by Anais Nin
A king snake sleeps in the eaves of her porch. She feeds the birds and the sea gulls. During the war she offered her services to patrol the beach.
She reminds me in her queenly ways of the grandes dames who people our world as the image of the grandmothers we would have liked to have, Isak Dinesen, Virginia Woolf, the Madwoman of Chaillot, but she carries her strong personality on the light wings of humor.
She tells the story of being taken as a girl of ten to the christening of a ship. The ceremony was lengthy, the speeches interminable, it was bitterly cold, and when she was handed the ribbon to pull, the gesture suggested pulling the chain of a toilet, a signal for something which she could not control.
She is a descendant of the patriot Nathan Hale.
She does most of her work on the terrace, out of doors, overlooking the sea. A path leads down a rugged sand, rock, and heather hill to a rather somber sea dotted with rocks.
Her sculptures are placed either against the open sky, or profiled against the sea. They rest on the sand in her terrace. One of them is on a stand, indoors, but in profile against the sea and often struck by the sun and shining like a diamond.
In another epoch she would have had a salon, and all the famous artists would have sat at her feet. But our age is not an age of worship or admiration. She had that gift toward other artists.
[Summer, 1948]
I am working at the fiction of Gonzalo become Rango [The Four-Chambered Heart]. The present Gonzalo is dead for me. He has destroyed every vestige of friendship. I work at the fiction with mixed feelings of love and pity for the dream he destroyed. I know how human beings destroy themselves, every step of the way, and one can only feel pity. Do I begin the fiction to re-create him? To keep what was beautiful? The illusion of Gonzalo, his tales of Peru, his guitar playing, his singing and his Heathcliff wildness? The fiction breaks away from the actual facts. It is another life. It is another character. It conveys other messages. It takes its place in a continuum. Fiction teaches us that the sorrows of living are meaningful. Fiction restores the meaning. The experience which is being lived day by day may seem futile, destructive because the vision of its totality is lacking. In the novel it acquires a pattern. It is fiction. It reaches beyond pain to the pattern of meaningfulness which consoles us for all the agonies, and uncovers elevations.
There remains as residue an unbroken love of the dream itself, the myth, in spite of its human death. Thus must Henry have buried June over and over again, with misgivings, because the corpse of our human love is illumined and kept alive by our first illusion, and one is uneasy at burying it, doubting its death. Will it rise again and remain a part of our life forever?
I feel depressed, invaded by the past because my writing forces me to remember, because that is the source of my stories. If only I could create fiction out of the present, but the present is sacred to me, to be lived, to be passionately absorbed but not transfigured into fiction, to be preserved faithfully in the diary.
The alchemy of fiction is, for me, an act of embalming.
Dream: Marijuana has been planted in my room with directions to melt it in a bottle to disguise it. I have not finished when I hear a noise. I throw everything into a drawer and go out. My room is searched and I know I will be imprisoned.
Inexplicable dream because I have had so little to do with marijuana. Once I tried it in Acapulco, out of doors, and it produced no results. Another time George Leite gave me some in Berkeley and all I felt is my usual love of dancing. Do I feel guilt at my frequent elated moments which come out of passionate moments and not from any herb? Do I think my enjoyments should be punished by imprisonment?
I am suffering again from the mysterious malady of anxiety and marvel at whatever alchemy transmutes this and gives it to others as a life source, wondering if it is not the alchemy itself which is slowly killing me, as if I kept the poisons of doubt and fears in my being and gave out only the gold. Everywhere I go life and creation burst open, yet I remain anchorless, uprooted.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning. It took me years of sorrow to learn these airy bird's spirals around the loved ones so that the love should never crystallize into a prison. Flights, swoops, circles. For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them. It is the one contagious illness of the spirit one must preserve others from, if one loves. For it has nothing to do with love, it is its antithesis, and no love can thrive within the walls of fears.
This fear of loss, which haunted my childhood, my adolescence, my young woman's life, the fear of love being doomed to vanish as my father did, is a secret not to burden others with, for then the love will seem heavy and not survive the airless anxiety.
Life in Los Angeles is not as toxic as in New York. The proximity to the Orient and to Mexico has made people less obsessionally ambitious and more in love with life. Everyone has a garden, and people are not enslaved by the clock. The Japanese have designed the gardens, the Mexicans influence the rhythm. You feel the presence of the desert when people speak of the Santa Ana winds, which recall the simoom in Mallorca. You feel the fruitfulness of the canyons, and the presence of the sea. The sun pulls you out of the house. The artificial presence of film makers does not seem part of the land. The surrealists would be pleased with the sudden appearance of a subway station on a truck being taken to a studio, by the movie villages Nathanael West wrote about, the reproductions of Western towns, of Swiss villages, of Southern mansions. As you are walking along a street suddenly you see a whole house approaching on wheels; it fills the streets. It is being moved. I thought it would be marvelous to film a party going on as the house moves; it reminded me of the Haitian stories about the trees which moved from place to place in the night. One never thinks of a house moving.
I am awakened by the singing of birds. I cannot introduce them. I ask their names and then forget them like a careless hostess. But they sing well and gaily. The sun always shines through the Venetian blinds. I have a choice of two new dresses to wear. I walk down the hill to breakfast at Musso's, where they make the most fragile pancakes. The banality and vulgarity of Hollywood Boulevard do not bother me. Nathanael West understood it. I see another Hollywood, young artists of all kinds, making films without money, doing pottery and weaving, painting, engraving, sculpture.
I am learning to drive. A new freedom. A quest for health and beauty, to efface some of the harm from my years in hell. At times I feel like a convalescent from hell. The sun shines on the chromium of my car, on my new dress, on my new dash and my new confidence. The quest for sun and suntanning and swimming is of major importance here and it suits me.
The white houses, the perpetual sun, and the major theme "we are going to the beach," "will you come to the beach?" "today is a good beach day," et cetera, is Grecian. When I return to my desk there is an envelope filled with newspaper clippings on Under a Glass Bell. There are telephone messages from Kenneth Anger and Paul Mathiesen, Curtis Harrington. Now I can write. I can extract the essence of the past for fiction without pain. The present is beautiful. As in Acapulco there is a more subdued but perpetual air of fiesta. The birds sing at night.
After hearing music I was elated, keyed up, and with friends we decided to go to the sea, to the Amusement Park in Venice. And there I found my fear again, all the fears I thought I had conquered: fear and terror of speed, heights, the scenic railway, of violence, of the labyrinth, enclosures, of chutes, of darkness, traps. Why?
Am I not made for happiness, I asked inside of the dark house of terrors, facing sudden skeletons, traps, sudden plunges into total darkness? Will I hear the birds sing again? Will I feel pleasure tomorrow when I see the jacaranda tree in bloom?
***
The ugliest, most prejudiced review was written by Elizabeth Hardwick in Partisan Review. How can anyone go into a tantrum of insults over Under a Glass Bell? What is there to hate so fiercely? For example:
...In Anaï
s Nin the attraction to the inexpressible is fatal and no writer I can think of has more passionately embraced thin air. Still, she has nerve and goes on her way with a fierce foolishness that is not without beauty as an act, though it is too bad her performance is never equal to her intentions. I suppose it is true that nothing is so boring as intransigence that does not lead to art superior or even equal to that which is dramatically snubbed. The dreary, sour side of programmatic purity-egotism, piety, boastfulness—annihilates what was meant to be joyful and releasing and leaves only the vanity, like that outrageous pride one sees on the faces of the more interesting American derelicts, those who know they can, if they pull themselves together, still go into the family business.
No doubt this middle-class bum is vanishing; martyrdom and the illusion of righteous protest are just as "dated" on the Bowery as elsewhere. In the same way Anaïs Nin, one of our most self-consciously uncompromising writers, seems old-fashioned. She is vague, dreamy, mercilessly pretentious; the sickly child of distinguished parents—the avant garde of the twenties—and unfortunately a great bore....
[Fall, 1948]
In San Francisco, walking around Ruth Witt Diamant's neighborhood, I looked into a vast garden and saw a tiny Japanese teahouse which looked unlived in. I visited the old couple who owned the estate and they agreed to rent it to me. But it was left to me to empty it of trash kept there for many years, old newspapers, old magazines, broken furniture, discarded valises. It took many weeks to clean, to paint, and to install a shower. I loved the teahouse. I felt I was living in Japan. But winter came. The teahouse had no heat and was terribly cold and damp in the middle of so many trees, vines, and moss. My health forced me to give up my beautiful teahouse I had worked so hard on and move into an apartment which had a huge central fireplace and received sun all day through big windows overlooking the bay.
This reminded me very much of looking for a gypsy wagon with Gonzalo, then a houseboat, as if I always wanted to live outside and beyond the reality of the place where I was.
Ruth comes every day to tell me it is my duty to the community to go to gatherings, parties, et cetera. But my feeling is that my duty is to write. If I go out every night, I cannot work well the next day.
Gangster Dream: I am walking with an older couple. Suddenly we notice there are three or four gangsters, dressed as they are in the movies. Dark clothes, dark glasses, and a brutal, fixed, hypnotic immobility. I seek to escape. Then I realize it is not me they want but the couple. The woman, as she is led away, turns an agonized face toward me. I am distressed but also glad not to be involved. I was only a passing friend. However, later in the dream, the same couple is free, in their own house, but the gangsters are coming. The couple asks me to answer the bell and give them time to escape. I know I am risking revenge from the gangsters but this time I feel I should risk my life in contrast to my first impulse to escape the situation completely.
It is not imagination which stirs in the blood obscurely at certain spectacles, certain cities, certain faces; it is memory. Some memories lie dormant, like hibernating animals, atrophied memories, but others survive in the genes and easily reappear in the present. Idea of memory very persistent. I think of it all day. I believe the body carries cells of memories down through the ages, in the same way it transmits physical traits. These memories lie dormant until aroused by a face, a city, a situation. A simple explanation of "we have lived this before." Of recognition and familiarity. Racial and collective memories have continuity, forming unconscious layers.
In California the white buildings, the sun and the palms re-create Cuba for me, childhood memories of sea, of gaiety, and of a kind, caressing climate.
Have I walked away from my demons?
In San Francisco I can work better. I am not dissolved in nature.
Exhausted with writing, and with the conflict of making a riverbed for the flow of the diary so that it may not seem like a diary but an inner monologue, a series of free associations accompanying the life of several characters. Not yet solved. The diary cannot be published in its entirety. How can I convert it into a Joycean flow of inner consciousness?
Last night I wanted to give up writing. It seemed wrong to make a story of Gonzalo. I felt the inhumanity of art. I thought of my fictionalizing of Paul in Children of the Albatross. It destroyed nothing. It touched his heart. The story of Gonzalo may be the only undestroyed image of him, because he set about to destroy himself. It may be an inspiration to other Gonzalos not to destroy themselves.
Last night I was a woman, hurt by memories and acknowledging the ever recurrent continuity of love. This morning I am a writer and have come to terms with the woman by saying: "It must be sincere, it is fiction but it must be sincere, it must be truthful to the feelings if not to actual facts." And I worked gravely, sincerely.
In my fiction there is no death, as there is occasionally in the diary. Do I extract the death-dealing parts? Shall I go to the end this time and describe dissolution and death?
One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All the writers have concealed more than they have revealed.
But paradoxically, we create fiction out of human concern for the victims of the revelations. This concern is at the root of literature.
***
I remember D. H. Lawrence complaining that nature was too powerful in Mexico, that it swallowed one. If I lived there, would the need to write disappear? When the external world matches our need, our hunger, our inner world, might not the need to create cease? Morocco did that. It made me contemplative, content with a spectacle of life so vivid that it stilled all needs. Would a mere change of culture put an end to our restlessness, our dissatisfaction, our need to create what is not there?
In Acapulco I felt for the first time the slackening of this tension I suffer from in my dealings with the world. The contact was established without difficulty. I felt at one with the people and nature.
I do not feel this tension when I am writing, I am at ease in the diary. When will creation and life fuse for me, and when will I be equally at ease in both?
[Winter, 1948]
We receive a fatal imprint in childhood, at the time of our greatest plasticity, of our passive impressionism, of our helplessness before suggestion. In no period has the role of the parents loomed as immense, because we have recognized the determinism, but at the same time an exaggeration in the size of the Enormous Parent does not need to be permanent and irretrievable. The time has come when, having completed the scientific study of the importance of parents, we now must re-establish our power to revoke their imprint, to reverse our patterns, to kill our fatal downward tendencies. We do not remain smaller in suture than our parents. Nature had intended them to shrink progressively in our eyes to human proportions while we reach for our own maturity. Their fallibilities, their errors, their weaknesses were intended to develop our own capacity for parenthood. We were to discover their human weakness not to overwhelm or humiliate them, but to realize the difficulty of their task and awaken our own human protectiveness toward their failures or a respect for their partial achievement. But to place all responsibilities upon them is wrong too. If they gave us handicaps, they also gave us their courage, their obstinacy, their sacrifices, their moments of strength. We cannot forever await from them the sanction to mature, to impose on them our own truths, to resist or perhaps defeat them in our necessity to gain strength.
We cannot always place responsibility outside of ourselves, on parents, nations, the world, society, race, religion. Long ago it was the gods. If we accepted a part of this responsibility we would simultaneously discover our strength. A handicap is not permanent. We are permitted all the fluctuations, metamorphoses which we all so well understand in our scientific studies of psychology.
Character has ceased to be a mystery and we can no longer refuse our responsibility with the excuse that this is an unformed, chaotic, eyeless, unpredictable force which drives, tosses, bre
aks us at will.
Claude Fredericks I never had time to describe. He was an enthusiastic and loving friend, spontaneous and generous. He worked with us at the Gemor Press, to learn printing, and then set up his own press, the Banyon Press, and published a few books before going to Italy. He was a friend with whom one could exchange confidences. He writes a diary. I read some pages of it. His descriptions of sexuality are very specific and he may not be able to publish it.
We argued about Nightwood. He prefers Anna Karenina."It has more scope." But I answered that scope was not as important as depth.
Everyone speaks of scope, but what they mean is a bigger screen, more people, and they do not realize that in this there is no hope of knowing human beings. Masses make human beings anonymous and one-dimensional.
Claude presents to the world an Oriental-cast face, but if you seek to know him, he also presents the Oriental smile, a reflection of yours, a sympathy which is ever present, like a supreme act of politeness, an opinion which at the slightest opposition vanishes. He is difficult to know because he offers you only his charm and thoughtfulness.
He was the born confidant, the shadowy friend, the evasive supporter. What you assert he does not deny. In a sense he acts out feminine attributes in relationships, he yields, he consoles, he sustains. He is the felt in the bedroom slipper, the storm strips on the wintry windows, the wool lining back of piano keys, the interlining in conversations, the shock absorber on the springs of cars, the lightning conductor. He is the invisible man. When he worked at the press with us, and Gonzalo's anarchism, erratic hours, caused us so much anguish and extra work, he was the receptive ear, the devoted helper. In his diary he asserted his physical hungers and fulfillments. But I have yet to know this enigmatic friend.