Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5

by Anais Nin

  He closed his eyes, he was about to weep. I smiled. I let him spill his drink on my dress. I did not dare desert him because I feel such sympathy for the unloved. I knew the world he moved in, where beauty is a requisite, the ever adolescent, ever romantic life. So I let him remain adhesive and talk:

  "Franklin, the boy on your left, is the cleverest, the most intuitive of all of us. He is a genius, and if Genêt had known him would have recognized him as such. Franklin lived with Harold in Chicago, and I know he looks like a priest, but he was full of hidden cruelties. You can see Franklin's eyes are cold and murderous as I talk to you. Isn't there sadism in all of us? Surely it is not unknown to you. You have read Proust, the most sensitive, not devoid of cruelty, it is all around us, I am the only one who seems to love without cruelty; but then everyone is cruel to me. I can see you are getting restless...." He was swaying, almost falling over me.

  "Décolle toi,"said Franklin. "I want to talk with Anaïs about Baldwin."

  David reproached me: "Why is it as soon as you tell a person you will love them for life they run away?"

  It was true I felt enmeshed in his drunken world and sought escape.

  Franklin helped in a cruel way: "You bore her." I wandered to the kitchen and talked with Pepe Zayas, whose paintings hang on the walls. "When the critics and people tell me my painting is good, I do not believe them. I feel they all conspire to encourage me, because they love me." (Persecution mania in reverse!) "You were the first one to awaken me in Black Mountain College and I feel now that just as I gave up writing after getting two stories published, I will stop painting too, even though I received good criticisms and sold paintings in Italy. Whatever happens, do not give me up."

  After I left, Stanley read to them from Children of the Albatross.

  You live in a certain world for a little while, you dramatize your adventures in it, and this world continues an existence of its own and you can never become completely detached from it because it returns to claim you, as the past returns even after your love of it, your illusion about it, no longer exists.

  Carter Harman is now music critic of Time Magazine, composer of ballets.

  Charles Rollo, intelligent and quick-witted but not deep. He has written delicately about the early books. But has reservations about Spy in the House of Love. Maxwell Geismar flares up with enthusiasm, over the telephone. Victor Weybright is still irritated by the character of the lie detector and offers me a thousand-dollar advance provided I remove him from the book.

  I see friends from New Orleans, friends on their way to England.

  Jim Herlihy asks me to look for black silk sheets, the latest in erotic decor.

  I see Wilfredo Lam, Negro-Chinese Cuban painter, protégé of Picasso. He is plaintive, anxious to sell paintings. In talk he elaborates intellectual constructions and all his cohabitations take place in space, not on a level of human gravity. He wants to shine with meteoric lights. As a human being, he stands like a Giacometti statue, abstract and distilled, in violent contrast to Teddy Brown, the Negro dancer of seventeen who says all he has to say with dancing, whose body is charged with electric fireworks, a magnificent agitation of a million particles and cells. Every Negro who imitates our abstract mental language serves to betray its absurdity, and exposes its weakness by caricature. Unconsciously, Wilfredo Lam presents us with an intelligent burlesque of our theories of art, concepts of living, mathematics of emotion, and analysis of passion. The formulas and the empty jargon. He cannot dance. He is the modern painter of white ghostly puzzles, subjected to our dissociative forces.

  "Did you see Madame Bouverie? Will she buy a painting?" Alice Paalen, meanwhile, looks worn and thin, a secret sorrow undermining her.

  I read from Spy in the House of Love at Circle in the Square.

  The danger of poetry, said Maxwell Geismar, is the risk of incomprehension.

  I see the lighting effects of Rollo Williams, using electronics to change the tones and scales of lighting. I see Head Hunters of the Jungle, a strong film. I see the painting exhibition of Alice, full of mystery always, mystical, occult. Her cats are like Egyptian cats, like fates, or diviners.

  There is a very real, very opaque silence around my work. Charles Rollo once praised Four-Chambered Heart and now tells me there are no good novels being written.

  Victor Weybright is still not sure about Spy. He wavers, and Arabel Porter takes care to make his judgment negative by passing a moral judgment on Sabina.

  Saw Tennessee Williams with Oliver Evans.

  An evening with Stanley and Woody.

  I feel a new kind of sparkle, not the poetic one of earlier years, the fireworks which strew ashes, but the sparkle you achieve when you conquer anxiety.

  Paolo Milano, a great natural comic (introduced Dante in a Viking Press edition). I finally pry the secret underlying his buffooneries: his hidden, secret writings. We quarrel in a friendly way. He does not believe in the poetic novel.

  Jim's novel given to a publisher. I mail Geismar's book to Mondadori.

  Under a Glass Bell is translated into Italian.

  Twenty-five years late America is discovering surrealism, its vitality.

  Rejection of Spy in the House of Love by Harper Brothers. Mr. Simon Michael Bessie feels the material is more adapted to poetry than prose. Macmillan said it was esoteric.

  I have telescoped the outer and inner reality into a special poetic phraseology, always a phrase that has a double meaning. There is a transmutation. The external and inner become one. You are a spy in the house of lov?. a cape is also the flag of adventure, a dress is becalmed, as feelings are, it is more than a symbol, it is the integration of the two into one. Meaning within the object, contained in the object, suggested by the object. Anyway, whatever it is, they do not like it. They won't defend it, or situate it or give me my place in literature. Considering total abdication, I weep in the restaurant.

  A deep sense of loss, the loss of a beautiful language painstakingly elaborated, a language I evolved which contains the meaning as well as the aspect. Sitting in a Greek restaurant the image of myself giving up a writing nobody wants appears like a vast fracture of diamonds sinking into the sea. A great loss, I honestly believe that.

  There are precious words (yes, I know, the word precious today is an insult) which have taken many of us a lifetime to infuse with irreplaceable meanings. No one else can do what I have done, I know that, because it took a spiritual vision allied to sensuality to clothe in flesh such deep meanings, and it took a life in hell and many lives of painful explorations, and it took even a dangerous sojourn in the world of madness and the capacity to return to tell what I have told. Centuries of civilization too, it took birth, tradition, it took my freedom from economic slavery, which gave me my integrity, it took a body to live it all out, a soul willing to burn the dross.

  I wept over the Negro problem in Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, and wondered once more at the people who sacrifice their human life to create a constant proof of the eternal for other men, proofs of the existence of the spirit, cathedrals, pyramids, works of art, saintly lives.

  An adolescent culture shows the adolescent incapacity to admire, to respect, or to evaluate.

  I have raged at the wall growing denser between myself and others. I do not want to be exiled, alone, cut off. I wept at being isolated, at the blockade of the publishers. But then 1 began to ask myself how much I was responsible for; the expectation of miraculous understanding was childlike.

  I chose poetry and the metaphor not for the love of mystery or elusiveness but because that comes closer to the way we experience things deep down. Explicitness and directness cannot be applied to our psychic life. They are not subtle enough.

  What we cannot see within ourselves, what we cannot seize within ourselves we project outside. A great part of our life is an invention to avoid confrontation with our deepest self. So I cannot make Sabina aware of her own anxieties and guilts because that would be untrue.

  For
myself, I seek the inner knowledge, I struggle with Dr. Bogner not to see America as a symbol, or France as a generalization. But this is a long, arduous quest for self-revelation which few would persist in. For example, it is not America itself I am in conflict with, but the country to which I was brought against my will and which separates me abysmally from my father's values, even by way of language.

  In myself I have struggled constantly to bring the two selves together, the direct human one of the diary and the poet who sees that we live by mythologies. As the mythologies dissolve, they harmonize. I see both the drama of what America symbolized (the surrender of my European cultural values), which would make reconciliation impossible, and the outside America I am discovering apart from that.

  With life in the West, I come closer to the heart of America, not to its industrial dehumanization but its human way of life.

  But I cannot make Sabina aware of her guilt. It would be false. I first saw this displacement onto others in June. June lived by displacement. One could never touch upon the center, because she did not create one.

  It would be funny if out of my struggle with America's total lack of imagination (even in science fiction they can only conceive of technology, instruments, and in a film I just saw, they fly to the moon, but once there, cannot imagine anything happening, and they can only suggest hurrying back home to earth because of a possible fuel shortage!) what they would finally accept is the Spanish realist of the birth story. But they didn't. Giraudoux's Madwoman of Chaillot was a failure; they attack Ralph Ellison's marvelous symbolic passages, Truman Capote's fantasy and poetry.

  Very proud of Jim's diary pages, a description of the party and one of a quarrel with a friend. Insight, power of feeling, and exactness. This came through his own willingness to suffer, his energy to struggle, to dig, to search. He absorbed pages from my diary and nourished himself on them, and he broke through the slick surface of his public writing and entered a rich world in which his intuition and articulateness came from the depths. His description of the party was sharper than mine. And when lie was in the center of hell, almost driven out of his mind, I said write, write, write, write. I did not refuse him sympathy (he had agreed walking out was not good, each time he decided to walk out he had monstrous nightmares), but I incited him to write. And he did. And he learned to calm himself, he learned to objectify through art.

  Today I teased him. I told him these pages were the best he had done (but they could only be done in the secret womb of the diary, the only laboratory of the truth) where insight, power, and economy were all fulfilled. But he will not use this dimension in his public writing. He had a description of his grandmother in his diary, rocking back and forth in her rocking chair, while he saw the multiple railroad lines which had crossed and recrossed the town where she had been born, changing it from farm to city, all in the duration of one lifelong rocking.

  He always has a virile rhythm, but it is sometimes on the surface. The moment he broke through the surface in the diary, I knew he could do deeper writing.

  Jim's anxieties compel him to do all things more deftly than anyone, to erase all possible traces of doubts, ignorance, fear of failure, bewilderment. Dexterity becomes a style, a form, an organic structure.

  ***

  I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship; it was refused.

  PROJECT:

  One half of this project has already been accomplished in three published novels:Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart. The second half and termination of this cycle is what I wish to work on with the help of the Fellowship.

  The three first volumes cover a depiction of the contemporary neurosis in novel form. The next three volumes will cover what I consider a philosophic demonstration of the understanding and mastering of the neurosis. In other words, a guidance under the form of fiction, the way out of the labyrinth of what the poet Auden calls The Age of Anxiety.

  My contention is that very few people have been able to obtain help from psychoanalysis, but many more can develop an understanding from the reading of my novels. This has already been proved by the keen interest of students in all the universities. I have not only been invited to lecture on the modern novel, on my own work in particular, but after the lectures I have been questioned for hours on intimate psychological problems which concerned the students.

  I am well equipped to carry out this project by training in psychoanalysis at the Cité Universitaire in Paris under Doctor Otto Rank (1935–1936) and a year of practice in New York under Doctor Rank's control.

  This project will take me only a year as I have all my material ready, my notes, outlines, and character sketches from a life-long diary.

  I sincerely believe my work is a contribution to a psychological understanding of the character and experience of our time.

  I believe that while we refuse to organize the inner confusions we will never have an objective understanding of what is happening outside. In this project the relationship between the state of the world and the inner psychological conflicts is proved. Until this inner confusion of values and insights is clarified we will not be able to evaluate historically, and consequently we will be incapacitated for action.

  For a more detailed description of my intentions and attitudes toward writing and the work I am engaged upon I am enclosing my lecture on Writing published the tint time by Dartmouth College.

  This writing I can do anywhere, and with the help of the Foundation I will be able to give my full time to it.

  Then I see Lila, always either in hell or walking out of hell, but unable to remain in any realm between. She has an ulcer, one more broken relationship, cannot write.

  It was Lila's story about feeling watched by a detective which inspired the character of the lie detector in A Spy in the House of Love. She told me that her father set a detective on the track of her sister when her sister ran away from school, and that she believed he had done the same to spy on her activities in New York. She told me she had seen him in the subway, or standing at the corner of the street where she lived, reading a paper, waiting. She saw him everywhere, at restaurants, night clubs, movie houses. She asserted that he followed her and made notes in a little notebook.

  Her father was a very important figure to her. He loved her possessively and wanted her home. When he became seriously ill and she visited him she asked him if he had employed detectives to spy on her. He was shocked at the idea, and his denial seemed so sincere that Lila never knew if the detective was genuine or a fantasy on her part, born of the knowledge that he had once done this to her sister.

  Sometimes I monologue on other writers: they never leave the ground; they don't know how to be the aviators of language, the air force of air-born words, the air squadrons of semantics; they cannot play with words and let them loose. I was reminded the other night of Henry's power in this realm of surrealist levitation. He who was immersed in earth knew how to fly above it.

  Jim expects this of me so inexorably that he is sensitive to the times I fly too low, when I get caught in trivia, when I get earth-bound, when I am trapped in duties, suppressed or oppressed.

  Dream: I am going to give a lecture and am reading. I have worked very hard on my lecture. It is written exquisitely in French. Then just as I am about to face my audience, I realize they do not know French. I try to translate the lecture as well as I can.

  I left out the introduction to the dream. A huge tarantula, hairy, hanging on a thread from the ceiling, was moving toward my face. I killed it. It fell on the floor, burst, and shed black seeds like those of a watermelon.

  The monsters I have dreamed recently, giant snakes, leeches, tarantulas, are my feeling about the reviewers, the critics, the people who have derided my work. They represent the dangers I incurred when I decided to expose my work to their criticism.

  Return to France, impossible. I dream of it. (In my dream I write my lecture in French.)

  Talk with Dr. Bogner. "The fraternal life I led with othe
r writers in France is not possible here."

  "Why?" asked Dr. Bogner.

  "I am not sure. I did make many efforts to live with the artists here. I know them all. But it was not the same. When we tried to meet at a café on East Thirteenth Street, [Stuart] Davis, the painter, turned on a loud radio to listen to a prize fight in place of talking together. The fraternity is destroyed by competitiveness. The pressure from the outer world is greater. The pressure of economics, the problems of living. In France the problems were reduced by the fact that everyone helped the artist, the climate helped, there was no puritan censorship of the artist's life, there was no political pressure, there was individual freedom. Varda is the only artist I know leading a free life today. He has reduced his needs. He only needs to teach once a week. The rest of the time visitors buy a collage now and then. He has no jealousy, envy, or competitiveness. I find in American life an excess of harshness, criticism, little capacity for admiration."

  Jim teased me about my animal dreams. He said they were not original. He said they were borrowed from a woman in Pasadena who dreamed of a very black snake sitting on a rocking chair in front of the fireplace with a bonnet tied under its chinlessness. And in the dream she reflected: "Well, all is well as long as it does not run wild around the housel"

  "Pardon me," I said in an offended tone, "if I'm going to lift anybody's dreams I insist on choosing the quality. That's a puritan's dream. If I'm going to steal others' dreams I'll steal yours."