Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  As the hour progresses I feel he is awakening a consciousness of obstacles and difficulties which I could easily forget if he let me, that all he is doing is re-awakening my fears and doubts. But he reminds me that, at the first sign of cruelty in Henry, I wanted to give up the friendship.

  Whenever Dr. Allendy tells me to close my eyes and relax, I begin to do my own analysis.

  Now he is probing the splitting of personalities, the imaginative poetic writing on the one hand, and the realistic writing in the diary. He begins to sense the importance of my work. Meanwhile I am saying to myself that he is telling me little that I do not know, little that I have not written already. But this is not true, because he has made clear to me the idea of guilt, of guilt and punishment.

  I elude Dr. Allendy's further questions. He fumbles. He can find nothing definite. He suggests many hypotheses. Yet I had come in a mood of surrender; I had come intensely tired from the night before, on purpose (I could have postponed the'séance). I thought I would be less mentally on guard, more malleable, less wary. Also, when he probed to know my feelings about him and I told him about my interest in his books, I had a mischievous awareness that he expected me to be interested in him, and I did not like playing the game while knowing it was a game. Yet my interest in his books was sincere. I also told him that I did not care any more to impress him, to gain his admiration. That I admitted my need of him.

  Anaïs: "At this moment I have less confidence in myself than ever. It is intolerable."

  Henry never analyzes, probes, or seeks to understand. He said, "You've noticed my love of finding fault, of criticizing, or ridiculing, yet I assure you I have less desire to exert them on you than anybody." This is a paradox, because he seems to be the one who does not pass judgment or accept that others should judge him. The man is full of contradictions.

  He was washing dishes. Fred and I were drying them. His vest was unbuttoned because the discarded suit given to him is too small for him. The lapels are frayed. He has a surreptitious, half-ashamed expression when he takes the garbage can away. He is ashamed of his orderliness, which forces him to wash the dishes, to tidy the kitchen. He says, "June objected to this in me, she said it was unromantic, that no real artist would bother with all this. She affected a royal disorder."

  I have to admit that I myself behave as Henry does, but that June's rebellion against these chores seems wonderful to me.

  "I have overdrawn the cruelty of June, the evil in June," says Henry, "because I was interested in evil. I take goodness for granted. But that is just the trouble, there are no really evil persons in the world. June is not really evil. Fred is right, eh, Fred? June tries desperately to be evil. It was one of the first things she told me the night we met. She wanted me to think her a femme fatale. I am inspired by Evil. It preoccupies me as it preoccupied Dostoevsky."

  The sacrifices June made for Henry. Were they sacrifices, abnegation, selflessness, or were they romantic gestures which heightened her personality? Henry incited me to probe this. June refused the humble duties of a wife. She made sensational or spectacular acts of devotion. Flamboyant ones. Going to "gold-dig" for Henry, arranging liaisons, etc. She would protect Henry only intermittently. In between, he could starve. She urged Henry not to work. She wanted to support him.

  I said to Henry, "But why are you so savage about her defects? Why do you write less about her dramatic qualities, her superb recklessness, her magnificent generosities?"

  "That's just what June said. She often repeated: 'And you forget this, and you forget that. You only remember the wrongs.'"

  "She did tell me that you were fascinated with evil, and that is why she tried to invent an evil life, to interest you."

  I could not bring myself to say that there were times when I was tempted to abdicate from my own goodness or faithfulness in order to create for myself a richer life, to have more to tell, to find a way to match the eventfulness of their life, the enormous amount of relationships, incidents, experiences. I could see already how contagious a full life can be. When I walk about Paris, I see and sense much more now than I did before, my eyes having been opened by Henry's revelations.

  But all these fantasies were dispelled when I found Henry in such a serious mood. He asked me to "roll up my sleeves" and go to work with him on the coordination of his book. Fred was working on his book.

  Henry tends to overflow, to expand so much that he gets lost. I am able to see what is irrelevant, over-developed, and confused. My own style is terser, more condensed, and it helps him.

  June would have interrupted the writing mood, precipitated Henry into more experience, more life, delayed his assimilation and digestion of experience (which he needs), shone with the glitter of motion and drama; and Henry would have cursed her, but said, "June is an interesting character."

  Anaïs: "Today, I frankly hate you. I am against you."

  Dr. Allendy: "But why?"

  Anaïs: "I feel that you have taken away from me the little confidence I did have. I feel humiliated to have confessed to you. I have rarely confessed."

  Dr. Allendy: "Why do you never confess? You have told me that you are reserved, that in most relationships it is you who receive confidences. People confess their fears and doubts to you. But you rarely do. Why? Are you afraid to be less loved?"

  Anaïs: "Yes. Quite definitely. I keep a kind of shell around me, because I want to be loved. If I exposed the real Anaïs, I might not be loved."

  Dr. Allendy: "Have you ever thought of how you feel when people confess to you? Does it make you love them less?"

  Anaïs: "No, on the contrary. I feel sympathy, compassion, I understand them better, it makes me feel closer to them."

  Dr. Allendy: "Have you ever thought of what a relief it would be if you could be entirely open and natural with everybody?"

  Anaïs: "Yes, sometimes I feel human relationships are too great a strain."

  Dr. Allendy: "After all, what do you fear so much? Come on, tell me, let's look at them frankly. What is the worst of your fears?"

  Anaïs: "My greatest fear is that people will become aware that I am fragile, not a full-blown woman physically, that I am emotionally vulnerable, that I have small breasts like a girl. And so I cover all this up with understanding, wisdom, interest in others, with my mind's agility, with my writing, my reading: I cover the woman up, to reveal only the artist, the confessor, the friend, the mother, the sister. I am even more unhappy since I have seen the woman who is my ideal of a woman, June, who has the dark husky voice, the full strong body, who has vigor and endurance, can stay up all night and drink all night."

  Dr. Allendy: "Do you realize how many women envy your silhouette? Your grace? How many men find a woman who looks like a girl infinitely attractive?"

  (This kind of direct assurance I have often received, and it does not convince me or I would have been convinced long ago, when I was the most popular model for the painters, so much in demand that I could not keep up with my engagements. I know he must find a more profound way of healing my shattered confidence.)

  Dr. Allendy was amazed at the extent of my lack of confidence.

  Dr. Allendy: "Of course, to an analyst, it is very clear, even in your appearance."

  Anaïs: "In my appearance?"

  Dr. Allendy: "Yes, everything you wear, the way you walk, sit, stand is seductive and it is only people who are unsure who act constantly in a seductive manner and dress to charm."

  We laughed at this.

  I felt softer and more relaxed.

  I talked about my father's passion for photography and how he was always photographing me. He liked to take photos of me while I bathed. He always wanted me naked. All his admiration came by way of the camera. His eyes were partly concealed by heavy glasses (he was myopic) and then by the camera lens. Lovely. Lovely. How many times, in how many places, until he left us, did I sit for him for countless pictures. And it was the only time we spent together.

  Later, when I gave a concert of Spani
sh dances in Paris, I imagined I saw his face in the audience. It seemed pale and stern. I stopped in the middle of my dance, frozen, and for an instant I thought I could not continue. The guitarist playing behind me thought I had stage fright and he began to encourage me with shouts and clapping. Later, when I saw my father again, I asked him if he had been at this concert.

  He answered me, "No, I was not there, but if I had been I would have disapproved absolutely. I disapprove of a lady being a dancer. Dancing is for prostitutes, professionals. I would not have allowed you on the stage. Besides, you can't read music."

  I told him that I had an amazing ear, and could learn anything by ear.

  Dr. Allendy suggested that I might have wanted him there, that I had willed him there.

  Dr. Allendy: "You may have wanted to dance for him, to charm him, to seduce him, unconsciously. And when you became aware that the dancing was an act of seduction, you felt guilt, and it was guilt which made you give up dancing as a career. Dancing became synonymous with seducing the father. You must have felt guilt for his admiration of you as a child, his admiration may have awakened your feminine desire to please your father, to hold him away from his mistresses."

  And so guilt, guilt had cut short a life I wanted, for after the concert I was offered an engagement with the Spanish Ballet of the Opéra. I would have traveled, I would have been pampered, I would have lived an adventurous and physical, colorful life.

  Could Dr. Allendy really have rescued me then, freed me of the EYE of the father, of the eye of the camera which I have always feared and disliked as an exposure. An exposure of what? Of the desire to charm, of coquettishness, of vanity, of seductiveness?

  Dr. Allendy said I wanted my father there, I wanted to dazzle him. And that today, when I do charm, dazzle, or win anyone, I do not want to win, really; I have too much guilt.

  Anaïs: "And writing! Writing I was not afraid to do?"

  Dr. Allendy: "No, that did not seem as if you put yourself forward to charm men, but your work, a creation, something removed from you. It is something you do alone, not in public. There is distance and objectivity. But I have no doubt that if you should succeed in it, you would also give it up."

  Then suddenly I remembered that my father wrote too, although it was not his profession. He wrote two books, one called Pour L'Art, and the other Idées et Commentaires, both on the aesthetics of art. I had seen him at work on them, and it was my mother who typed for him.

  The rest of our talk escapes me.

  Henry said, "Anaïs, I have watched you, observed you. You are blossoming so quickly that you will soon exhaust all I have to teach you, and you will pass on to other friendships. There are no limits to what your life might be! I have seen how you can swim in a large life. Listen, if anybody else did the things you have done for your mother and your brother, I would call them foolishly romantic, but somehow you make them seem so terribly right. Your diary-writing, for instance, it is so rich, so terribly rich. You say my life is rich, but it is only full of events, incidents, facts, experiences, people. What is really rich are those pages you write on so little material."

  Henry had been questioning me on my devotion to my mother and my brother. When he began to say I should not make sacrifices for them, I should live as I please, I was silent.

  He talked of what I meant to his growth. He feels a sense of growing deeper. "I can talk to you, it is so good to be able to talk."

  It was the first time he had been the object of a portrait and he loved being written about so fully. "Always what is human in the diary is wonderful."

  June would be surprised if she came in, to hear us talking about her. Fred lies on the couch reading. Henry sits by his desk. I sit on the floor. We all talk so quietly, divested of all glamour and dramatics, like craftsmen at work. June would scatter the silences, the pages of Henry's book, the pages of the journal, would make us all hate each other and worship her, and stir up the furnace in which novels are born but not written.

  I too am interested in evil, and I want my Dionysian life, drunkenness and passion and chaos; and yet here I am, sitting at a kitchen table and working with Henry on the portrait of June, while Fred is making a stew.

  My restlessness, which was vague and lyrical, has become sharp-pointed and intolerably clear. I want to be June.

  Never have I seen as clearly as tonight that my diary-writing is a vice. I came home worn out by magnificent talks with Henry at the café; I glided into my bedroom, closed the curtains, threw a log into the fire, lit a cigarette, pulled the diary out of its last hiding place under my dressing table, threw it on the ivory silk quilt, and prepared for bed. I had the feeling that this is the way an opium smoker prepares for his opium pipe. For this is the moment when I relive my life in terms of a dream, a myth, an endless story.

  As I can never catch up with the typing of the diary, Marguerite is very helpful, and she needs the work. We type in different rooms, but sit in the garden afterwards, talking. She talks about her life. Her father was director of a college in the provinces, and very severe with her. He demanded perfection. She is now trying to live alone. He had subdued her mother so completely that he had instilled in her a great fear of love and marriage. Dr. Allendy is helping her. Copying my diary seems to help her too, as when I am frightened I throw myself into action, whereas she withdraws. She is doing research work in libraries which she will not discuss. She is full of secrets.

  I confide in Dr. Allendy. I talk profusely about my childhood. Quote from early writings obvious phrases about my father. So intelligible now, my love for him. And also the consequent sense of guilt. I wrote at age eleven: "I feel I do not deserve my Christmas presents." I gave up my faith in God because He did not accomplish a miracle and bring my father back to me on my thirteenth birthday. That was my prayer and it was never answered. I began to write the diary on the ship bringing us to America, at the age of eleven, for him, to tell him the story of my wanderings far from him. I tried to mail the diary volumes to him. My mother did not let me, saying they might get lost. When I took communion at Mass, I imagined it was not Christ who visited me in this heart shaped like a room, but my father. I was aware that I had not only lost him, but a way of life, music, musicians, colorful visitors, prestige, a European life, as compared with life in America, unknown, with drab and colorless friends, and my mother struggling to support us.

  We discuss finances and I tell Dr. Allendy the cost of the visits will prevent me from seeing him more than once a week. He not only reduces his fee by half but offers to let me pay him by working for him. He has research to do in the library and has some articles which must be rewritten. I am very flattered. I have full confidence in my ability as writer. Dr. Allendy listens to my talk about June.

  Anaïs: "June is my ideal of what a woman should be. I am underweight. A few more pounds would add greatly to my self-confidence. I feel like an adolescent girl. Will you add medicine to your psychic treatment? My breasts are too small."

  Dr. Allendy: "Are they absolutely undeveloped?"

  Anaïs: "No." As I flounder in my descriptions, I say: "To you, a doctor, the simplest thing is to show them to you." And I do. And then Dr. Allendy began to laugh at my fears.

  Dr. Allendy: "Perfectly feminine, small but well shaped, well outlined in proportion to the rest of your figure, such a lovely figure, all you need is a few more pounds of it. You are really lovely, so much grace of movement, charm, so much breeding and finesse of line." And I begin to laugh too. But my hands are cold, my heart is beating and my face is flushed from the ordeal of the test. He is amazed by the disproportion of my self-criticism. How did these doubts begin?

  I had brought him a copy of my book on D. H. Lawrence. He gave me two books he had written. Problème de la Destinée. Capitalisme et Sexualité.

  I told him that he was helping me to live; that I had been able to confide in Henry and Fred and that Henry had written me marvelous letters on my childhood diaries.

  Dr. Allendy had observ
ed the unnaturalness of my personality. As if enveloped in a mist, veiled. He said I had two voices, one like that of a child before its first communion, timid, almost aphonic, the other deeper, richer. This one appears when I have a great deal of confidence. In this state I can imitate the singing of Dinah, the Negro singer. Dr. Allendy thinks that I have created a completely artificial personality, like a shield. I conceal myself. I have constructed a style, a manner, affable, gay, charming, and within this I am hidden.

  An enormous sorrow brands me at the age of nine (the loss of my father and of a glamorous European life) and makes me deviate from this light airy course forever. Grace and charm become secondary, superficiality vanishes, I begin to seek compensations. If my father left, it must be that he did not love me, and if he did not, it must have been because I was not lovable. I was going to interest him in other ways. I was going to become interesting. And I grew in depth through sadness and self-doubt. As a courtesan, at the age of nine, I had already experienced failure so I must try other ways to interest men.

  But why am I not satisfied with my achievements then? Because, originally, what I truly wanted was a life of pleasure, luxury, travel, adulation, adventures.

  I asked Dr. Allendy to help me as a doctor of medicine. Was this quite a sincere action? Did I have to show him my breasts? Did I want to test my charm on him? Wasn't I pleased that he reacted so admiringly? That he gave me his books afterwards?

  Is Dr. Allendy really curing me?

  Many times Henry talks nonsense. He is flushed, eloquent, drunk, nonsensical. He gets drunk on words.

  Summer heat. Cafés. Henry has a few pages to show me, the first pages of his next book [Black Spring]. He expected me to have written at least ten pages in my diary after the last talks. But something has happened to the woman with a notebook. I feel like letting Henry do the writing. I want to enjoy the summer day. Words are secondary.