Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2

by Anais Nin

  In the mail box there are many letters. A message from Waldo Frank: "Why don't you telephone me?" Invitations to cocktail parties, a book from Emily, the week's bill.

  One of my patients asked me to pose for her. I had to go to the same building, the Arcade on Broadway and Sixty-fifth Street, where I used to go as a girl of sixteen when I was an artist's model. And just as if I were as poor as I was then, I could only eat a sandwich for lunch because one of my cripples waited for me, to bring me only his illness.

  White lights! Going up! When I open the door of my room I sit on the doorstep, so tired out I have the feeling I will not be able to take the last three steps. The telephone is ringing. I let it ring.

  James Boyd took me to the theatre. He told me a fascinating story about Hemingway, who is a very close friend of his. He described Hemingway pacing up and down in his den, saying: "There is another dimension. I am fully aware of it, but I can't get to it." So he was trapped in his reporting of externals, his faithfulness to the surface, to words actually said.

  For all my patients sensuality is a giving in to "the low side of their nature." Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings.

  On the mezzanine floor there are concerts I never have time to hear. In the basement there are my empty trunks waiting for sailing time. Where the elevators strike bottom there is darkness and hysteria. On the main floor there is a perfumed Anaïs who meets celebrities, social workers, teachers, very poor people, society people, entertainers, actors, dancers, writers, timid people, slick people, bankers' wives, the flower of Southern aristocracy, snobs, benefactors, newspaper men.

  Thirty-six floors, maids cleaning, men carpet-sweeping, letters falling down the chute. Thirty-six floors to my activities, thirty-six cells, from six to eight patients a day.

  The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.

  I rebuilt shattered lives, resuscitated, led, taught. I handed out the key to the room where lovers met, consoled the deserted ones, restored faith, aroused the intellect, opened new worlds. Ecstasy. I gave the key to it too, and I feel it now because my lame ducks are dancing.

  In America, I can see, it is all survival of the tough. The sensitive, the tender are trampled down. Mass moulds, loss of individuality, confusion between individuality and the ego. So there has been a loss of individuality and respect for the self, a loss of identity.

  Met Norman Bel Geddes at the Ritz bar. Later we went to the Kit Kat Club. He tells me he ran away from home to become a magician in vaudeville.

  Everywhere we go everybody knows him. The entertainers come and sit at our table. Norman says: "When you get one of those performers in bed they have nothing to give you. They have given all of themselves to their performance." He is generous, friendly, promiscuous. Names flash in his conversation like names on a marquee. "When I saw Reinhardt ... Miriam Hopkins ... when Eva Le Gallienne and I had dinner in Paris ... when I produced..." His fraternizing with the world was enjoyable. It was the way Henry would behave if he had Hollywood and Broadway at his feet. He left me at my hotel at 3:00 A.M. murmuring: "You're marvelous."

  In Harlem I realized Negroes are natural and possess the secret of joy. That is why they can endure the suffering inflicted upon them. The world maltreats them, but among themselves they are deeply alive, physically and emotionally, and it is possible that their tormentors are jealous of this quality, they are the withered and bitter ones.

  Rank misses the gaiety of Paris, its cafés, its humanity and warmth.

  He said jokingly that he wished he could be analyzed by me. "Half of the effectiveness of analysis lies in the wish of the analyst to heal and to help. This wish is contagious, and often does half of the work. Every analyst has it at the beginning and then gradually loses it. If analysis becomes mechanical, it suffers. The neurotic feels it. You have kept your genuine interest in human beings. Freud began to analyze me. He believed every analyst should be analyzed himself. But we could not go on. He was not objective. Or at least, I did not feel he was. Too much wisdom prevented me from living out my natural self."

  Schizophrenia looks so much like indifference that it is difficult to tell them apart. I am not sure at times whether Henry has moments of total indifference, non-caring, or moments of splits caused by the violence and brutalities of American life.

  The danger of schizophrenia is that the neurotic in a state of shock seeks another shock to awaken himself, seeks pain. And the pain he feels gives him momentarily the illusion of being fully and wholly alive.

  Henry is writing about Attila and Christ, both in the end conquering the world, one by force, the other by love, and both doing as much harm.

  Henry is contented with a flow of people who are not vital to him. To this flow he gives his time, his energy, his ideas, talk, letters, but he does not give himself. He feels he is communicating with the world. He thinks I am aloof, but does not understand that I cannot give superficially, can only form vital, deep attachments to a few. I hold back from the casual flow.

  I lost weight, sleep. I was haunted by the troubles of my patients. Their nightmares became my nightmares. I could not enjoy my own life. I thought about them and how to help them day and night. I was ill with their illness, in sympathy, in empathy. I felt submerged, and desperate not to be able to save all the wounded. I went as far as I could in giving of my strength. I was depleted and drained of all I had to give.

  Rank was asking for another sacrifice: to give up my writing and rewrite his books. He saw me thin and worn and yet he disapproved of my leaving New York. I knew the time had come to leave New York or I would be consumed in service and healing.

  The gift Rank made me was that of being understood, justified, absolved.

  He would always ask me what I had been doing during the week. It was at this moment his magic would begin to operate, because no matter what I told him, from the most trivial: "I bought a bracelet," to the most important for me: "I found a job for my first patient," or "I wrote a page on minerals for House of Incest" Rank would immediately pounce on this fact with the joy of a discoverer, and raise this fragment to a brilliant, complete, dazzling legend. The bracelet had a meaning, the-minerals had a meaning, they revealed the amazing pattern by which I lived which only Rank could see completed and achieved. He would repeat over and over again: "You see, you see, you SEE." I had the feeling that I was doing extraordinary things. When I stopped before a window and bought a bracelet I expressed the drama of woman's dependence and enslavement. In this obscure little theatre of my unconscious, the denouement was this spontaneous purchase of a bracelet. According to Rank I was not seduced by the color and shape and texture of it, by my love of adornment. It was much more dramatic than that! Rank's interest was concentrated on unraveling the mystery of this ritual. "You see, you SEE." Not only the moment spent on Fifth Avenue was revived, intensified, but all I had done during the week was like a perfect play, or a novel, fostered by Rank's revelation. I felt like an actress who had not known how moving her voice and gestures had been, their tremendous repercussion, but also like a creator preparing in some dim laboratory a life like a legend, and now reading the legend itself from an enormous book. And this was certainly a part of the legend, Rank bowing over each incident, explaining, marveling at this miracle which had not seemed a miracle to me but a whim, my walking along and buying a bracelet, as miraculous to Rank as liquid turned to gold in an alchemist's bottle. The more I talked, the more stories I poured out, the more Rank convinced me that I had not only filled the world with a multitude of little acts but that all these acts were of deep significance and to be admired for the very act of their flowering. To please him, I would go back and find little actions I might have missed o
r lost down the dusty streets of my rich life, which, touched up by the illuminating wand of Rank's interpretation, acquired a new depth, a patina, a glow I had never noticed before, and which Rank feasted upon as if it were one of the most colorful tapestries he had ever seen. Colored lights played upon insignificant acts? Nothing was insignificant. I had gone back to the same place and bought a second bracelet. Why? I often bought two of everything I liked. I felt the danger of loss. I wanted to be prepared against the loss of a dress I loved which might wear out, the loss of a sandal of a unique design I might never find again. But two bracelets. Duality? Two loves? One representing the woman who wanted to be enslaved (slave's bracelet), the other to bind the other, the one I loved? Was I going to wear them together, like twins, or was I going to save one against the possibility of loss, or was I going to give the matching one to someone else? Nothing was insignificant. Even when I told Rank a lie, it was to expose the blindness of science, of psychoanalysis, to prove that it was not like the eye of God in my Catholic teachings, able to see everything that happened on earth.

  Rank laughed. I was always glad to make him laugh. He laughed at my understanding of the games. He said I did not want to make things too real so they would not turn into tragedy, or die as they so often did in reality. I liked play. I did not want tragedy, destruction. I had cultivated elusiveness, means of escape, magician's tricks.

  There was a meeting of psychoanalysts, and there were seven of us in the train going to Long Beach.

  The long, sad boardwalk, with its scraping noise of feet on wood. Crowds. Discord between sea and voices, voices screeching like owls, discord between the colorlessness of the sea and the crude raw colors of movie advertisements, between the smell of hot dogs and the smell of fish, angry flying clouds and grit of sand. The crowd walking, chewing, the wind stirring up dyed hair, the salt so bitter in the bite of the wind on the lips, bold houses which should have been hiding, exposing diseased façades, open-jawed shops with loud-speakers deriding the hiss of the sea, announcing the sale of furniture, of horoscopes, of dolls. The long boardwalk, gritty to walk upon, a fair of monsters exposed without charge, faces of owls, rictuses of walruses, the eyes of sting rays. A hotel which looked like a penitentiary on the outside and like a brothel inside, all red and gold. The sea was there, its rhythm broken by radios blaring. The vast dining room where everyone had passed, no one had passed, all bearing names on their lapels. Conventions. The sea cannot enter. Dusty curtains are drawn, and there are too many waiters, too many signs on the doors, too many bells, too many mirrors, rugs, cigar butts in vases filled with sand. The sea was concealed and silenced.

  It was that day, at a dinner, with a tag on my shoulder, that I discovered I did not belong to the world of psychoanalysis. My game was always exposed. At the door there is always a ticket collector asking: "Is it real? Are you real? Are you a psychoanalyst?" They always know I am a fraud. They do not take me in. It seemed to me that day that all of them were examining fragments which should never have been separated except in a laboratory. I was not a scientist. I was seeking a form of life which would be continuous like a symphony. The key word was the sea. It was this oceanic life which was being put in bottles and labeled. Underneath my feet, moving restlessly beneath the very floor of the hotel, was the sea, and my nature which would never amalgamate with analysis in any permanent marriage. I could not hear the discussion. I was listening for the sea's roar and pulse.

  It was that day I realized once more that I was a writer, and only a writer, a writer and not a psychoanalyst.

  I was ready to return home and write a novel.

  A few days later I sailed for home. When I left, New York was covered with fog. I could only hear the ship's sirens.

  [June, 1935]

  Louveciennes. Home. Rush of memories. Sleeplessness. I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth. Here I feel restless. The Persian bed. The clock ticking. Time slowed down. The dog barking at the moon. Teresa bringing the breakfast. All the electric bulbs are missing, the tenants took things away. The books are dusty. My colored bottles seem less sparkling after the sharp gaudy colors of New York. The colorful rooms seem softer, mellower. The rugs are worn. Where is the jazz rhythm, the nervous energy of New York? The past. The glass on my dressing table is broken. The curtain rods are missing. Where are the garden chairs? France is old. It has the flavor, the savoriness, the bouquet, the patina of ancient things. It has humanity, which New York does not have.

  I had traumatic fears on the boat. Dr. Endler would be waiting for me at the pier to take me back to the hospital to go through the stillbirth again. Or I would picture my father's house all in brown (brown, said Oswald Spengler, is the color of philosophy). Brown is a color I hate.

  Louveciennes is old and tranquil. I once loved its oldness, its character. Now it seems to have the musty odor of the past. New York was new.

  The garden wall is crumbling from the weight of the ivy.

  My mother thinks it is beautiful.

  But I am sad. I do not seem to fit here any more, or am I in love with feverish activity, intensity, excitement? The silence of Louveciennes, the stony peasant faces behind the windows. Peace. Home is peace. The village bells are ringing. The smell of honeysuckle enters through the window. A new me does not belong here any more, a new me is an adventurer and a nomad. People around me do not change as I do, do not sprout new branches. To come back was like being caught in a circle. I struggle against monotony and repetition.

  I spread out on my bed all the gifts I brought from New York. A set of wooden dishes with astrologic symbols against blue-painted edges. We will have a dinner and invite Antonin Artaud and René Allendy.

  It is the sameness of everything which makes me feel I have not moved at all. That is why adventurers take a ship and go to Africa, walk through Tibet, climb the Himalayas, ride on camels through Arabian deserts. To see something new.

  Face to face with a gentle, diminutive Paris, all charm, all intelligence, the new Anaïs feels: But I know it already. It is familiar. I am in love with a new, as yet uncreated world, vivid colors and large scales, vastness and abundance, a synthetic vast city of the future.

  How surrealistic it was to go up as fast as a bullet to the top of the Empire State building, to look down at New York as from an airplane, and find canary birds singing in a cage. Incongruous. In New York you feel you are living in space, with no earth under your feet.

  In Louveciennes the sheets smell of mildew, there are thousands of old autumn leaves to rake and burn. Anaïs, rake the leaves, you are at home, no more adventures.

  I had expected too much: great expansion, tremendous outward changes to match the inner changes in me, voyages to India, Spain, China, new friendships, new sensations, new rhythms.

  I am trying to land gently. From the fantastic voyage through all the levels of American life, the exploration of Rank's vast, cosmic mind, the intoxication of freedom, the adventure of analysis, to the isolation of Louveciennes, its sleepiness.

  I have to grow in a different way, not cover mileage, but in depth. I have to sublimate my love of adventure.

  My father is in the South, taking a cure for rheumatism. Joaquin is competing at the Paris Conservatory.

  I dream of a printing press, of publishing.

  There is a barn next to the house which once served to store wheat on the top floor, and horses and carriages on the ground floor. Everybody loves the idea of setting up a printing press there, and to become independent of publishers.

  China again, as Henry calls it, the China of the artist. The house began to awaken, to shed its magic again. People came and said it was like the house of Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes.

  Henry is working blissfully. Visitors. Slow meals in the garden. I create an inner whirlpool.

  I am not a patient craftsman in writing. I like to keep the aliveness and the freshness of writing. I like the first spontaneous version, the
explosion of seeds, the opening of new roads. Lively talk last night.

  We all write about the same people, but so differently. I am always true to life, as a woman is. Henry, [Michael] Fraenkel and [Fred] Perlès invent, fictionalize.

  Fraenkel came, appropriated the printing press project, dominated Louveciennes, talked uninterruptedly all day and far into the night. The ego! A small, frail man, nervous, ill, but the will and the ego immense, filled the house. He made outrageous statements, that Black Spring was the result of all the talks that took place between Henry, Walter Lowenfels and Fraenkel. Even Henry laughed at this. Finally he lost patience and said: "This talk is wonderful, isn't it? Well, I've had better ones with Anaïs right here in this room." But Fraenkel was drunk on himself. He would not take the train back to Paris. He moved in. I left them in the garden talking and went back to my work.