by Anais Nin
But I like these lower depths of Henry's life. It seems real to me. What is Dr. Allendy hinting at? That I had to go to the other end of the world, to opposite poles, to forget my father, to escape from his image, his values? I am denying all the values he emphasized: will, control, manners, achievement, aesthetics, elegance, social or aristocratic values, bourgeois values.
What would my father say of the odds and ends of cups with unmatched saucers, cigarettes on the edge of the tables, linoleum tableclothes, the homeliness of the furniture, also odds and ends, the ugly couch covers, the rug, the glasses from Woolworth?
It is true I am walking with Henry and Fred, or with Henry and his other friends through streets my father has never walked through, sit at bars he has never gone to, talk with people who would never have been admitted to his home.
Fraenkel loved my home, the idea of a house, a home as a pivot, a base, a hub. Henry, the vagabond, was amazed at Fraenkel's assertion that this was necessary to creation, that rolling and drifting prevented growth, that this was the way to grow, expand.
Henry has always respected the house, but Fraenkel was moved to tears, and talked of how he would make this his base and draw into it all the interesting people of the world, and make "symbols" of them.
"Why symbols?" asked Henry.
"Because that is the only way to hold on to them. As ideas they belong to you, they become incorporated into your world. As human beings ... well ... modern life makes friendships precarious."
"And why hold on?" asked Henry. "I never hold on."
"You live without pattern, without direction, that is your role, just to flow, a weather vane, without compass. You must go on being wild, rudderless. There is a consistency in your disorder. But someone will have to look after you."
"I will," I said.
Fraenkel looked Faustian, with his small beard, his narrow face, his cape, his sensual mouth, a face all pointed, foxy, on a small undernourished body, with frail but willful hands pointing to directions, asserting, with his sharp index finger pointing. Romantic actor's gestures are vehement, almost too powerful for the frailness of his body. He has written about Werther, much about death, and he could be Werther. He has no need to commit suicide. He has already died. I have never seen anyone so withered from within, so dead in life.
"To grow!" he says, and his hands, held clasped and pointed as if for a prayer, point sharply into space. Henry has never thought about growth, or about death either. Henry always seeks in men these intellectual concepts which he never adheres to. At first it was [Walter] Lowenfels, now Fraenkel. Fraenkel has a "system" of thought. He is all mind. An abstraction. It is almost terrifying. I can understand his seeking Henry, but I do not understand Henry seeking him. Fred hates Fraenkel; Fraenkel shows up Fred's fuzzy thinking.
I feel that an initial shock has shattered my wholeness, that I am like a shattered mirror. Each piece has gone off and developed a life of its own. They have not died from the shock (as, in some cases I have seen, women who died from betrayals, go into mourning, abdicate all love, never renew contact with man again), but separated into several selves, and each one developed a life of its own.
It is not fear that keeps me from gathering myself together and surrendering to one life. It is that there is an Anaïs who cannot bring all the pieces together, who can be devoted, love, and still feel alone and divided.
Does Dr. Allendy see this, that there is one Anaïs who can be depended on living at Louveciennes a domestic life, filled with duties, devoted to mother, brother, to the past. There is another Anaïs who lives a café life, an artist's life, timeless, not to run away from my father but because I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all.
Perhaps I am like my mother, and not like my father.
My mother first saw my father in a music shop in Havana, Cuba. He was nineteen years old. He had come from Barcelona to escape from military service. The music shop owner would let him practice on the piano in the back of the room. He was handsome, dark-haired and blue-eyed, with a very fair skin, a small straight nose, fine regular features, beautiful teeth, and beautiful manners.
My mother was a society girl. Her father was the Danish consul in Havana. Her mother had once been one of the most beautiful French girls in New Orleans. They lived in a house on the Malecon, a broad avenue along the sea. My mother was twenty-seven years old and still unmarried. She had mothered all her three brothers and three sisters when her mother ran away. My mother Rose, Rosa she was called, had a beautiful voice and studied singing. She loved music. She wore a dress similar to many I saw in her trunks later, all lace, with long lace sleeves, with a lace collar which came all the way to her chin and was supported by small white bones. The shoulders were puffed, the waist tremendously small. (The girls pulled on the laces of the corsets for each other until they could hardly breathe, and when they went to dances they pulled the corset laces so tight they could not eat beforehand, and that was the real reason for their fainting so easily.) She carried a white lace umbrella. She had a very full figure, a buoyant temperament; she was vital and cheerful. She had never fallen in love: she had refused to marry rich men, titled men, diplomatic service men, military men.
While she was buying music, she heard the piano. The owner of the shop allowed her and her sister to enter the back room. She listened to my father play Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." He played Chopin particularly sensitively and romantically. For my mother it was love at first sight. For my father I never knew. He once said, "Rosa's sister was prettier, but Rosa had a strength, a courage, a decisiveness I needed."
He was invited to the house, even though he did not have the proper clothes. My mother said he would tutor her in singing. The family opposed their courtship. My mother's father was desperately unhappy. She faced all opposition courageously, married her penniless musician, and they went off to live in Paris, where I was born. An artist in Cuba, at that time, had no prestige at all. For a bourgeois family, the marriage was a disgrace. Grandfather sent them money, and shipped them a piano as a wedding present.
They never returned to Cuba until my grandfather became ill with cancer. My brother had just been born. My mother took him and myself to the house on the Malecon. My father came later and spent his time trying to seduce my mother's younger sister. I caught typhoid fever and almost died of it. My mother was the only one who had the courage to give the doctor permission to give an injection which relieved my grandfather's unbearable suffering. Her love was brave and virile.
[May 25, 1932]
Letter from Madame Pierre Chareau, my neighbor, whose husband built the first glass-brick house, in 1931:
I have just finished reading your book on Lawrence, and I must rearrange the vision I had of you over the fence as the frail child-woman. You seem to be so capable of objective judgment (rare in any woman at any age) that it is almost impossible to realize that it is a young woman, a fair young woman who has felt and, almost as spontaneously as I am writing this word of thanks, has written the finest cry in the world, perhaps the only one that counts for the artist: I understand. Would that Lawrence could have read it. It would have covered, at least for a moment, the cry of the hounds...
Late at night. I am in Louveciennes. I am sitting by the fire in my bedroom. The heavy curtains are drawn. The room feels heavy and deeply anchored in the earth. One can smell the odors of the wet trees, the wet grass outside. They are blown in by the wind through the chimney. The walls are a yard thick, thick enough to dig bookcases into them, beside the bed. The bed is wide and low.
Henry called my house a laboratory of the soul.
Enter this laboratory of the soul where every feeling will be X-rayed by Dr. Allendy to expose the blocks, the twists, the deformations, the scars which interfere with the flow of life. Enter this laboratory of the soul where incidents are refracted into a diary, dissected to prove that everyone of us carries a deforming mirror where he sees hi
mself too small or too large, too fat or too thin, even Henry, who believes himself so free, blithe, and unscarred. Enter here where one discovers that destiny can be directed, that one does not need to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. One need not be branded by the first pattern. Once the deforming mirror is smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness; there is a possibility of joy.
It is Dr. Allendy who does the dissecting and the explorative operations. I bring them home, and sift them to catch impurities and errors in the diary. And then I tactfully, poetically, artistically, transmit what I have learned to Henry. By the time it reaches him, it does not have a clinical odor, it is not expressed in the homely jargon of analysts. He balks at some of it, but when it is properly adorned, seasoned, dramatized, he is interested. So I tell Dr. Allendy all my life, and Henry tells me all of his.
Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child-bearing and man-bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.
Fred, Henry, other friends, and I at the café. Talking, discussing, arguing, storytelling until the electric lights went out in the street, the night was dispersed, and a dim, shy, sienna-colored dawn entered the window. The dawn! The dawn, I repeated. Henry thought it was the dawn itself which was a new experience. I could not explain what I felt. It was the first time I had not felt the compulsion to escape; it was the first time I had abandoned myself to fraternity, exchange, confessions, without feeling suddenly the need to take flight. All night I had stayed there, without experiencing that abrupt end to fusion, that sudden and painful consciousness of separation, of reaching ultimately and always the need of my own world, the inability to remain outside, estranged, at some moment or other, from everyone. This had not happened, this dawn had come as the first break in the compulsion and tyranny of inadaptation. (The way I once concealed from myself this drama of perpetual divorce was to blame the clock. It was time to go, in place of now I must go, because relationship is so difficult for me, so strained, so laborious, its continuance, its flow.) I never knew what happened. At a party, at a visit, at a play, a film, came a moment of anguish. I cannot sustain the role, the pretense that I am at one with others, synchronized. Where was the exit? Flight. The imperative need of flight. Was it the failure to remove the obstacles, the walls, the barriers, the effort? Dawn had come quietly, and found me sitting at ease with Henry and Fred, and it was the dawn of freedom from a nameless enemy. At midnight I had always been metamorphosed into a solitary, estranged wanderer.
I was like a stranger in a strange country who was welcomed, who felt at home, who shared festivities, births, marriages, deaths, banquets, concerts, birthdays, and then suddenly became aware that I did not speak their language, that it was all a game of courtesy.
What locked me out? Over and over again I was thrust, and thrust myself, into roomfuls of people with a genuine desire to amalgamate with them, but my fears proved greater than my desire and, after a conflict, I fled. Once alone, I reversed the process and suffered to be locked out and abandoned by those who were talking and laughing in a commonly shared enjoyment and pleasures. It was I who made the move out of the enchanted circles, but because I felt as if this circle were electrified against burglars, something I could not cross, could not defy. I longed to be a part of every intense, every joyous moment, every moment of life; longed to be the woman who was weeping or laughing; the woman who was being kissed amorously before everyone; the woman who was given a flower to wear; the woman who was being helped into the bus; the woman who was leaning out of a window; the one who was being married; the one who was giving birth.
The hero of this book may be the soul, but it is an odyssey from the inner to the outer world, and it is Henry who is dispelling the fogs of shyness, of solitude, taking me through the street, and keeping me in a café—until dawn.
Before Henry, I thought art was the paradise, not human life, that in art alone could pain become an abstraction.
It was a man's way of mastering pain, to put art and space and time and history and philosophy between himself and human life.
Art was the prescription for sanity and relief from the terrors and pains of human life.
I was ready to see Dr. Allendy again. He questioned me relentlessly. He feels there is a secret. The theme of flight does not satisfy him. I feel that something in me escapes from his definitions. I dread the scalpel. I am living, installing myself in life. He is probing the moment at the concert when I imagined him sad and troubled. What exactly did I imagine? That he had financial worries, concerns over his work, or sentimental troubles?
Today I find flaws in Dr. Allendy's formulas. I am irritated by his quick categorizing of my dreams and feelings. When he is silent I do my own analysis. If I do, he will say I am trying to find him defective, inadequate, to revenge his forcing me to confess my jealousy of his wife. At that moment he was much stronger than I. He agreed that I was much freer than before.
Henry is dissolving my old gravity with his literary pranks, his satirical manifestoes, his contradictions, paradoxes, his mockery of ideas, his change of moods, his grotesque humor.
I now make fun of my own earnestness, my efforts at understanding others, at not wounding people.
We heard that Richard Osborn had gone mad. Henry danced like a clown and said, "Richard has gone mad? Hurrah. Let's go and see him. Let's have a drink first, and put ourselves in the right mood. This is rare, superb, it doesn't happen every day. I hope he is really insane and not faking."
I was at first disconcerted, and then I found his humor a way to defeat tragedy. I would like to know the secret of his not caring. I care too much. It is the same with Michael Fraenkel. He first appears in Henry's book as the man who was eating his dinner when Henry arrived and who continued to eat his dinner without offering Henry a share of it.
Henry wrote a parody of my first novel.
Henry's first novel, Lowenfels once said, was corny and purple writing, it was trash, it was pulpy. I can hardly believe that. Lowen fels claims to have initiated him to modern writing. Putnam's European Caravan seems to contain definitions which apply to Henry's writing. I am referring to improvisation, surrealistic associations of images, wild flights of fancy. His humor is like Tristan Tzara's "une entreprise de démolition."
The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated."
Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm. It is amusing that, when Henry, Fred, and I talked together, we fell back into a deep naturalness. Perhaps none of us is a sensational character. Or perhaps we have no need of condiments. Henry is, in reality, mild not temperamental; gentle not eager for scenes. We may all write about sadism, masochism, the Grand Guignol, Bubu de Montp
arnasse (in which the highest proof of love is for a pimp to embrace his woman's syphilis as fervently as herself, a noblesse-oblige of the apache world), Cocteau, drugs, insane asylums, House of the Dead, because we love strong colors; and yet when we sit in the Café de la Place Clichy, we talk about Henry's last pages, and a chapter which was too long, and Richard's madness. "One of his greatest worries," said Henry, "was to have introduced us. He thinks you are wonderful and that you may be in danger from the 'gangster author.'"
Today Dr. Allendy was incisive and powerfully effective. I will never be able to describe that hour. There was so much intuition and obscurity in the sequences.
Dr. Allendy: "Until you can act perfectly naturally according to your own nature, you will never be happy."
Anaïs: "But what is my own nature? Whatever life I was leading before I met Henry and June was stifling me. I felt that I was dying."
Dr. Allendy: "But you are not a femme fatale either. The femme fatale enjoys rousing men's passions, exasperating them, proving her power, tormenting them; and men do not love her profoundly, anyway. You have already discovered that you are loved profoundly. Do not play games which are not natural to you. You could never be June."
Anaïs: "I have always been afraid of becoming one of those women who are hopelessly dominated by one man."
Dr. Allendy: "What woman have you known who was hopelessly dominated by one man?"
Anaïs: "My mother. She only had one love in all her life, my father. She was never able to love anyone else. She was at his mercy. When he deserted her, her love turned to hatred, but he was still the only man in her life. When I asked her once why she had not married again, she said: 'After living with your father, with your father's charm, and his way of making everything wonderful and interesting, his talent for creating illusion, all other men seemed dull and prosaic and shallow. You cannot imagine how charming your father was!'"