by Anais Nin
Here we slip into a surrealist world, relativity without center of gravity. We are dealing with the absurd, the irrelevant, the allegorical chaos of a world whose past hypocritical semblance of logic we can no longer accept. We are inside the Magic Theater of Steppenwolf, inside the nightmares of Kafka but in American equivalents—that is, with the weightlessness of humor. The psychological ironies are as accurate as they should be in a twentieth-century mind. The. choice between life and death, creation and destruction, is always our own, but we prefer to blame other forces. The Suicide Academy invites us to meditate on the depth of our predicament, not in the seclusion of an old monastery but in an imaginary, transitional wayside station and in the center of drama, crisis, prejudices, distortions habitual to our daily life. It is not a meditation in quietness or isolation, although the snow landscape is vividly present and eloquent, as if its coolness were necessary to assuage the fevers and infections caught in active life. The place where we are to make our decision is invaded by visitors whose aim remains a mystery. There is no haven of objectivity or abstract cerebrations. Absurdity pursues and surrounds them all. The youthful, contemporary quality of the book lies in its main objective, which is to enjoy, not to explain, to be with all the happenings and to love whatever happens: Relationships which fail to catalyze, loves which miss their targets, wrestling matches which establish no victor, talks which add to distortions, ideologies which increase confusion, explanations which do not lead to a truce, all of them are there as in daily life, but Daniel Stern gives them the ebullience of wit, they float like lifesavers infused with the oxygen of lyrical delight. The dead clichés by which people defend themselves from change are bombarded in atomic dissolutions to invent new dynamics. Turning ideas upside down empties them of stale air and makes room for oxygen. The desperate aspect of our destructive impulses is transfigured into an allegorical dance on the snow, a tribal dance of desire. The message is directed to the senses: For example, we rediscover love through the strands of Jewel’s hair. Escapes, flights, evasions, the contemporary habit of splitting experience into a happening and of filming the happening, all is familiar. Max, the villain, is the film maker. “He shot them in quick, nervous clicks, like a spy recording some secret site on forbidden film. . . . [Were Max and Jewel] innocent film-makers or guilty film-takers?
“. . . camera madness, focusing, clicking, and winding.”
The whole group is swept into a surrealist voyage. It is not the walled-in nightmares of Kafka, constricted or claustrophobic. It is a dream of space, open, dazzling white landscapes, a mise-en-scène of joy, physical euphoria, muscular energy, in sharp ironic contrast to the constant presence of inarticulate and secret despairs.
Jewel is full of seduction, as she should be, and allergic to truth. “[Her] entire self was tangled up in her body. . . . She was the triumph of the apparent: utterly white skin, absolutely blue eyes, blonde hair that was the complete absence of black, of darkness.” Jewel, allergic to truth as a man-made formula, not suited to her feminine labyrinth, her feminine need to be created.
The ballet Jewel and Wolf, her ex-husband, dance on the ice is a lyrical flight: “. . . we loped out onto the ice like a team of fugitive figure skaters who had forgotten how to describe the classic figures and so were inventing new ones. Was there a figure Z? I’m sure we created one. Or a figure R2? I’m sure we invented it.”
In every intelligent book, the key lies within. I am certain this is true of The Suicide Academy. It invents new figures. This is the secret of its elating effect. If during their marriage Wolf had refused to create Jewel as she had wished, now that she is contemplating suicide and has only one day in which to enact it or repudiate it, he is willing to create her at last and circumvent her own destruction. “I would operate, skillfully using memory, the arsenal of emotions, untapped hopes, buried hatreds masquerading in other guises, misplaced loves: the scalpels and sutures of my particular practice.”
A key to the book, possibly its definition, can be found in these passages:
Suicide was a grand, dark continent to be charted and I was its cartographer.
Suicides were the aristocrats of death—God’s graduate students, acting out their theses to prove how limited were the alternatives. He had allowed Himself and His creatures. Their act was, at its best, superb literary criticism. At its worst—well, perhaps it was this blonde loveliness [Jewel] not yet defined, and dying of its lack of definition. Giving away to dust the lovely outlines of those ever-so-slightly conical breasts, those long and tapering legs, that rounded cheek curving to indentation of shadowed eyes . . . all because of lack of shape. No! Suicide must be more than mere abortion. Part of my job had to be to save people for their proper deaths.
The novel leaps from metaphysics to pugilism, from literature to jealousy, from race prejudice to mythology, from mental acrobatics to physical exertion to sensual adventures, disguising wisdom under its agilities. The central juggler never misses. He is dexterous and alive to the dangers of seeking new ideas, new sensations, new expressions. He is a figure skater of language.
The circle, you see, is at the heart of all human anguish. The sundial and the clock prove that if there were no circles there would be no time. If there were no time there would be no death. Thus—no circles, no death. . . . Most of our guests come to us suffering from circle fatigue. Repetition, full revolution and more repetition. . . . Then imagine the joy of the straight line: forward movement, change. Even if the straight line leads straight down into the earth. Think of it! An end to circles!
In one sense the novel belongs with the theater of the absurd, but in another sense it goes beyond that: The contemplation of man’s irrationalities has another purpose. It is an exercise in imaginative freedom. Since logic has been proved by events to be another form of hypocrisy, this turning of ideas upside down to shake out falsities does not end up in negations but in potential liberations. It demonstrates that the habit of skillful questioning, juxtaposing, juggling is not a pastime but a serious need for the seeker of truth. The academy symbolically burns to the ground. Built on ambivalences, all that remains of it is what each man rescues for himself out of the ashes, a world in harmony with his emotional vision, meaningful to him alone so that he can juggle himself into balance. A surrealist world in fact, obvious in history, politics, economics, science, which the Director of the Argentine Academy sums up thus:
We must suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense inherent in that ambitious word. If there is, we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonymies of God’s secret dictionary . . .
In my cold fever, whether due to the heightening of my fears or to alcohol, I saw the landscape as a calligraphic wonder. The thinning line of trees casting elongated shadows on the snow, like a prayer book in a foreign language, but which one knew by legend to hold a famous and beautiful verse; the long line of uneven rocks scattered in a shaky hand, stretching from grass’s end to the shore. First larger then smaller, light-burnished colors then blackened gleaming shades all straggled with seaweed, strophe and anti-strophe, unfinished statement of stone and sand. And the flights of sandpipers hurled at the sibilance of shore-froth hissing them back then enticing them to return to the edge, fragments of alien texts, sacred letters whose meaning had been forgotten, old feathered prophecies, creations of inspired astrologists of earlier generations. . . .
I told her, then, of my reading the landscape the way I read the sky when I was a child. Stuck with logos from the start, that was me. The world as untranslatable language.
We live in the midst of a black plague, a plague of hatred. This book is an antidote to the epidemic affecting us. Surrealism as a cure for nausea. The Suicide Academy is ultimately the book of a poet, which means he flies at an altitude above the storms of destruction, above neutrality, above indifference, and therefore beyond death.
Miss Macintosh, My Darling
A review of Miss
Macintosh, My Darling, by Marguerite Young, in Open City, Los Angeles, 1 May 1968.
When a writer decides to give us a complete universe, all that he has explored and discovered, it is necessarily vast. No one ever questions the expanse of the ocean, or the size of a mountain. The key to the enjoyment of this amazing book is to abandon one’s self to the detours, wanderings, elliptical and tangential journeys, accepting in return miraculous surprises. This is a search for reality through a maze of illusions and fantasy and dreams, ultimately asserting in the words of Calderon: “Life is a dream.”
The necessity for the cellular expansion of the book lies in Marguerite Young’s own words: “I just tried to leave pebbles along the road so that no one could get lost.” For the perilous exploration of illusion and reality, the author’s feeling is that if one is to follow the full swelling of the wave of imagination, one must bring back to the shore the wave which carried him. It is in the fullness and completeness of the motion that one achieves understanding.
That is why she is able to sustain, all through, both the rich deep tone and powerful rhythm of the book. This is a feat of patience, accomplished by weaving each connecting cell, with unbroken bridges, from word to word, image to image, phrase to phrase. She is an acrobat of space and symbol but she gives her readers a safety net.
Although she accomplishes for native American folklore the same immortality of the myth that Joyce accomplished for Ireland’s, Joyce was not her inspiration. Her inspiration was America, her middlewestem, down-to-earth America with its powerful orbital dreamers so rarely portrayed, born on native soil, American as Joyce’s characters are Irish, with the American sense of high comedy, extravagance and vividness: the bus driver, the suffragette, the old maid, the composer of unwritten music, the clam digger, the dead gambler, the waitress, the featherweight champion, the hangman, the detective, the stone breaker, the messenger pigeon, the frog, the moose.
The work has a disappearing shore line. It is a submarine world, geographically situated in the unconscious and in the night. “The sea is not harmful if you sleep under it, not over it, best place for keeping pearls,” says one of her characters.
The numerous characters enter one’s own stream of consciousness and cannot be erased because they are part of the American psyche, a psyche, as Marguerite Young says, capable of the wildest fantasy. They are listed only in the Blue Book of the Uncommon. Marguerite Young is an aristocrat among writers, perhaps the precursor of a new era in American literature.
The book is also a canto to obsession. Life is filled with repetitions culminating in variations which indicate the subtlety of man’s reactions to experience.
The characters are tangible, accessible, familiar. But it is the nature of their experience which Marguerite Young questions, its sediments, its echoes and reflections. What is reality? Deep within us it is as elusive as a dream, and we are not sure of anything that happened.
Angel in the Forest
A review of Angel in the Forest, by Marguerite Young, in the Los Angeles Times, 8 May 1966.
For those who had the unique experience of reading Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling, her Angel in the Forest, published twenty years earlier, will be a prelude to the vaster work concerned with the exploration of reality and illusion. In Miss Macintosh, My Darling, illusion stems from the opium dreams of the mother which had to be disentangled before the narrator could reach the end and purpose of her quest. This is a work of fiction. Angel in the Forest is a work of history. It deals with the creation of Utopia, which was America’s first illusion. This is the story of Father Rapp and Robert Owen’s two experiments in social science carried out in Indiana in the nineteenth century. The application of this theme to present-day problems makes it seem contemporary. When a poet chooses to write history, facts gain in power and in dimensions. Marguerite Young is a meticulous scholar, but she illumines every description and every character with the laser light of significance. Her facts radiate wit and irony and are incarnated in human beings.
“Question—what is the nature of experience—what dream among dreams is reality?”
The place, New Harmony, is resurrected as if it had never faded. The title refers to giant footprints, said to have been those of an angel, on a stone which a humble stonecutter saved from total obliteration (or perhaps carved upon the stone himself?). Indiana is Marguerite Young’s native land. With a few vivid lines she can summon up hundreds of its inhabitants, with their human foibles, idiosyncrasies, fallibilities, to show how they sabotage their own idealistic conceptions.
Mr. Pears, the bookkeeper dismissed for an error: “True he had drunk a little on the side now and then, but not enough to cause the dancing of arithmetic.” Mrs. Pears, who thought “nothing so bad as despotism which pretends to be democracy.” Together they show “a gradual waning of their hope for improvement at New Harmony.” Human beings’ own individual fantasies, hungers, obsessions, habits, defeat their own illusions. “Who, finally, was happy in New Harmony, a scene of conflict between individual and still-born collectivism?”
When the book was first printed, during a paper shortage, too few people were privileged to read it. It contains the seeds of the major work to which Marguerite Young gave the next seventeen years. History, she proved, is an aggregate of fictions, and she was to enter totally into the world of fiction where she found many of the sources of mysterious failures.
“William Taylor, in view of his belief in the relativism and subjectivism of happiness, and his distrust of any value but pleasure, proposed that the Owenites gathered around him should hold a funeral for the science of society, all merry drunks to be the mourners. To build a coffin for the idea of all mankind, a featureless body, they worked as never before in the whole history of Utopia.”
The relation of this experiment to the present shows its timelessness. It was necessary to bring out of the oceanic depths of the subconscious the sorcerer’s apprentices who undermined all social experiments. The author’s two books invite us to sit at a giant conference table and parley with them. This conference table is also a banquet table, serving in crystalline style characters whose footprints to our own door Marguerite Young has carved.
Edgar Varèse
From Perspectives of New Music, Princeton University Press, Spring Summer 1966.
To recognize the unique value of a man and an artist, most people wait for the perspective of distance and time. But those friends of Edgar Varèse who were aware of how strikingly the personality of the man and his music matched each other, had a more immediate clue to his true stature and unique place in the history of music. He was a man who lived in a vast universe, and because of the height of his antennae he could encompass past, present, and future. I could feel this each time I rang the bell of his home and he opened the door, for if he received me with the warmth he showed to all his friends, at the same time I could hear all around him and flowing out of the house an ocean of sound not created for one person, one room, one house, one street, one city, or one country, but for the cosmos. His large, vivid, blue-green eyes flashed not only with the pleasure of recognition but with a signal welcoming me into a universe of new vibrations, new tones, new effects, new ranges, in which he himself was completely immersed. He led me into his workroom. The piano took most of the space, and on the music stand there was always a piece of musical notations. They were in a state of revision resembling a collage: all fragments, which he had arranged and rearranged and displaced until they achieved a towering construction. I always looked with delight at these fragments, which were also tacked on the board above his worktable and on the walls, because they expressed the very essence of his work and character: they were in a state of flux, mobility, flexibility, always ready to fly into a new metamorphosis, free, obeying no monotonous sequence or order except his own. The tape recorder would be on high volume for open spaces. He wanted one possessed by, absorbed into, its oceanic waves and rhythms. Edgar Varèse would demonstrate a new bell, a new ob
ject capable of giving forth a new tonality, new nuance. He was in love with his materials, with an indefatigable curiosity. In his workroom one became another instrument, a container, enclosed in his orbital flights into sound.
When we climbed the small stairway to the living room and dining room to join other friends, greeted by his gentle and gracious wife, Louise, Varèse the composer became Varèse the conversationalist. He radiated in company, he was eloquent, satirical, and witty. There was a harmony between his work and his talk. He had contempt only for clichés in music or in thought. His revolt against the cliché never ceased. He used vivid, pungent language. He retained the revolutionary boldness of youth, but always directed by his intelligence and discrimination, never blind or inaccurate. He never destroyed anything but mediocrity, hypocrisy, and false values. He attacked only what deserved to be attacked, and never in personal, petty or blind anger, as is practiced by some artists today.
Speaking once of an unsavory political character he said, “A faire vomir une bolte a ordure.”
His wars were on a high level; they were waged against the men who always stood in the way of vast original projects because they could neither perceive them nor control them.
The last talk we had together was about the irony of the foundations and universities not giving him a complete electronic workshop to work with. He was filled with concepts he could not carry out for lack of the necessary facilities. He needed the machines which were so easily entrusted to young, unformed musicians. He needed a laboratory for exploration into future sounds. Most of these young men could not feed the machines, only run them, and Varèse could have fed them with endless volcanic richness.