Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5

by Anais Nin

  Letter to Anne and Max Geismar:

  Your escapist number one, Doctor of Philosophy of Escape, Bachelor of Art of Escape, Bachelor of the Science of Escape, Master of all Escape Territories, is writing you while driving at seventy-five miles an hour through Mexico. "When one is hurt one travels as far as possible from the hurt," wrote a writer nobody reads ("Child Born out of the Fog," in Under a Glass Belt), a writer we know too well and other people not well enough. Purple cactus, mountains shaped like Aztec temples, and children who think a Woolworth toy a supreme delight, all this and the contemplation of different kinds of troubles; such as droughts, or one's best cow killed by a foreigner's car, fevers, malaria from the lagoons, cataracts even in children, poverty; the hard rubbing of clothes in a cold river to achieve whiteness, the pride in whiteness which gives such arduous labor, destroys the validity of our sorrows. Why did the ancient artists not care about recognition and accept anonymity. Probably because they believed in celestial rewards, and we don't. I have come to learn their secret, and to learn to extirpate the ego, which is unknown here. Climate unfavorable. There are no egos. There is no respect for achievement, only for charm, wit, and other perishable products. Words are used for songs and courtship. Of course, one does not get cured immediately. While waving back at field workers, contorting with children and emptying a trunk full of toys and oranges (the children lack vitamins) while awed by the work of the architects, I have written twenty pages of a new book. One consolation: that if I had lived in the time when men built Chichén-Itzá, I would have loaned my braided hair to the hauling of the stones. I would have painted unsigned murals, written unsigned charters, but what do we have that we could thus give ourselves to, that would engage our gifts, and our giving of these skills? We do not have fiestas in the streets, religious or pagan, we do not sing to each other, or court young women with poetry....

  I was still feeling weak when I was faced with the sharp ascent of the pyramid. The stones are placed so that the step you take is twice as high as for our ordinary stairs. But the beauty of this ascent, pyramiding in a point toward the sky, I could not forfeit, and I climbed it. At the top, the vista of the Mayan city was dazzling—the dome of the building in which they studied astrology, the courts in which they had their athletic games, the pools, the arcades, the sculptures, the huge stone snakes guarding the entrances, the slab on which the human sacrifices took place, the well from which so many treasures had been stolen by archaeologists, now lying in some university museum. Fallen statues not yet reconstructed, fallen columns lying half imbedded in moss, statues covered by climbing vines, stolen at night and taken to other countries. Nearer to the sky, and, because of the space, the symmetry, the proportions, nearer to the sky than one feels from the Empire State Building.

  Two books which I loved and read during the trip: Sullivan's Beethoven and Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow. Two extremes, not only musically, but philosophically. One, supreme awareness and gaining altitude by suffering. The second, forgetfulness and gaining altitude by moments of fever, ecstasy. The first defines the role of art. The second the role of opium, drugs, musical jags.

  Regaining altitude after the episode at the hospital, helped by those two books and by the sight of Chichén-Itzá, the Mayan city.

  Climbing the pyramids with fevers and chills, but climbing, away and upward. Wrote a little in the car until fatigue and the strain of traveling silenced me.

  From Yucatán through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec toward the Pacific Ocean. How strange it was to drive through the jungle, on our way to Tehuantepec, knowing that for six hours there would be no villages, no gasoline, no water. The top was down. We could see the trees with their tops interlacing, the ferns, the same parasitic lianas hanging from them like tattered lace. The air was tinted green from so much foliage, the sun could not penetrate except in shafts now and then. The smells were pungent, like a mass of odorous herbs pressed together, damp, exhaling strong vapors. Now and then we met two or three men on horseback, in white suits and immense hats, carrying their machetes like swords. They were hacking wood or seeking mushrooms, I don't know. They watched us pass with somber eyes, neither hostile nor friendly. One group waved us to stop, and asked us to take a boy who was about eleven or twelve back with us because he was getting tired. The boy was frightened of us and would not sit next to me. He settled on the back of the car, holding on to the spare tire. After a while he jumped off. We fear the jungle and the unknown, and never think of how they fear us. It was a dirt road. Aside from the men with their machetes we did not see anyone.

  But the arrival at Tehuantepec was like entering a Gauguin world. Flowers, vines, rivers, and in the shallow rivers, nude women bathing. Women and children. We would have liked pictures of them but knew their hostility to photography. We went to the hotel, the usual rambling house with a patio, tile floors, and I had to beg for a room because I was exhausted by the six-hour drive.

  But after an hour's rest we were out again, walking through the market. The same women who had bathed nude objected to my off-the-shoulder cotton dress and spoke of American lack of modesty. They were astoundingly beautiful women, six feet tall, often with hair touching their feet. They were dressed in long velvet dresses, with embroidered vests and lace coiffures (the baby's baptism dress they found on the shore from a shipwreck they turned into a headdress). They weave cotton of vivid colors into their braids. Dressed like queens at the Elizabethan court they sell their wares at the market. They wear their fortunes around their necks in the form of Spanish gold pieces strung together. They run not only the market but real estate and everything else. The men are five feet tall. They sit around in cafés, they play the guitar and sing. The legend is that the women came from elsewhere, having lost their men in a war. They look more like luxurious gypsies. They are physically unlike the rest of Mexican women, who are small and delicately boned, with small feet and hands.

  The market was a feast for the eyes. Fruit and vegetables arranged in beautiful designs, like an abstract painting. Ribbons and colored wool and colored textiles hanging in the breeze like pennants. Big cauldrons of odorous stews cooking over braziers. Pottery of all kinds, water jugs in beautiful, graceful shapes, and also at times humorous, in the shape of a fat-bellied man or a woman with breasts or the whole curved jar painted like a woman's face.

  The women sit on straw chairs combing each other's incredible hair. The mantle of Godiva is eclipsed by the dark raven hair with blue shadows in it.

  A wedding couple passed, the woman tall and proud (for their carriage is noticeably proud), the man smaller and relaxed.

  The legend tells, of course, that many strangers who wandered into the region were seduced by the beauty of the women, by a life of ease, and remained there.

  They rebelled against photography and did not hesitate to throw pottery at the photographer.

  The flowers were like the women, vigorous and colorful, and seemed arranged in baskets as if they would never wither. The perfume of jasmine and magnolia was overpowering.

  [Summer, 1953]

  New York.

  A martini makes an ordinary glass shine like a diamond at a coronation, makes an iron bed in Mexico seem like the feather bed of a sultan, a hotel room like the terminus and climax of all voyages, the pinnacle of contentment, the place of repose in an altitude hungered for by all the restless ones.

  Create space and order in the house. It is very important. It is like the empty room of the Japanese, ideal for the gestations of the imagination and inner visions. Uncluttered. Our clutter interferes with freedom of thought. Air and lightness.

  Costume in New York is a white wool coat, a white dress, a white hat with two slim abstract birds in flight. A painter asked me: "Aren't you afraid the birds will fly away?"

  "No, I always fly off first and they follow me."

  Parties. Exhibitions.

  You dream of the evening and of what it will bring at twilight, it is the hour I love best and which always saddens me. You
cease the day's efforts, you recline, you bathe, you dress for some event. I love bridges best of all, planes, taxis, the diaries, the hour of dress, the in-between hours, the only moment when I exist alone.

  Lila and I went to see Camino Real. We did not like it. It vulgarizes fantasy, it is a caricature of love.

  Jim and I carry on a rapid-fire language of our own. His new novel, Blue Denim, is well done, firm, like a James Cain. But in his diary he transcends the direct action and produces what I call the equivalent of jazz in writing. He has rhythm and flashes of insight. The danger for him is one I cannot help him with, it is undetectable, it cannot be combated, even defined: the danger of the cliché. How does one evade it? By a knowledge of literature which Jim does not care to explore. He accepts the cliché. It seems, it appears, deceptively to be a universal language, but actually it is the disguise, it is the mask, it is the false language. It conveys nothing.

  On days of anxiety he looks pale, rigid, frozen.

  The most tragic moment in human relationships is when we are given to see, accidentally, by a revealing word, or a moment of crisis, the image which the other carries within himself of us, and we catch a glimpse of a stranger, or a caricature of ourselves, or an aspect of our worst self aggrandized, larger than nature, or a total distortion.

  What most people do not understand is that there are escapes and flights which are constructive. There are those who, in self-defense, build a shell as they advance in experience. There are others who, instead of building a shell, take flights, find other forms of life, other richer places and people and return consoled and strengthened. The Geismars do not understand this. I do not like the crustacean type of human being.

  I found Under Milk Wood childish, village gossip in nursery rhymes, pub humor, beer fumes, and Dylan Thomas himself looks like an overgrown baby.

  I suggested to Brigitte Tishnar, who works for Vogue, a series of articles on women's dress according to various writers. No response.

  I met Harold Norse, a poet who has great emotional power in a beautiful, disciplined form.

  I saw an astonishing film, Strange Decision, by Curzio Malaparte. The disappearance of beautiful or stunning films causes me anxiety. Where do they go? They pass too quickly, and where are they buried?

  Peggy Glanville-Hicks: she appears frail and small, but sharp and incisive bodily too, with a presence full of nervous energy and nervous fire like a bird. As she talks her focus is impeccable, her language subtle. Quick-witted and graceful. It was enchanting to find someone with such a luminous structure, a complete inner city of definite values. Living and feeling only from a core. Illuminations on music, on Paul Bowles (they were born on the same day and she has felt a twinship with him throughout her life). She made me regret the incident which estranged me from Paul Bowles. It happened when his wife Jane brought out her first book [Two Serious Ladies]. I remember I was so distressed by the tightness, the involuted quality, the constricted, coiling inward (not into an infinite interior but a tight one) that I wrote her a careful, gentle, warm letter warning her of the danger of constriction for a writer, and she took it as a condemnation (a wrong interpretation). She asserted it was that letter which arrested her writing. Knowing how tenderly I handle writers, I knew my letter could not have been harmful. The difficulties were in herself.

  Peggy thinks I have explored new territory. She was convinced I had described Paul Bowles at seventeen in Children of the Albatross. That is how she saw him.

  Visit to Max and Anne Geismar is another atmosphere. More earthy. A house in the country. Children. Dogs. A garden. Earth and mind. But no aesthetics. Max is laborious, Anne vital, small, assertive, but with a humor made of thrusts, an honesty like a child's, but satirical. Max is modest, self-effacing, and not as famous as he should be. Even though I do not see writers as he does (only historically and politically), he is still solid and sincere. Though we disagree on every subject, we respect and like each other. Anne's humor is a kind of courage. Max is warm and gentle. He is not contemporary, and certainly has no perception of future writing. He is moving backward into history.

  I saw Anne's face on the Mayan sculptures; the Mayans are said to be the long-lost Hebrew tribe. Max's and Anne's humor converts their anxieties. They belong to a period of the thirties I did not know, because I was in Paris. Max was encouraged by Edmund Wilson when he was a young writer. They were friends of Max Lerner, of the left intellectual group around The Nation. When he writes about young writers he either does not know what to say, or he is destructive.

  I have to face that I relate to my friends in a partial way. I observe, notice, enjoy what I love, and leave other aspects of them alone. I turn away, and what I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship? I seek the love so eagerly that I don't want to see what might interfere with it. I am ashamed of that. It does not seem like loving enough; I should include all of the person. It is my major flaw.

  Illusion. First there is the illusion of perfect accord, then revelation by experience of the many differences, and then I come upon a crossroad, and unless there is a definite betrayal, I finally accept the complete person.

  During a country weekend, the host got dressed in the costume of a country gentleman, red shirt and shorts, and offered his legs to the sun's promiscuous rays. However, the sun is more selective than we think, there are some legs it frowns upon, and does not tan with graciousness. Those are the legs of the people we do not happen to desire....

  Double exposures, all during this month, with images blurred and running into one another. I started to copy original diaries, which meant several trips to the Pasadena bank vault, a hurried one-day trip to San Francisco to bring back half of the originals I had left in Ruth Witt Diamant's cellar, trips to Bekins Storage, Arcadia, where I kept the typed copies. It meant renumbering them, rechecking dates (there was an error). It meant copying the volume of life in Paris, the detachment from Henry, the meeting with Gonzalo. It also contained the trip to Morocco and Spain. First of all these images as they appeared upon the images of life in Sierra Madre created strange superimpositions. The description of Morocco, pure images, without political undercurrents, the poem and the music and the realism of its life. This floating world of beauty, mystery underscored by the harsh nasal voices of the radio commentators: "New riots in Morocco. Thirty persons killed. Arabs kill Jews and French inhabitants." And in the newspapers, only images of the dead and wounded lying in the streets.

  Henry, in volume fifty, is concerned with age, certainly unreasonable, irrational, when twenty years later he has married a thirty-year-old actress and is obviously a satisfactory lover still. He was fading only in his own heart and body. A phase. And twenty years later he writes me: "I am writing about Moricand [A Devil in Paradise]. Do you remember the name of the restaurant on the way to the Porte d'Orléans, on the right, where I first met him? And who was the friend he talked so much about, not Blaise Cendrars—the other?"

  Café Zeyer, Max Jacob. It reminded me of Proust's visits to ascertain the kind of flowers Mrs. X wore on her hat ten years before at a party. He even wanted to see the hat.

  So while we correspond about Moricand I copy feverish pages about Gonzalo. Gonzalo was like a volcano on fire. This dark, fervent Gonzalo casts no shadow over the present. Fire consumes itself and all it touches.

  Curtis Harrington has a new job with Columbia Studios. He wants to recommend books and plays. I suggest Jim's play and Simenon, whose adventure books would make the most marvelous films. His books on Tahiti, on Africa, on South America.

  Curtis also wanted to recommend me to work on an adaptation of Marcel Proust's work. He arranged an interview with Jerry Wald. The room was invaded with books. They lay in pyramids on the floor. Little white papers stuck out of them, usually near the beginning. I had a feeling none had been read completely. There was a secretary who taped our talk.

  His questions, my answers, and the careful way they were being recorded made me uneasy. I had a feeling I was being exploit
ed, my suggestions, ideas, references to recent books. There was talk also about Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland, about my translating it and helping with the script. I love the book and felt it would be safer in my hands. But the way Jerry Wald talked, and his constant repetition of "you can't go wrong on the classics" astonished me. The books became merchandise.

  Curtis suggested I get an option on one of Simenon's books. I wrote to his wife. I received a curt reply that only agents were given options.

  That ended my working for Jerry Wald.

  I often baby-sit for the three little Campion girls. They are delightful children, full of playfulness and fantasies.

  I love the Campion family, I love Millicent, and yet I will never write about them because I love them as human beings only, they do not belong in the territories I am keen on exploring. The artist submits himself to adventures into the irrational. He is merely another type of adventurer. He does not climb Annapurna, but he risks both his human life and loss of reason or health as the mystics did who withdrew from the world to pursue a vision. The hells traversed by the artist most human beings are unwilling to traverse. When Jim accepts the demonic journey, he becomes more interesting to me, more interesting to write about.