by Anais Nin
He has a gift for involvement in many-leveled lives, for the variations, caprices, and nuances necessary to the human spirit. Every stone, every roof-tile, every window, every texture or material was designed for the consistent development of his building, its environment, and designed to elevate the quality of people's lives.
Uniformity and monotony kill individuality, dull the senses. Lloyd designed his work to reinforce individuality with poetry, beauty, and integrity. It was planned to create a more beautiful and satisfying human environment. Architecture as poetry.
It was my initiation into architecture as an art. Lloyd is a complete and uncompromising artist. He talks about the organic home, built of materials natural and available to the site; of his respect for trees and the form of a hill; his sense of nature, of the continuity of the natural environment, and of how architecture must contribute to it, not destroy it. To hear him talk about color, materials, textures, forms, was like listening to a painter talk of painting, a musician of composition. In his art he synthesized them all. He drew like a painter, he used words with a biblical simplicity, but his ideas were subtle and complex.
By contrast, the commonplace, shoddy, temporary movie-set houses around him were painful to see. He called them "cracker boxes," shabby, thin, motel-type homes for robots.
***
Some of his houses, which I visited the next day, have the stronghold quality of a castle, a castle for unique individuals, to stem the rising tide of ugliness. Pride. Why did the millionaire father of Kendall not have Lloyd build him an American castle, instead of importing a European one, stone by stone, and rebuilding it in Dallas? What kind of people prefer to live inside of an imitation which has no relation to their personality? The story of Hearst, repeated again and again. And all the other imitations of Italian, Spanish, French, Swiss, and German architecture I had seen on my trip.
The Wright pride. Yes, pride in quality. He supervises his buildings, takes care of every detail: searches for masons who care about stonework, painters who can paint, metalworkers who are skillful. Today, in an age of amateurs, this is a most difficult achievement.
At times his mouth grows bitter; he vituperates, he berates commercialism, he curses greed and land manipulators. He is a crusader for quality. His work suffers indignities. His houses pass into other hands and are mangled, damaged, altered. The acoustically perfect Hollywood Bowl was torn down, rebuilt, and ruined. It is now monstrously ugly.
Lloyd's work belongs to the great moments of architecture, but today's America has no sense of eternity or history. The transient, the meretricious, the imitation, the pseudo rule the day.
We looked over more plans. Projects. Dreams. Dream of a beautiful campus, with individual units to house the students, shaped like a sea shell. A marina with buildings also inspired by sea shells. Certain plans lie gathering dust. They were made for some capricious rich man or woman who was not aware of their beauty. And then, now and then, a fervent, a devoted person, who understands his work and works with him, co-operating to carry out his plans. Out of this came a gay and whimsical nursery school.
His struggle is against uniformity and wholesale design. He speaks out boldly, as Varèse did. If he sounds like a moralist, it is because beauty, quality, and ethics are inseparable. Beauty and integrity. And for them one has to be willing to make sacrifices.
Another visit. The flowers in the room are arranged by Lloyd's big hands with an art equal to that of a Japanese flower arrangement. Friends call him and his two sons the giants of the West. He has gruff ways at times. Helen is there like a diffused light, to create warmth, harmony, refinement, like the cushion and the velvet against the wounds dealt to the artist.
We talk about his bohemian life in New York, with friends such as Djuna Barnes, Theodore Dreiser, Helen Wesley, Eugene O'Neill.
Ibsen would have written about this Master Builder, with one great difference. This architect never falls off the high standards, the heights he established for himself. The mediocre and the deformed sprout around him, like weeds, ugly buildings which do not endure and which look shabby after a few months. He is offended, but he does not surrender. He finds it "futile, offensive, and all-pervasive, but not inevitable."
Among Lloyd Wright's notes and comments on architecture I found the following:
I am concerned with our natural environment, how we can discover and utilize form, and perfect the endlessly varied, stimulating and beautiful services it provides for mankind. It is the architect's opportunity and responsibility to understand and practice the art of creating with and out of them a suitable environment for mankind—advancing the art with every conceivable means, including, among others, poetic license and poetic prescience. And now, after billions of years of experience and preconditioning on this earth (from the development of the first one-celled amoeba to our present human complex) we have no valid excuse for not performing superbly.
To see Paul Mathiesen, the Nordic Danish fairy-tale boy, in the melting sun of Los Angeles was strange. The sun made him seem even more ethereal, more remote, his hair whiter, his eyes a vanishing blue horizon. His words had no weight, they were carried away by the wind. Paul took me to see his friend Curtis Harrington. Curtis was a child prodigy of film-making. In college, at seventeen, he had already done a version of The Fall of the House of Usher, and a short time later two surrealist films: Picnic and Fragment of Seeking.
He was devoted to Cocteau and to Maya Deren. He was gentle and unassuming, with his curly hair, a shy smile, and eyes like a contented cat. He was also a historian of film. He had written about the films of the past, even while dreaming of the future.
One evening Paul and Curtis took me to the old section, above Franklin Avenue, where the stars once lived: Ramon Novarro, Valentino, Theda Bara, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford. What seemed sumptuous then, in the twenties, now seems small and pathetic. We sat on the patio of a deserted house which had been Valentino's. The chairs were broken down, the hammock half-torn off its base, the swimming pool empty. Curtis reconstructed the period for me.
George Leite publishes Circle magazine and printed a story of mine. We corresponded. I promised to visit him in Berkeley.
When I arrived, I was amazed by his appearance. He is like a white Gonzalo: six feet tall, round head, black curly hair, big dark eyes. He is of Portuguese descent. He moves impetuously, with a quick jazzed rhythm. Leaped into his old car, drove me to his home, a half-empty cottage, where his wife waited. All I could see were books and records. They had children. They had offered to put me up in the parlor. We sat and drank coffee. George and his wife were like people from a foreign country, after New York. They were inarticulate. Between each phrase, often an unfinished one, they had to move. Books, people, places, were mentioned in a fragmented, incomplete way. Themes were picked up and dropped. I could never recover what was said. There was something disquieting about George. Restless. Evasive. Mobile. He placed records on the phonograph. They were like signals and messages, a secret code. I do not know enough about jazz to classify or name the players. I listened. It was as if we could not speak the same language. Slang, jazz, musicians' lingo, a phrase, thrown out, a silence in place of an answer. He drove me to my hotel. He seemed amazed that I left them. It was an unfinished evening.
The Leites took me out. But first of all George insisted I swallow a pill. I did not know what it was. Suddenly the evening became cottony and diffuse. No talk. We went to a night club. In front of the night club, I saw a pool of blood. It was not a pool of blood. It was red wine, from a broken bottle. George seemed to. be driving like a maniac. We danced on rubber feet. The jazz music whirled.
Again, they were amazed that we separated. At last I understood. We were supposed to sleep together, the three of us. I kissed them and sent them on their way.
The next morning I left for Monterey, where I had an invitation to stay with friends and to visit Jean Varda. My friends' house was a surprise. They were taking care of a castellated house, copie
d from a European castle, on a hill overlooking the beach. An incredible setting. Hundreds of empty rooms, empty closets, empty icebox. They were poor. The wife worked at the telephone company, while John wrote his novel. John was there to show the imitation castle to prospective buyers. They gave me a sumptuous room overlooking the sea. No sheets, no towels. There were other visitors. We all met in the kitchen with its empty closets. We put together haphazard meals. We lay naked on the terrace to sunbathe.
John had found a way to delay the sale of the castle. He told visitors that the place was infested with rats. That it was damp, that it needed an enormous amount of repair. That nothing worked: plumbing, telephone wires, electric wires. He discouraged them. The days passed. I would walk down to the beach, but not to swim. It was icy cold. My friends came out shivering, blue.
I went to see Varda at Monterey.
He lives in what was once a stable. A beautifully proportioned, high-ceilinged house, topped by a turret with a flag of Varda's own making fluttering in the wind.
He had said that people cared more for horses than they did for human beings, because stables were more nobly built, with space and height.
As he stood at the door, I loved his laughing eyes, his warm, colorful voice, his bird profile, his sturdy body. He is a builder who built his own home. Goes to the junk piles and picks up wood, old furniture, and magically transforms them. The fireplace is made of bricks and built in the center of the room, as in the peasant houses on Majorca. The smoke goes up the wide pipe through the ceiling. His collages illumine the walls. It is a feast of color and textures. The food is served in big wooden bowls, as for giants, and he uses giant wooden spoons. A ladder leads to the turret. I would have liked to sleep there, with its four small windows opened like an oriental mirador, on a mattress on the floor.
Janko Varda is the only modern artist who creates not the sickly-sweet fairy tales of childhood but the sturdy fairy tale of the artist. The delight and joy of colors, the surprises of shapes and forms, the constant ebullition of invention. Everything that came from his hands was more wonderful than its origin, whether it was a salad, a bedspread, a pillow cover, a curtain, a candelabrum, a candle, a book. Everything was signed Varda. He created his own world. He designed dresses for his loves, jewelry for his mistresses. He was a tireless raconteur of magic tales. His eyes, his voice, and his laughter created joy. He awaited only pleasure. He opened the door only to pleasure.
We ate, we talked. Evening came. He built a huge fire, cooked on it while we sat around it. There was a knock at the door. It was the puppeteers who had come to Monterey. They wanted to see Varda. They came in. They looked like the troubadours of the Middle Ages. They were tattered by travel. They carried the puppets in potato sacks. After eating with us, they offered a show. No light but that of the fire leaping, shadows leaping. And the puppets performing around the round brick fireplace.
Thinking about Varda and his life, his style of life so beautiful, without money, all created out of his hands and imagination. The Greek artist whose predominant quality is his sense of humor and his creation of magic beauty. The catalogues of his exhibits are a satire of the fashionable double talk used by contemporary critics. I was thinking that someday I must visit Smyrna, where he was born. He was raised in Athens, and just before World War Two he settled in France, in Cassis, a small town by the Mediterranean. His home was a crumbling twenty-room mansion that constantly overflowed with penniless artists, and where he was often visited by Picasso, Braque, and Miró. In 1939 he traveled to New York for an exhibition of his work, and then eventually settled in California. Asked where his home was, he answered: "The world." His address: "The Arts Club."
His collages have an oriental splendor; they are made with brilliantly colored bits of fabric and paper and mirrors. On a base of plywood he pins an arrangement of odd shapes. The first effect is that of an abstraction, but slowly one recognizes a woman, a tree, a house, a castle, a church, a street. A single color dominates the total effect, but with infinite variations emerging from it.
He said to me: "New York is a city of angry people. I am delighted you come to the graciousness of California."
The titles of his collages are a delight:
"Flowers Trapped in a Labyrinth"; "Spiral Woman"; "La Femme Étoilique"; "Machine for Propagating Nihilism"; "When the Woman Rises in the Landscape"; "Women Signalling Under the Moon"; "Aztec Ping Pong Table"; "As Still as Life Can Be"; "Women are Mainly Frugivorous"; "Complete Manual of a Seamstress"; "Still Life Resigned to Stillness"; "Nature Morte, Morte de Mort Violente"; "Still Life in an Advanced State of Crystallization."
He delivers us from the strangle hold of realism, the lack of passion and wit of other painters. He fulfills the main role of the artist, which is to transform ugliness into beauty. I can see him visiting the scrap heaps of any town, picking up wood, discarded boats, furniture, taking them home, reshaping and repainting them into a Byzantine object of beauty. In the barn, he used sheets of tin, thick boards whitened by the sea and wind, bottles, driftwood, sand and stone. With sheets of second-hand glass he opened one wall to the northlight. He laid a cement floor mixed with sand. The grain chutes served as wonderful shelf space, the manger as a deep trough for working materials. He made the chairs, the bedspreads, the dresses for his wife, Virginia. He built a bar by laying an old piece of brown marble across a foundation of empty bottles cemented together. He made masks of driftwood. He made Phoebe, a child-sized mannikin, dressed with winglike sleeves, one leg red and one leg blue. She has spangles of tin foil dotting her dress, and a pink ribbon in her straw hair. She is suspended by a pulley from the ceiling and seems to be a floating angel. For Varda, art is an expression of joy. He wears the same colors he uses in his work: pink pants, or an old rose sweater, green and purple.
His face is ruddy, like a man who lives in nature and who loves red wine. His cooking is as beautiful as everything else.
His gold collages eclipsed the sun, his blues the sea, his greens the plants. The laminated blues dimmed the refractions of the ocean. His treble greens vibrated and made the plants seem dead. With small pieces of cotton and silk, scissors and glue, he dressed his women in irradiations. His colors breathed like flesh, and the fine-spun lines pulsated like nerves.
In his landscape of joy women became staminated flowers, and flowers women. They were as fragrant as if he had painted them with thyme, saffron, and curry. They were translucent and airy, carrying their Arabian Nights cities like nebulous scarves around their lucite necks.
Sometimes they were masked, like Venetian beauties at masquerades. They wore necklaces of solar meteorites and earrings which sang like birds. Velvet petals covered their breasts and stared with enticing eyes. Orange tones played like the notes of a flute. Magenta had a sound of bells. The blue throbbed like the night.
After his scissors had touched them, his women became flowers, plants, and sea shells.
He cut into all the legendary textiles of the world—damask of the Medicis, oyster-white of Greek robes, the mixed gold-and-blue of Venetian brocades, the midnight-blue wool of Peru, the sand colors of African cottons, the transparent muslins of India—to give birth to women who only appear to men asleep. His women became comets, trailing long nebulous trains. Erratic members of the solar system. He gave only the silver scale of their mermaid moods, the sea-shell rose of their ear lobes, corollas, pistils, light as wings. He housed them in façades of tent shelters which could be put up for a moment, then folded and made to vanish when desire expired.
"Nothing endures," said Varda, "unless it has first been transposed into a myth."
He often speaks of paradise. He is in a state of grace with love and joy. He extracts from experience only the elixir of life, the aphrodisiac of desire.
He took no time to weep over fadings and witherings. He concealed his sorrows. Only once did he say to me: "I need the sea. If I could not sail in my boat, I would certainly go mad."
The drive south along the coast from
Monterey to Henry Miller's home in Big Sur was steep and dangerous, mountain driving, and Paul's car was not quite equal to it. But as we climbed, the view of the sea below, of the rocks, the pines, the other mountains, was beautiful. It had a strong, Nordic beauty, not the beauty of the tropics, which I love. It was a cold beauty. The sea was lead-color, somber, and carrying no sailboats or ships.
The car drove right into a courtyard, and there was Henry sitting out of doors, typing. He seemed healthier than in New York. He was proud to own the modest cottage we entered. It was simple and uncluttered. I noticed the full bookcases and recognized the old Henry's tidiness. Lepska appeared. She was blond, sturdy, attractive, but spoke very little. There was tension between them. They served us lunch. It seemed to me that Henry was demanding an expansiveness and warmth which was not there. Lepska was silent, but affable in a closed-in way. He criticized her. He was embarrassed. Why? He thought my trip West and to Mexico was a flight from my life in New York, and that he should help me in some way. And he felt acutely the fact that he could not. I made it clear I needed no help.
I was concerned about Lepska. Knowing Henry, I was sure she was young and insecure, and that he would never know how to give a woman confidence in herself. It would be no concern of his, her doubts, fears, her lack of confidence. I was sure he had praised me with exaggerations. The atmosphere was not relaxed, and Paul and I decided not to stay.
When I stepped onto the terrace in front of the cottage, and stood away from Henry and Paul talking, Lepska suddenly and impulsively made a gesture of affection, and said with great intensity: "Anais, I love you, and if ever you need me, or need anything, let me know." We embraced, suddenly, spontaneously. There was in her gesture a mixture of distress and desperation, and if I had stayed I am sure we would have reached the confidences which her silence earlier seemed to withhold.