by Anais Nin
The road again. Old men sitting on fences whittling pieces of wood, just a gesture, slicing and dropping chips on the ground. In European countries, the same old men carved heads, pipes, dolls, animals, painted them, and decorated their homes. They carved miniature Swiss chalets with their peasant hands.
Gentle landscapes. Rolling fields. Moss-covered trees. Wild landscapes. Blue and purple mountains.
The beauty of the South, luxuriant and intoxicating. Smell of gardenias. New Orleans. Pungent food smells, of herbs and curry, jazz issuing from small cafés, people in the street, relaxed. The coffee with chicory, and the croissant. The courtyards with their overgrown plants, balconies with tracery of iron-lace railings. The flowerpots, the cinnamon, the saffron colors. The leaves are dewy, the faces smile, the winds are caressing, the parks are filled with exotic birds, with flamingos.
To shut out the sun and heat during the day they close the shutters. This brought vividly back to me the days in Barcelona. In the penumbra, with the light of day penetrating in thread-thin slivers of light, there is a sensuous intimacy, of twilight living, as in an arboretum.
In such a place, with marble floor, shuttered windows and wicker furniture, we visited Gore Vidal. He took us to meet a southern painter, Olive Leonhardt. Beautiful face, icy yet intense blue eyes, silver-gray hair. Her paintings are stacked in a room off the entrance hall. She is painting her dreams, she is painting people and New Orleans filtered through her vision. She sees the flaws, the ironies. She published a book of satiric drawings called New Orleans Drawn and Quartered.
I saw the painting she had made of me before we ever met, of which she had sent a photograph.* It was me, half-plant, half-tree, half-Ondine, half the girl in Green Mansions.
She had made a painting of Weeks Hall's bedroom, the one with the large bed and the broken bedspring, the shredded canopy. It was wonderful. It was the only satiric surrealism I had seen in America. She deserves recognition.
The road again. The small, short routes. The long, monotonous ones. The cities without interest one longs to leave behind. Heavy clouds, light ones. Distance. Everything is always farther. The map deceives. I cannot add miles. Maps and timetables and railroad schedules are mysterious closed books for me. I am not a good co-pilot.
I do not travel backwards, although the sand around the New Orleans seashore, patrolled by sea gulls, reminded me of Saint-Tropez. Because in Saint-Tropez the pine trees grew close to the water, and the bamboo grew thickly. The low, twisted pines. When tired of the sun, we could lie on pine needles. One could undress and dress between bamboo bushes. They rustled. They concealed the lovers. On the road, the girls passed in open cars, bare-breasted. The avidity for pleasure, the gay bathing suits, the swift descent on bicycles down the hill to the port, cooking on the beach the very fish we had fished for. The smell of pine-wood fires. The night club built of bamboo and palm-tree leaves, called "Tahiti." Flowered cottons, sea-shell earrings, sea-shell necklaces, flowers in the hair. The old tourist lady who saw Gonzalo walking with me and said: "These foreigners are overdoing sun-tanning."
In New Orleans I did travel backwards, because the atmosphere was evocative of France. Here, there was a feeling of enjoyment of life as a primary occupation. It was a succulent, lively, odorous, seductive city.
Lake Pontchartrain. Delta country. The Mississippi River. These are places made legendary by writers. The South is rich in writers. It is a fruitful place for a writer. Characters, plants, atmosphere have time to grow and flower to their fullest, like the stalactites in the caves. There is time to record. All this land was heightened and flavored by its writers. The little Ford Model A chugs quickly through some of the towns and places. Some of the figures are seen only in profile, or as they vanish into a house. But one knows them. One knows the Mississippi River, its river boats, its inhabitants.
Little Rock, Arkansas. Oklahoma City. Now we come upon the flat regions, the immense bare landscape, cattle ranches, hedges to keep cattle from crossing the road, and for the first time the human figure seems to have a style, a character, a stance. The walk is assured, booted ... the pants tight, the hats arrogant. The land is theirs. The cattle cannot cross, but the tumbleweed, this strange round mass of ashen-gray twigs, like a ball of wool, rolls across, driven by the wind. It is very light, it rolls and bounces as the wind sweeps the plains. The wind and the songs start here. There is a song about the tumbleweed.
It is a melancholy sight, first because of the bare and barren land, then because the tumbleweed is weightless and powerless, and is driven here and there by the wind.
Texas, the Panhandle country, flatlands, cattle. The men get taller, and have a grand style of entering a coffee shop, ordering, sitting. They have a style as definite as that of the bullfighter in Spain, the Gaucho in South America, the style of a vocation which has an individual character.
Just before Santa Fe, there was a ranch we visited, in Pecos. It was built by the river. Mountains, river, and trees were stark, all in shades of ash and sand and spring-pea green. I do not know why I suddenly wanted to stay there. The city drains your strength. This place gave strength.
A total break with everything I had known. A bare simplicity. A Lawrencian simplicity. A wooden ranch house, trees, a river. That was all. I felt drawn to it.
But the Ford Model A was leaving in the morning. On to Albuquerque, New Mexico. On to Santa Fe and Taos, to visit Mrs. D. H. Lawrence.
And now we are in Indian country. The bright-colored clothes, predominantly red, the necklaces of coral and turquoise, the long black braided hair. Indians living in hogans made of small timbers, thatchwork, and mud. They weave, they farm. Native corn and grain are still milled on primitive grindstones, as in Mexico.
We climbed toward Taos. I could feel the ratified air, the height, the cold air of the mountains. It seemed sand-colored and half-deserted at twilight, when we arrived. A few Indians in rather tattered costumes sold tourist items. Necklaces, semi-precious stones, woven textiles, blankets. The architecture was of adobe brick, and the white walls and dark wood gave a Spanish air. It was late, and we had to have dinner and sleep first. We could not call on Mrs. D. H. Lawrence until the next day. I had written to her because she had once said that my book on Lawrence was the best. She replied that she would be glad to see us.
The next morning we drove to her house. I expected a tall, imposing woman from Lawrence's descriptions. I found a tiny old lady, all smiles and liveliness. As she led us into the living room, I wondered if it was Lawrence who had seen her as so imposing, like all men who never escape the child's idea of the mother as big and powerful. Age could not have shrunk her so.
The room was immense enough to hold on each wall one of Lawrence's very large paintings, and sometimes more than one. I recognized the fleshy figures, the fleshy tones, trees and figures similar in feeling to Gauguin's nature worship. But these figures were not sun-tanned. They were English. They were in grayer tones, the flesh not rosy as in Renoir or Boucher, but sunless, as if long covered by winter. There was no sun or gold in his paintings, as I remembered from reproductions. They seemed slightly faded. Was it the paint he used? Was it that I expected Mediterranean colors of joy?
Meanwhile, Mrs. Lawrence showed us scores on the piano and we talked about music. She sings German lieder. She would have sung for us if we had stayed longer.
The light was sharp and clear. The light of mountaintops. A modest, quiet man had opened the door for us and then disappeared. He knew people came to talk about Lawrence, and perhaps he felt in the way. In the back of the house, he had his pottery kiln. We went to visit and talk with him.
Mrs. Lawrence was cheerful, talked easily about Lawrence, but admitted she was tired of visitors and monotonous questions. "They ask things they would know if they had read him carefully," she said. She would write her own book.
We did not stay long. As we left, on the way out, the modest man came and with signs led us to the bathroom and the kitchen. He pointed to his paintings
on the wall, all very small, as if he did not want to take up too much space, not as much space as D. H. Lawrence. We admired them, and he smiled. Then he led us out. We could have stayed in the cottage up the mountain, where D. H. Lawrence first lived when he came. But I was as reluctant to go into the past of my literary loves as of my human ones. I was curious about tomorrow, about what new places we were going to discover.
North to Denver, Colorado, to Boulder, to the Rocky Mountain National Park, over the top of the Rockies, the Continental Divide, to Fraser, Colorado, Central City, and west through Royal Gorge to Grand Junction, Colorado, the Colorado National Monument. There I began to find things I had never seen, the beginning of those red rocks, like rocks taken out of an intense fire. Colorado in Spanish means "red." The Colorado River carries this red sand or red earth two thousand miles to the Pacific Ocean.
West to Utah, south to Moab, driving along the Colorado River. The Arches National Monument, the strange lunar aspect of Utah. The Mormon land. The white salt lakes, the deserts, and the small canyons of gray sandstone, tipped with pale-yellow crowns. Something so subtle, such as one expects of other planets. Here the severity and sparseness was beautiful, like the paintings of Tanguy. The canyons, with their mythical shapes, crenelated towers, castle turrets, like the stalagmites designed under the earth by water. Here it is the wind which is the most skillful and intricate sculptor. The layered geological strata in all shades from gray to gold at dawn, fan-shaped furrows, the feet of birds, fish and shells implanted on the sandstone. The sea has been here. The sandy textures give to all the colors of earth, canyons, hills, rocks, a soft focus, like that of a shredded crayon.
The Indians match the landscape. Other people seem like transplants, and go about their work like visitors, guides, transients. Indifferent, anonymous, not connected to the land. Closed faces, anonymous faces. I cannot remember their faces. I remember the Indians, sharp-faced, proud, haughty bearings. When they are about, then I can link the canyons with the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China. The land of America, so beautiful, offering snow-capped mountains, African deserts, rivers, caves, mines, treasure, coal, silver, oil, petrified trees, strange flowers, strange birds.
Now traveling through the Navajo Indian reservation. Slept at a ranch in the middle of the fantastic sculptured canyons, in the middle of a soft, sepia-colored sand.
In Utah no sign of the severe and rigid Mormons. But their choice of Utah, with its severe and often bare landscape, its white salt fields, its bare mountains, seemed appropriate to their discipline.
I saw, around the bend of a mountain road, at dusk, a covered wagon. I thought it was a movie prop, could not believe it was real.
I saw the Indian homes carved in the rocks, the highest floors reached by ladders. I wanted more Indians around. They looked sparse, decimated. Weaving rugs, and making jewelry for the tourist.
Blanding and Bluff, Mexican Hat, through Monument Valley to Tuba City, to Lee's Ferry, where the boat starts down the Colorado, to Bright Angel Point and then the north rim of the Grand Canyon.
The earth-red canyons, layered in geological strata, rising to a height of awesome proportions, peak after peak. The work of a myth, a force beyond our grasp, silencing human beings, evoking religions and gods unknown. Temples, pyramids, tombs, palaces. The colors in a wide range of sepias, reds, maroons, silvered at the top by light.
Standing there stunned by the mass of colors changing in the light, we heard a subtle vibration, a faint symphony of sounds. It was the wind, traveling through changing depths and heights, affected by curves, towers, heights, abysses, issuing prolonged musical whispers.
If one has lost in the city the sense of nature, its greatness and vastness, if one has lost awe, wonder, or faith, the Grand Canyon reinstates this vision of immensity and beauty.
On the way to Las Vegas, the real vast desert, burning and arid. Saguaro forests standing up like fingers of giant hands from the parched sand. The Joshua tree with its strange hairy arms flowering in green, pine-like tips. The cactus in bloom, the violent contrast between the prickly branch and the soft vivid petals of the flower in many colors.
The ocotillo. The fire-red blossoms resemble tassels, or feathery birds at times. There is a desert cactus which is all claws and thorns, and bears no flowers. The desert yucca in bloom appears like a dazzling white Christmas tree, straight and tall, bearing a rich ivory-white flower. All were blooming like spring, and by contrast with the sandy soil, the burnt, lava-like rock, the parched, thirsty earth, they seem miraculous, almost heroic. Compared with the flowers tended by gardeners, watered, protected, set in their appropriate soil and climate, these are defiant and strong, a vivid garden.
I do not describe the places I disliked, such as Las Vegas. Approaching Los Angeles, I smelled in the night the sweet smell of orange groves, exuding a rich perfume.
In Los Angeles I visited Lloyd and Helen Wright. He is the son of the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
I saw first of all a high wall, like the wall of a medieval castle. And a giant tree, which seemed to extend its ancient branches to keep the house from prying eyes. The door on the left led to the architectural offices of Lloyd Wright. On the right, a winding staircase led to the door of his home.
For the first time in many years in America, I entered a home where beauty reigned, in a world created entirely by an artist.
Lloyd Wright stood up. Over six feet tall, gray hair, a full round head with a very high forehead, laughing eyes, and an emotional mouth. He has a powerful voice, gracious manners, a hearty laugh. Next to him a tiny woman with a very sweet voice, sea-blue eyes, large and melting with softness. This is Helen, his wife, who was an actress and now gives dramatic readings of plays.
There was so much to see in the room that one could not become aware of it all at once. It took me all evening to absorb the pre-Columbian sculptures, the exceptionally beautiful Japanese screen, the heavy furniture designed by Lloyd. The room was full of mystery. The uneven shape, the trellised wall made of patterned blocks, the long, horizontally-shaped window, overlooking the patio below, and the old tree that, like a great umbrella, sheltered the whole house; patio and balcony filled with plants and the wondrous cereus, that passionate and exquisite white flower which only blooms once, at night.
The fireplace of soft-green patterned stone was throwing its colors and shadows on the room. The lighting was diffused, indirect, softened by the latticed-stone screened walls.
The colors were soft and blended together. The shelves held books, Japanese dishes of gray and blue with the rare fish pattern, crystal glasses, silver. Helen served a dinner lovingly and carefully prepared to blend with the place and the talk. Everything gave a feeling of luxury created by aesthetics, not by money. By work of the hands and imagination. The atmosphere was rich and deep and civilized.
Lloyd's presence gave a feeling of power. The sensitivity I saw later, when he took me to his office and showed me his drawings and projects, and models for future buildings. His drawings were very beautiful in themselves, the concepts absolutely original and poetic. That was the first word which came to my mind; he is a poet. He is the poet of architecture. For him a building, a home, a stone, a roof, every inch of architecture has meaning, was formed from an inner concept. It was also a triumph over the monotony and homeliness which I had seen from New York throughout the Middle West, in every city.
I saw the model of the Wayfarer's Chapel he was planning for the Swedenborg Society. It was all glass, a perfect symbol for the spirit's transparency, a perfect expression of transcendent acceptance of infinite space. Man's religious spirit on an altar open to the universe through the transparency of glass—candlelight, starlight, moonlight, and golden ornaments shining through, opening out through the sanctuary to the sea, the sky, the trees, and to infinity beyond. He had planted a forest of redwood trees which would form arches over the chapel, like those in Gothic cathedrals, only Lloyd Wright had returned to the natural arches formed
by the trees themselves.
I saw his plans for Los Angeles. It could have been the most beautiful city in the world, for everyone to come to see, as people went to see Venice. But architecture had been taken over by businessmen, and Lloyd the artist was not allowed to carry out his incredibly rich, fecund concepts. The room was full of them. When he took a rolled-up drawing from the shelves and spread it over the table, I saw buildings which equaled the wonders of the past. All the images of famous architecture I had read of came to my mind: from India, Japan, Mexico, Peru, the Middle Ages in Europe, Cambodia, Thailand.
Strength was obvious in him, but sensitivity and imagination were in his drawings. Homes, churches, plans for entire cities. A universe of lyrical beauty in total opposition to the sterile, monotonous, unimaginative "box"-buildings now seen all over the world.
He was not only continuing the first poetic and organic concepts his father had developed on the West Coast, where as a young architect he supervised and participated in the construction of many buildings. He was also creating in his own style. He designed and built the first Hollywood Bowl, and many private homes.
I expected Los Angeles to be filled with his buildings. This was not the case. Fame highlighted his father's work, but not Lloyd's—not as he deserved. If his plans had been carried out, the world would have been dazzled by them. His work was on a scale which should have appealed to the spirit of grandeur in the American character, a dramatic and striking expression of a new land. But instead, American architects chose to take the path of imitating Europe, of uniformity, monotony, dullness. In Lloyd's work there was space, invention, poetry, a restrained and effective use of the romantic, surprises always in the forms, new and imaginative use of structural parts, rooms, windows, and materials.