by Anais Nin
***
War declared.
Nothing left but to share humanly in the error, and the suffering of the world.
Henry's war-letters.
My only concern is whether I will be cut off. Even now if I wanted to cable [James] Laughlin I doubt if I could rely on him. There are others there who might really do something for me, I am sure of it. Such as William Carlos Williams, Dorothy Norman, Paul Rosenfeld, Huntington Cairns, Mencken, Dos Passos, certainly Faulkner, Ben Hecht, Ben Abramson, Gotham Book Mart, etc. I can think of dozens, but how to reach them quickly and effectively I don't know. The best thing would be for me to croak, then they would all cash in handsomely. I am wondering if you took my things from the safe at the Obelisk Press office. To leave them in Paris seems really risky. The notes and manuscripts I left there are worth thousands of dollars, a fortune to someone if I should die tomorrow. Remember that I carry about with me a will and testament leaving everything to you ... If you do go to America, and if it is at all possible, I hope you take my manuscripts and my books with you.
Gonzalo's letter full of anxiety about my safety.
New money blockades worry me for my orphans. Gonzalo struggling to return to Paris, working at grape-picking. His letters are human. I spend my days juggling through laws and difficulties to send money to Henry, Gonzalo, Moricand. The police know me. Soon I will have exhausted all my trickeries. I begin to pack boxes in the cellar. This volume will portray the end of our personal lives.
Moricand came to say good-bye. He has signed up with the Légion Etrangère. He had to lie about his age. "What else can I do? I am starving." We have a farewell dinner at the Brasserie Lipp, with Jean Carteret and other friends of his. He carries tied to his belt the aluminum cup and plate, knife and fork of the Légionnaire. He bequeaths me his fragile eighteenth-century cologne bottle, crystal with encrusted specks of gold. He repeats that I must live by a cosmic rhythm, not a personal rhythm. I weep because I can no longer save anyone. You cannot save people, you can only love them. You can't transform them, you can only console them.
Paris at night I step out of the restaurant into darkness. It is a sensual experience. I recognize no one. I stumble. I hear the voice of a man I am sure I could have loved, but he vanishes. Mysterious blue and green night-lights here and there.
Moricand talked about his childhood as if he were parting from it. "I used to enjoy smelling camphor and eating ginger at the same time."
I am amazed that all of us begin each day anew automatically as before, knowing we might die tomorrow. I dress simply. I powder my face. I paint my eyelashes. Meanwhile the radio announces tragedy, horror, suffering. It is engulfing us. No more anesthetic. I wear a magenta coat and black skirt, leather moccasin shoes, a leather Arabian bag slung over my shoulder. I read the newspapers. I listen to the radio.
When I cannot bear the horror any more I read Fille de Mamouri by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto. I realized the great power of form, and my own struggle against it. This explains my love of Jeanne because she was a poet, my following her into her own world and bruising myself against her formal life, so contrary to my own essence and unwillingness to play games. This formality irritated me in Moricand. But it broke down when he read Winter of Artifice. His letter then became a cry of human sorrow at having feared "life in the raw," missed human life because of his squeamishness, over-delicacy. But as he confessed his unnaturalness, his precautions against experience, I also became aware of the nobility in these dying forms. The armature of the aristocrat, something which sustains him through everything, becomes courage. So I wrote him a beautiful farewell letter, telling him all that I had admired in him, his sense of poetry and aesthetics, his pride, his wit and grace. Poetry in his case became a form of heroism. His sense of ritual, ceremoniousness. He was really an Oriental brutalized by Western life.
I detested formality but loved form. A nuance. I understood when Gonzalo told me how infinitely more civilized the Inca was than the European. He was delicate, noble in behavior, he had irony, a sense of ritual and dignity even in his amusements, even at orgies. I could never part with my own form, even when drinking. Yet I felt that it alienated me from others and wished for vulgarity. Henry mistook this style for pride. For him such a bearing could only be artificial, not natural. He was completely mystified by the behavior of Moricand. He would have found the same stylization in a Japanese peasant, a Spanish peasant, or an Indian.
I love naturalness, but I wanted it beautiful too. Some races are naturally poetic. The poetic sense of the Japanese seems to be based on a rigid form which has become a prison for their feelings. Etsu knew it well. To arrive at sincerity, for example, becomes difficult if you have a cult of hospitality. I received in Louveciennes people whose behavior I despised and yet I would not show it while they were in my house. It was enough that I knew how I felt, that was my sincerity.
The death of houses, how they seem to collapse as soon as we leave them, as soon as we prepare ourselves to leave them. I remember the house in Richmond Hill did not show any decrepitude until our life in it came to an end, when we left for Europe. Then as if we had sucked the living glow out of it, suddenly it appeared decrepit and shabby. So with Louveciennes when I returned from America a different woman, when Louveciennes ceased to be the center of my life and I spent more time in Paris. In one day it grew old, like a deserted lover, old and empty. It withered. I was amazed to see its defects, its mouldiness. Or was it my vision of it which altered? So with Villa Seurat when Henry left it during the first war-alert. It suddenly lost its glow. It began to break down. The rain and the wind came through a broken windowpane. The hot-water heater was worn out. The paint on the walls suddenly appeared soiled. The need of repairs appeared hopeless. Because life had withdrawn from it. Anguish about war dispersed us. Tragedy seeped into the houses, from outside. It could not be shut out any longer. Villa Seurat and other places once so illumined with life began to die under my eyes. Houses turn to corpses overnight when we cease to live and love in them.
Paris no longer has any rich life of its own, it is strewn with memories already. One speaks in the past tense.
It was through Gonzalo that I began to perceive and touch the world of the future. Observing the crumbling of a beautiful individual world I created, I can now hope in a collective one.
Gonzalo returned from Saint-Tropez full of hope and confidence. The war would assure the triumph of Marxism. Events were proving him right.
Henry escaped to Greece, which is consistent with his philosophy. Gonzalo's Peruvian Consulate offers to pay for his trip back to Peru.
What sad days. Human sorrow everywhere. Unlike Henry, who can leave a sinking ship without a backward glance, I feel a strong link with France, a deep empathy. Henry turned his back on it, without regrets. I worry over France's tragic fate. Moricand is taking long training hikes with the Foreign Legion. I have to nurse my concierge through a breakdown because her son is drafted and she is a war-widow, so she is sure her son will die too.
Then Moricand suddenly reappears! In training he collapsed, and then they realized his true age and dismissed him! So more dinners of consolation at the Brasserie Lipp.
I seek the luminous points, the living moments. I study Marx so I may not feel this cataclysm, this convulsion, as death but a revolution, an evolution. I seek to understand if there is to be a better future.
Henry's way is not my way. He thinks he has reached an Eastern detachment. But he may have reached a crystallization of the ego. The ego's life as supreme law. Moricand was shocked by his letters. Detachment, objectivity, descriptions of delectable meals, new friends, new pleasures. "My belly is full. My wallet is full. The world is right."
In war you only lose your life once, in life you die so many times.
I am one of the few who can say today: "I have loved each day as if the loved one were to die. As if I were to die tomorrow." I have loved and lived to the full. All my friends, when we sit in cafés, or walk the dark streets, hav
e regrets for what they have not done, not loved, not given. These last few days it is as if they wanted to catch up with all they had not dared to do. I hear cries of regrets for the days they did not live, enjoy, taste to the brim. I was never careless, inattentive, thoughtless, indifferent, absent, or asleep.
Some are rushing into love affairs. Good-byes become entanglements, parting from the life they knew becomes a wild last-moment marriage to it. Friendships become violent, and manifested. One exchanges gifts, promises, words of appreciation. One tells the other how much he meant, counted, adds up qualities, praise, because it may be the last.
Moricand's testamentary dinners. We eat in crowded cafés, seeking lights and noise. He introduced me to Werner Lenneman, who acted in Metropolis. He was the German Jewish star who by staying so long in water during the filming, lost his voice and ruined his career. He had been merely surviving in Paris. He told how trapped he felt, how he felt the same anxiety he had during thé making of the film when the waters rushed around him and the city was to be flooded. He felt trapped, because he would end in a concentration camp. He was a distant relative of Thomas Mann's. With so many burdens I could not help him. But he assured me that all he needed was money for a ticket to Switzerland and there he would be safe. That seemed such a small thing to ask for, and so I promised to get the money. I sold my camera to Man Ray, and pawned my father's coat-of-arms ring, and another ring, and brought the money to the café the next evening.
Gonzalo is planning to go to Peru and claim his inheritance which is due him, and work for Marxism, and as soon as he announced this to Helba she fell ill with a lung abscess. She returned from Saint-Tropez well, she was eating in restaurants, she went shopping. She was fixing up her rags for traveling with zest. She was to leave for New York with me and await Gonzalo who would join her after Peru. That same day she got ill. It was pleurisy. That night in their chaotic studio, tending the stove for Helba, reading by candlelight, eating food I had brought from my place, listening to Helba's laments, heating liniment every twenty minutes, I had such a feeling of despair that I wept. Gonzalo was at a meeting.
I want to understand the new world. I do want to evolve and change with it. I am beginning to understand it. Why was I so slow? I am nimble and quick-witted, yet I cannot accept ideas intellectually, as ideas. I have to drink them, eat them, live them, they have to become flesh, to become a human drama. For me to understand Marxism with the head means nothing, I must really feel it, live it, believe it.
How strange that Russia, all chaos, mystery, mysticism, hysteria, exaltation, should be the first to accept dialectic materialism. I think of the madness of Dostoevsky, religious fanaticism, and the instinctive life of Russia.
I believe more in Gonzalo than Henry, because Henry has lost contact with human life. At the end of the History of the Russian Revolution:
In the mythology of the ancient Greeks there was a celebrated hero Antaeus, who, the legend goes, was the son of Poseidon, god of the seas, and Gaea, goddess of the earth. Antaeus was very much attached to the mother who had given birth to him, suckled and reared him. There was not a hero whom this Antaeus did not vanquish. He was regarded as an invincible hero. Wherein lay his strength? It lay in the fact that every time he was hard pressed in a fight with an adversary he would touch the earth, the mother who had given birth to him and suckled him, and that gave him new strength. Yet he had a vulnerable spot—the danger of being detached from the earth in some way or other. His enemies were aware of his weakness, and watched for him. One day an enemy appeared who took advantage of this vulnerable spot and vanquished Antaeus. This was Hercules. How did Hercules vanquish Antaeus? He lifted him from the earth, kept him suspended in the air, prevented him from touching the earth and throttled him. I think that the Bolsheviks remind me of the hero of the Greek mythology. They, like Antaeus, are strong because they maintain connection with their mother, the masses, who gave birth to them, suckled them, and reared them. And as long as they maintain connection with their mother, with the people, they have a chance of remaining invincible.
Poetry and mysticism led to separation from vital human drama. Duality led me into impasses. Paradox between House of Incest and Winter of Artifice, between my diary and creation of fiction. When Gonzalo talks about interaction, interrelation, I understand. I see flow and movement. Wherever I see life and growth I follow. All I know is that I am in contact with vital elements. I am not cut off, or lost. I am not sharing with Moricand talk of age, death, the past, the end. Not hiding or escaping. It does not frighten me to have to revise all my values again.
Moricand joined the Légion Étrangère because he wanted to die in style and elegance, because he loved me and could not have me, because I was overburdened and could only help him in small ways, because he died long ago, long before I knew him, because for him it is the end of a world, of his world of elegance, grace, noble attitudes, romanticism, the end of subtlety and delicacy, because he wasted his love on an empty dusty little whore, because he was always terrified of life and never lived to the hilt, because he missed all its vital currents, because in astrology he only found the reflection of his own fatalism and self-destruction, because he could only see demons everywhere, because he really desired young boys and never had them except by caressing them in his erotic drawings, because he had known only two great friendships, with Blaise Cendrars and Max Jacob, and every other friendship was a mere echo of these, because he, like the analysts, was condemned to comment on dramas which he could never enter and play a part in, because he was a sage, and a timorous jeune fille in life, because he was tired of his own involved and oblique language, his labyrinthian excuses and apologies, his long evasions, his hopeless craving for luxury, his struggle to keep until the end his white starched collar, because his knowledge of the secrets of the stars was his only possession, because this was the end of the Neptunian age.
Now he offered his services to the ambulance section. We did not know when he would leave. Moved by a presentiment I spent the day looking through his letters and horoscopes and wrote the story of Moricand because I was losing him.*
When I listen to Gonzalo, read René Maublanc's Synthèse, I realize that my own Christian remedies were ineffectual, my individual charity powerless except in a small radius, and my individual sacrifices useful only to a few. I know that I brought nothing to the great suffering of the world except palliatives, the drug of poetry, the individual loves which change nothing in the great currents of cruelty.
Unwittingly, I turned a Bohemian and a bum into a man who is fulfilling his first ambition, his youthful desire to save the Indians of Peru from oppression and near-slavery.
Jean hurt his foot, and limped down five stairs to call me to bring food. I cooked a stew. There was a friend of his there, and we decided to say I had made the stew out of dried reindeer meat, the kind they leave for months on the roof of their shacks, to freeze and dry for use all year. As the friend lost his appetite at the idea, we finally confessed it was plain French stew!
The morning of the air raid foolish Anaïs rushes to Helba, thinking she would be hysterical, and forgot she was deaf and never heard it!
The second air raid brought out the anti-aircraft guns. A shell from them fell into my courtyard and through an automobile top parked there.
Jean comments on Moricand trying to join the Légion Étrangère (Moricand had told us about his clothes falling apart, his shoes disintegrating in the snow, they were given no uniforms, no shoes, there was snow on the ground, they walked for hours): "He went on purpose to expiate not having lived, all his evasions, escapes, puerilities, Mièvreries. It was an act of courage."
Last night I sat in Gonzalo's studio to keep him company while Helba slept upstairs in the balcony room. We sat around a square table, with a bulb hanging from a wire covered with blue paper (according to war regulations). Helba complained now and then in her sleep. Gonzalo poured coal into the stove. The rest of the studio lay in darkness, haunted by open trunks
, Helba's theatrical costumes and rags. Gonzalo talked about the future world. In this blue light, with Helba complaining, the liniment heating over the stove, the hot water for her tea boiling, Gonzalo's face so black, his suit so worn, I felt I was back in Dostoevsky's revolutionary days.
But this was not nihilism, it was a touching revelation of Gonzalo's faith. A re-created world. And I asked myself if the artist who creates a world of beauty to sustain and transcend and transmute suffering is wiser than those who believe a revolution will remove the causes of suffering. The question remains unanswered. Was art, like religion, a mere palliative, a drug, an opium? Some of the artists I knew were destroyed by the same poverty which destroys the people. Artaud is insane in Sainte-Anne.
Henry escaped. He writes from Grand Hotel, Athens:
I had a taste of the sun, the light, the pure air. I needed that. In fact, I can't get enough of it. I am like a man who has been starved for a long time. And I seem to be cured of city life. I like the country new, the isolation, the absence of excitement, even books. I practically do not read at all. I haven't read a newspaper since I left Paris. Passing the kiosks I see the headlines, quite enough for me. I don't care about the details. Add to this I find Greece a wonderful place. Just the bare landscape, and this absolutely miraculous light and color in which everything is bathed. France now seems like a closed book to me.
Everything we do now seems like a wake. Dinner at Rosalie's, once so full of gaiety, now empty. Most of the foreign artists have been sent home by their embassies. Overnight, it seemed as if one would never see again perfumed women, tea rooms, Opéra crowds, the Paris of serenity and rare rose gardens, of tender gardeners, well-swept streets, gentleness of manner.