Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 4

by Anais Nin

  I telephoned the fire department. But the man who answered heard my French accent, and the gaiety in my voice, and believed it was a student hoax. I called out to Kendall: "You talk to him. He does not believe there is a fire because of my accent." We were laughing, uncontrollably, because we could not really believe the fire, because it seemed so absurd, because Jimmy stood there with his manuscripts, and because he said; "Oh, Ana'is, this is a publicity stunt, of course. On the occasion of Ladders to Fire, we set fire to the house and we will have to come down a ladder." We opened the windows. The house was only two floors high and we would fall on the grass and on bushes, if the ladders to fire did not arrive soon. We heard the sirens. A huge fireman opened Jimmy's door, ready to rescue us. How do you rescue people taken with uncontrollable laughter? "It was a publicity stunt," we said. He thought it was the champagne. There was a lot of noise around. Neighbors had come to watch. Two engines were standing there. And the climax came when the fireman said: "No danger. It was the lady downstairs, who left a cake in the oven, and that made all the smoke."

  I work on a section, "Minuets of Adolescence,"* finding many ways to describe the evasions, vanishings, leaps of adolescent hesitations, using the ballet as a structure.

  Letter from Kendall:

  Quite impossible to work on my novel here, the flood is damming up within me and will burst through in some sort of violence unless I can escape to my writing as a canal of order....

  I seek to convince Gonzalo to return to Peru, where his aging mother calls him, where his family will give him his inheritance. His family is rich and powerful. His brother runs the largest newspaper in Lima.

  We argue across a restaurant table and I make a drawing to show him he is stalemated in New York. A job is impossible because of his lack of discipline, his anarchism. He could not even run the press at his own hours, in his own way!

  He says he cannot go to Peru because Helba will not go. She does not want to return poor and defeated to the family who rejected her.

  Gonzalo offers the same argument: "I cannot go back and face my family as a failure, poor and humiliated as they predicted I would be."

  "But you are not a failure. You can take back an armful of beautifully designed and printed books. I will outfit you and give you enough money. In Peru you may find someone to take care of Helba so that you can work on your brother's newspaper."

  I did not want to say: "You have destroyed everything, the press, my devotion, my faith." But suddenly I let out a strange, strangled sob at the devastation they had achieved. Gonzalo looked blind and mystified.

  He would like to go to France, where his niece Elsa lives, but he does not want to go back there without first seeing his mother, who is so old now. But he cannot face his mother in his poverty-stricken state, and if he does go to Peru the Communist Party will probably want him to stay there. Meanwhile, he has not telephoned for two possible printing jobs, part-time. He has not written to his mother, after borrowing my typewriter to do so. He has not written to France to see what his friends could find for him to do there.

  Gore is back from Guatemala. He has built a house and wants me to come and stay there a while. He looks healthier.

  At two o'clock I get a telegram from Kendall: PLEASE MAKE APPOINTMENT WITH LLPPINCOTT AFTERNOON OF THE 3RD. I have been struggling to get his novel accepted so that he will be free to write. Just as his writing is orderly, minute, perfect, his handwriting is chaotic and mad. He is unlike Gore, not simple or human but complicated and perverse. But the spark between us generates writing. Writing is our sanity, our gold, our only affinity.

  Gore has finished The City and the Pillar.

  Letter to Gore:

  I am going to try and tell you what was destroyed by your novel. It was the myth by which I live. I am a romantic and you are a cynic. It is this difference between us which has been stressed by your book, and not the similarity I had imagined. This is a book without illusion, without feeling, and without poetry. This is no reproach and no criticism. But for me, without feeling, without magic, without poetry, there is no life. Jim, in your story, kills Bob because Bob has not romanticized the sexual relationship they once had, has looked upon it flatly as a mere sexual incident of no importance. That angers Jim: he has idealized the first sexual encounter and for Bob it is nothing. So he kills him. Jim kills the legend in himself, but actually there was no legend, just Jim's need of idealizing reality. Now I read your novel as a revelation of your unconscious. When it comes to painting Maria, she is but a woman who has seen two wars, who has lines around her eyes, and who cannot find satisfying relationships. When' all the men have left her, as you say, she will be willing to accept the position of mother which Jim offers her.

  Everything in your eyes is diminished and uglified. All quality and beauty comes from one's own vision. In your vision everything is ugly. I like Pablo's exuberance and enthusiasm, and so I overlook his freckles, or his old hands. I like Frank's intelligence, and so I forget about his scarred skin. But you always focus on the faults, on what can be satirized. All the time I thought in your defense that you had been so deeply injured that you lost your faith in people, your feeling about them. But when you come to portray people, all the wonder and beauty of them disappears, and what is left is the ridiculous, the gray, the fault. So you are a realist.

  To see only the ugliness, that is what people do when they do not love. Your nausea about people, your ugly vision of them, will only hurt you. You are not aware that when you paint only cruelly, underlining only faults or weaknesses, you are the loser. For you create an ugly world in which there is nothing to love, and what is a lover without an object to love? That is what I call destructiveness. You have been hurt, so from now on you will hurt others! You live without faith, and that will make your world gray and bitter. The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love. Your mother harmed you more deeply than I knew. Or I had counted too much on my power to heal you. I miscalculated. The magic failed. You went off after our friendship, unchanged. As a magician, I feel the failure. A failed magician picks up and leaves. You not only killed Bob, which does not matter much for there are a million Bobs around, but you also killed off Maria.

  I did not mail the letter. I made him read it at the Ritz bar. It shocked him. But if I had to face an aspect of Gore I had not known, he was forced to face an Anai's he did not know. It was the loss of an invented Gore. Whatever Gore was with me, whatever side he showed me, was not the one he was to show in his life and in his work. He is only twenty years old. He writes a book on a one-dimensional world, sex in a void. A book which will hurt his possibilities in the political world. A prosaic and literal book. The editor at Dutton said: "I hate it." Gore calls on me for help: "Please tell me it is my greatest book." And this is the young man I thought tender and loving and devoted. Did he play a role? Did I cast my own glow on him? Did I imagine this Gore? Was it one aspect of him which came through under auspicious circumstances? Did I deflect his sadism, his cruel vision of others? How could I not see his cynical vision?

  Anai's, you invented a Gore which might have been, but which no longer exists.

  To me this was sadder than if Gore had died a physical death.

  When Ladders to Fire came out, and I could not afford new photographs, I thought of the surrealist's playfulness and gave Dutton the photographs taken by the Town and Country photographer who had made me a gift of them. I explained to the publicity department that I wanted them titled by the names of the characters, and only the center one identified as myself. The photos went out, and either through carelessness or malice, they all appeared as photos of me: me with Hejda's oriental, veiled face; me with Lillian's short hair and tailored suit. The very journalists who were always demanding humor as a requisite, demanding jokes, took this with dead seriousness as a part of that decadent surrealism they hated and knew nothing about.

  The reaction was totally negative
. Not one smile, not one recognition of the roles women play, of disguise and play. The picture in which I posed as the author was not used. The one of me acting out Lillian was misunderstood, and gave rise to the legend that I was a Lesbian. If I had ever enjoyed relationships with women I would not have minded at all. But as that was an unfulfilled part of my life, I felt the irony. I also felt that since it was done with the desire to estrange and excommunicate me from the community, it was malicious. When people do not accept your work, they always find a rationalization for not liking it. The reviewers caught that label to pin onto their total lack of understanding. The other label they used destructively was "surrealist." To them it meant only the pranks of Dali, sensationalism and eccentricity. I was surrounded by homosexuals writing about homosexuality, but the mere fact that I implied woman's love for a woman damned me.

  Oscar Baradinski is reprinting On Writing from the beautiful Dartmouth pamphlet. I sent him the photograph of me posing as Lillian, circling the face only.

  He printed the whole body in the tailored suit, in purple, and from then on whenever anyone did not like my work I was "typed."

  I protested to Baradinski. He promised to change the cover at the next printing.

  I also protested to Frances Steloff, and she promised not to sell the booklets as they were, but to wait for the new printing.

  Leo Lerman asked me for a short autobiography:

  Dear Leo:

  That was one question I was hoping you would not ask me but answer for me. About myself. Wanted you to make a portrait as you see me; I see myself and my life each day differently. What can I say? The facts lie. I have been Don Quixote, always creating a world of my own. I am all the women in the novels, yet still another not in the novels. It took me more than sixty diary volumes until now to tell about my life. Like Oscar Wilde I put only my art into my work and my genius into my life. My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure. I create a myth and a legend, a lie, a fairy tale, a magical world, and one that collapses every day and makes me feel like going the way of Virginia Woolf. I have tried to be not neurotic, not romantic, not destructive, but may be all of these in disguises.

  It is impossible to make my portrait because of my mobility. I am not photogenic because of my mobility. Peace, serenity, and integration are unknown to me. My familiar climate is anxiety. I write as I breathe, naturally, flowingly, spontaneously, out of an overflow, not as a substitute for life. I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing. More interested in becoming a work of art than in creating one. I am more interesting than what I write. I am gifted in relationship above all things. I have no confidence in myself and great confidence in others. I need love more than food. I stumble and make errors, and often want to die. When I look most transparent is probably when I have just come out of the fire. I walk into the fire always, and come out more alive. All of which is not for Harper's Bazaar.

  I think life tragic, not comic, because I have no detachment. I have been guilty of idealization, guilty of everything except detachment. I am guilty of fabricating a world in which I can live and invite others to live in, but outside of that I cannot breathe. I am guilty of too serious, too grave living, but never of shallow living. I have lived in the depths. My first tragedy sent me to the bottom of the sea; I live in a submarine, and hardly ever come to the surface. I love costumes, the foam of aesthetics, noblesse oblige, and poetic writers. At fifteen I wanted to be Joan of Arc, and later, Don Quixote. I never awakened from my familiarity with mirages, and I will end probably in an opium den. None of that is suitable for Harper's Bazaar.

  I am apparently gentle, unstable, and full of pretenses. I will die a poet killed by the nonpoets, will renounce no dream, resign myself to no ugliness, accept nothing of the world but the one I made myself. I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: "Excuse me, it was all a dream," and by that time I may have found one who will say: "Not at all, it was true, absolutely true."

  Everything I write is true, transposed but true. The source of the diary is my life's work. About myself, I have experienced everything and now I am ready to begin all over again. Dear Leo, I have nothing to say. I have not mentioned my flaws. I lack the courage to look at monsters, at cripples, at freaks, at the deformed, the twisted, the sick. I love mushrooms, the tropics, the color black. I suffer from chronic loneliness. I am born under the sign of Venus, the one that appears in the sea shell every morning with a sad expression: "Another long day of love to come." I was intended to live the life of Ninon de Lenclos, my favorite woman. I will never settle down, never have a home. My symbol is a roving ship. I am a writer. I would rather have been a courtesan. The rest is in the diary.

  Leo Lerman did not answer.

  There was a side of Gore which I saw, which existed in my presence, a Gore which might have flowered if a deeper love had been possible. This elusive, this ready-to-vanish aspect of the young causes me great pain, as when you see the innocence of a child destroyed. What destroys it? What in the world, in others, destroys it?

  I went to dinner with him. Same place. But not any longer the same relationship. We had dealt each other deathblows. I would not be, could not be his mother, with no other life of my own. He could not be the son of my writing, the heir, the one whose writing I could love. If he was the Gore of his writing, then he was a stranger to me. Gore said: "Someone said we should write a book together, for you overwrite and I underwrite. You are too warm and I am too cold. I have all that you lack."

  [January, 1947]

  Last night I gave a party to end Kendall's loneliness. Invited Bill Howell's sister, a beautiful ballet dancer, and Danny Kenning, her husband. James Merrill, Frank Westbrook, Pablo, Nancy and Carter Harman. As we sat on the floor in the candlelight they all looked young and beautiful. Each one extremely gifted in his own realm. Carter a composer, Nancy a writer and a slim, abstract beauty. I thought all of them worthy of Kendall's love. Carter is open, quiet, with a contagious smile, simplicity, intelligence and feeling fused. He is twenty-seven, slender, blue-eyed, with full lips, blond. He came through the experience of war without neurosis. He was an aviator, went to India. He is writing music for the ballet. He is winning and relaxed.

  Nancy is thin and fragile, like a bird, but at the same time cold and hard. It is a marriage of children.

  "Your writing," said Carter, "set off music in me, stirred all my desire to orchestrate. I wanted to be a writer just as you wanted to be a musician. I feel the need of words and I have a response to words. I want to compose for singing." He wrote music for some of E. E. Cummings' poems. The rigidity and tension of Kendall was darker by contrast with Carter. Constricted beings. Why do I hope to melt them? They harm me, and I cannot affect their constriction. Was it my father's constriction?

  I understand much better now my need for expansion and dilation. Was I afraid of where they would lead me, and did I choose who would act as restraining influences?

  Letter from Kendall:

  The party was strange, wonderful, full of unknown happenings, made magical by passing glances, by an understanding which I seemed to reach with some rhythmic essence in the dancer Frank. I feel years older. I feel charmed. I feel calm. I feel on the verge of discovery. I shall let the novel speak for me, for I am mailing it for him to read. In my person all my feelings are masked. I cannot speak through myself. I must speak in my writing.

  [February, 1947]

  The Poetry Center of Y.M.H.A. presents a reading from the "Prose and Poetry of Anais Nin."

  At ten o'clock I was reading from House of Incest.

  At ten, Kendall and Frank were having their first meeting.

  At ten, Pablo was
listening to a concert of French Renaissance music with Dolly Chareau.

  At ten, Bill Howell sat waiting to take me to a party after the lecture.

  At eleven, we joined Albert at a Haitian party, and entered into a realm of genuine joy and sensuous responsiveness. Albert is singing and playing the drums.

  At three o'clock we walked home on the icy streets. Kendall was attending a graduation party for James Merrill at Sutton Place, a ball for high society and debutantes.

  Carter's "Children Songs" heard over the radio. Delicate, innocent, playful.

  Bernard Pfriem, a painter, invited his friends for a party at my house: Dorrey, Toshka and three striking figures: Anatole Broyard, New Orleans-French, handsome, sensual, ironic; Vincent, tall and dark like a Spaniard; and Arthur, with mixed Negro and Jewish blood.

  Having been as usual dressed too early, in my white clinging dress, heavy gold Arabian necklace, hair piled high, I opened the door and the first to enter was Vincent. He was carrying an album of Afro-Cuban records. He quietly placed one on the phonograph and opened his arms. He is a professional dancer, smooth and supple.