Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  Jung also said:

  Since we cannot develop backwards to animal consciousness, there remains nothing for us to do but advance into the more difficult pathway to higher consciousness.

  Pauvre de nous!

  Henry writes me:

  Had a frightful night. Went to bed exhausted about midnight. At one o'clock woke up and lay in a half-dream state till 5 A.M., then fell into a stupor until one today. Dreamed the most horrible dreams, among them that I saw my own grave with a tombstone and a light shining on it. Am trembling. Don't know what ails me. Tried phoning you just now, but you were out. Feel terrible. Another night of this and I'd go completely mad. Jesus! I feel like Richard Osborn before he went mad.

  [December, 1932]

  I never imagined when I gave Henry the money to escape to London, that June would come the night before he left, take it all away from him. He writes me a weak letter:

  I'm angry, furious at myself, I'm leaving for London tonight. Fred came to the rescue. I'm leaving so it won't happen again. I hate June. After a bitter, nauseating conversation, I feel humiliated, deeply ashamed. It was agony, what I endured. And why I stood it, I don't know, unless it is that I have a feeling of guilt. June is beyond reason. She has become a madwoman. The vilest threats and recriminations. That is why I broke down and wept. She is capable of anything. She is terrifying in her violence.

  Henry can only fight in his books. In life he runs away. Now he is in London. I am raising money for June's ticket to New York, as she asked me for it. I am to leave it at the American Express.

  June is leaving a parting impression which is not beautiful. Emptying Henry's wallet, frightening Henry.

  Henry was stopped at the English frontier for carrying too little money. Questioned. Deported. He was wearing his shabbiest clothes. He told the authorities he was running away from his wife!

  In the café where we met, he broke out in talk about June. And two things stood out: his goodness, his real feelings. The weakness of the man, his listening to June to the very end of all she had to say, becomes, in the case of the writer, the passivity of the artist as spectator of life. Listening to June he ceased to be a man who should have silenced her; he became an investigator listening to what a normal man would not have wanted to observe. "I discovered the baseness of June. Through her anger, what was thrown into relief was her enormous egotism. Worse than that. Tawdry. When she left me, she turned to say at the door: 'And now you have your last chapter for your book!'"

  Henry had tears in his eyes when he described this last scene. Tawdry. What an unexpected word to brand June with.

  At this moment Henry looked careworn, sad, profound.

  Then he began to talk about D. H. Lawrence and Dr. Otto Rank's Art and Artist. His mind makes immense detours. Then he gets lost. And then I am able to bring him back, not because I know any more than he does, or because I am more whole, but because I have a sense of direction in the world of ideas.

  Much that I am reading in Art and Artist helps me to confirm the intimations I have had about the artist. What efforts I am making to understand. There are moments in Henry's talk when I feel truly tired, like a woman reaching for knowledge beyond her capacity. I stretch my mind to follow the curves and sweeps of man's mind. It is always the big, impersonal spaces which frighten me, the vast deserts, universe, cosmologies. How small my guiding lantern, how vast man's universe. It seems to me that what I hang on to is the human, and personal. I do not want to enter impersonal, non-human worlds.

  Is Henry right? He does not want me to write a diary any more. He thinks it is a malady, an outgrowth of loneliness. I don't know. It has also become the notebook of my extroversion, a travel sketchbook: it is full of others. It has changed its aspect. I cannot abandon it, definitely. Henry says: "Lock up the journal, and swim. What I would like you to do is to live without the journal, you would write other things."

  I would feel like a snail without its shell. Everyone has always stood in the way of the journal. My mother always urged me to go out and play. My brothers teased me, stole it, and made fun of it. It was a secret from my girl friends in school. Everyone said I would outgrow it. In Havana my aunt said it would spoil my eyes, frighten the boys away.

  Henry is sorting his numerous notebooks so that I may have them bound. His desk is covered with manuscripts. His books of reference are lined up before him. He is in his shirt sleeves. I bring a number of the surrealist publication This Quarter. Fred is typing too. Someone else is cooking in the kitchen.

  [January, 1933]

  In the Sorbonne lecture hall. A classroom atmosphere, chastity, seriousness. Madame Allendy is there, white-haired, blue-eyed, maternal, solid.

  (In 1928 Allendy and his wife incited the surrealists to produce a film of a dream for Études des Idées et Tendences Nouvelles. They found the money and director, Germaine Dulac. She ruined the film. L'ge d'Or contains some pieces of this film. From this incident Allendy inferred that the surrealists were insincere. It was for this group that he invited Adler, Einstein, Fernandez, Milhaud, Satie, Honegger, and Gris to speak. Maurice Sachs in his later memoirs was to describe Madame Allendy thus: "Un beau visage de révolutionnaire de 89, grave, sûr, bon et intelligent. Son regard est superbe.")

  Allendy comes out on the platform, serious, austere. It is the first time I see him from a distance. He looks more furtive, more timid than in his office. He stoops a little, like a scholar bent too long over books. One only sees his high brow and his crystal-gazer eyes. His sensual mouth is hidden in his beard. I can hardly hear what he is saying. It is a conference on the Metamorphosis of Poetry. The words of a doctor, a professor, a scientist. He is dissecting poetry. It has become a cadaver.

  I carried a muff. I was all in fur, fur hat, face in a high fur collar. It was winter. I was sitting on a hard bench of the Sorbonne. I heard words: science réductible, éléments, fusions, pensée métaphysique, altitude poétique, antinomie proviennent de la pensée statique, le poète inspire plus qu'il n'est inspiré.

  I am but a silky fragment of a woman.

  It is freezing outside. There is an orange butterfly on my quilt. My diary lies there. If it too had wings, they would have stuck to the wine stains on café tables, but the only scar it bears of its expeditions into the world is the trembling handwriting when I write in the train.

  Note to Allendy:

  It is not only the cure of the individual, but that in curing it, you reveal the worlds which lie beyond the ego. This liberation from the ego is what seems to me your most precious gift to me. And it is only then one begins to love...

  It was after the shock of June's ugly behavior that I went to see Allendy again. I felt overwhelmed by reality. I told Allendy about my preoccupation with reality. When I collide with it (it was the behavior of June which I called collision), I seem to experience a sudden break, I feel I swing in space, I go up in the air, I create enormous distance. Then after the collision, I feel submerged into dreams. The realism of June. Ugliness. And then I cease to live in reality. I feel that I miss it, always. I am living either in a dream or in pure sensuality. No intermediate life. The overtones or the undertones. And Allendy understands.

  Instead of seeking to help me, as I am talking in generalities, he begins to talk about his own madness. But his madness is on a different level. He tells me that at times he feels his house is haunted, that his dead father is always there. He believes that when he wants news of a friend who is far away, he needs only to open a book and read a phrase at random. He opened the manuscript of a friend and found: "Il avait de la fièvre," which turned out to be true of his friend. Allendy believes in the tarot cards, in alchemy, in astrology. But then he added, "Don't tell anyone, as they will think I am mad."

  This touched me. Underlying the cautious doctor, the wise analyst, this occultism ... He had a curious way of remaining silent, suspended, of never answering direct questions. How far does he go into these realms, I asked myself. There are times when he does not understand
me, as when he said that I wanted to take drugs out of snobbism, instead of out of a real curiosity of my imagination.

  Yesterday I was trying to see him clearly, from behind my shroud of heavy dreams. I liked his face when he talked about the book he was writing and his desire to find time to go to the Bibliothèque Nationale to look up data on alchemy; wonderful books there were, there. I liked him when he got up to investigate some noises and opened the door, saying: "This is a house full of mysteries."

  That he should mention all these intuitive, disquieting elements just when I looked upon him and his study, his books, his work, as a solid anchor in the middle of Dostoevskian instabilities and hysterias, troubled me. The brutality of June had exiled me from my own world, and this one I had taken refuge in was not familiar to me.

  When I left Allendy, I met Henry and his friends at a café. As we sat down, I heard the street accordion music which pursues me everywhere.

  Henry began to talk about Bubu de Montparnasse, and his own Bubu life, his bumming life, relation to whores, starvations, etc. He described his worn shoes, his desperations.

  Even though I am not familiar with this life, I understand it. If there was a distance between the world of Allendy and myself, and less between Henry's life and mine, what was there between me and the formal dinner at a stately house to which I had to go afterwards? Like the distance between planets. I had to struggle against the opium smoke of my dream to look at a ceiling doubly high, at candles doubly long, at the lace pattern of the tablecloth. The concert of crystal glasses on trays was like that of bells heard in far-off Swiss mountains early in the morning. I could not see the people; they seemed like engravings or paintings. I could feel my evening dress dragging on the gravel path, I saw a faceless chauffeur opening the well-oiled door of a car, the starched aprons of the maids like the sails of small boats. When the fur rug was placed over my knees, I wondered what drug I take which makes ordinary superficial life invisible to me.

  I was still examining some of the stories I had told Allendy, examining them for loopholes, defects. For he had demanded I never see Henry or his friends or June again.

  I said I had broken with them.

  Could I deceive a professional analyst?

  The secret of my lies must be that which makes for good acting. I never plunge into a lie carelessly, without first telling myself: "How would I feel if this were true?" (How would I feel if I had broken with Henry's world?) I start feeling and believing the situation. Also I have learned transpositions. I borrow from the distress caused me by June's behavior and transfer this to the present. I am distraught, I am shocked by June. But it is simple to include in this a break with Henry for having submitted to June's attacks. I have sometimes wished I could break with Henry's world. My hands are cold. I show symptoms of distress. Allendy can check that, but they have a different cause. However, by this time, I have entered my own story. I feel as if I had broken my friendship with Henry and his friends, and his café life. (And I have, for the space of an hour.) And it is true I need Allendy. It touched me humanly that Allendy could no longer be objective.

  Allendy said, "You had to do this, you were in great danger. I can tell you now that when I saw Henry at your brother's concert, he seemed a monster to me. It's your neurosis which made you associate with June and Henry and their friends. You, such an extraordinary woman ... like a fleur sur du fumier..."

  I laughed. Allendy thought I was laughing at the idea of a neurosis being the cause of my Bohemian life. Alas, it was not that. Allendy's phrase, "a flower on a dung pile," belonged so much to the dime novels read by servant girls that the poet I am was offended by that, as another woman might be by a man talking with his cigar in his mouth and his hat on his head.

  The absurdity of the image, the phrase, concealed from my eyes the complete absurdity of Allendy's statement because this was made with so much sincerity and devotion; but as soon as I left him, I thought, "An analyst in love is as blind as anyone else in love!"

  But to finish with my lies to Allendy. "Was he violent?" he asked me. "No, of course not," I said, wanting to laugh again at the idea of Henry's violence. "Dr. Allendy, you are being taken in by literature. Henry's violent writing deceived you."

  "You imagined Henry just as you imagined June," said Allendy.

  "Oh, no, I knew Henry very well." (Be careful, Anaïs, always use the past tense.)

  "He was a lucky man. He will never again have a friend like you."

  I could not help enjoying his post-mortem on my friendship with Henry. Allendy really believes that Henry was an illusion (was!).

  Allendy asked me about the diary. Is he uneasy? He wants to see it. I tell him I have written much less in it.

  "That's a good sign. You are able to tell me everything."

  When I left Allendy after my web of lies, I was happy. I felt that Allendy was a wonderful personage. For a moment I felt that I had really broken with my Bohemian world because I was unwilling to accept their way of life, and I walked carefree, lightly. It was only later that I regretted the lies, for lies create solitude. I needed someone to talk to openly, and by lying to Allendy I forced myself back into a terrible solitude. What could Allendy have done if he had known the truth? Withdrawn, been angry. He is so proud.

  He always said that one could feel lies. Yet he cannot feel mine. He must think I am a superficial person, who can surrender an artist's life so easily.

  I think it's humorous that I should have gone to Allendy to get cured of a lack of confidence in my womanly charms, and that it should be those very charms he has succumbed to.

  What is most touching about Allendy is his "mon petit."

  He is not a poet. What a pity. It is just what I need. His supply of imagery and symbolism is limited. What am I asking for? Literature. Literature, my bread and wine.

  But I do know I am surrounded by children and that I go to Allendy because I need someone to help me take care of my children.

  At the Sorbonne, Allendy talked eloquently about surrealism. Antonin Artaud, he tells me, is like his son. But he is still anxious about June, about my being in danger.

  He is pale and very tired. When he was eighteen, he went to war and was "gassed." It affected his lungs permanently. When he was four or five, he lost the nurse he adored.

  He looks very human, very sincere.

  But he does not understand the artist, so I am reading Rank's Art and Artist.

  He believes that my affection for him is only due to "transfer." "One always loves the person who understands you."

  I asked him if he was not suffering from excessive doubts of others' affections!

  He admitted that he suffered from a lack of affection, and the need of it since childhood. The love he receives from his patients is not for him, the man, but for the healer.

  He wanted me not to need him any more, to be weaned from him.

  Suddenly I realized the tragedy of an analyst's life. It is that the control he exerts over life gives him the tantalizing power to enter others' lives, to share in their secrets, in their intimacy, knowing more than the husband, the lover, the parents, taken into the patient's very heart and body. But then he is only allowed to look, to be the "voyeur," not to touch, not to be loved, desired, or hated. My whole life was offered to him but did not belong to him.

  When he first saw me, he thought, "How happy I would be with a woman like that!"

  Today he said, "You are full of precious qualities."

  But he knows all the time that what creates this sense of a bond is his understanding.

  I felt that if I surrendered him, or lost him by confessing I had not cut myself from Henry's world and friends, I would be losing the last of the idealistic men, the heroes, the protective, scholarly, learned, dedicated men. Because Henry is no hero, he is the rebel, the warrior, he is made to inflict wounds, not to heal, protect or to love.

  Henry writes me a note: "Read nearly all the Nietzsche—you will like it. You will see what a great thinker yo
u are. It fits marvelously with Rank, and Spengler."

  I would be rudderless without Allendy.

  And who is to say whether the analyst is as much a victim of an illusory affection as the patient?

  Who is to say that if the patient loves the doctor because he feels understood, therefore known, therefore loved, perhaps the doctor only falls in love with the patient because he is allowed this intimacy with a human being; he is allowed to peer at a body making love, into beds, into weeping fits, into cries of hunger, of fear, of sorrow; he is allowed to live another's life, to rescue him, to feel the weight of his guilts, his confessions, to know his needs. He feels wanted, indispensable, intermingled and interwoven with another. He can almost touch the body whose every quiver and vibration he is permitted to know

  Why should this love be any more illusory than the others?

  I have a feeling that the masochism of woman is different from that of man. Hers comes from her maternal instinct. A mother ... suffers, gives, feeds. A woman is taught not to think of herself, to be selfless, to serve, help. This masochism is almost natural to woman. She is brought up in it. (Example set in the family by my Spanish grandmother.) It is like the masochism of people brought up in the Catholic religion.

  It is my maternal instinct which places me in danger.

  If only I could be freed of this quest for the father. Father? Savior? God?

  Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it. Allendy is now convinced it is illusory; and I, since he has confessed his insecurities, anxieties, need of love, feel I must convince him of the reality of my affection.

  So I telephoned him this morning: "Have any of your patients got the flu, so I may come instead?"

  Henry, like D. H. Lawrence, had a healthy, troublesome, joyous father who liked drinking, and a mother who was sharper-tempered, cleverer. [Saul] Colin says in his book on Lawrence [Naturalisme et Mysticisme chez D. H. Lawrence] that Lawrence sought to return to the father by divinizing him as God, as a way to escape from woman and the worship of the mother. Henry does this by his cult of men of ideas, and his work is a struggle to triumph over woman, over the mother, over the woman in himself.