by Anais Nin
But my father escaped from this truth as he escapes from all vital issues, from all delving and probing. We see each other gaily, meet only in sophisticated, civilized, trivial spheres. Wit, racontages, conversation de salon, anecdotes. There is no connection. It is all false and airy. He makes a screen for himself out of his eloquence, wit, smartness. Is there a deeper man? There is a man who weeps, but that's sensitiveness, not depth. My father is a will-of-the-wisp, a vibration, a nuance, a minuet. And he thinks the same of me. I see how he watches me when I am ready to leave, and I am always ready to leave. Unreality. Flight. Delusion. The kiss that is not a kiss. The talk that is not a talk. He and I should not have tried to meet in life, but in some strange region of dreamlike frozenness. We were punished for trying to materialize a myth.
I would like to say to him: "We are too old and wise to go on pretending. Let us enjoy our maturity and not romanticize ourselves. You will continue to be a Don Juan until you die, because you thrive on the foam of conquest. You are made for mobility, fluidity, not the absolute. Between us there is only narcissism, and I have grown beyond that. I will continue my Bohemian life. Let us pay each other the compliment of not lying to each other."
But I know he is not as courageous as I am. He wants to continue to admire himself. Don Juan, who possessed more than a thousand women, gave up his life for his daughter. His daughter gave up all her friends for her father. A legend! I have grown beyond this. When I arrive at his house it is Maruca who tells me, weeping, that while counting the laundry with the maid she found a shirt all covered with lipstick.
See Winter of Artifice for development of theme.
During my struggle against the diary "opium habit" I had many misgivings. Should the diary disappear altogether? Was concerned with its value as a document, its usefulness to my work. Thought of the scenes I had extracted from the diary, the dreams and moods I used in House of Incest. Would it reappear in a more objective form? I studied Da Vinci's notebooks. Rank had said that Da Vinci's notebooks were often more interesting than his actual work. Rank could not answer this question from my past work. He awaits the new novel. I stopped writing for two weeks because I felt the need of a reorganization. I wanted to live.
Women, said Rank, when cured of neurosis, enter life. Man enters art. Woman is too close to life, too human. The feminine quality is necessary to the male artist, but Rank questioned whether masculinity is equally necessary to the woman artist.
At this point, when I became a woman, I glowed with womanliness; I was expansive, relaxed, happy.
Rank said, looking at me admiringly, "You look entirely different today." I felt as soft as a summer day, all bloom and scent, all joy of being.
"Perhaps," he said, "you may discover now what you want—to be a woman or an artist."
I had one evening of hysteria. A choice between standing in the middle of the room and breaking out into hysterical weeping, or writing. I felt that I would break out in some wild, disruptive fit of blind, furious rebellion against my life, against the domination of man, my desire for a free artist life, my fear of not being physically strong enough for it, my desire to run amuck and my distrust of my judgment of people, of my trusts and faiths, of my impulses. A fear of the wildness of my fever and despair, of the excessiveness of my melancholy. Then I sat at my typewriter, saying to myself, "Write, you neurotic, you weakling, you; rebellion is a negative form of living. Write!"
Henry said: "You must let things accumulate, not use everything immediately. Let things accumulate, rest, ferment: then explode. Not cover all the ground." He talked like Rank, with tears in his eyes, when he realized that I used the notebook to disentangle myself from human bondages. Pleaded with me to think only of my work.
Lunch at my father's. Talk about trivialities. Comtesse X. Was she the one my father talked about while we walked through the Bois? He told me, "We met at Notre Dame. She began with the most vulgar cross-examination, reproaching me for not loving her. So I proceeded with a slow analysis of her, telling her she had fallen in love with me in the way women usually fall in love with an artist who is handsome and who plays with vehemence and elegance; telling her that it had been a literary and imaginary affair kindled by reading of my books, that our affair had no substantial basis, what with meetings interrupted by intervals of two years. I told her that no love could survive such thin nourishment and that, besides, she was too pretty a woman to have remained two years without a lover, especially in view of the fact that she cordially detested her husband. She said that my heart was not in it. I answered that I did not know whether or not my heart was in it when we had only twenty minutes together in a taxi without curtains in an overlit city."
"Did you talk to her in that ironic tone?" I asked.
"It was even more cutting than that. I was annoyed that she had been able to give me only twenty minutes."
And then he added, "She slashed her face in order to justify her tardiness to her husband, saying she had been in an automobile accident."
This part of the story seemed highly improbable to me, as no woman in love will endanger her beauty. And here was the countess, with a face fair and flawless, where no knife had ever made the slightest scratch.
[February, 1934]
My father was curious about Henry. He invited him to lunch. When Henry arrived, my father said, "He looks like Prokofiev." He was formal, and watched Henry serve his dessert in the finger bowl, and watched him playing his naive Knut Hamsun role. It was Maruca who enjoyed Henry's naturalness and laughed with him, not at him. After lunch she wanted Henry to go with her to the zoo, where she was taking the neighbor's children, and Henry was delighted. My father let them go, as if all of them were children. I was relieved that Henry had not turned into an infuriated giant in a miniature salon, which he does on such occasions. He was sincerely awed by my father. A little later he did explode at the house of Charpentier, the literary critic of the Mercure de France. He insulted everybody.
I read the Jardin des Supplices of Mirbeau and wondered why it left me cold. Realized it was because the description of physical torture was, for me, so much less potent than mental tortures. Physical tortures are banal and familiar. Mental tortures we are only now beginning to delve into. Each one of these physical tortures, transposed into a psychological plane, would be novel. Interpreting each physical torture as having its correlation, analogy, in the psychic. Take, for instance, the peeling of the skin. That could become a symbol for hypersensitiveness. The death by the loudness of the church bells could be the sounds of hallucinations. This became the theme of House of Incest and it helped to coordinate the descriptions of anxieties.
Henry kept my pages on the theory of the dream, atmosphere, etc., at the head of his Book of Dreams. He wrote an imaginative page and then said, "I feel I have not done what you have done all through House of Incest. The abuse of language, the dislocation of it." Struck by my pages on the water life, Atlantide, pre-conscious, prenatal; and then he wrote a paragraph on "everything born of water." A few days later, still inspired by the liquid writing, he writes: "The buildings and the ships are entangled, the beasts rise out of the sea ... slippery motion which is no motion ... downy joy," etc. This time I feel distressed. It is too imitative and not superior. It materializes what I wrote, de-subtilizes it. What can I say? It is a satire. He does not seem to be conscious of it.
This has baffled me for a long time. Henry is the humorist, not I. Yet very often Henry writes, in all seriousness, things which I consider "take-offs," caricatures. Is he unaware of it? They are like parodies of poetry, parodies of ideologies, parodies of criticism, almost a Dadaist mockery of it, but he does not seem to be aware of it. Is it unconscious parody?
The dream world is becoming my speciality. Henry has gathered together all his dreams and is rewriting them, transforming them, expanding them. He wants to use them as a climax to Black Spring. He wants to recapitulate the themes of the book via the dreams. He came to me the first time with two pages which seem
ed off-tone to me. He wanted the animal realism of his dreams, and he introduced vulgar music-hall dialogue. It was not obscene, as some dreams are, but consciously and wordily vulgar. "The obscenity of the dream," I said, "is different. It is one of erotic images, or sensations, but it has no vocabulary. There is no dialogue in the dream, and very few words. The words are condensed like the phrases of poems. The language must be a kind of non-language. It cannot be everyday language. The dream happens without language, beyond language." Then Henry wrote the third part, or the third batch, and experimented with irrational language, getting better and better as he went along, while I watched for the times when he fell out of the dream.
Dear Doctor Rank: What I wanted to say over the telephone was this: I would like to see you when you are well again. And only then. I felt badly when I left you last time to think you were tired and ill. Everyone comes to you and depends on you, and tires you. I was upset to have been one of them.
My father had promised to be truthful with me, to let me be his confidante, and now he was inventing again, as if I were Maruca and could not understand the truth. We had agreed not to try and create for each other an illusion of an exclusive love. When I arrived the next day, after the frivolous lunch and the story of the countess, he had not slept all night thinking he was going to lose me. "And if I lose you, I cannot live any more. You are everything to me. My life was empty before you came. My life is a failure and a tragedy, anyway."
His life? A devoted, slavish wife. A beautiful home. Concert tours, travel, students, admirers, singers coming from all over the world to learn his songs, friends, social life, the life of Paris. He looked deeply sad. His fingers were wandering over the piano keys, hesitantly. "You make me realize how empty my activity is. In not being able to make you happy, I miss the most vital reason for living."
He was again the man I had known in the south of France. But he could not let me be. If I preferred Dostoevsky to Anatole France, he felt that his whole edifice of ideas was being attacked and endangered. He was offended if I did not smoke his brand of cigarettes, if I did not go to all his concerts, if I did not admire all his friends.
Realizing more and more that I did not love him, I felt a strange joy, as if I were witnessing a just punishment for his coldness as a father when I was a child; and this suffering, which in reality I made no effort to inflict, since I kept it a secret, gave me joy. It made me feel that I was balancing in myself the injustices of life, that I was restoring in my own soul a kind of symmetry to the events of life. A spiritual symmetry. A sorrow here, a sorrow there. Abandon yesterday, abandon today. Betrayal today, betrayal tomorrow. A deception here, a deception there. The arithmetic of the unconscious which impelled the balancing of forces.
Was this what Rank meant when he said, in the unconscious there was a need of revenge? That I should hurt my father? But all my life I prevented acts of destruction arising from my unconscious. I wanted to defeat destructiveness and tragedy. To create only illusion.
I did not mind his philandering, but I was eager for the truth. He was as before, but he hated to admit it to himself because of that ideal image he carried in himself, the image of a man who could be so deeply altered by the recovery of a long-lost daughter that his career as a Don Juan came to an abrupt end.
"I am not asking for anything," I said, "except that you be real."
"Now tell me all that your mother used to tell me. Tell me I don't know how to love, that I am artificial and superficial."
He was quarreling not with me, but with his past! Behind me stood my mother. He had been afraid that his daughter would condemn him too.
I could not see him clearly any more.
In that salon with its stained-glass windows, its highly polished floor, its dark couches rooted into deep Arabian rugs, its soft lights and precious books, there was only a fashionable musician bowing.
Although in reality he had not abandoned me, I felt he had passed into another world I would not follow him into.
I am keeping the house at Louveciennes. To live in it from April to October, to shut it in the winter and live in Paris. The fear of losing Louveciennes was a great torment to me. Home. A hearth.
I finished the novel (Winter of Artifice).
Henry read half of it and said it was terribly human and more than human. Depth and sincerity. Accepts my stripped, bare, essence writing, a kind of stylization again due to my great condensations. Said it revealed woman, a feminine attitude, more than any book he had ever read.
It is I who stand for life now, while Henry is entirely possessed by his demon. It is I who make him taste meals, walk, relax, go to movies, sit in cafés. He is writing Part One of the book on Lawrence, after immense, fantastic efforts at synthesis and construction, from notes and quotations and loose fragments, some of them written while June was here, others in Louveciennes, others in Clichy, others in various hotels in Paris. A gigantic task. His philosophy, his criticism, his attitude. All this he asserts now, confronting Murray, Spengler, and encompassing all of Lawrence as Lawrence was never encompassed. I have never seen him so possessed. He lives entirely in a world of ideas. It is I who must play the role of preserver of life and pleasure. He is burning up. What an intense two weeks. A book factory. He is disillusioned with Lowenfels. When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time his world had not been born yet.
I break down under criticism. Cannot take it.
Reacted well. Next day broke up the whole book and made a different plan for Part One, which Henry did not like. I tried unsuccessfully to weld the fantastic and the real, the plain and the enameled style. Failed because I castrated the poetry and made the plain writing sound false. Henry sensed the compromise. Great talk, in which he urged me to extremes, to combat the world, to face the resistance to House of Incest, the antagonism of Hélène Boussinesq, Joaquin, Bradley, Steele. To obey my own integrity, to fuse the two aspects of myself which I insisted must be kept apart.
It is when I am timid that I am ineffectual. Through timidity I also condense, contract, like a visitor who does not dare to stay very long for fear of boring, and makes speeches quickly.
Once again Henry roused my fighting spirit and my strength. Forced me to write a bigger book. Goaded me.
Music is unformulated; that is why it is such a blessing to hear after a struggle with formulation.
Writing now shows the pains of childbearing. No joy. Just pain, sweat, exhaustion. It saps the blood. It is a curse. Real throes. No one knows this but the true writer. The straining of nerves, the relation between the body's well-being and output, the struggle to escape from the grip of conscious ideas, the rest, to renew one's self So hard. What a grip on one's soul, one's guts, everything.
I yearn to be delivered of this book. It is devouring me.
[March, 1934]
As I rode to my father's house, I knew I would explode and that I would not let him go to Spain thinking he had been able to deceive me as he deceives Maruca. Through a series of coincidences, I heard about my father's latest escapades. He was taking a virgin violinist with him on tour but arranged to be alone with her, not traveling with the manager or the cellist.
I wrote the scene straight into the novel, not the diary:
"I wanted the truth between us, Father."
But he refused to admit he had been lying. He was pale with anger. No one ever doubted him before, he said. To be doubted blinded him with anger; he was not concerned with the falsity of the situation. He was concerned with the injury and insult I was guilty of, by doubting him.
"You're demolishing everything," he said.
"What I'm demolishing was not solid," I said. "Let's make a new beginning. We created nothing together except a sand-pile of pretenses into which both of us sink, now and then, with doubts. I am not a child, I cannot believe your stories. We both needed one person to whom we could tell the truth. If we had been real friends, been able to confide in each other, I would not ha
ve needed Dr. Rank."
He grew still more pale and angry. What shone out of his eyes was pride in his stories, pride in his ideal self, pride in his delusions. And he was offended, like an actor offended at not having convinced his audience. He did not stop to ask himself if I were right. I could not be right. I could see that, for a moment at any rate, he believed implicitly in the stories he had told me. If he had not believed them so firmly he would have been humiliated to see himself as a poor comedian, a man who could not deceive his own daughter.
"You should not be offended," I said. "Not to be able to deceive your own daughter is no disgrace. It is precisely because I have told you so many lies that I myself cannot be lied to."
"Now you are accusing me of being a Don Juan."
"I accuse you of nothing, I am only asking for the truth."
"What truth? I am a moral being."
"That's too bad. I thought we were above questions of good and evil. I am not saying you are bad. That does not concern me. I am only saying that you are false with me. I have too much intuition."
"Go on," he said, "now tell me I have no talent, tell me I do not know how to love, tell me I am an egotist, tell me all that your mother used to tell me."
"I have never believed any of those things."
But suddenly I stopped. I knew my father was not seeing me any more, but always that judge, that past which made him so uneasy. I felt as if I were not myself any more, but my mother, with a body tired with giving and serving, rebelling at his selfishness and irresponsibility. I felt my mother's anger and despair. For the first time, my own image of my father fell to the floor. I saw my mother's image. I saw the child in him who demanded all love and did not know how to love in return. I saw the child incapable of an act of protectiveness, or self-denial. I saw the child hiding behind her courage, the same child now hiding behind Maruca's protection. I was my mother telling him that, as a human being and as a father, as a hus band, he was a failure. And perhaps she had told him, too, that as a musician he had not given enough to justify his limitations as a human being. All his life he had played with people, with love, played at love, played at being a concert pianist, playing at composing, playing; because to no one or to nothing could he give his entire soul.