by Anais Nin
Henry was sitting at a café. He had been writing so deeply, so sincerely about his childhood. He said: "You spurred me on the other day to continue."
He is sober, thoughtful, swimming in creation and imagination. We talk about dreams, languages, childhoods. I am aware all at once of his loneliness, that nobody understands him as a whole, of his greatness, of his genius, of his aging, of the worlds in his head, of the fact that as he gets deeper and deeper into his book his sincerity, the real Henry, the creator, his illuminations spread over and around and beyond the Henry of everyday, the prosaic Henry, touches his baldness, his hands, his housework, he gets nearer to the truth.
And as the train stops [he writes], I put my foot down and my foot has put a deep big hole in the dream.... I have gained nothing by the enlargement of my world: on the contrary, I have lost. I want to become more and more childish and to pass beyond childhood in the opposite direction. I want to go exactly contrary to the normal line of development, pass into a super-infantile realm of being which will be absolutely crazy and chaotic but not crazy and chaotic as the world about me. I want to pass the responsibility of fatherhood to the irresponsibility of the anarchic man who cannot be coerced nor wheedled nor cajoled nor bribed nor traduced. I want to take as my guide Oberon the night rider who under the spread of his black wings eliminated both the beauty and the honor of the past: I want to flee towards a perpetual dawn with a swiftness and relentlessness that leaves no room for remorse, regret or repentance. I want to outstrip the inventive man who is a curse to the earth in order to stand once again before an impassable deep which not even the strongest wings will enable me to traverse. Even if I must become a wild and natural park inhabited only by idle dreamers, I must not stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity of responsible adult life. I must do this in remembrance of a life beyond all comparison with the life which was promised me, in remembrance of the life of a child who was strangled and stifled by the mutual consent of those who had surrendered. Everything which the fathers and the mothers created I disown. I am going back to a world even smaller than the old Hellenic world, going back to a world which I can always touch with outstretched arms, the world of what I know and see and recognize from moment to moment. Any other world is meaningless to me and alien to me and hostile to me. In retraversing the first bright world which I knew as a child I wish not to rest there but to muscle back to a still brighter world from which I must have escaped. What this world is like I do not know, nor am I sure that I will find it, but it is my world and nothing else intrigues me.
When I am sewing buttons I am not only sewing buttons, I am playing the mother to all of them, sewing together the fragments of the worlds they want, mending their tattered dreams, sewing together their shattered souls, so that they can feel it there, sewing together anti-poisons, to cure their bitterness, sewing the wounds where the banderillas were stuck in their enraged bodies which the world taunted and made so hopeless. When I first met Henry all he could do was to hurl insults, to spit, to lie in the gutters of Tropic of Cancer and drink, but now he can talk about having found the language of the night, and all the treasures he finds in his madness, a madness I cannot luxuriate in because I am the mother of them all, of their dreams, and I am obliged to sew buttons on torn coats when they return from their bouts, jousts, challenges. I am obliged to prepare the drugs of life to cure Gonzalo of the heroin he took until he fell almost dead in the street and was taken to a hospital, his heart breaking, exploding inside of him. I gave them what their mothers and fathers could not give any of them, Henry, Gonzalo, Helba. Their own parents put them all in the wrong world from which all of us had to escape. I helped them to escape.
The large wheel turning, the wheel of three-days-within-one, three-nights-within-one. At ten-thirty in the evening I am sitting in the studio of Annette with friends. Henry reproaches me for not liking Fred, for not being amused by his "veuleries" and Annette is babbling her French suavities, puerilities which sound intelligent and fall apart in my hands. Annette's husband is like a dog who shakes himself in a dream now and then, but never remembers any of his dreams. When he awakens he awakens as a good domestic dog, a watchdog. I look for the exit. I slip away. Outside, it is drizzling. It is only ten-thirty. I decide to visit Helba and Gonzalo.
Gonzalo is breaking wood to feed the stove. The works of Marx lie open on the table, by the light of two candles. It looks like a Dostoevskian setting. Gonzalo's charcoal drawings lie scattered among the books. They are sketches of river people, the tattered hoboes who sleep under the bridges, on top of newspapers, clutching their bottles of wine. Hoboes washing their sore feet in the river, fishermen sitting on the edge of the quays, in a trance. Old women sit under the trees. Others ply their trade behind the trees. The policeman is leaning over the wall to see that all is well.
Gonzalo sketched a hobo who collects all kinds of hats from garbage cans. The first time we saw him he was wearing a Scotch beret and we asked him where he came from. The second time a policeman with a sense of humor had given him a discarded police hat, frayed and faded.
Gonzalo talks again of Marxism. I read him my story of the rag-pickers which I wrote in one morning and one afternoon.
At midnight he walks me home. The river is enveloped in a mist.
Gonzalo found in the rag-pickers' story some of his own feelings about the love of fragments, of the unfinished, of the imperfect. Henry found it "strange and whimsical, very strange and wonderful." With Gonzalo as well as with Henry I explore a kind of underworld, the caves of Pluto, clochards, hoboes, rag-pickers, scamps, parasites, vagabonds, rogues, anarchists. When Gonzalo was young and his father the mayor of the city, he was sent with a posse to capture a bandit who had hidden in the mountains (Wild West of Peru). When he found him, he made a friend of him, they drank together all night, told stories of their lives, and Gonzalo returned saying he had not found him.
Gonzalo can't keep his wild mane of black hair combed, his nails clean, or his shirt buttoned. He says very proudly, looking around at Nanankepichu: "I will paint that door. I will get oil for the lantern."
Nothing happens. The door remains unpainted, the lantern unlit.
Henry Chinese, indifferent to everything, sly, humorous, tolerant, mellow. Gonzalo fanatical, fatalistic, Oriental. Negative. Gonzalo is always saying: "This is bad, this book is weak, that person is vulgar. Montparnasse is rotten." He tears down, mocks, demolishes, exactly as Henry did. Gonzalo says: "I would give my whole life for three months of fulfillment, creation." His arms fall at his side.
As he complained once of the great effort he had to make to open the bottle of wine, pull the cork, find a glass, and sit up to drink it, jokingly (because the subject of his drinking has never been openly discussed), I turned up once with a small barrel of red wine. I placed it on his table. I said: "All you have to do now is lie under it and turn on the faucet!"
It was this, he says, which cured him. Every time he saw the barrel he thought of me, of my teasing, joking, and it made him stop. He realized the wine was making him inert, supine, killing his energy.
Gonzalo and June resemble each other. No creativeness, but all their gifts blossoming in talking, in living. I like him as he is, with a bottle-opener in hi‹ pocket, his timelessness, his slackness.
I once said to Henry: "I don't like clowns, I like madmen."
Henry said: "Madmen are too serious. I like clowns."
Artistically, Gonzalo has infallible taste. He saw the flaws in the rag-pickers. He pushes me into the fantastic, for which, he feels, I have a gift.
Gonzalo is all devotion and care. He is devoted to Helba's work, to Elsa's, he takes care of them, cooks their food, runs errands, lights fires, does everything except work for a living.
Gonzalo tells me stories. I can see him as a child. Vital. Overflowing with energy. Up at six in the morning with his eagerness to live. In his father's hacienda. Spanish furniture, leather coffers, cedarwood chests, the smell of fine cigars. The father makes each
son take over the managing of the hacienda one day a week. He must get up early and learn to run the entire estate. When Gonzalo gave money to the cook he said: "Buy a leg of lamb for the family, and one for me." And he ate it. Immense solitude around them. Indian servants. Indian peones (farmhands). Miles and miles of land. Learning Quechua from them. Then eight years of Jesuit school. Then military service. Then Lima, where the students and the intellectuals boasted of associating only with boxers, theatre actors, dancers, and drug addicts. Gonzalo boxed and was a good runner. Lima had a large Chinese population, and many opium dens. Gonzalo took all the drugs, until they nearly killed him. He was saved by Helba. He was writing sports columns for the family newspaper then, and was sent to write about her, and when he met her he dedicated himself to her dancing. She was a mixture of Spanish and Indian. She had been married off at the age of fourteen to a brutal man. Gonzalo and Helba decided to run away to New York. First they went to Havana, where her Indian dances were ridiculed. Then at Tampa she fell ill and Gonzalo went on alone to New York. They struggled against starvation. Gonzalo had to wash dishes in restaurants. He could get no help from his rich family, having run away with a dancer! Then Helba was taken up by Shubert, and starred in a Ziegfeld show. Three years of money, success, travel, but Helba's "illness" developed. Eccentricity, then neurosis, then the beginning of deafness. She behaved more and more strangely. They went back to South America where the Latins laughed at her. She was no longer dancing Indian folklore dances but inventions of her own. Gonzalo thought she would be better understood in France. In France she was appreciated as an original, inventive dancer, but they starved. Helba's deafness became total. She withdrew into herself. Gonzalo drank.
When I tell Henry about Gonzalo's nursing of Helba, who, like Job, is stricken with every kind of illness (Henry remembers seeing her dance and being impressed by her vitality), he says: "Does he like that nursing business? I don't. If anybody is sick I guess I would run out of the house. When people are sick I think they ought to be left to die, that's what I think."
Helba tells me: "In Lima everybody knew about Gonzalo's irresponsibility. He worked for his brother's newspaper, he covered sports and theatre. That is how we met. When he began to manage my appearances, I was earning a great deal as a dancer. When my first concert was planned, and he started to advertise it, the announcements and the placards did not carry the date, place or hour of the performance! He never kept appointments with journalists or other managers. He had a horror of commercialization and success. It was always mañana. The Latin god Gana. No tengo ganas. I feel like it, or I do not feel like it. Gonzalo destroyed my career and my health. He is a Bohemian."
Gonzalo wears out a suit in three months. He burns everything. He spills the wine. He breaks forks and knives. His papers are soiled. He forgets everything, the letter he is going to mail, Helba's messages to me, the book he wants to read, engagements, appointments.
The houseboat is homely from the outside. As it was made of a barge cut in two, it looks like a boat drawn by a child, fat and stumpy. The studio was built on top of the deck, making it slightly top heavy. The upper half is made of grey painted wood, the lower of dark old wood. The studio has a glass roof, and windows on three sides. The lower half is dark, sooty, worn by many voyages carrying coal down the Seine. The prow is thick and wide. It is anchored to the quays by a heavy chain ded to an iron rivet, and two enormous long poles tied to iron rings. They creak with the strain of holding the houseboat close to the quay. There is a drawbridge which leads to a small door. The studio is on the right. I can see the Gare d'Orsay, the Tuileries gardens, and up the Seine. As one enters, to the left there is a small cabin and the kitchen. Narrow, curving stairs lead to a large bedroom, as large as the studio, with many small casement windows, and to the left a bathroom and a storage room.
By day the river throws sunlit reflections on the walls and ceilings, by night reflections of the lights on the quay. Day and night the river laps at the wood, and rocks the houseboat gently. It gives me a feeling of departure. What a strange coincidence that I wrote on the title page of this diary: "Les Mots Flottants." The Floating Words. A prophecy.
Les Mots Flottants led me to the Belle Aurore on the Seine. I sit in it now, writing. The Sunday I moved it to be near the Pont Royal, I telegraphed Gonzalo to come and help me navigate, but he was too late. I sailed alone, pulled by a tugboat.
When Moricand came he was astonished by the atmosphere of the place. He was sure it was an opium den. Even a poet like Moricand does not understand that there are ways to stimulate dreams without artifice. He associated boats with opium. Always thought I took drugs and that House of Incest was a product of an opium dream. I laughed at this concept. I said: "There are experiences which come from living out one's dreams. I once dreamed about a houseboat and was not satisfied until I had one."
So beautiful the bedroom, low-ceilinged, with heavy wooden beams. The old furniture from Louveciennes, which did not fit in the modern apartment on Quai de Passy, seems made for the boat.
Outside, on the quay are the hoboes, the alcoholics and the homeless. They sleep under the bridge, they light fires and cook their dinner there.
Moricand had brought me a revolver. He thought I would need it living by the river. To show me how it worked, he fired a shot into the river.
He also brought me the books of Léon-Paul Fargue, a poem by Max Jacob.
We talked by candlelight. The English poet who looks just as an English poet should look, David Gascoyne, came, bringing me the books of Pierre-Jean Jouve and a poem he had written for me, called "The City of Myth." Gonzalo came and David Gascoyne said: "He looks like Othello." The houseboat enchanted them. It took them away from a tortured world, into a poetic voyage. In my bedroom at night I am in a medieval galley. The Byzantine copper lamp swings like an incense holder. The shutters bang against the windows like the wooden wings of a giant seagull.
The rain falls heavily into the letter box and my letters look as if my friends had been weeping.
Moricand is perverse, full of ruses and destructiveness. He has frequented sadists, prostitutes, criminals. He has used the revolver he gave me. When I felt it in my hand I became aware of death. I never think of death. It seemed terrible to be capable of causing death.
Moricand told the story of the flower created by sand in the desert of Africa. It is a kind of petrified dust rose which falls apart if one touches it. I had imagined such a flower in the mirror story long before I knew of its existence.
I fell in love with the poetic novels of Pierre-Jean Jouve. They sustain one in a trance of poetic living. Paulina, Le Monde Désert, Vagadu, La Scène Capitale. I could not stop reading him all through a busy day, in the subway, in the café, on my way to Villa. Seurat, while my hair was being washed. Paulina opens with this quotation from Saint Teresa: "L'amour est dur et inflexible commel'enfer."
His poetic-psychological novels are masterpieces. Analytical insight wrapped in poetry is far more potent than bare analysis. The drug of poetry makes truth and lucidity more absorbent. The intellect cannot resist its invasion. Language becomes the magic potion. Rhythm becomes the instrument of contagion, and the fluidity of the images flows directly into the subconscious without interference. Pierre-Jean Jouve has described a world in which visions, hallucinations, symbolism, usually relegated to our night life, operate in full daylight, and in unison with the body, fusing desire and fantasy, dream and action, reverie and passion. He does not pretend to illumine everything. He does not construct all the bridges, chronology, sequences, to which we usually cling because they are not a part of life. In life we have these sudden illuminations, sudden blanks, sudden shadows, sudden abysses, and incoherence according to a logic which has been proved pseudo-logic. We do not synthesize experience, nor sum up every day the meaning of our acts.
We often live moved by impulses which our wide-open eyes of consciousness know to be dangerous, perhaps fatal. We rush into ecstasies before lucidity overtakes us, an
d paralyzes us. Illusion gives us heightened joys unknown to pedestrians and realists. And these people who resist intoxication by the drugs of imagination or aesthetics are those who seek it out of wine bottles, or drugs like opium.
After I have washed a pair of stockings, the tank is empty. When I have heated a cup of coffee, the coal is finished.
As the tugboats pass, their occupants wave at me. The men are at the tiller, and the women hanging out the laundry.
At times the current is too swift. I have nightmares of storm-tossed boats.
[October, 1936]
Last night there was a rehearsal for war. We all went out in the streets to watch the airplanes simulating air attacks and defenses.
Novalis wrote: "Poetic life is the only absolute, the only reality." That is what it is. I may be able to escape the fatality of historical time, the tragedies of daily life, the cruelty and destructiveness of the world into poetic life, the eternal.
Gonzalo, with his pockets bulging with newspapers and news of the monstrous world, often breaks the dream, but then draws strength from it and goes off again to work. One must not be afraid. One must know how to float as words do, without roots and without watering cans. One must know how to navigate without latitudes and longitudes and without motor. Without drugs and without burdens. One must learn to breathe like a wind-measuring instrument. The cord must be made of sand, the anchor of aurora borealis.
As a child, on the ship bringing me to America, I noticed that we moved toward a horizon line we never touched. The slippery, evanescent contours of illusion. When words and feelings have learned to float they reach the poetic mouvement perpétuel. To float means to be joined to some universal rhythm. The absolute means the pulsing moment of rhythm. It is while floating, abandoning myself to experience that I became tied to the whole world. I let myself be pushed by everything that was stronger than myself, love, pity, creation. I floated thus into unity. The boat is carried by something, by a water many times deeper than itself. I am now in the current. I fear no grounding, no sudden dislocation.