Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 4

by Anais Nin

  The presence of the young lightens the world and changes it from an oppressive, definitive, solidified one to a fluid, potentially marvelous, malleable, variable, as-yet-to-be-created world. I call them the transparent children. When Wilson disparages the pleasure I take in their company, as if they were not the proper companions for a mature woman, I see in him what alienates me from maturity and draws me to the future. Above all, there is the absence of joy. For example, in food Wilson is a glutton, and in Hecate County the realism of sex is not joyous. There is a heaviness throughout, and a prosaic quality. It is a world of ideas and traditions already set. I once objected to the story of the biblical laws engraved on stone. (Unchangeablel) So Edmund Wilson's life, words, and writing are on stone. And I return to my transparent world, where the young say spontaneous things, act by their dreams, seek their fantasies to be fulfilled.

  I had to face my fear of appearing in public I agreed to appear at a Young Men's Hebrew Association poetry reading.

  I awakened in the morning, thinking: "This is my birthday." I was calm all day. I made myself as attractive as possible. I wore my black tailored suit with a fuchsia-colored blouse. Frances came with me. My heart began to beat wildly. I did not remain seated at the table, as Parker Tyler did. I stood up. The lights were strong. At first I was frightened. Then I read my short lecture, and a passage from This Hunger: "She talked to the child inside of her." I also read "Ragtime." The audience applauded. I could not tell what people felt. But I felt what I was reading as if I had just written it. The applause was warm and spontaneous. I signed books. I felt elated to have mastered my fear, to have communicated with those who read me. To have come out of my shell. Frances said I read well and that people were moved.

  Afterward we went to Maya Deren's studio. I danced wildly with Pablo. The image of an opaque world one cannot change, as against a transparent one through which one sees the spirit and possibilities of change and creation. Dream of the transparent children, the light in them. I saw transparent shoes and wanted them. I love crystal. I love transparence.

  On the mastery of shyness. How can knowing about one's fear change anything? The greatest of all my fears was facing an unknown public. I dreaded the ordeal. An ordeal to come out of my circle of friends, in which I felt secure. I investigated the cause of this and talked it over in analysis.

  As children, we are made to feel we will only be loved if we are good (in the parent's terms). As soon as we begin to affirm our real selves, parents begin to reject us. We grow up with the idea that if we are ourselves we will be rejected. So, as artists, in our work we express our real self. But we keep the fear of not being loved for this real self. And timidity and shyness are the symptoms. A timidity we can overcome with those who understand and accept us. Now when I have to face the world with my real self exposed in the writing, there is a crisis. Am I going to be accepted, approved, loved, or punished and rejected? Hence the fear. Last night I took this chance and won.

  ***

  Wilson's writing never gathers up oxygen and flies into space. It always follows earthy gravitation and rolls downward. He is conventional, uninspired.

  I am aware that it is I who choose my characters. Then I make up a story. You see, Wilson represents maturity, and that means lust, power, self-interest, worldly aims; whereas in the world of the artist and the young there is disinterestedness, and a purity.

  When one tells a story in the form of a parable, a myth, a fantasy, people have to do the unraveling of the meaning, as when you bring a dream to the analyst and he has to interpret it. But I find that readers want me to do the unraveling. That would be like writing a poem and then its analysis.

  Leo Lerman tells me that in Maya's film I looked like Shelley, transparent. When you focus on a key word, a theme word, it seems at times as if everyone uses it. Leo Lerman and I often have whimsical and completely free talks over the telephone. He told me he had walked into a glass window.

  I said: "I am sure you could do that, walk right through unharmed."

  "Why do you say that? The glass shattered and I was not harmed."

  "Because you have a gift for transforming reality, for flying above the dangers, walking through glass."

  In Edmund Wilson I sought reconciliation with the father. Or was I seeking to conquer the father? Once more, to be able to say: He does not understand. One moment he thinks I am Ondine, that I have never loved or suffered; another moment he thinks my bohemian life must be absolutely amoral, decadent.

  As soon as he says something unsubtle, I withdraw. I never argue. I inhabit the unconscious, and 1 will always write from that realm, deeper and deeper, until I reach the collective unconscious of woman.

  "You do not live in reality. Political reality."

  "Does your political reality make you understand human beings?"

  When he says "reality" I see gray mornings, war, cruelty, exploitative booksellers who do not pay for the books we labored over, money problems, the critical father (Wilson), the aggressive mother (Lillian). Man the father is gross, heavy, not loving. The sons, the boys, the young artists are beautiful, delicate, subtle, tender, imaginative. I choose my personages to prove my point.

  There is a paradox in the dreamed life. I dream a houseboat, find it, live the dream as I wished. But at times the dreamed life, if it does not fulfill itself in reality, becomes a tragic trap. Is it true we choose our personages, our friends, according to the unconscious pattern we wish to prove? It is impossible to gain understanding from the father, from the church, from banks, governments, leaders. Don Quixote and the windmills? I do not think I am tilting at impossible enemies. Wilson is the enemy of what I stand for, write, seek, love. He is invested with an unquestioned authority over writers. He is a dictator up there on his New Yorker throne.

  People bow to the name and do not question his judgments.

  Meanwhile, leaving Maya Deren's studio, Marshall takes my hand and says: "Let's run. If we run fast enough, we will not see the ugliness of New York."

  Charles Duits is the most intelligent, the most cohesive, cultured, and developed of the adolescents. Leonard is intuitive by fits and starts, often confused, immature, with sudden illuminations. Marshall is more experienced in life, more emotional and free. Pablo is all emotion, a carnival of gay affection, physical expansiveness, violence. Leonard is still a nebula, clouded, misty, dim, sleepwalking. Marshall is more accessible to human feelings. All of them elusive, subtle, close to me. But they have created a luminous prison. They shut out other visitors, make fun of overserious or ponderous people, drive away academicians, famous, successful people, people of achievement, persecuting the banal, the trite, the ordinary as the ultimate crime.

  Frances feels that the time I spend with them is wasted, but I feel it is rich, richer than the time spent with Wilson. I feel inspired, moved. They understand me better. They have the exigent idealism of the young. They demand much, and make sure you never yield or sell out. To please them one must remain unadulterated, uncorrupted by reality. How well they recognize the first step toward concession.

  The analogy between the artist and the child is that both live in a world of their own making. This world soon enters into conflict with the outside world. Both the artist and the child create an inner world ruled by their fantasies or dreams. They do not understand the world of money, or the pursuit of power. They create without commercial intent. They rebel against existing conditions. They cannot be deceived. The realistic world for them is ruled by conscious compromises, self-betrayals, selling out.

  Dream of Edmund Wilson as a Roman emperor, wearing purple hair. (Judge?)

  There is a link between the playing in adolescent worlds and art. Rank wrote about this. Play and imagination. Fowlie wrote somewhere, too, that the poet was the one in whom the child's sensitivity survived in the adult, and that it was from this source that he wrote poetry.

  I always assumed I lived close to the young in order to protect them, or to guide them, but I think now it w
as also that I feel as they do, I think and act as they do. All the time I watched Pablo dancing, I was a dancer; and all the times Marshall painted glittering exotic fish, I was one of them; I was Leonard's nebulousness and his infrequent appearances in reality, his timid stories and complete eclipses, his muteness and inarticulateness, which I still practice when I am in an unharmonious, unpropitious atmosphere. A roomful of people I cannot feel close to, and I become Leonard. I also practice some of Charles Duits' constant flights from triteness in writing, his dreamer's intolerance and exigencies.

  Noguchi's studio in Macdougal Alley, one of the loveliest places in New York. The houses are small, the street of cobblestones, there are gas lanterns. It is an echo of English or French streets. At the closed end is a wall with trees behind. The houses and studios are each different in shape and decoration. It is intimate and mysterious.

  He showed me the diminutive models of his major works. They seem like a city of abstract sculptures. When I asked him if he loved the miniature models, he answered: "I feel greater tenderness for them. They belong to me. They are human and possessable; they are near; they lie in the hollow of my hand. The major work is so large. It is cut off from me. It goes to big buildings, to the Museum of Modern Art. It will be admired, but it is not mine any longer. I love this universe of small statues...."

  A small world. A new world. Where and when have I seen before this opposition of the large and the small, of the strong and delicate? At the beginning. In childhood, houses, parents, cities loom enormous. And under certain stresses, certain violent events, losses, separations, one experiences the world in the emotional size of Alice in Wonderland. One has a feeling of being smaller than events call for.

  More and more resemblances between psychoanalysis and the procedure of the novelist. He must be a psychologist, able to reconstruct a character from a fragment, to distinguish between distortion and verity.

  While I live surrounded in my leisure hours by the adolescents, I see also that they are parallels to my two brothers, younger than I. We are three in our house, hiding under the dining room table, as in a small Indian tent. The cover is green and has long fringes. We are three in a world of enormous angers. With my brothers, I feel a closer bond than that to the parents who create our world, changes, disruptions, without our having a say in them. The young men are those who cannot destroy me. But Edmund Wilson can, either by a destructive review or by indifference.

  In maturity, the child is known and amalgamated to the man or woman, integrated with the adult. But a child who has not received enough mothering or fathering will later seek the child in others, and give to them what he lacked.

  Wilson had said: "If I were married to you, I would bully you, force you, want you absorbed in me, and you could not develop. I can see how a woman like you needs her freedom to grow."

  Slaying dragons again. The big dean of the critics, the conventional, traditional critic, who cannot possibly understand. Had I thought that through knowing me, he would understand my work?

  He believes I am not destructive. Perhaps not. But when he says: "You bring out the best in me," I am not able to say that he does the same for me.

  So I went into the habitat of the father, the enemy. To win him?

  Reread the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I feel that the states of consciousness described did not take place after death, that the bardos happened during the lifetime. What has happened in our time is that body and soul do not travel together. They were rent asunder by Christianity, and so the passages become dangerous, they are incompletely achieved, and anxiety sets in, due to achieving neither life nor death, metaphysical or sensual fulfillment. I feel that what I have described very often in the diary, and in the story "The Labyrinth," are bardo states. Why did the Tibetans think we achieved this cyclical and circular journey only after death?

  I named this diary volume "The Transparent Children." For days I followed an association of images stemming from a dream about a transparent child, a transparent pair of shoes I wanted, my general love of transparency, and Leo Lerman saying I appeared transparent in Maya Deren's film. And back along this route to the world of the artist, the child, walking always together and trying to understand each other, because the child influenced our adult life. Beside me lies Wilson's review, too heavy and opaque to seize me, weighed down by conventionalities. The story of Caspar Hauser has a relation to this. The child is imprisoned for fifteen years in darkness, through the intrigue of a powerful adult world (royalty here stands for power). Then he is freed, accidentally, in a strange city. His honesty, his direct statements, his acts seem so strange to the adult world. They adopt him, and at the same time seek to convert him to their ways. They feel he is different. He keeps a diary. He destroys the diary because he feels they are trying to violate his secrets. He has a dream (or a recollection) of another world. It is a dream of a castle. Behind the door stands his beautiful mother. He wants to return to this castle and find his mother behind the closed door. The woman who could have loved him and saved his life did not dare transgress the barrier of age. He died because he was unprotected.

  Last night we were excavating the Maya Deren mystery. We all sit in a circle and wonder why we do exactly what she commands us to do. We are subject to her will, her strong personality, yet at the same time we do not trust or love her wholly. We recognize her talent. We talk of rebellion, of being forced, of tyranny, but we bow to her projects, make sacrifices.

  A quotation from Wilson on Joyce:

  Just as Joyce in Ulysses laid the Odyssey under requisition to help provide a structure for his material—material which once it had begun to gush from the rock of Joyce's sealed personality at the blow of Aaron's rod of free associations, threatened to rise and submerge the artist, like the flood which the sorcerer's apprentice let loose by his bedevilled broom...

  Whoever has studied psychoanalysis knows that there is no need to look for a classical myth outside to contain the free association. The structure lies at the core of free association and has to be searched for, like the opening of the labyrinth. A precise and architectural form emerges at the end, when all the images have been explored and related to experience, when the link has been made between the association and its origin. In other words, it is an invisible structure at first, and only when fully explored will it yield its own pattern.

  Richard Wright has moved into the Village, and came to see me. Tennessee Williams sent me tickets for his new play.

  At the home of the owners of the Kleeman Gallery, I saw one of the five extant copies of Shelley's Diary, which he wrote alternating with Mary, so that the entries are now by one, now by the other. The original is in London.

  An evening at Sonya Sekula's home. Her paintings are beautiful. Vivid and full of fantasy.

  A farewell party for André Breton, who will deliver a lecture in Haiti. His new wife seems most interesting, a sensitive international type, whose origin one can no longer guess. Esteban Frances, the Spanish surrealist painter, very lively and humorous, and his beautiful Mexican wife; Helion, the French painter, with a dazzling orange tie and mussed hair; Pegine Vail, with her hair down over her shoulders, and a turquoise comb; Peggy Guggenheim, with two miniature dogs and her clown face; Noguchi, with his startled, wistful air, tired from watching the moving of his big rose marble figure to the Museum of Modern Art; Madame Saint-Exupéry, with the consumed look of a woman who has lived, loved, taken drugs, lost her husband to his passion for air and space, now living with Denis de Rougemont. Sonya's mother beaming lovingly on this crowd; her father, grand homme d'affaires, peeking in, smiling, and vanishing. Frederick Kiesler, the modern architect, kissing ladies' hands. But as he is four feet tall, it makes a woman feel like the Statue of Liberty.

  Publishers are calling me. I am supposed to see Random House, Harper's, and Pascal Covici, of Viking. I am both happy and sad. I do not like their world, their values. I want to keep my sincerity. It means a harder battle, not like the one with my small press, my deb
ts, overwork, but one against values I do not believe in. I have to keep my world intact. My lunch with Covici was interesting. We laughed, and he was ready to sign a contract if I agreed to change from a wafer into bread.

  After my lunch with Harper's, I realized the most difficult part of my life is starting now. The struggle with money and the press is nothing compared with the more subtle struggle against accepting money for compromising. Harper's began today, like Mephistopheles with Faust: "Yes, we absolutely want you. You have great talent. But do you think the next book might be ... more of a novel ... according to orthodox forms?"

  "No," I said. "It will be done in my own way."

  "It is strange," the editor admitted. "Publishers think they can tell the writer what the public wants, and then along comes someone who does something different, like you, and it is very obvious the public wants you."

  "It is a question of sincerity," I said. "If you would let the writer be himself, then naturally his experience answers a real need, not a spurious one."

  Kimon Friar asked me to attend his lecture on love at the Y.M.H.A. so I went yesterday. I was in a depressed mood. I wore a black dress with long sleeves half-covering the hands, and a small heart-shaped black hat, with a pearl edging, shaped like Mary Stuart's hat. Kimon lectured at the head of a long table. At the foot of the table, one chair was empty. I took it. Maya Deren sat a few chairs away. Next to me sat a handsome young lieutenant. During a pause I leaned over to speak with Maya. She said: "You look dramatic."