Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5

by Anais Nin

  His own young wife had fallen from a horse in Germany, and lay wrecked and paralyzed in a wheelchair when he met her. A year later she was walking and he had married her. Young, and vulnerable, she suffered from jealousy of his patients. She felt anguish at closed doors, and she knew that Max often completed the cure with a kiss or a compliment.

  Behind closed doors did he give life to women in another form? He believed in the transmission of life!

  Notes on writing.

  Language of common man is not to be literally transcribed because it is his own prison and he wants to be helped out of its restrictions. Language which matches not his ignorant vocabulary but his feelings, which are always more subtle than his words. The common man neither feels nor thinks as he talks. He has not learned to talk. And that is our role, to talk for him, exactly as the virtuoso violinist plays for him a violin he cannot play.

  Artists who seem to be of no value to any movement immediately (not concerned with sociological themes) nevertheless become valuable to those who understand that individual dramas are reflections of the universal ones (Kafka, Proust) just as the universal ones are projections of individual dramas (Hitler). A person who joins a political movement for private reasons, personal or neurotic, is less useful to the political movement than the one who abstains because he is not qualified for such activity.

  Many romantic rebels against bourgeois society were of very poor caliber for social usefulness when they might have accomplished other tasks more efficiently.

  In movies not all directors are gifted in the handling of large collective scenes. A largeness of theme is not necessarily a universal one. The giants are those who by their self-development become the main source of nourishment for the tributaries. America is erroneously fighting such individual development. Hart Crane, the poet and a distorted personality, is just as much a part of the history of American literature as Dreiser. There is a misinterpretation of escapism.

  The only nonhuman existence is what we call our human life. If we live our human life and none other, directly, then we subject ourselves to the most inhuman of all conditions: slavery to family and national taboos, wars, illness, poverty, death. Even the phrase, "earning our living" is inhuman. Without religion or art or analysis to transpose the stark horror, we fall into the malady of our age with its great devotion to naturalism. A painting in a house is there to represent a color, a form, a realm we may not have been able to possess. A book opens a realm which our need to earn a living may have made unattainable. Everything that helps us to transpose the unbearable into a myth also helps the creation of distance from our inhuman life, to allow us to mix a little objectivity with the harsh, violent torments of our human bondage.

  Art is our only proof of continuity in a life of the spirit. When we deny it (as we have en masse and massively), we lose all that gives us a noble concept of human beings. Otherwise we would know only humanity's repellent aspects in war and commerce.

  What people really fight in the artist is his freedom, his attempts at freeing himself from human bondage. He forfeits and repudiates his human family if they seek to enslave him to a profession or a religion he does not believe in. He pays the price with solitude. He may repudiate his country if his country acts inhumanly, as many artists repudiated Hitler's Germany.

  In all my books there is a return to the dream, the source of the mystery, where the character seeks the key to its own meaning. In Winter of Artifice, there is a return to the dream at the end.

  Sierra Madre.

  When I cannot bear outer pressures any more, I begin to put order in my belongings. I get satisfaction from perfect order in my papers, in my clothes, in the house. I carry this to excess. As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects. There is a mania for discarding the useless, uncluttering the house, beautifying, tidying, a mania for superefficiency. I spend hours on this. It gives me peace. I remember being told that the symmetry of the gardens of Versailles was intended to give serenity, that symmetry was the symbol of classicism.

  I do have moments of peace. Yesterday in the garden. The sun was gentle. The dog was lying nearby, content.

  Turnley Walker had just left. He is big and powerful, physically. He has a big round face, green eyes, an earthy, humorous face. His legs are crippled by polio, he walks with crutches of steel. He avoids stairs, has difficulty getting up and sitting down. He is intuitive, intelligent, warm. He wrote a book about his polio experience. It was a best seller. He is writing other novels. After our interview on television {Book Review), we made friends. Once in a while, when he is working nearby at the Ford Foundation, he drops in.

  Moments of peace.

  I read Wassermann's Doctor Kerkhoven for the second time. The first time I had an emotional response. The second time I realized that from a psychological point of view the book is full of massive errors. Dr. Kerkhoven's way of analyzing his patients, his own lack of awareness about his feelings. After creating characters one does feel for and believe in, he draws the wrong conclusion, and the very "insights" of Dr. Kerkhoven are constant errors of diagnosis. It would show the terrible blindness which existed before Freud. Both psychological blindness and the incapacity to help others by illumination of the path. In the past I was not able to see this. Now I have greater lucidity. But I cannot make in my life, as yet, a synthesis, achieve wholeness and unity. I am still living by my dualities.

  Within the last two weeks archaeologists unearthed two more magnificent "Ships of Death" in a secret chamber within the shadow of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

  The ships were made to carry the soul of Pharaoh Cheops to the afterlife. They are curious constructions but quite comprehensible to the modern archaeologists who no longer believe that the pyramids and tombs were built in some metaphysical or little-understood relationship with the sun and the stars. Many kinds of Ships of Death are known from the tombs. But Cheops, the greatest Pharaoh of a great dynasty, was taking no chances. After building the greatest pyramid in the world, he built great boats for his posthumous peregrinations. He believed he could sail in them through the light of Heaven and the dark night of the Hell-river.

  Two Ships of Death had been built for the day of his death. The ships were called Manzet and Mesketet, one for the day voyage, and the other for the perilous course through the night realms.

  The image of these ships began to haunt me. I wove them into the pattern of my book on Lillian in Mexico. They inspired the title Solar Barque. The images connected in some way with my recurrent dream of the ship which I pushed through a waterless city. It connected with the boat sliding through lagoons in Mexico, with my obsession with boats, houseboats. It all formed a pattern.

  When a couple dropped in, while Renate visited me in Sierra Madre, they bored us so much that Renate confessed afterward that she wanted to bark: "Because if these are human beings then I would prefer to be a dog."

  Renate may have the key to the end of Nightwood.

  Paul is a Caspar Hauser who did not die, who navigated out of danger, and managed to remain in a world of fantasy.

  He has a great knowledge of the old myths. I became aware that they do not interest me because I feel we have to create our own myths. The old myths do not satisfy us.

  ***

  Some of the artists I know are so young and yet they use outworn symbols. The fixation upon the past seems to be a homosexual trait and may be connected with the fixation on the mother. In their films they love the twenties, their mother's period, their mother as they saw her in her youth. In Kenneth Anger, in James Broughton, in Truman Capote, in Tennessee Williams, in Proust, the time which counts is the time of the mother's youth. They like antiques, objects from the past.

  In this I am their very opposite. I seek to escape from the past, I prefer unfamiliar landscapes, unfamiliar atmospheres. I love change of setting, futuristic designs, changes of fashion, frequent metamorphosis, shedding of the past in all its forms. After a while I discard a dress
not because it is worn (I cannot wear out my dresses, I hardly fray them) but because the self which enjoyed that particular dress has changed, has outworn it, needs to assume another color, another shape.

  A day of lively pleasure with Renate and Paul.

  Renate told me a story: "Paul's car broke down and I had to go to Los Angeles, so I accepted a ride with an old man. He told me that a long time ago he was a lifeguard on the beach. And today at sixty he sleeps out on the rocks in a hollow, and the seals sleep on the other side of this rock. He got arthritis and his family insisted he come back and live in a house, but his first night in bed he fell and broke his arm (he was driving to a doctor to check on the healing of this arm) and he returned to sleep on the rock. One night he felt lonely, and so he tried to slip over on the side of the seals, but they nudged him gently away."

  "What does he look like?" asked Paul.

  "Like a seal," I said.

  From Renate's talk about the old man I went home and wrote about the old man and the seals [later included in Collages].

  Paul talks. But one does not remember his words. One remembers an elfin, mysterious smile. Pan's smile. He does not open his mouth to smile.

  Renate said: "Let me tell you my dream. I was listening to music. My body became compressed into a column. At the top of this column grew antennae of science-fiction design with three lassos of blue electric lights revolving in circles. In their centrifugal motion, they captured other waves. The waves of the brain. Seeking to contact other vibrations? The radiations of my brain not only designed fever charts but they were neon-lighted and threw off sparks like electric short circuits."

  Behind Renate's house, on top of the mountain, a red-tailed missile was planted in its steel cradle, pointing skyward, all set to soar.

  The sea had been there once and left imprints of sea shells and fish skeletons on stone. It had carved deep Venusian caves in the sandstone. The setting sun deposited antique gold on their walls. People on horseback wandered up the mountain. Rabbits, deer, bobcats, and snakes wandered down the mountain and came quite near the house.

  Jim Herlihy writes me: "Altitude fairly good this month."

  Working on Solar Barque. The ancient city of Guatemala, volcanoes, fireworks.

  A moment of peace.

  The children next door are playing. The birds are singing, the squirrels are looking for food.

  Dream of the Blue Mobile:

  A whole ceiling hung with icicle blue mobiles in all shapes, utterly beautiful, and tinkling against each other, swaying and spreading diamond-shaped darts of light.

  Renate and Paul discuss the conflict between humanity and creation. It is their drama. Hers is a warm, unstable, vulnerable, emotional nature, in pain. Paul says severely: "You insisted on entering a world which was locked to you. You crashed through. And now what you found hurts you. And it's only your insecurity which hurts you.I have never given anyone else what belongs to you."

  Renate does not see this. She only feels blindly and wholly the "agonia" of Paul's body given to another. In her faulty Viennese English she uses "agonia" instead of "agony," and it sounds so much more terrible. It brings images of torture, of Christ's crucifixion. In English "agony" is not used except as a prelude to death. Emotion does not reach such proportions. In Spanish it implies all the slow torture of jealousy.

  I feel for both.

  You have to protect human beings from the terrors of mythology, of what happens when you live with all the parts of yourself, all your dreams, all your desires, all your infatuations.

  The room Renate forced open is that of Paul's multiple lives. She could no longer avert her eyes.

  We are sad to see them struggle, for together they create a world of fantasy and magic. When they are creating together, whether with paint or parties, they are joyful and spirited and filled with inventions.

  It may be that what a lover most hates in the other's promiscuities is the very revelation of minor selves, selves which do not resemble one's dream, one's passionately designed great love. Paul may diminish himself in Renate's eyes. In jealousy there may be this struggle to maintain a fervent integrity between the idealized lover, container of all loves, and one's idolatry, to exclude the proof that there exist other Pauls, unrelated to Renate, who can admire mediocrity or lesser loves.

  Just as when I resented Alfred Perlés I should have known that he was revealing to me, against my will, a diminished Henry, by his shrunken imitation of him, a Henry I did not want to see, who could be related to Fred.

  Thus jealousy is not only an effort to keep a love all for one's self, but to keep the unity of a lover's image, caught in the dream, and prevent reality from corroding this image. It is the minor Paul and his minor loves which threaten Renate's love of him.

  Jealousy can only be annihilated by the recognitions of all the Pauls which are foreign to Renate, and allowing these Pauls to exist, because warring with the unknown aspects of Paul or those not related to Renate will only bring separation and loss.

  Maturity is first the shedding of what you are not, and then the balancing of what you are in relation to the human being you love, and allowing the selves of that person which are not related to you to exist independently, outside of the relationship.

  New York.

  Met Arthur Miller in his country home. We were talking about how Hollywood will never change its image of the Indians galloping in circles around the pioneers and being shot one by one.

  I said: "The most they will do is place the Indians in the center and have them shoot arrows at the galloping pioneers."

  Met Montgomery Clift's brother, who suffers at being Montgomery Clift's brother. He made a film of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico which reminded me of Acapulco. He is full of tenderness and gentleness, and in love with Kim Stanley.

  Saw Gate of Hell, a Japanese film of such beauty that you hold your breath. At last, beauty, the art of the film, poetry mixed with realism, the unique eloquence of shadows, mystery, suggestion, the perfect blend of naturalism and dream.

  I telephoned the Geismars. "Are you angry with me?" "No," he answered. "We had a dull and wholesome summer and are waiting for you to bring life."

  I called Jim: "What's the altitude today?"

  Felix Morrow tells me not enough copies of Spy in the House of Love are selling, but it does not hurt any more. A culture which cannot create a Gate of Hell cannot read Spy in the House of Love. Not yet.

  Over the telephone a voice:

  "Are you a Protestant?"

  "No."

  "What are you?"

  "I am not interested."

  "Wait a moment. You don't know what I am going to say. We are approaching families about a marvelous place called 'Beautiful.' It is a burial place.... Wouldn't you like to select a burial site?"

  I hung up.

  At the United Nations I breathe the air of internationalism, my favorite country.

  Lunch with Jim at a café where we ask for a Polish drink not knowing what it will be. It is a warm sweet wine with cinnamon. We talk about tragic things with our particular invention; it is a celestial bicycle pump, it pumps air into all suffocating human traps, recommended for all tragic situations.

  Jim going through a difficult period. His novelette unpublished, his novel unpublished, and his job at "Paper Plates" brings him just enough for rent and food (and a paper-plate regime for all his friends).

  A Haitian evening. A wealthy couple who own many Haitian paintings. An American Episcopalian bishop, an earthy, humorous, generous, and lucid man who lived in Haiti eleven yean and was responsible (or starting the Haitians painting, encouraging them, and developing a rich and impressive folklore painting, primitive, colorful, and enchanting.

  He came to ñnd someone to make a film on Haiti.

  He told about the hurricane. The water was five feet deep on the peninsula. Helicopters came to pick up the victims, flew them to Port-au-Prince, where they were clothed and fed. After a while they noticed the number of victims m
ultiplying instead of lessening. Thousands of poor Haitians were throwing themselves into the water to be rescued for the sake of a meal and clothes.

  He also talked about Albert Mangones. He was typical of the privileged class who received the best education in France and in the United States and dreamt of returning to his people and helping them.

  But the black Haitians did not want to be helped by a nearly white, educated, bourgeois architect. His projects were frustrated by the lethargy, passivity, and indifference of the Haitians themselves.

  Josephine Premice arrives from Paris. Her hair is cut boyishly, with bangs over her forehead. Her black eyes look bigger and more brilliant, as she is now very thin. Her laughter is still continuous like a breeze and the beautiful husky voice entrancing. She wears a long clinging jersey sweater with a turtle neck which enhances her long neck, and over that a black-jersey loose square coat.

  She is now rehearsing for House of Flowers. She likes Truman Capote.

  At one A.M. we are leaning over a bar, Jim and I, and I am stressing the primary importance of the wish. Not knowing what we want, not wishing for it, keeps us navigating along peripheries and tributaries formed and shaped by external influences. I said: "Forget about the probable and improbable. There is no improbable. Just a few hours ago I met Shirley Clark. She had no money at all but wanted to go to India. She is a film maker. The wish was the orientation. When an offer came to make a film about French children for UNESCO, she accepted, and it led to her being asked to make a film on an Indian dancer. Her wish, for years, was the beacon. The probable and improbable are only negative concepts we have to transcend, not accept."