Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 4

by Anais Nin

  Once one has used such words as "passion" and "friendship," one realizes how far Anai's Nin has gone in breaking up these clichés that we use for the dynamics of emotion. Though she owes something to Freud, as she does to Lawrence, she has worked out her own system of dynamics, and gives us a picture, quite distinct from that of any other writer, of the confusions that result to our emotions from the uncertainty of our capacity to identify the kind of love that we tend to imagine with our actual sexual contacts, and of the ambivalent attractions and repulsions that are so hard on contemporary nerves.

  Interesting though This Hunger is and charming though Under a Glass Bell was, I feel sure that Ana'is Nin has still hardly begun to get out of her intelligence and talent the writing that they ought to produce. This new book, like the one before it, has been published by Anai's Nin herself. Anai's Nin is at present a special cult, when she ought to have a general public.

  Diana Trilling in The Nation:

  ...The volume contains three stories, connected by the fact that each of them is about a gravely maladjusted woman hungering for affection. The first, Hejda, is about an Oriental girl who emerges from her veils to become something of an exhibitionist. The second, Stella, is about a movie star unable to love because of her excessive need to be reassured that she is loved. The third and most complicated, bearing the names of two women, Lillian and Djuna, is mostly about Lillian, a woman of conspicuous energy, confused—as far as I can make out—between the need to protect and her need to be protected.

  I refer to the three pieces as stories. Actually, however, while Miss Nin's narrative borrows the manner of fiction, they are much more like case histories than like short fiction of any sort.

  Miss Nin's characters have many of the conventional appurtenances of fictional life: they have been born, presumably they live and will die; they look a certain way; they have friends, money, sexual relationships, even children. But they exist for the author only as the sum of their clinically significant emotional responses; we are made aware only of such activities, physical surroundings, and encounters with other people as Miss Nin conceives to be relevant to their psychic health.

  Every writer establishes a role for herself in her books, and Miss Nin's role is psychoanalyst to her group of typical women. Her sole concern with her characters—I had almost said patients—is with the formation and expression of their symptoms, and what goes on in the rest of their lives she rigorously ignores.

  For instance, we are told of Hejda that, having been born in the Orient, her face was veiled during her early years, but we are not told the name of the country of her birth; or in connection with Lillian, Miss Nin suddenly mentions a husband and children, but because neither husband nor children influence Lillian's emotional development Miss Nin doesn't consider it pertinent to tell us anything about them. So much abstraction of her characters from the context of their real lives, together with so much specific detail when it suits Miss Nin's purpose to be specific, gives a certain surrealist quality to her stories. But her approach is not properly described as surrealist, since, in the instance of each woman Miss Nin is primarily concerned to lay out a case.

  The method of This Hunger is, as I say, the method of the clinical history, but with two important differences—one, that Miss Nin relies for effect not only on her clinical observations and conclusions, but also on her literary skill; and two, that whereas it is the intention of the writer of a case history only to add to our clinical knowledge, and if any wider comment is present it is present only by happy accident, it is the first intention of Miss Nin to make a full-sized literary comment upon life. And yet I find This Hunger both less good reading and less enlightening about life in general than many simon-pure case studies. Nor is this because I object—though I do—to the dominant poetical tone of Miss Nin's prose. Nor is it because I reject—though I do—the major implications of Miss Nin's stories, but because This Hunger is inferior to a good psychoanalytical case....

  ...I keep wondering why a book like This Hunger could not receive commercial publication in these days when nothing sells like the sick psyche.

  ***

  Wilson talked about his marriage.

  "With Mary it was war. Even sex was a belligerent affair. It could never happen naturally and joyfully, in a relaxed way. There had to be some play-acting. There had to be a battle."

  Scrutinizing me, he added: "You are a friend of man's, aren't you? You don't demolish him?"

  "If you demolish a man, you lose a lover," I said.

  "I hear you are surrounded by very young men."

  "They come to me. I like the adolescent world, yes, because they are still vulnerable and open. They are a relief from tight, closed, hard, harsh worlds. One of them was born May eighth, on your birthday."

  The contrast between Leonard and Edmund Wilson amused me.

  Edmund Wilson saying: "I hate young writers. I hate them." And I had a vision of Leonard, tall, lean, almost transparently thin, skin like a sea shell, pale and faintly roseate, the shining smile, not coarsened yet, not toughened yet, no self-assertion yet; retreats, retrograde evasions. Wilson arrogant, sure of himself. Even in his empty house I had the feeling that he was born in the English tradition of letters, nourished by libraries, formulas, and classical scholarship.

  I ran away, and the only reason I consented to see him again was that when I left he ran out to get me a taxi, and because my leaving was so precipitate he felt it was a desertion and shouted a most untypical cry: "Don't desert me. Don't leave me alone."

  The next day I had a cold. Edmund Wilson sent flowers, and a set of Jane Austen, with a note. He was hoping I would learn how to write a novel from reading her!

  But I am not an imitator of past styles.

  Meanwhile, he reread Winter of Artifice, and when I was well he came to see me.

  His face was red and flushed from weather or from drink. The five flights were hard on him, yet he made no preparatory speech. He was so directly affected by the book that he stood in the middle of the studio and blurted out: "You realize, of course, that the father is right, in Winter of Artifice, and the daughter completely in the wrong."

  "Yes, of course, you would feel that. You identify with the father, the classicist, and you imagine we have the same conflict."

  "I would love to be married to you, and I would teach you to write."

  If for days I had been depressed to realize the evanescence, the unsubstantially of the adolescent world, suddenly I realized in Edmund Wilson the full tyranny of the father, the wall of misunderstanding and lack of intuition of the father.

  He appeared to me as an oppressing figure. I do not remember what I answered. I have never felt it worthwhile to argue with the enemy.

  But my illusion of the adolescent world satisfying me was gone. I carry a deeper hunger, which adolescents cannot fulfill. They can only distract me from deeper troubles.

  The money Gonzalo received for printing a book is gone. He gave the last three hundred dollars to a salesman who came to sell him a bigger and better press which we do not need and cannot afford. He gave the money without a receipt. The machine would come straight from the factory. It never came. I was faced with a realization that Gonzalo can never deal with realities, that he is weighed with debts, and will ultimately destroy the press.

  This hunger is what I recognized in Frances and wrote about, and which both of us alchemized into a giving to others what we wanted so much ourselves: uncritical and deep love, passion, help in creation, faith, loyalty.

  The fiction writer, the artist, sometimes expresses what entered the consciousness of others. Strange that in the middle of plenty, of many friends, of activities, of achievements, I should carry about a book called -This Hunger.

  In Leonard I loved the innocence of Caspar Hauser. Caspar Hauser could only love a memory or a dream of a mother, divined behind a door, a mother he did not even see, a mother he could not find again.

  If Edmund Wilson is reality, and my art world
and the young artists who fit into it, illusion, then reality is far more destructive.

  [October, 1945]

  In order to escape the world of the man—Edmund Wilson—I disguised the woman in myself to be allowed to re-enter the world of the poet, the dreamer, the child. To live once more in the house of innocence and escape the mature world, which only thinks of power. A grim, cold, gray world.

  I went out with Edmund Wilson again. He said: "The first time I saw you, years ago at the Gotham, you were wearing a little cape and hood. I thought you were the most exquisite woman I had ever seen. I was so enthusiastic that I went and told Mary McCarthy. As I took my marriage very seriously and it was the first time I had praised another woman so much, Mary was very irritated. When we began to be estranged, to quarrel, among other things she accused me of being in love with you. I had tried to see you again. I found out that Paul Rosenfeld saw you. He arranged a cocktail party, remember?"

  I did remember, and I remembered that when I saw Edmund Wilson there, I thought he looked like the burghers in the Dutch paintings, too solid. I paid little attention to him.

  "We did not talk very much," said Edmund Wilson. "Then Frances Steloff put Under a Glass Bell in my hands. I had not liked your work before. It was too ethereal, too elusive. But I liked Under a Glass Bell. I did not do it justice."

  In contrast to the luminous adolescents, here was a strong, determined, palpable, positive man. Unable to enter my heart.

  I prefer my dreams.

  For all these people, there is no reality in my work only because the reality they know is that of sweat, the present surroundings, politics, ugliness of war, belligerent relationships.

  Talked with Maya Deren. What a fighter she is for her films, for her ideas. She defends and explains her work. She is stronger than I am. She takes her films around and is willing to enter the arena. I have not done that. I was completely overwhelmed when Frances' friends talked to me one evening and argued in favor of the realistic novel. I began to realize they did not accept or understand abstraction, timelessness, my effort to transcend class, history, time, race, in order to reach emotional dramas which lie behind that. It is visionary writing. How do you argue about that?

  I came home and wrote about realism and reality. Realism was not reality. Reality was how we felt and saw events, not events as they appeared objectively, because we are not objective.

  Behind, always behind masochism lies sadism. Behind indirectness does not lie feminity, but a crippled, fearful self who does not dare. Behind my romanticism lies a primitive woman with primitive hungers.

  I examine Djuna's goodness, and mine, too. What lies behind that? The whole obsession in my fiction is to uncover the disguises. There is an indirect power and a more subtle form of destructiveness. Rock bottom. Bitter truth. The faces of others change in my eyes. My own changes as I seek lucidity and honesty. I face my fear of the ugliness in which my friends have been born, in which they feel at ease, as Henry did, and which they have no desire to banish or transform. We all live in a web of subterfuges and transmutations.

  My greatest problem here, in a polemic-loving America, is my dislike of polemics, of belligerence, of battle. Even intellectually, I do not like wrestling matches, I do not like talk marathons, I do not like arguments, or struggles to convert others. I seek harmony. If it is not there, I move away.

  The face of Leonard has changed, too, with his letters. The bareness of the letters, the inexpressiveness. His letters were immensely disillusioning. Parsimonious, cool, and another self from the one which warmed itself in my presence. No more Caspar Hauser. That was a romantic concept of his vulnerability!

  Why is it I developed no fangs? All these years, I spent no time growing defenses.

  I did not think I would have to defend my work, too. The winter lies coiled outside of the window, bright and cruel. The new book is on the table. Not wholly loved or accepted.

  Maya Deren asked us to act in her new film. We went very early to Central Park, to the very place where I played as a child. She had erected a Maypole, and we danced around it. Pablo, Marshall, Frank Westbrook, the ballet dancer. At first I had the small role of a mystery woman in a black cape who was everywhere. Then Maya gave me more and more to do. Dancing, etc.

  I have divided the world into two hostile camps:

  World of the Artist World of Reality

  Joy Greed

  Power

  Creation War

  Self-interest

  Freedom Corruption

  Dullness

  Altruism Hypocrisy

  I have a hostility toward authority, money, the organization of the world.

  At Edmund Wilson's I dislike the dismal, joyless house of the father, his power in the literary world, the solidity of his environment, his good manners, his taste for classical literature. I remembered that many years ago, when we read Wilson in Paris, I disagreed with his saying that Joyce had invented the contents of Ulysses' unconscious, since no unconscious ever contained so many allusions and associations.

  He does not understand my way of life.

  He does not understand that I refrain from firing up his neurosis: "I am a very quarrelsome man."

  Sometimes I suspect that I see him just to prove to myself I could never live in what others call the "mature" world. I always experience a desire to postpone my visits with Wilson. While he confines himself to admiring me as a woman, we are safe. He is not the man creating the future. He is tradition.

  He is crystallized and inflexible. He tells me that he has always loved two contrasting types of women, one destructive, one kind and creative.

  To me he seemed to have this hardening of the arteries I find in men of achievement. The florid skin, the satiated flesh, the solidity of the earth, and its heaviness. He is didactic; he has conventional ideas about form and style; he has scholarship. He is all brown: brown earth, brown thought, brown writing. His descriptions of life with Mary McCarthy sound like Jakob Wasserman's character Ganna in Doctor Kerkhoven.

  Father, man, critic, enemy of the artist.

  "You are a woman who does not destroy man."

  That may be true, but he is a man who would destroy me.

  The conflict in my life is the conflict in my novels: opposition of an ugly reality to a marvelous intuition or dream of other worlds. Not permitting the human to destroy illusion. Opposing the artist to the world of authority, power, and destructiveness.

  I write like a medium. I fear criticism because I fear it will destroy my spontaneity. I fear restrictions. I live by impulse and improvisation, and want to write the same way.

  I set up Edmund Wilson as a symbol of the man's world, the critic who wants to direct my writing. You see how a man behaves? Beneath his interest, tyranny. Men of power use their power. The artists I live with have no power in the world. They are the dreamers, who create beauty.

  He is a force, a force of certitudes and convictions.

  It is not Wilson but my image of reality I see in him. Force, authority, power. They are uncreative. I have a right to elude them.

  [November, 1945]

  I set out on an errand, a full-grown woman, and this is what happened to me. I, weighing about one hundred and thirteen pounds, five feet one inch tall, wearing a womanly black coat, womanly shoes with high heels, a womanly black dress, walking along Eighteenth Street with a package for the Railway Express Agency.

  From the left and from the right emerged giant trucks. The street was lined with truck garages, and the trucks were starting out for the day's deliveries, all of them red, with huge red-and-silver noses, shining fireman-red bodies, wheels as tall as I. Backing out of the garages, making a wall around me, parked on the curbs, so that my entire vision of the street was one of massive accumulation of red trucks, huge wheels turning slowly. And suddenly I was no longer a woman walking firmly, assuredly, down Eighteenth Street. Somewhere I had stepped through a mirror and some force had waved a hand and made me smaller. I was small. The trucks
were immense. The mechanically opening iron doors were immense. The wheels were crushing. I was small, helpless, hopeless. My dress was not the curved, body-formed dress of a woman. My coat was not tall and long. My feet felt small and fragile. I felt diminished, reduced to nothingness. I felt lost, fearful, diminutive. I could not remember what the accumulation of years had formed and contributed toward my maturity. In one instant this maturity was lost, discarded. A child emerged and stood in its place, a child afraid, threatened on every side by giant trucks directed blindly by men sitting so high above me they could not see me. The wheels did not see me as they turned upon me, did not feel me, I had no density or weight. I do not remember why Alice in Wonderland was changed, or how she became smaller than her original size. But I knew that my smallness was a great shock to me. I was small, and the city gigantic, and the trucks overwhelming, and the garage doors made for giants.

  My first thought was: Now I understand my love for the adolescents, for Leonard, for Pablo, Marshall, and Charles Duits. Why was it not clear before? Pablo, nineteen, saying everything with his body; Leonard, nineteen, wrapped still in the mists of adolescence, the trailing mists one sees around planets as yet far from the earth; Marshall, twenty, warm, and bright, active like mercury; and Charles Duits, composed of the crystals of finite poetry, not melting, but sending signals of distress from amethyst eyes. I was not with them because I wanted to protect and guide them, but because I feel as they do, act and think as they do. And all the time I was pretending to be the wise mother or the clear-sighted muse, was pretending to be a mature and stable woman, I was wearing my mother's clothes and they were too large for me, for my role. All they revealed was my true substance, which made me understand how they feel, and therefore know their needs. And on that morning I was even smaller and more frightened than they were. I was completely lowered and diminished.