In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333)

by Anais Nin

  The New Woman

  A lecture given at the Celebration of Women in the Arts, in San Francisco, April 1974; first published in Ramparts, June 1974.

  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 war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

  The artist is the only one who knows that 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 his particular vision and share it with others. And 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.

  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, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives 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 it. When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

  For too many centuries women have been busy being muses to the artists. And I know you have followed me in the diary when I wanted to be a muse, and I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue—that I had to do the job myself. In letters I’ve received from women, I’ve found what Rank had described as a guilt for creating. It’s a very strange illness, and it doesn’t strike men—because the culture has demanded of man that he give his maximum talents. He is encouraged by the culture, to become the great doctor, the great philosopher, the great professor, the great writer. Everything is really planned to push him in that direction. Now, this was not asked of women. And in my family, just as in your family probably, I was expected simply to marry, to be a wife, and to raise children. But not all women are gifted for that, and sometimes, as D. H. Lawrence properly said, “We don’t need more children in the world, we need hope.”

  So this is what I set out to do, to adopt all of you. Because Baudelaire told me a long time ago that in each one of us there is a man, a woman, and a child—and the child is always in trouble. The psychologists are always confirming what the poets have said so long ago. You know, even poor, maligned Freud said once, “Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.” So the poet said we have three personalities, and one was the child fantasy which remained in the adult and which, in a way, makes the artist.

  When I talk so much of the artist, I don’t mean only the one who gives us music, who gives us color, who gives us architecture, who gives us philosophy, who gives us so much and enriches our life. I mean the creative spirit in all its manifestations. For me even as a child, when my father and mother were quarreling—my father was a pianist and my mother was a singer—when music time came, everything became peaceful and beautiful. And as children we shared the feeling that music was a magical thing which restored harmony in the family and made life bearable for us.

  Now, there was a woman in France—and I give her story because it shows how we can turn and metamorphose and use everything to become creative. This was the mother of Utrillo. Because she was very poor, the mother of Utrillo was condemned to be a laundress and a houseworker. But she lived in Montmartre at the time of almost the greatest group of painters that was ever put together, and she became a model for them. As she watched the painters paint, she learned to paint. And she became, herself, a noted painter, Suzanne Valadon. It was the same thing that happened to me when I was modelling at the age of sixteen, because I didn’t have any profession and I didn’t know how else to earn a living. I learned from the painters the sense of color, which was to train me in observation my whole life.

  I learned many things from the artist which I would call creating out of nothing. Varda, for example, taught me that collage is made out of little bits of cloth. He even had me cut a piece of the lining of my coat because he took a liking to the color of it and wanted to incorporate it into a collage. He was making very beautiful celestial gardens and fantasies of every possible dream with just little bits of cloth and glue. Varda is also the one who taught me that if you leave a chair long enough on the beach, it becomes bleached into the most beautiful color imaginable which you could never find with paint.

  I learned from Tinguely that he went to junkyards, and he picked out all kinds of bits and pieces of machines and built some machines which turned out to be caricatures of technology. He even built a machine which committed suicide, which I described in a book called Collages. I am trying to say that the artist is a magician—that he taught me that no matter where you are put, you can always somehow come out of that place.

  Now, I was placed somewhere you might imagine would be terribly interesting, a suburb of Paris. But a suburb of Paris can be just as lonely as a suburb of New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco. I was in my twenties and I didn’t know anyone at the time, so I turned to my love of writers. I wrote a book, and suddenly I found myself in a Bohemian, artistic, literary writer’s world. And that was my bridge. But sometimes, when people say to me, that’s fine, but you were gifted for writing, my answer is that there is not always that kind of visible skill.

  I know a woman who started with nothing, whom I consider a great heroine. She had not been able to go to high school because her family was very poor and had so many children. The family lived on a farm in Saratoga, but she decided to go to New York City. She began working at Brentano’s and after a little while told them that she wanted to have a bookshop of her own. They laughed at her and said that she was absolutely mad and would never survive the summer. She had $150 saved and she rented a little place that went downstairs in the theater section of New York, and everybody came in the evening after the theater. And today her bookshop is not only the most famous bookshop in New York, the Gotham Book Mart, but it is a place where everybody wants to have bookshop parties. She has visitors from all over the world—Edith Sitwell came to see her when she came to New York, Jean Cocteau, and many more. And no other bookshop in New York has that fascination, which comes from her, her humanity and friendliness, and the fact that people can stand there and read a book and she won’t even notice them. Frances Steloff is her name, and I mention her whenever anyone claims that it takes a particular skill to get out of a restricted, limited, or impoverished life. Frances is now eighty-six, a beautiful old lady with white hair and perfect skin who has defied age.

  It was the principle of creative will that I admired and learned from musicians like Eric Satie, who defied starvation and used his compositions to protect his piano from the dampness of his little room in a suburb of Paris. Even Einstein, who disbelieved Newton’s unified field theory, died believing what is being proved now. I give that as an instance of faith, and faith is what I want to talk about. What kept me writing, when for twenty years I was received by complete silence, is that faith in the necessity to be the artist—and no matter what happens even if there is no one listening.

  I don’t need to speak of Zelda Fitzgerald. I think all of you have thought about Zelda, how she might never
have lost her mind if Fitzgerald had not forbidden her to publish her diary. It is well known that Fitzgerald said no, that it could not be published, because he would need it for his own work. This, to me, was the beginning of Zelda’s disturbance. She was unable to fulfill herself as a writer and was overpowered by the reputation of Fitzgerald. But if you read her own book, you will find that in a sense she created a much more original novel than he ever did, one more modern in its effort to use language in an original way.

  History, much like the spotlight, has hit whatever it wanted to hit, and very often it missed the woman. We all know about Dylan Thomas. Very few of us know about Caitlin Thomas, who after her husband’s death wrote a book which is a poem in itself and sometimes surpasses his own—in strength, in primitive beauty, in a real wakening of feeling. But she was so overwhelmed by the talent of Dylan Thomas that she never thought anything of her writing at all until he died.

  So we’re here to celebrate the sources of faith and confidence. I want to give you the secrets of the constant alchemy that we must practice to turn brass into gold, hate into love, destruction into creation—to change the crass daily news into inspiration, and despair into joy. None need misinterpret this as indifference to the state of the world or to the actions by which we can stem the destructiveness of the corrupt system. There is an acknowledgement that, as human beings, we need nourishment to sustain the life of the spirit, so that we can act in the world, but I don’t mean turn away. I mean we must gain our strength and our values from self-growth and self-discovery. Against all odds, against all handicaps, against the chamber of horrors we call history, man has continued to dream and to depict its opposite. That is what we have to do. We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art—we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

  The woman of the future, who is really being born today, will be a woman completely free of guilt for creating and for her self-development. She will be a woman in harmony with her own strength, not necessarily called masculine, or eccentric, or something unnatural. I imagine she will be very tranquil about her strength and her serenity, a woman who will know how to talk to children and to the men who sometimes fear her. Man has been uneasy about this self-evolution of woman, but he need not be—because, instead of having a dependent, he will have a partner. He will have someone who will not make him feel that every day he has to go into battle against the world to support a wife and child, or a childlike wife. The woman of the future will never try to live vicariously through the man, and urge and push him to despair, to fulfill something that she should really be doing herself. So that is my first image—she is not aggressive, she is serene, she is sure, she is confident, she is able to develop her skills, she is able to ask for space for herself.

  I want this quality of the sense of the person, the sense of direct contact with human beings to be preserved by woman, not as something bad, but as something that could make a totally different world where intellectual capacity would be fused with intuition and with a sense of the personal.

  Now, when I wrote the diary and when I wrote fiction, I was trying to say that we need both intimacy and a deep knowledge of a few human beings. We also need mythology and fiction which is a little further away, and art is always a little further away from the entirely personal world of the woman. But I want to tell you the story of Colette. When her name was suggested for the Académie française, which is considered the highest honor given to writers, there was much discussion because she hadn’t written about war, she hadn’t written about any large event, she had only written about love. They admired her as a writer, as a stylist—she was one of our best stylists—but somehow the personal world of Colette was not supposed to have been very important. And I think it is extremely important, because we have lost that intimacy and that person-to-person sense, which she developed because she had been more constricted and less active in the world. So the family was very important, the neighbor was very important, and the friend was very important.

  It would be nice if men could share that too, of course. And they will, on the day they recognize the femininity in themselves, which is what Jung has been trying to tell us. I was asked once how I felt about men who cried, and I said that I loved men who cried, because it showed they had feeling. The day that woman admits what we call her masculine qualities, and man admits his so-called feminine qualities, will mean that we admit we are androgynous, that we have many personalities, many sides to fulfill. A woman can be courageous, can be adventurous, she can be all these things. And this new woman who is coming up is very inspiring, very wonderful. And I love her.

  Anaïs Nin Talks About Being a Woman: An Interview

  From Vogue, 15 October 1971.

  QUESTIONER: Are you surprised by your rediscovery by the young and your power as a force with them?

  ANAÏS NIN: The young, after all, were the first to come to me after my return from Europe at the beginning of World War II. The young find in me a similarity in attitude—living with the senses, intuition, magic, using the psychic, an awareness of a different set of values. They find in me a primary interest in life and intimacy, in knowing each other. When I lecture in colleges, I talk about funawn, a Welsh word that means the kind of talk that leads to intimacy. We talk about their lives and personal things, and then they open up to me. At first, I wondered why they wanted me to lecture and now I realize they simply wanted to see if I were real.

  Q: Kate Millett in her controversial book Sexual Politics attacks your friend Henry Miller for the way he, a male writer, has influenced our thinking about sex. Because of your intimacy with and support of Miller, do you feel you compromised yourself as a woman?

  AN: Not at all. He was my opposite. As I wrote in my diary, I didn’t like his attitude towards sex. But even Freud behaved entirely differently with Lou Andreas-Salomé. You see, it’s a matter of the woman. Miller treated me differently. I took his antipuritanism as comic. By asserting his appetites, he changed both men and women. I think I saw Miller very clearly, but I don’t feel now I have to attack or defend him. Miller did a lot to remove the puritanical superstitions of other men. At that moment, women were inaccessible. He brought them nearer. He made them real.

  Q: You observed once you had not “imitated man.” What role do men have in your work?

  AN: No, I didn’t imitate men. Men, for me, were doctor, psychiatrist, astronomer, astrologer. It was their knowledge I needed. I followed men in everything creative, but I sought always to strengthen and reveal the pattern of women. Women were my patterns for living, men for thinking. When I was thirteen and fourteen, Joan of Arc was my heroine. After all, she went to war for a man and not for herself. There are so few women who have found real freedom for themselves. I think of Ninon de Lenclos in the seventeenth century and Lou Andreas-Salomé in the nineteenth. The symbolic people and their freedom are important to the new consciousness. Women must stop reacting against what is. They should be making the new woman very clear to us.

  Q: What for you is the “new woman”?

  AN: In my works, I had portrayed free women, free love; but I had done it quietly and these “new women” were not perceived. There is no one pattern for the new woman. She will have to find her own way. This is the work to be done, but it will have to be done individually. Women want a pattern, but there is no pattern for all women.

  Q: Much has been made by Women’s Liberation of Freud’s biases against women. Did these biases affect you, in your own analysis?

  AN: I really can’t answer that question. I haven’t read Freud in a long time, but I do remember Dr. Otto Rank, who analyzed me in Paris, saying that we didn’t really understand the psychology of women, that women had not yet articulated their experience. Men invented soul, philosophy, religion. Women have perceptions that are difficult to describe, at least in intellectual terms. These perceptions come instantly from intuition, and the woman trusts them. What bothers Women’s Lib about Freud doesn’t bother me. Psychology helpe
d me. I very much felt the inner necessity to grow. The ideologies—as Rank said—may have been made by men, but I used only what was useful to me.

  Q: Why has active interest in the erotic been so long taboo for women?

  AN: Men must have invented the taboo. I think of Fellini. He dramatized his unconscious life in 8 ½; but, when he filmed his wife’s unconscious life in Juliet of the Spirits, he didn’t allow her any adventures. She was a passive spectator. For him, woman is only pure by faithfulness and abstention. D. H. Lawrence was the first to acknowledge that woman has a sexuality, a life of her own, and that lovemaking can originate with the woman. Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry. But if a woman writes openly about her need—for example, Violette Leduc or Caitlin Thomas, the widow of Dylan Thomas—she is damned.

  I have always admitted the sexual appetite and given it a great place in my work. One of my books was called This Hunger. Henry Miller did a lot to break the canonization of women. Some women, like men, would rather be treated as sexual objects than be canonized. Women don’t like being romanticized or idealized any more than they like being insulted or humiliated.