Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  He recited poetry. We talked about form, the theatre, his work.

  "You have green, and sometimes violet eyes."

  He grew gentle and calm. We walked again, in the rain.

  For him, the plague was no worse than death by mediocrity, death by commercialism, death by corruption which surrounded us. He wanted to make people aware that they were dying. To force them into a poetic state.

  "The hostility only proved that you disturbed them," I said.

  But what a shock to see a sensitive poet confronting a hostile public. What brutality, what ugliness in the public!

  It makes me sad that Allendy helped me to live and that I have not been able to help him. I hate to abandon him to his narrow, constricted world. I would have liked him to know joy. He once described his feeling that between him and life there was always a veil. Last night I hated to see his magic fading. It is as if, between his appearance at Joaquin's concert and today, he had taken several more leaps away from life. Perhaps last night at the Sorbonne he realized he was dying; that he will continue to send forth from his small book-lined room timid neurotics to live and love in the world; and that he will be left sitting behind his chaise longue, taking notes, while everything he wanted will pass him by: adventure, eroticism, travel, ecstasy, high living.

  So last night at the Sorbonne, his magic wavered, flickered, paled, and sank.

  My father's letter: "My daughter Anaïs, my darling..." I can laugh at the theatrical D'Annunzio phrases. My theatrical father. Didn't he and D'Annunzio hunt the same mistresses, singers and actresses, although D'Annunzio was older and more cynical and, according to my father, not always able to carry out his fervent promises as my father was. And yet, according to the stories told, too, so capable of talking enchantingly to women that they forgave him, and often words and poetry were substituted for action without their noticing. I still remember his leaning over me when I was a child, in Arcachon, and observing with a flowery bow: "What passionate eyes she has, watch out!"

  But I do miss Allendy. I let him guide my life, judge it, balance it. The period of dependence was sweet. He was God, conscience, absolver, priest, sage. He freed me of guilt and fear. But when he became human, he used his power to separate me from my artist life, to thrust me again into the stifling, narrow bourgeois life.

  Now he warns me against Artaud. He tells me Artaud is a drug addict and a homosexual.

  I have no guide. My father? I think of him as someone my own age. All the others are my children. It saddens me to have become again an independent woman. It was a deep joy to depend on Allendy's insight, his guidance.

  Today Bernard Steele came, Artaud's young publisher. He is also the publisher of Dr. Otto Rank. He brought Rank's Don Juan and His Double. The night I met him at the Allendys, he had been so ironic and flippant that I had disliked him. Today, sitting in the garden, he looked tender, alive, exposed, his eyes wide open and drinking in everything with a tremor. He had mocked D. H. Lawrence and had been ironic about Artaud. The wind is warm. The little brook rustles through the old ivy. The wild strawberries are perfuming the air. We are sitting in the sun. The bottle of sherry gleams like a jewel.

  Bernard Steele plays the guitar. He is intelligent but paradoxical, full of contrasts and contradictions. He is a musician seeking to appear as an intellectual. As an intellectual he is not logical. He is refined and unhappy. He does not deceive me. He is not interested in publishing, or in literature, but in living his own life.

  Marguerite and I are completely open with each other. Our confidences have taken the place of talks with Allendy.

  She made me laugh today.

  She wanted to free herself from Allendy without hurting his feelings. She did not know how. To arouse her jealousy, perhaps, he told her that he had a "legitimate" mistress who would be very angry if she knew about Marguerite.

  "There had never been, in all of Allendy's confidences, any question of a mistress. He had told me that his life was empty because of his last experience with a neurotic woman, which had frightened him. I sensed him free. I know his relation to his wife is purely fraternal. I was putting on my stockings when he said this. I stopped to make some gay remark. But later this statement returned to me and inspired my psychoanalytical way out of my situation.

  "When I began to invent the 'schema' by which I was going to free myself of meeting Allendy on Thursday without harming him, I was making an abstract play. But by the time I told Allendy all this, I began so vividly to imagine how I would feel if I loved Allendy and discovered that he was dividing his love between me and another woman, that I became very emotional and thoroughly sincere.

  "Allendy's eyes became soft. 'I understand too well. You need absolutism.' Then I was moved by his goodness. He said he knew all this before, he knew I was not a woman who could play with love, but then he lost his insight, lost his head. I could not hold that against him. He would be my friend for life. He would give up the pleasure he took with me.

  "I became aware that I had moved Allendy with a most fraudulent case, which I was beginning to believe in! It was becoming increasingly difficult to remember that Allendy had no mistress, because I was moved by my own story, and Allendy's compassionate interpretation of it.

  "Then lie begged for Thursday's meeting as a good-bye meeting, promising me a big scene, a drama, promising me violence, since I liked drama. His humor and sense of play came to the surface. He was almost joyous, almost radiant. His eyes flashed in a dangerous manner and he said: 'I'll beat you, as your father did. You deserve it. You have played with my feelings.' Now the theme of beating recurred so often in Allendy's talk that when he mentioned it today with his eyes flashing, I was impressed. My curiosity was aroused. Thursday promises to be interesting."

  Marguerite did meet Allendy at the Métro Cadet. She was late and Allendy thought she was not coming.

  "I said I would like a drink but Allendy did not approve of this. He said he never took anything in the afternoon. It would upset his habits. The room this time was all in blue, the style of Madame de Pompadour, the alcove lined with sky-blue velvet. Allendy did not kiss me. He sat on the edge of the bed and said: 'Now you will be punished for everything, for enslaving me and then wanting to abandon me.' And he took out of his pocket a whip!

  "Now I had not counted on a real whip. My father used his hands. I didn't know how to react to it. I liked Allendy's fierceness, his angry eyes, his will. But when I saw the whip I felt like laughing. He ordered me to undress. I undressed slowly. I had to control an irresistible desire to laugh!

  "Oh, Anaïs, it was such bad theatre! It was Grand Guignol. A dime novel. What does one do when one is suddenly in the middle of a dime novel? La Vie Scandaleuse de Sacher-Masoch. When Allendy tried a few lashes, I laughed. It was not exciting. It was only my pride which was offended. I was laughing at the absurdity, the unreality. When my father beat me it was real. My mother would sit sobbing in the next room. I refused to cry.

  "Allendy said he would reduce me to a rag, that I would beg and crawl and do everything he told me. He used the whip only once, and I stood where he could not touch me again. He thought I was playing the game.

  "And then he said this, which was right out of the cheap books they sell on the quays: 'You can scream your head off, nobody pays any attention to screams in this house,' and at this classic line I began to laugh uncontrollably, and Allendy thought I was laughing to tantalize him, egg him on.

  "Just before we met, Allendy had said to me that his work was growing monotonous; that it was sad to see how human beings were all alike—reacted the same way at the same moment; that it was always the same pattern. I remembered this when I felt the whip lashes warming my body, faute de mieux. Allendy looked satisfied. He kept saying that he felt good, that he felt wonderful, that he knew I would like it, that it brought out the savage in him. Un sauvage pour rire! The wise man who must arouse the savage in himself with a whip!

  "But I acted well so that, in the taxi, he had a recurr
ence of 'passion' (I speak relatively) and he was joyous. He said that no one would ever imagine such a scene possible, nobody. Not even my novelist father! This idea delighted him. Poor Allendy did not understand that all I craved were the flagellations of real passion and enslavement by authentic savages only. Allendy said: 'This way you reach a kind of vertigo.'"

  After we laughed, we became serious. I said to Marguerite: "The question is, have men died today because they have tampered with the sources of life, or do they tamper with the sources of life because they are dead and wish to find its springs again, to create an artificial control of the sources of life?"

  The other day Henry came with William Bradley, the literary agent and friend of many writers.

  Immediate sympathy.

  Bradley was enthusiastic about me. Talked to Henry in the train back. Fervently.

  Today he telephoned me. Has read my childhood journal. Says it is remarkable—naïveté—charm and depths. Amazing child. Quaintness. Everything. I was upset and cannot remember all he said. His voice was warm and expressive. He and his wife had laughed and wept over the journal.

  Artaud wrote me:

  I have thought a great deal about all you said on my conference. I did come away with a feeling of total failure, but I do not feel the same way today. I have, since then, heard many reactions to it and I believe that it was effective. But I also know what I intended to do and what fantastic concept I had wished to reach when I first planned it. And summing it all, it inspired anxiety, it disturbed without satisfying and without taking people's intelligence where I wanted to take them. You knew, but beyond my words, and not because of them.

  One thing amazes me, judging from the manuscript which you gave me, House of Incest, you seem to have an awareness of subtle states, almost secret ones, which I have only felt at the cost of enormous nervous suffering which I did not seek out. I am very curious to know by what science you reach the core of psychic states.

  Forgive me for writing you so late, but I have work to do for my publisher on a book on Heliogabalus which I have just decided to write. I work at it all day and have also to do much research in libraries. That is why I have not yet telephoned you.

  For this work on Heliogabalus I seek knowledge of Chaldean astrology (the true one) and it would make me happy to talk about all this with you.

  I have holes in my shoes. I do not pay my bills. I try to finish House of Incest.

  Henry on my writing:

  Elaboratel That is the only way out of these watertight abstractions of yours. Break through them, divest them of their mystery and allow them to flow. Now and then you break them and rush out with convincing power and eloquence. But it is as if you had first to break diamonds inside of you, powder them to dust, and then liquefy them, a terrific piece of alchemy. I think again that one of the reasons you have lodged yourself so firmly in the diary is because you fear to test your tangible self with the world. You are producing gems.

  I think Henry is right about elaborating. But I think he does not understand that it is because I have a natural flow in the diary: what I produce outside is a distillation, the myth, the poem. The elaboration is here. It is the gem made out of this natural outpouring. Shouldn't people prefer the gems?

  "I've gone beyond Lawrence," Henry said.

  Henry retracts the criticism of "abstraction" as applying only to the beginning of House of Incest. He attacks the extreme reserve and mystery of the phrases, asking for more explicitness. But that is poetry, I protest. Poetry is an abstraction. I am not sure Henry understands House of Incest. Soon I will see a parody of it. There is a paradox between the seriousness of his attitude towards his writing and the burlesque quality of it, and I puzzle about this. At times, parts of his writing I find of the highest buffoonery; he is surprised that I laugh.

  Artaud a tortured being. Irritable. Stutters at times. Always sits in some hidden corner of the room, sunk into the deepest chair, as into a cavern, as if on the defensive.

  He relaxed slowly as we talked. He began to talk flowingly. His talk so tenuous. It gives a strange feeling, as if one were witnessing the very process of a birth of a thought, a feeling. One can see the nebula, the unformed mass moving, struggling for shape, the careful, precise, meticulous, scrupulous effort made not to betray its meaning by a careless word. He doubts all explicitness. Thought has to be surrounded, spied upon, captured, like some elusive matter.

  "I have never been able to talk as I think, to anyone. With most people you can only talk about ideas, not the channel through which these ideas pass, the atmosphere in which they bathe, the subtle essence which escapes as one clothes them."

  I said, "They are not ideas at all, they are sensations. It is sensation no one can describe, the perception of the senses."

  I was so moved when he explained his difficulties and struggles to write, his excessive sensitivity, impressionability, his incapacity to enjoy. Everything filtered through pain, exacerbated nerves. It was not inertia, or death, or insensibility, but an excess of every faculty, of every sense. The weight he must lift, the sunrise seen through fog, a bilious fog. The walls of the absolute against which he breaks his head. He cannot live within the relative, the everyday, it is always the extreme, a tearing of the being.

  I am not sure I understand the excess of his torments.

  "In my self-created world of dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, I am at ease," I said. "I am glad to be in it. The most terrifying images which haunt me, once I have written them, no longer frighten me."

  "I do not have even that relief," said Artaud. "Those regions you say I reach, I get no satisfaction from reaching them. It is all torture. I make superhuman efforts to awake..."

  "But why awake?" I asked. "Why? I prefer my dreaming world, my nightmares, to reality. I love those houses which fall into the river."

  "Yes," said Artaud. "I observed you were satisfied in your world. That is rare. I sense great abstractions in House of Incest, an orchestration in writing, a force, an intensity. Translate a few parts of it for me, I don't read English very well."

  We talked about our fears, listed them. His were of madness, of being unable to write, or to talk, or to communicate with others (he wrote that no one had ever felt more keenly the inadequacy of language). Was it that what he wanted to tell was so difficult? Or that he had an impediment to writing itself? Or that he did not know when he had succeeded in saying it? But that is the struggle of every writer, I said. Every writer feels he is struggling with an inchoate, formless mass, fails to say the greater part of what he feels.

  He is in great need of sympathy.

  We are born under the same sign.

  He left me to have his Wednesday evening dinner with the Allendys.

  Dr. Otto Rank on Art and Artist:

  The neurotic, no matter whether productive or obstructed, suffers fundamentally from the fact that he cannot or will not accept himself, his own individuality, his own personality. On one hand he criticizes himself to excess, on the other he idealizes himself to excess, which means that he makes too great demands on himself and his completeness, so that failing to attain leads only to more self-criticism. If we take this thwarted type, as we may do for our purpose, and compare him to the artist, it is at once clear that the artist is, in a sense, the antithesis to the self-critical neurotic type. Not that the artist does not criticize himself, but by accepting his personality he not only fulfils that for which the neurotic is striving in vain, but goes far beyond it. The precondition, then, of the creative personality is not only acceptance, but its actual glorification of itself.

  Cannot or will not accept himself. How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities? Allendy may have said: "This is the core," but I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space. The effect of analysis is wearing off in this way. The clear, stark vision I had of myself is getting lost again by my obedience to the life of the imagination in which
I chose to believe. The veil was sundered, and soon after, I covered the truth again. Eddies of illusion engulf reality again. I have accepted a self which is unlimited. What I imagine is as true as what is. I want to get lost in mystery again. Wisdom engulfed by life.

  The artist goes beyond the neurotic. He glorifies his personality. Henry has done that. I do it through June, portrayed in House of Incest.

  Henry has an intuition about this. He said, "The first day I saw you, I felt and believed you perverse, decadent, as June was. I still feel in you an immense yieldingness, I feel there is no limit to you, to what you might be or do. An absence of boundary, a yielding that is limitless in experience."

  But why call this perverse? Henry has it too.

  What interests me is not the core but the potentialities of this core to multiply and expand infinitely. The diffusion of the core, its suppleness and elasticity, rebound, ramifications. Spanning, encompassing, space-devouring, star-trodden journeys, everything around and between the core.

  My father writes me a beautiful letter:

  Your letter, your beautiful letter, and the reading of your child diary (a marvelous gift) were for me not a revelation but a justification of the faith I had in you, my hopes and illusions for you, of my attachment to you, and this is the same period during which you mourned for me around a Christmas tree. You are not only my daughter, you are my daughter doubly, through flesh, and through the spirit. You are like me, a dreamer, excessively idealistic and exalted. The inevitable catastrophe of my departure. Oh, how you clung to me that day, how you kissed me. How you wept. You must have had a presentiment that it would be a separation of many years, of the great sorrow which would from now on weigh down our life.