Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2

by Anais Nin

  "Are you sure," I said, "that the notes you are teaching her are the same ones she will sing at her concert?"

  I should not really tease him, knowing as I know now that this is the most robust bone in his body.

  Hélène decides not to go and live in London. "I am too attached to you, Anaïs, like a lifeboat to a ship."

  But it is I who am the lifeboat (in size) and she the Titanic.

  Stock-market news: "Une timide reprise de la dynamite."

  Dynamite shares show a slight recovery!

  The Henry I first knew was humble and unsure. The Henry of today is self-assured and slightly megalomaniacal. Always talking about China and wisdom, after an evening when he said unwise and brutal things to an English girl.

  The Marxists consider Allendy a doubtful left-winger because he published an article on "Sexuality and Capitalism" in a medical journal. They called it "exploiting the bourgeois appetites," when Allendy was merely fulfilling his medical function, his doctor's observations. A poet was put in prison for using the name of God in a poem. Gide was ostracized for reporting his true impressions of Russia. I have fought too much for a spiritually honest and free life to pass from one narrow-mindedness to another, from one dogma into another, from one prejudice into another.

  Gonzalo says justly: "You have to look beyond the defects, the discipline. To make a new world demands first of all destruction and severity. The men of today will be sacrificed, the individual will be sacrificed, but for a new order. You have had the strength to expand in spite of a bourgeois world, but what of the weak, those who cannot, those who are downtrodden?" This argument always touches me. The weak ones. Those I help every day, trapped in all kinds of miseries.

  Gonzalo is sacrificing his Bohemianism. But he finds discipline a conflict. He lives without a clock.

  David Gascoyne. Living in a real sous les toits room, in an attic, low ceiling and slanting windows. He gave me Pierre-Jean Jouve, a new world, new dreams, a new poison, a new drug. The first to treat the knowledge of psychoanalysis as a poet, to write a novel which is half a poem.

  Then to Henry's. Denoël and Steele will publish Black Spring in French. Flattering letters. James Cooney, of Woodstock, starts a new magazine [The Phoenix], appoints Henry European editor, accepts my "orchestra" fragment from Winter of Artifice, writes of doing all the diaries on his hand press, one by one.

  Valentina and Lila come to visit me. Valentina enters like a queen of the amazons, wearing an orchid in which a bird could get lost, an emerald as large as a hazelnut. Lila wears a tailored suit, which she fills out voluptuously. Furs and perfume. Valentina has been coiffed by Antoine. Valentina has been overpowered by Lila's invisible mustache. They took me to hear Suzy Solidor. Cocktails at the Ritz. Not my world. No words to remember. Nothing remains of them when they leave. A fleur de peau. Fleurs de peau.

  ***

  I visited Jean Carteret's apartment at the very top of an old apartment house near Clichy. Before I enter he has seen me through a spy-eye in the door, which makes the hallway appear immeasurably long, the person standing in front immeasurably tall and as if standing miles away. I entered an apartment as dark as a dungeon, a black hallway with glowworm lamps. Jean has to lead me. But his eyes sparkle in a way which reminds me of his own description of an aurora borealis. It passes like a muslin veil in waves, such an immense phenomenon of light and color that Jean said it seems to stare at you like an eye. The eye is the only sense we have which crosses between the finite and the infinite. The aurora borealis is the eye of the world. The eyes of Jean have that quality. They shine nestled between flowing hair and a blond beard. In the gentle way his eyelids fall there is goodness. In the length and softness of his pale eyelashes there is femininity. The nose is pure, the mouth sensual. He is wearing the black wool costume of the Laplanders, a long square blouse like the Russian peasants', but lined with bands of yellow, red and green embroidered in felt.

  In his room blood-red predominates. The bedspread, the cushions, and the curtains are dark red. He has covered his windows with Japanese rice-paper pasted on the glass, so that a view of other houses is shut out, so that the eyes are thrown back into the room which is like the cave of Ali Baba, filled with treasures:

  Blue painted sleds from Lapland stand upright in the corner, ready to slide heavenward to the planets. Inside of the sled he has placed a small oil-lamp which sheds a blue Arctic light. In his hand he holds a Chinese opium pipe without opium. He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie. A collection of pipes from all over the world lies scattered. An enormous Chinese gong rings the hours. It once awakened the Tibetan monks, but it came from the flea market. An African pirogue carved out of wood sails on the mantelpiece, with four Africans rowing. Two large ivory-handled knives are nailed to the wall above Jean's bed. Reindeer horns, hung on the walls, support an open book on magic, and a book of erotic tales. Delicate dried coral blooms unexpectedly from the top of a pile of books. The bookshelves are placed high near the ceiling. A sunburst hat from Madagascar hangs from the last shelf. He pulls out a box from under his bed which contains a skeleton found in the Canary Islands. A tree root gathered in Tahiti rivals Brancusi's petrified snakes. Jean is a great wanderer, but he likes to bring back proofs of what he has seen, sand from Mount Athos, liqueurs from Hungary, water from the Black Sea in a bottle, volcanic stones, beaded curtains from Algeria.

  We sit on two children's chairs from Greece. Were they carried over not from Greece but from the kingdom of his childhood, from some small provincial town similar to the town of Rimbaud's childhood where he lived so closely bound to his sister? Are Jean and his sister still sitting in these diminutive chairs? Was the child still there, never fully ejected, never outgrown?

  His mother forbade him to study the violin, for which he had a passion. He collected instruments which he nailed to the wall. His mother smashed the violin he wanted to play. "No child of mine will become a good-for-nothing violin player." The instruments on the wall seem to be playing a silent music which only the buried musician in him can hear. He could not resuscitate this violinist but he became the archaeologist of his own soul. He surrounded himself with eloquent objects. Necklaces intertwined with rosaries. Little bags filled with odorous herbs. He opened more valises, and spilled on the floor erotic post cards from Spain, a Tahitian grass skirt, a pipe carved out of a lobster's toe. He is like a young magician. He likes to disguise himself. He changed his costume several times during the evening.

  Spoons, stones, icons, bird feathers, a whip, dried lichen, are not inanimate objects in his hands. They become objects used for Black Masses, conjugations of magic chaos. He wants to possess the whole world in his room. To make up for the lost musician. He probed and pursued the music killed by his mother.

  On the wall hangs a huge mushroom-shaped holy water stand. The holy water stand of poisons, I baptized it.

  A Turkish rug seems ready for flight, the heavy felt Lapland boots seem ready to wear for hunting in the snow. His lamps are covered with medieval armor hats. A small Chinese scroll lies open on a stand. A pen and inkstand might have belonged to Dostoev sky. Jean offers me incense from India, a cigarette from Germany.

  He is possessed with restlessness and wanderlust, forgetfulness, timelessness. He lives in a labyrinth of words, tales, memories. His game is with fetishes. Objects not abstractions. Proofs of his voyages, proofs of all he touched and loved, proofs of his wanderings. Into his rooms he brings back the universe. The violin is muted, he never lays his hands on it, but the music is in him, it floods the place, the harmonies issue from the shell of his misery. He is condemned to wander outside of his violin, yet in every object around him I could place my ear and hear the music his mother was unable to silence.

  He talks to me about the conflict of politics. He has the same conflict I have between humanism and dogmas. I am tempted to abandon my individual world to serve a collective world. But Carteret says Marxism is not an expression of our humanism, it is practical, u
tilitarian, concrete, factual. It is not a selfish, individual life which pulls us away from other systems, collective systems, but another level of life. We live on another level. We have to act on another level. We are not escaping, we are not enjoying an opium life, we are dreaming the dream of life itself, the dream of the growth of man, each man, one by one. Our action is on another level. For these words I was grateful to him. "This is a realistic epoch, an epoch of concrete details, of economics. We cannot be of use to it."

  Gonzalo says: "Literature, metaphysics, philosophies, they were never effective without violence. Violence is necessary, inevitable. People cannot free themselves through art or religion. Even to establish religion, violence and revolution were necessary."

  Renata Bugatti came like a storm, with the head of a Roman soldier and the intelligence of a Sphinx. She has such a force that I remember hearing her play the piano at the Salle Pleyel thirteen years ago. I remember the suit she wore, the fierce carriage of her head. I do understand these outsized women. Strange, these women who terrify men are the women who do not intimidate me at all. One can face them in the open. It is exhilarating. They are direct, honest.

  ***

  I cannot enter the dream of revolution as Gonzalo dreams it, into its essence, its purity. Yet I have such a strong desire that others may live, and to give individually becomes increasingly difficult. Gonzalo attacks this kind of giving because he says it only delays reforms, palliates evils which must be confronted. To give individually means to be submerged, killed and not to achieve a very wide range. One must give collectively.

  This is how it is done. You put on a special apparatus resembling that for the deaf (as normally you would not catch the rumble of economic crisis, collective running of factories) and you listen in. Then you talk about Paix et Démocratie with lowered eyes, admitting it is an anti-fascist organization and working for Spain. The apparatus registers: a sympathizer to the cause. His eyes warm up. You exchange propaganda. You file his name in the box for Paix et Démocratie. Gonzalo is very pleased.

  I walked away in the soft rain. A church bell was tolling. This grave gong sounding through the agitated city, a city of nerves, horns, strident sounds. I felt its resonance. What fine receptivity. In this vault in me where I hear only large deep notes, only the marvelous, will I be able to receive the dream of revolution for the good of all? A world of great arches swung over vast spaces—the dreamer learns to span these but I can never forget that the Inquisition tortured human beings who did not believe in Catholicism, and that the revolution will torture and is torturing all those who do not adhere fanatically to it. It is this I cannot accept. Was there ever a pure revolution? A system achieved without human sacrifice?

  Renata asked Jean: "What is your occupation?"

  Jean answered: "My occupation is to learn to walk through all of them in a state of transcendentalism, to live only in the essence, and within the frame of none." A form of liberty. But Renata was too primitive to understand this. It was when she used the word cruelty that her long mouth became most expressive. She wanted to be cruel, she understood how one could torture the loved one for the pleasure of consoling him. She talked about herself. She once fell into the hands of the magician described by Thomas Mann. She was under his power for ten days. She wanted to be cured of her fear of the public. He did not succeed in hypnotizing her as he did others but he could make her play against her will. She gave a whole concert under his domination. She believed herself cured of her fear. She left him, and at the next concert the fear returned.

  Jean told her that she was always looking for the brother. "Drama comes into your life periodically." The writer Colette called out to her loudly in a theatre once: "Voilà le beau garçon de Rome."

  Appearance of strength, yet filled with fears. "My greatest fear is identification, of passing into others." Her father was a celebrated tenor, a gambler, Don Juan. Carteret said: "You are a mystic."

  I did not see her as he did. She is in a high state of tension, which gives an illusion of power. It seemed to me that I could see in Renata's eyes the demonic little elevator of desire sliding up and down as she contemplated Jean Carteret in his role of visionary. Her gravitation was in danger. I knew and recognized this dizzy fall into a precipice as she contemplated Jean's small and tender ears, the hair on his neck soft as if it had never been cut. His talk creates space, air, rhythms.

  Renata was saying: "In love I always see an adversary. I prefer friendship. All fusion is devouring. I always had the desire to enter a lion's den. Colette had the same wish, she wanted to confront a panther. And the panther threw itself on her and tore her clothes."

  "I love Colette's writing," I said.

  "Why don't you visit her?"

  "Because in Le Journal de Claudine the girl Colette most hated in school was called Anaïs."

  Work on diary for Perkins. Work for Paix et Démocratie. Work for the Booster.

  I no longer believe duality is a weakening element. One can make a strong tool out of it. It all depends on one's flexibility, if one is able to yield to double pressures and move with fluidity between them. It is the rigidity which causes the breaks.

  Jean said: "I believe it is not unfaithfulness which drives the great lovers but that when you are highly sensitized to love, when you vibrate deeply sensually and love passionately, it is like a current in the body which, being perpetual, creates a warm contact with all. I feel so many people physically, amorously, because I am in a state of love, like a mystic, and it is greater than myself, it is immense, this overflow. Just as activity creates activity, energy creates energy, creation creates creation, so passion creates more and more capacity for passion. One's receptivity, capacity, is expanded, and there you have the answer to the amorous expansion of all born lovers. That is why the word fidelity means nothing to me."

  He also talked about his erotic adventures: "Sometimes I am afraid I am too slow in coming to a climax and tiring out the woman, or too quick and missed giving her pleasure. I am concerned about giving woman pleasure. It is rare when I have known simultaneous pleasure. In one night or two one does not find the right rhythm. I have known so many women and synchronization only a few times. And the woman remains a stranger to me. In me there is always doubt, unsureness, fumbling, failures, or half-fulfillments. And very often to excite myself I have to invent an erode fantasy, recall an erotic picture I saw, or another woman I desired and could not have."

  Adventures, without the magnetic attraction of love, of stirred emotions, upheavals of feeling which sensitize the body, arouse the nerves, awaken the flesh! The pleasure of love is so much greater than that of adventure. Jean's pleasures seemed pale compared to mine. He said in answer to me: "You are fortunate to have found eroticism within love, not apart from it as it is with me."

  We talked about schizophrenia, which I see as a lack of contact, a kind of withering of feeling with or for others. And as I feel too much contact with human beings, the world, I said I must be suffering from the opposite of schizophrenia, empathy, identification with, dispersion into, abandon and loss of self in others. Then why the feeling of loneliness? "We do touch all things by osmosis, empathy," said Jean. "We are in contact with a center, yet part of us escapes and lives marginally, a part of us in exile, hence the feeling of loneliness. It is that we live in becoming, in the future."

  Deep joys in sacrifice, in obtaining Allendy's support for Paix et Démocratie rather than his subscription to the diary, in listening to his confidences.

  Came home and danced to the radio. Seas of emotion heaving under my feet. I feel a tension which should carry me to the moon.

  Hélène is invited by her lover to go to Norway with him. She is renting her apartment. I like her because she can play with experience. Together we could remove any event from its tragic context. It would assume the color of a dream, a fiction. We told each other vivid and violent happenings as people tell each other their dreams.

  Renata Bugatti playing at a concert. Her
mask tormented. When I hear her play I hear the man and woman I once heard behind a hotel wall, moaning rhythmically. Renata is seeking to possess the piano, enter the music. It is a corps à corps. It is a sexual bout ending in defeat. Her nostrils quiver. Her mouth is designed for cruelty. Her chin is willful. But it is a defeat. The melody does not rise even when she turns her face upward. It is a substance made heavy by her passion. Her will cannot attain what the man and woman attained behind the hotel wall, a moment of pleasure. Her passion is primitive, blood and guts, and cannot be alchemized into music. The piano she pounds is her own body, with a male violence, and the mask is of the one who never reaches either the orgasm or sainthood. No music rose or passed out of the window. It was too heavy with blood.

  This took place at the house of Baron de Rothschild. The vast salon had been turned into a concert hall. We were surrounded by paintings of his ancestors. In front of me, there was a beautiful woman I could only see when she turned her head. She was marred by a dark-brown growth on her chin. I turned my face away. I looked out into the misty green garden. And I saw three full-length mirrors planted there, reflecting the trees, three mirrors in the middle of a dewy garden.

  In one day, a kaleidoscope. The lantern slides and I am at the Stuart Gilberts', talking with Denise Clairouin, who asks me: "And that work on the diary, how is it going?" I answer that it is going well, but I do not confess that I prefer to be writing about the present rather than be condensing the past into six hundred pages for Mr. Perkins.

  I push myself to visit Helba in her new apartment. It is even more startling to see her, in a clean, airy, lighted new apartment, come out looking like a bedraggled gypsy, wearing one of Gonzalo's shirts, and over this a kimono which she has dyed black and through which the frayed red still shows. On her feet she wears a pair of Gonzalo's big socks filled with cotton wool at the tip, like a rag-picker's Christmas stocking. She is lying in bed reading a book about diseases. The windows are shut, the sun is locked out, she has managed to make this joyous clean white new place almost like the old mildewed cellar where I first saw her. She is busy marking in the book all the diseases she has. "See," she tells me, handing me the book, "I have diseases described on pages 143 and 26, in fact, if I read carefully enough I have all of them. I am copying out a recipe for dandruff." Her face is yellow and old. My pity is exhausted, I can't respond any more, because all this misery comes out of stubbornness, ignorance and a persistent self-destruction. My doctor gave up taking care of her. "She does not co-operate, she goes her own way, she pays no attention to what I ask her to do." I am not eager to stay. It is like visiting a tomb. I am really angry at her will to die, dragging Gonzalo into perpetual anxiety, fear, dirt. It is a rivalry between life and death taking place here, and Helba wins over me each time. When I give her a new apartment, how can she make it look like the old cellar?