Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  CHAPTER 26

  Los Angeles, California, 1966-71

  TRISTINE

  THE 1966 PUBLICATION OF THE Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1934) was perfectly in sync with the zeitgeist. Thanks to Anaïs having edited out any mention of Hugo, her diary was perceived as the true record of an openly sexual single woman living on her own in Paris with no need of a husband. I knew Anaïs’s liberated, independent lifestyle was invented, but that didn’t stop me from trying to replicate it along with the young women of the ’60s who took it as fact.

  The first published volume of Anaïs’s Diary created a new persona for her—not Anaïs Guiler, the privileged wife of an investment banker, nor Anaïs Pole, the bohemian wife of a sexy younger man, but Anaïs Nin, the independent, unmarried woman who had lovers and wrote about them. She positioned herself as a single woman ahead of her time who championed a woman’s right to explore and value her own sexuality. For my generation of early Boomers, Anaïs Nin became the icon for our sexual liberation. Colleges and universities all over the country invited her to speak, accept awards, and attend celebrations in her honor.

  Anaïs almost always said yes. I had thought she would limit her public exposure given the risks, but she leapt to it with the same abandon and repertoire of tricks that had kept her aloft on her illegal trapeze for over a decade. Radio interviews, TV appearances, auditoriums full of adoring fans—Anaïs appeared before them all as a joyful, free, compassionate, wise, and accomplished exemplar of the new woman. She wasn’t about to let fear of exposure prevent her from reaping the rewards of a literary renown that had so long eluded her.

  Thanks to academic feminists, such as I soon became, and our promotion of previously ignored women authors, Anaïs gained a genuine self-confidence she had lacked. She was finally, and within her lifetime, recognized for what she had intuitively known from childhood: that she was the foremost diarist of the twentieth century. Her belated success proved to her that she had been right in sticking to the callings of her heart and soul, reaffirming her faith in women’s intuition and subjectivity; while I, at the same time, was being trained in grad school to accept only supportable, documented objectivity.

  Despite the many accusations from critics that a woman who published her diary had to be a narcissist, Anaïs, unlike most people who achieve fame, proved a better person for it. She became more centered, generous, and kind—and happier because she didn’t have to lie to her husbands as much. She now had money from her royalties to pay for her coast-to-coast flights, as well as a lecture agent who booked appearances for her alternately on either coast. What a relief for her to have this help with the trapeze!

  It was glorious to see Anaïs in these days of her fulfillment. Hugo made few demands on her because he was now completely dependent on her financially, while Rupert leapt to play the handsome young consort to her elegant priestess. She kept her friends “in the know” close, holding Chablis-and-cheese parties for us at the Silver Lake house.

  Anaïs would still panic when one or the other husband overheard something incriminating, and although I remained as tightlipped as a CIA agent, every time I traveled east to visit my godmother, Anaïs would phone to ban me from speaking about her to Lenore or seeing Hugo. After my failure to prevent Rupert’s middle-of-the-night phone call to Hugo years before, she never again entrusted me to guard her trapeze, which was fine with me as long as I remained her confidante. The responsibility of collecting Hugo’s mail and intercepting his calls fell to a ditzy pair of middle-aged women—“the twins”—friends of Renate who dressed alike and accepted little cash gifts for their services.

  I now had a different function in Anaïs’s life. Since I was getting my PhD in English literature at UCLA, my new assignment was to legitimize her published Diaries and novels within the university, for while the coeds of America celebrated her, the academic establishment still held her in contempt. Anaïs knew that her lasting literary reputation depended upon young feminist scholars, such as myself, teaching and writing about her work. I reveled in my reflected glory as Anaïs’s protégée and would have liked to tell everyone. However, Renate advised me to downplay the personal relationship, so I’d receive fewer difficult-to-answer questions and would be taken more seriously as an Anaïs Nin scholar.

  I’d gone to UCLA for grad school because it would keep me near Anaïs, and there I joined one of the earliest women’s consciousness-raising groups. Initially, my involvement with the group increased my admiration for Anaïs. Our method for raising our consciousness echoed the nonjudgmental intimacy of her Diaries. At our meetings, we went around in a circle sharing our personal experiences on a particular theme: mothers, fathers, siblings, lovers, to have or not to have children, professions closed to us, the many putdowns for being female we’d internalized.

  We confided to each other our secrets, trusting that anything said within the group would never leave it: a baby given up for adoption, years of spousal abuse, faked orgasms, an abortion, a sexual attraction to another woman, an unrevealed rape. Like snakes, our stories dropped into the pit encircled by our chairs, and we examined them wriggling there along with our shame and guilt. We murmured to each other, “It’s not your fault … That’s why we are meeting, so that someday it will be different for women.”

  By 1970, though, we had transformed into an action group with the goal of establishing a Women’s Studies program at UCLA. Those of us who were grad students put together proposals for classes we believed should be offered to undergraduate women, and our whole group, including faculty wives, university secretaries, and women from the community, pressured the administration to fund the courses. By August 1971, a number of us grad students were scheduled to teach the very first classes at UCLA that acknowledged the contributions of women in our respective fields.

  By that time, Anaïs had edited and published three volumes of her Diary. I made the first two volumes, then in paperback, required reading for my Identity through Expression: Women Writers class, offered through the English department. When I handed out a draft of my syllabus to my women’s consciousness circle for feedback, Clara, the most brilliant and beautiful of our remarkably attractive group, objected.

  “I guess you could include Nin for historical reasons, but you can’t call her a feminist author as you have it here.” Clara snapped her unpainted fingernails against my course outline and pushed back a cluster of copper curls that haloed her flawless face.

  With her continental sophistication acquired from having attended the Sorbonne and her impeccably correct leftist politics, Clara awed me as Anaïs once had. It bothered me that when I’d first let drop to Clara that I knew Anaïs Nin, she had been unimpressed, unlike everyone else who marveled that the exotic diarist was living, no longer in Paris, but right there in prosaic LA.

  The heavyset provost’s secretary asked, “Who’s Annis Nin?”

  Clara gestured for me to answer, but I nodded back, wanting to hear her take on Anaïs. Clara began, probably borrowing from her prepared class on French women writers: “The French like Nin because they have a tradition for her. She follows in a direct line from the French courtesans who were better known for their lovers and literary salons than their own writing. They were professional muses: Marion Delorme, Claudine-Alexandrine Guerin de Tencin, Marie Duplessis, Ninon de l’Enclos.” Clara deferentially flipped a hand to emphasize her ease with these French names. “They were like the Greek hetaera or the Japanese geishas,” she continued, “experts in the arts of pleasing men. They were oppressed because they could only survive by maintaining the pleasure of their male patrons. They could hold power only as long as their sexual appeal lasted, though some of them were able to make it last well into old age thanks to their beauty tricks.”

  “Do you know any of those tricks?” the provost’s secretary asked.

  “They were stupid. They used white powder that gave them lead poisoning.” Clara waved away the question. “That’s not the point. The point is they were hardly liberated.�
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  “Well, they were for their time,” I argued.

  Clara took my opinion seriously. “I suppose you could say that. By being parasites on the nobility they had better lives than servant women or farmer’s wives, but that was a question of class.”

  I enjoyed batting ideas with Clara; she always came back with a well-reasoned argument, an intellectual muscularity absent in the feminine subjectivity and intuition Anaïs heralded. I countered to Clara, “In some ways the courtesans were better off than we are. They had the leisure to write. Their time wasn’t taken up having children, or working, or managing households.”

  I realized immediately that Clara would see “leisure to write” as an elitist concern, but the provost’s secretary jumped in: “Sounds like a liberated life to me!”

  Clara gave her a withering look. “A muse spends her life enabling men’s creativity instead of her own.”

  “Well, Anaïs Nin isn’t just a muse.” I came to my mentor’s defense. “She’s a diarist and novelist in her own right. Maybe she was a muse to Henry Miller when they were in Paris, but now she’s committed to her own work.”

  Even as I was saying it, though, I realized it wasn’t true. Anaïs had completely abandoned her diary and novel writing, in favor of playing muse to her fans through her prolific correspondence. Clara was right, as well, that Anaïs was like a courtesan in that everything about her was delicate and feminine—her soft voice, her graceful movements, her painstaking appearance—as if she’d been designed to fulfill men’s fantasies.

  Clara smirked at my defense of Anaïs. “Oh, that’s right, you know her, don’t you?”

  “A little.”

  “You know her?” the provost’s secretary interrupted. “Can you get her to visit our group?”

  “I don’t think so. She has a lecture agent who books all her appearances.”

  “Offer the stipend you get for guest lecturers in your class, and we’ll all come,” the excited secretary urged.

  Her unabashed eagerness made me want to show Anaïs off to the group, but Clara said, “She’s not going to come to your undergraduate class or visit our little group. It would insult her narcissism now that she’s a star.”

  I was so tired of hearing this accusation of narcissism against Anaïs that I was determined to show Clara she was wrong. I’d get Anaïs to come talk to our group and my class. It would be a feather in my cap, and Clara would see for herself how egalitarian, witty, eloquent—and feminist—Anaïs really was.

  I always seemed to be trying to prove something to Clara because compared to her raised political consciousness, mine always came up short. She participated in a dangerous underground for Latin American victims of terror, summered on sugar collectives in Cuba, and stood in solidarity with working class women. So in addition to the UCLA women’s group, I joined an on-campus socialist group for grad students and professors. It turned out, though, that our group didn’t actually do anything except read and discuss texts by Marx, Lenin, and Engels. One evening, I said to the study group—because my landlord wasn’t renewing my lease—“What if, instead of just talking about communism, we tested it ourselves to see if we could make it work?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Bob, whose beard was the same orange shade as his long hair. He liked experiments; he had a PhD in nuclear physics and had told us that the only jobs he could find in his field were for the US government, so he’d saved his large salary for three years and dropped out at twenty-six with enough money, according to his calculations, to last the rest of his life.

  I proposed, “What if we become a commune and live together in a house where we each pay according to our ability and receive according to our need?” I didn’t think anyone would go for the idea, especially since my income as a teaching assistant was near bottom, but to my amazement three of the guys said yes. Bob brought along his girlfriend, so we were five; sufficient, we decided, to call ourselves a commune. After we added up what we could collectively pay for rent, we began to look for a mansion to lease.

  We found a Greene and Greene–style manor house in Santa Monica four blocks from the boardwalk. In August we all moved in, the guys unloading salvaged furniture my mother had been happy to clear from her living room and running my mattress up the curved, balustraded stairway. We joined a Venice food co-op for weekly boxes of organic produce and established a nightly ritual of communal dinners in our chandeliered dining room.

  I knew that upon Anaïs’s return from a European trip, she would want to see my commune. She was avid about keeping up with the alternative culture scene: she’d tramped through a field to see geodesic domes, attended love-ins and sit-ins, and turned me on to Judy Chicago’s feminist art installations.

  So as I was driving to Silver Lake, I formulated my plan. I’d invite her to the commune for a collectively prepared dinner, and afterwards in our expansive living room, she could address my women’s group and class. I’d prove to Clara that Anaïs didn’t consider our group small potatoes. I’d offer Anaïs my course speaker stipend, because I knew she would appreciate the resonance that I was proffering her a real invitation, with a real stipend, for a real university event, whereas my apprenticeship had begun seven years earlier by sending a fictitious invitation, with a fictitious stipend, for a nonexistent university event. That’s the way it was with Anaïs. Whatever she imagined—her mariage a trois, her literary stardom, her financial independence—eventually actualized. She had taught me to dream and to actualize my dreams as she had.

  When I entered the open front door, Anaïs and Renate were huddled on the built-in couch, discussing their facelift experiences. They changed the subject, knowing that as a doctrinaire feminist now, I considered plastic surgery to hide a woman’s age politically incorrect.

  After I’d kissed their lifted cheeks, they insisted on hearing all about my new Women’s Lit class. It was the first time anyone had taught Anaïs’s Diaries in a university. Anaïs wanted to know the other authors on my syllabus, but when I listed Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath, and Nikki Giovanni, she wrinkled her nose in distaste while nodding discreetly.

  I described the first meeting of my class, when eager young women had lined up in the hallway and poured out into the courtyard, hoping to get on the waiting list. “They limited the enrollment to thirty-two, and over a hundred women showed up!” I enthused. “One guy pushed his way into the classroom and shouted, ‘This is sexism! I should be able to take this class!’”

  “What did you say?” Renate was enjoying this.

  “I told him, ‘This class is for women only. There are plenty of classes you can take that were designed just for men.’”

  “Did he leave?” Renate asked.

  “No! He threatened to sue me and the university for discrimination against him for being the wrong gender!”

  Renate exclaimed, “Oh, no, Tristine!” After her ordeal of being sued and losing her house to her contractor, Renate was terrified of lawsuits.

  “That kid won’t sue me,” I assured Renate. “I told him he could get in line with the women in the hallway and sign up on the waiting list. I said, ‘I promise you, you’ll have as much of a chance of getting in the class as they do, so you are being treated equally.’”

  “That was good.” Anaïs smiled. She didn’t approve of men being seen as the enemy. She repeatedly reminded me that a woman should be responsible for her own emotional issues and not put them on the man.

  I shared with Anaïs and Renate my mother’s reaction when I’d told her about my consciousness group’s victory in getting funding for our classes.

  “That’s wonderful, Trissy!” Mother’s heavily jowled face, exhausted from overwork, had lifted with a rare smile of hope and pride. It was the same with Renate and Anaïs. Their faces were already lifted, and they were already full of hope because of the success of Anaïs’s Diaries; but they glowed, too, with pride for what we younger women had accomplished.

  This gave me my opening. I i
nvited Anaïs to address my class and women’s group.

  “Don’t you dare, Anaïs!” Renate butted in. “You have to preserve your strength.”

  Damn, Renate was working at a cross-purpose. I should have talked to her beforehand.

  I moaned to Anaïs, “Oh, my students will be so disappointed if you don’t come!”

  Anaïs looked stricken at the thought of disappointing them. She routinely accepted speaking engagements at remote Midwestern colleges where she had to sleep in associate professors’ guestrooms, and she personally answered every letter she received in sack loads because, she said, “I don’t want my readers to feel rejected. I know what that feels like.”

  True, she loved the rock star reception when she entered an overflowing auditorium, but in fairness she loved her admirers back. She invited to her parties at the Silver Lake house the loneliest souls met on her travels, people who had told her their sob stories in their letters and then stalked her for, in their floaty words, “a touch of her magic.” She felt it was her job to save them, so Renate and I would find ourselves having to socialize with these airheaded young people—the painfully shy poet who would only speak if asked a question, the girl disfigured in a riding accident who kept one side of her face angled away from you, the runaway with the bad teeth, and the recently released ex-con—all sipping Chablis while standing next to Bebe Barron, a pioneer of electronic music; or James Herlihy, whose novel Midnight Cowboy had become an Academy Award–winning movie.

  Anaïs would glide over to talk to the most awkward and shy guest at the party and shame the rest of us into following her example. She described herself accurately when she wrote that out of her father calling her ugly as a child had come her x-ray vision. People were made of crystal for her. She saw right through their defects—the humped back, the duck walk, the embarrassing acne—straight to their essence, the shadow of their disappointments, the outline of their desires, the glow of their dreams. She completely lacked snobbery and practiced an almost saintly kindness.