by Anais Nin
An evening with our neighbor Forest Rangers. The little American room, like a motel room, impersonal, barren. The innocuous books handed out by the Book of the Month Club, the absence of paintings, the functional home and the maintenance talk, about gardening, plumbing problems, community trash problems, dumping, smog, incinerators.
The people around me are so standardized that they are colorless, anonymous, and have no distinguishing characteristics. Their talk is fundamentally unrevealing, functional. I have as much difficulty in telling one face from another as I have one house from another, one set of children from another. I feel I know what they are going to say, what they say to each other in intimacy, I feel it is a formula, and I wonder whether a society as conscious of its social life can become so uniform that a personal, intimate relationship becomes impossible. Once, a neighbor came, and in the middle of a colorless talk, broke down and wept: "I am so unhappy with my husband." I responded immediately, and we discussed the situation. But the next day the door was closed again and she talked about the weather.
We were invited to the home of Bob Balzer. He is very wealthy, he travels, he is a friend of famous people. He built himself a Japanese house. It was situated on top of a hill overlooking Hollywood. Three young Japanese men in white kimonos met us at the door. We took off our shoes and were given slippers. The house was beautiful. It was a copy of the most beautiful of all styles in architecture. It has a sense of space, serenity, and stylization. The sliding panels concealed closets, screens, and statues. The simplicity, and the separate and unique beauty to be contemplated deeply. Even a reproduction of a Japanese house, too new, too lacquered, too glossy (I am sure the genuine ones are soft and muted in texture and tones) was an aesthetic experience.
On the terrace, after the music, we drank champagne. But just as the beauty of the canyons, the sea, the chaparral is still so obviously external and does not contain the flavor of legends, a mythological essence, so this evening, while offering an aesthetic experience, gave but a shell which did not move me deeply. It gave me the feeling of a stage set, because the man of wealth who was satisfied with this reproduction was like the man satisfied with the reproduction of a painting. There was no deep bond between the purchaser of an imitation and Japan. Imitation is not a proof of love but of the satisfaction with semblance rather than creation.
At Bob Balzer's party Lloyd Wright was there, capable of creating an original home, native to America, indigenous. But because Lloyd had not received the approbation of fashion, the blessing of popularity, society would not let him create works which would have been original American architecture.
During the music, I meditated on my personal death. I realized I must complete my work, because I am an instrument for human consciousness and an instrument constantly disciplined to create, not to imitate.
But if I should die, music, painting, literature would always continue, but not my particular awareness caused by the intermingling of two cultures, of the differentiation between creation and imitation.
I drank the champagne, and with the illusion of beauty shed by the reproduction (an illusion strongly aided by the three young Japanese men in their white kimonos), the summer night, and my ability not to hear trivial conversation, I went into a spatial flight and reached enjoyment.
In the car, driving back, I consoled Lloyd. "Yes, we know the difference between original creation and imitation. We have the original with us."
Still under the euphoria synthetically created by a synthetic beauty, I had met and conquered the fear of death by discovering a realm which does not die, the highest moments in art which alone are perpetuated. I had discovered the realm in which I am at home, and glad to be buried in, the pyramids of art. And there at least, I would never feel loneliness.
Let us suppose a person is made up of four colors. Let us suppose we respond intensely to one color in him—the tone of voice or the expression of his eyes. We will continue to respond to this particular trait rather than to an image of the total personality. We have a continuous response to fragments.
Only analysis inquires into these automatic responses and seeks to alter our reduced circuit. It exposes its mechanical character, and seeks to open all the circuits to include a total vision into others' personalities. It seeks to open us altogether to new impressions and more complete receptivities.
I was invited to East Hampton to celebrate the Fourth of July.
It was a family scene which to a passer-by might have seemed touching, and which, if pasted in a family album, would have shed sweetness and nostalgia like pressed flowers. The scene from the outside was painted in trite but familiar colors, the kind that long-lost adventurers or men at war dream of returning to.
Three generations had gathered outside where the garden met the beach. They sat in the garden, at dusk, awaiting the darkness to set off fireworks. Grandmother lay in a chaise longue, discoursing on the evils of sunbathing, as if the sun were responsible for the withering of her skin. The flowers all around her seemed to shed their perfume dutifully at her bidding, listening with bowed heads to her addition of the hours spent on caring for them, as children listen to their mothers describing what a difficult childbirth she had endured for them, quietly amassing a reservoir of future guilt. "My geraniums," said the grandmother, "my rhododendrons," as if this roll call would make them stand in tidy ranks ready to march against the weeds.
Her daughter was expecting another child, and because of her boyish haircut, her very long legs, and heavy earrings, looked like a Ubangi woman of royal descent.
She was explaining how she managed to get evenly tanned while pregnant: "I dig a hole in the sand, and rest my stomach in it, and that way I can expose my back to the sun."
Grandmother turned to grandfather then and said: "How I wish you could dig a hole in the sand and hide your stomach there for a while."
At this, grandfather, who had been about to lie beside her on the double-sized lounging chair, moved away as if he had been stung by an insect and went to sit as far away from the danger as possible. He also drank his highball a little quicker, as if to accelerate the state of anaesthesia.
There were two married couples. The Ubangi woman wore a bathing suit, the other woman a cotton dress. As if there were not enough flowers and vegetables and fruit around, the dress was also covered with them. The flies, butterflies, and bees were often deceived.
"I always wanted to work hard," said the grandfather, "and then go around the world."
"But I can't travel now, because of my arthritis," grandmother said.
"Arthritis can be cured," I said.
Then the truth appeared, which the arthritis disguised. "At my age! When I look at myself in the mirror I can't imagine traveling now. I used to have the smartest figure."
"Happy birthday to you, grandmother," sang one of the children, bringing her one of the flowers which had fallen into the pool and carried a bee attached to its humid pollen.
"Think of having a birthday on the Fourth of July! I used to think that the fireworks were for me. A little boy who adored me used to say to me: 'Why, Edna, nobody else but you has fireworks for her birthday. You must be someone special.' I was fifteen before I discovered that those marvelous fireworks were not in my honor. From then on I have always hated them. Besides, they always dirty the beach and ruin my hydrangeas."
"The fireworks tonight are in your honor," I said.
"Can we start the fireworks?" asked the seven-year-old grandson. "It's almost dark enough."
"No, you can't. None of you children must touch the fireworks."
"But why?"
"Because they are dangerous. I knew a little boy once who had the whole side of his face burned off. And another little girl who lost a finger. Fireworks are unreliable. They sometimes backfire, or they set fire to the house."
And so all her anger to have discovered that fireworks had not been set off in her honor was passed on to the children, an inheritance of terror which affected them for th
e rest of the evening, so that when the fireworks started, they were in a state of anxiety and all their pleasure was marred.
A red-haired boy moved his small mouth like a fish looking for nourishment among the weeds.
"What I like best about my family," said the grandmother, "is their kindness. Kindness is very rare and I always brought up my children to prize it above everything else."
"Open your presents," cried one of the children, "open your presents!"
The first package contained an electric vibrator which everyone began to use playfully, amused by its soft purr and electric caresses. Everyone but the grandmother, who knew it was intended to relieve her of pain but who wanted these pains unnoticed and was impatient to conceal an object which underlined her humiliations.
The second box contained a hand-knitted bed jacket for her need of rest and which she did not like.
The third was a book on Valentino's life, which recalled to the grandmother the passing of a period she had lived in, and wanted to forget, as it made her feel old. As a teen-ager she had worshipped Valentino. She laid the book aside.
The two young husbands began to light the fireworks in the middle of the beach. One of them seemed to choose instinctively the ones that did not go off properly. They would sputter, and go out in his hands, and he would stand there feeling somehow personally responsible, standing there like a young lover suddenly deprived of his potency.
Grandmother was still worrying about her garden: "Tomorrow I will hate you all."
While some of the effective fireworks were illuminating the beach, the grandfather suddenly went into the house and after a moment several shots were heard. There was a minute of frightened silence. Then grandfather reappeared smiling.
Grandmother became shaky and nervous and said: "Every time he gets a few highballs in him, he starts shooting off his gun."
"It's rather touching," said someone, understanding the grandfather's desire to cause a sensation.
Grandmother said: "You should be ashamed, it's dangerous, you're drunk, and you might have killed me."
This threat, combined with that of the fireworks, sent the children running to climb a tree.
"Oh, that tree, that tree is so brittle, you will fall off," cried the grandmother.
"Don't spoil your new dress," shouted the mothers.
The fireworks continued but the little girl felt safer sitting high up on the tree.
As each one flared up, red, or gold, or green, as sprays, or petal-shedding flowers, as comets, as nebulas, as volcanoes, grandfather would say: "There goes sixty-five cents! There goes ninety cents! There goes a buck!"
Perhaps this remark accelerated the fall and the turning to ashes of the fireworks, perhaps it was the implication that so much of his labor was being foolishly exploded and wasted; but in the eyes of the family the sparkle and elation began to peter out, like the fireworks that did not go off.
"In my time they had prettier fireworks," said the grandmother.
"You mean in the time of the dinosaurs?" asked one of the grandchildren.
It is true that there are elevations in art, in music, in writing which sustain us, help us to live. They transmute our sorrows into beauty. But it is also true that there are pitfalls from which art cannot save us, and then it becomes necessary to find an understanding of our human life, of our illness. I have found this understanding, this quest for healing and wholeness, necessary to me and to others. The poets, as I observed from my studies of the classical and modern romantics (whom we call neurotics), always end in catastrophe, in tragedy, illness, death. They were the victims of life rather than its conquerors. See the tragic life of Baudelaire, of Rimbaud, Verlaine, of Dylan Thomas. Only recently Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Rimbaud walked out of his poet's life and into oblivion.
Part of our reality is that we invest others with mystical qualities; we force them to play the role we need. We do not take into account the strength of these myths and thus deny one of the most powerful motivations in our character. We invent situations, we live out, independently of others, a private dream relationship, and a private drama, and the frustration of this relationship is acted in a void, taking the greater part of our energies.
I have chosen to write about artists first because I know them best, then because the expression of fantasy and imagination is more clearly manifested in them than in other lives. In other men most of their life is repressed by the bourgeois structure, their professional, social, and community mores. The artist retains his sensibility; it is the element he needs for his profession. The artist matches his life to his needs and lives by his own design and does not conform to patterns made by others. The artist lives more in harmony with his own character and is closer to freedom and individuality, and therefore integrity.
We say the realist describes what he sees, but what we see is formed, shaped, altered, and colored by what we feel. The same city would change its face a hundred times according to our mood. It may appear desolate, menacing, lovely, or hospitable. The change of mood is like the change of lighting.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness. "Ersatz" in literature. Gangsterism in literature. And in John Hawkes'The Cannibal I am not sure yet, but it seems like an artificial unconscious. Writing should develop our senses, not atrophy them.
Gertrude Stein wrote: "Something is always happening, anybody knows a quantity of stories of people's lives that are always happening, there are plenty for the newspapers and there are always plenty in private life. Everybody knows so many stories and what is the use of telling another story? There is always a story going on. So naturally what I wanted to do in my play is what everybody did not know or always tell."
The secret of writing. The experience resembles the knot one brings to therapy, where one learns to unravel it. Analysis begins with the cryptic phrase out of a dream, usually. The phrase is the key to a condensed tangle. Then there is the process of untangling by a method of associations, chain-reaction sequences, analogies.
In the novels I begin and end with a poetic phrase. I was always haunted by the poetic phrase. Now I find the story begins and ends there, with the unraveling of its meaning. The poetic phrase contains the mystery, leads one to investigation and also sums up the meaning, crystallizes it. What takes place during the unraveling is the revelation of character. In between is the dilution of the crystal. When I suffered in the process it was because I was achieving this by a series of crises, as one does in analysis. But I see now the poetic phrase is the key phrase of the theme to be developed, and it is also a summation.
From Jim Herlihy's diary:
Anaïs swims in the waters she was made for, twenty thousand leagues under the heart, as naturally as a cobbler mends shoes.
I have not yet found my own waters, but I think I know those who have and have not.
I like to write, but half the time the typewriter keys are nothing but sticks and I use them like a man on stilts. I think B.N. and I will be coming later into our purities.
Anaïs functions even in her melancholy, Bill drowns in his, I strangle in mine. Anaïs wins over her demons by recording in the journal, in a language that is her own, pure. I don't have mine yet. I fight for it. I've heard familiar echoes, watched a certain ghost grin, experienced moments in which there were wings on the keys. Not comfortable yet. Pepe is one of us, I think, searching for his own voice.
Work: work doesn't solve everything but when a person is practicing the work that he loves, you can always tell; there is a rhythm in their absorption which shows in the eyes; their eyes glitter with sights brought back from private places: when the
right words come together the world becomes at that moment mathematically perfect: so with each stitch of the cobbler's machine, the tailor's needle. They are seeing unity, peace, in some tiny fragment of the world and they know that this fragment is themselves. Pepe sews hats and dreams of Madonnas in galleries and of the books he may write: but before he will have reached the kind of purity I'm trying to talk about, he will have to sew the hat and know that it is his, paint the Madonna and likewise, or write his book. Then he can withstand, as Anaïs has, the hurts that come into us and at us from other levels of our living.
I hear the cries in Jim's diary. I understand them. The agonies, the rebellions, the angers, the compassions. Waiting for a letter which never comes.
Letter to Jim Herlihy:
First let me say that the story of "Black William" is one of your best stories. It needs very little tidying up. What you did was to take an incident which written in an ordinary way might have been ordinary and cliché but written as you did becomes more than a fine piece of realism. It is far more than that. It is a study of the curious relationship between compassion, identification, and choice of object, of the agony lying behind the writing itself, the struggle to depict, to enter the man's feelings. The ending was a surprise, because you built up the man's pride and honesty. You went behind the stage and exposed the relation between Black. William and you, the man and the writer. Wonderful your wish to have a place to long for, to return to, and your preparations to rescue him. I think it's very very good.