by Anais Nin
Imagining ... like amnesia. Forgetting who I was, and where I was, and why I could not do it. Not knowing how to answer so I would not hurt him, I said, "I am not strong enough."
"That's what I thought when I first saw you. I thought you couldn't take the discipline of a dancer's life. But it isn't so. You look fragile and all that, but you're healthy. I can tell healthy women by their skin. Yours is shining and clear. No, I don't think you have the strength of a horse, you're what we call a petite nature. But you have energy and guts. And we'll take it easy on the road."
Many afternoons, after hard work, we sat at this little café and imagined what a dancer's life might be.
Miralles and I danced in several places together, at a haute couture opening, at a millionaire Brazilian's open house, at a night club; but when I auditioned for the Opéra, Amor Brujo, and was accepted and would have traveled all over the world, I gave up dancing [1928].
And Miralles died alone in his hotel room, of asthma. He had been saving his money to retire to his home town, Valencia. He was good, homely, and would say to me: "You know, I have no vices like the others. I would be good to you." Just because I listened to his gaudy stories of a gaudy past, he glowed, he went at his dancing with renewed vigor, he was rejuvenated, he bought himself a new suit.
For a while, it was as if I had lived in his shabby hotel room, with photographs of Spanish dancers pinned to the walls. I knew how it was in Russia, in music halls all over the world. The odor of the dancers, of dressing rooms, the pungent atmosphere of rehearsals. Lola, Alma Viva, L'Argentinita. I would wear bedroom slippers and flowered kimonos, big Spanish flowered cottons. I would open the door and my father would be standing there, saying: "Have you forgotten who you are? You are my daughter, you have forgotten your class, your name, your true stature in life."
One day I awakened from my amnesia. No longer a dancer. Miralles turned ashen and grey, was snuffed out. He became again an old, weary dancing teacher.
How often I tried to kill the "ideal" self, assassinate the critical self. Lose myself. That is, one of them.
The ideal self is slowly becoming a ridiculous figure. I laugh at it.
My books are splitting, too: the dream on one side, the human reality on the other. I took passages out of House of Incest which belong in Winter of Artifice. The mood is human, not hallucinated. About House of Incest, when I read Mirbeau's Jardin des Supplices, I remember being struck with the limitations of physical cruelty and pain. I also remember that I felt obsessions and anxieties were just as cruel and painful, only no one had described them vividly, as vividly as physical tortures. I wanted to do, in House of Incest, the counterpart to physical torture in the psychic world, in the psychological realm. (June, Jeanne, Artaud, Marguerite, their very real suffering.)
Henry very pleased with his "portrait" in Winter of Artifice.
"Such a full portrait, so human, so warm."
I saw my father in one of his out-of-the-world, out-of-reality moods. He was reading as he walked from the gate to the door of the house. He launched into a discourse, a monologue: "Why don't they have first-class smokers on the train? I went to the station master and complained. I said to him: 'It is a loss for French revenues because I smoke French cigarettes, etc.'"
Like June. A torrent of words. To cover what? I tried to tune myself to his mood. I urged him to continue his life as before, to enjoy his mistresses, that his love for me must expand his life rather than narrow it.
He answered, "No, I could never live like that again. I want this love to be the apotheosis of my life. It is too great a thing to spoil with ordinary love affairs. It must remain clean, single, unique."
As I can only judge my double from myself, I can see that he would like to make our love an ideal finish to his Don Juan career, that he confuses the wish with reality. I know he cannot live up to this, and I do not ask him to. It was not my suggestion at all. But when he questions me about my life, I feel I have to make the same romantic promises. We will both lie to each other, and for the same reason: to create an impossible ideal world.
The frightening thing about men aging is how they count their love-making. My father says, "I should only make love once a week at my age."
Is my father tired of his one-night affairs, lonely, loveless? Does he want understanding in place of sexual diversions?
His narcissism is much stronger than mine. He has never loved his opposite. My mother was his opposite and they immediately began to battle. The greatest crime, it seems, that she ever committed (aside from her strong will and bad temper) was a crime against romantic aesthetics: on their wedding night (at that time, women wore half-wigs and much stuffing in their hair) she laid all the false hair pieces on the night table.
As he can only love what is like himself, he will love, in me, only what resembles him, not our differences.
He always says: "How natural you are, how real."
In Louveciennes he relaxed finally. I took him to see the bird nest in the garden.
It is like looking into a mirror. I know that when he leaves me, he will ride back to Paris meditating on his errors, what he should not have said, what went wrong.
He may have regretted the opportunity I gave him to be open and truthful about his life, which he did not take advantage of.
When Henry returned the copy of House of Incest, it was annotated. I found he had made this note: "All pictorial passages wonderful. Would make a film script. Begin with scene of gigantic fish bowl."
When he came, we launched into a vigorous talk. He presented me with some of Brassai's photographs and told me of the talk they had together. I introduced him to Joseph Delteil. We began to compose a scenario. Henry would compose a scene, I another. We enlarge, expand, probe my sketchy material. He wants to pour into it his notes on a scenario. He would create the universe of the dream, I the details. He drags in cosmic symbology, and I the individual. We get intoxicated with our inventions. It is like a drug. We talk about the dream—return to my original statement that most dreamwriting is false and intellectually composed, that the real dream has an authenticity and can be recognized. The intellectually composed or fabricated dream does not arouse the dream sensation in others (like Cocteau's film, for instance).
Talking on the dream, I am always fertile and voluble. It is my favorite realm, and I am so familiar with its technical aspects. Henry gets excited, and he invents, collaborates, extends. All that the movie could do with House of Incest. "Go and see Germaine Dulac," he says. "She will like you."
We get drunk with images, words, scenes, possibilities. We are in such a mood that Henry says, "This is what I enjoy—a talk like this—I don't enjoy myself going out for a spree—it's all dead, the cabarets, the cafés, most of the people. I go out expecting fun and I come back spitting with anger and disgust." He gets up to show me how he walks, spitting crossly, and it makes me laugh.
He reads the last pages of Winter of Artifice, criticizes and praises. I am ironic about French literature which he praises and in which I find, at present, no great figure—no D. H. Lawrence. We agree that the French bring more perfection—Duhamel, Delteil, etc.; but that the others, less perfect, are greater. Impossible to say why. They are great with the greatness of human imperfection. One loves them. One admires the French writers. They are like Bach, compared with more lyrical musicians. I love the romantics. Henry tries me out, tests me in this, by playing records I don't know. Immediately I catch the elements I do not like, which leave me cold. Logic, order, construction, classicism, equilibrium, control. I wanted to shout: I admire imperfections, Dostoevsky, Lawrence, and Henry. There is a power there.
Henry tries to restrain my extravagance in writing, while yet allowing himself complete exuberance. Why? It may be I am not good at my craft yet. My style suffers when I seek freedom, when I feel too strongly. My writing will have to learn to support the weight of my vitality. I guess I'm still a little young, in writing. But window-breaking brings in oxygen and I am full of ox
ygen just now.
I should caricature my weakness. I want to master my tragic sense of life and achieve a comic spirit. I want to be less emotional and more humorous.
Certain events happen very close to me, others are dim. Some are vital and warm, some have a dreamlike quality. With my father the relationship is unreal, like something happening in a dream state.
I awakened in a courageous mood. I had on my list three difficult things to do, three ordeals to face. Visit to Rank. Reconciliation with Bernard Steele. Visit to Edward Titus to ask for the money he owes me. I wondered which one I would tackle. Decided first to bring Steele out of his jealous sulking, his anger that I did not stay at his home for the weekend but left with Artaud, his jealousy of Artaud and Henry.
He was out.
Edward Titus was in the south of France.
[November, 1933]
When you know someone from his writings you think he will live forever. I considered Otto Rank a legend even after Henry visited him. He was a legendary character until I came across a list of his works in the Psychoanalytical Library and saw on the card, on the left-hand corner, the dale of his birth, and on the right-hand corner, a blank left for the date of his death. This shocked me into awareness of his temporary presence. His life span was already over half spent, and I must talk to him now. He was not eternal. On the right-hand corner of a library card lay the inescapable proof of his inescapable fate. His books, big, heavy, and substantial, would always be there, but I felt I must talk to him now.
The library card also gave his address. He lived overlooking the park.
There were other reasons. I felt torn apart by my multiple relationships, and I would have been able to live fully in each one, had enough love and devotion for all of them, but they conflicted with each other. All of my father's values negated Henry's: all his exhortations and his influence were spent on eliminating from my life Artaud, Allendy, psychoanalysis.
I felt confused, and lost.
It was not a father I had found, in the true sense of the word.
It was a foggy afternoon when I decided to call on Dr. Rank. At the subway station near his home, there was a small park with benches. I sat down on one of them to prepare myself for the visit. I felt that from such an abundance of life, I must make a selection of what might interest him. He had made a specialty of the "artist." He was interested in the artist. Would he be interested in a woman who had lived out all the themes he wrote about, the Double, Illusion and Reality, Incestuous Loves Through Literature, Creation and Play. All the myths (return to the father after many adventures and obstacles), all the dreams. I had lived out the entire contents of his profound studies so impetuously that I had had no time to understand them, to sift them. I was confused and lost. In trying to live out all of my selves...
There were always, in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning, and another who only wanted to bring beauty, grace, and aliveness to people and who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
Should I come and say, Dr. Rank, I feel like a shattered mirror, or mention my book on D. H. Lawrence and the other books I was writing?
He considered neurosis a failed work of art, the neurotic a failed artist. Neurosis, he had written, was a manifestation of imagination and energy gone wrong. Instead of a fruit or a flower, I had borne obsessions and anxieties. It was this concept which appealed to me, that he did not call it an illness, but, as in nature, a misbegotten object which might have equal beauty and fascination as the relatives of more legitimate and noble birth. Neurosis was Spanish moss on a tree.
Which self should I bring him? The Anaïs who could be swept off her feet in the middle of a busy street and experience an emotional levitation? Street, people, incidents, words: all acquired a poetic diffusion, dissolving all sense of obstacle, fatality, crystallization, finite conclusions. It was an abstract drunkenness, druggedness, like the illuminations of the poets.
Or should I tell him about my crash landings?
I had no in-between existence: only flights, mobility, euphoria; and despair, depression, disillusion, paralysis, shock, and a shattering of the mirror.
"I am one of the artists you are writing about, Dr. Rank."
It was Dr. Rank who opened the door.
"Yes?" he said, in his harsh Viennese accent, wrapping the incisive, clear French words in a German crunch, as if the words had been chewed like the end of his cigar instead of liberated out of his mouth like a bird out of a cage. French words were sent out to fly in the air like messenger doves, but Dr. Rank's words were chewed, spewed.
He was short, dark-skinned, round-faced; but what stood out were his eyes, which were large, fiery, and dark. I singled out his eyes to eclipse the short Dr. Caligari body, the uneven teeth.
"Come in," he said, smiling, and led the way to his office, which was a library, with bookcases reaching to the ceiling, and one large window overlooking the park.
I felt at home among the books. I chose a deep chair and he sat across from me.
"So," he said, "it was you who sent Henry Miller to see me. Did you perhaps wish you could come yourself?"
"Perhaps. I felt that Dr. Allendy's formulas did not fit my life. I have read all your books. I felt that there is more in my relation to my father than the desire of a victory over my mother."
By his smile I knew he understood the more and my objection to oversimplifications.
He asked me for a clear, full outline of my life and work. I gave it to him.
"I know the artist can make good use of his conflicts but I feel that, at the present time, I am expending too much energy trying to master a confusion of desires which I cannot solve. I need your help."
Immediately I knew that we talked the same language. He said, "I go beyond the psychoanalytical. Psychoanalysis emphasizes the resemblance between people; I emphasize the differences between people. They try to bring everybody to a certain normal level. I try to adapt each person to his own kind of universe. The creative instinct is apart."
"Perhaps it is because I am a poet, but I have always felt that there is something beyond Lesbianism, narcissism, masochism, etc."
"Yes, there is creation," said Dr. Rank.
When I mentioned the brief psychoanalytical formulas he smiled again, ironically, as if agreeing with me as to their insufficiency. I felt the expansion of his thought beyond medicine into metaphysical and philosophical universes. We understood each other quickly.
"What I want to know is what you created during periods of extreme neurosis. That will be interesting to me. The stories you wrote as a child, which all began with: 'I am an orphan,' are not to be explained, as Allendy did, merely as criminal desire to do away with the mother out of jealousy of the father, out of an inordinate love of the father. You wanted to create yourself, you did not want to be born of human parents."
He was neither solemn nor grave. He was agile, quick, as if each word I uttered were a precious object he had excavated and was delighted to find. He acted as if I were unique, as if this were a unique adventure, not a phenomenon to be categorized.
"You tried to live your life like a myth. Everything you dreamed or fantasied, you carried out. You are a myth-maker."
"I am tired of lies and deformities. I need absolution. I must confess to you the mood which preceded my talk with you. I made this note on the train: 'On my way to see Dr. Rank I am planning impostures, cheatings, tricks.' I begin to invent what I will tell Dr. Rank, instead of coordinating truths. I begin to rehearse speeches, attitudes, gestures, inflections, expressions. I see myself talking and I am sitting within Rank, judging me. What should I say to create such and such effect? I meditate lies as others meditate confessions. Yet I am going to him to confess, to get help in the solution of my conflicts, which are too numerous, and which I do not succeed in m
astering by writing. I prepare myself for a false comedy, as I did with Allendy. Preparing to deform, and all to interest Rank."
"Your inventions are you, too," said Dr. Rank. "They all stem from you."
"Perhaps I came not to solve anything, but for another adventure, to dramatize, to enlarge upon my conflicts, to discover all that they contain, to seize upon them in full. My experience with Allendy was a new conflict added to my life, added to the old. Perhaps I want to go on juggling. I am again at an impasse. So I shift my ground, displace my objective. Conflict insoluble, so I will interest myself in my talks with you."
I had been afraid he would rush into a definition, a formula, but not at all. What predominated was his curiosity, not the impulse to classify. He was not like a scientist intent on fitting a human be ing into a theory. He was not practicing mental surgery. He was relying on his intuition, intent on discovering a woman neither one of us knew. A new specimen. He improvised. I felt that my lost identity was already being reconstructed with his recognition and vision of me. He had not thrown me back upon a vague ocean of generalities, a cell among a million cells.
"What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting."
"Are you saying I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling, the confused?"
No judgment from Dr. Rank.
"What brought you here?"
"I felt like a shattered mirror."