Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  My mother does not tell us directly what reproaches she has against my father, but each flare of temper, each lie, each theatrical attitude, or dramatization, or willfulness, is condemned by her with: "You are just like your father." Joaquin's temper, his destructiveness, or Thorvald's secretiveness, or my fantasies.

  But I became aware that she had a great burden, and I dedicated myself to helping her. I became my brothers' second mother.

  Mother leaned on me. She shared her anxieties with me.

  The features, the form, the voice of my father blurred. The image was buried deep into my being. The yearning spent itself. We corresponded. He sent books, and tried to teach me French by letters. I was not very disciplined. In one letter I wrote two pages without accents and then added one hundred accents at the bottom and said: "For you to distribute correctly."

  But although he seems submerged in my memory, he is magically ineffaceable. Unconsciously he guides my actions. Consciously I become what my mother wanted, hard-working, helpful, devoted, a housekeeper, a mother, practice bourgeois sobriety, purity, simplicity. Our life is altogether human, a struggle for existence, goodhearted friends, laboriousness. I become a devoted daughter. I mend, sew, embroider, knit. But I also read voraciously, and put on plays (improvisations, an innovation at the time, which distressed my brothers). I refused to write scripts, so it would be spontaneous; but once in costume, they stood and waited: "What shall we say?"

  In school I made friends. An Irish girl, a Jewish girl. I spent my afternoons with them; we skated in Central Park. We wrote for the school magazine. I went to dancing school, had infatuations.

  My mother, with the help of her sisters, had bought a brownstone house, and she rented rooms. In the rooming house there were artists, the Madrigueras, etc. I loved the Catalonian violinist. My mother said, "Beware of artists, beware of Catalonians." I was sixteen but my mother treated me like a child. I was timid, and naive.

  I read avidly, drunkenly, by alphabetical order in the library. I had no guidance, as I rebelled against the rowdy, brutal Public School Number 9.

  My father invited me to come and stay with him and with Maruca in Paris for a visit. My mother dictated a letter which I wrote obediently. The sum of it was that if he had not loved me all these years enough to worry about my existence, my eating, schooling, dressing, that I would not now (when I was beginning to give no trouble) leave my mother to stay with him. My mother convinced me that he did not really love me, that now it was a matter of pride to show off his pretty daughter.

  Today I accepted a dinner invitation at Bernard Steele's house in the suburbs. I took the train with Artaud, and Steele met us at the station. I was bringing Tropic of Cancer to show Steele. I had been invited to stay overnight. But the entire evening, the dinner was so flippant, so artificial, so cynical, that both Artaud and I looked at each other and recognized the same distress, the same uneasiness. It was false, false. Instead of staying, I said I had to leave and I took the train back with Artaud.

  In the cold, harsh light of the train, on the hard, bare, wooden benches, Artaud sat brooding. I said I could not stand flippancy, bantering, mockery. Artaud said he felt the same.

  "But I saw how deeply disappointed Steele was that you did not stay all night." Artaud had noticed that, and I thought he was a thousand miles away from the whole evening.

  "And I heard you promise you would dance for him."

  "He plays the guitar, that was natural."

  Was Artaud pointing out an inconsistency in me? Did he doubt that I was in the same mood, cut off from the artificial gaiety of the evening?

  He sat brooding, as if suspicious of me.

  The next day he wrote to me:

  Last night I was extremely preoccupied, obsessed rather, by a few ideas which only manifested themselves in me by a void. I did not thank you enough, nor tell you once more how precious your friendship is to me. You once said that no revelations about the intimate life of a human being ever offended you, but there are things even more difficult to confess in such a state of mind as mine, and which may justify amply my being absent to the point of being barely courteous.

  This short note, special delivery, was soon followed by a letter:

  A few pages of Heliogabalus, which I expect to read you Thursday and which I finished last night, will explain to you, and justify, my attitude last night, which may have disturbed you. You must surely know similar mental obsessions, but you cannot have lived—I hope you have never experienced—such horrible states of mental constriction, of exacerbation, of emptiness which, in me, manifest themselves outwardly by a constant role-playing, a lie. The work and suffering of my spirit cause a lie on several levels of which the most revealing is the creation of an attitude, a frozen attitude, static, formal: the smile on the face corresponds to a secret rictus, extremely secret. I know I do not need to say more, or dwell longer on this. Water is very close to fire. But I imagine an attitude like mine is not quite believable, and yet it is real. I do not need to tell you that I was not what I was, I did not feel what I pretended to feel, that my stiffness did not correspond to what I would have liked to be, and yet I was absolutely in capable of modifying my external behavior. You understand, I am sure, but I will explain personally and more clearly—with details which the written word cannot convey, I mean that the written word is not able to convey such states. My external behavior created itself in spite of myself, against my own wishes, and yet I was temporarily satisfied with this external self: my organism could not dream of another modality, could not compose a different attitude. The best of myself was reduced to non-existence. Excuse this spontaneous correspondence, tempestuous; a kind of guilt and shame incites me to send this letter anyway...

  Such scrupulousness. How many of us have been guilty of not being ourselves, yet none of us would have taken such care to confess it, to atone for it. He could not be himself in the unnatural atmosphere of the Steeles. I realized that he was irritated and humiliated by his inability to participate in the tone of the evening. But in the train I was unable to make him understand that I had sensed all this, that to assume a false role was a natural way of protecting one's true self from some inimical places. Such disguises are necessary, particularly if the true interior state is grave, at work, creating.

  I wrote him this. And added:

  One cannot expose the true self everywhere, at any time. It was the Steeles who were in dissonance with us. I tried to tell you in the train that the conversation at that dinner was impossible, and that we both felt "dépaysé."

  You can play a thousand roles, and never deceive me about the true Artaud. It is no crime to play roles. I am too aware of the basic self. And once I have seen it, known it, I believe in it, no matter what appearances say. One evening of false tones, a false atmosphere, is only a detail without importance. You feel humiliated by vulgarity, banality. I understand that. When one is truly rich, inwardly, ordinary life becomes a form of torture. I divined the malaise you felt all night. And that is why, to show you on whose side I was, I left with you and offended Steele.

  Such an immense pity I have for Artaud, because he is always suffering. It is the darkness, the bitterness in Artaud I want to heal. Physically I could not touch him, but the flame and genius in him I love.

  [June, 1933]

  Visit from Bradley, who understands a great deal. He takes the role of adviser, director, asks me for a direct narrative. He wants to bring me out of my secret caves. He said many interesting things on art, music, writing, artists. Acute things.

  He said the influence of literature on a writer was bad, that Henry was hampered by too much reading. Said my theme of love of my father was big and obsessional like that of Henry's with June. Must write it out. Sometimes when people talk to me, I feel that I have done all they ask of me here, in the journal, when they ask me to be authentic, passionate, explosive, etc.

  He fought the poetry of House of Incest. Objects to stylization. Said I had come under the influence of
American idealism, which I denied because I feel the puritanism, idealism, came from my mother, the Dane, the Northern influence. Bradley said, "Your father remains the great love of your life—it is hard on other men. I speak for my sex."

  Bradley was humorous, quick, and stubborn too. Urging me to become more egotistic. Said my humanity was my weakness. Urged me to live for myself, write for myself, work for myself only.

  "But I feel alive only when I am living for or with others! And I'll be a great artist in spite of that. And if I am not a great artist, I don't care. I will have been good to the artist, the mother and muse and servant and inspiration. It's right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract art. Only art born of love, passion, pain."

  My father writes me:

  MA GRANDE CHÉRIE:

  Your letter brought me one of the facets of your innumerable faces. An aspect of goodness and grace which reveals all the capacity for compassion of woman. Do not regret your efforts to win Joaquin over to me, nor your failure. You have planted a seed; it will grow. Anaïs, your image, your hands, your eyes, your voice, all of YOU I love, are such a great happiness for me, a happiness so new and profound, of such a rare quality that I am incapable of receiving another love. You cannot imagine how you have fulfilled my life with a new sense of intimacy and penetration of woman I have never known before. A false religion, false and narrow—a false morality turns us away every moment from all the forms of happiness possible to us. The entire world suffers from this lack of intimacy, of fusion, of interrelation and (I insist on the word) interpenetration.

  Remember that afternoon when, at the risk of losing you, I began by talking about my faults (and I am not through yet) and I tried to know yours? And this was the beginning of a real bond. Qualities I consider taken for granted and, anyway, most of them are acquired; whereas faults neither our logic nor our will were able to modify or correct—they are the real expression of our primitive selves, natural selves, in the state of absolute purity. Spontaneous ideas, lightning thoughts, resonances of the inner self, new obscure vibrations, hereditary echoes, deformations acquired in the contractions imposed on us by our society—physical, moral, psychic—feelings good or bad, generous or selfish, sweet or bitter, cynical or absurd, monstrous or normal (oh, these useless, poor words, so inadequate when one enters the psychic world): all this is us. To seek to understand one another and to love one another while concealing this double self, the only one which is really us, and of which we are neither the creators nor the responsible inventors; it means not to understand, not to love life.

  I regret nothing. I only regret that everybody wants to deprive me of the journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one which makes my life bearable; because my happiness with human beings is so precarious, my confiding moods rare, and the least sign of non-interest is enough to silence me. In the journal I am at ease.

  We had a very important talk on dreams. Henry has followed my ideas and has been recording them. Now he begins to see the book it might become, to see its authentic surrealism. He is beginning to wonder what the quality of dreams is, and how to render it, to ask himself questions I have asked myself. In House of Incest there was a development from the dream, because I have, so often, the dream mood in life, about life, while living. But Henry is sticking closely to the actual night dreams.

  I talked about light and atmosphere and fluidity; he about the tone and absence of inhibition, body and feelings acting in absolute unison, a wonderful feeling of ease. I was excited that he should enter and possess the dream world. When he began, he only wrote them down to please me. Henry laughed about it. I said, "Hold on to them, they will make a new kind of work, of book." This is my territory, to which Henry, as usual, brings a new power.

  After all, I did not understand what happened to Artaud the other night. He came yesterday and explained that his stiffness was not caused by Steele's mockery but because he was suspicious of me. He was resisting me and was suspicious of my sympathy. He was afraid.

  "I don't understand," I said.

  We were sitting in the garden. There were books on the table, manuscripts from which Artaud had been reading to me. Just before he spoke of this, he had been talking about his book Heliogabalus, about his life. He was born in Turkey. He stopped suddenly and asked, "Are you really interested in my life?" Later he added, "I want to dedicate my book to you. But do you realize what that means? It won't be a conventional dedication. It will reveal a subtle understanding between us."

  "There is a subtle understanding between us," I said.

  "But is it an ephemeral one? Is it just a whim on your part, or is it an essential, fundamental connection? I see you as a woman who plays with men. You have so much warmth and sympathy, one can get deluded. You appear to be fond of everybody, you scatter your affections. I am afraid you are fickle, changeable. I imagine you interested in me today, and dropping me tomorrow."

  "You must trust your intuition. All my agreeableness is superficial. In reality I care for a few people very deeply, thoroughly and enduringly. Certain connections cannot change like that. I have not based my interest in you on any worldly discovery of you. I read your work carefully, thoroughly, and I feel I understand you, that is all. I was open and frank about it."

  "But do you often write letters like that to writers? Are you in the habit of doing that?"

  I laughed. "No, I have not written to many writers. It is not a habit. I am very selective. I can only think of two writers I have written to besides yourself—Djuna Barnes and Henry Miller. I wrote to you on the basis of a correlation between your work and mine. I started on a certain plane, I met you on this plane. It is a plane on which one does not play a superficial game."

  "You did a thing which was magnificently unconventional. I could not believe in it. If it were done with that disregard of the world, out of an impulse such as you describe, then it is too beautiful to believe in."

  "I would not write to Bernard Steele like that. If you misunderstood what I wrote, that I was addressing the Antonin Artaud revealed in his writing, if you had answered on an ordinary plane, then you would not be Artaud at all. I live constantly in a certain world where things happen not at all as they happen in Steele's world, for example. I am aware that Steele would put a different interpretation on my letter, but not you."

  "I could not believe this possible," said Artaud. "I never believed such an attitude possible in this world. I feared to understand. I feared to deceive myself, that it all should turn out to be ordinary, that you should be a sociable woman who enjoyed writing letters to writers, acting sympathy, etc. You see, I take things so seriously."

  "So do I," I said, in a tone of gravity he could no longer misread. "I am warm towards people, hospitable and friendly, but it is on the surface. But when it comes down to basic feelings, to meaning, connections are very rare, and it is to the seriousness in you, the mystical poet, that I addressed myself directly, unconventionally, because my insights are swift, and I trust them. I also take things very seriously. I have already told you, I live in another world, and I thought you would have an insight into it, as I had of yours."

  Artaud added, "The other night, in the train, when you talked so gently, I felt I hurt you by my withdrawn mood."

  "No, I attributed it to your work. I know that when one is doing a work of imagination, one becomes completely absorbed in it, and that it becomes difficult to come out into the world and participate in it, particularly if it is a flippant world."

  "It was all too wonderful. It frightens me. I have lived too long in the most absolute moral solitude, spiritual solitude. It is easy to people one's world, but that does not satisfy me."

  Artaud put his hand on my knee. I was startled that he should make a physical gesture. I made no gesture. I said, "You won't feel such a sp
iritual solitude any more." Defining it, I thought, would postpone the question I saw in his eyes, and which hangs over us, puzzling, as to the nature of our bond. He withdrew his hand. We sat very still. His eyes looked very beautiful, filled with seriousness, mystery, wonder, the Poète Maudit for a moment out of his inferno. I asked him to read to me from his book.

  He said Steele had tried to make him appear gauche and ridiculous at his house, out of jealousy. I know that is true. I also realized that Steele had watched my growing interest in Artaud with irritation. Again it was clear that the only route to me is by way of the imagination. Steele is handsome, magnetic, but ordinary. Artaud is tormented and inspired.

  He embroidered on the meaning of my name. Anaïs, Anahita, the Persian goddess of the moon. Anaïs, the Grecian external me, lovely, luminous, not the somber me. Where is the somber me who matches Artaud's despairs? In the diary. Secret.

  The night after Artaud's visit, I dreamed that he possessed me and that I was surprised by his passionateness. But awake, I did not feel that this was the nature of my bond with Artaud. In my dreams I sleep with everybody. The twelve rooms in the dream? Past, present, and future? I ought to be able to capture the atmosphere of the dream better than anyone. I live so much in it, following sensations, impressions, intuitions, trusting in them.