That France had become for me mother, mistress, home and muse I did not realize for a long time. I was so desperately hungry not only for the physical and the sensual, for human warmth and understanding, but also for inspiration and illumination. During the dark years in Paris all these needs were answered. I was never lonely, no matter how miserable my condition. To be a prisoner of the streets, as I was for a long time, was a perpetual recreation. I did not need an address as long as the streets were there free to be roamed. There are scarcely any streets in Paris I did not get to know. On every one of them I could erect a tablet commemorating in letters of gold some rich new experience, some deep realization, some moment of illumination. All those individuals without name whom I encountered in moments of anxiety or desperation remain permanently engraved in my memory. I identify them with the streets on which I met them. Theirs, like mine, was a world without passports, visas or calling cards. A common need brought us together. Only the desperate ones can understand this sort of communion, evaluate it truly. And always, on these same immemorial streets, it was chance which saved me. To go into the street was like entering a gambling hall: always all or nothing. Today millions of people once respectable, once comfortably situated, once secure, as they thought, have been obliged to adopt the same attitude. “Only get desperate enough,” I used to say, “and everything will turn out well.” No one elects voluntarily to become desperate. No one believes, until he has experienced it for himself, how salutary this condition can be. The revolutionaries do not subscribe to this view of things. They expect men and women to affirm the right principles without having been through the fire. They want heroes and saints without giving them the opportunity to suffer, to pass through the ordeal. They want a transition from a bad state of affairs to a good one without the dépouillement which alone will make them surrender their old habits, their old and out-worn view of things. The man who has not been stripped to the bone will never appreciate a so-called good state of affairs. The man who has not been forced to help others (in order to save himself) can never become a revolutionary force in society. He has not been cemented, he can never be cemented, into the new order; he has simply been glued to it. He will come undone the moment the heat is applied.
One may wonder, since I had been through the ordeal before (in America), why I had to go through it again. Let me explain. In America, when I went under, it was to touch a false bottom. The real bottom, chez nous, is a quicksand from which there is no emerging. I could never muster hope. There was no tomorrow, only the endless prospect of a deadly gray sameness. I could never escape the feeling that I was in a vacuum, bound in a strait jacket. To free myself was to rejoin a world whose air I could not breathe. I was the bull in the bull ring, and the end was certain death. A death without hope of resurrection, moreover. For not only do we make sure in America that the body is dead, we make certain that the soul too is killed.
In France I not only found the things I mentioned but I found also a new will to live. I found a father too, several in fact. The first was my old French teacher from the Midi, dear old Lantelme, dead now I suppose. He spent his summers on the Ile d’Oleron. My visits seemed to gladden his heart. Our talk was always of the old France, of Provence particularly. He gave me the illusion that I had once been part of it, that I was closer in spirit to the men of the Midi than to my own countrymen or to the barbarians of Paris. Between us there were no barriers which had first to be broken down. We understood and accepted one another from the very beginning—despite my horrendous French. Through his offices my mind was made ready to perceive the ripe wisdom of the French, their native courtesy, their tolerance, their sense of discrimination, their keen ability to evaluate the essential and the significant. Through him I became aware of a new kind of love: the love for the humblest things. Everything with which he surrounded himself was cherished. I who all my life had parted so lightly with everything now began to view the most trifling objects, the most insignificant events, with a new eye. In his home I began to understand for the first time the true meaning of man’s creation. I saw that it was a reflection of the divine. I saw that we must begin at home, with what is nearest to hand, with what is despised and overlooked because so familiar. Slowly, slowly, as if veils were being removed from my eyes—and they were indeed!—I began to realize that I was living in a treasure garden, the garden of France at which the whole world casts loving, yearning glances. I understood why the Germans, above all others in Europe, had need of this garden, why they never ceased to cast covetous glances in its direction. I understood why they would trample on it if they could not possess it for their own. I understood also why my own countrymen would continue to make it a refuge though they had (supposedly) everything in the world at their disposal. I could understand why in moments of envy or bitterness, or out of a perverse nostalgia, they would one day refer to this paradise as an asylum for the aged and the feeble. I could foresee that the very land which offered them freedom and ease they would one day renounce, or denounce, as a bed of corruption.
La France vivante! Why does that phrase continue to ring in my ears? Because it is the one which communicates the signal fact about France. Even putrescent, France is always alive, alive to the finger tips. How many times since the war’s end have I heard from the lips of Americans—“But France is finished!” I am tired of giving the lie to these glib defeatists. France finished? Jamais. The very thought is inconceivable. That France was defeated, that she was sorely humiliated, that she has assumed a guilt incommensurate with the crime (crime, what crime? I ask), all this is undeniable. That she is finished, ausgespielt, foutu, no, never. It does not matter to me if the hyenas have taken over; it does not matter ultimately if the element which has won out is not representative of the best. All that matters is that France is still vivante, that the spark has not been extinguished. What do we expect of a country which has been under the heel of the conqueror for five long years? Do we expect her citizens to turn somersaults in the streets? (Think how the people of our own South reacted when the War between the States was terminated. Think how they feel and act even today eighty years after they surrendered to the North.) What do we expect of France? That her citizens should rise from their graves as did the saints on the day of the Crucifixion? What the blithe, insensitive spirits of the New World fail to understand is that the French as a whole have yet to be convinced that the agony is over. For us the war may be over, but not for France, not for any country in Europe. When with our cute little bomb, one of those Christmas packages which only America knows how to prepare, we “saved the world” again we forgot to include the recipe for eternal peace. We jealously guard the power to annihilate the world at one stroke but we have nothing to offer in the way of hope and enthusiasm.
Europe is always the disrupter of the peace. We (of course) only make war to stop the Europeans from fighting. After each war Europe is supposed to be finished. “It will never be the same again,” we croak. And of course it never is, not quite the same. It it only here in America that everything always remains the same.
Everything which evokes raptures from me, in connection with France, springs from the recognition of her Catholicity. A man from a Protestant world suffers from morbidity: he is uneasy in his soul. Something is eating him away, something which leaves him, to put it in one word, joyless. Even Catholics, if they are born in such a world, assume the cold, inhibited qualities of their Protestant neighbors. The American Catholic is totally unlike the Catholic of France, Italy or Spain. There is nothing in the least Catholic about his spirit. He is just as Puritanical, just as intolerant, just as hidebound as the Protestant American. Try to think of a Catholic American writer who has the verve, the amplitude, the sensuality of men like Claudel and Mauriac. They are nonexistent.
The virtue of France is that she made her Catholics catholic. She made even her atheists catholic, and that is saying a good deal. To make whole, universal, to include everything, that is the pristine sense of catholic. It is the at
titude which the healer adopts. This larger meaning of the word is something which the French as a people understand par excellence. In a catholic world the small and the great exist side by side, as do the sane and the insane, the sick and the well, the criminal-minded and the law-abiding, the strong and the weak. It is only in such a world that true individuality can assert itself. Think of the great diversity of types in France among the literary figures alone, now or in any epoch of the past. There is nothing to match it that I know of. There is actually a greater difference between one French writer and another than between a German and a French writer. One could say that there is more in common between Dostoievski and Proust than between Céline and Breton or between Gide and Jules Romains. Yet there is a thread, a tough and unbroken one, which connects such unique men of letters as Villon, Abélard, Rabelais, Pascal, Rousseau, Bossuet, Racine, Baudelaire, Hugo, Balzac, Montaigne, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, de Nerval, Dujardin, Mallarmé, Proust, Mauriac, Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, Roger Martin du Gard, Duhamel, Breton, Gide, Stendhal, Voltaire, de Sade, Léon Daudet, Paul Eluard, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Delteil, Péguy, Giraudoux, Paul Valéry, Francis Jammes, Elie Faure, Céline, Giono, Francis Carco, Jules Romains, Maritain, Léon Bloy, Supervieille, St. Exupéry, Jean-Paul Sartre, to name but a few.
The homogeneity of French art is due not to the uniformity of thought or environment but to the infinite variety of soil, climate, scenery, speech, customs, blood. Every province of France has contributed to the creation of her culture.
It is a common saying that in France the young are born old. The violence and gaiety of youth are short-lived. Responsibilities are shouldered before one has had time to have his fling. The result is the cultivation of the spirit of play. The child is adored, the sage is venerated, the dead are worshiped. As for art, it invades every domain of life, from the temple to the kitchen. To penetrate the spirit of France one has to examine her art; it is there she reveals herself absolutely.
Hardly was the war terminated and communication restored, than we learned of the courageous pertinacity of her artists. Almost the first thing France demanded of the outside world was books, books and paper with which to print. Throughout the war her great painters had continued with their work. The older ones revealed a continuous development and a surprising evolution considering their isolation. The agonies of war had deepened, not annihilated, the spirit of the artist. Both those who fled and those who remained had something new and vigorous to show for the years of defeat and humiliation. Is not this the sign of an invincible spirit? The enemies of France would, no doubt, have preferred to see her artists die to the last man. To them this picture of quiet, persistent devotion to one’s art smacks of cowardice or resignation. How can a man go on painting flowers or monsters when his country is under the heel of the conqueror, they ask. The question answers itself. They were not painting “flowers or monsters”! They were painting the experiences registered in their souls. They were transforming pain and brutality into symbols of beauty and truth. They were rendering, or restoring, if you like, the faithful picture of life which the absurdities and horrors of war obscure and nullify. Whereas the Maginot Line proved to be but an illusory defense against the invader, the spirit of the French artists revealed something more durable. The obsession for beauty, for order, for clarity—why should I not add “for charity”?—that is what underlies the spirit of creation, which is the true seat of resistance. It was the men who were poor in spirit who conceived the idea of a Maginot Line. The artists are not of that stripe. They are, as we have been told so often, the eternally young. They ally themselves with all that endures, with that which triumphs even over defeat. The artist does not resist the time spirit, he is of it. The artist is not a revolutionary, he is a rebel. The artist does not crave experience for its own sake, but only as it serves his imagination. The artist does not dedicate himself to the preservation of his country, but to the preservation of what is human. He is the link between the man of today and the man of the future. He is the bridge over which humanity as a whole must pass before it can enter the kingdom of heaven.
PORTRAITS
UN ETRE ETOILIQUE
(FROM MAX AND THE WHITE PHAGOCYTES)
At the time I wrote this—1934 or ’35, I think—the Diary, of which I was privileged to read fragments, was only about thirty volumes big, if I remember rightly. By now, if she has kept it up, there must be well over a hundred volumes. The great pity is that it will probably never be published in the author’s lifetime.
The book in which this text first appeared—Max—was the first of what was to be a series, the Siana series, under the imprint of the Obelisk Press. Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book was the second to be published; the third, Anaïs Nin’s Chaotica, never came out because the war intervened.
What impresses me now—twenty years later—is that my publisher, Jack Kahane, had finally gained sufficient confidence in me to permit me to edit this short-lived series. If circumstances had permitted the publication of further volumes I would undoubtedly have sponsored some strange books—and bankrupted the Obelisk Press as well.
As I write these lines Anaïs Nin has begun the fiftieth volume of her diary, the record of a twenty-year struggle towards self-realization. Still a young woman she has produced on the side, in the midst of an intensely active life, a monumental confession which when given to the world will take its place beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Abélard, Rousseau, Proust and others.
Of the twenty years recorded half the time was spent in America, half in Europe. The diary is full of voyages; in fact, like life itself it might be regarded as nothing but voyage. The epic quality of it, however, is eclipsed by the metaphysical. The diary is not a journey towards the heart of darkness, in the stern Conradian sense of destiny, not a voyage au bout de la nuit, as with Céline, nor even a voyage to the moon in the psychological sense of escape. It is much more like a mythological voyage towards the source and fountainhead of life—I might say an astrologic voyage of metamorphosis.
The importance of such a work for our time hardly needs to be stressed. More and more, as our era draws to a close, are we made aware of the tremendous significance of the human document. Our literature, unable any longer to express itself through dying forms, has become almost exclusively biographical. The artist is retreating behind the dead forms to rediscover in himself the eternal source of creation. Our age, intensely productive, yet thoroughly unvital, uncreative, is obsessed with a lust for investigating the mysteries of the personality. We turn instinctively towards those documents—fragments, notes, autobiographies, diaries—which appease our hunger for more life because, avoiding the circuitous expression of art, they seem to put us directly in contact with that which we are seeking. I say they “seem to,” because there are no short cuts such as we imagine, because the most direct expression, the most permanent and the most effective is always that of art. Even in the most naked confessions there exists the same ellipsis of art. The diary is an art form just as much as the novel or the play. The diary simply requires a greater canvas; it is a chronological tapestry which, in its ensemble, or at whatever point it is abandoned, reveals a form and language as exacting as other literary forms. A work like Faust, indeed, reveals more discrepancies, irrelevancies and enigmatic stumbling blocks than a diary such as Amiel’s, for example. The former represents an artificial mode of synchronization; the latter has an organic integration which even the interruption of death does not disturb.
The chief concern of the diarist is not with truth, though it may seem to be, any more than the chief concern of the conscious artist is with beauty. Beauty and truth are the by-products in a quest for something beyond either of these. But just as we are impressed by the beauty of a work of art, so we are impressed by the truth and sincerity of a diary. We have the illusion, in reading the pages of an intimate journal, that we are face to face with the soul of its author. This is the illusory quality of the diary, its art quality, so to speak, just a
s beauty is the illusory element in the accepted work of art. The diary has to be read differently from the novel, but the goal is the same: self-realization. The diary, by its very nature, is quotidian and organic, whereas the novel is timeless and conventional. We know more, or seem to know more, immediately about the author of a diary than we do about the author of a novel. But as to what we really know of either it is hard to say. For the diary is not a transcript of life itself any more than the novel is. It is a medium of expression in which truth rather than art predominates. But it is not truth. It is not for the simple reason that the very problem, the obsession, so to say, is truth. We should look to the diary, therefore, not for the truth about things but as an expression of this struggle to be free of the obsession for truth.
It is this factor, so important to grasp, which explains the tortuous, repetitive quality of every diary. Each day the battle is begun afresh; as we read we seem to be treading a mystic maze in which the author becomes more and more deeply lost. The mirror of the author’s own experiences becomes the well of truth in which ofttimes he is drowned. In every diary we assist at the birth of Narcissus, and sometimes the death too. This death, when it occurs, is of two kinds, as in life. In the one case it may lead to dissolution, in the other to rebirth. In the last volume of Proust’s great work the nature of this rebirth is magnificently elaborated in the author’s disquisitions on the metaphysical nature of art. For it is in Le Temps Retrouvé that the great fresco wheels into another dimension and thus acquires its true symbolic significance. The analysis which had been going on throughout the preceding volumes reaches its climax finally in a vision of the whole; it is almost like the sewing up of a wound. It emphasizes what Nietzsche pointed out long ago as “the healing quality of art.” The purely personal, Narcissistic element is resolved into the universal; the seemingly interminable confession restores the narrator to the stream of human activity through the realization that life itself is an art. This realization is brought about, as Proust so well points out, through obeying the still small voice within. It is the very opposite of the Socratic method, the absurdity of which Nietzsche exposed so witheringly. The mania for analysis leads finally to its opposite, and the sufferer passes on beyond his problems into a new realm of reality. The therapeutic aspect of art is then, in this higher state of consciousness, seen to be the religious or metaphysical element. The work which was begun as a refuge and escape from the terrors of reality leads the author back into life, not adapted to the reality about, but superior to it, as one capable of recreating it in accordance with his own needs. He sees that it was not life but himself from which he had been fleeing, and that the life which had heretofore been insupportable was merely the projection of his own fantasies. It is true that the new life is also a projection of the individual’s own fantasies but they are invested now with the sense of real power; they spring not from dissociation but from integration. The whole past life resumes its place in the balance and creates a vital, stable equilibrium which would never have resulted without the pain and the suffering. It is in this sense that the endless turning about in a cage which characterized the author’s thinking, the endless fresco which seems never to be brought to a conclusion, the ceaseless fragmentation and analysis which goes on night and day, is like a gyration which through sheer centrifugal force lifts the sufferer out of his obsessions and frees him for the rhythm and movement of life by joining him to the great universal stream in which all of us have our being.
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