by Anais Nin
I cannot rest in Louveciennes. The beauty is not enough. I have to keep racing to avoid my past catching up with me and strangling me. I have to live very fast, place many people and incidents between my past and me, because it is still a burden and a ghost.
Last night a frivolous night with friends from New York. Bright lights, savory dinner at Maxim's, Cabaret aux Fleurs to watch Kiki, but it was not Kiki who seemed attractive to me, Kiki with her bangs and short tight skirt, but her aide-de-camp, a woman so humorous and alive she vivified the entire place. I told her she was wonderful, and she answered me: "Please tell that to the patronne." "Where is the patronne?" I said. "She is there, counting the money." So I went up to the patronne and told her. From the Cabaret aux Fleurs we went to the Boule Blanche. Mr. W. was very red after a month of hunting in Scotland. When the Negro hostess bent over Mr. W. to serve his drink, he stared at her so intensely that she simply pulled her breast out of her dress and offered it to him. His face was wonderful to see. If he had been riding one of his thoroughbreds, he would have fallen off.
We are sitting at the Café Select. Dorothy Murphy joins us. She never quite knows where she is. She looks at times like a Pomeranian. She recognizes certain people, certain foods, certain drinks. But the rest of the time her eyes look on the world as from a rolling ship, and without any sense of recognition. She knows where the Coupole is, but only with her nose. But once there, on her chair, she does not know why we are sitting on those chairs, talking an unfamiliar language. Whereas it is our lips which move, it is her nose which moves and twitches. To form words as we do demands a long effort on the part of her tongue and all her phrases end in a question. We should understand the language of her nose. The syllables in the form of a perpetual question are a caricature of our talk, but the twitch of her nose is truly Pomeranian. Each vein on it bears clearly the year of vintage. One can detect the blue of Beaujolais Supérieure, the sun color of Pouilly-Fuissé. Whisky has formed little craters. Rum has designed a fine grain like the seed of figs. The entire nose, though lacking in prow, is not as pointed as a submarine, but widens in imitation of what as a woman she lacks. It is a nose which testifies to drinking valor. Sitting in her café chair with the same bewildered air of a dog in a strange place, she sniffs the smell of rain on raincoats, of rain on rubber boots, of rain on umbrellas, in puddles, the indoor air of Paris, apéritif and charcoal burners, fog and gasoline, tobacco and café au lait, and she is silent. Her dress has not dragged in the mud, but looks as if she had slept on the sawdust, as if the starch had been boiled out of it, as if it had been pressed through a clothes wringer. Her hat drooped like cock feathers after a fight, but one feather on it remained pointing and alert. By the time I left my chair she had opened her mouth to say something. But what she says has already been said by the feather. What it says is that if instead of one feather sticking up resolutely she had none at all, her friends would not have all abandoned her. But it was this last feather, this feather posing a question, rebelling against doom, protesting, anguished, anxious, heroic, this heroic feather rising from a cemetery of crestfallen sorrows, which dismayed, haunted and estranged people. The last tower of a castle in ruins, the last cry of a turkey condemned by the cook to die, was like that outrageously arrogant feather, surviving drunkenness, proclaiming a gaudy past, the stubborn gallantry of a flag-bearer in a battle of bottles. It was this which made people turn away.
Brassai is never without his camera. His eyes protrude as if from looking too long through a camera lens. He appears not to be observing, but when his eye has caught a person or an object it is as if he became hypnotized. He continues to talk without looking at you. (Later, Brassai, who was Hungarian, suffered much during the war. The Germans entered his workshop and went through all his files of negatives. Looking for what? They carried away many of his photos of Paris at night, many mementoes, many prints he had found on the quays, many old and irreplaceable negatives of erotic subjects.)
Marcel Duchamp sat down with us, and talked about Brancusi. He said he was "arrested." He had found his philosophy and would not budge away from it, would not be dislodged.
Marcel Duchamp thought that an artist should never crystallize, that he should remain open to change, renewal, adventure, experiment.
Yet he himself looks like a man who died long ago. He plays chess instead of painting because that is the nearest to complete immobility, the most natural pose for a man who died. His skin seems made of parchment, and his eyes of glass. A different death from Fraenkel's, not obsessional, but noble and classical.
Inside of me I feel the microbe of jazz. It entered my blood. It is neither white nor red, this microbe which causes my agitation. Rhythm. I am aware that the rhythm of New York was external, and here it is analytical and conversational. I have a feverish need of novelty, renewal.
I am now writing on the eclipse of my relationship with my father for Winter of Artifice.
The mysterious theme of the flavor of events. Some pale, weak, not lasting. Others so vivid. What causes the choice of memory? What causes certain events to fade, others to gain in luminousness and spice? My posing for artists at sixteen was unreal, shadowy. The writing about it sometimes brings it to life. I taste it then. My period as a debutante in Havana, no flavor. Why does this flavor sometimes appear later, while living another episode, or while telling it to someone? What revives it when it was not lived fully at the time? During my talks with my father the full flavor of my childhood came to me. The taste of everything came back to me as we talked. But not everything came back with the same vividness; many things which I described to my father I told without pleasure, without any taste in my mouth. So it was not brought to life entirely by my desire to make it interesting for him. Some portions of my life were lived as if under ether, and many others under a complete eclipse. Some of them cleared up later, that is, the fog lifted, the events became clear, nearer, more intense, and remained as unearthed for good. Why did some of them come to life, and others not? Why did some remain flavorless, and others recover a new flavor or meaning? Certain periods like the posing, which seemed very intense at the time, violent almost, have never had any taste since. I know I wept, suffered, rebelled, was humiliated, and proud too. Yet the story I presented to my father and to Henry about the posing was not devoid of color and incidents. I myself did not feel it again as I told it. It was as if it had happened to someone else, and the interest I took in its episodes was that of a writer who recognized good material. It was not an unimportant phase of my life, it was my first confrontation with the world. It was the period when I discovered I was not ugly, a very important discovery for a woman. It was a dramatic period, beginning with the show put on for the painters, when I was dressed in a Watteau costume which suited me to perfection, and received applause and immediate engagements, ending with my becoming the star model of the Model's Club, a subject for magazine covers, paintings, miniatures, statues, drawings, water colors. It cannot be said that what is lived in a condition of unreality, in a dream, or fog, disappears altogether from memory, because I remember a ride I took through the Vallée de Chevreuse many years ago, when I was unhappy, ill, indifferent, in a dream. A mood of blind remoteness and sadness and divorce from life. This ride I took with my senses asleep, I repeated almost ten years later with my senses awakened, in good health, with clear eyes, and I was surprised to see that I had not only remembered the road, but every detail of this ride which I thought I had not seen or felt at all. Even to the taste of the huge brioche we were served at a famous inn. It was as if I had been sleepwalking while another part of my body recorded and observed the presence of the sun, the whiteness of the road, the billows of heather fields, in spite of my inability to taste and to feel at the time.
Today I can see every leaf on every tree, every face in the street, and all as clear as leaves after the rain. Everything very near. It is as if before I had a period of myopia, psychological blindness, and I wonder what caused this myopia. Can a sorrow alone, a
n emotional shock cause emotional blindness, deafness, sleepwalking, unreality?
Everything today absolutely clear, the eyes focusing with ease, focusing on the outline and color of things as luminous and clear as they are in New York, in Switzerland under the snow. Intensity and clearness, besides the full sensual awareness.
Neurosis is like a loss of all the senses, all perception through the senses. It causes deafness, blindness, sleep, or insomnia. It may be that it is this state which causes anxiety, as it resembles death in life, and may seem like the beginning of death itself. But why do certain things come to life, and others not? Analysis, for example, reawakened my old love for my father which I had thought buried. What were the blocks of life which fell completely into oblivion? What was lived intensely sometimes disappeared because the very intensity was unbearable. But why did things which were not important return clear and washed, and suddenly embodied?
Neurosis causes a perpetual double exposure. It can only be erased by daylight, by an isolated confrontation of it, as if it were a ghost which demanded visibility and once having been pulled out into daylight it dies. The surrealists are the only ones who believed we could live by superimpositions, express it, layer upon layer, past and present, dream and actuality, because they believe we are not one dimensional, we do not exist or experience on one level alone, and that the only way to transcend the contradictions of life is to allow them to exist in such a multilateral state.
I come back to Louveciennes to read letters from my ex-patients, all swimming in life, grateful and happy.
To escape depression sometimes, I walk all through the city, I walk until I am exhausted. I call it "La fête des yeux." Antiques on Rue des Saints-Pères, art galleries, fashions on the Rue Saint-Honoré. Or I buy Vogue and live the life of Vogue, all luxury and aesthetics which I gave up. I could have attended the ball at which everyone went dressed as the portraits of Velásquez. I sit at the Lido, watching the rich old ladies pick up the young Argentine dancers. I go skiing or yachting as in Vogue pictures. I buy a transparent cigarette case and a chapeau auréole. I really attend the dress show of Schiaparelli which is a magnificent work of art. I can well believe she was a painter and a sculptress before she designed dresses. But I could wear none of her things at Villa Seurat, or at Louveciennes.
I never buy for duration, only for effect, as if I recognized the ephemeralness of my settings. I know they are soon to be changed to match the inner changes. Life should be fluid.
My father, on the contrary, builds for eternity. He has such a fear of life that he struggles for permanency, to defeat change. He wants the strongest, most lasting woods, closets full of medicines for possible future needs. He is pained when I send him a letter without waiting for the chronological order. The creator's love of change and mobility does not inspire human confidence. I think in all this I am motivated by such a passion for life that the idea of not moving is for me a death concept. I shiver when people boast of having been born in the same bed in which they hope they will die. The quest for fixed values seems to me a quest for immobility and stagnation. I think of museum pieces, embalmed mummies. Whatever is not alive I want to cast away, even if it is an old chair. Whatever is not playing a role in the present drama is good for the attic. The Spaniards have a ritual: once a year they burn the old objects, in the street, in a big bonfire.
I believe in avoiding constructions which are too solid and enclose you. The same with the novel, if you catalogue too completely, the freshness and the life withers.
Colette Roberts comments on Winter of Artifice: "Your novel touches me. It is human and real. But because it happens more deeply than the level on which people usually experience life, there seems to be glass around it, like the glass over the paintings at the Louvre. One sees the real painting, all right, one almost feels it, but there is glass."
When I was analyzing I observed clearly that the fear of death was in proportion to not-living. The less a person was in life, the greater the fear. By being alive I mean living out of all the cells, all the parts of one's self. The cells which are denied become atrophied, like a dead arm, and infect the rest of the body. People living deeply have no fear of death.
[October, 1935]
For the winter I rented Jeanne's furnished apartment. At first I enjoyed living in her atmosphere, slipping into the décor of her world, but soon I had to hide the porcelain figures, the eighteenth-century gold-and-mosaic clock, eighteenth-century paintings. I had to pin back the heavy white brocade curtains with their gold tassels. But I loved the white telephone next to my bed, the white satín sheets embroidered with Jeanne's initials. Since her divorce she stays in the country and comes to visit her children, who live with their father at the other end of the apartment. This apartment is separated from mine by a long glass hallway planted with hothouse tropical greenery and has a separate door.
I see the Tour Eiffel from my bedroom. In the apartment above me someone studies the piano haltingly.
Perhaps if I do not succeed in living June and Henry's chaotic life, fail to enter into it completely, I may succeed in living a life like Jeanne's, while carrying into it all that differentiates me from them: depth. Luxury is sweet and beautiful. Luxury helps to dream.
How well I dreamed in New York under Rank's protection! Flowers every day. Taxis. Beautiful restaurants. I loved shooting letters down the glass tubes, elevator doors opening magically, maids in starched light-green dresses, elegance, soft lights, radiators boiling, whistling, snow on the window sills.
The rhythm of New York was what I felt in harmony with. My room at the hotel flooded by the sun and snow reflections. White flowers in a vase. A phrase from that immense and wise soul of Rank's to guide the day.
I worked all morning on Winter of Artifice. Walked along the Seine after lunch, so happy to be near the river. The hum of cafés. No money, so I close my eyes when I pass a shop.
Henry is working too. He cut out some pages I did not like about "I snooze while you work, brothers." Ranting and moralizing. Trivial passages. It is clear now that I have more to say and will never say it as well, and he has less to say and will say it marvelously. It is also clear that surrealism is for him, not for me. My own style is simple as in my father book, direct, like the diary. Documentary. Henry's rich and meaningless to the mind. Turning inward, to write all day.
Certain pages on my father are deep and moving. I have been thoroughly honest. My style is bare. I never think of how I will say it, only to say it as spontaneously as possible.
I wrote the last pages of Winter of Artifice. About the last time I came out of the ether to see a dead little girl with long eyelashes and slender head. The little girl died in me and with her the need of a father. The great emotion with which I wrote the last pages, and the last lines, was so strong that it was only much later that I understood their meaning.
The book is not finished, only half done, because I write the emotional pages first, without order, and then I have to fill in and construct. I have been in a serious, solitary mood, withdrawn, knowing only the austere joys of work.
The key to Henry's work is contained in the word burlesque. What he writes is a burlesque of sex, a burlesque of ideas, a burlesque of Hamlet, or Bergson, or Minkowski. A burlesque of life.
What I feel is too deep and too human for that. I write my book on my father and I feel lonely, for I am detaching myself from the Villa Seurat life.
When I lost my necklace of blue stars which I loved, all Henry could say was: "That's good, that's one less object in your life." Henry makes Fred throw away a tuxedo, a suit, shoes, manuscripts so "he will travel more lightly," and they throw them in the rain so that nobody will use them, profit by them.
Conflict between my feminine self who wants to live in a man-ruled world, to live in harmony with men, and the creator in me capable of creating a world of my own and a rhythm of my own which I can't find anyone to share.
My desire for adventure, expansion, fever, fantasy, grandeur.<
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***
A visit from Jeanne. We transported ourselves into fantasy. She read House of Incest and was completely affected. She read me from her second book. Unreality. The fairy tale. Enchantment. Out of life. Her life has the grandeur I love, she has wings and power. Her talk is imaginative. The mistake I made before, which put an end to our friendship, was that my timidity and my love for a human connection did not harmonize with her incapacity to connect with anyone, her schizophrenia. "I construct nothing durable," she said.
I have learned to do without this human warmth, to accept these floating icebergs, these remote non-human species like my father. To live in fantasy without human closeness. Her freedom and mobility in space carried me away. A few hours before, at Villa Seurat, I felt my worlds crumbling because I could not accept mediocrity. When I saw Jeanne I realized in what realm I can always sail freely, the realm of the dream. I have decided to become reckless, to do and try everything because nothing holds me on earth, and I am not afraid to die. I will live out my fantasies, intoxicate myself with people, life, noise, motion, work, creation, even if it means a shorter life, for life is not truly worth dragging out too long. Perhaps all this which lies outside of reality is what gives joy.
Jeanne is coming back soon to change her dress here and go out for the evening. Les métamorphoses. That is very important.
What is it that pulls me away from what others call happiness, home and loved ones, why does my love for them not hold me down, root me? Games. Adventures. The unknown.
I have finished writing the emotional pages about my father in Winter of Artifice.