Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2

by Anais Nin

  He tries to channel his gifts and intuitions in the form of astrology, or the analysis of costume, mannerisms, handwriting. But I feel that it is all intuition. He has lectured at Allendy's "Idées et Tendances Nouvelles." He said: "But all the slides I showed kept coming out upside down. I think I wanted to keep all my knowledge for myself—a mystery."

  Over the absorbing glance that could drink and never be satisfied fall gentle eyelids of the most delicate skin, and in the gentle way they fall there is goodness. In the length and softness of his blond eyelashes there is a silken yieldingness, but over the delicate eyelids fall savage eyebrows, wild like a Bushman's. The small nose is vulnerable, the brow spiritual, the mouth full and sensual, and the hands those of a peasant asserting his strength. As he stands there, he is constantly in mutation between fierceness and yielding, between assertiveness and sudden eclipses of his whole being which cause him to pale and vanish before certain people who are not of his climate. Constantly oscillating even in the same moment between a physical appetite which his mouth demands and some secret flame of a dream sapping at his strength.

  Hélène returns and tells me about a conversation she had with my father in the south of France. He made her translate House of Incest for him. She explained it to him, how it came to be written, out of dreams, etc. My father said: "Anaïs lives in fantasy. I like logic and rational order."

  She said: "Anaïs lives in another kind of reality. She can do without order and logic because she has a core of her own. It is you who are the romantic one, and possibly chaotic because you cling so fiercely to outer order. Her life is a kind of metaphysical play."

  I loved Hélène enough to save her life a few times, to restore her appetite for life, her faith in herself. But I cannot sustain this, and I beg her to see C. G. Jung. As soon as I help her out of her illness, I see the demon reappear in her, the mocking, sensual, selfish woman in her. Her sexual hunt begins anew, but it is an appetite, an enthusiasm, and she wants only pleasure.

  Each one of us has his demon. Gonzalo's demon is a revolutionary one.

  He reads me from Libro de Chilan Belam de Chumayel, which contains all that is left, all that we know of the Inca civilization.

  Stuart Gilbert on the diary: "Remarkable. Never read anything like it. So much feeling. Of course, you magnify. Everything is six times larger, but your feelings are so real that one has no feeling of exaggeration but of sincerity. Divided lives. Living most excitedly, passionately, and at the same time aware, detached, cool. You see everything. Small portraits of people you are not intimately involved with very humorous. One can see everybody as well as yourself. You have the makings of a Proust. This is too natural and will never be published. You ought to write a novel. You can be mocking without meanness, and you tell the truth without hatred. There is an absence of hatred."

  Gonzalo begins to understand the stillbirth story. Says it is out of the frame of epoch, social world, consciousness, beyond moral, the present. Beyond time. It is woman facing nature.

  Denise Clairouin said: "The diary will never be published. People can't bear such nakedness. You are so much in life. Never write for intellectuals. The childbirth story will immediately be censored."

  Henry writes about the incident of his trip to London after the break with June, and gives it a completely different twist. Instead of being (as he told me) a victim of June's anger, he and June sit drinking merrily and in a fit of drunken sentimentality, Henry gives her the money, etc. It is all written in a hard, brassy manner. This perplexed me, set me wondering on the shifty aspects of truth. Which version was a lie? This one, or his version in his letter to me? *

  Henry said: "This is fiction."

  There is always a superimposition of a hard Henry over a tender Henry. The two often get confused in my mind.

  Comes the moment when I choke, when all I have lived, seen, heard, felt, overwhelms me, comes up in my throat, drowns me. Comes the moment when over-abundance bursts the cells and I have to shout. Life comes to a climax, an orgasm. Everything pointing to an orgasm. "Poème de l'Extase" of Scriabin, dream of Gonzalo saying the flame of his life was Helba's dancing, the dancing of Uday Shankar, Lawrence Durrell's Black Book, talk with Henry and David Edgar, work on diary, while Henry writes about the three volumes he read, talk on playing roles with Evreinoff, the Russian actor, and with Jean Carteret. Evreinoff says you can become anything or anyone you wish merely by playing the role, but it has to be thorough, an immersion into the role, a profound study of all its details.

  Mrs. Green writes me: "Come and give a lecture in Estonia." She sends me the photograph of the most beautiful boy of eight I have ever seen. He seems made of velvet, from the soft light of his enormous eyes, to the softness of his features, the tenderness of the mouth, the pose of the neck, his hands, a soft-focused child, a dreaming child, who reminds me of Joaquin at his age, except that Joaquin added great liveliness and sparkle.

  Joaquin's piano-playing applauded by the King of Spain, Joaquin and Mother climbing the sixty-five holy steps in Rome, on their knees. Spring sketching a pale appearance.

  People throw themselves from the Pont Royal. The coldness of the water awakens them from their hypnosis with death, and they begin to shout lustily for help. They cling to the rusty chain anchoring the houseboat. The policeman on guard at the top of the stairs runs down and pulls up the chain with the help of a hobo. The suicide clings to it. He (or she) is hoisted on deck, or on to the quay.

  He is almost always ashamed. Ashamed not to have had the courage to live, or ashamed of not having had the courage to die? I cannot tell.

  Everyone is jealous. Some admit it, others do not. It is a perversity to be jealous of the past because the past is usually made of ashes. But with the artist the past survives in another form, and I can understand those who are jealous of the past of an artist. It becomes a monument. Examine the past of most people, and you find a neat cemetery or an urn with ashes. But examine the past of an artist and you find monuments to its perpetuity, a book, a statue, a painting, a symphony, a poem.

  Helba said: "How could I not love you, Anaïs, we are sisters. You have saved my life. When you came I wanted to die. You saved my life. I do not love Gonzalo as a man. He is a child. He has done me so much harm. He is really an Indian, he just wants to drink and talk with his friends. I have to sew for him continually. He tears everything. He sticks wine bottles in his pockets and they are always torn. He does nothing for me. He is full of wild ideas, full of candor. He cannot think of tomorrow. He is just a child. If you are fond of him, I am glad, because of the kind of woman you are, because you are full of quality and you are an artist."

  We kissed.

  Dinner for Moricand, Jean Carteret and Hélène, the Medusa. Moricand was telling about the auction sale of his belongings, how much he suffered, how outraged he was by the rapaciousness and lust of the people fighting over his drawings, paintings, books, intimate souvenirs, trophies, symbols, magic gifts, tokens of love. "They bartered and handled things I would scarcely handle myself with the greatest tenderness. I had poems of Max Jacob, letters, the garter of a woman, hairpins, handkerchiefs with perfume still clinging to them. Seeing them bartering over these things, I felt calcinated, like those trees one sees in the South still standing but with their entrails burnt out, ashes. Perhaps it is true that those who unveil the mysteries have tragic lives. I was born of well-to-do parents in Switzerland. I came to Paris and rented a beautiful studio and gave beautiful dinners. I knew Picasso, Louis Jouvet, Max Jacob, Cendrars, Henri Michaux, and made drawings of them all. Then I became interested in occult sciences, and concentrated on astrology. I did a whole series of erotic drawings. When Max Jacob became a converted Catholic he would tell me: 'Conrad, burn those drawings, or else God will punish you.' I did not burn the drawings. My parents died. My older brother, who was a businessman, took all of the inheritance, swindled me, with the excuse that I led an immoral life in Paris. I fell into the most abject poverty. I was incapable of ea
rning a living. From the days of my wealthy past, I knew many ladies in society who wanted to invite me as their house guest. I could have lived indefinitely on their property. All I had to do was to converse brilliantly in their salons. They live in castles and manor houses in the country and get bored. I could bring them stories of life in Paris and revelations of intimate adventures. But they wanted me alone, and not with Blanchette."

  I could imagine how Blanchette seemed to Moricand's aristocratic hostesses. Blanchette was a young woman he had met on the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, behind the Madeleine, where she picked up clients. She was pale, as if she had never breathed any air but that of the street and the cafés where she plied her trade. She was passive, quiet, expressionless. She had big tired, faded eyes, hair badly dyed by herself, which she wore in bangs, in the style of 1920. She never talked. She had a white dog. The white dog was never very white, more often brown with dust and mud. He was neither combed nor brushed. There was a strong resemblance between Blanchette and her dog. The dog never barked. Blanchette endured Moricand's visitors. She never looked at his books or horoscopes. She never joined in the conversation. I believe Blanchette was there as a trompe-l'oeil. Because the delight Moricand took in telling about Max Jacob's love of boys and their exploits at night when they went searching for boys in a carriage was too genuine. He always told the stories as if they were the life and loves of Max Jacob, but the expression of his face was one of such enjoyment that it betrayed him. Memories of pleasure illumined his face. And in his drawings there were exact reproductions of these pleasures. As he told them his body lost its rigidity, its almost hierarchic poses. It began to undulate gently, like the body of a woman. He would raise his left shoulder, and lower his right hip as if to show its flexibility, yieldingness, its pivotal talents. His hand would be placed where Venus de Milo, if we had found her arms, would have hers placed, to hold her robes with a modesty which indicated where she had hoped eyes would stray.

  Did Moricand want Blanchette to protect him from the over-protectiveness of his Muses, Egerias, patronesses? Or to veil his interest in boys?

  Thinking again of what Moricand had said, that all those who unveil the mysteries have had tragic lives, I asked him if he thought this applied to the psychoanalysts too.

  "All the unveilers," said Moricand.

  And I thought of Allendy's life.

  Moricand looked at Carteret and said: "You are Rimbaud gai."

  And Carteret said: "There is something non-human about you."

  "Don't be afraid to say it," answered Moricand. "There is something fatal."

  The Medusa came in, with her hair done by Antoine, in a white toga, and said: "Last night I dreamed about a temple with columns made of people, and I could not get to it because there was an abyss under my feet."

  Evreinoff said: "People were almost afraid to clap at the dancing of Uday Shankar. The feeling of a magic ritual was so strong they felt as if they were in a temple."

  Everyone at this moment looked at my cotton Persian dress and I knew I was a part of that world in which everything was said by a symbol. I could easily forget all the thought of the Western world, all the analysis of the West, the intellectual overgrowth, and take all the meaning into the body and give it out in gestures only. That was the miracle of Uday Shankar. There was not even a need of music. The "sommeil lucide et sans durée de Siva..."

  In the middle of his talk Moricand stopped. There was a complete blank. "That happens when I suddenly begin to watch myself talking." The Medusa said: "I call that my absences."

  Moricand was telling her about the stigmata of Theresa Neumann.

  This is the nearest one can come to magic in the West. Moricand, Allendy, Carteret, Rank. Western magic.

  Evreinoff points to his toes, leaning over, explaining: "In the Moscow Art Theatre one was taught to conceal the outward marks of timidity. For example, a singer, instead of twisting her hand, was taught to twist her toe.

  "There are so many, things lying within one, potential, unconscious, that if you are acting a role, and this role corresponds to a dormant self, this self awakens, becomes reality. But if you act a false role, something entirely outside of one's self, you get sick, uneasy. As in the Gilbert and Sullivan musical, the poet who was not a poet, who pretended to be a poet, got a terrible cramp."

  Pepe-le-Moko, the Siamese cat, made a sound like a dove.

  During lunch I ask myself: was it pure hazard that in Spanish, English and French the words passion and compassion are almost the same. Add the con, which means "with." So compassion—with passion.

  Henry represents violence, and chaos, which I could not express, and I represent a Henry he could not express, a tender Henry.

  The rest of the world arouses him to combat. It is thus one arrives at one's own balance, in relationship to others. Henry expresses my martial self. A strange paradox. I who never fought, fought in defense of Henry. And Henry who never yielded, yielded tome.

  I must continue the diary because it is a feminine activity, it is a personal and personified creation, the opposite of the masculine alchemy. I want to remain on the untransmuted, untransformed, untransposed plane. This alchemy called creation, or fiction, has become for me as dangerous as the machine. Feelings and emotions are diverted at the source, used as the fuel to other purpose. What comes out of the factory: painting, sculpture, pottery, rugs, architecture, novels, I now regard with fear. It is too far from the truth of the moment. Perceived by feeling, during the life, not after.

  It resembles the moment when I felt that with Rank I saw too much, unveiled too much, the psychological terminus. Too much awareness, without accompanying experience, is a skeleton without the flesh of life.

  Analysis has made three errors:

  1. Idealism. In struggling against the negative, destructive element in relationships, it also sets up a falsely idealistic one, a perfect balance, an absolute, which is humanly impossible.

  2. It considers all escape as bad, as evasion. Some of these escapes are mobilities into creative areas, towards light or sun, new growth, new departures or renewals.

  3. The desire to get back into the womb can become, in a creative way, a making of a womb out of the whole world, including everything in the womb (the city, the enlarged universe of Black Spring, of The Black Book), the all-englobing, all-encompassing womb, holding everything. Not being able to re-enter the womb, the artist becomes the womb. Analysis does not take into account the creative products of neurotic desires.

  My story "Ragtime" accepted by New Directions, New York.

  I burnt my eyelids severely under the sun lamp, did not wear glasses. Eyes swollen and painful. I wear scarves to hide my oiled eyes. Picturesque effect. A Moslem woman, a veiled madonna. But for me a week in darkness, fear of blindness. Deprived of the opium of intensity I fell into an abyss.

  Henry has hot blood and a cold soul. When he saw my eyes he said: "Now you will have time to meditate."

  He and his friend David Edgar move in icy objective worlds. Ideas. New words. Technique of water color. Analysis. Henry gave a conference on "La Vie Intégrale." He read me a review of Tropic of Cancer in Le Mois. Fan letters. He read me the thirty pages he wrote on my diary. They are magnificent, but not about the diary. Edgar is all mind, all ideas, as Lowenfels and Fraenkel are.

  To construe? To misconstrue? What? The whole universe? All life suddenly looks monstrous again, and yet is it a monster? How many days and nights have I expected catastrophes which did not happen, how many hours during the last years have I expected the loss of love? What is this pall of anxiety, the expectation of the nerves, the fears in full sunlight, compared with my life as others see it? The envy of women for my life and loves. The days when I am outside of the monster, days of peace, normal vision, when Henry does not look like a rogue without scruples, when I can laugh, those are the days which make me doubt the monster, its presence, its reality. It is only a nightmare. That is why I cannot rest, cannot be idle, I cannot sleep as much as oth
ers, that is why I seek my joys, my activity, my creations, my loves, my friends.

  I awake joyous. The world is clear and soft, at peace. The trees, the sky, are peaceful. Leaping out of a taxi in the sunny morning I meet Joaquin just back from Italy. We have breakfast together. We buy music paper on which to type my text on the orchestra from Winter of Artifice. No time to meet Eugene Jolas, who asked to meet me. Stuart Gilbert, ensorcelled by the diary, asking: "Are you writing?" I take notes in the bus. Henry says joyously: "I will die of tranquility." Enjoying his life, living with a deep enjoyment of peace. Writing steadily. Content.

  My moments in the bath are the only moments I have for meditation. I love the richness.

  Helba so sick I took her to see the doctor. I translated what she said in Spanish to the French doctor. The man she was married to at fourteen had given her syphilis. She had been pronounced cured years ago. "When was the last blood test made?" asked the doctor. "What kind of cure were you given?"

  "Two months ago my blood was tested. I was given injections of mercury."

  He turned to me and because she could not hear us he said plainly: "That explains the deafness."