Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  I was saying, "I am only asking you to be honest with yourself and with me. I admit when I lie. I am not asking for anything except that we live without a mask."

  "Now say I am superficial."

  "At this moment, you are. I wanted you to face me and be truthful."

  It seemed to me that my father was not quarreling with me, but with his past, that what was coming to light now was his underlying feeling of guilt towards my mother. If he saw in me now an avenger, it was only because of his fear that his daughter might accuse him too. Against my judgment he had erected a huge defense: the approbation of the rest of the world. But, in himself, he had never quite resolved the right and the wrong. He too was driven now by a compulsion to say things he never intended to say, to make me a symbol of the one who had come to punish, to expose his deceptions, to prove his worthlessness. And this was not the meaning of my struggle with him. I had not come to judge him but to dissolve the falsities! He feared so much that I had come to say: "The four persons you deserted in order to live your own life, to save yourself, were crippled," that he did not hear my real words.

  We could not understand each other. We were gesticulating in space. Gestures of despair and anger. My father pacing up and down, angry because of my doubts of him.

  No more warmth or flow. All communication paralyzed by the falsity.

  And I was thinking: perhaps I stopped loving my father long ago. What remained was slavery to a pattern.

  Certain gestures made in childhood seem to have eternal repercussions. Such was the gesture I had made to keep my father from leaving, grasping his coat and holding on to it so fiercely that I had to be torn away. This gesture of despair seemed to prolong itself all through life. I repeated it blindly, fearing always that everything I loved would be lost. It was hard for me to believe that this father I was still trying to hold on to was no longer real or important, that the coat I was touching was not warm, that the body of him was not warm, not human, that my tragic desire and quest had come to an end, and that my love had died.

  Maruca will take care of him. I am here to bring him to life again, out of his artificial, fake, timorous, marginal life. To taunt and drive him out of his downy shelter, out of his self-deceptions, dishonesties, idealizations. The fakeness in us, the poses, the airs, the vanities, the comedians. As Joaquin put it so well: "You and I quarrel not because we are different, but because when you are human, real, my 'chichi' soul attacks you, and when you are full of 'chichi' then my real, human side wants to show you up."

  Dream: A fire, which many men are trying to quench. I see them all battling with it, and I hear their moans as they work, because of the intensity of the fire. I know secretly they should give up the fight because there is something burning there, a fuel of terrifically concentrated power, a condensed, unquenchable liquid. I wonder why the men don't realize it and give up.

  My father became ill after our scene. He took refuge in illness. He received me in bed, with great theatrical ritual. Maruca was at his bedside. His voice was weak. In front of her he said, "Anaïs thinks I am running off with a virgin violinist of seventeen."

  Maruca smiled benignly. "Your father is a simple, loyal, truthful, honest man."

  This comedy was unbearable. The bland, hypocritical angel, who knew that I knew all the details of the "virgin's" downfall. And that they were going to Algeria and Morocco. But I was at the end of my strength, and I left them, sobbing uncontrollably, as if I were parting from all my hopes at once, as if he had died. I parted from my desires for an honest, absolute relationship. He wants gay lies. He is weak and puerile.

  Back to the diary, loneliness. Isolation. Writing.

  So my father has gone on tour, and I will think of him as one does of a minuet, the Pare de Versailles, a Mozartian sonata.

  Rewrote my novel three times.

  I end the novel ironically.

  Now that there will not be a deep understanding between my father and me, I am weary of life. I seem to have come to a standstill. The only avenue is art. Books and more books.

  Henry fights my parables, my sibylline tongue, my hieroglyphs, my telegraphic and stenographic style. It takes great courage to criticize me. I fight like a demon.

  Marguerite reads it all and says: "Congratulations. It is really visionary writing. Unique."

  I got up singing and wrote pages on June and me walking over dead leaves, weeping. June talking about God. Henry has taught me to linger, to wrestle, to be patient.

  I write my father a whimsical letter, all fluff, whipped cream and froth.

  Return to Louveciennes for Easter holidays.

  Jack Kahane has failed in business as well as in true loyalty to Henry. Bradley has lost interest in him. Rather than see him frustrated again, I will pay for publication of Cancer. None will go all the way with him. We felt free. They all worry about money, fear of risk, etc.

  Cleaned the whole house from top to bottom, from attic to cellar. Cooking in earnest. Hands soiled and spoiled. But every closet, every nook and corner, tidy and clean.

  Invited Rank to dinner.

  A disappointing evening. Mrs. Rank is negative, and spent her evening snipping everybody's wings. We were having dinner in the garden. Henry was there too. Rank talked volubly and fully, like his books. Henry broke down the tensions with his enjoyment of food and wine. Mrs. Rank cold and brittle. Rank put his peaches in his champagne, as they do in Vienna. He became very gay.

  Planning a trip to London for Henry's book.

  Dinners: for an Egyptian etymologist, a moronic millionaire, a young unborn novelist, Jeanne, etc.

  Henry has moved to the heart of Paris in the populous Cadet district. Whores, Arabs, Spaniards, pimps, artists, actors, vaudevillians, night-club singers.

  Henry, in the Hotel Havana, is writing about dung, ulcers, chancres, disease. Why? He is writing the final version of Tropic of Cancer.

  [April, 1934]

  I go to London alone. To see what I can do for Tropic of Cancer.

  Before I left, I also won Kahane by a marvelous speech, and he will publish Henry, only I pay for the printing. I was full of courage and determination.

  On the crest of this courage I visited Sylvia Beach, for Henry, Anne Green, Rank.

  I sit on a camp stool, second class, on deck, tenderly watched by a young English sailor.

  I carry in my music-holder Henry's manuscripts, Self-Portrait [Black Spring] and study of D. H. Lawrence.

  The sun on the deck, dreams.

  I had an evening alone in London. I went to the Lyric Theatre to see Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt. Captivated by the beauty of Fontanne, her waxy face and her deep, suggestive acting. Curious woman. With hands like ivy growing around one, choking one in a dream of a mysterious, non-human love. The theme was taken from psychoanalysis. Cured of the past, but one sleeps with it, nevertheless. One goes to bed with one's disillusions, just the same. That was the moral. Life stronger than awareness of the mind. The crutches, the hunchbacks, the multiple cripples of our dreams, the scars on them, all of them create a human passion. It is not in heaven that marriages are made. Only when the dreams die do you get genuine copulation. It is the dreams which make fusion impossible. You marry the day you realize the human defects of your love.

  I found myself walking the streets, fascinated with houses, windows, doorways, by the face of a bootblack, by a whore, by the dreary rain, by a gaudy dinner at the Regent's Palace.

  A friend took me to see Charles Laughton in Macbeth. He was moving, and sensual, with his great contrasts of softness and cockiness, his tousled hair and Negroid lips. He may not have been a proper Macbeth, not a man who would die of mental and spiritual disease, but he was a Macbeth who really groaned and made one fear, and his cruelty was convincing.

  When we visited him afterwards, he was sitting crushed and limp. He expressed a strong condemnation of himself. "I am just not built to portray Macbeth." I was amazed at his humility. His depreciation of himself.

  Paris. I
walk the streets. I tease Henry for filling my head with streets, names of streets. I say, "In place of thoughts now, I carry the name of a new street. I think about streets. Riding in the bus, I watch them. I have no ideas. I just watch, and look, and listen. Rue du Faubourg du Temple. Square Montholon. What do you have when you have the name of a street?"

  "Nothing," said Henry.

  My head is empty now, it is full of streets.

  One may have nothing when one has the name of a street, but one possesses a street in place of a thought; and slowly the earth, the street, the rivers, gain ground, fill the mind with noise, odors, pictures, and the inner life recedes, shrinks. This advance of life, this recession of meditation, was my salvation. Every street displaced a futile yearning, a regret, a brooding, a self-devouring meal. The Square Montholon triumphs over the long hours I spent constructing an imaginary, ideal communion with my father. Smells, automobile horns, and the eddies of traffic dispel the ghosts. I am letting myself live, I eat in all the restaurants of Paris. I go to all the movies, to all the theatres, I want to know many people, possess a map of realities as Henry possesses his map of Paris and of Brooklyn.

  A devouring passion for reality, because my imaginary world is so immense it can never be annihilated. Only it must not be allowed to devour me.

  Out. I am always out. With everybody. Last night, I did get sad in the beautiful Scheherazade night club with the wrong people. I pinch myself. Allons donc, streets, you're on the street at last, walking along, along the crowded streets of Henry's crowded books. External and internal, to be balanced, nurturing each other, or else the internal eats me, like rust. Introspection almost devoured me. Henry saved me. He took me down into the street. It is enough that a few hours ago I was obliged to think about my father in order to write about him. It is enough, enough. Come Square Montholon, Boulevard Jean Jaurès, Rue Saint-Martin, like merry dice dancing in my empty head. It is I who taught Henry that streets in themselves were of no interest. He accumulated descriptions but I felt they needed to be the décor for some drama, some emotion. It is I who awakened the man who walked through the streets. No more anonymous maps, but maps of both form and content, matter and significance, streets and the men who walk through them.

  Restless. Looking again for intensity, fever, turmoil. Everything seems to move too slowly ... slowly.

  My life is full. I am translating Volume One of the diary. I wrote about the incident of looking for Russian-style pajamas for my father. I wrote for House of Incest the visit to the painting of "Lot and His Daughter" at the Louvre with Artaud. Whenever I feel sadness about my father, I write. When I yearn for him, I write. When I feel regrets, I write.

  Bloom. There is a bloom on everything and on everybody. Happiness. The soft bloom of happiness. Soft breezes, talk like summer breezes, love like ripe flowers, new dresses like new grass. The round curves and smells of summer. Idyllic. Inside the happiness, the worm, the worm of imagination, craving, expecting, searching. Has pain made too deep a scar so that I do not feel the gentle touch of happiness? The flesh too scarred, too coarse-grained, to feel the softness of the summer? Only another wound can make it tremble. I am not made for happiness. It is like sleep.

  In the mail, a letter with Rank's statement, after reading Henry's book on Lawrence: "But where is Henry in all this?" He found pages in which Henry plagiarized him, but admitted Henry had expressed it better. He found that whatever Henry constructed on one page, he destroyed on the following one. I then realized how Henry had unconsciously escaped beyond my judgment by entering the world of Spengler and Rank and overwhelming me with grandiloquence and gigantism, with enormity and massive constructions, imposing ideas, philosophic systems. I was finally blinded by Henry's long speeches, accumulation of notes, enormous amount of quotations, etc. Has Henry deceived himself as well as me? Have we lived in an immense illusion? He did say once: "I wonder whether I am saying something."

  Of course, I am not yet persuaded that Henry has produced nothing in the Lawrence book. I feel there is an uncreated, unformulated writer struggling to be born.

  On Tuesday I decided to become an analyst. It would make me financially independent, and express my gift for reading character and desire to help others.

  I rushed to get my hyacinth-blue dress from the cleaner's and to Rank to tell him of my decision.

  He thought my desire to become a psychoanalyst really meant I was identifying with him, wanted to be him.

  He would test my sincerity. I would have to study with him at the Cité Universitaire.

  Rank is willful, firm, whole. I feel the dynamite in him, a great depth of emotion unified and concentrated.

  [June, 1934]

  Just outside the gate of Paris, on a broad boulevard, a new and modern Paris, the Cité Universitaire, clean and white and cubistic.

  I did not want to go to the Psychological Center. But I had told Rank I would come, and I went for his sake.

  As I walked in the sun, I fell into a Grecian mood—life of the body blossoming full in the fragrance of philosophy.

  The conference room, with its schoolroom desks, and Rank standing before the blackboard. There are about fifteen teachers. Two of the women have sagging breasts, and hair on their lips. The men, three of them: one a deadpan; one who looks like an artist, and turned out to be Hilaire Hiler; and the third a European with a sly expression. Rank—black-eyed, small and soft hands moving as he speaks, a dolorous expression. Hilaire Hiler is big, loud, overflowing. Mr. Bone, the cool one, has a high brow, laughing eyes, a stiff poise. The conference is like the droning of a bee. Words. Words. Words. I am looking at a window open on a garden. It is a very low window. I am hungry for the sunlight, the trees, the grass. As soon as the lecture is over I move towards the window. Hilaire Hiler offers me a cigarette. "We'll smoke it outside," I say, and I sit on the window sill, swing my legs over it, and leap out into the garden. A moment after I leap out, out come Rank and Dr. Bone by the same route. We talk, Hilaire Hiler tells me some of his troubles. They have to do with his ears. He was born with huge ears, half the size of his head. They stood out. They were an object of ridicule. They made a monster of him. He did not dare expect love from women. He only trusted prostitutes. Then his ears were operated upon by a specialist who had much practice from plastic surgery on wounded soldiers, the Gueules Cassées, after the war. He made his ears look almost normal. They were no longer noticeable. Hilaire Hiler had, all his life, attributed his complexes, inferiorities, difficulties in relationships, to his ears. He felt if he overcame this handicap his life would be changed. When the ears became normal, he expected a total change in his feelings towards people. But the psychic state did not change as quickly, as radically. He did not become, overnight, a confident man, sure of love, bold in courting, natural, easygoing. The change was external. The inner pattern was set, and as if engraved on his unconscious. He refused then to continue psychoanalytical help. He felt he should not need it, a man with normal ears. Why should a man with normal ears need help to live? He had decided to become an analyst. Painting was not a way to earn a living. He wanted to have a dignified profession. That was why he was here today, following Dr. Rank's courses. He was not sure he understood Dr. Rank's theories. Rank talks much more like a writer, an artist, a poet.

  It is time to go in. Someone has placed a chair near the window to make returning easier. Rank helps me down. He whispers to me, "How I loved your doing that, leaping out of the window! You could not return to nature quickly enough!"

  The discussions after the lecture are pragmatic, dull, prosaic, factual, all craft and technique. Americans are never interested in abstract thought, never attracted by the idea of exercising the intelligence and the imagination for the pleasure of discovery, of the process itself, as they exercise their bodies for a physical pleasure. No. It must be a practical knowledge, applied immediately, immediately useful. Pure ideas, pure speculation, pure exploration without conclusions do not interest them. Rank looms too big, with his t
alk about cosmological knowledge, his non-conformism, his subtlety, his paradoxes. Listening to him, I can perceive the brilliant philosopher and the dangerous enemy of Freudism.

  There is tragedy at the bottom of his black eyes.

  At the end of the talk, Dr. Bone comes up to me, asks me to help him raise the level of the discussions. He looks ironic, amusing, smart. He asks me if I will have lunch with him. But I tell him I am not free. When Rank asks me later, then I accept, to meet him at the Café Zeyer.

  He comes scurrying. Orders chicken. It is incongruous, his sitting there among the mirrors, the gilded columns, the red plush seats.

  I accept life as it is, the ugliness, the inadequacies, the ironies, for the sake of joy, for the sake of life. It is a comedy. It is slightly ridiculous and full of homeliness. The homeliness which my father repudiated at the cost of naturalness. Today I laughed. I let others care. I shift the burden.

  In the very center of the Carnival, I began to think of a Cathedral. An immense Cathedral loomed in the heart of my light joys, the opposite of flow. I used to build cathedrals, cathedrals of sentiment, for love, for love of men, for love as prayer, love as communion, with a great sense of continuity and detail and enduringness. Built against the flux and mobility of life, in defiance of it. Then with Henry, with June, with analysis, with Rank, I began to flow, not to build. Yesterday, flow seemed so easy. Pure flow and enjoyment of life leave me thirsty. I begin to think of Cathedrals. Why? I had the medieval faith needed for great constructions, the fervor and exaltation. I build up human relationships with divine care. With sacrifices, lies, deceptions, I build up continuity, permanence.