Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2

by Anais Nin

  I was writing when Fraenkel came into my room. He was humble and gentle because he had found a copy of his book marked by me and he liked the notes I had made. He said: "You know better than anyone what this book means." He touched his own book fondly, tenderly.

  After this incident I told Henry I thought the printing press should be set up at the Villa Seurat.

  Henry wrote about France:

  Physical deterioration, but the soul expands. Things are rotting away on the outside and in this quick rot the ego buries itself like a seed and blooms. Here the body becomes a plant which gives off its own moisture, creates an aura, produces a flower. I see one big globule which swims in the blood of the great animal MAN.

  This globule is Paris. I see it round, and full, always the whole globule at once. The globule will stretch and expand, it will permit him the most fantastic movements, but will not break. Suddenly I am inside the globule. I entered by osmosis. I seeped through between late afternoon and midnight. I am inside now. I know it. I had managed to get inside all together, a complete man, including my soul.

  Fraenkel was talking about how we became tired of logic, of rationalism, how surrealism, humor and chaos came to break down logic which was unlike life and uninspiring. The living thing, as Henry puts it. I recognized this quality in Henry and followed its influence. It is closer to the feminine way of perception, which I gave up when I had to take care of my mother and my brothers, when I tried to take the place of the missing father and my mother would say: "Now tell me what to do, with that clear, logical mind of yours." I went back to intuition and instinct when I turned to D. H. Lawrence, and then to Henry, who represents the non-rational. The very fact that he is all paradox and contraries, unresolved and without core, is like life itself.

  What makes people despair is that they try to find a universal meaning to the whole of life, and then end up by saying it is absurd, illogical, empty of meaning. There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. To seek a total unity is wrong. To give as much meaning to one's life as possible is right to me. For that is a contribution to the whole. For example, I am not committed to any of the political movements, which I find full of fanaticism and injustice, but in the face of each human being, I act democratically and humanly. I give each human being his due. I disregard class and possessions. I pay my respects to their spirit, their human qualities or their talents. I fulfill their needs as much as I am able to. If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

  ***

  I miss the electric rhythm of New York; it was like riding a fiery race horse. I was drunk on liberty, on space and dynamism. Where are the dazzling lights, the roar of airplanes, fog horns, fast cars, wild pace? I am restless. Adventure is pulling me out. When a man feels this, it is no crime, but let a woman feel this and there is an outcry. Everywhere I look I am living in a world made by man as he wants it, and I am being what man wants.

  I was happier when I was selfless, but now that this growth and expansion has started I am unable to stop it.

  I feel so strangely released, I feel no boundaries within myself, no walls, no fears. Nothing holds me back from adventure. I feel mobile, fluid.

  I do not miss Rank. I think I have finally conquered the need of a father. He played the role generously, but he also tried to dominate me and absorb me into his work. He wanted me to devote my life to the rewriting of his books, a lifelong task which would have destroyed the artist in me. He will never forgive me my return to Paris.

  Walking from the Opéra to Parc de Montsouris, I realized that Paris was built for eternity, and New York only for the present. A documentary film on Egypt portrayed their obsession with eternity.

  We planned to do our own publishing, even though we do not own a press yet. Fred baptized the press Siana, reversing the spelling of my name.

  Fraenkel makes a list of books we will publish and omits me.

  All I have been suffering from is falling from a quick rhythm to a slower one. I cannot sit in a café for hours, or talk for ten hours as Henry and Fraenkel do. I crave action and motion. It is as if my heart were beating faster than theirs and I had broken into the running pace of New York.

  I come back with relief to Louveciennes, after the café life, to a certain order and discipline in work, a certain seriousness which I conceal from the world. The world prefers clowning, jokes, and vaudeville shows.

  Henry is not concerned with insight. He is not troubled by paradoxes and inconsistencies. He accepts contradictions, irrationality and chaos. He is working on Capricorn.

  I asked Henry if he would like to visit Brancusi with me. He said no, he didn't like prophets, it was a pose. So I went to visit Brancusi with Dorothy Dudley's daughter.

  It was late afternoon. He lives in a little house with a courtyard. He opened a huge iron door to us. He wore a white mason's suit, and his beard was long and white like Father Christmas. His studio was white, his statues white or silver. I liked his Bird Without Wings. One long lyrical flight, piercing space. His dark eyes closed completely when he laughed. He looked like a Russian muzhik, a peasant. His face was healthy and rosy in his white beard. He cooked shish-ke-bab in his open fireplace, and served this with big bottles of red wine.

  His statues watched us, but by contrast with the statues of Chana Orloff, they all had a lightness, a capacity for flight, and their abstraction made them unobtrusive, disappearing into the shadows as the big studio darkened. To laugh he threw his head back. Red wine, laughter. He danced, and he explained the stories he told with gestures, he acted them out. Time passed, but when time came to leave, he complained. We said we had to leave, it was very late. He said he could not bear for anyone to leave, he could not bear separation.

  We laughed and said we could not very well sleep in his studio.

  Dorothy's daughter and I began to back towards the door, and Brancusi began to talk volubly as if to distract us from leaving. As he had sculptured so many eggs, I teased him about introducing him to Chana Orloff who sculptured pregnant women. "Or perhaps you have met already, and it is the sight of your eggs which made her sculpture so many pregnant women." Brancusi responded that he would never impregnate a realist. Only young women like us, beautiful young women. Then, as he had sculptured the famous "Colonnes Sans Fins" I asked him if he also believed in "Nuits Sans Fins" (Columns Without End and Nights Without End). We finally left, laughing, teasing, but when we stood on the outside of the iron gate, and Brancusi behind it, with his hands on the bars and such a wistful, lonely expression in his dark eyes, we felt that we were deserting him. *

  Henry is writing about June.

  "My interest in the past is almost scientific, like a detective's, not human. It just happens that I am struggling with several mysteries. And I want to be truthful."

  He was describing his first meeting with June, their first kiss, her first lie.

  "I am writing coldly, so slowly. I am not in love with what I am writing. I have not returned to the past to hug it. It is only my mind which is working. I feel that I was asleep during my whole life with June, that it was a dream, that I was somnambulistic."

  "She wanted you to be asleep, she needed you to be asleep."

  "I realize that she was my creation. I realize how much I learned from your novel, how much I learned from your sincerity."

  Fraenkel is living on the ground floor of the Villa Seurat. Fraenkel and Henry talk a great deal about Spengler, about the end of the world, war, revolutions, destruction, death. The world of death. When I object to this as a philosophy, Fraenkel says that being a woman I am taking a hurdle over and beyond war, into life, because I stand for life. I do not believe Henry is interested in the theme of death, either, but he likes these ideological wrestling matches.


  I have just finished Dr. Esther Harding's book The Way of All Women and Fraenkel was interested in hearing that it was because of the loss of polarity between male and female that we had so much of man seeking man in order to re-enforce his masculinity, and woman seeking woman to re-enforce her femininity. But polarity will come again as it comes at the end of psychoanalysis, when both men and women have found their separate sexual identity, sexual core. How it became weakened, Dr. Harding does not say.

  All the world suffered from the sterility of consciousness, and had to be cured by tapping the unconscious to find the true sources of life again.

  Fraenkel said that would be impossible because the whole world would have to be analyzed.

  "Oh," I said, "it will be, not individually, but by infiltration, contagion, through new arts and new philosophies, new ways of criticism and new ways of interpreting history. Everything that happens to a small group ultimately happens to the masses, to the world."

  Visited Chana Orloff, Richard Thoma, and Fujita, in the Rue des Artistes.

  As I walk down the Villa Seurat with my red Russian dress, I feel in love with the world again, in love with the whole world.

  Jack Kahane [of the Obelisk Press] agreed to publish Winter of Artifice and made me sign a contract. Yes, I have a contract in my pocket.

  Henry is becoming a celebrity. He receives letters from T. S. Eliot, a review by Blaise Cendrars, and 130 copies of Tropic of Cancer were sold to date.

  Our own press will publish Henry's Scenario first, inspired by House of Incest, which I see as a parody of it. House of Incest will be published after that. The third book will be Henry's one-hundred-page letter to Fred.

  [July, 1935]

  Reality. When you are in the heart of a summer day as inside a fruit, looking down at your lacquered toenails, at the white dust on your sandals gathered from quiet somnolescent streets. Looking at the sun expanding under your dress and between your legs, looking at the light polishing the silver bracelets, smelling the bakery odors, le petit pain au chocolat, watching the cars rolling by, filled with blonde women taken from pictures in Vogue, then you see suddenly the old cleaning woman, with her burnt, scarred, iron-colored face, and you read about the man who was cut into pieces, and in front of you now stops the half-body of a man resting on a flat cart with small wheels.

  Henry said: "When I am depressed, I go to sleep."

  And suddenly I realized that when I get depressed I have to act. New York cured me of depression by intense activity.

  We read this definition in Arnaud Dandieu's book on Proust: "Le tempérament schizoïde peut's"exprimer par une fuite dans l'action aussi bien que par une fuite dans le rêve. Le Docteur Minkowski a très bien montré qu'un des symptômes les plus clairs de la perte de contacte avec la réalité était la perte du sens de repos." *

  In the diary I cannot include the endless talks on art, philosophy, literature, because I am more concerned with human beings and their intellectual life is usually a part of their masquerade. The big themes left out of the diary can be found in the books of Spengler, Otto Rank, Antonin Artaud, André Breton, and recently in Denis Seurat's Modernes.

  Artaud once said to me: "The difference between you and other women, you breathe in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen."

  Dorothy Dudley writes me: "I felt inside of nature in House of Incest, a poem. Poets are rare. You are one of them."

  I suggested to Henry that he give up the impossible effort to synthesize his book on D. H. Lawrence, to accept its impressionistic fragments.

  I am the young mother of the group in the sense that I am giving nourishment and creating life. All of them now in motion. When I look at the changes, the transformations, the expansions I created, I grow afraid, afraid to be left alone, as all mothers are ultimately left alone. To each I gave the strength to fly out of my world, and at times my world looks empty. But they come back.

  Henry gives me a summary of a three-day discussion of schizophrenia. Henry is worn out, nervous, affected by his own story of how he broke down Fraenkel and made him weep (we all reproduce in one form or another the process of psychoanalysis for each other: confession, exposing the self behind the masks, absolution, faith, new faith and new vision).

  Fred came with ten pages of his translation of Winter of Artifice into French.

  "We are not happy," I said, "we're joyous, that's a different thing."

  We all went to have coffee together. Henry was still talking about his analysis of Fraenkel, telling me how the description of schizophrenia also applied to him.

  "Tropic of Cancer was a book of cannibalism and sadism," he said.

  As I know him now, it was a mask, a disguise of the sensitive Henry to parry the blows of the world.

  Yesterday I went to Elizabeth Arden's to shed my fatigue. I was lying down with cotton over my eyes. This induced a half-asleep state, a kind of half-dream such as Proust described so well. Then I saw both outer realism and inner realism of the subconscious, saw how they could be fused or alternate harmoniously as they do in life. The state of passing from fantasy to realism, from reverie to action, that was what I wanted to do. In our life they are interwoven. In literature they were treated as separate activities. I began to monologue about my father. I rushed home to my typewriter and swiftly wrote five pages about my father's feet and the drama of projection. Now I know how I will write that book. It is a full recognition of the influence of the subconscious on the vision. In and out of the tunnel of consciousness and subconsciousness, with all the realistic details as well as the waking dream.

  Then came an enthusiastic letter from Rebecca West, who gave my book to her son-in-law, a publisher, and he was in accord with her opinion.

  So to work.

  Copied ten pages of the diary I kept in New York. Enjoyed reliving the feverish activity. Then I wrote the ten pages on the orchestra in Winter of Artifice. Music. That was the key word. Music. He, the musician, did not make the world musical, rhythmic, lyrical for me. "I never could dance around you, my father. No one ever danced around you. As soon as I left you, my father, the whole world swung into a symphony."

  Joaquin sent me the first royalties he earned on his sonata, published in London.

  Henry's first royalties vent into the printing of his Scenario.

  Finding the motives for the actions of human beings is my way of justifying their behavior. I am like the keeper of the python in London. When asked how he managed to feed the python without endangering his life he said: "Oh, I feed him on a stick, he is fond of me, but he does not have enough sense to see the difference between my hand and a piece of meat."

  Henry believes in love, money, fame, as a child does. "It will always come from somewhere."

  Fear of the world produces crystals in writing. One seeks the faultless, crystallized phrases, perfection, the hard polish of gems, and then finds that people prefer the sloppy writers, the inchoate, the untidy, the unfocused ones because it is more human. To jewels they prefer human imperfections, moisture of perspiration, bad smells, stutterings, and all the time I keep this for the diary and give the world only jewels.

  [August, 1935]

  One afternoon in Fraenkel's studio we composed a charade on the theme of Fraenkel's death. He asks us to believe in his death, just as people were asked to believe in Christ's death, because he says until we believe in it he cannot be resurrected. I cannot share Fraenkel's madness as I shared and understood Artaud's. I think because in Fraenkel the madness is intellectual, and in Artaud it was rooted in real emotional pain. And besides, Artaud is a great poet.

  Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine. In the interior monologue there is no punctuation. James Joyce was right. It flows like a river.

  Henry calls me "Schneewittchen," the German word for Snow White.

  I wrote about a hundred pages on my
father (Winter of Artifice). I copied the diary I wrote in New York and returned the original to the vault in a bank where I keep them. I took a taxi to the Villa Seurat and ran into Fred carrying milk for his breakfast with Fraenkel. Fraenkel invited me in and Henry joined us. Henry was in a very good mood because he received a letter from a new admirer and we all sat down to work on mailing subscription blanks for Black Spring, to be brought out as part of the Obelisk series. I wrote a lot of letters to arouse interest in the book. Then Fred and I marketed for lunch, and after lunch we all went back to work. Fraenkel's femme de ménage washes the dishes. Richard Thoma arrives. He brings me back the copy of House of Incest I loaned him. He has designed a dress for me.

  He tells fantastic stories of voodoo curses and black magic, which are prolongations of his romantic writing. He is not a surrealist.

  We all went to the Café Select. We talked of how we are all victims of obsessional patterns and themes. Fraenkel always wants the woman he cannot have, who belongs to somebody else. Henry loves the prostitute but let a whorish aspect show in June or any woman he loves, and then he becomes critical.