Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  I confide in him. I do not withdraw from competition. I trust that he does admire me. This, he says, is an improvement. A few months ago I would have withdrawn. Now I am telling him that I dreamed of closeness after he showed such understanding of me the last time.

  But how strange that he should be late for the first time today. This brings him to the idea of destiny: "what we fear might happen, does happen." I always fear to be abandoned or at least neglected, and so it happens ... I make it happen. To what extent we thus shape our destiny is a mystery, even to Dr. Allendy. He goes so far as to assert that, if I had not feared to be neglected or liked less than his other women patients, he would not have been delayed. This is very obscure and hypothetical. Certainly a fatality haunts me. This set me dreaming about fatality. Do human beings pick up "waves" from others' thoughts? Did Dr. Allendy pick up waves of my thoughts while I sat waiting: be late, and then I will be able not to trust you, confide in you, love you, and be in another's power?

  He was glad of the warmth now appearing in our relationship. But he showed me how the dream betrayed that my happiness came more from his neglecting other people to give me all his attention than from the attention itself.

  Anaïs: "It is strange that today I made a note to ask you why I am obsessed with a few persons only. Why are my devotions so concentrated on a few people? I do not spread out as Henry does."

  Dr. Allendy: "Yes, exactly, it is a bad sign. You do not really confide in many people, then they do not know you, and then you quickly surmise they do not understand and love you. On the few people you feel connected with, you pour a lavish devotion. This must cease. In love, too, one must relinquish to really love. You cannot admit rivalry. The more broadly and expansively you love, without exclusiveness, the more you reach the mystic whole, the larger sense of love, the less individualistic, the more universal love."

  I begin to understand. I feel the tensions easing, pain lessening. Dr. Allendy always restores sincerity. He finds that I suppress my jealousies and my angers, turn them against myself. I show great self-control over them. He says I must express them, get rid of them, and then find another way to rid myself of them, but not by repression. He says I practice a false goodness. I make myself good, kind. I force myself to be generous, forgiving. "For a time, for the present at least, act as angrily or vengefully as you wish to."

  Terrible results from this suggestion! I found coming to the surface a thousand causes for resentment against Henry, his too easy acceptance of my sacrifices, his need to defend whatever is attacked, to contradict anything that is said, his fear of intelligent women, his praise of common people, his unmotivated angers, and above all, his total disinterest in understanding others or himself. He clings to his own distortions.

  Dr. Allendy says that it is admirable to turn all angers away from others and against myself, to have really prevented myself from doing harm. But it is only a postponement of a more sincere solution. I wanted to expurgate from my nature whatever was not noble, or beautiful. But that is not Dr. Allendy's way. His is to confront all the angry thoughts, feelings, the jealousies and condemnations, to find their cause, seek the root of such feelings and then operate on that. Need of security and reassurance can cause criminal acts. What can be removed is the motivation.

  I think of D. H. Lawrence, so irritable and so bitter and nervous. D. H. Lawrence prepared me for Henry, his irrational angers, unsteady thinking. One might say about Henry, as Henry James said of de Maupassant:

  He had simply skipped the whole reflective part of his men and women, that reflective part which governs conduct and produces character ... He fixes a hard eye on some small spot of human life, usually some ugly, dreary, shabby, sordid one, takes up the particle and squeezes it either till it grimaces or till it bleeds. Sometimes the grimace is very droll, sometimes the wound is very horrible ... M. de Maupassant sees human life as a terribly ugly business relieved by the comical...

  Sometimes I feel, too, that my friendship with Henry is not just a personal one; it also symbolizes one between France and America, between the aristocrat and the common man, the civilized and the primitive. The man of tomorrow will come from the people, will deny civilization. What will happen to that core of fury and bitterness?

  I have to defend June from it; he was going to write her a crushing letter, full of accusations; and, at that moment, I brought him a document which may justify and explain all her actions. It was a description of drug addicts in a book:

  They talk profusely and brilliantly and broach, without sound knowledge, subjects which intimidate normal men. They have a super-acuity of intelligence. The talk is a manifestation of excitement which sometimes takes other forms. Creative people, for example, become imaginative and work.

  Fear and hatred of daylight.

  Restlessness. Impossible to engage in any activity permanently. Need to be in movement.

  Hypersensuality. Perversions.

  Absence of moral scruples.

  They are obsessed with mobility. After lying down, they have to arise; after walking, they sit down again, or lie down, and almost immediately must walk again.

  The haunted drug addicts are usually haunted by fear of police, fear of raids [June's story about police questioning her in the taxi].

  Drug causes illusion of being bitten by insects—an illusion caused by itchiness brought on by the drug itself. (Itchiness of the nose, dry lips.) May lead to tuberculosis, epilepsy or suicide.

  June shows many of these symptoms.

  Henry was overwhelmed. June talked so constantly about drugs, like a criminal who returns to the scene of the crime. She needed to mention the subject while all the time violently denying that she took drugs (two or three times, perhaps, was all she ever admitted). Henry began to piece the fragments together. When I saw his despair, I was frightened.

  "We may be wrong, you know, there are neuroses which present similar symptoms." And then I added, "And if it is true, we should pity her, not be so hard on her."

  But Henry passed the only ethical judgment I ever heard him pass on self-destruction, that taking drugs denoted a terrible weakness in one's nature. That this made the relationship hopeless. I felt such pity for him, too, when he told me he had been examining June's love for him and become aware that she had no real love for him.

  I said, "She has her own way of loving you, inhuman and fantastic, but strong too."

  "She loves herself more," said Henry.

  Henry and I talked about the writer's life. How his life is arrested by his work, the periods during which he dies humanly. Henry, when he is deep in his book, takes on the air of a zombie, a man whose soul has been taken away from him. But I thought it was only a temporary death, for the work, in turn, causes one to re-enter the flow of life enriched, as though the arrest were only a suspended activity while one creates a richer life.

  To be strong when he is writing, Henry may have paid the ransom of great weakness in the world. I, too, the moment I rise from my desk, I am disarmed.

  Henry will stay on at a party until the very dregs show. I tend to leave it before it becomes ugly. He wants to touch bottom. I want to preserve my illusion.

  What have I touched off in him; will it change his writing?

  His life with June seems now like a wild meteoric deviation, comparable to my flights from my real self.

  If we could only write simultaneously all the levels on which we live, all at once. The whole truth! Henry is closer to it. I have a vice for embellishing.

  Besides the reading of D. H. Lawrence, there was another element which had prepared me for Henry's gutter language, the Rabelaisian animalism of it. And this was my father's language when he was with intimate men friends, or when he lost his temper. In Spain it is a common thing for men to use obscene language on every occasion but not in the presence of women. Men on every level of social or educational refinement. My mother deplored this, did all in her power to prevent our hearing or learning it, but admitted that it was a very Sp
anish trait. It was a rather startling contradiction to his ultra-refined manners.

  There was a storm last night while we sat in the café. Marble-sized hail. Sea fury of the trees.

  I had been reading one of the few passages I did understand in Spengler, on the relation between architecture and the character of the people. How the houses of the Orientals represented their emotional attitude. No windows on the outside, open on the inside, into a patio, a secret intimate life. And then the rooms all linked together by this patio. Luxury concealed. Thoughts concealed.

  Henry began to parody an elegant man talking condescendingly to a prostitute, with hauteur, a parody of women in sexual convulsions, and stories began to pour out. A tumultuous childhood in the streets of Brooklyn. Tough games in empty lots, battles, bicycle rides, nothing at first to indicate a future novelist. Action. Slyness. Deviltries. Stealing pennies from blind news vendors. Lies. Deceptions. Sexual hunger. Aside from shabbiness, ugliness, poverty, nothing there to justify his angers. I seek the origin of his bitterness.

  ***

  All of us, Henry, Fred and I, are sitting in the garden of Louveciennes. Henry says, "This is no ordinary garden. It is mysterious, significant. There is mentioned in a Chinese book a celestial kingdom, or garden, suspended between heaven and earth: this is it."

  Night again. Walks. We show Henry the manor house which has two towers. They stand out sharply in the moonlight. I tell how I have never been inside of this house, and yet I know how it is furnished, what the tower room looks like, with walls made of wood panels, and, inside of these walls, secret drawers, closets, bookcases. But recently my aunt brought me the handwritten diary of my great-grandfather, the one who left France during the revolution and went to Haiti, then to New Orleans, and then to Cuba, where he built the first railroads. His description of the manor house they had left in Anjou was the exact replica of this house, and the photograph my aunt took was a duplicate of this house. She described the inside of the tower room, and the furniture. Everything corresponded to the taste of that period. But how did I know this? Was it a racial memory?

  The village of Louveciennes is asleep. Dogs bark as we pass. I listen to Henry. There are definitely two Henrys. Towards certain women, he is tough and hard-boiled. Towards others, he shows a naïve romanticism. At first June appeared like an angel to him, even in her dance hall background. I see him now as a man who can be enslaved by a passion. But in all the stories he tells me, it is the woman who has taken the initiative. He even admits that this is what he likes about the prostitutes. It was June who put her head on his shoulder and asked for a kiss the first night they met. His toughness is external only. But like all soft passive people, he can commit the most dastardly acts at certain moments, prompted by his weakness, which makes him a coward. He leaves a woman in the most, cruel manner because he cannot face the moment of breaking the connection.

  But all his actions seem dictated by the torrential, instinctual flow of his energy. I cannot believe a man could be so ruthless, yet he seems to live by some other laws, a primitive life, other tribal habits than those familiar to me. He respects nothing. To live. He once said that only angels or devils could catch the tempo of June's life, and it is the same with him. This is nature, with its blind storms, earthquakes, tidal waves, appetites. Yet he gives the dog half of his steak, and expands the world, and brings joy.

  Then this scattered man, easily swayed, now collects himself to talk about his book. Our talks have a firm, exhilarating interplay, resilience. His riotous living, curiosity, gusto, amorality, sentimentality, rascalities, enough to fill a hundred books. He has never known stagnation. Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy. Henry generates enthusiasm.

  Why does Henry say: "I want to leave a scar on the world!"

  I received this morning the first pages of his new book [Tropic of Capricorn]. What pages! He is whole, powerful, every word hits the mark. The splendor of it.

  One night Henry, Marguerite, and I sat talking in a café. The talk was desultory until Henry began to ask questions about psychology. Everything I had read during the year, all my talks with Dr. Allendy, my own explorations of the subject, my own theories; all this I expressed with amazing vehemence and assurance. It was all on the theme of destiny. What we call our destiny is truly our character, and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.

  Henry stopped me. "I don't trust either Dr. Allendy's ideas nor your thinking. Why, I saw him only once. He is a brutish, sensual man, lethargic, with a fund of fanaticism in the back of his eyes. And you—why, you put things so clearly and beautifully to me—so crystal clear—it looks simple and true. You are so terribly clever, so nimble. I distrust your cleverness. You make wonderful patterns—everything is in its place—it looks convincingly clear—too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions—so that one only thinks one has been given all you thought, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers, and layers—you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You're the thinker who arouses the most confusion in me, most doubts, most disturbances."

  Marguerite added quietly, "One feels that she gives you a neat pattern and then slips out of it herself and laughs at you."

  "Exactly," said Henry.

  I laughed. But the idea that Henry could suddenly attack me, become critical, wounded me. War, war with him, was inevitable.

  Henry stayed on after Marguerite was gone. He said, "Now I've acted in my usual way. I've said things I did not mean. The truth is, I was carried away by your speech. I've never seen you go to the bottom of anything like that, but it made me jealous of Allendy's achievement. I have a strong, perverse hatred of the person who can tell me something new. You opened worlds to me, but it came from Allendy."

  His explanation sounded weak to me.

  I am myself wrapped in lies which do not penetrate my soul, as if the lies I told were only to lull others, "mensonge vital," which never become a part of me. They are like costumes. But Henry's lies?

  He talked about his malevolence, his sudden launching into a role, a part which baffles those who believe in him, who believe they know him. If unity is impossible to the writer, who is a sea of spiritual protoplasm, capable of flowing in all directions, of engulfing every object in its path, of trickling in every crevice, of filling every hole, at least truth is possible in the confession of our insincerities. But at times, what my mind engenders fictionally I enrich with true feeling and I am taken in, in good faith, by my own inventions.

  Henry said I had broken him down with my talk of destinée intérieure, as if I were working on him the emotional cycle of analysis: confidence, understanding, love, strength, independence. My talk about sincerity, the joys of repose in complete confidence, the human relief of depending on another; all this upset him, hit the mark. I talked emotionally about the flow of confidence developed in analysis such as one cannot have even with the loved one. How the analysis taps hidden and secret sources. How the aim of analysis resembles the old Chinese definition of wisdom: wisdom being the destruction of idealism. The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others—an admirable image. When this is broken down by the analyst's discoveries, it is a relief because this image is always a great strain to live up to. Some consider the loss of it a cause for suicide.

  What a lot I had to say about the artist. I only began the other night.

  How to defeat this tragedy concealed within each hour, which chokes us unexpectedly and treachero
usly, springing at us from a melody, an old letter, a book, the colors of a dress, the walk of a stranger? Make literature. Seek new words in the dictionary. Chisel new phrases, pour the tears into a mold, style, form, eloquence. Cut out newspaper clippings carefully. Use cement glue. Have your photograph taken. Tell everyone how much you owe them. Tell Allendy he has cured you. Tell your editor he has discovered a genius, and turn around into your work again, like a scorpion in his fire ring, devouring himself.

  If the Chinese had not discovered that wisdom is the absence of ideals, I would have done so tonight.

  While I was working, I was in despair. I discovered that I had given away to Henry all my insights into June, and that he is using them. He has taken all my sketches for her portrait. I feel empty-handed, and he knows it, because he writes me that he "feels like a crook." And what have I left to work with? He is deepening his portrait with all the truths I have given him.

  What was left for me to do? To go where Henry cannot go, into the Myth, into June's dreams, fantasies, into the poetry of June. To write as a woman, and as a woman only. I begin with dreams, hers and mine. It is taking a symbolic shape, closer to Rimbaud than to a novel.

  When life becomes too difficult, I turn to my work. I swim into a new region. I write about June.

  Henry has asked the impossible of me. I have to nourish his conception of June and feed his book. As each page of it reaches me, in which he does more and more justice to her, I feel it is my vision he has borrowed. Certainly no woman was ever asked so much. I am a human being, not a goddess. Because I am a woman who understands, I am asked to understand everything, to accept everything.

  Today I began to think of an escape. Writing the poem, the myth, was not enough. I began to think of Allendy's teachings. His ideas have been underlying many of my actions. It is he who has taught me the world is vast, that I need not be the slave of a childhood curse, of devotion to whoever plays, in a major or minor way, partly or wholly, the role of a much needed father. I do not need to be a selfless child, or a woman giving to the point of self-annihilation.