by Anais Nin
Met two remarkable taxi drivers. One a very slender, youthful but gray-haired man who said: "I am very thankful to have a passenger who adorns my new cab."
Surprised by his language, I made him talk. He was captain of a ship during the war, but his career meant separation from his wife and he preferred happiness and freedom. He intended to own a fleet of taxis and at the age of sixty to retire and write a book about his life and the people he met.
I suggested he start writing his book now, as he worked. I said we must fulfill ourselves in the present and that he would be happier in his taxi-driving work if he also accomplished his literary ambition. I complimented him on his literary language.
The other was a magnificent old man of eighty-two, with a weathered red face, fat and jolly. He told me that he drove a taxi in the winter and a horse and carriage in the summer. He was one of the oldest of the Central Park carriage drivers. He had adapted to modern life. But he was happiest in summer: "I miss the smell of the trees, of the grass and of my horse."
At the Public Library at Forty-second Street I saw the room of manuscripts. It looked like a jail cell. It was locked, and not only locked but it had a heavy iron-grille door like that of a prison. It was more terrible to me, this burying of manuscripts, than the burial of a body in the earth. Perhaps because I have been tormented by the ethical conflict of the diary. Should I destroy it for the sake of human beings it might wound, or keep it because it has value for human beings. I received my life from books. So I would be killing a life-giving creation, to save a few from the truth. But who saved me from the truth? No one ever spared me that. The world needs the truth. No matter how painful. Because when people bury the truth it festers. The grilled, locked room of the Public Library is also the tomb in which we lock the dangerous truths.
I cannot imagine my diaries there. Read in gloom and darkness, not in the sun and by the sea.
Letter to a writer who asked: "Why does one write?"
Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me: the world of my parents, the world of Henry Miller, the world of Gonzalo, or the world of wars. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and re-create myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it, he hopes to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.
We also write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don't write I feel my world shrinking, I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.
I enjoy breakfast, the morning light on a church steeple, or on a modern building which looks Grecian against the sky.
I arrived in New York in a black coat and black dress. I left in a white coat and white dress.
[Spring, 1954]
Spent twenty days in Acapulco.
Never has a period of my life seemed more like a dream, a dream in which I wept with joy. Acapulco is the place where my body and spirit are at peace. Everything contributes to its dreamlike atmosphere.
The drive from Mexico City on Sunday. Cuernavaca was festive, it was overflowing with visitors, the cafés were crowded and animated. The Mexicans, when not at work, dress as for a fiesta. There is always a fiesta, always something to celebrate, a saint or a revolution. Ribbons, red and yellow, in the black hair. Starched white dresses, red, green, yellow, purple, or light-blue ones. The little girls with short black hair and bangs wear butterfly bows of satin in bright colors, the same butterfly bow that as a child in Cuba I was so eager to have tied so it would stand like a butterfly about to take off.
A heavy rainfall came suddenly and drenched us, and everybody scattered, laughing at the rain.
The drive to Acapulco is harsh and difficult. The new road is not yet ready and the old one torn up. We drove over rocks, through clouds of dust, through dry riverbeds, new tar and gravel. In spite of this the sight of Acapulco around the bend of the road, from the top of the mountain, is like a mirage long desired. No place in the world where the mountains, rocks are so awesome, the vegetation so abundant and fecund, the air so soft and caressing, the people so human and natural. No need of painters to paint a world, no need but of eyes to see. The dresses of the women blend in colors with the flowers and the fruit. Their dark hair is adorned with ribbons and colored wool. Their hair is glossy, their teeth dazzling.
After the heat and thirst and weariness, Acapulco in the sunset seems like a balm; it enters the blood like a drug after one inhalation of the scent of flowers, one glimpse of the bay iridescent like silk, the sunset like the inside of a shell, so much like the flesh of Venus. The coconut palm with its naked elegance which makes other trees seem fussy like a woman with over-curly hair, gossipy and chattery. The palm with its stylized body, lean and pliant, nude, throwing all its adornment into one luxuriant head of hair of plunging feathers and plumes which sweep the sky gently.
The poets of India were always comparing palm trees and women. A child can draw a palm tree easily, a sensuous feather duster ever dusting a tropical sky of clouds and mists and keeping it brilliant day and night.
At the hotel we ask for ice and remember that impatience is a major faux pas in Mexico, a breach of taste, a futile gesture too, which is inevitably frustrated by the Mexican, just as tyranny is resisted by other races. It awakens the most solid resistance. It is the major sin against timelessness. How dare we enslave men and women to clock time, to seconds, minutes, hours, when they have succeeded in eluding time, in living in the moment at a natural rhythm.
I learned this from an old photographer on the beach. There are several very old men carrying old-fashioned cameras covered by a black cloth. They take a photograph which they develop on the spot. This particular old man was very beautiful. The wrinkles had not changed the lean shape of his head and his smile was as open as an adolescent's. The friends we wanted to group together took a long time to gather themselves in one spot. I was pressing them for the old man's sake. As he watched me shepherding them, saying: "The old man is waiting," he said to me with a full smile: "No se apure, no se apure. Hay mas tiempo que vida." There is more time than life. There is time. Time and timelessness.
Our days are spent at the beach, swimming, and our evenings, dancing.
Awakening is slow, breakfast is slow, the beach is slow to awaken.
From swimming to eating to dancing.La Ronde, la ronde of Max Ophul's film, a series of love affairs circling, interweaving, cycles without a break.La ronde of body rhythms. Wild waves at Revolcadero. Wind which makes you feel like a sail, or a bird. You forget your feet. Suntanning. The sea is warm like a womb. How soft the night, and music is the net which catches all the acrobatics of love, of dre
aming, idleness, pleasure, so we are never allowed to drop to the ground.
The gentleness of the Mexican voices dissolve one with trust: gentleness exists. From the songs I am carried by aerial musical notation to a harp being played while we eat on the square, to the marimbas, to the jukeboxes filled with Cuban mambos, to a street singer, to a night-club singer, and always to the sea, a sound of being washed, or being lulled while never more alive, drugged, yet never more alive, alive with the body only, warmth, sea, sun, all interwoven by the breathing of the sea linking dancers, swimmers in a rotation so sweet that I sit and weep with joy.
One night club is an African bamboo and palm-leaf hut on the beach. The tides wash your feet as you dance, the ancient Ondinean theme upon which mambos and American jazz play their accelerations of the pulse, in the same quickening of desire and completion which love-making practices upon our bodies.
Another night, at another hut high above the bay. The spotlight from the night club lights up a leafless jacaranda looming like a giant Japanese design against the dark purple mountain. The necklace of lights around the bay has a texture of velvet tonight. I weep with joy again, not only at the still, serene beauty but at the soft, tender breath of the tropical night so rich in tones, perfumes, and textures that it seems to caress you physically, to whisper to the cells of the body to match this voluptuous existence.
The way the waters of the bay lie, like a capricious bolt of silk unraveling its sinuous reflectiveness to light, sometimes reflecting, sometimes elusive, at times ruffled and contradictory, opposing green to the mountain's heavy violets, asserting turquoise obstinately against an overly orange sunset, or like tonight, asleep, having enfolded in itself all the colors of the day in the ineffable colors of sleep no painter can ever reproduce. My body photographed this night for the days of deprivation.
The first time I wept I thought: only the Latins and the Negroes are right. Happiness is in the physical life, and sorrow in thought. At least I can say I have possessed all physical life. But I wish I could devote myself to it, live only for it.
I envy the Mexican babies carried within a wide scarf around the mother's body. When I look into Mexican eyes I wish I had been born here, in the warmth and emotional richness of their nature, with feeling at the core.
That is why I wept. Because my hunger for this had been so often unsatisfied. And now the fullness of the gift melted me. This was my home, the home of beauty and feeling.
Los Angeles. A night at Zardi's to hear Shorty Rogers' Band. We are sitting at a table right beside the band, where we are drenched in the jazz that sparks from the trombone, the clarinet, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums. The subtle, the incredibly developed variations of these accomplished and dexterous players. The increasingly accelerated rhythm of the blood, the mounting ecstasy. I felt that next to the wild moment of passion, I loved this jazz, and then the sea, and then more music.
Jazz is the music of the body. I wish I could give back to the jazz musicians the joys they have given me. I feel jazz in my blood, in my nerves, in my flesh. I receive the drumming right on my body. I didn't say all this well enough in Spy in the House of Love. I have so much more to say. I can't catch up with all I know. I hope I will be given time. Sometimes when I think of death, I think merely that it would be too bad, for I have not yet yielded up all the treasures I have collected. The chemistry I am producing of turning experience into awareness is not yet finished.
The contrast this evening, sitting in the large hall of Cal Tech, listening to a Brahms quartet, the spiritual continuity, the eternal quality, the deeper layers of the soul and feeling. The jazz musicians are the Dionysian people, seeking fire and impulse and ecstasy from drugs. There is such a subtle way of metamorphosing one's life. Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth. The earth demands servitude from us, menial tasks, earthy tasks, every day, every hour, and only at this moment at which we discard the servitude and enter the world of the spirit through music or painting or writing are we free. It is the only genuine freedom. Once acquired it is deep and permanent.
In every book I have written I was faced with the painful conflict of protecting someone. How can I tell all without damage, betrayals, murders?
In jazz there are the volcanic explosions of the drums, the wails, the moans, the sensual vibrations, and above all, in bebop, the curious mystery of the withheld theme, known only to the jazz musician but kept a secret and then given to us in the variations, free associations, the peripheral explorations and improvisations.
This is so close to my own destiny. I too withhold the theme (diary) and play all the music permitted me to play outside of that.
For the novel with Mexican background I have created a character named Lillian Bey. She is the daughter of an American who lived and worked in Mexico. She was born in Mexico and was influenced by its warmth and expressiveness. Then at sixteen her father was sent back to the United States and she had to adapt to life in America. She was an excellent musician but hated concerning in a formal way and gradually drifted into night-club playing. Her engagements kept her traveling.
When I start the book she feels estranged from her husband and children, restless, and wants to be alone for a while to understand what is happening to her and whether this is a permanent estrangement.
She is caught between nature (and her nature) and the city, between life of the body and synthetic life, between nature and the distillations of art. Were the swamp, the lagoon, the jungle of Mexico less than Max Ernst's swamps, lagoons, jungles? Was the desert less than Yves Tanguy's deserts and its ruins less beautiful than Chirico's roofless and solitary columns?
So much to tell. Lillian leaves her husband, finds him again and relives the beginning of her marriage and her errors.
Lillian deserts her husband and children, but finds extensions of them in her voyage because our actions are not always in harmony with our psychic inner life, and in the sincerity of her quest for self and for others, she rediscovers her husband, the key to his behavior and the key to the reunion. I gave her some of my experiences in Mexico, but she, because of her pattern, interpreted them differently and learned different lessons from them.
The dirt floor in the huts, the crib hammocks hanging from the ceiling, and, as in Oriental homes, the minimum of possessions, one trunk of goods, one set of clothes, one shawl—this reduction appeared to Lillian a great simplification by poverty.
Discovery of her inability to be alone. First of all a feeling of desertion when people did not invite her, even when they were people she did not want to be with. Worse even when she forced herself and went out with a man who owned a stockyard in Chicago. She called him Mr. Spam.
I am writing about Lillian in Mexico while the musicians are playing chamber music. They are scientists from Cal Tech. The open cello case stands in the corner and looks like one of Henry Moore's sculptures.
I pursue my adventures in Mexico, and Lillian's adventures. When Paul Mathiesen came, he seemed too mystical, and Lillian feared he would destroy her carefree sensual mood. He was to her the pale dreamer, ill at ease in frivolity. She eluded him as she was eluding her own interior life, fearing he would guide her inward again and she wanted only the sun, the sea, and forgetfulness.
Dios ganas. Gonzalo used to explain that the word ganas meant "I feel like it, or I do not feel like it." The Peruvians ruled their lives by Dios ganas. And the Mexicans too. It was a fully justified attitude: you either felt like it or did not feel like it. No one questions the integrity of such decisions.
[May, 1954]
New York.
In Acapulco I did not remember. But the serpent which lay coiled awaiting the moment to inject his poison was patient. I knew its name. It was the need to write, the need to be a writer, the curse of it, the unrequited gift to the world. I knew what awaited me: the enormous, stark, harsh failure. The party at the British Book Center for Spy in the House of Love to which none of the invited critics c
ame. The puritanical, tight-lipped reviews.
America tried to kill me as a writer, with indifference, with insults. I can name the offenders. But they cannot kill the life and beauty of my writing, of my life, they can only strangle the books. Even Maxwell Geismar with his lukewarm words. And then the irony of his words over the telephone: "The book is so alive, so alive."
I answered: "Why didn't you say that in your review?"
"You have to remember who you are writing for."
The review of Spy in the House of Love[in The Nation] by Maxwell Geismar:
TEMPERAMENT VS. CONSCIENCE
Anaïs Nin is as well known to literary circles here and abroad as she has been little known to the general reading public. Her unpublished diary is something of a legend, and the present book is the best of her series of novels published in this country. The craft moves directly toward the area of psychological realism; the prose is a pleasure to read. This is, in short, a sensitive and discerning fable of a woman's love life, which manages to compress within a very brief compass some of the rewards and almost too many of the anguishes of passion for its own sake. It is almost a terrifying book—saved by the humor with which Miss Nin endows her theme, which raises it finally to the level of an artistic tragicomedy. The story concerns the amorous exploits of the heroine, Sabina, a veteran of these battles, pursued by her own guilt and fears, caught between her temperament and her conscience. In the symbolism of the narrative she is pursued by the "lie detector," a sort of F.B.I, of the heart. (This figure is an amusing mixture of psychoanalytic technique and conventional morality.) The heroine evades him, and we begin to realize that Miss Nin is one of the few women writers in our literary tradition to affirm the centrality of the biological impulses for her own sex, and on the same terms as for men. The point is that she is also prepared to describe these emotions from the feminine point of view with the same ruthless honesty that marked a D. H. Lawrence or a Dreiser. And what a price is paid by the protagonist—or the victim—of the present story for her moments of ecstasy and conquest! She must move on a superficial level of lies, tricks, evasions in each new case of love; the tactics of feminine deceit are all exposed here in a manual of love's subterfuges. On a deeper level of genuine affection she must still prepare to wound before she is wounded, to betray so that she may not be betrayed, to make her escape before the lover makes his. The price of impulse is eternal anxiety, Miss Nin implies. This spy, like all spies, must be prepared for treason, for flight, for ignoble death. The theme is dramatized in a series of separate episodes with rather shadowy masculine figures who operate mainly to project the various roles a woman also plays in love—or is forced to play. In the end Miss Nin's heroine turns for comfort and wisdom to another woman, Djuna, who has figured in the previous novels in the series. Friendship is the solace for passion, perhaps, as art is the crystallization of imperfect human desire.