanted to give 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 of being: insomnia, frigidity, anxiety. By giving impressions of feelings and sensations, such as you might give through music, by enrichment of the sensibilities, I seek to approximate the sensory, emotional way we receive experience.
My way of working resembles that of a composer of music. I start from a word or a phrase which arouses rich associations, and begin variations on this, expansions, improvisations. Always in an effort to extract the largest possible meaning.
When I think of one woman who has oriental characteristics, I see an infinite number of women reflected in her.
I write emotional algebra. All my life I have promised myself to begin at the beginning and tell the whole story very simply, step by step. Then I begin, and the first thing that happens is that my pace becomes rapid, my rhythm breathless, and I am off again, searching for the quintessence of emotional reality. Why does the poet use symbol in his stories? Why does the natural storyteller take his time and deal in a direct way with untransformed events?
Truth and psychological reality are at the basis of what I write, but I have learned that our reality is partly directed by the unconscious and partly formed from former experiences casting their shadows on the present.
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I can always produce the realistic incident which caused the writing, which lies at its source. I can produce the true model, the place, the time. But because I insist on extracting the essence, on giving a distilled product, it becomes a dream, where all reality appears in a symbolic form. Everything I write will have to be translated, but by doing this, as when one deciphers a dream, one will learn the language of the unconscious, a valuable language.
I choose the extraordinary moments of life, the heightened ones, because they are moments of heightened revelations, of illuminations, of the greatest riches. They are the moments when the forces of the unconscious rise to the surface and take over. By this choice of the strongest moods, exaltations, states of being, I accentuate the reality of feeling and of the senses. I use the language of emotion and the senses, which is different from that of the intellect.
In Ladders to Fire I used modern painting as the best symbol to depict the disintegration of the personality, the fragmentation. Modern painting is used as a key to the character of Jay, revealing his split from reality, his dismemberment. What an overdevelopment of the conscious intellect separated, split asunder, and dismembered can only be put together again by the senses and the emotions. The life of the senses, of feeling, would lead us back to wholeness, to experiencing everything in its totality. Man began to disintegrate under the microscope of analysis, carried to its ultimate perfection by Proust. Man dissolved in the undifferentiated flow of unconscious monologue found in Joyce. But neither of these processes needed to prove fatal to man, any more than the splitting of the atom needed to destroy energy. On the contrary, it released more energy. Analysis of man could release more energy and create a more sincere synthesis. This new dimension, discovered and explored, could well be an instrument to make men more potent and whole.
