by Anais Nin
I like Rank better serious than laughing. He does not know how to laugh. His pranks are inner pranks of the mind, his humor is paradox, the reversal of ideas, the trickeries and trapeze stunts of thoughts. I like his silent humor, his thought humor, but in life he is inexperienced. To living he brings nothing. The details of life which so fascinate Henry, he overlooks. The comic face of a passer-by, the color of a house, the savor of small things. Physical, visible life. He disregards appearance, color, detail. His life is in abstractions.
When caring ceases, when one no longer struggles to build solidly, indestructibly, no longer erects cathedrals of faithfulness to the past, cathedrals of emotion, when one enters the realms of laxity, areas of ironic indifference and resignation, letting life flow with a certain emotional negligence, one may attain states of nirvana, dreaminess, beatitudes of another kind.
Rank has to proceed immediately to extract the meaning or the essence. Too swift a disposal of the flowers which are to be pressed into perfume. Il pense sa vie. His true life may be in the analysis of it. He has no enjoyment of the flower.
***
I get up with great vivacity, dress in fresh and colorful things, rush in a bus to the Cité Universitaire, walk bareheaded in the sun. I greet Rank before we enter the lecture hall. Hilaire Hiler sits at my side. The intellectual nourishment was null. Everyone interrupted Rank, asked obvious questions, and created such a nursery ambiance that it made me furious.
Hilaire Hiler and I went to lunch at a little bistro. We talked vividly. He is emotional, violent and tough. Talked about his father, who is half American Indian, half Jew. Hiler is six feet tall, his father was small. He was a painter too, he exerted a tremendous tyranny over Hilaire. At the same time, Hilaire admires him. His attitude towards psychoanalysis is that it saved his life and therefore he wants to impart it, spread it, practice it. It is sacerdotal. When we returned, Rank talked well and refused a question-and-answer period. He returned my preface to Tropic of Cancer, saying: "Wonderful. Too good, too good for the world."
I saw Bradley. Knopf rejected Winter of Artifice, but in flattering terms. Bradley accepts me, but criticizes my condensation. When he asks me for more details I say I believe in Japanese painting. He says my novel is written like a play, at times. I say I believe in condensation. I hate stuffing. Bradley attacks my new profession. He says I must stick to writing. I hold my ground. I want to earn my living by psychoanalysis, so that I may always write as I wish to, never make concessions. And this experience, I say, is valuable to a writer anyway. It is like a doctor's life. It opens up people's secret lives, and what can be more interesting than that to a novelist?
The next morning, the sun, the Grecian order of the Cité Universitaire, at the end of the city, like the ramparts of a new city as yet incomplete, with only the sky beyond. The sun. I meet Rank at the café for a coffee. I have lunch with Hilaire Hiler, who has come all dressed up for me. I meet Dr. Frankenstein, who is delicate, and feminine, and dreamy. I spend four hours on psychoanalytical studies. I hear about the classification of disease, about Bergson from Minkowski. But I am more moved by life, by the stories of Hilaire's life.
I am like a person turned inside out, flowering to the utmost, through my senses, mind, emotions. I wear a big white straw hat at a rakish angle. I discover a whole forest of strange new flowers. No ideologies. The realm of pure senses. Hiler's coarseness, Frankenstein's delicacy, a tropical atmosphere in the coldest possible place, flowering under the eyes of twenty withered schoolteachers. The woman is turned inside out, and all this wealth that was once secret is pouring out. I have an immense hunger for life. I would like to be in so many places. I would like to be traveling and roaming and vagabonding. I would like to be writing. I would like to be dancing somewhere in the South. I would like to go on a drunk with Hiler, I would like to go to Zurich and seduce Jung. I would like to meet the whole world at once.
Rank so alert, brisk, tense, swift, witty. Hiler moody. Seminar yields nothing. There are no answering sparks. Rank exerts himself, but wearies of the deadpan faces, and the monosyllabic questions. A B C D E F.
His talk is disruptive and baffling to the others. He undermines conventional psychoanalysis.
I believe that what he has seen is the ultimate error of all philosophies and systems of ideas. He is afraid of the truth he has discovered. It does not help him to live, to heal, or to teach.
Marguerite says that the analyst has been made to play the role of God. He is imagined to be all-knowing, all-forgiving. But this role is destructive to a man.
I never go to the very end of my experiences; I did not take drugs with June, or rebel destructively as Henry does: I stop somewhere to write the novel. The novel is the aboutissement. I did not go to the very end with my father, in an experience of destructive hatred and antagonism. I created a reconciliation and I am writing a novel of hatred.
When a philosopher like Rank begins to doubt ideologies, what can he do? By now, whatever gifts he may have had for life are atrophied.
I write novels, perhaps, to supply the deficiencies of life itself. The novel was better than taking drugs with June and destroying my health. It was my superior drug. When life turns into an arid desert, I stop. Rebellion against my father. War with my father's values. A futile waste of emotions which damage other human beings. Better to write Winter of Artifice. Rebellions thought out, instead of wreaked upon others. I let June go to the very end of her perversities.
We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out.
Hiler's big eyes have a heavy way of turning in upon their sockets. He seems to be looking over the rim of his own eyes, chin down. They are heavy and sad. He is a dark animal. How will he fare in the lucid world of analysis?
Analysis is the very thing I did not want now. Just when I have learned not to clutch at the perfume of flowers, not to touch the breath of the dew, not to tear curtains off, not to extract essences from petals, to let exaltation and dew rise, sweep by, vanish. The perfume of hours distilled only in silence, the heavy perfume of mysteries untouched by human fingers. Flesh touching flesh generates a perfume, while the friction of words generates only pain and division. To formulate without destroying with the mind, without tampering, without killing, without withering. That is what I have learned by living, that delicacy and awe of the senses, that respect for the perfume. It will become my law in writing. All that was pushed into the laboratory, dissected under a hospital-naked light, pushed into clarity and rationality, withered. The beautiful, living and moving, dark things that I destroyed in passing from the nebulous realms of pure dreaming to a realization of the dream. Because I did not bring into life the same aura of blindness, the silences, the same empty spaces, the shreds, and the iridescence of images as they appear in dreams.
I think it is the poet in me affirming itself because of the struggle against psychoanalysis. I live, I laugh, I dramatize, I love in the very heart of Beaudoin's topography of psychoanalysis, of Rank's theory on the birth trauma, Dr. Frankenstein's classification of mental diseases. I sit next to sensual Hiler who has invited me to be his mistress, and if not his mistress, then would I be his analyst, and if I would not be his analyst, would I smoke kief with him?
Finished translation of Volume One of diary into English.
The life of the unconscious is the life without pattern, continuity, or rigidity. It approximates the dream. It is pure flow. It is what I said in my preface to Tropic of Cancer: "It is not a question of heroism but of flow."
Henry has been weeping and laughing over Winter of Artifice. Says he would not change anything about me if he could.
The Guicciardis gave my novel to Cornelia Vanderbilt. Horace thought she would like it because she has red hair.
Bradley comments on my preface to Tropic of Cancer: "Very good, very good. Perfect. But certainly you intellectualize the book, you see it as your generation sees things. I would have been more simple, talked merely about the gusto and
love of life and the fine descriptions of Paris. But you see so much more than I ever saw. Yet one cannot say it is not there. It is certainly a preface which would make one want to read the book."
I begged Rank to let me give up the psychoanalytical school. All he said was, "I will miss you."
I went again just to see that unhappy man's eyes light up with pleasure and gratitude.
While at the Cité Universitaire, I experienced my first knowledge of the monstrous reality outside, out in the world, the cause of D. H. Lawrence's and Henry's ravings and railings on the disintegration of the world. Doom! Historical and political. Pessimism. Suicides. The concrete anxieties of men losing power and money. That I learned at the school! I saw the headlines, I saw families broken apart by economic dramas, I saw the exodus of Americans, the changes and havocs brought on by world conditions. Individual lives shaken, poisoned, altered. Rank suddenly ruined financially, losing his home, moving, forced to go to America. The struggle and instability of it all. I was overwhelmed. And then, with greater, more furious, more desperate stubbornness I continued to build my individual life, as if it were a Noah's Ark for the drowning. I refused to share the universal pessimism and inertia.
Rank introduced me to a sculptress he admires, Chana Orloff. She has a vast studio at the Villa Seurat. A dead-end street with colorful small villas like an Italian street. The trees from the small yards overhang balconies and big studio windows. The houses are peaked, with slanting skylight windows.
As he took me to visit her, he told me her story. Chana Orloff was always sculpturing pregnant women. She loved to study what happened to women's bodies. Her feeling about motherhood was entirely confined to the image of carrying, holding, extending, and preserving. She made a wish at the time, that if she ever had a child, he should need her. She envisaged motherhood as nursing, protecting, serving. She did not say "need her forever." But she may have thought it. When she did have a child, a son, he was born crippled! He lived in a wheelchair. Chana Orloff was shattered with guilt. She felt it was her wish which had caused this. It was to deliver herself of this haunting guilt that she had visited Rank.
The studio was filled with statues of women. They were larger than nature and in all the various stages of pregnancy. It was oppressive!
Chana Orloff wanted to sculpture my head and Rank promised her I would come.
I thought of all those children Chana Orloff wanted to bring into this despairing world, this world going to pieces under our eyes.
My father says: "Your life is all fireworks."
I make him laugh now, with my letters full of verve. He can no longer stifle me.
The despair of the world. Rank's tragic eyes. His understanding is infinite, like the sea. But I have the sensation of sailing alone on it. He is immense and deep but not personified, not in life. Grand stretches of silence, of the unlived, of the non-human. Suddenly he becomes very distinct, clear, when he formulates an idea about Henry's book on Lawrence (he is writing always about Henry Miller, never about Lawrence) or about woman's psychology (woman has had to conceal her real self in order to survive). Man wanted a double, a twin, a half of himself only, in woman. His thought, then, is sharp and acute.
I see a whole cycle of creation closing upon woman, the study of woman. I see all the roads of philosophy, the history of art, morphology, psychology, all converging to clear up the mystery of woman.
I said good-bye to the psychoanalytical school exactly as I said good-bye to Wadley High School when I was sixteen and I walked out after a few days attendance. What is it I salvage from mediocrity, wholesale ideas, stereotypes? My individual world, in which I grow faster, learn more, and live more deeply. I stay home and copy twenty-five pages of my Double book. But I kept the friends I made. I invited them to dinner. Miss Fleming like a mock-orange flower, Dr. Frankenstein grey-haired, intelligent, Hiler and his clownish moods. An amusing evening, a split evening, Hiler pulling towards idiocy, pranks, and Marguerite towards astrology; Marguerite teaching the women astrology, while Hiler dances with me. Hiler saying while we dance: "Why don't you come and smoke kief with me?" Marguerite looking quite noble, refined, distinct, intact. Hiler so puffed, worn, stained with living, pursuing Miss Fleming the virgin, and me at the same time. Hiler all worn at the edges.
I got a grateful letter from Bradley for the day he spent here in Louveciennes, and a note from Bone asking if he can come.
I put back into the vault two more copies of the diary.
I visit Henry. When I am alone now I am not happy. Anxiety devours me. Outside, with friends, whirling activities, overfull days, I can cure an ineradicable melancholy.
This diary is my kief, hashish, and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. Instead of writing a novel, I lie back with this book and a pen, and dream, and indulge in refractions and defractions, I can turn away from reality into the reflections and dreams it projects, and this driving, impelling fever which keeps me tense and wide-awake during the day is dissolved in improvisations, in contemplations. I must relive my life in the dream. The dream is my only life. I see in the echoes and reverberations the transfigurations which alone keep wonder pure. Otherwise all magic is lost. Otherwise life shows its deformities and the homeliness becomes rust. My drug. Covering all things with a mist of smoke, deforming and transforming as the night does. All matter must be fused this way through the lens of my vice or the rust of living would slow down my rhythm to a sob.
Compared with Rank, Henry seems pale and passive. Rank is active and explosive. He takes the lead.
In the climate of his certainties, his leadership, there is a rest from doubt. He has doubts about ideas, but none about the significance of life and character and actions.
I am posing for Chana Orloff every afternoon, and Rank sometimes drops in and talks. The statues are all around us, big, white, pregnant, bulging women, a forest of women. Round white plaster flesh, ripe breasts, maternity, abundance. And sometimes, while we are sitting there, Chana Orloff's son arrives, and we hear the creaking of the wheels of his wheelchair and its bumping against the door.
Rank is talking about his despair. He cannot earn a living in France. He may have to accept an offer from America. He does not want to leave. The French, he says, are not neurotic. They have accepted the separation between love and passion. They maintain their family unit, balanced, and faithfulness to marriage, children, home. But they do not give up passion. They have no conflict. Their interest in psychoanalysis is mild. Rank says, "In France I was beginning to live. My creation is done. I have written enough. I want to live." But the pressure of reality is terrible, his wife, his daughter, his future.
I started to write a letter to my father and I was stopped by sobbing. Frustration and despair. He is no father. I loved an image of him which did not exist. When he is away, this image begins to obsess me. It invades me, and I begin to believe in it again. It is destroyed each time I see him. When I want to write him, I don't know who I am writing to, an imaginary father or a real one.
I began to explore Villa Seurat. It is a charming street. The houses are all small, and in various colors of stucco. Most of them have studio windows. Some are private and some are divided into apartments. Chaim Soutine once lived there. People remember how he walked along the narrow sidewalk, always grazing the walls. Trees grow in the backyards, and sometimes in the front. The street is cobblestone and as the sidewalk is so narrow, one often walks in the middle.
I found a studio there for Henry. It is on the top floor. A big studio room, with skylight windows, and a small bedroom with a balcony. The kitchen is very small, inside of a closet. But the studio is joyous and light. Henry is tremendously excited about the idea of living there.
Café Alésia. Artificial geraniums. Many mirrors. Jazz. All red and white. Rank arrives, so alert and quick, and he comes talking about magic. Psychotherapy is magic. The neurotic is a passive magician. Child is a magician who expects magic. And I had come with the word magic on my lips. I said something
later about Allendy having lost his magic.
"Because he put it into astrology and took it out of psychoanalysis."
He told his students, "In America I may be burned for this magic theory."
He was inspired, suddenly illumined, full of ideas, bright.
We talked about social psychology and the Double. I asked him why we only remember Robinson Crusoe on his island, whereas two-thirds of the book was really about Robinson Crusoe's travel-ings after he left the island. He said it was because all of us would like to live on an island!
Freud called him an enfant terrible. He loves to upset and disturb.
What he wants me to consider is this: if I could come to New York for a few months, I could give him the courage to make a new start, and he would train me intensively so that I could practice psychoanalysis, and be independent.
"I denied myself life before, or it was denied me, first by my parents, then Freud, then my wife."