by Anais Nin
Gonzalo loves with devotion, fidelity, sacrifice, with a giving of the self. Henry loves in a primitive way, he enjoys, takes, uses, and never gives himself. It is all for him, for his work, for his benefit, for his career as a writer, for his appetites, his pleasures.
My father is talking about the marvels of the microscope, about the scorpion he saw and studied, about the minerals, the gold dust. And meanwhile I ask myself about the novel I wrote, was it the truth? Henry deformed June in his novel, did I deform my father? Art is a microscope, as you examine one aspect of a human being, you cannot give the whole, the entire picture. The diary is closer to the truth, because it paints my father each day anew, with changes, paradoxes, contradictions, growth, and in these oscillations lies the truth. Here alone is the human vision restored. The novel is an act of injustice. One is true to the theme, an aspect of relationship, not a portrait. I do not want to be a novelist. I want to keep the snapshots of the father I knew in Valescure. The novel depicts the conflict, not the human being separated from his conflict. It depicts the dangerous animals we are in relation to each other. As Lawrence once said, every human being is dangerous to every other human being. Now that we are no longer at war, I can see him differently. He likes to sit on the floor, as I do, and tell me about his dreams which resemble mine, about the ship passing through a waterless city, about a train leaving and his valise not ready, of flying, of cataclysms. I looked at him with sad eyes. Tell me more, Father, about the microscope. He is ashamed of all he wants for himself, of his thirsts, appetites, his whims, his games which he must pursue inexorably while people die and starve around him, of his need of luxury and show, of his need of gadgets, of new cameras, microscopes, and so he says: "I bought the microscope during Maruca's illness, to amuse her." When I know Maruca has no interest in the microscope, and even less in the best microscope ever made. Games.
Others' needs, real needs. Dark needs, vital needs. Games with poetry, costumes, music; guitars, charcoal, water colors, with words, the vital games of art. Bread and poetry. All the pleasures I might take in luxury, as my father does, I willingly surrender to the greater pleasure I get from creating life, hope, fulfillment all around me. I feel a deep pleasure when others enjoy. It is deeper than any other.
There is a drug in Mexico called sinicuik which helps one to remember the past. I could call my diary by that name. Taoist teaching: "To get one's due is to remain in the whirligig of time; but not to claim one's due is to fly off at a tangent to eternity."
"Importance of being a fool (to make others laugh). Foolishness, not knowledge, is power." Henry's philosophy.
In China: Blocks of wood carved with printed texts used as walls of houses. People could come and rub paper against them and get texts of important documents.
"The fundament of Taoism is the subtle idea of the permeation or interpenetration of opposites." "In Tao the only motion is returning." Chinese proverb: "When a thing is pushed to its utmost limit it will return." "Another way of going beyond good and evil is the assiduous practice of what Lao-tze would call soft or feminine virtues."
More and more revealed in the diary is my struggle against the scientific intellectual inventions of man. With my feelings and instincts I belie all the theories and psychological explanations of man. What I did with analysis was to use, transform, and finally reject all but the poetry.
At this point I was fortunate enough to meet the Inca, Gonzalo, who picks up Frazer's book, Myths of the Origin of Fire, and says: "Why seek the origin of fire? Why not be the fire?"
I have a growing obsession with order, I organize my closet, my papers, create an unburdened atmosphere, no useless objects, everything ready to be found, lived with. Reduction. Papers classified, medicines in order, as if ready for a trip, clothes in order. To make living smoother, faster. Order gives me serenity. It is the philosophy of the Japanese. Order around you helps you to think clearly. I need this because my body is too keyed up, like that of a race horse, and I need sedatives. I have given away everything I do not need. No waste. No accumulation of belongings. Nothing around me torn or broken. I see in Helba's and Gonzalo's life the very opposite; they are always submerged and drowned by what they have not done, trammeled by small obstacles, laundry never done, nothing to wear, everything lost, torn, dispersed.
I was able to buy a printing press for Gonzalo. Gonzalo was in ecstasy. For him it meant financial independence, prestige, domination, propaganda for Spain. His pride is now aroused. I have awakened his energy, his love of leadership, dispelled his sense of guilt which makes him afraid to live for himself, ashamed to do anything for himself. We went to buy the machine together. We danced around it. It lies flat on a table like a proof-making machine. Henry wanted it, but does not really need it. His work is published and accepted. Gonzalo needs it and can earn his living with it. His joy was wonderful to see. Afterwards I thought a little regretfully that I would have liked the press for myself, to do with as I liked, but I can never do this while those I love have a greater need. I was enjoying Gonzalo's joy.
Lawrence Durrell writes me about the two novels I had sent him [Winter of Artifice and another, later incorporated in Ladders to Fire].
Postscript the following day; i.e. today. Dear Anaïs. I have read your two manuscripts, and I'm delighted with you. What a woman you are, my god. I'm a bit scared of meeting you, etc. The Father one was lovely, beautifully proportioned and written with a hot poker. Tremendously memorable; and the little girl portrait is moving for me. But the other is, I think, bigger in scope, though it lacks the objectivity of the Father one. You become a real female gorgon, double-headed. The only criticism, if you can call it a criticism, that occurred to me, was that in making it so subjective, so intensely personal, you were forced to make the characters transcendent, superhuman: mythical, as they were mythical in your world. I wept a bit, because this is the first book in Europe which belongs to a female artist; and it is bitter. I was not concerned so much with the interplay of the characters; but thought all the time how female it was, how the gift was total, always, unreserved, not withheld. And this is a crucifixion much worse for a woman artist than a man—because her world operates so intimately through man. Somehow the prime detachment for the female is not a rift with humanity, but a rift, an amputation from the male; whereas for me it works differently. Perhaps women have had more practice in involution; perhaps the deep sensitive biological nerve of the woman is more hurt by the snapping of the cord (perhaps I am simply talking rubbish). But the spectacle is more wounding, more painful, when a woman assumes the role of protagonist. Anyway, I find it so. I wish there were more of those mischievous, reassuring touches: like when Jay was talking so painfully about the whores, etc., to assure himself about the depths being as necessary as the heights and all that. When you put a feather in your hat and draw back the bowstring then you make me delight: because the male is so vulnerable to this kind of mischief. He is transfixed before he has any retort ready. He stands with his mouth full of bread and onions and shuffles his feet. And the magnificent edifice of his self-esteem simply totters! I love that! It is extraordinarily great. I'm glad I'm not a woman. How can you stand it? They are calling me to bathe. It is hot. I shall send you the novels back soon: Nancy is finishing them. Who is Jolas? Isn't he the chap with the dream-note-book. Is he any good? Awful the stuff in the last New Directions. Have met a wonderful painter called Ivy Langton. I would like her to illustrate the heraldic madhouse. In her funny little brain she keeps a menagerie of people as volatile and living as Breughel: but she has miles more feeling than he has: so much of the automatic art (Klee, Miró and Company) seems to me to be on crutches: somehow static: but in her paintings there is an incessant activity, though the little figures seem petrified on the canvas by their strength of color. I wish I could buy a painting by her. She knows Reichel. Says he is always drunk, but admires his work. Lived in Paris ten years and loathes the English. This last trait is enough to make her an artist even if she had nothing
else. A funny little Lincolnshire lass who is good because she does not care. More anon.
In Henry's writing there is a sonority, a fever, an amplitude. Cosmic Wind. The diary was once a disease. I do not take it up for the same reason now. Before it was because I was lonely, or because I did not know how to communicate with others. I needed the communion. Now it is to write not for solace but for the pleasure of describing others, out of abundance.
Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much." This could be on my tombstone. What I feel intensely and always respond to is the aloneness of the others, their needs. Which love makes the great closeness, the fraternal, the friendship, the passion, the intellectual harmony, the tender one, devotion, the lover, the brother, the husband, the father, the son, the friend. So many kinds of fusions! What is it that annihilates the loneliness? The understanding of Rank, devotions, ardor, creative harmony?
Break and shatter loneliness forever!
I am never close enough; I want some impossible communion.
I must accept intermittences. Loneliness in between.
Letter from Faber and Faber to Denise Clairouin:
We have been having an exceptionally difficult rime deciding about the diary of Anaïs Nin. As you already know from my request for the further material, we were very much interested; yet in the end, and after very great regret, we cannot see how to shape the material into book form which could be published in England. Much of what we should wish to use for the integrity of the book, we should be prevented from using by the restrictions on books in England. In the end the difficulties of the problem have defeated us, and I am sending the volumes back with a great deal of reluctance.
On loneliness. My connection with Henry is on a creative, an imaginative, a more impersonal level. It is not continuous because he shares himself with his work and with the world, he leads a collective life.
Gonzalo's talent is for the personal relationship. He is emotional, direct, personal, human. He is spontaneous, warm, loyal, devoted.
Gonzalo's dynamism and involvement in history, Henry's celebrity, Helba's returning strength, satisfy me.
My father writes me: "I came away filled with peace and sweetness."
Gonzalo expanding, blooming. I call him the Dieu du Feu, the god of fire, whom he used to drown in wine. I run between the Shangri-la of literature, Villa Seurat, and Nanankepichu, the Indian drug of poetry. I write about metamorphosis.
The Mouse is always given the same food I eat and not treated like a French servant. One day I ran short of money and I asked her to buy eggs instead of meat. She began to cry.
"Oh, Madame, I knew it could not last. We've had meat every day and I was so happy. I thought at last I had found a good place. And now you are acting just like the others. I can't eat eggs."
"But if you don't like eggs, you can get something else. I merely mentioned eggs because I was short of money today."
"It isn't that I don't like them. I always liked them at home, on the farm. We ate a lot of eggs. But when I first came to Paris the lady I worked for was so stingy—you can't imagine what she was like. She kept all the closets locked up, she weighed the provisions, she counted the pieces of sugar I ate. She bought meat for herself every day and eggs for me, until I got deathly sick of them. And today when you said ... I thought it was beginning all over again."
We cleared up that misunderstanding and all was well.
But I left the houseboat for a week and when I returned the Mouse looked more worried than ever.
A few weeks later the Mouse was grinding coffee in the kitchen when I heard her groan. I found her very white, doubled up with pain in her stomach. I helped her to her cabin. The Mouse said it was indigestion. But the pains grew worse. She groaned for an hour, and finally asked me if I would get a doctor she knew who lived nearby. It was the doctor's wife who received me. The doctor had taken care of the Mouse before, but not since she lived on the houseboat. That made it impossible for the doctor to visit her because he was a "grand blessé de guerre?' and on account of his wooden leg he could not be expected to walk across an unsteady gangplank. That was impossible, the wife repeated. But I pleaded with her. She finally gave a half-promise.
When he came the Mouse was forced to make some explanations. She was afraid she was pregnant. She had tried using something she had been told about, pure ammonia, and now the pains were terrible.
The Mouse had to uncover herself. I asked her why she had not confided in me.
"I was afraid Madame would throw me out."
The doctor said: "You risked a terrible infection. If it does not come out now you'll have to go to a hospital."
"Oh, I can't do that. My mother will find out then, and she'll be furious with me."
"Maybe it'll come out by itself but that is all I can do. I can't be mixed up in things like this. In my profession I must be careful. Bring me water and a towel."
He washed his hands carefully. "All you servants make trouble for us doctors."
"Don't send me to the hospital," pleaded the Mouse.
When the doctor left the Mouse said: "To tell you the truth, Madame, it isn't worth it. I don't see anything to it at all. It only happened because you were away and I got terribly frightened. My young man came and I let him stay here, and that's how it happened."
The fever mounted. I was forced to take her to the hospital. I packed her valise. She insisted on wearing her Sunday hat which she kept under her bed in tissue paper, and a piece of mouse-fur around her neck. She wanted her book with her. It was a child's reader. At the hospital they refused to take her in. I appealed to my own doctor. She was saved, and I kept the secret from her family. But I could not forget the woman bleeding there on the bench of the hospital while they asked endless questions. The little round moist eyes, the tiny worn piece of fur, the panic in her. The brand-new Sunday hat and the torn valise with a string for a handle. The oily, soiled pocketbook, and the soldier's letters pressed between the pages of a child's reader. And this pregnancy accomplished in the dark, out of fear. A gesture of panic, that of a mouse falling into a trap.
This volume of the diary [No. 54] is large. A large, honest, expansive one given to me by Henry, on which I can spread out beyond the diary, encompassing more, transcending myself. The small notebook I could slip into my pocket was mine, this one I cannot clutch, hide, restrain or retain. It spreads. It asserts itself. It lies on my desk like a real manuscript. It is a larger canvas. No marginal writing done delicately, unobtrusively, but work, assertion. It so happens I am alone. I can leave it on my desk. The place is wholly mine. Perhaps I shall include the world. I neglect the world. Henry was right, what I write is less communicable than what he writes because he has a human love of writing, of words, he takes a sensuous pleasure in writing, it is flesh and food, whereas I have a sort of contempt for the sensuous joy of expression, I seek the meaning, the contents. A lonely quest, which isolates me. Henry is nearer to all because of the language, because he likes to talk, to formulate, to share. His concern is with communication, mine with exploration, discoveries, tracking down elusive states of mind, of feeling. We shall look around a bit, my diary, at the enjoyments. We shall dwell on the sensuous pleasures of language, the word made flesh, and have less concern with significance. Henry often does not care for meaning. He does not care if one paragraph contradicts and annihilates the other.
Sometimes in the street, or in a cate, I am hypnotized by the "pimp" face of a man, by a big workman with knee-high boots, by a brutal criminal head. I feel a sensual tremor of fear, an obscure attraction. The female in me trembles and is fascinated. For one second only I am a prostitute who expects a stab in the back. I feel anxiety. I feel trapped. I forget that I am free. A subterranean primitivism? A desire to feel the brutality of man, the force which can violate? To be violated is perhaps a need in woman, a secret erotic need. I have to shake myself from the invasion of these violent images, awaken.
Henry's writing has that effect on m
e, his brutality of speech, his barbaric language, his primitive behavior. Food and sex the primal needs for him.
In Gonzalo too, I like the man of nature. The poet Neruda said to him: "Where is your horse? You always look as if you had left your horse at the door." The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold. He dried his hands over the fire and watched the smoke running through his opened fingers. Le Dieu du Feu, I said laughingly. He cannot be submitted to time. He is chaotic. He does not know how much can be done in half an hour. Half of him is forever asleep, coiled in his Indian mother's womb, in reverie, in Indian laziness. Only half of him acts in the world, and the idealist is already nauseated by the political game, by the self-interest and the power-lust around him, by the writers gain ing publicity for themselves under cover of the Spanish cause, by the men profiting from the blood sacrifices of others. "I am doing dirty work," he says. "The work behind the front is filthy and unworthy. I would rather be fighting." He is pure. He has the shyness of noble animals. He always refuses orgies, or exhibitionism at parties. We both like ancient, unreal qualities, we like heroism and passion, and these are vanishing from the world.
Gonzalo represents for me all that I inherited from Spain, mystic, ardent Spain, whose peasants are as polite and stylized as its aristocrats. Imbedded in my blood, in the blood of my race, was the figure of a romantic Don Quixote and I had to find him. Gonzalo, the Inca Don Quixote; only he fights for a cripple, and for Spain's revolution.