by Anais Nin
Dr. Allendy: "And so she spent the rest of her life hating him, and fearing his influence over you."
Anaïs: "That was why she took us to America. She wanted to bring us up in a totally different culture. She herself had been brought up in Brentwood, a Catholic convent for society girls, in New York."
Dr. Allendy: "The more you act like yourself, the nearer you will come to fulfillment of your real needs."
Anaïs: "But I am not sure what this self is. For the moment I seem to be busy tearing down what I was."
Dr. Allendy: "I do not despair of reconciling you to your own image."
What a beautiful phrase! To reconcile me to my own image. And if he can help me to find this image? The words were not as important as the sensations he created in me, a loosening of innumerable tensions. His voice was gentle and compassionate. Before he had finished I was sobbing.
My gratitude was immense. He was silent while I sobbed, and then he asked me a gentle question: "I did not say anything to hurt you?"
This has been a time of pleasure, broken only by superimpositions from the past. I want to linger over it.
I am dressing more simply. I have felt much less the need of an original way of dressing. I can wear ordinary clothes now. Why? Costume was, for me, very symbolical. It meant many things. It had, first of all, a poetic significance: colors for certain occasions, evocations of other styles, countries (Spanish flavor, Moroccan touches, etc., etc.). It was a sign of individuality (I never wore what everybody wore; I designed my own costumes). I did not follow fashions. I did not wear neutral colors, neutral suits, plain or homely or nondescript things. I wanted striking clothes which distinguished me from other women. Costumes added to my confidence, as I suffered so keenly all through my girlhood to be badly dressed with the cast-off clothes my aunts sent me from Cuba. I had to go to American schools with clothes designed for the tropics, pastel colors, silks, and all of them burnt by the sun so that very often they would split and tear during a party, or at graduation exercises. They were always party dresses, summer dresses, dresses which only the Latins would invent, garish colors. Later my mother selected my clothes, and again they did not resemble or represent me. I invented many original things to wear, had my watch set in a wide, soft, Russian link bracelet, put fur on my winter shoes, made dresses out of Spanish shawls, etc.
The first time I went to see Dr. Allendy, I dressed in my most dazzling clothes. He looked rather amazed. I was reminded of the fantastic dressing of actresses, of the wife of Maeterlinck, who would say to her friends: "Would you care to assume the responsibility of taking my arm in the street?" (She created such a scandal by her dress!)
The pathological basis of creation! I could have been a famous dress designer! The only problem was that my imagination created costumes which did not fit in my simple life, were not intended to be worn in the little train from Louveciennes to Paris, or to Dr. Allendy's office. What I sought in clothes was an evocation of the fairy tale. In New York, in winter, posing for a painter, I once arrived at nine in the morning in a vivid red velvet dress.
Some of this may have been a result of being raised in Latin clothes for the tropics, in contradiction to the New York winter, and the American love of neutral clothes. But here I was, dressed like a Russian princess, the first time I came to Dr. Allendy; and today, here I am, dressed like royalty in exile, seeking anonymity. Dr. Allendy noticed the change. Then he ventured to say (for all the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it, has been prepared for it by an organic process of gradation and evolution) that he thought I had also dressed to accentuate my "strangeness," my separateness from the crowd, but in a way which reminded him of what the primitives wore to frighten their enemies! At this I laughed. I could see the paint, the feathers, the beads, the bone necklaces, the fur headgear and teeth, and clinking bells!
Dr. Allendy: "Strangeness always frightens people. You may have thought this originality impressed, but it may have estranged people."
Anaïs: "I never thought of that. I am attracted by unconventionality. When I become 'normal,' what will become of my art of dressing? I don't really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits."
Dr. Allendy: "Then you will feel alone, as you have felt before. Isolated. Do you want that?"
Dr. Allendy said that it was necessary to become equal to life, that the romantic was defeated by life, really died of it, whether by tuberculosis in the old days, or by neurosis today. I had never thought before of the connection between neurosis and romanticism. Wanting the impossible? Dying when unable to reach it? Not wanting to compromise?
***
Henry's responses to all things, his capacity for seeing so much in everybody, in everything. I had never looked at a street as Henry does: every doorway, every lamp, every window, every courtyard, every shop, every object in the shop, every café, every hidden-away bookshop, hidden-away antique shop, every news vendor, every lottery-ticket vendor, every blind man, every beggar, every clock, every church, every whore house, every wineshop, every shop where they sell erotica and transparent underwear, the circus, the night-club singers, the strip tease, the girlie shows, the penny movies in the arcade, the bal musettes, the artist balls, the apache quarters, the flea market, the gypsy carts, the markets early in the morning.
When we come out of the cafe, it is raining. Rain does not bother him. Hunger or thirst only. Shabby rooms don't bother him. Poverty does not bother him. You drink a fiery Chartreuse at a zinc counter. In life he follows his impulses, always. The only thing which surprises me is that he has no desire to meet other writers, musicians, painters, his equals. When I talk about this, he shows no interest. Would you like to meet Julian Green? Hélène Boussinesq, the translator of Sherwood Anderson; Florent Schmitt, who lives near us in Louveciennes; Manuel de Falla, or others? "No," says Henry. "What would they see in me?"
It all began with my reading of D. H. Lawrence. But Henry is no Lawrence. Lawrence was a romantic, and he sought to fuse body and soul. Henry asserts the primitive instincts. He leaves feeling out of his writing. No symbolism in Henry, no mythology. We do have a feeling at times of not being ordinary people. When we looked at photographs of D. H. Lawrence's house, Henry said he would someday show me his house in Brooklyn, where he lived out his childhood, and that he wanted to see 158 West Seventy-fifth, where I wrote the journal he is now reading.
I confessed to Dr. Allendy my desire for experience and my curiosities.
Anaïs: "I am curious about your life. I would like to know whether you get restless, whether you ever stayed up all night, wandered through night clubs, had mistresses, etc."
Dr. Allendy: "I cannot answer such questions; for the sake of analysis, it is best if I remain an impersonal figure. I must remain enigmatic. An intimate knowledge of my life would not be an answer to your questions. Experience is, in itself, good, but what is important is your attitude. Any experience which answers to a deep need of your nature is right, but there are times when I feel you are driven by other motives. I suspect sometimes you have forced yourself into experiences for unnatural reasons."
Anaïs: "I want to grow, mature. I want to match Henry and June's life. I also at times feel I want to make an effort to overcome my fears, and my recoils. I am afraid that if I followed my natural bent, I would withdraw from the world. Henry embraces everything, the ugly, the sick, the vulgar. I admire that. I made a world so beautiful, filled only with people of quality, with beauty and finesse, and it was static."
Dr. Allendy: "Perhaps Henry's lack of discrimination, of evaluations, is bad."
It was the first time Dr. Allendy passed a judgment on Henry.
Anaïs: "Which of my experiences were not genuine, how could I distinguish between them?"
Dr. Allendy: "The genuine ones give pleasure."
Dr. Allendy: "At times, yes."
He would say nothing more. This was something I had to discover for myself. I have felt, at times, the difference between curiosity and real feeling.
But he probed why I had "forgotten" my last appointment with him. I was beginning to lean on him. I was grateful to him. Why did I stop for a week? To stand on my own feet again, to fight alone, to take myself back, to depend on no one. Why? The fear of being hurt. Fear that Dr. Allendy should become a necessity and that, when the "cure" was finished, our relationship would end and I must lose him. He reminds me that it is a part of the cure to make me self-sufficient, so that by the time the visits are over I will not need him. But by not trusting him, now I have revealed that I am still motivated by fears.
I also wanted to know whether he would miss me.
Dr. Allendy: "If you dropped me now, I would suffer as a doctor from not succeeding in my cure of you, and I would suffer personally because you are interesting. So you see, in a way, I need you as much as you need me. You could hurt me by dropping me."
Anaïs: "I have lost everyone I ever cared for. Every house, every country I loved. First I loved our house in Neuilly. I was very sociable then. I was four years old and I would go out in the street and invite everybody for tea. I loved our house in Brussels, always full of music and musicians. I lost that, and my father. I was happy in Spain. I loved my grandmother. The life we led there was so much happier than in New York. My mother was teaching singing at the Granados Academy of Music. We had a small apartment with balconies from which we could see the mountains and the sea. We had a maid, Carmen, who sang all day as she worked. We had prestige and interesting friends. My father's family came from there. My father told me that we were distantly related to the Guells, who were aristocrats. The Guells had a house with a private chapel, and a magnificent library which the Jesuits burned because it was too liberal. There was a statue erected to a Guell. We would hear stories about their past. The family divided into two branches, one wealthy and the other artists. One became a court painter, José Nin y Guell. And who, naturally, became poor."
I understand that I am reliving with Dr. Allendy situations of happiness and fear of loss. In my childhood diary I wrote: "I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much."
[June, 1932]
Yesterday at eleven in the morning, Joaquin had been playing the piano. He passed under my window and shouted: "Come out to the garden with me and let's sit in the sun. I don't feel well." I was busy, but I dropped what I was doing. We sat in the garden. At lunch he would not eat.
It was appendicitis. Clinique de Versailles in the ambulance. The longest half hour in my life. Fear of losing him. When the door opened and he was brought out on the stretcher with his face so white, I panicked. Perhaps he is dead. I looked at the faces of the nurses and doctors. The doctor said, "Your brother will be all right."
When he was placed on his bed, I stood looking at him. He was breathing with difficulty, and it terrified me. I watched over him. He is not only my brother; he is my child. I took care of him. I was his nurse and his second mother. In his eyes, dilated with pain, there was a fear of death. I love my brother, and there are times when I know this love of my brother makes me feel man is a brother; it created a pact which has disarmed my power to do man any harm. Man, my brother. Needing care and devotion. My mother and I are sitting there in the hospital room, as if to echo every spasm of pain. To feel life and love and pain in the womb, always, as if in our own body.
A summer evening. Fred, Henry, and I are eating in a small restaurant open on the street. We are part of the street. It is not Henry, Fred, and I eating, but the street full of people eating, talking, drinking. It is the whole world eating, drinking, and talking. We are eating also the noises of the street: the voices, the automobiles, the cries of the vendors, children's cries, the cooing of doves, the flutter of pigeons' wings, the barking of dogs. We are all fused. The wine which runs down my throat runs down all other throats. The warmth of the day is like a man's hand on my breast; the warmth of the day and the smells of the street caress everybody; the restaurant is wide open and the street penetrates into the restaurant. The wine bathes them all like an aphrodisiac ocean: Henry, Fred, the street, the world, and the students preparing for the Quatz Arts Ball. The street is invaded with Egyptians in barbaric jewels and little else. Their skins are dyed in golden suntans. They overflow from buses and taxis. They invade the café. They help themselves to our decanter of wine, to other decanters of wine, steal a lamb chop, fried potatoes, laugh, and continue on their way.
Henry is drunk. He is reminiscing, "One day when Fred had just got his pay, he took me to a cabaret. We began to dance and we took two girls to Clichy. When we were sitting in the kitchen having a snack, they asked us to talk business. They asked a big price. I wanted to let them go but Fred paid them what they wanted and they stayed. One was an acrobatic dancer and she showed us some of her tricks naked, with only slippers on."
Shouts and laughter from the students. They want to pull me away. "We'll dress her up as Cleopatra, she looks like Cleopatra. Look at that nose!" When I held on to my chair, they knocked the wine bottle over. We had to push our way through the crowd.
"This Paulette," said Henry, "she and Fred are cute together. I don't know how it will end. She is younger than she said; in fact, she was a virgin. She let Fred think she was a prostitute. She ran away from home. We were worried that her parents should make trouble for Fred when they found out. He makes me take care of her in the evenings while he is at work. I have taken her to the movies but the truth is, she bores me. She is so young. We have nothing to say to each other. She is jealous of what Fred wrote about you. The goddess..."
Henry told me this while Fred went to meet Paulette and bring her to us. Paulette was thin, and homely and frightened.
If Henry can steal razor blades, keep the extra money a taxi driver gave him by mistake, write treacherously about June and his best friends, there is also a Henry who is something entirely different, which he himself may repudiate one day. He shows the world only his toughest side. The side I know is more like his water colors.
He is a mass of contradictions.
"The diary may die," said Henry.
"Why should it? I am afraid to forget. I do not want to forget anything."
Henry said, "This is my Golden Age between wars."
I was talking a little like June, and Henry would think all this complicated and interesting. I could, if I wanted to, stop and simplify the whole thing for him. But I preferred to let myself go in that bit of drunken incoherence which I now find so relaxed and enjoyable. Henry experienced the same split when he wrote me a paragraph once in a letter, and immediately realized it would make an excellent preface to something or other. Henry and I have this double awareness, with only moments of complete abandon. And that may be why we are attracted to the madness of the poets, Rimbaud, Tristan Tzara, Dadaism, Breton. The free improvisations of the surrealists break down the artificial order and symmetry of consciousness. In chaos there is fertility. How difficult it is to be "sincere" when each moment I must choose between five or six souls. Sincere according to which one, reconciled to which one?—as I once asked Dr. Allendy.
I began to see that my costumes had been an armor. I remembered that once when Henry wanted to take me to Montparnasse in a plain dress I wore, I felt I could not face all his friends unless I "dressed up." I had lost my true rhythm. But what was my true rhythm? This was too direct a question for Dr. Allendy to answer. He said he could only answer it obliquely. He felt himself that I was fundamentally simple and charming, feminine and soft. All the rest was literary, intellectual, imaginative. If I were really callous, I would not show such pity, sympathy, and tenderness
in every situation. There was nothing wrong with playing roles, except that I must not take them seriously. Too often I become sincere, and go all the way.
He asked me where I had been most happy. Real, quiet happiness. I said in Switzerland, in nature, where I lived without make-up, without fancy clothes, stripped of all roles and play-acting.
"You see," said Dr. Allendy, "you want to please, you want to be loved, and you take poses, even your interest in perversion is a pose. You lack faith in your fundamental values. You put too much faith in externals."
Here I balk a little. If psychoanalysis is going to divest me of all decoration, costume, adornment, flavor, characteristic, then what will be left?
[July, 1932]
I am waiting in Dr. Allendy's salon, in which the green-tinted glass of the hothouse makes everything look under water. The cats are prowling around. I am amazed that they have not swallowed the goldfish in the small pond. I hear the trickle of a small sculptured fountain. I hear a woman's voice in his office, behind the big black Chinese curtains. I feel jealous. I am annoyed because I hear them laughing. They laugh oftener, it seems to me, than we do when we talk together. He is late, too, for the first time. And I am bringing him an affectionate dream—the first time I have allowed myself to think of him tenderly. Perhaps I should not tell him the dream. It puts me in his hands, it is giving him too much, while he ... My bad feelings vanish when he appears. I tell him the dream.
In the dream we were sitting face to face in his office. He was holding my hands. He had neglected all his other patients to sit and talk to me. He was completely absorbed in me. There was a mood of intimacy.