by Anais Nin
La Voie Lactée.
Constellation of ideas.
Conflict with diary-writing. While I write in the diary I cannot write a book. I try to flow in a dual manner, to keep recording and to invent at the same time, to transform. The two activities are antithetical. If I were a real diarist, like Pepys or Amiel, I would be satisfied to record, but I am not, I want to fill in, transform, project, expand, deepen, I want this ultimate flowering that comes of creation. As I read the diary I was aware of all I have left unsaid which can only be said with creative work, by lingering, expanding, developing.
Henry said that I did not permit the geological change to take place, the transformation achieved by time which turns carbon into a diamond.
"No, that is not true, I think. I like the untransformed material, I like the thing before it is transformed. I am afraid of the transformations."
"But why?" asked Henry.
"Because it is a going away from the truth. Yet I know it is attaining reality because I recognize there is a greater truth today in your fantastic description of Broadway than in my instantaneous sketches I made in New York while staying there. When I was a child I wanted to see how the plants grew. I used to stir the earth away from the growing pod, to see the process.
"Fear of transformation has something to do with my fear of loss, change and alteration. I write to combat this fear. For example, Henry, I used to dread your cruelty. I took meticulous care to record your moments of kindness, understanding, like something which could be used later to conjure away the evil, the fears. It is like this. A marvelous thing would happen to me and it would seem like the lighted match to a primitive—a miracle. Like the primitive, I did not know it would be repeated, that other matches existed, that the power to produce a little flame lay within me. In this I have made no progress. This fear I confessed to Rank. It is like the fear of change in a face. Now it looks beautiful, human, near, and now contorted, evil, and cruel. But in the diary I can keep track of the two faces of reality. I have a record, I can balance one vision against another. As I write, I can dissipate the fear of alteration and loss. My instantaneous vision of the world I believe in. It is my reality. It is born of intuition, of feeling. The transformation required of creation terrifies me. Change, to me, represents tragedy, loss, insanity."
Henry was surprised by this. "This is your malady."
"Well, if it is my malady, Henry, I should express it to the utmost through the diary, make something of the diary, just as Proust made his work out of his disease, his malady for remembering, resuscitating the past, his obsession with recapturing it alive. I should give myself wholly to the diary, make it fuller, say more, live out my neurosis and see where it will carry me. Whereas until now I fought it, I tried to cure it, you tried to cure it, Rank tried to cure it."
"The problem," said Henry, "is one of arithmetic. You will never catch up with the days. And the record of the days will not satisfy you. A day is not everything. The record of a day goes on and on, and sometimes something bigger is left out, postponed, lost. It will be like a big web which will strangle you. Art requires indifference. You're yielding to your primitive cult of life, to your adoration of it. And each day of record arrests the flow. The flow would gather in mystery, cause an explosion, a transmutation. You're also concerned with completeness. You say, for instance, you're worried about a certain portrait. It isn't complete, like one of Proust's characters. There you talk as an artist."
"I do feel that the portraits in the diary are only done at the moment a person is important to me. The person rises and sinks, appears and vanishes only in relation to the range of my vision, in relation to what I see of him. It's like a statue without arm or head, unearthed, and having to be deciphered, divined. Why am I not satisfied with a day? Perhaps only because I did not make it full enough, so that it would contain the infinite? A day of the diary should be complete like a book, and all the spaces I skip, all the arms missing, all the layers not illumined because I did not touch them with my own warm fingers, love or caress them, should be there in the dark as the mystery of life itself. What is this bigger thing I captured in my book on my father that was not in the diary? A day so full. Is it that the record prevents the supreme flights? Every day of record counts against this bigger thing or can it be made so big and beautiful that it can become the whole thing—the infinite? Is the flowering possible only with forgetting, with time, with the rotting and the dust and the falsities? If I wrote in the diary for fear of loss, then, as Nietzsche said, it was for the same reason that the artist created. For the artist without his vision of life—of the tragic and the terrible—would go mad and only art can save him."
An hour later I was walking along the Seine looking at houseboats.
Ever since my visit to the people who bought the house which once belonged to Guy de Maupassant, I have longed for a houseboat.
This was his house in £tretat, near enough to the sea so that one day, during a wild storm, the sea came as far as the house and dumped on the garden a fishing boat which remained there. This was the house so often described in his stories, letters. An alley of poplars led up to the entrance. It was a double alley, so that on each side of it there was an alley covered by the arch of branches. It was said that Maupassant could observe his visitors from there and decide whether or not he wanted to see them. Many women must have walked along that alley. Many carriages driven up to the door. We had dinner in a dining room paved with tile. I saw the room he used as an opium den. I saw the platform covered with a straw mat, and the opium table and utensils. But what I remembered best was the derelict sailboat, deep and wide, planted in the back of the garden. It was used as a garden tool house. I asked my hosts if I could not spend the night in it They laughed at me, and said I would be more comfortable in the guest room. The boat had a strange effect on me. It reproduced exactly my most recurrent dream of a boat stuck in the ground, unable to sail for lack of water. Here it was, stranded and static, in an old garden. Never to sail again. Rotting in the earth, like a flower pot. With moss growing over it instead of barnacles, with the smell of earth on it instead of sea.
The sight of it gave me a dream that night. I dreamed that I was spending the night in the fishing boat at the bottom of the garden. I fell asleep, and it began to sail down a river. I had no control over its journey. People called to me from the shore, distressed, or ironic, or critical, or mocking, or pleading. Where was I going? How long would I be? Why didn't I return? Why did I not moor with them for a while? The flow, once begun, was uncontrollable. Waving at those on the shore, husband, friends, I myself felt happy to be in motion. The journey took twenty years. For twenty years I sailed continuously in my dream.
When I returned from this weekend at Etretat, I wrote a short story. The journey ended in a circle. I returned to my point of departure. My friends were unchanged.
As I stood leaning over the parapet, the policeman on duty watched me. Did he think I was going to commit suicide? Did I look like someone who wanted to commit suicide? He watched me going down the stairs to talk to the owner of Nenette, a lovely bright-red houseboat, the deck flaunting not a flag but a string of colored laundry fluttering, flower pots being watered. On the little windows there were beaded curtains. They had a nostalgia for their little suburban cottage, their garden. And I for the water. Nenette was not for rent or for sale. It was still young enough to carry coal, to work for its living. The owner advised me to go and visit the discarded barges, the unseaworthy houseboats being repaired for resale.
Walking along the quays, near the Tuileries, I gathered information and advice.
My father came, egotistically, egocentrifugally, egocentripetally delightful and clear and clean as a Frigidaire and tender and lying, pathological and incurable mythomane.
Thursday, Henry and I visited Moricand. He has no interest in the present. He monologued on Max Jacob and Blaise Cendrars, his two idols. He has too much to remember, and his only pleasure was to re-create it. There are
some whose past life helps to illumine the present, to flow into the present enriched, loaded with treasures but still avid for more. There are those, like Moricand, who give the impression of having closed the locks so that the water is held static in one place and no longer flows into one continuous river. Did he see Henry? Did he see me? We were spectators. His room has a meticulous order, a geometric precision and form, in spite of poverty, of illness, of anguish. No chaos. No explosions. "Explosions of Neptune," said Moricand, "are all internal, no one is aware of them."
For the writer, it seems as if the past never died. Gonzalo is jealous of my past friendships. To console him, I talk about my dead love for my father. I say: "Your jealousy is necrophilic, past loves are dead loves."
"But you're constantly visiting tombs, with flowers. What a love you have for the dead!"
I said playfully: "Today I have not been to the cemetery."
Moments when the universe seems profoundly harmonious, when Henry is writing magnificently, when Gonzalo is effective politically, when Moricand has been commissioned a horoscope and is therefore sure to eat.
Henry's pages on Blackie and their climax, an insanity produced by life, as I wrote about him early, and now he says himself: "My surrealism is born of life. That is true surrealism."
Juxtaposition of the poetic and the ugly. Henry is to me the only authentic surrealist. The others are the theoreticians. He is a surrealist in life, in his work, in his character. "What I enjoy in him is his surrealism.
When I visited him yesterday he had been writing intensely and he said: "I've been working madly and I don't know whether it is good or not. Tell me. Am I utterly crazy or utterly right?" I read the pages and told him he was utterly right.
After I wrote here the other day on art versus diary, I felt the danger of putting art into the diary. It might kill its greatest quality, its naturalness. I must split up and do something apart—it is a need. No consciousness of perfection must enter the diary. Good-bye completeness. My plan of writing up a Day and a Night until I reach perfection.
[September, 1936]
My father came to say good-bye before going to Spain. As he was leaving, my mother arrived and they collided at die elevator. My mother was weeping when I opened the door. She was carrying a market-bag full of things for me. She sat in the balcony and cried. She murmured.: "Thief! Thief!" I consoled her with deep feeling. "No," I said, "he did not steal your children from you. We love you more and more, the more I know him, the more I love you." I felt her suffering deeply. "He means nothing to me. I do not love him." I talked this way until she was consoled.
At night my mother's suffering haunted me. I walked to her apartment to see if her light was out, and she asleep. I was tormented by pity, by the image of her as devoted mother carrying a market-bag, and her weeping. Her light was out. I could sleep now. The next day I found out that she had gone peacefully to sleep thinking that it was my father who had looked scared! Yes, he looked scared! I am sure he had not noticed the market-bag, I said.
She left for Italy to join Joaquin, who was giving concerts in Milan and Rome. We had a farewell lunch, and we sat together working on a rug.
Before she left, my mother told me a story about myself: at age nine, when I was carried on a stretcher with an appendix about to burst, I said to the doctor: "Docteur, ne croyez-vous pas que je suis une malade imaginaire?"
At seventeen I wrote in my diary: "I would like him to be poor, very poor, and that he should need me..." It was true of Henry and of Gonzalo.
Gonzalo the laughing, the lazy, the debonair, with a love of the bottle. I envy those who can drink, disintegrate, grow loose, slack, careless, ragged, sick, because I can't. Something pulls me up always. I go there only to find myself a friend, and then I come out and entice them into my world, away from theirs. Gonzalo's cigarette butts and ashes strewn all over. He makes drawings of me, writing, reading, sitting on a pillow in the balcony, by the river. He made fifteen drawings of my ears.
"Your ears are quite incredible. They do not look like ears, they are so delicate. I never saw such ears. All my life I have looked for ears like that."
"And looking for ears you found me!"
"Anaïs, I understand your life. You are a great explosive force. You have such freedom in you, such fearlessness. But you never let yourself explode. You put all kinds of obstacles in your own way, they are all obstacles, lids, restrictions, all your loves are devotions, services, keeping you from exploding. You have drowned your strength. You hamper and block yourself."
"It is not compatible with being a woman. Within all these boundaries, restrictions, I do what I want."
"Yes, you do, magnificently. You do all you want except to live for yourself. Your care not to destroy anything takes all your energy and ingenuity and imagination."
"I understand your life, Gonzalo. A great force is asleep in you, curled up inside of you like a snake. You pretend to be asleep—absolutely asleep—lazy and dreamy and nonchalant. But I feel the dynamite in you. You drowned yours in wine."
I saw the houseboat which belongs to Maurice Sachs.
I walked along the quays which face the Gare d'Orsay, walked up a gangplank and knocked on the door. Maurice Sachs is a pale, tall and rather flabby-looking man with striking dark, soft eyes. He had advertised that he wanted to rent his houseboat.
He led me inside. It was a long coal barge which had once served as an ambulant theatre and had traveled down the Seine River, stopping at every small town to give a show. It was very long, very wide, black and tarred on the outside, unpainted wood inside. Except for the studio in the prow, the whole length of it seemed one long table covered with sketches, manuscript pages, opened books, photographs. Maurice Sachs was going away for a few months and was packing some of his belongings. The light fell on all this from opaque windows. He seemed vague, abstracted, and anxious too. The walls were papered with tar paper, and I loved the smell they exuded. One window on the river was like a trap door held open by chains. At the stern, the water showed under widely separated beams to indicate how much pumping the barge needed. The wood was covered with soft green mildew. The huge chain which held the anchor gave the whole place a medieval air.
There was only one big coal stove to keep the whole place warm. Maurice Sachs himself suggested it was not the right place for me, it was too big to take care of.
But the visit to his houseboat barge left me with an even stronger desire to find one I could live in.
I was sitting waiting for Gonzalo at a café when my eyes fell on an advertisement. "Houseboat for rent. La Belle Aurore. Quai du Pont Royal."
I rushed down to see it. This time the owner who opened the door was Michel Simon. His face looked battered and distorted, but he had the most beautiful hands I ever saw on a man, slim, white and sensitive. He took me into the glass studio he had built above the deck. It was beautiful, with windows through which I could see up and down the river, and the Quai d'Orsay as well as the Tuileries gardens.
He began to tell me the story of the houseboat. He had intended to live in it with his monkeys. He loved his monkeys. "They are kinder to me than human beings. They love me. One female, when I went on a tour of the provinces, went on a hunger strike and died. Do you think a woman would love as deeply? But the houseboat was not right for them, because they could escape onto the quays, and frighten people, and the police were alarmed. I had to take a house in the country." Meanwhile he was showing me the interior. On the same floor as the glass studio were two cabins. One was inhabited by an old one-legged man with a beard, wearing a captain's cap; the other by a sullen-looking young man who did the heavy work, pumping the water, running the electric battery for the lights, fetching water from the fountain, lighting the fire, cleaning the deck, etc.
The third cabin was the kitchen, with a huge coal stove for cooking which also heated the water for the radiators, and for the bath. And then there was a bathroom with a tub. The place was warm, beautiful. We walked down the stairs t
o the bedroom, which was as big as the studio, and which had small ogival windows on both sides like the windows of an old galley.
I said I would take it immediately. The only condition Michel Simon insisted on was that I keep the old ex-captain. And René, because he was an orphan.
I came back that very evening with the first month's rent. The boy René called out: "Hey there, who are you?" The old man, grandfather of the river in his blue peasant blouse and captain's cap, peered through the glass window and muttered: "Oh, it's you, wait, I'll open." I could hear the clump clump of his wooden leg.
There were sounds of beams creaking, those which held the houseboat tied to the quays, and sounds of rusty chains from the anchor pulling in the swift evening tide. I smelled the familiar tar. Dim lights came from the street lamps on the quays, and from the other boats passing by. The old man and René went back to sleep, and I sat and talked with Michel Simon and signed a contract.
I listened to the lapping of the water.
Now and then a boat passed, stirred up the river, the water heaved and the old barge swayed. It was like being at sea, sailing.
"We are navigating," I said.
The next day when I came with Gonzalo, he was enthusiastic.
He said: "The Incas always had a small subterranean passage in their home which led to a secret garden, a garden which was called in Quechua, 'Nanankepichu' That means 'not a home.' That is what you should call your houseboat."
The river was alive and gay. The tar on the walls shone.
I will move in in a few days.