by Anais Nin
Some writers expect to know what form to adopt before they begin to write. I feel that form is not a matter of préfabrication, but that it is created by the meaning, the content of the book, by its theme. For me it is an inner eruption, very similar to that created by the earth itself in its perpetual evolutions. They happen according to inner tensions, inner pressures, inner accidents of climate, and it is the accumulation of such inner organic incidents which created mountains and oceans. To discover my own form I have first to dig very deeply into this natural source of creation. And the sources of creation, as in geology, lie very deep at the center of the being, as they do at the center of the earth. Once I have been willing to travel in darkness, to the center of the earth, I find precious coals, metals, stones, and all the elements necessary to life. I also find fire, and without fire no creation is possible, for fire makes coalescence. Fire, earth, and water are all parts of creation, passion, experience, flow. Once I have tapped those sources, writing becomes as natural as singing.
When writing comes with difficulty, it simply means that, like the ancient sourcier, I have not yet found the sources of water.
Too great an emphasis on technique arrests naturalness. The material from which I will create comes from living, from the personality, from experience, adventures, voyages. This natural flow of riches comes first. The technique is merely a way to organize the flow, to chisel, shape; but without the original flow from deep inner riches of material, everything withers.
America has suffered from a cult of craft and techniques. Every technique is a craft which is adopted from without, not from inner necessity, or inner vision. It can only photograph and register: nothing else. It cannot impart life. I look at writing as a natural, spontaneous thing, like a torrent. When I see a very meager stream, hesitations, difficulties, premeditations, preparations, and much talk, I know the source is poor.
The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relation to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualize. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive instruments of discovery.
These discoveries coincided with the discoveries of psychology and science (or rather were influenced and developed by them). Being true to my own experience, I discovered the basic theme of modem literature: man dismembered by analysis, by modern life, by modern technology, achieving a state of nonfeeling dangerous to his sanity and his life.
The primitive and the poet never parted company. When Picasso reached a certain plateau in his creativity, he reached for African inspiration to renew himself. Intellectual knowledge is not enough. Music, the dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our blood stream. Ideas do not.
Much writing in America has confused banality with simplicity, and the cliché with universal sincerity. There is a puritanical suspicion of what may seduce and charm the senses.
There is a prejudice against subjectivity, because it is believed subjectivity is a narrowing of the vision. But this is no more true than to say objectivity leads to a larger form of life. Nothing leads to a vaster form of life but the capacity to move deeply inward as well as outward. What is important is neither subjectivity nor objectivity but mobility, aliveness, the interrelation between them and between all relationships. A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.
The most important problem for the novelist is that each generation must create its own reality and its own language, its own images. Each one of us must re-create the world.
There is a new dimension in character, and I am seeking a way to seize it. The old single point of view is too rigid.
Man's life is in great part dreamed. This part must be exposed and tracked down. It is part of our reality, our emotional reality.
I work by flashes of intuition, a succession of illuminations. Far more is revealed in a selected moment than in a huge construction of details. The world around the character is described as the character sees it; an emotional landscape. The sewing of a button reveals the carelessness of one man in his relationship to the woman who is sewing.
Moving back and forth in time, because the past interferes in and often takes over the present.
It was Henry James himself who said that if you describe a house too completely, too concretely, objectively, solidly, in every detail, then it becomes impossible for the imagination to conceive of what might happen there. The character of the house overshadows events, creates its own associations with peripheral atmospheres (time, place, history, architecture). The reality of the house swallows the canvas and the storyteller. I go in the opposite direction. I want the least trappings and decor possible.
[Summer, 1946]
When Maya asked us to act in her film, we all confessed our individual fears. Frank Westbrook's skin was marked by smallpox and he was sensitive about it. Sasha promised he would bear that in mind. I confessed I was the oldest and feared close-ups. Each one of us had a defect, a flaw, a minor weakness. A heavy leg, or a heavy neck. Sasha and Maya assured everyone that the editing would respect that. Sasha took infinite care with Maya. He made Maya beautiful in her films. The freckles disappeared, the heavy features were softened, the wild curly hair was lighted and airy. So we entrusted ourselves to them.
I remembered this returning from Maya's, where we saw the finished film. We sat shell-shocked and silent when it was over. Frank Westbrook's skin was highlighted and every pore, every tiny pockmark magnified to seem like a crater. A close-up of me, twice natural size, was shiny-skinned and distorted by magnification. Everyone found his flaw there. Maya said: "It is always so. Everyone is shocked when he first sees himself in film or hears his voice for the first time. That is why I made you sign a release. You will get over it."
"Maya, do you mean that though we worked for you as friends, gave you all our time, and often the money we did not have to spend on taxis, you will not consider our feelings and make any change in the editing? You shot so many feet of Frank. Do you think you could find another shot of him from not so close up?"
Kim Hoffman, Steve, Gore, Bill Howell, Pablo. All of them would be disappointed. There was an ugliness in the vision, in the camera eye, in Sasha himself, who witnessed our reaction without a tremor of sympathy. He seemed to feel that the greatness of Maya as a film-maker justified everything, and that our reactions were of no importance.
The curious thing was that the unique qualities of my friends, which Maya had been interested in—Pablo's gaiety and sparkle, Gore's poise, Steve's beauty, Hoffman's witty face, Frank's dancing and intelligence—none of these were captured. They appeared diluted, watered-down.
You can only see in others what your nature allows you to see. The range of your vision depends on the extent of the personal development.
I found that Maya's prejudice against psychology stemmed from her battle with a psychiatrist-father. She rejected all symbolic interpretation, yet the actions in her films were symbolic, not realistic. She was definitely influenced by Cocteau.
If Maya wanted to portray in the party scene a hypnosis of the senses, the intertwining of relationships, people caught in trances of warmth, the cabinets particuliers de I'amour, mutual attractions, she did not suggest it, and it did not take place. What was revealed was emptiness.
Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned. Because when those who seek to help you merely indicate that you are dreaming, that you are caught in illusion, you can answer truthfully: I am planning and designing the future.
What is the difference between the fragmentation I see around me, and the plurality the German writer Novalis considered a sign of genius?
Is it that rich personalities have many aspects, but do not fall apart?
Gore's family had a house in Easthampton and he suggested I s
pend a week out there. I rented a room in a picturesque cottage. Claude Fredericks was staying with friends nearby, Moira not very far away, and Madame Pierre Chareau was also staying with friends. I rented a bicycle to get around. A group of us would gather at the beach. Gore would walk down from his chic beach club and join us.
I think he was ashamed that we bicycled through the town.
One night Hugh Chisholm gave a garden party. This was so beautiful that it reminded me of the dreamed party of Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier. There were colorful tents and wheelbarrows filled with rose petals, on which rested bottles of champagne. The men and women were out of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. It was beautiful to look at, but lacked warmth and naturalness. I did not stay long.
I stood waiting for the light to change at a crossroad. What startled me and made me examine the cyclist waiting beside me was the extraordinary brilliance of his large eyes. They shone with a silver sparkle which was almost frightening, because it highlighted the tumultuous panic close to the surface.
His gestures were free and nimble, the gestures of an adolescent, restless and light. The eyes alone contained all the fever. He had driven his bicycle like a racing car. He had come down upon me as if he did not see trees, cars, people, and almost overlooked the stop signal.
The red light changed to green. He gave a wild spurt to his pedaling, and then stopped suddenly to ask me the way to the beach. The tone in which he asked directions was as if the beach were a shelter to which he was speeding away from grave dangers.
I disliked Easthampton. The cloud of monotony and uniformity which hung over the new, neat mansions, the impeccable lawns, the dustless garden furniture. The men and women at the beach, all in one dimension, without any magnetism to bring them together. Zombies of civilization, in elegant dress with dead eyes. Static. The sign in front of the church: "This is the site of the most costly church on Long Island."
At midnight the place was deserted. Everyone was at home with bottles from which they hoped to extract a gaiety bottled elsewhere. It was the kind of drinking one does at wakes. Only the bars were open, where limp figures clutched at oblivion.
I ran out of sleeping pills. I walked looking for a drugstore. They were all closed. At one o'clock I was still walking, hoping to tire myself and be able to sleep, but I could not overcome my memories of Saínt-Tropez: the fiestas, the lively scene at the port, the open cafés, the lights, the dancing, the flags, the banners of yachts.
A car stopped beside me. A tall, white-haired Irish police officer addressed me courteously:
"May I give you a lift?"
"I couldn't sleep. I was looking for a drugstore, where I might find sleeping pills."
I climbed into the car. I said: "I'm homesick for other beaches I have known."
"I was homesick when I first came from Ireland."
"Did you ever see Saint-Tropez?"
"Yes, I did. I was once a bodyguard for a rich man. I'll take you to my home first. The wife and kids are asleep, but I can get you some aspirin."
He left me in the car. He entered his house. He came out carrying a glass of water and two aspirins. I took the water and the aspirins obediently. He focused his flashlight upon a bush in his garden and said: "Look at this!"
I saw flowers of velvet, with black hearts and gold eyes.
"Roses of Sharon," he said reverently, and in the purest of Irish accents. "They only grow in Ireland and in Long Island."
"I'll sleep now," I said.
"Yes, you will. One can only sleep when one has found something to be grateful for. You can never sleep when you're angry."
He gave me roses of Sharon to admire. Driving me home, he spoke of another homesick character.
"He is a young fellow in the Royal Air Force. Aviator all through the war, seventeen when he volunteered. He's grounded now, and he can't take it. He's restless, and keeps speeding, and breaking traffic laws. I stopped giving him tickets. He's used to airplanes. Being grounded is tough. I know how he feels."
The next day we met at the beach. The grounded aviator was there. We were introduced. We took a walk along the beach. John began to talk: "I've had five years of war as a rear-gunner. Been to India a couple of years, to North Africa, slept in the desert, crashed several times, made about a hundred missions, saw all kinds of things. Men dying, men yelling when they're trapped in burning planes. Their arms charred, their hands like the claws of animals. The first time I was sent to the field after a crash ... the smell of burning flesh. It's sweet and sickening, and it sticks to you for days. You can't wash it off. You can't get rid of it. It haunts you. We had good laughs, though, laughs all the time. We laughed plenty. We would commandeer prostitutes and push them into the beds of the guys who didn't like women. We had drunks that lasted several days. I liked that life. India. I'd like to go back. This life here, what people talk about, what they think, bores me. I liked sleeping in the desert. I saw a black woman giving birth. She worked in the fields carrying dirt for a new airfield. She stopped carrying dirt to give birth under the wing of a plane, just like that, and then bound the kid in some rags and went back to work. Funny to see the big plane, so modern, and this half-naked woman giving birth and then continuing to carry dirt in pails for an airfield. You know, only two of us came back alive of the bunch I started with. My buddies always warned me: 'Don't get grounded; once you're grounded, you're done for.' Well, they grounded me, too. Too many rear-gunners in the service. I didn't want to come home. What's civilian life? Good for old maids. It's a rut. It's drab. Look at this: the young girls giggle, giggle at nothing. The boys are after me. Nothing ever happens. They don't laugh hard and they don't yell. They don't get hurt, and they don't die, and they don't laugh either."
There was a light in his eyes I could not read, something he had seen but would not talk about.
We walked tirelessly along the beach, until there were no more homes, no more cared-for gardens, no more people, until the beach became wild.
"Some die silent," he continued, as if obsessed. "You know by the look in their eyes that they are going to die. Some die yelling, and you have to turn your face away and not look into their eyes. When I was being trained, you know, the first thing they told me: 'Never look into a dying man's eyes.'"
"But you did," I said, suddenly understanding the expression of his eyes. 1 could see him clearly at seventeen, not yet a man, with the delicate skin of a girl, the finely carved features, the small straight nose, the mouth of a woman, a shy laugh, something very tender about the face and body, looking into the eyes of the dying.
"The man who trained me said: 'Never look into the eyes of the dying or you'll go mad.' Do you think I'm mad? Is that what you mean?"
"You're not mad. You're very hurt and frightened, and very desperate, and you feel you have no right to live, to enjoy, because your friends are dead or dying, or flying still and in danger. Isn't that it?"
"I wish I were there now, drinking with them, flying, seeing new countries, new faces, sleeping in the desert, feeling you may die any moment and so you must drink fast, and fight hard, and laugh hard. I wish I were there."
I saw him two or three times, and then he disappeared. He was in the hospital with a bout of malaria.
I returned to New York. The sea at Easthampton had not renewed me. It was not the same sea.
George Davis persuaded Harper's Bazaar to publish the section "Stella" from Ladders to Fire. Leo Lerman was asked to write a short introduction. They used a still photo of me from Maya's film.
Irene Selznick telephoned her husband in Hollywood about "Stella." Then she came to see me.
She wanted me to write a play for her. I explained that I felt the way I wrote was the opposite of theater. I had no gift for realistic dialogue or action. The life was inner, and the talk part of that inner awareness.
The appearance in Harper's Bazaar gave an illusion of success in the world. It is an ephemeral illusion, as the people who read Harper's Bazaar do not care about writing for
its own sake. It is a gesture of fashion, like a dress. It only means you are fashionable for the moment
[October, 1946]
One day the bell rang and, as usual, I stood at the head of the stairs to hear who was coming. I heard puffing and groaning like that of an animal, and some object which was dragged up the stairs, a step at a time, bumping the edges each time, settling, and then moving again. The whole scene accompanied by nonhuman sounds. Finally, a hunchback appeared at the door, with a deformed face that seemed to have been squeezed to become smaller to fit the body. His eyes were weeping from the cold. He carried a carton of books from Dutton, copies of Ladders to Fire.
I said: "Come in. You can leave it right there. Would you open it for me? Would you like a cup of coffee?"
"Yes, ma'am."
While I heated coffee, he asked me: "Why did you buy so many books?"
"To give to my friends. I have friends who can't pay such a high price for books."
When he opened the carton, I took out a copy. I was not pleased by the jacket. I had given Dutton a beautiful smoky engraving of a fire with a white ladder running through it. It had been printed in the orange color of cheap imitation-orange candy. But there it was:
