Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  [September, 1933]

  Maruca took me to Father's house. The neatest, the most spotless street of Paris, where the gardeners were occupied in clipping and trimming a few rare potted bushes in small, still, front gardens; where butlers were occupied in polishing doorknobs; where low cars rolled up silently and caught one by surprise; where stone lions watched fur-trimmed women kissing little dogs. On winter evenings the luxurious home was heated like a hothouse. The windows were of amber stained glass, the rugs deep.

  Maruca gave me a photograph of my father taken when he had just left us. I fell in love with this image of his inner self, the one before he donned a mask. The face before the will asserted itself. Mouth soft and half open, full, not yet thinned out by tightness. No furrows between the eyes, no hardness, no setness. This was the face I had expected to see the first day, the face I probably carried away with me as a child, the face of exposed sensibility, vulnerability, emotion. The years had built a mask. Will. Will. Will. I was shocked and sad. I placed this photograph on my desk. And then I realized that I had loved a face which was disappearing, a young father; and the full horror of my father's aging struck me, chilled me. His age. I felt nostalgia for a soft face which no longer exists, who might have been, then, the lover of my dreams. Today I see the crystallization. The mask of wisdom, control, aging, death.

  Henry and I met at the Trocadéro. I was waiting, standing against a big old tree reading M. de Phocas of Jean Lorrain, an echo of A Rebours—morbid and sulphurous. All Paris was tinted the color of the eyes of Astarte which haunted the man. All Paris smoked with opium, murder, insanity. I felt all the hells described by Artaud, by the maddest poets, even while walking with a healthy and blooming body after horseback-riding in the Forest at seven in the morning. I am like a person walking through a mirror broken in two. I see the plot. One woman, stylish, fresh, blooming, is walking towards the Trocadéro; and the other walks into nightmares which haunt the imagination, and which I described in House of Incest. The nightmare always. Am I in love with the nightmare, as Kafka was, as so many poets? In the forest, air and sun and dappled leaves, dancing blood, flying on a horse, leaping over white gates.

  "Le bouc noir passe au fond des ténèbres malsaines."

  Henry thinks as he approaches me, "I don't recognize the hat but it can only be Anaïs who reads while she waits."

  And together we visit Abyssinia, the Sudan, East Africa, etc. We look at masks, wooden figures, grass huts, instruments for magic ceremonies, weavings, paintings on stones, pottery, idols, the mother of the dead, costumes for ceremonies of circumcision; we gloat over the rolls of manuscripts and the drawings to be carried as talisman against the devil and which must be as long as the person is tall. All eyes. Eyes. No heads. But squares pierced with eyes. Book of Magic Recipes. Books of magic. Monsters of hair, of cord, fish teeth, burnt wood, breasts like funnels, vulvas carved open, scrawls, lace-patterned chairs. I am vibrating from head to toes. Artaud was right when he said artistic sensations were perceived by me through my senses. I felt intoxicated.

  We sat in a café afterwards. I was still laughing about a huge necklace of bones which was put around the necks of the women who lied. Henry was talking about his books, his ideas, his notes. So fertile, so rich. His book Black Spring, his scenario, his book on the movies, his book on June. He became lost.

  "I am coming now to my China..."

  "What does China mean to you?"

  Henry's explanation is vague at first. China seems to stand for a certain condition of existence ... the universe of mere being. Where one lives like a plant, instinctively. No will. The great indifference, like that of the Hindu who lets himself be passive in order to let the seeds in him flower. Something between the will of the European and the karma of the Oriental.

  But I have not entirely seized Henry's idea of China. At the moment I sensed what he meant, but it was fragile and tenuous. His life has been one long opposition to will—but that was not difficult for him: he was born without a will, he was born passive. It is a philosophy created out of a temperament. He has practiced letting things happen. Now he wants to express in literature the effectiveness of relaxing the will for the sake of enjoyment. He is the man who dodged jobs, responsibilities, ties. He freed himself of all tasks but one: to write, perhaps at the expense of others, at the expense of smaller men and lesser artists.

  But among the forces behind Henry's work, aren't there others' wills? Henry talks about the need to organize his notes—his mountains of notes. Organization. I have, so many times, plunged into his chaos with two hands, to organize first the man, and then the work. To be consistent with himself, he should not have sought this from me: a unification, a wholeness, a drawing together, a core.

  For, at bottom, what he is is Dada.

  Manifesto of Dadaism.

  Dada, c'est tout, ce n'est rien, c'est oui en Russe, c'est quelque chose en Roumain, c'est quelque chose en presque toutes les langues et qui n'a pas son dada, c'est l'absurde absolu, l'absolu du fou, du non, c'est l'art pour l'art, c'est Dada.

  I love the darkness. I love walking through the streets of Paris with the image of Sacher-Masoch as he appears on a paperbook cover, dragging himself at the feet of a beautiful naked woman who is half-covered with furs, wearing boots and whipping him. She deceives him because he asks her to deceive him. His eyes glisten when he sees a strong servant girl, because he thinks perhaps she can whip him much harder than Wanda.

  The figure of a cringing Masoch does not appeal to me. What appeals to me is this violent tasting of life's most fearful cruelties. No evasions of pain. That day I could not talk to the doorman or to the hairdresser, who needed sympathy, because I wanted to ask them why I had such a passion for fur, a real passion, so that if I had money I would carpet a room with fur, cover the walls with it, and cover myself with it. Is it possible, I wanted to ask, that we remember having once been an animal? That this incapacity to destroy, which Henry accuses me of, may soon be reversed? That my cruelty wears a velvet mask and velvet gloves?

  Sacher-Masoch's book is gaudy, but how can one ever forget the Hungarian peasant dancers who, on warm days, took off their chemises and danced in big voluminous skirts, turning until the skirts lifted and showed all the brown hot bodies? And the African maidens who wore little belts of beads and fish teeth with bells. Bells dancing around their hips. And the motion of the horse this morning, the sweat and smell of the horse between my legs, the turmoil of smell and heat and motion between the legs so that I wanted to lie on the grass and be made love to.

  Without his writing, I don't know what Henry would be. It completes him. People who know him as gentle, wonder at the writing. Yet sometimes I have the feeling that this gentleness is not entirely genuine. It is his way of charming. Of disarming. It allows his entry anywhere, he is trusted. It is like a disguise of the observant, the critical, the accusing man within. His severity is disguised. His hatreds and his rebellions. They are not apparent, or acted out. It is always a shock to others. I am aware at times, while he speaks in a mellow way to others, of that small, round, hard photographic lens in his blue eyes. The writer is a coward. He does not fight his battles sur place, openly, in the presence of others. Later. Later. Alone.

  I began my letter to Father: "Quelle triste heures ..." and realized I was going to write heureuse instead of heure. Revelatory. For I was to tell him how sad I was that I could not come to Valescure. Why? Why?

  I remember a whimsical moment when he was reading from Journal Three, Mother's description of Father's proposal. "I looked at his beautiful blue eyes, his long dark hair, his patched pants ... and said yes..."

  Father, who was resting after his treatment, almost leaped out of bed. Leonine indignation. Half humorous, half serious: "Patched pants! Quel blasphème! Me, me in patched pants! Why, if I had ever worn such mended trousers I would not have left the house. I would have cloistered myself. Can't you see how unlike me that is?" And it was, it was absolutely incongruous, impossible to imag
ine my father wearing mended trousers!

  He has a touching trick of being hurt easily but of rising out of it quickly by humor, mocking himself, ironic, whimsical. Subjugating his vulnerability, covering it, disguising it. Later he wrote to me, commenting on a gift I sent him: "Crime of extravagance. Where do you get such extravagance? No wonder. You issued from a pair of patched pants!"

  Humor. Humor on the brink of a desolate, tragic secret, as mine is, a gaiety always for others, like a bouquet in silver paper, on the periphery, while inside...

  The only tender and stirring part of his rigid forms. I felt the form of his life, his instrumentation of it, as if he were a conductor. Musical intricacies and development. Each word, each feeling, each gesture composed, the synthesis of an élan, but an élan of art. At this hour, it is right. The moment is right. The lights. The room. Life orchestrated, molded by his will. When we walk together, don't take my arm. Movement subjugated, movement molded. Life contained, shaped, improved upon. No sloppiness, slovenliness, abandon, casualness. Style. Form. Now you can come. Wear your evening dress. Orchestration. Instrumentation. No disorder, no whims, no fantasies.

  Henry breaks all the molds, all the forms, all the shells, all the edifices of art, and what is born is warm and imperfect. It is human.

  My revolt against my father died. I was looking at the photograph of him when he was twenty. I thought of his stoicism, the will with which he dominates his moods, his chaos, his melancholia. My father and I give only our best to the world. I was thinking of his whimsicality and gaiety when he is saddest. I did not want this plaster cast of stoicism over my face and body. I wanted to get out of my own shell. Overcome this terrific timidity which encloses me. At Lowenfels', I barely talked, and envied him his drunkenness. I must expand, live out, love, so as to evade obsession. I must think of others, spread out.

  How deeply jealous is my father, I wonder. He is so enigmatic, so secretive. Is there as much darkness in him as in me? How desperately he seeks the sun, beauty, harmony. To heal himself, to keep his balance.

  [October, 1933]

  I must learn to stand alone. Nobody can really follow me all the way, understand me completely. My father encourages a restricted life. He is driving Maruca's mother around, to movies, a bourgeois life, bourgeois ideals. Henry is the egotistical artist. He is a better example.

  Dear diary, you have hampered me as an artist. But at the same time you have kept me alive as a human being. I created you because I needed a friend. And talking to this friend, I have, perhaps, wasted my life.

  Today I begin to work. Writing for a hostile world discouraged me. Writing for you gave me the illusion of a warm ambiance I needed to flower in. But I must divorce you from my work. Not abandon you. No, I need your companionship. Even after I have worked, I look around me, and who can my soul talk to without fear of incomprehension? Here breathes my love of peace, here I breathe peace.

  Dropped the diary and wrote first twenty pages of June story objectively.* Conscious order. Excision of irrelevant details.

  My father writes me:

  My only real failure in life was my marriage to your mother. But then I was so young, and your mother was, consciously or unconsciously, playing a role: she deceived me, and took her mask off the day of our marriage.

  He was shocked by Artaud's Théâtre de La Cruauté.

  Sick, neurotic, unbalanced, drug addict. I do not believe in exposing one's sickness to the world. In dramatizing one's madness.

  Dissonances with my father. I wrote him two letters, with news of Thorvald, and my talk with Joaquin; and the interest of the news is marred for him because our letters crossed and there was confusion. That was the essential point: that I, having written him without waiting for an answer, caused a disorder which was painful to him. I wrote him ironically, mocking myself for having disregarded the conductor's directions, for having played impulsively and disorganized the symphony. Deep down, I felt that an inhuman order which kills spontaneity and naturalness is wrong.

  But the real tragedy in our relationship is that we both set up an ideal and romantic image: we were both going to dedicate ourselves exclusively to each other. We were not going to lie to each other. We were going to be confidants and friends. But, inevitably, being so much alike, I was going to conceal my Bohemian life, and he his mistresses. I could read transparently through his hypocritical excuses for sending Maruca back to Paris ten days earlier, and coming back alone on the thirtieth. I could visualize him entertaining a mistress at Valescure in the same hotel. Nor was he going to travel back alone. It offends me that he should tell me the same lies as he tells his wife.

  Forget this pestering female, lamenting that her men have not the courage to kill the dragons, and that the only men who are capable of killing dragons are Telephone Kings, Oil Kings, Boxing Champions, Horse-smelling Generals, none of whom I could have loved.

  Nail carpet in the hall.

  Buy my father's favorite cigarettes.

  Organize and clean the house.

  And as for the dragons...

  Somehow or other I always lose my guide halfway up the mountain, and he becomes my child. Even my father.

  I do not think I am looking for a man, but for a God. I am beginning to feel a void which must be the absence of God. I have called for a father, a guide, a leader, a protector, a friend, a lover, but I still miss something: it must be God. But I want a god in the flesh, not an abstraction, an incarnated god, with strength, two arms, and a sex.

  Perhaps I have loved the artist because creation is the nearest we come to divinity.

  My father's emphasis on non-human perfection, for a while, seemed to indicate he might play the role of God the Father. He has no love of human imperfection.

  My father says: do not look at me, look at all that I am attempting to be, look at my ideal intentions.

  The death of Antonio Francisco Miralles in a hotel room, alone, of asthma. Miralles, my Spanish dancing teacher.

  Whenever I stepped off the bus at Montmartre, I could hear the music of the merry-go-rounds at the fair, and I would feel my mood, my walk, my whole body transformed by its gaiety. I walked to a side street, knocked on a dark doorway opened by a disheveled concierge, and ran down the stairway to a vast room below street level, a vast cellar room with its walls covered with mirrors. It was the place where the little girls from the Opéra Ballet rehearsed. When I came down the stairway I could hear the piano, feet stamping, and the ballet master's voice. When the piano stopped, there was always his voice scolding, and the whispering of smaller voices. As I entered, the class was dissolving and a flurry of little girls brushed by me in their moth ballet costumes, laughing and whispering, fluttering like moths on their dusty ballet slippers, flurries of snow in the darkness of the vast room, with drops of dew from exertion. I went down with them along the corridors to the dressing rooms. These looked like gardens, with so many ballet skirts, Spanish costumes hanging on pegs. It overflowed with the smell of cold cream, face powder, cheap cologne.

  While they dressed for the street, I dressed for my Spanish dances. Miralles would already be rehearsing his own castanets. The piano, slightly out of tune, was beginning the dance of Granados. The floor was beginning to vibrate as other Spanish dancers tried out their heel work. Tap tap tap tap tap. Miralles was about forty, slender, erect, not handsome in face but graceful when dancing. His face was undefined, his features blurred.

  I was the favorite.

  He was like a gentle Svengali, and by his eyes, his voice, his hands, he had the power to make me dance as well as by his ordinary lessons. He ruled my body with a magnetic rule, master of my dancing.

  One day he waited for me at the door, neat and trim. "Will you come and sit at the café with me?"

  I followed him. Not far from there was the Place Clichy, always animated, but more so now, as the site of a permanent fair. The merry-go-rounds were turning swiftly. The gypsies were reading fortunes in little booths hung with Arabian rugs. Workmen were
shooting clay pigeons and winning cut glass for their wives. The prostitutes were enjoying their loitering, and the men were watching them.

  My dancing teacher was saying to me: "Anaïs, I am a simple man. My parents were shoemakers in a little village in the south of Spain. I was put to work in an iron factory where I handled heavy things and was on the way to becoming deformed by big muscles. But during my lunch hour, I danced. I wanted to be a dancer and I practiced every day, every night. At night I went to the gypsies' caverns, and learned from them. I began to dance in cabarets. And today, look!" He took out a cigarette case engraved with the names of all the famous Spanish dancers. "Today I have been the partner of all these women. If you would come with me, we could be happy. I am a simple man, but we could dance in all the cities of Europe. I am no longer young but I have a lot of dancing in me yet. We could be happy."

  The merry-go-round turned and sang, and I imagined myself embarking on a dancing career with Miralles, dancing, which was so much like flying, from city to city, receiving bouquets, praise in newspapers, with joyous music at the center always, pleasure as colorful as the Spanish dresses, all red, orange, black and gold, gold and purple, and red and white.