by Anais Nin
Allendy admired everything. He was amazed at the solidity of the setting I had created: outside, I gave the impression of an ephemeral, fleeting creature not at home in the world and about to vanish.
The house made him see me as a human being.
"At eighteen," he confessed, "I wanted to commit suicide. My mother gave me a distorted idea of women."
Just as my father gave me the idea that all men were selfish, incapable of love, unfaithful.
Then, to prove the exactness of the image, one seeks people who match this image, corroborate this assumption, this generalization.
But how wonderful it is to acquire an objective knowledge of others.
When Allendy says, "I am cold and grey," I sense the obscure, buried, sunken, eclipsed man who was stifled by his mother.
No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether. I was always tempted to resuscitate such men by my own joyousness or luminosity.
When I break glasses in a night club, as the Russians do, when my unconscious breaks out in wild rebellions, it is against life which has crippled these idealistic, romantic men. I respect these men, cold, pure, faithful, devoted, moral, delicate, sensitive, and unequal to life, more than I respect the tough-minded ones who return three blows to one received, who kill those who hurt them.
Yet I would have loved D. H. Lawrence rather than intellectual Huxley.
But each time I take the side of the primitive men, I turn my back on half of myself.
Allendy can see with his seer's eyes. He lacks poetry, extravagance, the power of ecstasy.
But he has won as an analyst, because he made me understand something very important. Whether because I am a Latin, or because I am a neurotic, I have a need of gestures. I am myself expressive, demonstrative; every feeling I have takes on expression: words, gestures, signs, letters, articulateness or action. I need this in others.
But Allendy says the need of gestures, of proofs of friendship, love, devotion, comes from lack of confidence. I should not need them. I should be able to dispense with them.
Proofs of love and friendship are what I give to others all the time. And everyone seems to need them.
He admired my aquarium, with its fish and plants made of glass. I asked him if I could give him one for his birthday on the nineteenth. And he accepted.
When Allendy left, I could not sleep. I was retracing the entire course of my life in the light of his words, and discovering new interpretations. I had always seen my father as cold, sadistic, cynical, faultfinding. Perhaps there was another image I had missed. The day he was about to beat me after beating my two brothers, because of the look on my face, he let me alone, almost tenderly, actually moved. Was he really moved? Did he beat us because Spanish fathers believe in beating their children? Because he himself was severely beaten by his father, a military man? Another day, when I was gravely ill, he bought me a compass, and brought his work to do by my bedside. His letters from France when I lived in New York, age twelve, thirteen, were loving.
I could not tell Allendy that Henry had bought me a present, because he has said, "I hate Henry because he is a barbarian. The barbarian is the type of man I most hate."
The barbarian bought me a present, yet a friend of his put him in a novel as a callous, anarchic, destructive drunkard and adventurer.
"I was badly analyzed," said Allendy, "and I tried all these years to finish the job myself."
I plied him with questions. He said, "I always thought that one had to deserve love, I worked so hard to merit it."
This phrase was so much like what I often wrote in my diary. The idea of deserving love. And then watching love being given to people who did nothing to deserve it.
Les Criminels by Ferdinand Bruckner, done by the Pitoëffs. The play shows a complete house of three floors and what happens on each floor, each room, simultaneously. When the action is strong, the spotlight is on that one room, while the others are in semidarkness and the actors whisper. I was immensely moved by it. Not so much by the theme of the blindness of justice (a very different kind of crime takes place on each floor, and all of them are judged by the same law, as the same crime) as by the simultaneity of life being lived in various rooms (levels) at the same time.
The same process takes place in life constantly. Layers, levels. I come down from the studio where I have been fixing the aquarium for Allendy's birthday to answer a telephone call from Jeanne about our evening, and I return to my opened Nietzsche marked by Henry while the radio plays on, and I open another of Marguerite's cramped, timorous letters (like a man walking on stilts) while Emilia brings me the electrician's bills to pay and asks me to telephone for coal and all this time I am remembering Madame Allendy trying to charm me last night by her artistry in her home. She designed a gigantic pearl in the center of the dining room table, which gave off a planetary light. She forces the tulips open until they look like exotic flowers (whose name I asked). But she complained that the armchairs had not lasted ten years as the upholsterer had promised and asked me if I did not think that too short a period. I answered that I had never been able to test the life span of an armchair that long because I had traveled and changed home constantly, and that, entre nous, I did not want an armchair to last that long!
The dinner was for the purpose of my meeting Bernard Steele, the publisher of Antonin Artaud. He wanted to meet me because he liked my book on D. H. Lawrence. But he made mocking remarks about Lawrence: "A man who never saw the sunshine in life," to which I retorted, "He was a miner's son!"
"You are terribly interested in Lawrence?"
"Not so much now. He does not need defending any more."
Steele gave me a small book by Artaud, Letters to Rivière.
The next day I arrived with the aquarium, the creation of a glass blower, everything of glass, the colored stones at the bottom, the fishes, the plants, the coral, the caves. I unpacked the pieces and set it up for him. How Allendy loved the glass ship, the stones the color of his eyes, the lights placed so that one could not see them, only as radiance from the fishes themselves. His eyes. They were humid with pleasure. The ship had foundered on the semiprecious rocks.
Allendy said, "I always wanted so much to travel ... I liked hearing your description of Deya, in Mallorca."
"And now...?"
"Oh, now there is nothing new to see. We are familiar with every place, with the movies and with books. There only remains the moon to be explored. Have you ever thought of the moon?"
"It is too far away. I am still interested in so many places right here, all around me. And it is not the places one wants to explore, but one's joys, surprises, responses to a rich world. I am not satisfied with Blaise Cendrars' descriptions of South America, or Siberia, or with films either. I want to see for myself. I want my own feelings and visions."
Allendy's detachment from life frightens me. He is dying. I don't want him to die, I said to myself. It is dangerous to hold men back from death. I feel it is unhappiness which drives him to meditate on the moon. I want to give him life and adventure, but I cannot convey to him that it is the mood, not the places, the relationships which can light up shabby hotel rooms, stained café tables, brimming noisy streets, sour wine.
I met Zadkine, the sculptor of wood figures. We went to his little house behind an apartment house on the Rue d'Assas. There are two small houses with a garden between them. In one he lives with his Russian wife; in the other are his sculptures. There are so many of them they look like a forest, as if so many trees had been growing there and he had carved them into a forest of bodies, faces, animals. The different qualities of the woods, the grains showing, the various tones, weights, make one feel there is much of the tree left in them. Women carved out of bamboo, slaves in joyless slavery, faces cut in two by the sculptor's knife, showing two sides forever separate, eternally two-faced. Truncated undecagonal figures, in veined and vulnerable woods, fragments of bodies, bodies armless and h
eadless. At night, when he is out of the studio, do the trees bend, weep, shiver, nostalgic for the leaves? Wailing at the transmutations?
In the center of these figures, Zadkine, small, rosy-skinned, with a round face like a boy, hair tousled, always laughing, joking, mischievous.
His small, quick gestures, his ironic, mischievous expression, his red cheeks, give him something of a handsome clown, a handsome monkey. His humor and joy are so strong, tinted with philosophy, he says gaily such profound things, his sculptures so ponderous and haunting, that one seeks in vain for the affiliation between his carving and his delight, his boyish pranks and his wood contortions. For he carves prisons, man in bondage, yet he himself laughs within them, as if they were part of a game.
He wears corduroy suits, an orange wool tie; one might meet him at the gate of a farm, flushed with wine. How did abstract art ever capture this playful Russian who should be braving the snows, with a fur hat to cover his red ears, and shouting to his horses as he shouts for his dinner at the restaurant.
"I want to see more of you," he says, as I leave.
Allendy tells me of the incident which took his confidence away. The person he loved the most in the world, as a child, was his nurse. She adored him and pampered him. Always baked him cakes and pastry which he ate with great pleasure. But she left him to get married. The child Allendy erases her from his memory. He does not want her name mentioned. But he refuses ever to eat pastry or cakes again. At her leaving he has his first serious illness, pneumonia, and remains in weak health until eighteen. Last November, while walking through the Trocadero Gardens, he saw a nurse feeding pastry to a little boy. The whole incident was revived in his memory; he became excited and felt relieved of a great secret weight. He blames this loss for his reluctance to install himself in life.
I tell him it is too early for him to prepare for death; accepting separation is a step towards death (as he has told me). He answers that now he is afraid to become too attached to life. I feel that I am sitting by the bedside of a dying man. I feel the load of his sadness. Can I help him? He is basking in my warmth, he is rejuvenated by my presence. He is anxious about my lies, doubtful, confused. He knows he cannot tell when I lie. "You lie so well," he says sadly. But I retort, "I only lie as doctors do, for the good of their patients." Which made him laugh uproariously, as I have never heard him laugh.
How much in need of love he is! How he expands when I show concern over him. And the wiser, more objective I become, the closer he thinks I am coming to him. And what a rascal I am! Yet I did not feel treacherous. I felt like myself at thirteen when I first felt the ugliness of life and began mothering my brothers. That Allendy has completely given his life to others is a point of resemblance between us. When Henry says, "Life is foul," he makes it more so. When I say to Henry, "I have to go and see my mother," he says, "Why?" What I really want is to abandon all my duties and responsibilities for adventure. And that I will never do, leave my mother and Joaquin helpless. I will not do to others what was done to me.
There is a great continuity in my relations and devotions to people. For example, I remember what Allendy and I talked about the last time, and if a thread remained loose I pick it up and set about untangling it and placing it where it belongs. It is a work of minute cellular construction which all life constantly strives to destroy. The entire mechanism of practical life obstructs such a construction. The telephone rings; the patients are waiting; the conference has to be written, prescriptions, and my own mass of cares, duties, the house, the friends, the garden, the needs of others. All this brutally submerges the pattern, the web of profound correlations. I fight hasty, casual, careless contacts. Just a patient, subterranean, delicate effort to destroy the solitude of human beings, to build bridges. To achieve this in relationship and in writing takes much time. Proust had to retire from life to do it in writing.
I give to this creation a care I give to none other. When we are interrupted, it is characteristic of me that my thread remains unbroken. I stand in the room possessed by the theme, and I do not let go. While Allendy is finishing his telephone call, in my mind I continue our talk until it is completed, only superficially disturbed by the realistic intrusion, deeply untouched by it, independent of it. This continuity Henry has felt: it is like a catalyzer, a point de ralliement, a magnetic centralizer of scattered and disconnected elements.
A friend of Joaquin's has just seen my father in the south of France and he tells me, "Your father has suffered from your abandonment. I believe him. He does lie occasionally but I always know when he is lying. He is very sensitive, very effeminate, and extremely selfish, of course. Needs to be loved and pampered. He came to see me the other day and talked for several hours about the sorrow of having lost his children. Said he sometimes reread your letters, which he adored, and he could not understand why you abandoned him. He has suffered very much from this."
I said, "Write to him. that I will see him when he comes to Paris."
When I came home I sat by the fire and, staring at it so long, I became hallucinated. I thought I was standing inside a glass bell such as I have as a paperweight, a ball of glass which I shake and then the flurries of snow dance inside of it and cover a diminutive castle.
This castle resembled "Les Ruines" in Arcachon where my father left us. It was a copy of a medieval castle built for D'Annunzio and which my father had rented for the summer. It was a gloomy place, covered with ivy, completely overshadowed by old trees. A fine haunted-castle setting for the drama which was to take place there. It could have served as a setting for the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The windows were of colored glass, as in churches.
The town itself was a gay sea town, full of summer visitors, but we did not seem to be a part of that life. I had just come out of the hospital after a near-fatal operation on a burst appendix, and after three months of a slow recovery, I was weak and terribly thin. My mother thought the seashore would be good for me. When we arrived, I saw him watching us from the window. He did not seem happy to see us. (I learned later that the parents of Maruca, one of his piano pupils, had rented the place for him so she could continue her studies.)
But there was a garden, a tangled and wild garden one could get lost in. And there were colored glass windows, and through the core of the designs, a button of multicolored glass, one could see a prismatic, colored world in oranges, blues, water-greens, rubies. I kept my eye glued to those stones for hours, looking at this prismatic world. Another world. It was my first sight of another world. Colors. Ruby-colored trees and a sky of orange. Faces elongated like dirigibles, swollen like balloons.
Gabriele D'Annunzio lived near us, the man who wrote that, at any time, he preferred to keep a rendezvous with music rather than with a woman. He had a mistress who loved her dogs better than her children, who sent her children to the hospital but nursed her dogs.
I decided to become a painter. I was ten years old and wrote poetry. I made plans for the future. I planned to have an orphanage and take care of orphans. I would give my fortune to the poor. I would have no children of my own.
We spent a great deal of time with my father's wealthy patrons. I was instinctively jealous of Maruca, who was sixteen and seemed almost like a playmate to us. She was small and childlike, with tiny hands and feet. She was officially engaged to a young painter, yet I had an intuition she was loved by my father, an intuition which was confirmed when he married her many years later.
It was there my father deserted us forever. It was there that, when he announced he was leaving on a concert tour, I did not believe him, and I clung to his coat saying, "Don't leave us, Papa, don't leave us." I knew he was leaving permanently and not, as my mother thought, on another concert tour.
Years later, when I returned to Europe after ten years in America, my father was at Le Havre to meet me. I was returning to France for the first time. Life in America had changed me.
We talk in the train for three hours, all the way to Paris.
I see befor
e me a stranger. He is a dandy. He smokes his cigarettes in a gold cigarette holder. He is dressed with utmost chic. He wears cream spats and a pearl pin on his tie and brilliantine in his hair, which is long but perfectly controlled. He carries a cane, and cream-colored gloves. This would not disturb me. But his talk...
There is something wrong with his talk.
It is artificial.
Perhaps living in America, with my mother, I had become more sincere.
He was preparing me for his marriage to Maruca.
Why could he not say: "I love her," and that is all. He was making an elaborate apologia, based on worldly reasons: a man could not live alone; she was wealthy, and would help "Grandmother" in Spain; his health would be better with a wife; his mistresses wasted too much of his time; etc. It sounded frivolous and trivial, mundane and superficial. It may have been that I expected too much, at least not salon talk.
In Paris I met Maruca, grand-couturier dress, a wave of perfume, a light girlish voice, an anxiety to please. She had been almost a playmate of ours! She was small, sweet, devoted. But I felt absolutely estranged, and more so when my father began to criticize my mother. The years of poverty, life in America, had created an abyss, and my father felt that this is what my mother had wanted. To estrange us from him. I had forgotten how to speak Spanish, remembered only half of my French. I gradually withdrew from the relationship.
Taxis are my wings. I cannot wait for anything. Wonderful to step off the little train at 3:25 in the smoke and noise and crowd of the city, to run downstairs, to ride dreaming through the city, to arrive at Allendy's just when he is about to pull open the black Chinese curtain. To run out again to the café where Henry is sitting with friends. The taxi is the magic chariot, passing without pain from one plane to another, a smooth course through the pearl-grey city, the opal that is Paris, answering my mother about the dyed sheets while I am still, on another line of the musical score, repeating in myself the fragments of my talk with Allendy. My mother is saying, "Fifille, do you like the binding for your last journal? It only cost twenty francs." I love my mother deeply now, her humanity, her goodness, her energy, her buoyancy. Joaquin says, "You are so quiet, are you ill?" He catches me smiling at myself, at the over-fullness of my life: the music holder filled with books I have no time to read, George Grosz's caricatures, a book by Antonin Artaud, unanswered letters, a wealth of stuff; wishing I were like June, di vinely indifferent to details, allowing safety pins on my dresses; but I am not. My closets are in beautiful Japanese order, everything in order, but all subordinate to a higher order, and at the moment of life, thrust into the background. The same dress can be crumpled and worn in bed, the same brushed hair thrown to the winds, safety pins and hairpins can fall, heels of shoes can break. When a higher moment comes, all details recede into the background. I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.