Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 4

by Anais Nin

  "LADDERS TO FIRE by ANAIS NIN."

  "You wrote the book?" asked the hunchback, noticing the name on the paper he was holding out for me to sign.

  "Yes, I wrote the book."

  "Do you make a lot of money out of a book like that?"

  "I get ten per cent of the price of each book."

  "That's not very much. Will it be a best seller?"

  "The publisher does not think so. He is putting it out quietly, so no one will notice. He does it for prestige. Prestige means someday he may be proud of it. It may be mentioned by a big critic."

  "If you don't make a lot of money, and he does not make a lot of money, I don't see the sense of it."

  "There is some sense to it. I love to write. Some people love to read. We may have pleasure out of i Don't you have something you really love to do?"

  "Yes," he said, "I love fishing. I do it every Sunday."

  "It's the same thing," I said.

  He labored down the stairs. I was reading my own book as if it were new to me, as if it had been written by someone else, when the bell rang and the same sea-elephant sounds came up the stairwell. It was the messenger from E. P. Dutton.

  "You forgot to sign."

  "Oh, I'm sorry."

  He took another look at me from his very small teary eyes, as if I were a curious specimen, and left with a twist of the mouth intended as a smile.

  Ladders to Fire was officially published. About three hundred people came to the Gotham Book Mart and feted me as one dreams of being feted, each one carrying several copies of the book for me to sign, for himself, for friends. They said: "Please go on, please do not change. It is so real. It changed my life...." Three days of bookshop parties proved to me that the world for which I write is larger than publishers thought, and also of higher quality and of greater sincerity. The young writers to come will waste less energy in battling, in printing, in talking for themselves. Parties at Young's Bookstore, at Lawrence Maxwell's, at Four Seasons. At Lawrence Maxwell's bookshop a paper crown was offered to me by Eugene Walter.

  People do not offer me ordinary compliments, but their feeling, by their eyes and by their silence. All this covered the painful cheap burlesque of the New York Times review, entitled "Surrealist Soap Opera"; Diana Trilling's implacable anger; and worst of all, Leo Lerman's betrayal. He telephoned me: "You should lie low and hide after all this exposure of one woman loving another." (The relationship I describe is not even Lesbian!)

  ***

  I received a letter from a young writer, and later a manuscript. The manuscript won my praise and response. It was subtle and poetic, the words were rhythmic and suggestive. It achieved a quality almost totally lacking in American writing today, that of tragedy.

  The mother, scarred by smallpox, lying in a darkened room, unwilling to participate in daylight life, and the boy taken to her for formal visits only. The castle bought in Europe and reassembled in Dallas, Texas.

  The loneliness. The formal dining room with candelabra. The garden with statues. And the boy falling in love with a statue. It was born of Proust, but had its own tone, its own atmosphere.

  This Kendall is a craftsman. He is a mathematician. His objectivity made his hand steadier, his measures more exact. He described the obstacles, the distances which people maintain to preserve themselves from fervor, contagion, and fusion.

  He responded with criticism of This Hunger. He was looking for a classical order and form.

  Letter from Kendall:

  I can only say of your letter that from it I experienced a kind of fluidity of appreciation—a mild, warm wave that broke over a succession of aspects and objects according to some inward rhythm in which your letter was everywhere—that was the beauty, that the advantage, to find myself in the presence of a letter to which everything directly contributed, leaving no touch of experience irrelevant. This wave expresses my feeling about the letter; considering it is for me a matter of prodigious difficulty because, to be quite frank, and I feel that I can be nothing else with you, the fact that you are a woman is for me a matter of the extremest incongruity, for reasons that you must have perceived; reasons that will emerge with, I hope, great sincerity and intensity in the succeeding sections of the novel. Indeed, my complete lack of sense of humor makes me rather dread our future meeting, which I nonetheless anticipate with the greatest expectancy, for I feel that I shall have nothing to communicate except a sadness through my silence.

  I was amused, and shocked, too, that the warmth of my praise for his book, my response to his writing, should have been taken for a love letter, and that he is already planning his defenses!

  [November, 1946]

  Correspondence growing. I work on my lectures.

  I have become aware that homosexuals live in groups, almost communally promiscuous, and sustain each other professionally. Once they feel accepted, they surround you subtly with a barrier made of a chain of friendships. First I met one, and then his friend, and then their friends, and now I find myself surrounded. They bring their gaiety, their brilliance, their gifts, their charm, their beauty, and it is a magic circle. Subtly, they keep Man away, by either parody, mockery, or direct jealousy. They appropriated me.

  Was this due to my quest of the artist world? Was it that I found most ordinary men harsh, power-driven, obsessed with their goals, not with life?

  Robert Lowry came, and because of his books, his printing press, I was ready to like him. He was brutal in his language, ugly, sinister. Bitter.

  James Agee only likes drinking companions. And I cannot drink all night.

  With the children, or in spite of them, as a woman I stand in a kind of desert. I have reached an impasse.

  The press collapsed under a mountain of debts. Corroded by Gonzalo's irresponsibility. It was closed. Even to move out it was I who had to do the packing, sorting, filing, cleaning. Gonzalo took the small press home. He sold the big one to pay his debts. He began to sell his books, pawn his winter coat, his typewriter.

  Neurosis acts like a gray or neutral filter over experience. Gore's letters from Guatemala (which should be full of color, sun, sharpness, vision) sound attenuated, diminished, dulled. Lack of faith, of responsiveness to surroundings and people. A blight. Neurosis is a blight.

  Edmund Wilson writes obtusely about Ladders to Fire, but he thinks I have made progress in the new part of the book. Although "the story is a little amorphous, there are charming things in it."

  Only the young really understand and respond.

  Five o'clock is the hour of my depression. Because the active day is done, during which I subdue and conquer my disillusions or disappointments. But five o'clock is the fatal hour, end of work, beginning of awareness, when the buses are so full you cannot get on, when the taxis will not stop, when the subway is chokingly full, when everyone is running somewhere, when the lovers have chosen each other. Then, at the corner of the street, unable to reach home, I feel this wave of choking anguish, of homelessness, rootlessness, loneliness.

  Every friend I reach out to here seems incapable of a big friendship. They all shred, dissolve into minor friendships. Instead of writing in the diary, I have been trying to talk with someone, to write to someone. They write tight, meager letters, ungenerous, small, parsimonious.

  Letter to Kendall:

  There is a misunderstanding. I do not want it to spoil my response to your work. You must know that I am not only a woman, that I am a writer, and that I can admire and respond to writing quite apart from the personality of the writer. I understood your manuscript perfectly and my response and enthusiasm were not intended for the writer, they went beyond the personal. It was addressed to the writer and to the tragic quality of the writing. The description of distance between people always moves me and my efforts always to decrease such distances may lead to misunderstandings. Why I allowed myself to express it is because I find the world parsimonious in its responses, puritanical, fearful, economical. I like warmth and generosity and it was because there is s
o little to like wholly that when I find it, I like to say so. I not only know everything that is implied in the manuscript, but I divined the fear you felt, the fear that this might make understanding by a woman impossible and incongruous. Please, dear Kendall, grant me enough subtlety and above all enough personal experience with your problem. To tell you the truth, I knew and assumed this beforehand, because I have found it not a unique case, but a collective one among writers and artists. It is a problem which has to do with what Eliot called the sickness of modern love, with people's incapacity to love totally. It is a split and a break within love itself, more serious in America, more fatal, because of Puritanism and matriarchy. What I feared was that you should not be able to accept my understanding of the work. Believe me, you have misunderstood my response, if you interpreted it as a love for the person. It is true that faith uses the language of love, and that they appear to be the same. The truth is that I have always been the very best of friends, and not as a woman, to the kind of person you are, on the basis of sensibility, creativity. I hope this misunderstanding will not distort our friendship and that you will believe me when I say I sensed and respected the obstacle from the first, even in your short story, and that perhaps it was the security this obstacle gave me which allowed me freedom to respond wholly to your writing.

  Letter from Kendall:

  I must explain to you the reason for what you called the perfection of my writing. I was hoping so much that you would say perfection because I do want to tell you why. For me there is no perfection in my own life. Mine is a life of miserable complexity and unhappiness so that my writing is all that I can rely on. Only in it do I find release from my tensions. I have no life besides my language, at least no happy life. I would unhesitatingly change places with a person whose writing showed less perfection because by showing this the writer would communicate to me that there was some measure of happiness, no matter how little, in his own life. I shall never be able to exist happily except through art, and therefore I must devote to it my entire life. Nothing else must enter my life, for I have often felt at times when I have been wounded terribly by some friend that the wound was actually internal, a physical one which would destroy me, and I feel that I have something to say before my destruction. You too are a person who can be terribly wounded, but there is evidence in your writing of a kind of medicine, or soothing balm, which you possess to apply to your wounds. I cannot tell what this is. In respect to This Hunger I must confess that I was perhaps jealous of a joy in living which your language shows, and since there is a kind of communion which your words hold with mine, call it confession, I envied your joy.

  Albert Mangones is back.

  "Anai's, I thought you had forgotten me."

  "I thought you had forgotten me!"

  "You are not easy to forget," he said.

  Three years telescoped, and became as if he had been away a few days. He is now thirty years old. He is a Marxist. He wanted to help Haiti. He married his childhood sweetheart, who waited for him eight years. He has a child eleven months old.

  What a contrast to all the wordy convolutions of Kendall. Here is a Polynesian island, tropical nature, flowering, flesh dewy and tinted by the sun, eyes glowing, and a mouth shaped for pleasure.

  Letter from Kendall:

  Thank you for your kind letter of assurance that we can be good friends by virtue of faith in each other's writing, for I have never been able to combine the two worlds of art and actual living: and I feel that with you I will not have to make the effort of impossibility. These two worlds cannot exist for me side by side. I cannot be aware of both at the same time—one must be completely transformed into the other—there is no in-between, no mean—there are only two extremes, and I am not conscious of their inter-relation until that relation creates itself. I cannot create it consciously, simply because I cannot create my everyday living. It remains to me an infinite mystery—I can only say it is complex. The world of art is simple: I can construct it as perfectly as I choose: and my satisfaction comes from knowing that the hours, the days, and the years that I shall spend with my construction represent a living time of perfection, for moving from this perfect world to the imperfect one I have conscious evidence in the written word of my perfect world even though the letter has ceased to exist because of my moving....

  So many abstractions to mask the loss of the Garden of Eden! Caresses, tenderness, strength, richness, softness, fire, honey, flesh, the paradise of earth and sensual love.

  Albert is sad because he has Negro blood as well as white and he stands caught between the two worlds. He was ejected from the Communist Party in Haiti. So now he works at the United Nations, when he had studied to build houses for the poor of Haiti and wanted to help his people.

  [December, 1946]

  Dinner with Kendall at the Hotel Lafayette. He has dark, burning eyes like a Spaniard, and we talk easily. He has a greater love of his poetry than he has of his prose. I have the intuition that it is because the poem is a disguise and the prose revelatory. He is secretive.

  He tells me an incredible story. His father does not want him to be a writer. He opposes him in this completely. He is wealthy, but he will not give Kendall time to shape his novel. His face, while he spoke of this, was pained. Then he pulled out of his pocket his father's birthday present to him: a gold fountain pen and a gold pencil. The father did not understand the irony of this. Kendall was bitter about it.

  I left for a lecture tour of various colleges. At Harvard, I stayed at Carlton Lake's house. Carlton is cultured, intelligent, sincere, interested in my work for many years, and eager to start a publishing house. A real friendship.

  It is almost frightening how I give myself to a situation. The present moment becomes the center. I take an interest in Carlton's life, I enter their lives, his and his wife's secrets, hungers. I felt compassion for the wife, intellectually inadequate, but childlike and genuine, and I helped her to have confidence, to lose her fears. The entire scene becomes glowing and vivid, near. I truly share their life. I experience all they feel. I feel warm and close to them. It all glows with humanity and understanding. We exchanged feelings, parts of ourselves. The reality, the intensity of my two days spent in Carlton's house, confidences, a whole volume of life.

  I spoke at the Poetry Room of the Harvard Library, introduced by James Johnson Sweeney. About two hundred people came, when only one hundred were allowed. The room was designed to hold fifty! The lecture and the reading were received with great absorption. No rustle of paper, or coughing.

  I wore a black dress and a shocking-pink scarf. I won many people, even some who were openly prejudiced, like Professor Post of Boston University. In the morning, we made a record of my reading of "Ragtime." I was shocked to hear my voice for the first time, to hear the slight French accent, and even more shocked by the young, tremulous voice.

  The next day I left for Dartmouth. I had been invited by Professor Herbert West. Before the lecture I was taken into his library. He talked about his loneliness, about academic life, the annihilation of his desire to write, his life only through reading. He took me into the core of his life, a sadness. He was one of the first to write about Henry Miller. Impossible to live a free life in a university. Gossip and watchfulness.

  An interesting, roughhewn, warm and human man, but heavy. We talked all evening.

  The next morning, after breakfast, I spoke and read to an auditorium filled with some four hundred students. Again I captured their full attention. Professor West said it moved him to see so slight and small a figure facing this hall full of men.

  The university plans to publish the lecture.

  Kendall sent me two telegrams, one expressing eagerness to see me at Amherst, the other an imaginative answer to my sending him a sea horse. As I opened the telegrams I had a feeling of warmth and intimacy, but one which is no longer singularly attached, which is transferable, not fixed on one person.

  But before Amherst came Goddard College. Maya Deren had bee
n there just before me, showing her films. The students were full of resentment because she had insisted on talking about her films first, as if to make sure they would look at them in her way. They had wanted to see the films before they discussed them with her.

  We tried that with the first reading. I read a story first and then we discussed it. But what a grilling, what an obsession with what is left out. They do not understand the writing, but pathetically feel that more factual detail will help them to understand. The hours from eight to twelve were spent in discussion. I am learning to parry attacks, to resist intellectualizations, to avoid irrelevant questions. But I was exhausted.

  Then a five-hour drive to Amherst. I was invited to stay at James Merrill's apartment, in a two-story house. Kendall came. We had dinner, with champagne. We were happy, talked exuberantly, fabulously free. Kendall is nineteen, I find, and born February twentieth. No wonder I felt affinities. He is tall, dark-haired. His face is roughhewn, the sensitivity betrayed only in the eyes and in his hands. There is nothing feminine about his appearance, but insecurity in his hesitant speech. When strangers came in to see me, having heard I was there, Jimmy and Kendall did not like it, and did not make them feel welcome. Kendall was talking about the ultimate novel. We were trying to define it. I talked about Fez as the labyrinth; about Nijinsky's diary. Jimmy Merrill has humor and playfulness, which relieved the intensity and anxiety of Kendall.

  Jimmy put on records of classical music. He read us a poem. Kendall read a poem. Kendall said he would write an essay on my work. I described my idea of an ultimate novel. Freed of upholstery, of unnecessary detail. We made fun of doors opened and closed, cigarettes lighted, glasses filled, iceboxes opened and closed, as keys to the characters! I told them what Wilson had said about the fact that "Lillian never takes a drink" and yet reminded him of Mary McCarthy. We were so intoxicated with our talks, excitement, so near to a drunkenness with words, with poetry, with projects, that when Jimmy said: "I smell smoke," we did not respond. He went to open the door, and had hardly opened it an inch when smoke poured into the room. He closed the door. He said: "Ana'is, telephone the firemen. I must gather my manuscripts together."