by Anais Nin
"Gonzalo, I cannot live in such a world. That is why I turn away. Unless I can act, save them, fight the cruelty of the world, I have to turn away and live in another world. I cannot see it as one political party, or another, I see it as the cruelty of man."
Gonzalo's torment was slowly calmed. I gave him medicines for Helba, and I took the subway to meet Henry at the café. Henry has been signing his contract with Éditions Stock for the translation of his books. When he arrives he talks excitedly, but he says he is not excited because it has all come too late.
It is always too late for the artist, when it does not come instantly, the moment he has finished his work, for after all he does not want an answer which comes years later.
It is raining. His friends, the Rattners, were invited to celebrate. Abe Rattner paints like Rouault. Bettina writes about fashions.
Henry knew Gonzalo years ago, Artaud knew him, and yet I did not meet him until years later. Why? I would not have understood him before.
What is destiny? Henry introduced me to Gonzalo when the right time came, when the impersonality of Henry's life and friendships seemed cold to me.
How each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. With Gonzalo I rediscovered my Spanish world, my Spanish blood, warmth and personal involvement, direct passionate response to experience, fire, fanaticism, fervor, faith, the power to act whole, wholeness, caring. Henry does not care. Gonzalo cares. He could die for a cause, for the workmen, for the poor. Henry only seeks his pleasure and his self-glorification. Gonzalo wants to give himself.
Ironically, Henry is saying that he is becoming a saint, and that his life was an error. "Write this in your journal, Anaïs." Henry says he likes to be with himself now, not outside, he is collecting himself, concentrating.
And I am dispersing myself, as I learned from him, to give myself, waste, live blindly. People pass into other planes, exchange qualities, change. Henry discusses analysis with Edgar, I am moving away from analysis into action.
Ever since Osborn came, haunted Henry's studio, borrowed money and food, Henry, while acting with compassion and wisdom, became more and more depressed. His own passivity, acceptance, inertia ties him in a knot. I tried to help him. I suffered his bad moods, fatigue, despondency. I understood. Henry was far away.
When Henry is faced with a conflict he simply goes dead. When he is faced with the need to take the lead, to act, to free himself, disengage himself, he is paralyzed.
He gets sick. He sleeps. He hibernates. He cannot act. He sleeps all day, as if this would solve the problem of Osborn.
He says he feels shattered inside, tired, in need of concentration. We had dinner in a café, and talked quietly. He said: "I feel I have never lived on the same level as the level I write from, except with you and now with Edgar."
"Did you do that not to be alone, to be like others, with others, not to go mad? You sought out mediocrity in people, in life. Why should Osborn's state depress you so? Are you afraid to be cut off from reality as he is?"
Dream: A long winding path of ice. I am walking on it with great terror of the ice breaking. I run in a panic. Henry begins to walk over it and I hold his hand. I tell him not to try because he is heavier and he will fall through. The ice breaks. I am holding him so he will not fall into the pit but I feel the heat that comes from it and I pull Henry out of hell. We all have to pass through a narrow aperture to reach a certain place. I feel the usual anxiety before a hole, and decide to take another route. I leap over lakes, bushes, hills, like a deer. I reach an isolated castle, very old and ravaged. It has many rooms locked with huge keys. The rain is pouring in through broken windows and the floor is rotting. I open all the rooms. I come upon a room and through a glass door I see a man sitting with his back turned, sitting in an absolutely empty room. He is blond. I get panicky and I run away, carrying one of the keys. When I join the others, the manager of Helba has decided I am to dance an Indian dance with my body painted in gold and feathers. I say to Gonzalo: "I think Helba would do this far better than I." Gonzalo agrees. A man says: "If you got inside of that castle, can you prove it?" I say: "I have one of the keys." "Then you are a hysterical woman," he answers. Cocteau, Chirico, and Dali!
Durrell writes:
Your little Dionysiac birth story. That lives and shines, I tell you ... I have no doubt, not a shadow of a doubt about you as an artist. The sense of dislocation proves that to me more fully. Loneliness is the password...
To Durrell:
When I read your letter the word faith loomed immense and I was struck with the warmth, the summer softness of the letter. When I read about the "spiritual atrophy of Gregory," I said no, the only trouble with Gregory is the emotional conflict, the English conflict. It is feeling which England is ashamed of, which bothers Gregory. Difficult to say all this in English. The taboo on feeling. I don't mean that Gregory is English, nor has he atrophied feelings, but they are coiled inside, indirect, they move obliquely, they romp in the dark only, they manifest themselves perversely, through irony, hysteria, and fully in the poetry only. That is what is entirely lacking in Huxley [to whom he had been compared—A. N.] and why I see no affinity whatever. Huxley is no poet to begin with. Ça tie chante pas. And you do. Why must Spandrell commit a crime? It's to leap out of paralysis created by abstractions. People jump into crime, to bring the blood to life when they are bloodless. Emotion is again left out. Sensation is mistaken for it. See the leap from surrealism to revolution, war. Gregory, because he analyzes, is aware, divided, but he is not paralytic. His instincts, nature, are alive. His feeling lies like an explosive. Waiting to show its face in ecstasy. At other times it is blinded, dazzled, muted by the vision. I could say to you what Henry said about me in the diary, living with eyes too open ... And I see yours closing a bit, the metamorphosis. You are already somewhere else. You reached life by divination first, I take it, as I reached it. How much like Gregory and his sincerity and his cosmic reachings. I wonder where you are now, in your metamorphosis? I'm in the night looking for silence. The head is quiet and everything else, all the other cells are breathing tentacles. Wonder why you called me the submarine superwoman. That made me laugh, yet it is accurate. Only it took me many years to recover my fins and my swimming strides. I was trying to walk (like the penguins) and to think like a man. I was very impressed with man's thinking!
Eugene Jolas comes to visit. He looks like a bull about to charge. He is heavy with German mysticism. He is disillusioned with the poets' temporal concessions. He praises House of Incest as a marvel of language, beauty, and which "gave him great fears." I believe he felt that his life was dedicated to the discovery of a new language. Does he not feel James Joyce did it? He is disillusioned with the "actual." So we talk in harmony, a kind of opaque mystical language. I hear the semantic horses leaping over our heads, a bath of fogs and mists and his "language of the night" with its red caves, and very black letters and mysterious hieroglyphs. In the face of Jolas I see a man tormented, with an anxious smile, and a mystical despair in a world becoming absolutely one-dimensional.
Visiting the Gilberts, I was in despair because I felt timid, there were too many people around.
Stuart Gilbert repeats that I am intense and emotional about myself but that when I describe others I have irony and humor. He enjoys my sketches. Has read all that is copied of the diary and says I have achieved my own style.
One can imagine him very well in the uniform of a colonial judge in Indo-China or Sumatra. The face of an English Buddha, dispensing justice, his small eyes alert for comedy, his "tolerance" of the native, his learning, his detachment. When he retired, Caresse Crosby said to him: "Translate this for me." (I forget what it was.) "But I'm not a translator," he said. And he ended by translating Joyce into French, and writing about James Joyce.
The piano takes up a great deal of the salon, which has two windows overlooking the Seine. A big drooping tree makes a
trellis through which the barges and boats pass and the river becomes like a shattered mirror, or a spilled necklace of diamonds. Mrs. Gilbert has a tender and lovely face, the face of the ideal mother wife, even though young, eyes ready to understand and to shelter, voice to assuage, smile to console, and with that a lovely laughter of the human being not lost among abstractions, creating the atmosphere in which books are like living sparkling guests, not objects. There are always books about, in piles, on tables. Deep armchairs, graciousness, and an unostentatious way of cultivating only quality. Their apartment on the Seine is a steadfast boat no storm can upturn. It is anchored in the world of intelligence.
My mother collected clothes for the Spanish Red Cross (for Franco's Red Cross). I asked her to give me one suit contributed by David Nixon, the violinist, for someone who was extremely poor and working for Spain.
"Not a Republican?" asked my mother.
"Not a Republican."
I took it to Gonzalo, who had nothing to wear for the opening of an exhibition at which some of his drawings were being shown. I asked a friend to buy one of Gonzalo's drawings so he would be encouraged, promised I would buy it back later. Then came the day, and we all met on the Rue de Seine. Gonzalo appeared in his dark-blue suit and I could see what an effort it was for him not to run away. He is wild and timid in crowds. He looked continuously to the left and to the right for an opening, as if corralled and seeking a chance to escape. His eyes looked more somber than usual, and he kept his head bowed. Although the suit was big enough he looked as if Western clothes were not intended for him. Heathcliff. The untamed Inca from Peru, too tall, too wild for this small gallery, for the narrow Rue de Seine. He did not fit in this diminutive world, between walls, in a crowd, listening to artificial compliments. He stood near the door and then stepped outside for a breath of air. I stood beside him, and we both saw, at the same moment, David Nixon walking towards the gallery, with my mother! David Nixon would recognize his suit, my mother would recognize a Republican! Gonzalo vanished with the speed of an expert magician.
When Henry talks about his impersonal relationships (one friend as good as another, interchangeable, they can come and go, he does not care), I try to explain to him my impersonal compassion which he does not understand. I am pushed by a force over which I have no control, to create, to construct, to give hope and compassion even when I do not care for the person.
Every now and then Helba says she is going to dance again. This means that her trunks with her costumes have to be hauled out of the cellar, that Gonzalo has to prepare paints to decorate her dresses and headgears which are tarnished, I have to buy some beads and spangles, tassels, gold thread, costume jewelry, colored glass, mirrors. For days she will be in a fever of activity preparing her wardrobe. And then, just as suddenly, she forgets the whole attempt, closes the trunks, and Gonzalo drags them back to the cellar.
I watch Helba sewing rags. No matter what she is given, in her hands it soon looks like a rag. She sews rags and makes costumes for the theatre such as the ones children make for amateur theatricals. She makes clothes for herself which make her look like a rag-picker. All she touches seems like a rag-picker's object as soon as it has been kneaded by her hands. It turns old, faded, patched in a few seconds. As if her hands withered whatever they touched. Once after a party at which she admired my Persian flowered cotton dress, I took the dress to her as if I wanted to clothe her in some shining flowering garment in place of her rags, a magic garment. She promptly dyed it black. She killed its colors. Another time (as she says I have a nose like a rabbit), I took to her at the hospital a white rabbit-fur cape to lie in bed with, saying it was my own fur which would keep her warm. She never wore it. She cut herself a cape out of an old grey, moth-eaten blanket. She persists in dressing like a beggar imploring pity. She indulges more and more in her pitiable role until at times both Gonzalo and I feel weary as before professional beggars. She continues in this role long after it has ceased to be true. Was this the child in Helba refusing to die? All unfulfilled desires are imprisoned children.
She sits with shoulders hunched. Helba's dancing was a miracle, the opposite of her life. In life she limps, hunches her shoulders, sways awkwardly, has slow reflexes, dresses like a beggar and moves like a cripple. On stage she became fiery and satanic. Her Indian dances were violent and strong.
Her face is faded. Her skin is old, though she is only thirty or so. She has expressions like a shrewd peasant woman, like a beggar girl in the streets. As a very poor girl of the people she aroused Gonzalo's compassion, Gonzalo—Don Quixote, the defender of the poor. She was dancing in nightclubs then, and Gonzalo was the black sheep of his powerful and wealthy family.
In the fall of Helba's eyelashes, in the shape of her eyelids, there is suffering. She humiliates herself, makes herself uglier, poorer, she shrinks within herself, has no interest in anything but her dancing, cannot see others dancing, or read, or even turn her eyes outward. She has a yellowed, ascetic face. I gave her clothes, coats, everything I could possibly spare. Gonzalo would say: "Helba has no coat." Then one day, when they were moving, I had to help Helba pack, and all her trunks were brought from the cellar, her costume trunks. One of them had to be opened, and out spilled a fur coat, dresses of all kinds, underwear, shoes, stockings, all her finery from the days she danced with the Ziegfeld show in New York. Handbags, handkerchiefs, belts, combs, everything which she could possibly need and which she had been hoarding like a gypsy while I stripped myself of all I had to dress her.
Gonzalo's devotion to Helba touching. I feel the same pity when I see her smaller, shrunken, deaf, with hair hanging limp, her dead black hair, and no longer dancing but withering.
She says: "My hair is falling off in bunches. My teeth are sore, and loosening. Gonzalo is mad. He seems changed only because he is leaning on you. He lets everything happen, and he says it's destiny. With his cigarette he nearly set fire to the apartment house. He threw the still-lighted butt down the garbage chute and it started a fire during the night. For a woman to love Gonzalo is not happiness. He is one who sacrifices woman to himself without knowing it, unconsciously. He is a child. I know why you want to give him a printing press. You want to keep Gonzalo from going to Spain to fight. You are thinking of me. The idea of Gonzalo at war, when I think of it, the whole beauty of this afternoon turns black."
Sometimes I watch her gestures with horror. For at times she goes far beyond the dramatization which her dancer's training makes understandable. She is a theatrical character, she does express everything with her body, but in her dancing, when she danced with so much inwardness, I already recognized the gestures of insanity. She exaggerates her mimicry to express physical pain to a monstrous degree. For the pain of pleurisy, which I have known, she acted with her hands like the statue of the god whose entrails were being eaten by the ravens. For a stomach pain she mimics someone devoured by flames. Finally I recognized she had transposed her gift for theatre into a gift for dramatizing her illness so it would always seem like a state of agony just before death. This threat of her death hung over Gonzalo's head, giving him not a moment's rest. He could only forget her threats when drunk. To see these gestures border so often on the gestures made by the insane appalled me. There is insanity in caricature of gestures, grotesque deformations. If Helba's drama did not destroy Gonzalo, I could be moved by it, but I had to become the exposer of it to save Gonzalo's very life.
Distressed by my timidity. Was introduced to André Breton and almost turned away in a panic. He awes me, because I am fully aware that his ideas have influenced all of us deeply. And he is a great poet himself.
[Summer, 1937]
Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it. It was my only reality as a child. It gave me a closeness to human reality forever. I sought it out afterwards, voluntarily, to remain close to all my friends, Henry, Helba, Gonzalo, Moricand, who were all poor. Poverty also has a religious significance. It represents sacrifice, it is usually the outco
me of a choice between artistic, spiritual values and the material ones. It has a spiritual significance. To protect the poor I have denied myself voyages, luxury, clothes, comforts. I have kept only the barest necessities. I have stripped myself joyously. I feel great joy thinking of Henry working in his studio, with his water colors, Helba able to go to the doctor, Gonzalo with paper to draw on, suits to wear. The fewer possessions I have, the richer I feel. I seek poverty. But when I see what it did to Henry, Gonzalo, and Helba, I wonder. Their health destroyed, their work, their life. Without protection, their dream destroyed. No food. No materials to work with. No paper, no paint, no typewriter, no costumes, no medicines. Yet I seek this. Every day I come nearer to it. To be nearer to spiritual values? Nearer to the defeated, the failures, because I feel they have qualities the others do not have, the rich, the selfish, the flattered, the recognized, the decorated? I am born under the sign of the giver, Pisces, I will have to give even more. I have to give up visiting my father in Caux, staying in Corfu with the Durrells, Montecatini with Hélène or Venice with my mother and Joaquin, because I have to pay for Henry's rent, Gonzalo's rent, and to feed them all. No rest. No seashore, no travel, no vacation. Voilà. No Heine's beach costume, no mountain air, no sun on the body. But I get pleasure from seeing how my children live. Gonzalo is so good for the present, he is good for life, but that is why he may be of less value in the eternal, in art, than Henry. He is immediate, and that is why he lives in politics. He lives so much in the present that he has the beautiful gift of direct emotion, as a woman has, a beautiful gift of responding with all of himself, as Henry does not Gonzalo lives so much in the present that when he gets cigarettes he forgets the matches, and he has to go out again. A moment later he thinks of coffee. As soon as creation begins there is a need for planning, for thinking of tomorrow. I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.