by Anais Nin
Another truth overlooked by psychoanalysis is that after they have classified a relationship as masochistic they never consider that what may seem to be the seeking of suffering may in some cases be one's spiritual salvation. They completely forget the fact of the soul's salvation.
There is, for example, the frustration I feel at Henry's lack of insight. But his lack of insight has forced me into self-expression, it has deepened my own and humanized me, for I always have to explain to Henry. Who is to say what is destructive and what is creative?
Henry perhaps helped me to find my strength by constantly challenging it. If it is true that I have the defect of being hypersensitive, it is also true that I have an uncanny divination of others' feelings. Gonzalo is perpetually amazed at how I guess all he feels, expose it, heal it. It is a penetration of the soul.
Henry is always admiring what is outside, external. Helba complains Gonzalo cannot live except with a group of people. He too, like Henry, moves in shoals. Gonzalo and Henry both arrive from the street with a glow on their faces. They come from the most innocuous places, a cafe, a talk with an anonymous, nondescript, colorless person, an exhibit of paintings. They denigrate what they have seen. But the glow is there. It is the glow of exercise, of motion, of pure physical circulation. It comes from flux and reflux, the waves. It is impersonal. It is the shoal-life pleasure, which woman cannot understand, because she gets this glow from intimate life. It is the health of collective exercise, of collective swimming. Woman looks for depth, and for intimacy. I should not say "woman," and generalize as Proust does, I should say I, Anaïs, to be more exact.
[August, 1937]
I walked to Henry's studio to meet Lawrence Durrell and his wife. What first struck me were his eyes of a Mediterranean blue, keen, sparkling, seer, child and old man. In body he is short and stocky, with soft contours like a Hindu, flexible like an Oriental, healthy and humorous. He is a faun, a swimmer, a sail-boat enthusiast. Nancy, his wife, is a long-waisted gamin with beautiful long slanting eyes. With Durrell I had instant communication. We skipped the ordinary stages of friendship, its gradual development. I felt friendship at one bound, with hardly a need of talk.
When they left, Henry, Fred and I spent a quiet evening. We went to a movie. I saw workmen revolting, a fight with the police, injustice, suffering, hunger. At that moment, because the workmen were shot down by the police, because the machines left them without bread, I understood Gonzalo's talk about communism as a possible relief to injustice. I do not believe it can cure it, because injustice and cruelty are inherent in man, incurable, but it might control it somewhat.
It struck me again, that individual suffering should be merged into universal suffering. One should adopt the world's troubles in replacement of one's own. Of course, the personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself. My struggles with myself led me to understand the struggles of others.
When you write consciously, you follow the most accessible thread. Three or four other threads may be agitated like telegraph wires at the same instant and I disregard them. If I were to capture them all I would be cornering the nimblest of minds, revealing simultaneously innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage. The whole truth! I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four pages to each of the present ones, I would have to write backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and the overtones because of the slipperiness of embellishments, the vice of idealism which distorts the truth at every turn. The danger in carefully backtracking to pick up what fell out of the net is the danger of falling into introspection, that monster who chews too long upon a morsel, achieves only absolute mastication, and who withers all it touches rather than illumines it.
Gonzalo belongs to other centuries. What did he think of New York, of Paris, when he first saw them? They seemed small, crowded, and he had claustrophobia! Helba was the star of the Ziegfeld show, as an Inca dancer. She danced in Paris. He played the piano for her, he helped her paint her costumes. He played cards, he drank, and he took drugs. The women never left him alone. He had an extraordinary magnetism for women. He tells me this without vanity. He also tells me how being a Latin, a Moor, an Indian, he was not able to respond to women who courted him. He had to make his own choice. He was always in Sight. The only force which unifies him, pulls him together is either love or politics. He has a gift for leadership and domination. He can talk to workmen, impress them. He is eloquent and fiery. There is power in him. But his weakness is like mine: he cannot use others. He can rule himself, drive himself, create, he has a vision, but he cannot use others, he does not know how to use others, make others work for him. He wants to serve communism, but he cannot bind himself by any contracts, he will not, cannot submit to anyone. He wants to do independent work, without obedience and discipline. He wants to work for the collective good, but he cannot, will not give up his freedom, his individual liberty.
He asks me: "Is it possible that two years ago I was just a Mont-parnassian, just a Bohemian?"
"Never deep down," I said. And I remember the first time I put my finger on the spring of his real nature, what it was I touched one day which exploded like dynamite: his pride, his aristocracy, his leadership, his devotion and compassion. I remembered how he awakened emotionally, like a man hit by a whip, whose manhood suddenly and violently asserted itself. I remember where we were sitting, in a small café by the Seine, when he had just said that I looked like a sixteenth-century virgin he had always loved, like the woman men went to the Crusades for, like his first ideal of a woman. It seems as if returning to his first ideal which he did not attain (he married its opposite) he suddenly had returned to the days when he was the lord of vast lands, owner of slaves, soldier, and mayor of his village. I awakened this in him, although when I met him he was as deteriorated as a hobo.
He said: "I believe, chiquita, that our friendship was not only a personal friendship, but that we were thrown together to serve humanity."
His ideal woman was the mother of Gauguin, who was a South American political heroine, one of the first socialists. I think he is confusing me with her. But why, if he likes heroic women, women of action, did he marry first of all a dancer, and then give his devotion to a writer, an artist?
I wanted to be of help to Republican Spain but I could not write letters full of platitudes, heroic bombast, sentimental propaganda, naïve humanitarianism such as Gonzalo does, collecting money, entertaining volunteers, attending meetings, listening to news on the radio and reading newspapers from cover to cover. Gonzalo said: "All we want is your sympathy and faith. We do not expect political work or service from an Artaud, or an Erik Satie."
Helba and I are walking in the Bois. I took her for a walk in the sun. We stopped at a model-dairy for a glass of fresh milk. And of all people, my father's snobbish mother-in-law came in, dressed in the latest model from Vionnet, with a toque by Trigère, a coiffure by Antoine, a new set of nails by Emil, false eyelashes by Gérard, a dog groomed by Cécile, gloves by Hermès, a leather handbag by Chanel, perfume by Guerlain, face treated by Elizabeth Arden, and her chauffeur, costumed by Rue Saint-Honoré specialists, waiting nearby with a Scotch plaid from Old England in case of danger from a breeze.
Helba was wearing Gonzalo's discarded torn red shirt, my green Majorcan sandals, a skirt made of a potato sack, and was blowing her nose with rag-pickers' rags. She was carrying her sewing material inside of a tin box marked in large letters: OVARIAN SUPPOSI- TORIES, which she had rested on the table. Because Helba is deaf I had to raise my voice. Alta Gracia could have heard all of our conversation about the state of Helba's insides and her operations, about her test for syphilis, her constipation, etc. Alta Gracia decided it was best not to recognize me. The softness of the summer day like an ermine paw.
Everything seems miraculous, that the summer should be so soft, that fountains should play on the Champs-Elysées, that men and women are walking. A city never entirely known, yet which
gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately. A sky which changes every day and yet keeps its opaline tones. Can life continue to unroll this way with a freshness never withered, new faces, new marvels? Can one arrive so many times at fullness without touching bottom, every year new leaves, new skins, new loves, new words. One day I weep at change, but then there is no death, there is this everlasting continuity, nothing is lost, it is transformed, or have I learned to walk magically over hot coals without burning my feet?
I have known Lawrence Durrell for a thousand years. He is a boy of ten playing in the Himalayas with the snow disease on him (the English disease of impersonality). He is an old man in some ways, who does not live impulsively but cautiously, he is a spectator, he is a boy who laughs.
When he came last night to eat out of my wooden plates, to watch the river below, he tasted the place, he let himself be ensorcelled by it, he sat at the center of it, on the floor, like a Hindu, and enjoyed it.
We walked through the Exposition. He wanted to ride the roller coaster, he wanted to travel on the train for children. We talked about everything, and at the same time there was no need of talk. How well he knows Henry. Talking about the Max story (the story of a Jew in which the Jew is exposed ruthlessly, X-rayed, caricatured, crucified forever),* he said: "You are frightening, Henry. The way you cut the cord, the umbilical cord from what you describe—no pity or love—just the all-seeing monster, the savage vision, exposure. Something really outside of the human. If I were a Jew this story would kill me."
A dimension without emotion. This in Henry I do not admire. Perhaps I have done it in the birth story, at times in the diary, but never without pity. Then Henry wonders why people are terrified, why Fraenkel got sick when he read the story, just as I wonder why the birth story has such a terrific effect on people.
Durrell is blond, fair-skinned. He has beautiful teeth, a sensual humorous mouth, blue eyes with northern lights in them, small stature, small hands, something childlike about the body. A fine warm laughter, easily brought on, a sort of uncanny knowingness mixed with hesitancy. This English obsession with impersonality makes him a spectator, makes him seem withdrawn, at the same time warm.
I sent him the metamorphosis story. "Nous autres du Midi nous sommes très liants."
Patrick Evans, a friend of Larry's, writes me:
This is before breakfast, the air is full of sun but it's still fresh. I've just read your novel about your father [Winter of Artifice]. It's very moving. I admire it very much. And I'm enormously glad that Lawrence Durrell lent it to me to read. It's not the first thing of yours which I've read but it is, for me at any rate, the best. House of Incest I enjoyed very much; there are some staggeringly wonderful things in it; but I found it disconnected, there was no unity running through it, like the upward growth of a tree trunk. Or rather, there is unity there but it isn't on the surface, one has a remote presentiment of the drama but it never quite comes through, it's like seeing the tree trunk through a wall of many colored fog. Or like a floating island—one expected the sea and in fact the sea is there, but one never gets to it, one is always on top of the island. The book is full of good things but they are all isolated and foreign to one another—the most amazing images, here a perfect line and there a perfect line, several of them on every page, a whole drawerful of gems; but they are all jumbled and disconnected, not strung together on one thread. The thread got lost somewhere. But in the book about you and your father it is different. There is the same excellent writing, the style quieter it is true but enormously good nevertheless—language used as the exact and spontaneous notion of experience; and there is also that collectedness and forward movement like the movement of a ship, which House of Incest hasn't got. Not merely a thread of drama, a dynamic wire running through the whole with accretions of undramatic, static incidents or descriptions clustered upon it like parasites; the whole thing is drama, with nothing superfluous. And it's alive, breathing. I'm very much moved by it and full of admiration for the honesty and aliveness and courage of it. (If I may say so without seeming fulsome and falsely complimentary, the sort of cher confrère stuff, fervid celluloid admirations designed for public occasions, which so infuriates me and disgusts me in French literary men.) I'm very grateful to you for having written it. In our age as in any other, there are so few works produced in which the writer relies simply on living experience, pure and unadorned (unaug-mented), for the whole flesh and complexion of his art; it is so easy to mask the self, to produce a grandiose or elegant, or pétillant effect, empty of the sensation of living, by adopting a pose and by using petty devices by way of technique; it's very seldom that one finds a writer who is naïve and real, and frank, as genuine as food and as undeniable, as real, as the wind or the sky or a tree. Your work excites and pleases me and thrills me, and frightens me a bit too. I hope someday I shall be able to write something which approaches the same level. (As regards the cher confrère aspect—I'm still in the earliest stages myself struggling out of swaddling clothes. I've written a bundle of verses which are nine-tenths rubbish and the remaining tenth good. Just now I'm at grips with my first novel—got about a third of it done. Full of difficulties; it's wrestle, wrestle, wrestle, all the time.) And so out of the blue Ionian, on a creamy summer day with the sunshine blowing along, a salute and thanks.