by Anais Nin
As for escape, ivory towers: The culture on which Japan has based its life for thousands of years was born in a court which was shut off from the outside world, because traveling was too dangerous, because there were no ways of communicating, no ways to expand at the time. So in a closed-in court, turned in upon itself, were born all the rules of aesthetic beauty, literature, architecture, gardening, philosophy, which were to give Japan the admiration and respect of scholars and visitors.
If Richard Wright could be allowed some peace from constant wounding in daily life, his writing might become greater.
Henry was allowed a rest from the restrictions and the sense of limitation into which he was born. Wider forms of culture. Free of abrasive daily injury, Wright might work better, I felt.
Albert did not agree. And Richard was disappointed, because Albert's point of view is the one he hears all the time.
What I did not want to say was that perhaps after a stay in France, Richard might be less neurotic, might trust the friendships which are offered to him. I have tried to be his friend, but I find him reserved and full of mistrust.
Gore telephones me. He fought for me at Dutton. And won. They wanted to wait two years to publish Children of the Albatross. They will publish Children of the Albatross now!
[April, 1947]
Carter Harman came to work on the music for House of Incest. We worked well, understood each other. He wants to make a dreamlike musical drama of the book. It fills him with music.
Worked with Carter again. I write down what we agree on. He is writing the music.
We went to Lincoln Kirstein's ballet.
Dinner at Nicholas Wreden's apartment. He is my editor at Dutton. Homeliness, bourgeois solidity, comfort, a love of conventional matters. I am bored. Gore is there. He takes me home.
Will Carter Harman become a great composer? Will Gore become a famous writer? Carter is completely emotional, all music. He arrives modestly, with his valise full of scores, and the chronometer.
Leonard's answer to reading his portrait in Children of the Albatross was five yards of luxuriant, fire-colored brocade from Korea, wrapped around a secret box, which was the symbol I used to describe his character.
And a note: "I was deeply moved by the book."
Gore does not know what Mr. Macrae, senior editor at Dutton, did behind his back. Every time I had to go to see Nicholas Wreden to discuss something about Ladders to Fire, to arrange lecture dates or interviews, I would make a dash back along the corridor to the elevator. But Mr. Macrae, with infallible intuition, would open his office door and intercept me. He would walk me to the elevator, or invite me into his office. In his office, he would show me photographs of his family at a horse-jumping festivity. But the sum of his conversation was always: "Ladders to Fire is not selling well. During my lunch hour I sat in the park, and as I looked at the people sitting with me on the bench, I thought: These people will never read Ladders to Fire."
My answer was: "They would if I were sitting on that bench."
Having no suggestions for remedying the slow sales, I decided to try and win his loyalty by showing him the childhood diary, as he is a Catholic, a family man, and a father. He read it and his comment was: "That was a sweet book. Why don't you write like that now, instead of all that bohemian village life?"
Pablo has decided to travel around the world with a friend of his. He took a job aboard a Danish freighter which takes on only about fifty passengers. Pablo was to do all kinds of jobs, whatever was needed: wait on tables, carry valises, clean the deck.
He wanted me to see the boat, but visitors are not allowed on sailing date. He wanted me to be there and say goodbye to him. He would be gone for months.
He suggested I call up the Line, express interest in taking such a trip as a passenger, and ask if I could visit the ship. Yes, they said, I could.
So I arrived on sailing day, well-dressed like a potential passenger, and the Danish captain himself did the honors. First I had to sit with him and taste Danish beer, while Pablo and his friend waited on us. Then he took me to visit the ship. His quarters, the passengers' quarters and, toward the stern of the ship, the crew's quarters. Pablo and his friend hovered nearby. When we reached Pablo's cabin, which he shared with his friend and two other young men, right above his shaving mirror he had already tacked up photographs of his friends. The largest photograph among them was of me, his "Sabina," as he called me, with a dedication. The Danish captain must have seen it. He never let on. I was able to kiss Pablo goodbye, to stand on the pier watching him sail away, a touching figure somehow, on that rather stern-looking ship, without frills or fanfares. A lonely ship, for men only, and how would it be for months and months, for a boy as full of exuberance and life and warmth as Pablo?
Poetry magazine, April 1947:
We hear from Paris of a reading of new works by Antonin Artaud at the Vieux Colombier, for which all his friends and backers turned out, including Gide. Half of them could not get inside the theater, and the poet was so agitated that he is said to have been incoherent. Artaud's disturbing poems, according to the normal time-lag, will probably have a vogue in this country sometime in i960. He has been called by Justin Saget, the Combat reviewer, "The last of the true race of poètes maudits."
[May, 1947]
Woody Parrish-Martin is dark like a southerner, always laughing, always lying fully stretched on the floor, drinking and talking. His talk is a series of fairy tales and fantasies with invisible links, full of charm and wit. He is a talking writer. He has difficulty getting to the writing. I love his stories. He also has a mocking spirit. His comments are often critical. I know nothing about his background, but his attitude in life is that of someone with a superior training, who comments rather critically on imperfect human beings. He has style. A subtle thing, in dress, talk, manners. He enters smiling. This smile covers an enfant terrible.
In his own apartment he has empty cages of all kinds, which fascinate me. Oriental, Victorian, from various countries. He is gifted on many levels, but they are not analyzable, they do not form a whole. Scattered gifts and scattered personality, scattered stories which, as an artisan, I wanted to preserve, collect, but which dissolved, evaporated.
One story I remember was about a young woman whose lover deserted her. She was forced to marry someone else. In church she wept. She wept real pearls, which the entire village came to collect.
I always hear Woody laugh. This laughter is also his insulating circle. I cannot know him better. He turns everything into a witty game.
Another person for whom I feel a respect and whom I wish for a friend is James Agee. I like his writing, his appearance of one who does not care for appearance, his silence and his seriousness. His clothes are never pressed, he rarely wears a tie, he is often unshaven. He is very tall, and loosely built, very thin and bony. He reminds me of Lincoln without a beard. But when he came to my parties he did not talk very much.
Three formidable barriers stand between me and American writers: one is drinking, which I do only moderately; another is I do not have the rough, straightforward, tough, plain-spoken manners of masculine women, which inspire them with confidence; the third is, I suppose, my not being a native.
It is this which always throws me back into the circle of the young, who are hungry for my presence and for my work. We never drink as the older writers do. We invent and create and write and paint and travel.
The friends I want to have and who do not respond: Martha Graham, Isak Dinesen. (Pablo took a copy of Under a Glass Bell to her personally. I never heard the consequences, but I dreamed of her life, her castle, her stories.) Also Anna Kavan in England and her The House of Sleep, so much like House of Incest.
James Baldwin is writing his first book. He has a winning personality. Here the wall is mostly his obsession with politics. The obsession with politics is perhaps the greatest wall of all for me. The politics they all talk about are not humanistic. They are not psychological. They are abstract and theor
etical. They feed on daily news to be reinterpreted. They are an intolerably narrow and rigid form of thought. All the words to say, the ideas, are established by your group leader, or the magazine to which you belong. You are in one group, and do your best to destroy the other group. Books are reviewed solely from the point of view of political affiliation. Friendships are dictated by it, ruled by it, destroyed by it. My search for truths which transcend such compartmental thinking is suspect. It is as if I refuse to go to war, declare myself a pacifist, and am ostracized.
I came to America as a temporary visitor, with a permit to be extended every six months.
Now that the war was over, and I knew I could not return to Paris, I had to leave the United States and re-enter as a permanent resident. This would permit me to start proceedings for naturalization. A great deal of paperwork and red tape was begun.
I considered going to Canada, which was near, or to Mexico, which I had dreamed about. I went to a cocktail party and was talking about all this with a young American from the West. He said: "Do you mean you were about to return to France knowing only New York City? You mean that is all you know of America? New York is not America. You must see it all, especially the South and the West."
Henry's book [The Air-Conditioned Nightmare—Ed.] had not given me a desire to see all this, but the young man from the West, and his love of the country, did. I began to think about this country, wondering if I could see it on my way to Mexico.
I found a friend who was driving to Las Vegas to get a divorce, and we agreed to share expenses.
It was when the plans were made that I realized how keenly I wanted to escape from New York, how harsh and abrasive the life was. Like the climate.
[Summer, 1947]
A Ford Model A with the top down. The open road leading you on, unwinding. Rhythmic chugging for hours, so that even when you stop you feel as if you were rolling, rolling.
First of all there was the Holland Tunnel, as if New York City had been an enclosed tunnel and I were reaching open freedom. Space. Suddenly the sky opens and takes up most of the space. The sky is the major part of the setting. The earth takes a small part of the stage at first. Clouds changing every moment, at times far off and at times close and threatening. Far ahead, the road looks like a mirage. The trees pass quickly, signs on the road, posters, telephone poles, towns, houses. The clouds travel with you, or lead the way, or point to a storm, or to dawn, or to a hazy twilight, massed capriciously, dissolving, or gathering up density. After the city I became aware of how rarely I lived the moods of the sky, how rarely I had a clear view of it.
After the tunnel, my eyes filled with green: fields, woods, forests, hills, mountains.
The towns, the motels are hallucinatively alike. Where are we? Washington. The motel, the coffee shop, the drugstore. As we rise at dawn, we have breakfast with workmen in coffee shops on the road, open for truck drivers. People eat at the counter, silently. They exchange greetings about the weather. It is cold today, it is damp today, it is hot today.
Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. Hours of unwinding road. Wonderful names on the map. The Smokies National Park. On the way, we went up a mountain by mistake. When we reached the top it was snowing. It was snowing and the road ended there. It was a dead-end road. We had to turn in the snow, with darkness like an abyss all around us, and return to where we came from.
After the snow, heat and sun as we drove to Roanoke, Virginia. Wide roads, narrow roads, dirt roads, perfect roads. Sometimes we are alone on the road, sometimes surrounded by infernally loud trucks. At times, signs obliterate the landscape. A salesman's landscape.
In Virginia, at a restaurant, we met the majestic old lady who runs the place and who knew Walt Whitman. How strange it is to meet someone who has known a writer I would like to have known. You hope she is a sensitive conductor, who will put you in touch, like the clairvoyants, the hypnotists, with one whose death you regret. But not this imposing old lady with a cane. Perhaps she merely fed him when he was hungry. She was uniquely concerned with our appreciation of her cooking and that we should leave nothing on the plate.
The beautiful caverns of Luray, in the Shenandoah Valley.
Two men were convinced from the structure of "Cave Hill" and certain geological evidence that a large cave might exist there. Mr. Andrew Campbell and Mr. Benton Stebbins began a careful exploration of the surface of the hill. After much search in an old sinkhole, among briers and fragments of stone, they found a place where cool air came through the crevices of the rock, escaping into the warmer atmosphere. They were lowered by a rope into the dark and mysterious "Chamber of Silence."
The beauty of the forms and textures in the caves surpasses that of cathedrals, jewels, oriental palaces, crystal chandeliers, damask curtains, spires, the gold roofs of Bangkok, the lakes, the corals at the bottom of the sea. They seem the seed of all design, of tents, pagodas, arches, stained glass windows, panoplies, flowers, and at the origin of fairy tales.
The silence, the fragility, the occasional sound of a drop of water about to be crystallized and sculptured, the mirror-surface of the lakes, the patterns of arrested waterfalls, fixed waves of the sea, suspended rainfall, snowdrop designs. Baffling words: pure image, pure delight.
Always a changing sky, a changing landscape. But no change in the faces yet.
Driving wears down the nerves. The motel is welcome, plain or fancy. Sometimes it is slick and shiny, with lacquered furniture. Another time it is a mountain cabin in the woods, with a brook running beside it. Sometimes there was a real fireplace, and wood to burn; at other times an electric heater. Stretch the cramped legs. Sleep.
North Carolina. Winston-Salem. South Carolina. Atlanta, Georgia. Mobile, Alabama. The landscape grows lush, softer, the people more languid, the motions slow, the streets dusty, and the houses sleepy. It is beautiful and unhurried. Houses are wrapped in verdure, fences in climbing flowers. The fields are of a clear, washed green. No dust. From Mobile, Alabama, to New Orleans. The more southern, the more I respond to it, to perfumes, repose in the gestures, the mantle of nature matching its rhythms, man-to-earth and field-to-man, horses and men, and the little Ford Model A, not as noisy as other cars, less obtrusive, smaller to park, more in keeping with the landscape. Gone the harshness, the brittleness, the violent uproar of the city.
Romantic houses, and most romantic of all the house of Weeks Hall, "The Shadows."
The house half-hidden among wailing trees, so old their branches bend to the ground, moss, ivy, parasitic veils, trailing scarves, dew, smells of old earth and decadent flowers. Pools with moss-green bottoms, peacocks, statues, noble stairs, noble columns, noble doors, noble windows, marble on the floor, scented sandalwood, mirrors, candelabra. And Weeks Hall himself, as old as any man could be, jovial, red-faced, the voice of the house, monologuing its history, tales, memories, guiding so one would not miss the embroidered hunting scene under glass, the embroidered tapestry chairs, the cabinets lined with brocade. The liqueur bottles topped with silver stoppers, but not full enough to satisfy the thirst of the master. Not enough food in the kitchen, not enough servants, not enough of anything to sustain the grandeur of the life that is vainshing. But before vanishing it exudes its perfume of flowers kept too long in their vases, of silk too-long-worn, keeping traces of the many heads which had rested on its pillows, beds creaking, palanquins disintegrating, the poles holding the damask no longer able to hold it, the mattress long gone, the sheets long ago shredded.
Weeks Hall is concerned with the preservation of the house as a museum of southern culture, to be given to the city of New Orleans. But will they maintain it? Otherwise erosion, weather and time will corrode it all, the paintings, the furniture, the engravings and etchings, the photographs, the architect's plans, the fish in the pools. Because of poverty, already so much damage.
At one time, when he was wealthy, he had famous visitors sign their names on a door. By inadvertence, a house-painter painted the door, erasing the famous names. Weeks Hall sh
ipped the door to every person who had once signed it, all around the world, until he recovered the signatures. Here it was.
Concern for the past, even to the extent of protecting the bones of the past. One of his ancestors had asked to be buried in the garden. He did not want to be buried in the New Orleans cemetery with other people. He was buried as he desired. But once, while Weeks Hall was away, a gardener dug too deep for a long-rooted tree, and unburied the ancestor, carelessly. When Weeks Hall returned, he went about the ritual of reburial. To his horror, he found a bone missing. He set the servants and the guilty gardener to searching. If they did not find the bone the dynasty of Weeks Hall would die. He was already an old man, gouty, and with an insatiable thirst for alcohol.
I remembered reading somewhere:
The learned rabbis of the Jews write:
There's a bone, which they call Luz.
No force in nature can do hurt hereto;
And therefore, at the last great day,
All the other members shall, they say,
Spring out of this as from a seed.
The bone was said to be the nucleus of the resurrection body. Weeks Hall must have believed this. His concern was so great.
He was still talking in the twilight. The cicadas were singing. He had found the missing bone, and all was well. Weeks Hall would not disappear. "The Shadows" would not be cursed by the ancestor.
