by Anais Nin
Talking with Henry I experience the sensation that there will come a time when we will both understand everything, because our masculine and feminine minds are trying to meet, not to fight each other. June could only be perceived by way of madness. The territory of woman is that which lies untouched by the direct desire of man. Man attacks the vital center. Woman fills out the circumference.
[March, 1933]
By telephone from Henry: interview with Dr. Otto Rank 100 per cent successful. Rank has made a friend of him. Admires Henry. Says Tropic of Cancer does not represent all that he is, only an exaggerated aspect of him.
"I owe all this to you," says Henry.
I answer, "You owe it to what you are yourself."
I had told Henry that Rank would appreciate him. Henry was a little uneasy, but he trusted me. He needed the confidence that this challenge would give him.*
The Countess Lucie, who appears all the time in the pages of Vogue, shell-rose skin, pale gold hair, as slender as one can be without loss of voluptuous outline, green-eyed, resembling Brigitte Helm. Très frileuse. A big fire in the fireplace in the spring. White satin armchairs and divans. Wearing a negligee which recalls all the negligees of Odette. Her talk is strange, brittle, sharp-focused. She is starting a magazine with Edmond Jaloux; she will translate some of my writing for it. I look at the tall, tall windows covered with lace. Pillows under your feet, and life tasteless. She is so eager, so eager that I should accomplish a miracle. It is Lucie who has sought me out, who said, "I like so much your great calm, you have conquered life. I am at a stupid, vacillating period of my life. I would like to have your sureness. I am waiting for love, the core of a woman's life."
"Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me."
"I feel doomed to being a spectator. I am a spectator of Jeanne's life. I adore Jeanne. But I want to find my own world. I can usually imagine people's surroundings. I cannot imagine yours."
"I can only tell you that my surroundings are me. Everything is me, because I have rejected all conventions, the opinion of the world, all its laws. I am not obliged, as you and Jeanne are, to play a social role."
Lucie is floundering between art and society, Bohemianism and aristocracy, conventions and perversions. Because she is an artist she speaks glowingly of my walk, my hands, my gestures. I watch her opening her tulips so that they look less prim and more like exotic flowers. Would all this beauty have to be swept away for Lucie to find a life that tastes of life? What is the difference between us? I lived out my dreams. The dreams were only a beginning. They indicated the path to follow. This world which fascinated Proust, seduced him, I do not wish to live in. Lucie can come into mine.
I walk out lightly in the germinating, blossoming spring, hearing new sounds, the joyous new breathing of the earth, anticipating meeting Antonin Artaud tonight with the Allendys.
Allendy, by his wisdom, has dissolved my friendship. How can I tell him this, when he has begun to suffer from jealousy, and has begun to demand. The truth is, I find it impossible to resist the tremendous pleasure of charming, flirting, even when I am not in love. What a confession! It must resemble the elation ski champions feel before a beautiful, endless, white slope, or the swimmer faced with a mountainous wave, or the mountain climber looking at the highest peak. Ascensions, leaps, swift descents. But Allendy's wisdom has saved him from greater pain. I have begun to play, as he tried to teach me, to yield to caprices, whims, fancies. If, as Allendy wished in his fantasy, he had married me when he was young, what a life I would have led him!
The visitors have left. I am sitting alone in the studio. The Allendys came with Antonin Artaud. Antonin looked at the crystals. We walked through the moon-drenched garden and Antonin was strongly moved and in a romantic mood: "The beauty we think lost in the world is here. The house is magic, the garden is magic. It is all a fairy tale."
Artaud. Lean, taut. A gaunt face, with visionary eyes. A sardonic manner. Now weary, now fiery and malicious.
The theatre, for him, is a place to shout pain, anger, hatred, to enact the violence in us. The most violent life can burst from terror and death.
He talked about the ancient rituals of blood. The power of contagion. How we have lost the magic of contagion. Ancient religion knew how to enact rituals which made faith and ecstasy contagious. The power of ritual was gone. He wanted to give this to the theatre. Today nobody could share a feeling with anybody else. And Antonin Artaud wanted the theatre to accomplish this, to be at the center, a ritual which would awaken us all. He wanted to shout so people would be roused to fervor again, to ecstasy. No talking. No analysis. Contagion by acting ecstatic states. No objective stage, but a ritual in the center of the audience.
As he talked, I wondered whether he was right that it was the rituals we had lost, or whether it was that people had lost the power to feel, and that no ritual would give it to them.
Artaud is the surrealist whom the surrealists disavowed, the lean, ghostly figure who haunts the cafés but who is never seen at the counter, drinking or sitting among people, laughing. He is the drugged, contracted being who walks always alone, who is seeking to produce plays which are like scenes of torture.
His eyes are blue with languor, black with pain. He is all nerves. Yet he was beautiful acting the monk in love with Joan of Arc in the Carl Dreyer film. The deep-set eyes of the mystic, as if shining from caverns. Deep-set, shadowy, mysterious.
For Artaud, writing is painful too. It comes spasmodically and with a great strain. He is poor. He is in conflict with a world he imagines mocking and threatening. His intensity is brooding, rather terrifying.
In the garden, as we stood behind the others, he had cursed hallucinations and I had said, "In my world of hallucinations I am happy."
"I cannot even say that. It is torture for me. I make superhuman efforts to awake."
Allendy had told me that he had tried to free Artaud of the drug habit which was destroying him. All I could see that evening was his revolt against interpretations. He was impatient with their presence, as if they prevented him from exaltation. He talked with fire about the kabala, magic, myths, legends.
Allendy had told me that Artaud had talked with him several times, but had finally refused analysis. It was a formula, and yet he admitted it had helped him.
When Allendy first came to Louveciennes, he said, "I feel here as in a very distant country."
And Artaud had said, "Not at all, I feel at home here."
As I predicted, Henry is getting stimulated by Walter Lowenfels while I am being stimulated by Artaud, and it is only because I too am living multilaterally that I can understand Henry's new enthusiasm. His extravagant pages on Lowenfels are the counterpart of my extravagant pages on Artaud.
Artaud had written about his frightening solitude, so after reading his L'Art et le Mort, I gave him House of Incest and wrote this for him:
DEAR ANTONIN ARTAUD:
You who have used the language of nerves and the perception of the nerves, who have known what it is to lie down and feel that it is not a body which is lying down, flesh, blood, muscles, but a hammock suspended in space swarming with hallucinations, may find here an answer to the constellations your words create, and the fragmentation of your feelings, an interweaving, a parallelism, an accompaniment, an echo, an equal speed in vertigoes, a resonance. A resonance to your "grande ferveur pensante," to your "fatigue du commencement du monde." What is essential is not to feel that one's words fall into a void. Not one of your words in L'Art et le Mort has fallen into a void. And you can see, perhaps, in these pages how I prepared a world to receive you, by an absence of walls, absorbent lighting, reflecting crystals, drugged nerves, visionary eyes, dreaming fevers. This book, though written before I knew you, was written to synchronize with your vision of the world.
Letter from A
rtaud:
I had intended to write you at great length about the manuscript which you gave me to read, and in which I feel a spiritual tension, a sharp selection of language and expression similar to my ways of thinking. But these days I am literally obsessed, haunted, and uniquely preoccupied by a conference I must give on Thursday on The Theatre and the Plague, a hard and elusive theme, and one which forces my thoughts into a movement completely contrary to my usual mode of thinking. Besides, I read English very badly, almost not at all, and you write a particularly difficult English, complex and selective: so my problem is doubled and tripled. Please excuse me for not communicating with you more fully. I will do so as soon as my lecture is over. Meanwhile believe in my most grateful feelings for all you have already done for my Theatre project which I hope you can give your care to actively and as a " realizatrice."
The journal as itinerary. Artaud did not understand why I preserved the journal in iron boxes. He is the very opposite. He preserves nothing. He owns nothing. Henry, when I first met him, owned nothing. I have a sense of destiny, of time, of history. Henry says he would no longer have the courage to travel penniless on the open road. He is tired of external adventures. His intense collecting of his notes, binding them, designing charts, proves that.
I am doing research for Allendy on the Black Death, for a book he is writing.
Henry talks about schizophrenia, the universe of death, the Hamlet-Faust cycle, Destiny, the Soul, macromicrocosm, megalopolitan civilization, surrender to biology. I feel he should be writing only about his life, not ideas. Why does he want to appear to be a thinker, a philosopher? Or is he seeking to put his world in order so he can make a place for himself? Or is he under the influence of Lowenfels and Fraenkel? Henry is at his desk, wrestling with D. H. Lawrence, delving into hills of notes, sighing, smoking, cursing, typing, drinking red wine. But he hears me tell Fred about the research I have been doing for Allendy, Chronicles of the Plague, and of the violent life which suddenly burst from the terror of death. It was evidently a rich and fecund period. Henry began to listen, thought this fitted into his scheme, too, and so fired questions at me, very pleased with the data, the information which strengthened his thesis. He uses everything.
His new phase is philosophic. Henry talks about his Bohemian life with June, chaos, as a phase, not as his true nature. He likes order. He says all great artists like order. A profound order. So Henry is now trying to master chaos.
"Joyce," says Henry, "stands for the soul of the big city, dynamics, atheism, gigantism, frustration, an archeologist of dead souls."
We talked about Lawrence and death. I read Henry my comments. "Did you write that? Did you write that?" In amazement. "Why, that's the last word that can be said..."
Feminine vision is usually myopic. I do not think mine is. But I do not understand abstract ideas.
Before our talk we had been to see a movie with Lil Dagover, one of Henry's enthusiasms. A bad movie, but her statuesque, voluptuous body makes him dream. After the movie she appeared in person, mincing, attenuated, artificial, slick, and disillusioned him completely. Perhaps in a fury against the disillusion, he began to talk wildly. We were sitting in a Russian café. Women in evening dress, ugly, but Henry was tempted to bite their bare shoulders.
Henry believes he is passing through a great transition from romantic interest in life to classical interest in ideas. A year ago, when Fraenkel said to Henry, "People are ideas," Henry had asked: "Why ideas? Why symbols?"
He has become a philosopher. We sit in cafés and drink, but he continues to talk about Spengler. I wonder why. Is he trying to organize his experience, to situate it? I am proud of his activity, yet I feel cheated of the adventurous Henry. Of his underworld, his gaudy tribulations, bawdy nights, of his search for pleasure, curiosities, his life in the streets, his contact with everyone, anyone.
I do not miss Allendy at all. How wise he was to doubt my affection. The transfer is ended, the dependency. What remains is gratitude, and an acknowledgment of his wisdom. But wisdom is a swifter way of reaching death. I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing. Allendy has chosen to die quickly, early, for the sake of dominating life. The romantic submits to life, the classicist dominates it.
He saved himself from pain. He is dead now, living only through others, the voyeur sitting behind the chaise longue, behind the upholstered back which muffles his presence, and I can still hear his pencil noting down the life of others. One can live the life of others, too, but only if one is living one's own; because when we are alive we are able to see, hear, sense, understand more, penetrate other lives. His indirect participation ... watching alcoves, night clubs, dance halls, bars, cafés, night life, love affairs of others...
He gave me courage to go on living. To this I bring tributes. But I only gave him sadness and regrets, yearnings, a few moments of madness. Pride in his insight and his skill, for he recreated me.
Schoolroom of the Sorbonne.
Allendy and Artaud were sitting at the big desk. Allendy introduced Artaud. The room was crowded. The blackboard made a strange backdrop. People of all ages, followers of Allendy's lectures on New Ideas.
The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered.
Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, grey. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about "The Theatre and the Plague."
He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theatre came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors.
His face was contorted with anguish, one could see the perspiration dampening his hair. His eyes dilated, his muscles became cramped, his fingers struggled to retain their flexibility. He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever, the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own crucifixion.
At first people gasped. And then they began to laugh. Everyone was laughingl They hissed. Then one by one, they began to leave, noisily, talking, protesting. They banged the door as they left. The only ones who did not move were Allendy, his wife, the Lalous, Marguerite. More protestations. More jeering. But Artaud went on, until the last gasp. And stayed on the floor. Then when the hall had emptied of all but his small group of friends, he walked straight up to me and kissed my hand. He asked me to go to the café with him.
Everyone else had something to do. We all parted at the door of the Sorbonne, and Artaud and I walked out in a fine mist. We walked, walked through the dark streets. He was hurt, wounded, baffled by the jeering. He spat out his anger. "They always want to hear about; they want to hear an objective conference on 'The Theatre and the Plague,' and I want to give them the experience itself, the plague itself, so they will be terrified, and awaken. I want to awaken them. They do not realize they are dead. Their death is total, like deafness, blindness. This is agony I portrayed. Mine, yes, and everyone who is alive."
The mist fell on his face,
he pushed his hair away from his forehead. He looked taut and obsessed, but now he spoke quietly. We sat in the Coupole. He forgot the conference. "I have never found anyone who felt as I did. I have been an opium addict for fifteen years. It was first given to me when I was very young, to calm some terrible pains in my head. I feel sometimes that I am not writing, but describing the struggles with writing, the struggles of birth."