Diary of Anais Nin Volume 3 Read online

  The Diary of Anaïs Nin

  Volume Three 1939–1944

  Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann

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  A Harvest/HBJ Book

  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers

  San Diego New York London

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  Copyright © 1969 by Anaïs Nin

  Preface copyright © 1969 by Gunther Stuhlmann

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may

  be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

  means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopy, recording, or any information storage

  and retrieval system, without permission in writing

  from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of

  the work should be mailed to: Permissions Department,

  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers,

  Orlando, Florida 32887.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-12917

  ISBN 0-15-626027-1 (Harvest/HBJ : pbk.)

  Printed in the United States of America

  L M N O P Q R

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  Preface

  Anaïs Nin, we learn from her gradually unfolding Diary, has had to come to terms with America, with the experience of a "new world" as it were, several times in her life. Each time this encounter took place at a different stage in her own development. Each time it produced a response, a reflex, that had far-reaching consequences both for her life and for her art.

  The Diary itself, Miss Nin's basic stance vis-à-vis the world, had its origin in her first journey to the United States. Her ultimate choice, two decades later, between the profession of psychoanalysis and her commitment to writing—between a "life of action" and a "life of the senses," as she phrased it—was triggered by her New York experiences, as we have seen in the second published volume of the Diary. The present volume is the record of her third crucial confrontation with the New World, dining the difficult years of the early 1940's, which eventually determined her career as a writer.

  When Miss Nin arrived in New York for the first time, at the age of eleven, with her mother and her two younger brothers, she was not prepared to share the unsettling immigrant experience of so many of her fellow passengers. America, she had been led to believe, represented merely a "temporary" dislocation. The painful separation from her beloved father, the celebrated Spanish composer and pianist, Joaquin Nin, was to be of short duration. In the notebooks she had begun during the lengthy passage from Barcelona on the S.S. Montserrat, as a "letter" to her father, she anticipated an early resumption of the enchanted life in his orbit that had been disrupted, inexplicably to her, by a family crisis. So she stepped ashore clutching her brother's violin case—a symbol, perhaps, of her "artistic" past—proclaiming visibly her distinction from those who had obviously come to embrace a new life, to start out, again, as "Americans."

  New York, the sprawling, angular hub of what was then a provincial frontier country, presented a sharp contrast to the tree-lined, residential charm of Paris, where she had been born. It offered none of the mellow grace of Brussels, Arcachon or any of the Old World places her father's virtuoso career had previously taken the family. Settling into the dreary middle-class gentility of Manhattan's West Side, attending a Catholic school, where she was made conscious of the peculiarities of her newly acquired English, or being exposed to the sweatily proletarian boardwalk in Coney Island—all these manifestations of "American" life compared rather unfavorably with her memories of Europe. "I would prefer to return to Barcelona," she confided to one of her early notebooks. "I hate school. I hate New York. It is always noisy, everything is somber, shut-in, severe." As a transient stranger, she also felt ambiguously isolated. "I make no friends and the reason is this: One is never sure to stay anywhere."

  Clinging to the hope of an eventual release from her American exile, obedient to her mother, the young Anals earnestly tried to cope with the new environment. But after an uncomfortable year in New York, a terrible realization began to dawn on her: "The veil is torn and I must tell myself: Father is never coming back. Now a thousand things I did not understand become clear. I forgive Mother for deceiving us, letting us believe Father had not gone away forever. She did not want to destroy our youth with tragedy. But now I find reality more terrible as I was not prepared for it."

  The loss of her father, this central, traumatic experience of Miss Nin's youth, which was to haunt her for so many years (as we have seen in the two previously published Diary volumes), perforce also heralded a significant change in her own status. The return to Europe, to the familiar, aristocratic Bohemia of her father, had definitely been cut off. Now truly "displaced," she regarded herself as an odd, precocious "foreigner" amidst her American contemporaries, whose formative backgrounds, ambitions and expectations she did not share. "Why," she asked her budding Diary, "am I not like everybody?"

  "When a child is uprooted," Miss Nin wrote many years later, "it seeks to make a center from which it cannot be uprooted." Her center, as we know, became the monumental Diary she is still keeping today. It served as the confidant of her maturing years, the precious mirror of her intimate self. It turned into the multileveled novel of her life, the ultimate instrument of her art. In New York, she carried the Diary, tucked away in a straw basket, like an astronaut, enduring an alien environment, linked to his life-sustaining survival pack.

  Cut off from retreat into the past, except in memory, Miss Nin now embarked upon the exemplary process of pioneering which was to become one of the basic themes in her life. Instead of "giving in," of conforming to the prevailing standards and expectations of American life, or of rejecting them altogether in futile rebellion, she opted for a third alternative. In the midst of the concrete wilderness she began to construct, to preserve, her own "livable" world. It became, essentially, a world of attitudes rather than objects, of personal values rather than abstract ideologies, of aesthetic appreciations rather than material ambitions. Almost instinctively, she grasped for what was perhaps the only workable answer to permanent displacement of any kind: the creation of an intimate, individual world, an "un-uprootable" personal bastion in a fluid, potentially hostile and destructive environment.

  Unlike many native-born Americans who never experienced a climate concerned with or even appreciative of cultural values, who first had to "escape back" to Europe, to get away from the "drab sameness"—as Brooklyn-born Henry Miller called it—of a parochial, materialistic immigrant society, Miss Nin had been brought up in a cosmopolitan world of art. The experience had been firmly implanted in her as a child. It had been preserved, like a treasured icon, in her mother's brownstone in the West Seventies, where Spanish and Cuban artists found a hospitable gathering place. And she herself had rejoined this world, a few years later, by becoming a model, a Spanish dancer, by gaining access, on her own, to those enclaves in New York where other "foreigners"—real or imagined—pursued their "foreign" trade of artistic creation. Thus, before Miss Nin returned to France eventually, in the 1920's, she had already re-established, in America, a link, an umbilical cord, to the boundary-transcending world of art and artists which forevermore was to remain her sanctuary on both sides of the Adantic.

  When Miss Nin disembarked again in New York, almost twenty years later, in November 1934, she approached the New World in a different mood, as we have seen in the opening section of volume two of the Diary. Her relationship to America—as that ot post-World War I Europe in general—was undergoing decided changes. What once had been a remote, obliterating melting pot for the tired masses of Europe was now emerging, in its own right, as the probing ground of a fascinatin
g technology, as a harbinger of a New Era. The advent of better communications—faster ships, airplanes, radio, newsreels, the export of American jazz, of Hollywood films, the emergence of a fresh, indigenous literature—had carried a new Image, a new awareness of the United States to Europe. It was an image of vitality, and vitality, the possibility of growth, the opening of new perspectives, had always attracted Miss Nin.

  Thus, she landed in New York with a sense of elation, no longer an anxious child, an inexplicably exiled stranger. New York held promise, it was a bracing antidote to an aging, perhaps moribund Europe. The once oppressive, sky-obliterating towers of Manhattan now appeared to her as symbols of the modern world, of the potentialities of progress. New York, she wrote, was "pointing upward, into ascension, into the future."

  France, like most of the Old World, had witnessed the birth and initial development of psychoanalysis with benevolent reserve. But America, it seemed, had reacted to the promise of this new "science," as to so many other things, with genuine enthusiasm. Thus, when Dr. Otto Rank moved his practice from Paris to New York, Miss Nin decided to follow, to assist him, for a while, in his pioneering work. After the richly textured years in the small village of Louveciennes, on the outskirts of Paris—so intensely described in the first published volume of the Diary—the prospect of change, of a new involvement with others, apparently appealed to Miss Nin's creative sense of adventure.

  New York, indeed, offered a fertile ground for analysis, as Miss Nin was soon to find out in her room in the "Hotel Chaotica," in Dr. Rank's Central Park office. Beneath the "plastic brilliance, hard metal surfaces, glare and noise" of Manhattan, which had seemed such a hopeful contrast to the constrictions, the smallness of Europe, she encountered different kinds of constrictions, of smallness, of inhibitions in the tales of her patients which soon overwhelmed her. Her search for human potential had become a destructive nightmare. When the onslaught of unearthed neuroses threatened to devour her own creative work as a writer. Miss Nin returned to France, in June 1935, forsaking—as it turned out—forever the practice of psychoanalysis.

  Paris, Europe, in the 1930's. had not yet succumbed to the syndromes of the new age of skyscrapers and highway culture. Despite its own political and economic turmoil, it was still a "humane" city, lived-in, worn down to a comfortable human pace. The myriad cafés lining its tree-shaded boulevards still offered room for the talker, the walker, the genuine artist and the genial fraud One could still live, as Miss Nin did, in a houseboat, La Belle Aurore, tied to a city quai, or find a reasonably priced apartment in Passy, overlooking the Seine. The sometimes miserly, provincial Parisians still respected the artiste, even when he was not affluent economically. Her friends—Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Jean Carteret, Lawrence Durrell, Conrad Moricand—were not subjected to the dignity-crushing yardstick of "making it" There was, perhaps, less room for "mobility," for the kind of phenomenal success attainable almost overnight in America. But there were, perhaps, also fewer people who felt as deeply dissatisfied as those "successes" Miss Nin had encountered in her psychoanalytical work in New York.

  When Miss Nin was forced to leave Paris, in December 1939, after the outbreak of World War H, she left behind a city that had nourished her artistic and human growth for almost two decades. She had published her first book there, in 1931, a study of D. H. Lawrence, and her latest book, Winter of Artifice, had just come off the presses, only to disappear in the turmoil of war. In Paris, she had become reunited and reconciled with her father, and she had seen him collapse on stage during his thousandth concert. In Paris, she had undergone psychoanalysis with Dr. René Allendy and Dr. Rank. She had built her lasting friendships with Miller, Durrell, with Gonzalo, the Peruvian revolutionary who had tried to acquaint her with Marxian ideology, who himself perhaps symbolized some of the noble futility, the dilemma of political action, which emerged as one of the hallmarks of the 1930's. In Paris, she had tended to the ever-swelling ranks of refugees from the Spanish Civil War, to the escapees from political and religious persecution in Nazi Germany. And throughout, she had tried to preserve the personal island she had created against the growing dark sea of misery and destruction.

  Her farewell to Paris, to Europe, expressed once more a deep sense of loss: "We all knew that we were parting from a pattern of life we would never see again. It was the end of our romantic life."

  Miss Nin's third arrival in New York—this time, appropriately, by the novel conveyance of a "flying boat," a hydroplane from Lisbon—inevitably opened up some of the old wounds of her first encounter with the United States. Once again she arrived as a "foreigner," an English-language writer published only in France, as a "refugee." Uncontrollable events had once more separated her from a vanishing Europe, from an enchanted past, from a "romantic life."

  Much of this volume reflects the discomfort, the sense of isolation Miss Nin at first experienced in New York. "The tragedy is that just as we were about to enjoy our maturity in Europe, which loves and appreciates maturity, we were all uprooted and placed in a country which only loves youth and immaturity." She echoes her childhood feelings: "There is an atmosphere of separatism. The foreigner is an outsider. I seek to mingle with American life, but I feel a suspicion, a mistrust, an indifference."

  Most people, she finds, turn away from the unfamiliar. They are not interested in dreams, visions, in Europe, in the "past." They profess cultural interests, cultural ambitions, but they lack a receptivity for subtleties, sophistication. "I ask myself where am I now? In a place which denies myth, and sees the world in flat, ordinary colors."

  Confronted by the glacial aspects of New York life underneath its façade of uncomplicated hospitality, she seeks out other "outsiders." The only ones who have preserved a naturalness in their lives, she feels, in spite of all deprivations, are her Negro and Haitian friends. In Greenwich Village she discovers a backdrop for "genuine artists and genuine relationships." But even there many of the small amenities of European life are missing, the climate is barren.

  "I used to live in the streets," Yves Tanguy, the exiled French painter, complains to her. "Here I never want to go out." Henry Miller, who had been forced to return from Greece, other Europeans—Max Ernst, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp—voice similar sentiments. There are no comfortable cafés, no casual meeting places. There is no real sharing of life, only shallow prattle or egocentric monologues. And though Miss Nin tries to establish around her some of the old cosmopolitan life, she seems frozen in the New York environment.

  Parties here seem only pale reflections of those in distant Paris. Refugees, she notes, tend to repeat themselves after a while. Valiantly, she tries not to act "like the White Russians in Paris," to bridge the gap.

  She meets American poets, but she finds them "confused about their roles. They set themselves up as philosophers or men of action. I do not think a poet should preach, seek to convert, philosophize or moralize." She reads and meets American writers, yet she feels that "life and writing here are boxed-in, as monotonously symmetrical as the architecture. It is a dreary order, a mechanical structure, a functional practical servant." She finds the "mature here are tough intellectuals, harsh, rigid ... they are only interested in ideas, politics, science, not in art, aesthetics or life." Their harshness runs counter to her feminine sensibilities. "American literature," she writes somewhat prophetically, "needs expansion of consciousness."

  She is, again, sought out by the young, the unknown, who sense in her, perhaps, a kindred spirit, an unusual, receptive woman who has achieved independence not by trading on her femininity, a fellow visionary who is not part of the grinding cultural machine that consumes rather than nourishes. But she still feels ill at ease among them. She is aware of an essential, separating difference. She misses in them, perhaps, a sense of continuum. "They are busy trying to find their own style, their own art. But they borrow and imitate as we did when we were young, only we were grateful for our influences." The razing of the past, the obliteration of memory, reject
ion rather than organic growth seems at the root of their enthusiasm. "America," she notes, "is rejecting all European influences, like children who reject their parents."

  Suddenly, she is keenly aware of the passage of time. "I am watching Henry age, and Gonzalo age, and I feel the weight of their aging."

  Her work, in New York, falls upon deaf ears. Nobody seems interested in "European" writing, in what some editors believe is "unhealthy," decadent "surrealism." Write something like The Good Earth, she is told. Cut out the poetry, the dream, the vision. Give us the facts, Ma'am. "In being deprived of publication," she writes early in 1941, "I am deprived of existence, forced back into solitude, disconnected from life." She does not want to be a "foreigner" forever. "Being published would have been a bridge between myself and America," but "by rejecting me you throw me back into my small personal world."

  When nobody within the established publishing scene offered to bring out some of her work, she decided to go it alone. Communication, to her, was an essential necessity. "It was my first bridge. To reach my father. To reach Europe. To keep the people I love from vanishing. Writing against loss, against uprooting, against destruction." In January 1942 she sets up her own small press in a loft on Macdougal Street.

  Work on a new edition of Winter of Artifice is slow, cumbersome, and exhausting. But it is also a "marvelous cure against anger and frustration." It is an act of defiance, an assertion of independence. "At the end of the day, you can see your work, weigh it. It is done, it exists." Her words have become tangible.

  Challenging indifference evokes a new sense of vitality in her, a new determination, a new solidity.

  She has become more chary of psychoanalysis as a panacea. "If one can get lost in the labyrinth of emotion one can also get lost in the labyrinth of analysis. I found this out with Rank." But she maintains that psychoanalysis "is our only way of gaining wisdom because we no longer have religion."