Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  He is pale. He appears, at first, cold and formal. His face is a mask. We set out for a slow walk. He says, "We have a world of our own. We have a peculiar way of looking at things. By current standards we are amoral, but we are true to an inner development. But we have given much to others, enriched their lives."

  We are not talking, merely corroborating certain theories.

  He says, "My obsession was to be a complete man, which was the ideal of Da Vinci. That is, civilized, but primitive too, strong but sensitive. I had to learn to balance the elements of the greatest unbalance, a masterpiece of equilibrium." He is older. He has found a way to balance this nature full of contradictions, as I have not.

  At lunch he was sober and played the doctor, obsessed with certain diets, uncompromising. Would not let me eat bread or tomatoes. Again cold in appearance. He told the maître d'hôtel I was his "fiancée." I realized how this "mask" had terrified me. The taut will, the criticalness, the severity. He watched the waiter and winced at a few drops of water spilled on the tablecloth. As a child I had the obscure feeling that this man could never be satisfied.

  He bore his illness with dignity and grace. Though it hurt him extremely to move, he took his bath, he shaved, his nails were immaculate, he dressed with care.

  After lunch he rested. Then he met me, looking immaculate, dressed with subtle elegance. Walking stiffly with a cane, but head held high, joking about his infirmity. The people of the hotel leaped to serve him, adored him, catered to his every whim. He took me out in his beautiful car. I could see in him far more rigid patterns. I am more flexible, more easygoing. We sped out towards the sea, reveling in the opaline colors, the changing light, the smells of heather, flowers. We sat on a rock facing the sea.

  And then he talked about his love affairs, and they did net seem as casual, as indifferent as legend had described them. Not the Don Juan who conquers, and the next day is gone. He mixed his pleasures with creativity; he was interested in the creation of human beings. He tells me the story of the humble and rather homely little governess no one paid attention to. "Without me she would never have known love. I used to cover her homely little face to be able to make love to her. It transformed her. She became almost beautiful."

  He said, "I only abandoned a woman when she ceased to have a meaning for me. Or when there was a danger of my falling in love. Usually, after the third or fourth night, I sent a big bunch of red roses, and they knew what it meant."

  The next morning he could not move from his bed. He was in despair. I surrounded him with gaiety and tenderness. I finally unpacked his bag while he talked to me. And he continued the story of his life. Meals were brought to the room. I told him stories too, my whole life.

  "You are the synthesis of all the women I have loved. What a pity that you are my daughter!"

  He sat in a chair the next day and read me an article on his musical opinions and sketches.

  The mistral was blowing. This gave to the summer days an enervating, feverish quality.

  He was getting better. We were able to go to the dining room for lunch. He dressed to perfection and, with his alabaster skin, his neat trim figure, his soft hat, he looked like a Spanish grandee. We walked slowly under a tropical sun, he teaching me the life of insects, the names of birds, and the distinctions between their cries, so that the world became filled with new sounds and everywhere I go now, I hear voices of birds that I was not aware of before.

  He talked about his life with my mother. The greatest cause of conflict between them was his passion for aesthetics and her lack of it. She did not care about dress, about grooming, about illusion. The very day of their wedding they had a quarrel, and his disillusions began. She had a high temper, and was jealous and possessive. She was primitive, natural, and hated "illusion," which she conjugated with "lie." If my father made harmless inventions, such as saying it was she who had made the marrons glacés, my mother had to confront him with the gravity of his lie, and force him to acknowledge it before people. If he hung a painting on one wall, she moved it to another.

  He told me ribald stories. The Spanish earthiness mingled, in him, with the romantic illusionist. He showed me a thousand faces, a thousand aspects. Could I have heard this coarse earthy language from him as a child, and so be less surprised by Henry's use of it, almost familiar with it?

  We both started out with the desire to be devoted, complete, human, noble, faithful; but our passions broke the dam, and forced us into lies. We were never reconciled to our treacheries, to the impetuosity of our nature, to our evolutions and transitions, which made us humanly unreliable. As D. H. Lawrence said: "Every human being is treacherous to every other human being. Because he has to be true to his own soul."

  But we dream of union, faithfulness.

  One night we walked on the terrace of the hotel in the moonlight. He looked twenty-five years old, like Joaquin.

  He talked a great deal about the importance of balance. "Such a tenuous balance," he said, "we could easily become unbalanced. Our balance hangs on a tenuous thread. Look for the light, for clarity, be more and more Latin." When Samba the Negro brought the mail on a silver platter, my father said, "Take them away. We have no need of anyone in the world."

  And then I felt the need to leave, the need I always have, to leave. Fear of breaking down? Fear of disillusioning him? Fear of discovering we did not agree? Of the flaws in the harmony? He stressed the harmony. But if I stayed, we might discover contrasts. Flight. I always look for the exit. After nine days...

  My father said I angered him as a child because he felt I had a whole world of secret thoughts which I would not, or could not express, that I lied like an Arab, and that I was high-tempered. But I explained to him that the feeling I had was that no one was interested, and also that what I invented constantly was fantasy, and that when I tried to tell of it, people always said: "You are lying." It was an invented world I lived in, and I was afraid to have it destroyed. He should have understood that. Perhaps because it was like his world, he fought it in his own child. "And now," he said, "the discovery of each other brings a kind of peace, because it brings the certitude that we are right. We are stronger together ... we will have less doubts."

  This seemed deeply true, yet I wonder if it is good to ally similarities, one agreeing with the other, as twins might, so that this might give an illusion of balance, reassure us about our orientation, or whether we should seek this by contrast with others, in extreme opposites as Henry is to me? I did find my way alone out of Catholicism, out of the bourgeois life created by my mother, out of the emptiness of my life in Richmond Hill. I found D. H. Lawrence alone.

  Is it possible my father should love me more than I love him? Perfection paralyzes me.

  In Valescure, the day when we found our new relationship, it was the day of San Juan. In Spain, on the feast of San Juan, people pile up all the old furniture from their attics, anything which might burn, old beds, old mattresses, and make bonfires in the street. I do not know the meaning of the ritual; but, for my father and me, it seemed to me appropriate, to make a bonfire of the past, of memories, of everything and to start anew. I left my father and continued on my trip.

  Father writes me now:

  All my life I have hated Sundays [just as I do.—A.N.]. The Sunday of your departure was particularly hateful. The train took away clarity, luminosity, fire. My room seemed cold, shrunken, somber. Where were the sparks, the charbons ardents? A subtle perfume floated in the air, yours. Wherever there is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me. You are an inexhaustible flow of precious stones, a rare soul, proud and ardent, your radiance is inner, and full of beauty and clarity.

  And again my father writes:

  I received a letter from my mother. Joaquin has been to see her every day. He was tender and charming. Everyone liked him. She writes: "He is handsome and charming, but does not have your elegance. When I asked him if he had seen you, he said to me very emotionally: 'No, I haven't, because of my mother. Not to h
urt her. I prefer to sacrifice myself. It is a double sacrifice because my father will think that I judge him, condemn him, and that is so far from the truth, first of all because I have no right to judge, and secondly because tomorrow I might behave exactly as he did or worse. But my mother dedicated her life to me, and I owe her my total devotion to make her happy. Even at the cost of a sacrifice such as seeing my father only from afar.' He is always pleased when any resemblance to you is observed by anyone, in way of speaking or acting!" But he did add that he would not say this to anyone but Grandmother or to me, to the only ones concerned.

  I have just finished reading Lawrence's Plumed Serpent. A great disappointment. I was absolutely bored..."

  Letter to Henry:

  You do not have a philosophy. You have feelings about living. Your ideology woven into the Lawrence book is really a protest against ideology. Your discontent, windmill attacks, are a protest against opinions, judgments, prophecies, conclusions. Your letters to me have been a protest against ideas. You are at war with yourself, with the intellectual you.

  I say, let the intellectual alone, the savant, the philosopher. Enjoy life. Intoxicate yourself with life. Describe it. Do not comment on it, or draw false conclusions. You have had your cerebral winter—your mental fervors. You were not happy. Black Spring will make you happier. I beg you, give up cerebration. You are in rebellion without knowing why.

  I dislike Henry's blind attacks on everything, like Lawrence's. When he is unhappy he is ready to destroy the world.

  Women are so much more honest than men. A woman says: "I am jealous." A man covers it up with a system of philosophy, a book of literary criticism, a study of psychology. Henry is so often confused, irrational, formless, like D. H. Lawrence.

  Henry has nothing to be bitter about. Why does he continue to fight the world? He loves war for its own sake. He lives in an animal world, in which life is full but without directive power or a fully awakened self-consciousness.

  Note from Artaud:

  We have a world of things to stir up together, we will concern ourselves with them when you return, face to face. All this is too important and too vital for us, and I cannot, in a letter, answer your multitude of questions and, above all, the great question which your multiformed attitude presents to me.

  NANAQUI

  You will understand my silence in suspense and my brief note when you return.

  Letter to my father:

  I almost wept when I opened your letter at Aix les Bains at the very moment when I was packing my bags. This detail—of thinking to write me on the day of my departure—a detail so thoughtful, so delicate, a thing I weary of doing for others and which I had dreamed of being done to me, but others love in such a different way. One has to know how to love, how to think in love, as well as in other arts. As you know. It seems to me that you have come to reward me for all the art and ingenuity I have wasted on others, on loving, the rest of my life.

  Louveciennes. Home again. Evening: to walk into my house is to walk into down, into color, into music, into perfume, into magic, into harmony. I stood on the threshold and re-experienced the miracle, forgetting I had made it all, painted the walls Chinese red, turquoise, and peach, laid the dark carpets, selected the mosaic fireplace, the lamps, the curtains. I was ensorcelled, as by the work of another. A caress of color, warmth, a hammock of suave harmonies, a honeyed womb, a palanquin of silk.

  My joy and energy overflowed. I love living, moving. I began to ordain my kingdom. I swam through a Sargasso Sea of mail; the telephone rang, Allendy, Artaud, Henry, Joaquin. Work. Engagements. Letters. To give each one the illusion of being the chosen one, the favorite, the only one. If all my letters were put together they would reveal startling contradictions. Because I imagine people need those lies as much as I need them. Truth is coarse and unfruitful. I tell Allendy I have just arrived as if he were the first one I called.

  My father tells me benign lies such as: "This is the first time I have wanted a lot of money," (to make me gifts) when I know he has always needed a lot of money, that he loves luxury, American cars, silk shirts, gold-tipped cigarettes, and lavish bouquets for his mistresses. I smile. All the incense I gave others is blown back to me, under my nose. All my own tricks and lies and deceptions are offered to me out of my father's magician's box. The same box I use for my illusionist practice.

  While he is writing me, Delia, or some other woman, is lying two feet away; her perfume can reach me; and he may be saying to her: "I must write to my daughter that she is now the only woman in my life, for that is a proper romantic end to an aging Don Juan's life: he must surrender all and become his daughter's chevalier servant." The treachery of illusion. Creating illusion and delusion. Improving on reality. Who is going to wring the truth from the other? Who lied first? Once when my father was reading me aloud a letter from Maruca, he read me a whole paragraph of affectionate greetings to me from her. Then he left the letter on the table and when I reread it, there were no such messages, just a conventional: "Give my love to Anaïs."

  Henry has these Saturnian eclipses, as Artaud has. Cold, inexpressive, somber, lost. Artaud warned me against them because he is fully aware of them, aware of the self separated from the self. Henry does not know what he suffers from. I say the word "eclipse" and that word is enough to illumine the chaos of Henry, and he begins to coalesce. I pull his scattered mind together. I make him focus on his direction, self-knowledge. He makes me taste the streets, cafés, movies, food and drink, and he tastes the joys of awareness. "So true, so true," he cries. And he begins to work almost immediately.

  This diary proves a tremendous, all engulfing craving for truth since, to write it, I risk destroying the whole edifice of my illusions, all the gifts I made, all that I created and protected, everyone whom I saved from truth.

  What does the world need, the illusion I gave in life, or the truth I give in writing? When I went about dreaming of satisfying people's dreams, satisfying their hunger for illusion, didn't I know that this was the most painful and the most insatiable hunger? What impels me to offer now, truth in place of illusion?

  I was going to continue to pick up the threads of an early narrative and superimpose them upon the present, which reveals their synchronization.

  I thought that the image of my father had become blurred with time; yet at thirteen I describe in the diary the man I am going to marry:

  A very pale and mysterious face, with very white teeth, a slow noble walk, an aloof smile. He will have a sweet and clear voice. He will tell me about his life filled with tragic adventures. I would like him proud and haughty, that he should love to read and write, and to play some instrument.

  This is a portrait of my father. An image engraved indelibly in mysterious regions of my being, sunk in sand, yet reappearing persistently, in fragments, in other men.

  The sky was full of dark clouds, which saddened me, for it seemed to me that these clouds were there expressly for me, to announce the dark clouds which would weigh down my future life.

  My mother allowed me to read a few novels by George Sand, and when I returned from this realm I contemplated the deep waters of the lake with a new feeling, for I had just learned what love was.

  My dear Diary, it is Anaïs who is speaking to you, and not someone who thinks as everybody should think. Dear Diary, pity me, but listen to me.

  Even then, I had literary preoccupations. This event, I sensed, was important, decisive:

  I should rewrite my arrival in New York [age thirteen]. It seems to me that my briefness does not do justice to the occasion.

  I did not know that this trip to America was, deep down, my mother's effort to estrange us from my father, not only by distance, but by immersing us in a contrasting culture, the opposite of the Latin, and teaching us a language he did not know. It was a gesture made against all that he represented.

  In America, my mother hoped we would learn idealism, purity, as she understood it. Her own Nordic ancestry asserted itself against th
e Latin. Her Danish blood against her French blood (her mother was a New Orleans beauty—had lovers, abandoned her children). My mother was puritanical, or my father's behavior had turned her against sex, against man. She was secretive about sex, yet florid, natural, warm, fond of eating, earthy in other ways. But she became all Mother, sexless, all maternity, a devouring maternity enveloping us; heroic, yes, battling for her children, working, sacrificing. Accumulating in us a sense of debt, a sense that she had given her life to us, in contrast to the selfishness of my father. She upheld bour geois virtues, thrift, domestic talents, honesty, sense of duty, self-sacrifice, etc. She battled against all "resemblances" to my father. But she did let Joaquin be a musician, and she encouraged my intellectual pursuits.

  [August, 1933]

  Scene with Artaud. "Before you say anything," he said, "I must tell you that I sensed from your letters that you had ceased to love me, or rather, that you had never loved me at all. Some other love has taken hold of you. Yes, I know, I guess, it is your father. So all my doubts of you were right. Your feelings are unstable, changeable. And this love of yours for your father, I must tell you, is an abomination."

  A venomous, bitter Artaud, all fury and rancor. I had received him with a wistful tenderness, but it did not touch him. "You give everyone the illusion of maximum love. Furthermore, I do not believe I am the only one you have deceived. I sense that you love many men. I feel you hurt Allendy, and perhaps others."

  I was silent. I denied nothing. But I felt he was wrong to interpret it as premeditated. He sees impurity everywhere.

  "I believe in your absolute impurity."

  Like a monk with his gods, purities, and impurities. Such accusations did not move me. They reminded me of a priest shouting from a pulpit, and I felt I would rather have him think me a Beatrice Cenci than one who had pretended to love him. He loved Beatrice enough to present her on stage, but in life he would set a bonfire for her and burn her. He was acting not like a poet, but like a vulgar mistress with a gun in her pocket. Apocalyptic condemnations. There was nothing beautiful about his anger. I seemed to take pleasure in his misunderstanding of me. Because he did not believe me when I tried to say "I do not want you as a lover" and now he was blaming me for my weakness. I let him. I did not seek to make him understand himself or me. I let him describe me as one "tenebrous oscillation." I let him pronounce his anathemas, curses, as a malefic, dangerous being, black magic, and he seemed more and more like an outraged castrated monk.