Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2

by Anais Nin

  I have finished struggling with the dualities and ambivalences of Henry's writing. He expresses an idea and almost simultaneously a burlesque of it. We had a vigorous argument in which I tried to prove that a man can be contradictory but not ambivalent because then creation is impossible. Creation is taking sides. There is a distinction between relativity and destructive contrariness.

  "Burlesque," answered Henry, "is a means of destruction." His instinct is to destroy. But what? The world of ideas? Then the best way to destroy the world of ideas is to live and write about life, the passions. But he does not turn his back on ideas. At the moment he is interested in the theme of death because he is stimulated by Fraenkel as well as D. H. Lawrence. Yet in his preface to Fraenkel's Bastard Death he begins with four very serious pages, and ends up with twenty pages of burlesque.

  From the day I talked with Jeanne I began to create a whirlpool again, a ballet, a symphony. I saw René Lalou, John Charpentier, Salvador Dali, Anne Green. I visited Le Verrier. Dancing from one to another so as not to fall into depression. Charpentier saying about Blake's head: "Quelle belle caisse à résonance" unleashed pages on orchestra in Winter of Artifice, in which I include the violinist who played violin with her own body, passing the bow between her legs. The idea of an orchestral piece in writing had been fermenting in my head. I wrote ten pages without stopping.

  Something takes place at the Villa Seurat which I cannot share. It is a kind of dadaism.

  The doors are closing on me. I cannot earn my living as an analyst without the presence of Rank. I cannot start publication because Fraenkel would dominate it. I cannot travel for lack of money.

  Henry said: "I feel depressed about the inertia of the world." He cannot get the response he wants. We were talking as we walked along the Seine. There was a fog and we felt lost in it. It seemed like an outer representation of my mood.

  I met the poet Jules Supervielle. Wet, dreamful eyes. A haunted man, with human roots. He is partly South American and writes delicate lyrical fairy tales, and delicate poetry. He is in love with mystery and fantasy. I love L'Enfant de la Haute Mer and Voleur d'Enfant. I could hear the voices of children in another part of the apartment, a lively household, laughter. He read me his new poems with wistfulness. We talked about surrealism. He does not like it. He is trying for utter simplicity, humanity. He agrees with me that dreams have clarity, luminousness. Supervielle dreams day and night. He hates surrealism because it is chaos and absurdity.

  "Ce sont des farceurs."

  Supervielle creates a world of his own which never strays too far from reality, filled with children, humor, whimsicality, with the sea, houses, gardens, animals.

  He said he was always trying to catch up with the man he wanted to be.

  When Henry wrote a fan letter to Kay Boyle she thought it was a letter from a very young writer, who, while admiring and praising her, could not help imitating her own style.

  I once coaxed Allendy to give me a hashish pill.

  I decided this was the time to try it, as I felt weary of my mother role but could not find a new one. Perhaps the hashish pill would bring some revelation.

  I was fully awake and yet dreaming. And my dream was bigger and more overwhelming than my ordinary dreams. It filled the whole room. There was an immense black ocean threatening to engulf me. A big wall protected me, but as I examined it, it was made of books, thousands of enormous books. Books. Books. But the ocean was beginning to shake this wall and I was in danger.

  Such an obvious symbolism made me laugh.

  I do not belong in the Villa Seurat. I do not belong in Jeanne's world. I will have to make my own world.

  [January, 1936]

  Letters from patients asking me to return to New York come every day. When I hear jazz I feel a tremor of adventure, as if the analysis I am going to do if I return there were an adventure, a romance. I dream of the miracles I will perform. Inside of myself I feel ready for a new rhythm, the rhythm of New York. The monster I am going to grapple with is the machine which mechanizes people. I am not a victim of it, so I can stand outside of it and challenge its power, defy its standardizations, dehumanizations, depersonalizations. I can even enjoy its loud mechanical heartbeat, the mechanical beat of New York.

  Pain at parting from my loved ones. The human Anaïs feels pain and wonders why she is possessed by this need for fruitful activity, for an expenditure of herself, for fullness.

  The Christmas tree is withering. Joaquin is playing a Beethoven concerto with the Havana Philharmonic. My mother writes joyous letters. Thorvald may be in New York. James Boyd sent me his novel.

  The life here too tame. The pretty apartment. Pastel-colored friends. Money restrictions, publishing restrictions. Open the window! Let's have the immensity of New York, its magnetism and forces, jazz, smiles, tempo.

  I will be leaving for New York in a few days.

  Arrived in time for Joaquin's U.S. debut at Town Hall. It was a shock to me, for it brought out all the ghosts from the past, from life in New York before Paris, life in Richmond Hill, and I never like to be thrust into the past. I had come to New York for its life in the future.

  People began to come for strength and wisdom, and I felt my own weakness. All of them getting well but saying: "I need a friend."

  Met Dr. Conason again, a friend of Henry's, a tireless monologues He is one who weaves a net around himself, a net of words, and they paralyze him.

  Henry seems numb and remote. For him New York is the past, too painful and he wants to shut it out. I understood his suffering.

  He is working on Tropic of Capricorn, to alchemize the past. The pain became creation.

  What a fear of relationship there is here. No talk. Drinking together. Blurring all feeling and senses. No sense of richness, fullness, expansion. Terrified of intimacy. And consequently alienated. Lonely.

  Sunday supper at Mrs. Thomas'. Raymond Massey, Adrienne Allen (he is acting in Ethan Frame and she in Pride and Prejudice). John Huston, the Middletons. Aesthetic surroundings. Exquisite food and conversation. Mrs. M. has a porcelain face, but her mouth trembles, and I was told she had had a breakdown. Later the talk became glazed and cynical, scathing and acid about people I did not know.

  Norman Bel Geddes said: "Ferdinand Bruckner's play The Criminals, which I admire, was too Russian for Americans."

  "What do you mean, too Russian?"

  "Americans do not understand tragedy."

  Slowly the fullness I came for was there.

  Snowstorms, streets like the mer de glace. One patient is weeping while remembering the cruelty of his playmates. Another overflows with the bitterness of a passionless life. Another weeps because the poems she was writing in secret were discovered, read aloud to the class and jeered at. One says: "You have given me more than one human being can give to another." In one there is an artist who has been brutalized. In another a child who has been neglected. I am rescuing the individual who is submerged by the power of the masses here.

  One of my patients calls me in Russian his "holy secret."

  Rank is in the South, lecturing.

  Last night. Hilaire Hiler's studio. I was in a gay mood. I danced satirically, dialogued in a south-of-France accent with Hiler and he said: "You're the only one who has come here who is not grey." They were all smoking marijuana. As I do not inhale it had no effect on me, but I decided to pretend it did and really put on a performance which convinced everyone I was riotously intoxicated. Wild improvisations.

  Then I went dead. Too much illness around me, too much sorrow. For the first time I understood indifference. Suicide of a soul. Not to care. I wanted to convince myself that I did not care. All my patients are getting better, writing books, giving concerts, taking sides in politics, getting married, but I am dead. Freedom and recklessness. Perhaps because I have fulfilled my responsibilities, I feel free not to care any more.

  [April, 1936]

  Visited Rank. He was settled in an apartment on Riverside Drive. When I arrived
he was standing at the door, gentle, eager, sad. He was thinner, younger, sunburnt. A knowing smile. The river flows under his window. We have an hour to talk, as if I were a patient. He seems resigned to be working intensely as before, with little time for life: "But it is just as well, I am too much of an absolutist for life. It would be better for life if I were less total. You have escaped from the obsession of analyzing. I am glad for you."

  "But I am still in conflict with my feminine self. I am afraid to lose my personal, intimate happiness in this drive towards growth and fulfillment."

  To a great deal Rank asked me, I answered: "I don't know, I don't live by analysis any more, but by a flow, a trust in my feelings."

  "I envy you," said Rank.

  Perhaps it was this I had saved from his intensive obsession with analysis, my emotional life. I did mind his never letting things be. It seemed to me that living by my feelings and impulses I was happier.

  To flow, to drift, to live as nature. I felt that Rank was sad and wished he could be free, discard the doctor. I went to the limit and to the end of this experience, finished with it.

  My brother Thorvald arrived from South America. I waited for him a long time at the pier. He did not come walking down the gangplank. Then an officer came to tell me that he was still aboard, detained by an error in his passport. He said that Thorvald had to stay aboard all night and then would be taken to Ellis Island for questioning. But that I could come aboard and visit him. In fact I could have dinner with him and stay the night if I wished. So I sent a message that I would like to come. And on the deck we faced each other after an absence of ten years. He had left us in Paris, my mother and Joaquin, saying he could not live there, that he preferred to try his luck in South America. He was twenty-one when he left. How different he was now! A man's voice, blue candid eyes behind dark glasses, poised, trim but no taller, the same height as my father. His face a mask too, like my father's. Brusque gestures. Somehow, I could not tell why, he seemed to me like a very young man trying to play the role of a man. It may have been my vision of him from childhood, my remembering him as an adolescent. Thorvald the tease, the only one of the three who had decided to become thoroughly American, to dress like the other boys in school, to be practical, businesslike, to toughen himself. When a child he played the violin well. Soon he cut his hair short, learned baseball. He was going to make money, be a success, etc. Surreptitiously he must have been proud of me, for he took me to games instead of taking his girl friends and pretended to his boy friends that I was his "girl" of the moment. Later he became a Don Juan and collected handkerchiefs to show how many girls he had taken out or kissed. Thorvald was secretive as a boy, estranged from the rest of the family.

  We both wept. And talked. Talked all through dinner.

  "Do you remember, Anaïs, how you shamed me by fighting the boys who attacked me, they all piled up on me because I had long hair and I was a foreigner, and you came and beat them off with an umbrella?"

  "Do you remember how you shamed me by saying it was because I was an artist that I could not learn mathematics?"

  "You bossed me, and I only emancipated myself when I became a boy scout. But you look swell."

  We were having dinner in the empty dining room. A ghostly ship. Already being scrubbed, washed, vacuumed, all the doors open, the beds rolled up, the people scurrying to polish and tidy. Empty rooms, empty salons, an empty dining room, empty decks.

  I was rediscovering my lost brother. My brother who cut himself off from all of us, by not writing letters. He will not show feeling. He talks only of money and practical matters. He is reticent. He is afraid to be misunderstood. He is afraid of gossip. He likes to act in amateur theatricals. The hard shell over him I interpret as a cover for his sensitiveness. But then I always interpret the hard shell thus and I have often been wrong.

  The ghostly ship, not sailing, without any other passenger, was so much like the ship of our childhood. We took a journey through the past.

  The boat became the room of the Enfants Terribles of Cocteau. The whole rest of the world was left out. It was a strange and unique boat, loaded with the past, with socks to mend, tennis shoes, quarrels, chewed pencils, homework, dishes washed in unison, service to my mother. We did not talk about today. Only about yesterday. Yesterday. Childhood. He remembers that we both went to work very young, that he wanted to go to college and could not, that we both worked.

  So we are on the boat of our childhood which is not allowed to steam away, which makes other voyages overloaded with the past. A hiatus. A bridge. A suspense. An entr'acte.

  My father had written to Thorvald that I had become interested in the queer science of psychoanalysis, and that I had become filled with strange ideas.

  Thorvald expected not to be able to talk to me, but when we met we understood each other.

  A trip to Morocco. A short but vivid one. I fell in love with Fez. Peace. Dignity. Humility. I have just left the balcony where I stood listening to the evening prayer rising over the white city. A religious emotion roused by the Arabs' lives, by the simplicity of it, the fundamental beauty. Stepping into the labyrinth of their streets, streets like intestines, two yards wide, into the abyss of their dark eyes, into peace. The rhythm affects one first of all. The slowness. Many people on the streets. You touch elbows. They breathe into your face, but with a silence, a gravity, a dreaminess. Only the children cry and laugh and run. The Arabs are silent. The little square room open on the street in which they sit on the ground, on the mud, with their merchandise around them. They are weaving, they are sewing, baking bread, chiseling jewels, repairing knives, making guns for the Berbers in the mountains. They are dying wool in vast cauldrons, big cauldrons full of dye in which they dip their bunches of silk and wool. Their hands are emerald green, violet, Orient blue. They are making sienna earth pottery, weaving rugs, shaving, shampooing and writing legal documents right there, under your eyes. One Arab is asleep over his bag of saffron. Another is praying with his beads while selling herbs. Further, a big tinta-marre, the street of copperwork. Little boys are beating copper trays with small hammers, beating a design into them, beating copper lamps, Aladdin's lamps. Little boys and old men do the work. They hold the tray between their legs. The younger men walk down the street in their burnouses, going I know not where, some so beautiful one thinks they are women. The women are veiled. They are going to the mosque, probably. At a certain hour all selling, all work ceases and they all go to the mosque. But first of all they wash their faces, their feet, their sore eyes, their leprous noses, their pock-marked skins at the fountain. They shed their sandals. Some of the old men and old women never leave the mosque. They squat there forever until death overtakes them. Women have their own entrance. They kiss the wall of the mosque as they pass. To make way for a donkey loaded with kindling wood, I step into a dark doorway. A choking stench overwhelms me. This stench is everywhere. It takes a day to get used to it. It makes you feel nauseated at first. It is the smell of excrement, saffron, leather being cured, sandalwood, olive oil being used for frying, nut oil on the bodies, incense, muskrat, so strong that at first you cannot swallow food. There is mud on the white burnous, on the Arab legs. Children's heads shaved, with one tuft of hair left. The women with faces uncovered and tattooed are the primitive Berbers from the mountains, wives of warriors, not civilized. I saw the wives of one Arab, five of them sitting on a divan, like mountains of flesh, enormous, with several chins and several stomachs, and diamonds set in their foreheads.

  The streets and houses are inextricably woven, intricately interwoven, by bridges from one house to another, passageways covered with lattice, creating shadows on the ground. They seem to be crossing within a house, you never know when you are out in a street or in a patio, or a passageway, as half of the houses are open on the street, you get lost immediately. Mosques run into a merchant's home, shops into mosques, now you are under a trellised roof covered with rose vines, now walking in utter darkness through a tunnel, behind a donk
ey raw and bleeding from being beaten, and now you are on a bridge built by the Portuguese. Now admire lacy trelliswork done by the Andalusians, and now look at the square next to the mosque where the poor are allowed to sleep on mats.

  Everywhere the Arab squats and waits. Anywhere. An old Arab is teaching a young one a religious chant. Another is defecating carefully, conscientiously. Another is begging, showing all his open sores, standing near the baker baking bread in ovens built in the earth.

  The atmosphere is so clear, so white and blue, you feel you can see the whole world as clearly as you see Fez. The birds do not chatter as they do in Paris, they chant, trill with operatic and tropical fervor. The poor are dressed in sackcloths, the semi-poor in sheets and bathtowels, the well-to-do women in silks and muslins. The Jews wear a black burnous. In the streets and in the houses of the poor the floor is of stamped earth. Houses are built of sienna-red earth, sometimes whitewashed. The olive oil is pressed out in the street too, under large wooden wheels.

  I had letters of introduction. First I visited Si Boubekertazi. He sat in his patio, on pillows. A beautiful Negro woman, a concubine, brought a copper tray full of delicacies. And tea served in tiny cups without handles.

  At the house of Driss Mokri Montasseb I was allowed to visit the harem. Seven wives of various ages, but all of them fat, sat around a low table eating candy and dates. We discussed nail polish. They wanted some of mine, which was pearly. They told me how they made up their eyes. They bought kohl dust at the market, filled their eyes with it. The eyes smart and cry, and so the black kohl marks the edges and gives that heavily accented effect.

  Pasha El Glaoui de Marrakesh offered me a military escort to visit the city. He said it was absolutely necessary. He signaled to a soldier standing at his door, who never left me from then on except when I went to my hotel room to sleep.