Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 4

by Anais Nin

  I said: "I feel like Mary Stuart, who will soon be beheaded."

  The lieutenant leaned over and introduced himself: "I am Warrant Officer Gore Vidal. I am a descendant of Troubador Vidal." Later he admitted that he had guessed who I was. He is luminous and manly. Near the earth. He is not nebulous, but clear and bright, a contrast to Leonard. He talks. He is active, alert, poised. He is tall, slender, cool eyes and sensual mouth. Kimon was lecturing on Plato's symposium of love. When it was finished, Vidal and I talked a little more. He is twenty years old, and the youngest editor at E. P. Dutton. His own novel is appearing in the spring. He knows Under a Glass Bell. He asked when he might visit me.

  Mr. Covici of the Viking Press took me to lunch. An intelligent Romanian, who also came to America at the age of eleven.

  I told him my work was like those distant planets which have a nebula and slowly approach the earth, and when they do there will be an explosion.

  "That's just what I want," said Mr. Covici, "collision with the earth. I want you more earthy."

  "You'll have to wait for that," I said.

  "Oh," he groaned, "can't you write a novel like everybody else, with a beginning and an end?"

  "No."

  "I admit you are evolving your own form."

  The defenses people build up become in themselves the trap. I think what I love about the young is that they have not yet created disguises and masks.

  The fear of this, which I saw happening to everyone around me, also created the diary. The real Anai's is in the diary. Even the destructive Anai's who refuses to destroy in life. I do not harm Wilson, who is for the moment a man in trouble, but I do make his portrait in the colors I do not like; the brown of philosophy, the gray ashes of scholarship, the dreary traditions.

  Gore Vidal's first visit to the studio caught us in a humorous moment, for when he arrived a group of us (Frances, Marshall, Jean Garrigue, Duits, Pablo) were enacting a wake for Matta. Poor Matta.

  "Did he die?" asked Gore Vidal.

  "No," I said. "But he married a millionairess, and we are seriously concerned as to what will happen to him as a painter."

  Gore Vidal comes from a wealthy family, so this conversation must have astounded him.

  He came another time, alone. He tells me he will one day be president of the United States. He identifies with Richard the Second, the king-poet. He is full of pride, conceals his sensitiveness, and oscillates between hardness and softness. He is dual. He is capable of feeling, but I sense a distortion in his vision.

  He has great assurance in the world, talks easily, is a public figure, shines. He can do clever take-offs, imitate public figures. He walks in easily, he is no dream-laden adolescent. His eyes are hazel; clear, open, mocking.

  His grandfather was Senator Gore. His mother left his father when Gore was ten, to marry someone else. "She is Latin-looking, vivacious, handsome, beloved of many."

  With all that, he is lonely. In the Aleutians he suffered frostbite. This freezing seems to cling to him. He has something of the frozen adolescent who has not yet melted with trust, passion. He is tight. "In the army I lived like a monk. I wrote my novel."

  When he brings me the novel, I am startled by the muted tone, the cool, detached words. It is writing I do not admire. The once-frozen young man is not as lifeless as the writing. Action, no feeling.

  Am I wrong to think there is a potential warmth in him? Is the writing a disguise, a mask? Another Hemingway to come?

  Rather than engage in a belligerent friendship with Edmund Wilson, I broke with him. I do not want to live again and again the father-and-daughter drama.

  I broke gently, and he was sad.

  Gore said: "I do not want to be involved, ever. I live detached from my present life. At home our relationships are casual. My father married a young model. I like casual relationships. When you are involved you get hurt."

  My father's desertion created the opposite reaction in me. I was always seeking new closeness, greater closeness.

  But he does not like the artist life, and he represents my father's values. He takes me to luxurious restaurants to eat caviar and drink champagne, or to Charles à la Pomme Soufflé.

  This Hunger will soon be out of print. I get a flood of letters.

  [December, 1945]

  Gore is at Mitchell Field. He comes in on weekends. He comes to see me. We had a fine talk. He read to me from Richard II. He complained of an arthritic hand. I said: "It's a psychic cramp, from writing about an ordinary character when you yourself are not an ordinary character." I tease him. Touched upon his depressions. Then Marshall arrived with a Welshman and his harp. He sang ballads in a beautiful voice. Charles Duits came, and Pablo. The evening was airy and magical.

  When Gore telephones, he says: "This is Troubador Vidal."

  Gonzalo tells me there is a romantic-looking girl who sits near the press, reading Under a Glass Bell, and wants to know me. But at the same time, she is frightened, so he suggested she meet me when I lecture at the Mills School. At the end of the lecture, she appeared. I recognized her. She was like a ghost of a younger me, a dreaming woman, with very soft, burning eyes, long hair streaming over her shoulders, ready at any moment to vanish if the atmosphere was not propitious.

  I could have said: "You are the romantic Anai's I am trying to conquer. You are a figure out of the past." But so they come, out of the stories, out of the novels, magnetized by affinities, by similar characters. And I could not dispel her. I loved her. She did not say a word. She merely stared at me, and then handed me a music box mechanism, without its box. She finally told me in a whisper that she always carries it in her pocket and listens to it in the street. She wound it up for me, and placed it against my ear, as if we were alone and not in a busy school hall, filled with bustling students and professors waiting for me. A strand of her long hair had caught in the mechanism and it seemed as if the music came from it.

  She came to see me, blue eyes dissolved in moisture, slender, orphaned child of poverty, speaking softly and exaltedly. Pleading, hurt, vulnerable, breathless. Her voice touches the heart. She came because she felt lost. I had found the words which made her life clearer. She talks as I write, as if I had created a language for her feelings. She walks out of my books and confronts me. She is without strength and without defenses, as I was when I first met Henry and Gonzalo.

  Her name is Sherry Martinelli. She lives with a painter, Enrique Zanarte. She tells me: "Enrique says I am mad, because sometimes I ask him: 'Are you feeling blue or purple today?' as I believe our moods have colors. Also, I prefer to break a dish after I eat, rather than wash it. Do you think there might be, somewhere, a man who feels as I do? When we went to the zoo together, I was angry because he loved the rhinoceros, who has a carapace against feeling, whereas I liked the kangaroo, who carries its young as I would like to carry my three-year-old daughter with me all the time."

  She is twenty-seven, but she belongs with Pablo, Marshall, and Charles Duits. "There are phrases one picks up in the street and lives with." She is pure poetry walking and breathing, inside and outside of my books, so I feel I am not lying, I am not inventing, I am not far from the truth. "Oh God, all the books one reads which don't bring you near the truth. Only yours, Anai's."

  Her eyes become immense when she asks questions. Blue, with the pupil very dark and dilated. She looks mischievous and fragile. She wears rough, ugly clothes, like an orphan. She is part Jewish, part Irish. Her voice sings, changes: low, gay, sad, heavy, trailing, dreaming.

  Edmund Wilson came with orchids, kissed my hand and said: "Why did you desert me?"

  My love-starved children. Demanding. Never enough. Endless needs.

  Josephine was in love with her cousin, who was several shades paler than she, and her father and mother worried constantly that she would succumb to him. Josephine treated my studio as her second home. She jokingly called me her sister, and we talked a great deal about everything. But about her cousin we did not talk. He came to the part
ies. He was well-dressed. He had a good job. He spoke beautiful French. But Josephine's joie de vivre was so powerful that a love sorrow would not show through all the sparkle. With the children, she was the favorite. They responded to her gaiety and energy. They were all a little in love with her. She taught us to dance. We admired her prancing, the proud firmness of her back, her strong legs, her humor.

  The anxiety of the parents communicated itself to me. If Josephine and her cousin were lovers, and he did not marry her, then she would be hurt. I thought of a plan to discover the truth. When we were all acting in a charade, which we loved to do, I asked her to make all the sounds known to a woman making love.

  Josephine lay on the carpet and gave such a vivid, such a complete scale of the sounds of love's delight that it would have taken a whole chapter by Richard Burton to describe them. The coo of dreamy delight, the response in vibrations to the finger notations, the sound of delight at proximity, the cry of simultaneous courtship. The echoes of the other cries: the answer, the bird calls, the tear cry when pleasure strikes like lightning. She knew all of them.

  When she was finished and we laughed and complimented her, and tried some that were less expert than her own, for her voice had a range none of ours had, she looked at me. And she knew then that I knew her secret. But I never knew at what moment Josephine was hurt, because although she never married her cousin, Josephine never shed tears about past loves. She was always speeding ahead to love anew.

  I forgot to tell the story of my tea bath. In the summer I felt ashamed not to be sun-tanned, so I bought a pound of tea and bathed in it. Josephine came in, and when she found out what I was doing, she laughed uncontrollably. We both laughed at the irony of it.

  My friendship with Leo Lerman is a telephone friendship. Over the telephone he talks of flowers, and he shows his storyteller's gift. His tales, already fictionalized by his heightened personality, delight me. I hear them more clearly than at parties. Like the tales of Moricand, they are intended to charm without revealing anything of the storyteller. I am certain Leo conceals a tragic life, stubbornly disguised in frivolity.

  This morning, late, he called: "Guess what I am doing? We are sitting here reading Under a Glass Bell."

  "Who is we?"

  "Truman Capote."

  "Do you like the stories?"

  "We love them. He loves them."

  Leo Lerman re-created for me a part of his childhood which was so vivid that I felt I had known it. It is a Russian background, and perhaps Russian literature prepared me for it. The entire family emigrated, a tribe. The grandfather was a melamed, spiritual and severe, rigid, wisdom and punishments meted out equally. Each member of the family as clear as a Chekhov character. Aunts, cousins, brothers, sisters. The hierarchic figure of the grandfather was dominant, but the one I loved best was the mother, who had brought from Russia a love of cut glass. Love, I said. It was not love, but a passion. Her greatest pleasure was to dress up and visit all the Third Avenue antique shops, searching for cut-glass salad bowls, or glasses, saltcellars, water jugs, tea cups. To her it was like a search for diamonds. Whatever tragedy took place at home, illness, Leo's own fragile health, material problems, family dramas, Leo's mother healed herself with cut glass. The pinch of poverty, religion, and the luxuries of ritual, none could diminish her passion for cut glass. She frequented auctions. She was so fearful of being condemned by her husband that she brought her trophies home in ordinary brown shopping bags.

  The house in which they lived was in a quarter of Russian immigrants, talking their own language, Russian-Yiddish, so complete a universe that Leo did not want to go to school and learn English. But eventually the members of the family went their own ways, carried away by job opportunities in other cities. When the time came to move out definitely to become a part of American life, rather than remain an island of Russian melamed learning, Leo's mother was still collecting cut glass. The house was full of cut glass. The closets were full of cut glass. Some cut with more refinement and grace than others, but always casting those magical kaleidoscopic light rays which make cut glass a fascination to the eye. The light refracted through each piece was a vibration of magic. The house was dispersed, the family was dispersed, but Leo's mother was still buying cut glass. Objects from the past. They were her entrance to a dream.

  I gave a party. Mrs. Mary Louise Aswell had invited Truman Capote. When the bell rang I went to the door. I saw a small, slender young man, with hair over his eyes, extending the softest and most boneless hand I had ever held, like a baby's nestling in mine.

  He was painfully timid. He looked as if he wanted to hide, or as if, as I had so often done myself, he were looking for the exit. Timidity always arouses my own. He seemed fragile and easily wounded. He seemed, above all, the most childlike of all the young I had around me. I had read only one story of his, delicately written, tender.

  After this meeting we met at parties, at Leo Lerman's, and we never talked. We met at the wrong moment. I had too many childlike people around me. I hungered for a mature, full-grown artist! But his work entranced me. His power to dream, his subtlety of style, his imagination. Above all, his sensitivity.

  Maya has stopped working on her film, temporarily. We all live on pins and needles for fear of catastrophe, a quarrel or anything else that will spoil it, as she has a need to seduce everyone, from Duits to Marshall to Pablo, and even me. We all live breathlessly, hoping she will find someone to pacify her so that filming may go on. We may have to draw lots: Now you, Number Nine, go to Maya and make love to her and make her happy, for the sake of the film.

  I will probably sign a contract with Dutton since they may take me on unconditionally, because of Gore Vidal.

  This Hunger is sold out.

  Sonya told me Breton said I was one of the "illuminated women," and asked to have some of my work translated for him.

  To please Mr. Covici of the Viking Press, to write as others do: Marshall Barer is twenty-four years old, he weighs one hundred and twenty-six pounds, his height is five feet ten inches, and he was born February nineteenth. He came one evening, brought by Kim Hoffman, and immediately started to tell me stories.

  There was a man who could put his hand through glass, who could walk through a mirror, whose only concern was that the wonderful sensation of walking through glass did not last long enough. One day, a newspaper reporter wrote, during a public visit to a big observatory, after the inauguration of a new giant telescope, it was discovered that one visitor was missing. When the guard returned to the telescope, he found a man's suit of clothes neatly folded next to it. No identification papers.

  Marshall danced with Josephine, as nimble and malleable as she is. He courted her away from Pablo. Leonard and Pablo were jealous of him. When he telephoned, there was a mute protest from them.

  His presence was elating. I liked the airy, gusty way he comes in, his brightness and alertness. The last visit, late afternoon, he had been reading Elizabeth Bowen, so he was in a mood for a high tea, for polished shoes, and dainty housekeeping. As it happened, Millicent had given the apartment a spring cleaning, I was making tea with care and trimmings, and all was set to match Elizabeth Bowen's book but the shoes. Marshall asked for shoe polish and cleaned his shoes.

  In our studio life, whoever starts a game, a mood, a theater act, we all fall in.

  Marshall's body is completely lax, loose. When he lies down, he seems to spill onto the couch, no rigidities. He never sits on chairs, but on the rug. Marshall reads on the rug.

  Gore came.

  We slide easily into a sincere, warm talk. He dropped his armor, his defenses. "I don't like women. They are either silly, giggly, like the girls in my set I'm expected to marry, or they are harsh and strident masculine intellectuals. You are neither."

  Intellectually he knows everything. Psychologically he knows the meaning of his mother abandoning him when he was ten, to remarry and have other children. The insecurity which followed the second break he made, at nineteen, afte
r a quarrel with his mother. His admiration, attachment, hatred, and criticalness. Nor is it pity, he says. He is proud that she is beautiful and loved, yet he condemns her possessiveness, her chaos, her willfulness, and revolts against it. He knows this. But he does not know why he cannot love.

  His face, as the afternoon light changed, became clearer. The frown between his eyes disappeared. He was a child thrust out too soon, into a world of very famous, assertive, successful, power personalities. His mother confesses her life to him. He moves among men and women of achievement. He was cheated of a carefree childhood, of a happy adolescence. He was rushed into sophistication and into experience with the surface of himself, but the deeper self was secret and lonely.

  "My demon is pride and arrogance," he said. "One you will never see."

  I receive from him gentleness and trust. He first asked me not to write down what he would say. He carries his father's diplomatic brief case with his own poems and novel in it. He carries his responsibilities seriously, is careful not to let his one-night encounters know his name, his family. As future president of the United States, he protects his reputation, entrusts me with state secrets to lighten his solitude. Later he wants to write it all down, as we want to explore his secret labyrinth together, to find the secret of his ambivalence. To explore. Yet life has taken charge to alter the situation again. He, the lonely one, has trusted woman for the first time, and we start the journey of our friendship, as badly loved children who raised themselves, both stronger and weaker by it.