by Anais Nin
A delirious party, in candlelight, full of incidents. Three friends acted out charades. Dick, rejected by Pablo in favor of someone else, became utterly drunk and went out to the terrace. The banister is not strong. He leaned over it too heavily and it broke. Vincent, at the risk of his life, held on to him until the others pulled them both indoors. Toshka became very drunk and demanded a lover. Someone disappeared with her to the roof. Carter and Nancy did not stay till the very end.
Vincent wanted me to know that he was amazed at himself for having saved Dick's life. He said: "I would not ordinarily do a thing like that. I am a coward. I guess I was trying to surpass myself, my usual behavior, to impress you."
At this party, with people not of my own choosing, I felt a stranger. What made it contrast violently with my dreams was that a bolt of white silk, which Leonard had sent from Japan, had been thrown over the screen like a symbol of the innocence I seek, my withdrawing from cynicism, from drinking. My loved record of Debussy's "Sonata for Violin and Piano," which I consider the saddest piece of music ever written, was broken by my drunken visitors. In contrast with the party I described in Ladders to Fire, suspended in the half-dreamed, seeking fulfillment, this one left stains of wine, candle wax on the floor, cigarette stubs, crumbs of sandwiches, empty bottles, ashes, dregs, devastation. I had to clean up, take a bath, erase all traces of it, before I could go to sleep. This taste of the dregs so familiar to Rimbaud, the taste of desecration.
Letter from Kendall:
How very strange that because Frank lost his key I had to enter his apartment Saturday night by way of a fire escape. The symbolism of the act was completely apparent to me, as I am sure it must be to you. There is for me no entrance but the emergency, for I myself am constantly living in a state of accidents, of disasters. And I realize most strongly every day that my only relief is one of writing, that if I ever find a human relationship it will have to come by way of writing, the words must create a path, the relation, the contact between myself and the human. It is fatal to enter by way of emergency. You do understand that ultimately I am incapable of love, because it has assumed such gigantic proportions in my life that I examine it always with every atom in mind. I do not believe there is any love which can endure this kind of analysis. It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to plunge, yes, plunge into any adventure. I hold myself at a distance, above, beyond, below it, never in its center, but on the other hand, I have not yet forged myself to stone. I shall not plunge into my writing this summer, I shall compose from the greatest heights, with the utmost coldness and cruelty, I shall destroy in my writing everyone I have ever loved, and then finally I shall destroy myself. I shall not feel the slightest of guilt, the least conscience, the smallest responsibility except to my process of destruction. And then I shall be utterly alone, shall exist like a Sphinx in the desert. I'm so glad you are rewriting. You must learn to be terribly critical of yourself in terms of writing, and that will be most difficult because you are perhaps the kindest person I have ever known. The very fact that you are such a wonderful woman hampers your writing, because for you the need of living is strongest. And you are able to live, so by all means do. I cannot, so I must write. But always know that when I am most cruel, I am most weeping.
There is one theme running through all the work of Kendall, Gore, Leonard: this theme of paralysis, inability to love, linked to noncreation. For they are all tied together. Very little is created out of hatred. How did I find myself in a trap, surrounded by homosexuals, by people who cannot live richly and be fulfilled? I know, too, that they are dangerous to other human beings, that they hate those who live or love or write without difficulty. Why do they come to me? Do I allow them to? I understand their difficulties, though they are not like mine at all. I cannot help them. My kindness only embitters them. They cannot possess it all to themselves, because they bring me such a small part of themselves that I cannot fix my whole affection on one.
Anatole Broyard said to Sherry, after dancing with me: "Anai's is sensual."
Sherry answered: "No, Anai's is mystic."
Anatole: "No, Anai's is sensual. Or perhaps a harmony of both."
Vincent said: "You're a strange woman. At the party you did not play the hostess, you did not run things. You were not angry when they broke the records. You seemed to accept that people would behave like that, but you were so far away, and went further away as the evening went on...."
The manuscript of Children of the Albatross lies on the table. I have to write the end.
Kendall writes me a desperate letter: "Au fond du gouffre."
Kendall takes up on a different instrument my complaint at age twelve: "One day I will be able to say I have reached bottom." I answer his desperate plea: "Let me lead you out of the house of incest. I know every turn of the labyrinth. I will not let you destroy yourself."
So today I awakened feeling like a flower, suave, smooth, gentle. I awakened in a pure aloneness which is not loneliness. The typewriter. Work awaiting me. I put on my quilted, ivory-satin housecoat, bought at the thrift shop for five dollars, and went down for the mail. A note from Kendall:
Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down those depths and come to the surface again. Again what can I say to your letters when I feel so terribly poisonous before your incredible kindness. Here is a poem I wrote about you:
Announce your presence like a bell,
Not loud, but echoing its softness
Around the infinite sounds of love's
Issue from the dancer's cell,
Swirling in vowel of motion
Nearing the tempo designed for rites
In the kinetic calmness forming
Noon's violent religion of shimmering rotation.
With such tribute on my desk I work, smiling, on the pages about the organ grinder and his monkey.
Visits from Albert, from Gonzalo, from Vincent.
Letter from Kendall:
Your letter today about what I was hiding. Yes, I am hiding from myself the dreadful realization that I have for the first time and what I feel to be the last, been unable to resist loving the primitive, the boy. We are both consumed, separately, in loneliness, for we have no way—but there must be a way—of communicating. There is no escape for me at the moment, because I have not the time to write. He is most miserable—I can sense it—and will turn into hate. This is, indeed, the ultimate tragedy of non-communication which Henry James clarified.
Kendall's immensely rich father refuses him an income of two hundred dollars a month while he finishes the novel he is working on.
Gonzalo wore out my faith and devotion. But he repeats that his life was all "bad luck."
I telephoned Kendall on his birthday. I was saddened to hear that he was having a party for young men only. Such a total exclusion of woman must be disastrous to balance!
On my birthday there was a snowstorm. I went out at ten o'clock in the morning because my typewriter had started to skip frenziedly (the right illness for my typewriter), to get it repaired. I went to Gonzalo's to leave money to keep them from starving. I worked on a section of Children of the Albatross. Pablo came to fetch me at eight thirty that evening. We went to the Haitian Carnival. In my Spanish dance costume I danced all night. The Haitians did not allow me to sit out one dance. My birthday was a dance with men whose desire is open, strong, proud, whose bodies are alive, flowering, exuding power and passion.
From there we went to the Soho café. My mood changed as we watched a drunkard who had once been a singer, an actor, a master of ceremonies. He appropriated the microphone from the French singer and sang brokenly, lurching all the while, with vestiges of past wit and past linguistics. His eyes were sad, childishly pleading for applause, for one more drink, humble before the authority of the proprietress. A week before, he had come to her, sober, and said: "Will you promise to send me a Christmas card? No one ever sends me a Christmas card. I can't bear that." She kept her promise. He cam
e back a week later, sober, to thank her. He works at the morgue. He kept saying all evening: "I must go to work." He was nicknamed "Cold Cuts" after he had described minutely the nature of his work. He kept saying: "There will be no corpses until six o'clock. It is too cold a night for suicides." He drank down to his last cent, and the owner gave him a quarter for carfare.
I went home and could not sleep. "Cold Cuts" haunted me. I had to write about him.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
[March, 1947]
Sunday I finished Children of the Albatross. I am alone. Content. Finished copying and polishing the book, to be delivered tomorrow. I want to write an essay on the similarity between oriental philosophy and psychoanalysis. There is an oriental quality to my work.
Letter from Gore, from Antigua:
I must construct this home as a symbol, whether I live in it or not is not important, it is enough that it is here, but there is no heart to it, of course. These days I am a solo dancer, dancing magnificently with no audience. My attachment to you continues, it grows more poignant, more vast, more hopeless with each day—what can one do with beauty? It is there, it hurts. I have sometimes the feeling that too much of me was left in the womb, it is not a matter of development, rather of what never was—was not born at all. I can never be too long bemused by dreams. I feel a stranger passing through, the books are only shadows I cast before the sun....
Bill Howell and I visited Richard Wright. I had to lead Bill away before he spoiled his relationship with Wright by obstinate argumentativeness. Wright said he disliked Howard Fast for some personal injury he had done him, and Howell set out to argue Wright out of his feeling.
I feel around me a depersonalization of relationships which alarms me, for mine are so personal, and each person is unique and irreplaceable. I consider this a weakening of friendship and love.
I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself. I pursue in them echoes, vague resemblances to bigger relationships. I have to make deep relationships out of Howell's gentleness, or Gore's directness, or Leonard's trancelike dreaminess. Mosaics. A construction of small pieces. A bit of a letter, a poem, a tenuous presence, a few words. Pablo leaves his self-portrait on the wall, a mobile, the bird flying from the ceiling. Their tender ways enslave me, but because they are incomplete, not men yet, their presence is erased. But perhaps also because, being a woman, I detected what a psychiatrist could not detect, I became keenly aware that homosexuality was in part, and in most of the young men I know, a stage of immaturity. If two of them made a couple, advanced in living, relied on each other, were devoted and faithful, if I saw around me a big relationship, a great love, I would believe in their maturity. But as a woman, I was allowed to see their fears, their insecurity, their fragmentation, their promiscuity, their vacillations, the shallowness of their sexual encounters. It was their difficulty in living which aroused my sympathy: Gore's body and heart frozen in the Aleutians, Leonard's timidities. Howell's disintegration after the war because he discovered there the source of his difficulties with women. He was coming out of a bar, partly drunk, and was attacked by five soldiers. He did not seek to defend himself. Every time we talked about this he asked me the same question: "Was I a coward? Was it fear?" But one day, when he had drunk more than usual, he added: "The worst of it is that it gave me pleasure. Yes, it gave me pleasure to be passive."
Because I am a woman, the homosexual entrusted me with his childishness. The ephemeral sexual encounters, the disregard of the other's personality, the needs, oh, the endless needs of assurance, reassurance, admiration, encouragement. Something about the psyche as crippled as I was by my father's desertion, something creating difficulty in developing, in assurance, in maturing.
I saw in Pablo expressions of a very young boy. Moments of innocence which lighted his face, gestures of childlike tenderness, not sexual. I saw them fall asleep in the middle of a party, as deeply as children. I saw their spontaneity in art, which I enjoyed: they could draw, write, sing, dance, almost without training, as children do. There were even facial immaturities, immature teeth, hands. All the elements which compose charm and delight, and gifts such as attend the growth of artists, seem to maintain in their personality, in spite of maturity and aging, the sensibilities, the curiosity, the ever-alert responsiveness to life of the child.
This quality, the quality of renewal, perpetual youthfulness, which I liked in the artist, I find in the homosexuals. Except that here it is marred by anxiety, remorse, inhibitions, self-censorship. Why would they not be proud and simple about it? Why do they not have romantic and lasting attachments? Why do they not write romantic novels about homosexual love? There is a furtive quality to it all. Or else it comes out in irony, satire, or mockery of itself. This quality of caricature, which I first met in Henry, I see all around me. It is a subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, distortion, a burlesque which denigrates all it touches, diminishes it, attributes falsity to sincerity, and hypocrisy to sentiment, and denies feeling altogether. In fun, I have often threatened my homosexual friends to write a serious, a deep, a moving book on homosexuality. It seems to me the subject is distorted and its possibilities of beauty avoided. It is always treated with shame, like men's quest for prostitutes.
Kendall showed his distorted and sadistic side in a story he wrote about the party, the party at which he met Frank, and which I thought beautiful. For him the party was an evening of ugliness, I became the seductive and dangerous witch one must destroy, everyone was a grimace, a threat, a party to the ignoble plan to end his loneliness. That which I had done out of compassion for his loneliness became a scene as degraded as a house of prostitution. And the one who whispered all the twisted interpretations into his ear was a young poet who looks like a sensitive and intelligent person, acting like lago to Othello, only on so low a level that it was quite unbelievable. Was he in love with Kendall, and jealous of my offering him entry into my world? The contrast with the real party, for which I had selected my most gifted, most sincere friends, so shocked me by its grimacing ugliness, presented me with such a repulsive unconscious, that it broke our friendship instantly. The powerlessness which turns beauty into ugliness. This they can do: destroy, belittle, distort.
The child seeking protection and love and then turning against the mother in a fury, because she is a woman, because she belongs to a man, because she is not his to use and misuse.
Letter from Kendall:
I have never known a person whose relationship to myself I have not finally ended by destroying in my ultimate masochism; but I have learned from you that relationships can exist which are too valuable, too dear, too basically spiritual to suffer destruction. I have, I assure you, suddenly developed a sense of values which I never possessed before. There is only one way in which I can heal the wound I gave you by the story, and that healing must be the completion of the novel to the best of my abilities and the dedication of the novel to you.
Strangely enough, I can forgive many things, many acts, many treacheries, many forms of selfishness, exploitation, anything except ugliness in the vision I call cynicism. I think the cynic is the one who projects his inner ugliness onto others. That one trait alienates me completely.
Josephine is singing at the Ruban Bleu. Leonard is still in Korea. Kendall and James Merrill are back at Amherst. Pablo is in Panama visiting his first mistress. Gonzalo comes every day. He looks like a very tired old lion. He works the small press at his home. He has small jobs to do.
I gave a dinner for Richard Wright and Albert, who wanted to meet him.
Albert told Wright about his difficulties in Haiti. He had studied architecture to help his people build low-income housing, like the projects he had seen in America. He went out of his way to assert his African origin, although he was pale,
and half-Spanish. But he found himself ostracized by the Negro politicians, the full-blooded local Negroes, because of his light color and his comfortable bourgeois background. His disillusion was with the Left, which could not co-ordinate these inharmonious elements. Nothing that he had dreamed was accomplished; and now, at the United Nations, it seemed to him there was only interminable, legalistic talk. Not enough action for his youthful impatience, his readiness.
Wright was very understanding, and talked of his own disillusions. He was contemplating going to Europe.
Albert thought he should not go, because he was needed here, among his people.
"I can only be useful as a writer, and as a writer here I am strangled by petty humiliations, and daily insults. I am obsessed with only one theme. I need perspective. I need to get away from my personal hurts, my personal irritations. I am so constantly disturbed I cannot even work. I need to live free if I am to expand as a writer."
I supported Wright on this.
Why does everyone here believe that by all of us thinking of nothing else but the mechanics of living, of history, we will solve all problems? Sometimes one has to be away to think properly. I don't think the American obsession with politics and economics has improved anything. It is as narrow an obsession as any other. Richard may be right. He needs a letup from this daily friction.
As soon as one turns away from politics, there is moral indignation. But politics is not the only task there is to dol Each one must do his own well, and it will influence politics indirectly: the doctor, the psychologist, the social worker, the priest, the poet, the writer, the musician. I am tired of this constant "drafting" of everyone to think only of present-day events.