by Anais Nin
I began our session by making Allendy sit in the patient's armchair and by analyzing his "omens" as expressions of his lack of confidence in life and in love. I pointed out that he carried in him a projection of defeat which creates defeat. He laughed.
I used all his formulas and his lingo on him.
He said, "I always wanted to be a magician. When I was young I used to imagine I was a magician."
"Perhaps becoming an analyst was the modern expression of this need."
"I have missed all the joys and pleasures of life. There was always a veil between me and reality. I have never been happy with a woman."
I was taking care of him, not he of me.
"It is a malady in me, perhaps, but I have never been a passionate man, never knew anything but tenderness for women."
Henry is sitting revising his novel. I see so clearly the aim, the mood, the temper of his work, that I am able to help him cut out extraneous material, change the order of chapters. I told him my theory of skipping meaningless details, as the dream skips them, which produces not only intensity but power. He begins, "Wednesday morning I stood at the corner..." I say, drop "Wednesday"; drop the extra weight to achieve speed, the essential ... a literature of "cuts." His pages on ecstasy are the most fiery pages I have ever read. A climax in ecstatic writing. I bow before them. There are times when he produces gigantic dissonances: at other times, a kind of Dadaism. He will make one assertion on one page and on the next page he cancels out what he said and asserts the opposite. His pages on "seismographic shock" are marvelous. He runs from extremes of sentimentality to cold, monstrous madness. There are humorous scenes as we work, particularly when we proofread. Once I read aloud in a mechanical tone, looking for proof errors: "Before and after the erection ... the genital banquet." I read it as if it were "Thursday the sun was shining..."
We laughed.
Henry thinks only of his work [Self-Portrait, later called Black Spring]. No more whoring and vagabonding.
The first half of his novel is all incident; the second is all ecstasy, rivers of poetry and surrealism issuing from the adventures, explorations, a fascinating completion. When I praise his writing for its power and explosiveness, he says he thinks the same of mine. A feminine revolution.
We have much influence over each other's work, I on the artistry and insight, on the going beyond realism, he on the matter, substance, and vitality of mine. I have given him depth, and he gives me concreteness.
Yesterday I suggested a change in the order of the last two chapters because one was slow, human, sentimental, not too well written, the other mad, brilliant, and I felt this one was the climax. Henry often produces without any artistic consciousness. He also refuses to evaluate, or throw out, as I do. He is uncritical. I believe in impulse and naturalness, but followed by discipline in the cutting.
I am merciless on his childish rantings (he has a folder of pages I have extracted because they were just tantrums, as I said), everything petty, over-realistic (his fights with June over the value of Greta Garbo). I say: "Have bigger fights." When he is irritated he produces a petty literalness. He stops to rave against June's cold-creaming. He describes this as an attack upon American women 1 It is all cheap, like a newspaper report on what do you think about platinum blondes. I will not let him make the faults of bad taste which marred Lawrence's work. Bad taste and bad temper.
I only act as an analyst, helping him discover himself, revealing to him only his own nature, desires, aspirations.
He helps me by always asking me to say more, to write more assertively, to clarify, expand, to be strong.
The first time Jeanne came to Louveciennes all I noticed were her eyes, the distress in them, the wild swimming of the pupils in their orbit. She was tall, blonde; she looked like Danielle Darrieux with less softness of contour, a more austere quality. She limped. She dragged her leg and she talked continuously.
"I hate to see my brothers as bodies, to see them growing old. Once I sat writing a letter in a room and the two of them were playing cards. I looked at them and thought: What a crime that we should be alive, it is a simulacrum, everything was finished long ago, we have lived already, we are far away from our husbands, wives, children, friends. I have tried so hard to love, and I can, up to a certain point, and then no further."
We were sitting in the back of the garden, where trees, bushes, flowers, ivy, all grow wildly, and a small trickle of water runs under a small Japanese bridge. Her husband was visiting the house and talking with other friends. Jeanne was so restless, her eyes tossing like miniature ships at sea, that I offered to walk through the forest. We walked over a thick carpet of pine needles, and she talked:
"I have no human sympathy, I suffer neither pain nor feel joy either. I am only aware of my brothers. I know only fear, a great fear which makes me stay away from the theatre, from reading, from analysis, from any avenue of realization, of clarification. I want to preserve my divorce from reality, and yet I know that at times this divorce is so absolute that I step into madness. I reach moments when I become deaf to the world. I stand in the street and see the automobiles passing and I hear nothing. I stamp my feet and hear nothing. I ran into a bar and asked the woman serving drinks a question. I saw her lips moving but I could not hear the words. I was terrified. I may be lying on my bed and this great fear invades me. I begin to knock on the floor or the wall, to break the silence; I knock and I sing until the fear passes."
As we walk, she breaks off branches, and listens to the dry sound of the break. She said: "Passons a une nouvelle forme d'exercice."
She became aware of the quality of my listening. "You listen in silence, yet one feels you never pass judgment. What do you do when you are defeated?"
But she did not wait for my answer.
She stops on the path to catch her breath. "I may be shaking hands, and suddenly the person recedes into the other room and I see my hand miles away. I am in my own room, amused." The word "amused" is the key word to her social world. In her world everything must be amusing, piquant.
The stability, the gravity of her husband is also amusing, his dependency on clocks, his methodical reading of newspapers, his unbreakable engagements, his important business trips.
"What made him venture into the esoteric, mysterious, impregnable, inhuman citadel of my brothers and me? Tragic marriages for the women who married my brothers too: they feel like outsiders. We do not feel their sorrows, for who are they? Merely human beings, banal little human beings, baffled and defeated by emotions, by our lack of sympathy, unable to share our anachronistic exaltations, our search for ecstasy."
She said, as she left: "Come and see me. We will practice rhabdomancy."
Jeanne's house was a castle where one might have spent years exploring all the rooms filled with antiques. She whisked me through them as if she did not want my attention caught by furniture, brocades, candelabras, screens, rugs. She took me to her room, which was all white, curtains, rugs, bedspread, uncluttered, shuttered, with the only note of color coming from Orient-blue bottles. Her room did not seem part of the castle. Next to it was the children's room, the room they occupied as children, with the small beds, small chairs, small table she had described, where they came in time of trouble. The toys were still there, scattered. Stamp collections, circus horses, dolls, trains, colored balls.
"You don't turn away from your fears," said Jeanne, "you don't laugh at them."
"I'm a writer, Jeanne, I don't want to frighten away any of the ghosts, I want to know them well, intimately. I have to be able to describe them."
"I write too." I read her writing. It was so light, so frivolous, so shallow, it was like her life in society, a masquerade. She does not write as she talks.
I saw the lightness and the masks, the leaps into space, even into madness, as ways to out-distance the unutterable incest. Nuptials in space, like some insects, while in flight. Faithful to the first bonds, the first cell and the first unity of childhood passions. To the poets,
insanity seems closer to divinity than sanity. The madman arrives at death not by human progression, the disintegration of cells, but by a series of holocausts. Joan of Arc roasting at the stake was perhaps in no greater pain than Jeanne seeking to live in the romantic world of Byron which no longer existed.
This family had exhausted, in five generations, the ordinary joys of fame, fortune, beauty, intelligence, voyages, honors, genius, debauch, power, leaving four heirs who could only love each other.
As we walked swiftly through the rooms, a servant rushed towards Jeanne to intercept her: "Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry is waiting for Madame."
She led me into the salon. He sat by the fire. He had a round, pale face, dark but soft eyes, and a body not too tall and rather plump. He had a calm manner, and spoke gently to Jeanne. He seemed to be dreaming.
The car which had brought me was waiting and I had to leave. As I sat in the car, Jeanne's brother came out. He leaned over formally and kissed my hand. " Mes hommages, Madame."
As the car drove me away, I caught a glimpse of the stately house, concealed gradually by enormous old trees.
I remembered Jeanne's words: "I love to feel in unfamiliar worlds, disoriented, uprooted. I love to go out with an ordinary man who says banalities, who wants to offer me a silver fox and makes me feel like a kept woman."
Her house reminded me of the house in The Wanderer of Alain Fournier.
Poisson d'Or. Tziganes. Three aristocratic Russian women, beautiful, with two wealthy men. Seven bottles of champagne. Ordering gypsy singer to sing for them at their table. Russian painter seated in front of me. Stares at me. When I dance with my escort, we collide and he kisses my neck. Orgy of singing and dancing. The three Russian women weep, quietly, with enjoyment, voluptuous satisfaction. The painter and the host almost fight because a man breaks lumps of sugar while the gypsy sings. Musicians sing and dance for the angry man as if to soothe him. The painter smiles subtly at me. Lady in white also begins to dance in front of him. The painter is whisked away by his partner who makes a scene. Irony, with the deep emotional music going on. The feeling that when I handed my coat at the check room, I handed over my identity. I become dissolved in the atmosphere, into red curtains, champagne, ice, music, singing, the weeping which the Russians love to do, the caress of the painter's eyes. Everything sparkles and exudes a warmth and a flowering. I am not like Jeanne, fragmented into a thousand pieces. I am at one with a sea of sensations, glitter, silk, skin, eyes, mouths, desire.
I wanted to be back in Henry's kitchen: Henry in his shirt sleeves, salting the pâté de foie gras (what a faux pas), steam on the windows, the smell of cauliflower, the warmth, Henry's voice filling the room with resonance, elbows on the table, the cigarette holes in the oilcloth.
I stand before each new world, new person, new country, hesitant, unsure, hating new obstacles, new mysteries, new possibilities of pain, of blunders from lack of courage. Fear, lack of confidence, has narrowed my world, limited the people I have known intimately. The difficulty of communion. Je vous présente mes hommages, Madame. Politeness like a shield. Culture is a shield. The world of my father. With Henry it is the world of my mother.
I read Jeanne's manuscript, which is touching, but thin, shallow, vague. A fairy tale. In dreams too, there is maturity, growth, depth, power. A long travail. I would like to take her by the hand and lead her. Her hair, her long Mélisande hair loose, her mouth open, her eyes dilated, her skin fair and pale. "Elle vivait d'elle même," she writes. I hear her deep voice singing Brazilian songs, accompanied by her guitar.
A Georgian prince, Mahreb, fell in love with Jeanne. Lucie and I urged her to give herself. I analyzed her lyrically, poetically, fantastically.
Jeanne sits curled up on the couch and looks unreal. She talks about wanting to give Mahreb magic gifts. When she complains that he utters only perfectly ordinary phrases, then I experience the strange pain and jealousy of not being a man; for I would know what to say to Jeanne, how to court her dreaming heart. But I sit very still now.
Jeanne looks mysterious, elusive, unseizable. She went out one Christmas morning with the Christmas tree tinsel rolled around her neck many times, and carrying a glass bird perched on her little finger. Of course, she met a White Russian taxi driver and, of course, he understood and would not charge her for the trip and, of course, she wrapped the tinsel necklace around his neck, clasped the bird on his meter, and gave him fifty francs.
We planned an "accidental" meeting with Prince Mahreb. Jeanne, her husband, and I would go to the Hermitage Moscovite. We would let the Prince know and he would happen to be there with a friend.
But when the Prince came to our table, acting surprise, I saw the eyes of Jeanne's husband flare green with jealousy and suspicion. He suspected us all, rightly, of treachery. Wild music, champagne, Jeanne breaking three glasses of champagne as she would break her marriage. I danced with Prince Mahreb, a very dark, tall, quiet, stupid man, but sensual in every motion he made, dancing, or lighting a cigarette, or drinking champagne as if he were drinking you. Using his fiery eyes like a hypnotist, resting them on you. The black long hairs on the wrist, the bronze skin, and saying little, never dispelling the mystery, the suspense of what his eyes were saying. I saw the eyes of Jeanne's husband on us (she had told him it was I who was interested in him) and I felt uneasy. Eyes of the world. Jeanne's eyes floating like water lilies on a cloudy pond. She is drunk with defiance, hatred, destruction, the joy of destruction. Eyes of her brother caressing me, eyes of Jeanne's husband ransacking my conscience: "You betrayed me." He watches Jeanne, who is exalted, breaking more and more glasses. We dance. I am stricken with compassion, for I know Jeanne is trying to break out of a prison; but I fear it is not Prince Mahreb who will help her. The Georgian prince is dancing a folk dance alone on the floor, wild, like the Cossack dances, and he utters chilling battle cries. One can well imagine him on horseback, with sword and fur hat, and I remembered, at this moment, Jeanne's children explaining to a stranger why their mother went out so much. "Father is very boring. He reads his papers all the time."
We are alone in the night club, at two in the morning, and the musicians are tired; but Jeanne is demanding, "A Georgian dance! A rhumba! A waltz! More champagne!" The eyes are revealed in the flare of matches lighting cigarettes. Eyes of Jeanne full of drunkenness; the Prince's eyes heavy, torpid, without dreams, waiting like a banked fire only for the moment of love-making to burn; eyes of Jeanne's husband suspicious; eyes of her brother mocking. I sit between them and I feel the union of their minds, the synchronization of all their gestures, pride, affectation, arrogance; and while he says to her, "Take a lover," and she pushes me into his arms, I know we are but understudies, the Prince and I. Eyes like brimming glasses, foaming. The love of others an intrusion, but necessary, to divert the attention of the world away from their unbreakable child marriage. A union without organs, members, roots, like those of fishes. Promiscuity of eyes, of language, twinship. They were married long ago, in their children's room, at some children's game and ceremony, as the Enfants Terribles of Cocteau.
Henry writes me:
Yesterday I bought you À Rebours, and afterwards had a great attack of conscience. What have I ever bought you? Why, when I got that check from [Dr.] Conason, didn't I cash it and get you something? I am always thinking of myself. I am, as June said, probably the most selfish person in the world. I am amazed at my own selfishness. When I bought the book I felt like a worm. So little. I could have bought you the book store and handed it to you, and it would be nothing.
[February, 1933]
I want to live only for ecstasy. Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers. I am aware also that I am becoming June.
Allendy tells me about the research I can do for him at the Bibliothèque Nationale. He said, "You see everything as a poet." Was it a repr
oach? He said, "You remind me of Antonin Artaud, only he is fierce and angry, and I cannot help him."
The man who is only half a magician is coming Thursday night. As I could not, or would not, picture him taking a taxi, going to the Gare Saint-Lazare, buying a railroad ticket to Louveciennes, landing at the small shabby station like an ordinary man, I told him that a friend had loaned me a car and chauffeur and he would be driven from his house to my house, magically. I told him it was the car of the Countess Lucie because he had been fascinated with my description of her. I wanted to create a journey like the journey of The Wanderer to the house in the forest where there was a masquerade going on. Poetry. Then I took almost all of my month's allowance and hired a car for the evening.
Allendy came. He was enchanted with the house, the garden. We sat downstairs by the fire, in the small salon.
In this setting of sensuous colors and textures, he seemed out of place. A leaping, joyous fire glowed in the fireplace which I had found at the Arts Décoratifs, and was made of Moroccan mosaics in a rich design of blues with a few touches of gold. Allendy admired it like something exotic. The reflections of the fire played upon it, on the peach-colored walls, on the dark wood, on the wine bottles from Spain.
The two hundred years of the house had given it a look of sinking into the ground comfortably. It was not an illusion. It had settled, and the angles of the ceilings and walls were slightly askew. The bedroom, particularly, had a slant to the ceiling so marked that, at times, looking out of the window, the tilted frame gave one the sensation of being at sea.