by Anais Nin
I am in sympathy with Marxism, I respect efforts, and illusions. Certainly I have no use for capitalism, and I hate the systems which exist now. You will receive an envelope asking you to sympathize with the Iberian-American group. I find myself surrounded by miseries I can no longer cope with. So I want to try a vaster, more encompassing remedy. I would have preferred a collective analysis, but since that is not possible, let us try Marxism. You ask me to explain what you felt at the Writer's Union. You experienced the unbreakable isolation of the individual. To be a part of a group one has to become a void, a sheep, a sort of gelatinous substance. Remember D. H. Lawrence: "It is harder to stick to one's own soul than to die with others [go to war]."
Stuart Gilbert on House of Incest:
In an earlier age the author of House of Incest would probably have ended her career at the stake—in good company, needless to say, beginning with Joan of Arc. For there is something uncanny in her clairvoyance. It is as if she had drunk a potion or contrived a spell giving her access to that underworld whose entry bears the prohibition: "All consciousness abandon, ye who enter here!" Courage was needed to embark on such a quest, and, with courage, shrewdness and a delicate sense of balance, enabling the clairvoyant to walk the tightrope between self-analysis and self-abandonment. All these qualities and with them no ordinary skill in the manipulation of words and rhythms, are manifest in the work of Anaïs Nin.
My father took a house on the outskirts of Madrid.
Letter to Father:
The atmosphere of Paris is oppressive and heavy with political unrest. We are not yet condemned to live in the subway, but it will come. For the moment we only take it to visit friends. The assaults of reality are more and more violent. It becomes more and more difficult to maintain an individually beautiful or integrated world. I have to kill one dragon a day, to maintain my small world from destruction. Unfortunately the dragon of reality is too tough to eat, or we would be saving money spent on steak. An impossible flesh, reality, gelatinous and at the same time fibrous, nervous, drooling, frightened.
[December, 1936]
The magazine returned my review of Black Spring because it was not an analysis of its contents.
Christmas Night at the Poisson d'Or. Caviar and vodka. Tzigane songs, fiery dances, emotional orgy with Russian friends and Hélène R., until five in the morning. A Russian breaking glasses against his own head. They are not ashamed to weep. Five-thirty and we are out in the boulevards, wide awake. Hélène wants to walk. We will go and have breakfast. Where? We are sitting in Melody's bar. The orchestra is Argentine. Only a few Negro women and a few men left. It is six-thirty in the morning. The orchestra plays a paso doble. I get up and dance alone, incited by the musicians and the Negro women. It is seven in the morning. The dawn is blue. The feeling always that this may be the last night of pleasure, the last night of drinking vodka, dancing, laughing. That soon it may be cannons, and alarms, and bombardments, war, and blood, and horror.
Chinese ideal: "To make even a poor scholar's room artistically satisfying: show the large in the small, and the small in the large, provide for the real in the unreal, and for the unreal in the real."
Quality in painting the Chinese call kingling: "Empty and alive, extreme vitality and economy of design."
Hélène tall and full-blown, with perfect features, a classical bearing, and eyes of such light green that the sockets at times look almost empty, as in old statues. Magnificent and impressive, yet the first story she told me when I met her at Henry's was about herself as a child. She liked to crouch in a corner of the room, covered by a shawl. Her family would call her, search for her. She pretended not to hear. Once they found her thus, and shook her angrily. "What are you doing there?"
"I am traveling," she answered.
***
Hélène is sitting on my couch. She is saying she would like to be a man because a man can look at all things objectively, he can be a philosopher. When she found herself married (in Brazil) and the mother of two little girls, she was terrified, almost insane. She did not know it then, but she did not want to be a mother, the mother of children. She wanted to be the mother of artists, of creations. She suffered from terror, terror of nature, of being swallowed by mountains, stifled by the forest, absorbed by the sea. She has a horror of the actor and metamorphosis. She suffered from claustrophobia. She had a dream which recurred, of being carried away by a centaur. When she mentioned the centaur it was very easy to situate her in the myth. She is larger than nature, and stylized, perfect in face and body. I thought of the Olympians and the myths of large people, larger than human beings. I call people who are larger than nature myth people. But because they have also a symbolic significance, I separate those who are ordinary from those whose lives are significant, symbolic. They have a grandeur. In their world I breathe freely. Enters Hélène with her many dreams, her strength and positivism, the power to act out her dramas, as Gonzalo has. She belongs with June.
We were talking about Henry. I said: "He helped me to accept life, and I helped him to accept the power of illusion which he had ceased to believe in because June's illusions were built on air. Mine were creative and real. I am not the illusionist at the fair, with only cardboard around and behind me, playing tricks. I am an illusionist with real power, the power to make things come true. I promised Henry he would not be a failure, that I would make the world listen to him, and I kept my promise. Much that I have wanted for myself did not come true, but I suppose the day the creator wants something for himself, his magic ends."
Red wax fell on the floor last night. Red wax from the candles on the tables and from the lanterns. Red wax on the table. Empty bottles of champagne and vodka.
Last night around the table, Gonzalo, Helba, Elsa, Grey, a Javanese girl, Carpentier, his wife and mother.
I believe something magical happens when I wipe the furniture, praying that others may enjoy it, when I lay the table thinking others will enjoy it, when I cook food and wish they would enjoy it, when I light the candles saying: "Enjoy them." When I serve the wine saying: "Enjoy it." There was a glow of joy in the orange walls, the guests enjoyed each other, enjoyed Gonzalo's dark beauty, Helba's long black hair, Elsa's slanted eyes, Grey's slender dancer's figure, the Javanese girl's high cheek bones. They enjoyed the roasted pig, the almond paste from Spain. When it came to drink a toast to the New Year Gonzalo drank to Nanankepichu.
When Henry is writing he is divorced from life. Gonzalo is in life continuously. He reads very little. He has a big friendship with Artaud without knowing Artaud's work, the same with Neruda. He worked with Artaud on his theatre. When Gonzalo talks about them it is about them as human beings. What he hears and retains is the essence of what they give in their talk or in their actions. He has read very little of my writing. His world is an entirely personal world.
Henry had a lively correspondence with Lawrence Durrell, the English poet who lives in Greece. He admires Tropic of Cancer and sent Henry the manuscript of his Black Book. I wrote him about my response to The Black Book. We corresponded. He sent me for Christmas a story dedicated to me. It is called "Asylum in the Snow." *
I wrote to him:
DEAR LARRY:
You have done something amazing in "Asylum in the Snow," reached a world so subtle, almost evanescent, caught a climate so fugitive, the dream life directly through the senses, far beyond the laws of gravity. You use a language which is surrealistic and full of echoes. Magical phrases. You wrote from inside of the mystery, not from the outside. You wrote with closed eyes, closed ears, from inside the very shell. You caught the essence of what we pursue in the dream, and which most of the time eludes us. You wrote about the incident which evaporates as we awaken. In answer to "Asylum in the Snow" I am sending you House of Incest, which I consider a woman's Season in Hell.
[January, 1937]
I mastered the mechanisms of life the better to bend it to the will of the dream. I conquered details to make the dream more possible. With hammer
and nails, paint, soap, money, typewriter, cookbook, douche bags, I created a dream. That is why I renounce violence and tragedy. I have made poetry out of science, I took psychoanalysis and made a myth of it. I mastered poverty and restrictions; I lived adroitly, intelligently, critically; I sewed and mended, all for the sake of the dream. I took all the elements of modern life and used them for the dream. I subjected New York to the service of the dream. And now it is all again a question of dream versus reality. In the dream nobody dies, in die dream no one suffers, no one is sick, nobody separates.
Now politics. What shall I make of that? Will Gonzalo put my name down on the list of people working for Republican Spain? He is proud of this. He tore me from tradition, he awakened me politically. Let him put my name down, I say. If I can make a poem out of rag-pickers, I can make a poem out of an economic revolution.
Gonzalo asked me if I would come to the meeting Wednesday evening.
I entered with impunity the world of psychoanalysis, the great destroyer of illusion, the great realist. I entered that world, saw Rank's files, read his books, but found in the world of psychoanalysis the only metaphysical man in it: Rank. I lived out the poem and came out unscathed. Free. A poet still. Not all the stones tied around my psychoanalyzed and analyzing neck can drown the laugh. Life, for me, is a profound, a sacred, a joyous, a mysterious, a soulful dance. But it is a dance. Through the markets, the whorehouses, the abattoirs, the butcher shops, the scientific laboratories, hospitals, Montparnasse, I walk with my dream unfurled, and lose myself in my own labyrinths, and the dream unfurled carries me.
It is because of my insistence on the dream that I am alone. When I take up my opium pipe and lie down and say: politics, psychoanalysis. They never meant to me what they mean to others. Nor New York. Nor nightclubs. Nor anyone around me. Nor Montparnasse. It is my mystery. They always want me to become serious. I am passionate and fervent only for the dream, the poem. Whether I ally myself to the analysts to find that I am not an analyst, or to the revolutionists to find out I am not a revolutionist, does not matter. I feel my solitude at the instant I make my greatest connection with human beings, the world. When one practices witchcraft one practices alone. One interviews the devil alone. Something is happening to me of which I am not afraid; it is an expansion of my consciousness, creating in space and loneliness. It is a vision, a city suspended in the sky, a rhythm of blood. It is ecstasy. Known only to the saints and die poets. Ecstasy before life. Before all things, the growth of a seed, Durrell's Christmas story, Héléne's Chirico face, the orange in her voice. I may explode one day and send fragments to the earth.
I cannot believe in Gonzalo's dream. I feel deeply for people's hunger and needs but I do not believe any system will save them.
Henry, contrary to all appearances is not in life, not inside.
Underneath the cult of the dream, I sense the inexorable destruction and separation in life which I rebel against. I rebel against change and evolutions. So it is the exactness I keep here, the breath and the odor, to keep everything alive! But we cannot bear to keep everything alive. That is why death was given us, and gradual death in life. Because we cannot feel so much. Parts of us must die, must die to free us, to lighten us. How well parts of Henry die in him because he possesses the gift of destruction. I can only gather together until it becomes unbearable. To hear too much, to see too much, to have no detachment or protection or refuge from being alive.
First political meeting. Comité Ibérien pour la Déjense de la République Espagnole. The big studio is lit with one lamp. The men arrive. Mexicans with long black hair, gold rings, colored shirts. Chileans, Nicaraguans, Cubans, poets, medical students, law students. The stove is lit. It is a foggy night. But we can see the policeman on guard at the top of the stairs. His presence gives anxiety to those whose papers are not in order. Neruda is uneasy. He is pale and flabby. His nickname is Yoghurt, because o£ his color. Gonzalo is physically the biggest, the most fiery, dynamic one there, talking with his deep husky voice. The others are rather pale, prosaic. The main theme is how to utilize, exploit the death of a Mexican poet who died in Spain for the cause. A pamphlet should be written. Some of his poems should be published. How much money is there in the cash box? Forty francs. How do we get the money? Neruda rubs the soft white hands of the politician. Gonzalo looks like a man about to throw a bomb. His hair is wild. The height of his brow gives him a romantic air. The dark Indian in him cursed with a soul.
Later at the café, when everyone had left, he said: "I know that until now your problems were purely artistic; and how to take care of a few people around you. I realize that I bring you into an entirely different realm. Yet I can't help feeling that it is good for you, that you are too vital a woman to live in ivory towers, I can't help feeling that today the artist cannot stand apart. He must have a political conscience."
When he talks about the artist's role in the transformation of the world I ask with gentleness, "But of what use can I be? I thought of transforming the world, abolishing poverty when I was fifteen and sixteen. Afterwards I realized the futility of it and I worked obstinately to build an individually perfect world. That I have done."
"Yes, but there comes a moment when this perfect world is destroyed by what happens in the bigger world. Now you cannot go any further. You are blocked. Your work cannot be published because it outrages bourgeois ideals. You cannot live your own life because too many people are dependent on you."
This is true. Somewhere, at a certain point, my individual world touches the walls of reality. I am faced with outer catastrophes, wars, revolutions, economic disasters, decadence, and I cannot protect my world and its dependents from them.
I have built a rich private world, but I fear I cannot help build the world outside. Deep down, I feel, nothing changes the nature of man. I know too well that man can only change himself psychologically, and that fear and greed make him inhuman, and it is only a change of roles we attain with each revolution, just a change of men in power, that is all. The evil remains. It is guilt, fear, impotence which makes men cruel, and no system will eliminate that.
But Gonzalo is sincere. And I want to believe.
A printer, brooding on the loss of the woman he loved, set her name in type and swallowed it.
A gangster who attacked a man to rob him drove a nail through his hands to tie him to a bench.
The horrors of Spain. Who can cure man of cruelty? They have bullfights. But instead of a bull, it is a rebel, and the others stick banderillas in him, explosive banderillas.
They place dynamite in the wombs of women.
Hélène so strong, emphatic, unyielding. Yet in her confessions, all she tells me is fear, indecision, fear of solitude, fear of being enslaved by man, made again into a wife and mother. She has guilt, for having walked out of her life. She has a lover who is a famous conductor. She deliberates over marrying him. She likes best his occasional visits. He is there, but not all the time. She is studying painting with Fernand Léger.
"I want to live within meaning, not outside of it."
She is a friend of Maruca's and my father. Hélène says: "From all I hear about him he is a complete and absolute child. How could you expect him to play the role of father?"
Gonzalo attended a meeting with Gide and Malraux.
Last night a visit from the Carpentiers, the Stuart Gilberts, Hélène and Moricand. Friends start a review called Civilization to resist the savagery and bloodiness of the time. We read their manifesto. It was scholarly, serene, noble. What a contrast. I promised to write reviews for it. To work for pacifists, and to work for Spain. Duality? No, I believe in a philosophical detachment from violence, savage destruction, and I also believe in action and rebellion.
To Hélène I say: "You could be happy with Henry. You have strength and the ability to laugh at everything."
In Spain the blood is flowing.
Henry is getting admiration from everywhere. He wants to go to Denmark. A woman writes him that she ca
n be a thousand women to him. He cut out a picture of Mae West because she was born in Brooklyn. Henry is waiting for the plumber. "Everything is fine. The stove is hot. I got a fine letter from the lady in Denmark, a stupid letter from England ('the role of art as sterilizer/ says an English critic)."
I walk around the Cité Universitaire. I sit at the Dôme where everyone looks soiled, as if they had not gone to bed and had slept on a park bench.
At seven-thirty I am at Hélène's because she called me saying she had terrible nightmares. A ay of distress. No matter how rapidly I live, I always hear the voices of those who lag behind me. Hélène lags behind me in life, choked by fears, guilts and conventional scruples. I thought that she was ahead and strong.
She has been thinking about Henry. Was he the type of man she needed?
"I decided against it. He is an intellectual. I'm too selfish for that. I don't want to be sacrificed to a work."
"I promise to reconcile you to yourself," I say, and then remembered these were Allendy's words to me.
I like her honesty and sharp wit.
Gonzalo obtains help from the Spanish Legation. They will supply money, stamps, paper, printing facilities. Gonzalo has written the first manifesto. He is glad. I ask questions. I listen.