The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

by Anaïs Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension.

But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days

when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am do...

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.

Emotionalism and sensibility are my quicksands.

It takes great hatred to make caricature and satire. I have no hatreds. I have compassion. Everything with me is either worship, passion, or else compassion, understanding. I hate rarely. But I respond to Henry’s fiery rebellions. His angers. I can’t fathom the paradox of his enjoyment and his angers. My rebellions were concealed, inhibited, indirect. His are open revolutions.

I never hate enough to mock, caricature, or even describe what I hate at length. I am more preoccupied with loving.

I elect something I can love and absorb myself in it.

His first letter to her was delirious. She showed it to her mother. June wanted to know if Henry was a drug addict. This question startled Henry, because his intoxications come from images, words, colors.

volubility.

June and I have paid with our souls for taking fantasies seriously, for living life as a theatre, for loving costumes and changes of selves, for wearing masks and disguises. But I know always what is real. Does June?

“I know Henry thinks I’m mad because I want only fever. I don’t want objectivity, I don’t want distance. I don’t want to become detached.” When she says this, I feel very close to her and I hate Henry’s writing, and my own, which makes us stay aware, to register. And I want to become immersed with her.

June does not reach the same sexual center of my being as man reaches. She does not touch that. What, then, does she move in me?

June’s elusiveness, her retreat into fantasy, suddenly enrage me, because they are mine. A new anger and a new strength are aroused by her unwillingness to face her acts and feelings. I want to force her into reality (as Henry does). I, who am sunk in dreams, in half-lived acts, I want to do violence to her. What do I want? I want to grasp June’s hands, find out whether this love of woman is real or not. Why do I want that? Am I driving obscure, mysterious emotions out into the open (as Henry wants to do and does constantly)? Do I get angry with her self-deceptions, which are like mine? Her subtlety makes me desire frankness; the quicksands of her evasions make me, for the first time, demand clarity. At times I feel as she does, like taking flight from selves I do not know, and at other times I feel like Henry, like pursuing and exposing these selves to crude daylight.

Do I feel my own self definite, encompassable? I know its boundary lines. There are experiences I shy away from. But my curiosity, creativeness, urge me beyond these boundaries, to transcend my character. My imagination pushes me into unknown, unexplored, dangerous realms. Yet there is always my fundamental nature, and I am never deceived by my “intellectual” adventures, or my literary exploits. I enlarge and expand my self; I do not like to be just one Anaïs, whole, familiar, contained. As soon as someone defines me, I do as June does; I seek escape from the confinements of definition. Am I good? Kind? Then I seek to see how far I can go into unkindness (not very far), into hardness. But I do feel I can always come back to my true nature.

“We have both lost ourselves, but that is when one reveals most of one’s true self. You’ve revealed your incredible sensitiveness. I am so moved. You are like me, wishing for such perfect moments, and frightened for fear of spoiling them. Neither one of us was prepared for this, and we had imagined it too long. Let’s be overwhelmed, it is so lovely.

The intensity is shattering us both.

I do not think that, in spite of the passion so often described by Henry, June and Henry have really ever fused, yielded to each other, possessed each other.

I gave him the one thing June cannot give him: honesty. There is a strange detachment from the ego in me. I am so ready to admit what an egotistical woman would not admit: that June is a superb and inspiring character who makes every other woman insipid. That I would like to live her life, but for my compassion and my conscience. She may destroy Henry the human being, but she fascinates Henry the writer, and he is more enriched by the ordeals she imposes on him than by happiness. But like June I have infinite possibilities for all experience, like June I have the power to burn like a flame, to enter all experience fearlessly, decadence, amorality, or death. The Idiot and Nastasia are more important to me than the self-denial of Abéard and Héloïse. The love of only one man or one woman is a limitation. To be fully alive is to live unconsciously and instinctively in all directions, as Henry and June do.

“I understand her. She cannot be considered as a whole. She is composed of fragments. Only passion gives her a moment of wholeness. Perhaps, being as she is, she may lose your human love, but she has gained your admiration of June the character.”

I have always been tormented by the image of

multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a WHOLE, whereas I was made up of a multitude of selves, of fragments. I know that I was upset as a child to discover that we had only one life. It seems to me that I wanted to compensate for this by multiplying experience. Or perhaps it always seems like this when you follow all your impulses and they take you in different directions. In any case, when I was happy, always at the beginning of a love, euphoric, I felt I was gifted for living many lives fully. (June?) It was only when I was in trouble, lost in a maze, stifled by complications and paradoxes that I was haunted or that I spoke of my “madness,” but I meant the madness of the poets.

fulgurant

I have learned from Henry to make notes, to expand, not to brood secretly, to move, to write every day, to do, to say instead of meditating, not to conceal the breaking up of myself under emotion. He arouses tremendous strength in me. I write against and with him. I live against and with him. I am conscious of his life. I feel rich with it. His letters and the notes on the back of them, his wealth of activity, give me a feeling of warmth and fervor which I love, a feeling of expansion, of ampleness, plenitude. I could not live any longer in an empty world. I must have much to love, much to hate, much to grapple with. I am deeply happy. I no longer have the feeling of emptiness around me.

“Strange irony, in Spanish, compassion means with passion. Your passion is without compassion. Compassion is the only key I ever found which fits everyone.”

I get tired of his obscenities, of his world of “shit, cunt, prick, bastard, crotch, bitch,” but I suppose it is the way most people talk and live. A symphonic concert today, and reading the poetry and music of Proust, confirmed my mood of detachment. Again and again I have entered realism, and found it arid, limited. Again and again I return to poetry. I write to June. I try to imagine her life now. But poetry took me away from life, and so I will have to live in Henry’s world.

There is one world closed to him. It is the oblique, indirect world of subtle emotions and ecstasies, those which do not take a physical form, a plain physical act. He said he would never stop banging his head against it. I said, “There are some things one cannot seize by realism, but by poetry. It is a matter of language.”

I feel that when Henry talks to me he seeks another language. I feel him evading the words which come easier to his lips and searching for more subtle tones. I feel I have taken him into a new world. He walks cautiously into it, gently. I said to him: “Don’t think that when I talk so much about beauty and poetry in relation to June that I am merely trying to romanticize, to make it all appear innocent or ideal. I am only trying to describe feelings which are not so simple to describe. For you the sexual act is everything. But sometimes the senses can make a great deal of the mere touch of a hand.”

Dostoevsky was a portentous author for Henry and for June. When I first met them, I felt they were living in his climate, with the same fervors, extravagances, and impersonations of his characters. Today Henry seemed completely Henry and no one else.

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation. I think I have an immediate awareness in living which is far more terrible and more painful. There is no time lapse, no distance between me and the present. Instantaneous awareness. But it is also true that when I write afterwards, I see much more, I understand better, I develop and enrich. I live more on time. What is remembered later does not seem as true to me. I have such a need of truth! It must be that need of immediate recording which incites me to write almost while I am living, before it is altered, changed by distance or time.

I have just stood before the open window of my bedroom and I have breathed in deeply all the honeysuckle-perfumed air, the sunshine, the snowdrops of winter, the crocuses of spring, the primroses, the crooning pigeons, the trills of the birds, the entire procession of soft winds and cool smells, of frail colors and petal-textured skies, the knotted snake greys of old vine roots, the vertical shoots of young branches, the dank smell of old leaves, of wet earth, of torn roots, and fresh-cut grass, winter, summer, and fall, sunrises and sunsets, storms and lulls, wheat and chestnuts, wild strawberries and wild roses, violets and damp logs, burnt fields and new poppies.

He shatters the reserve with which I handle my explosiveness so as not to hurt others. He exposes the withdrawn Anaïs who lives several fathoms deep. He likes to churn the ground.

ensorcelled.”

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

tropisms.

simoom

Henry was telling me about a book I had not read. It was Arthur Machen’s Hill of Dreams. I was listening, and suddenly he said, “I am talking almost paternally to you.” At that moment I knew Henry had perceived the part of me that is half child, the part of me who likes to be amazed, to be taught, to be guided. I became a child listening to Henry, and he became paternal. The haunting image of an erudite, literary father reasserted itself, and the woman became a child again.

Dr. Allendy: “Did you hate me for making you cry?” Anaïs: “No, I think I liked that. It made me feel that you were stronger than I.”

Anaïs: “Today, I frankly hate you. I am against you.” Dr. Allendy: “But why?” Anaïs: “I feel that you have taken away from me the little confidence I did have. I feel humiliated to have confessed to you. I have rarely confessed.” Dr. Allendy: “Why do you never confess? You have told me that you are reserved, that in most relationships it is you who receive confidences. People confess their fears and doubts to you. But you rarely do. Why? Are you afraid to be less loved?” Anaïs: “Yes. Quite definitely. I keep a kind of shell around me, because I want

to be loved. If I exposed the real Anaïs, I might not be loved.”

My restlessness, which was vague and lyrical, has become sharp-pointed and intolerably clear.

Never have I seen as clearly as tonight that my diary-writing is a vice. I came home worn out by magnificent talks with Henry at the café; I glided into my bedroom, closed the curtains, threw a log into the fire, lit a cigarette, pulled the diary out of its last hiding place

under my dressing table, threw it on the ivory silk quilt, and prepared for bed. I had the feeling that this is the way an opium smoker prepares for his opium pipe. For this is the moment when I relive...

Late at night. I am in Louveciennes. I am sitting by the fire in my bedroom. The heavy curtains are drawn. The room feels heavy and deeply anchored in the earth. One can smell the odors of the wet trees, the wet grass outside. They are blown in by the wind through the chimney.

Anaïs: “I am curious about your life. I would like to know whether you get restless, whether you ever stayed up all night, wandered through night clubs, had mistresses, etc.” Dr. Allendy: “I cannot answer such questions; for the sake of analysis, it is best if I remain an impersonal figure. I must remain enigmatic. An intimate knowledge of my life would not be an answer to your questions. Experience is, in itself, good, but what is important is your attitude. Any experience which answers to a deep need of your nature is right, but there are times when I feel you are driven by other motives. I suspect sometimes you have forced yourself into experiences for unnatural reasons.”

Anaïs: “You once called me a ‘petite fille littéraire.’ Did you mean I was trying to live out novels and biographies and not my own self?” Dr. Allendy: “At times, yes.”

But he probed why I had “forgotten” my last appointment with him. I was beginning to lean on him. I was grateful to him. Why did I stop for a week? To stand on my own feet again, to fight alone, to take myself back, to depend on no one. Why? The fear of being hurt. Fear that Dr. Allendy should become a necessity and that, when the “cure” was finished, our relationship would end and I must lose him. He reminds me that it is a part of the cure to make me self-sufficient, so that by the time the visits are over I will not need him. But by not trusting him, now I have revealed that I am still motivated by fears.

How difficult it is to be “sincere” when each moment I must choose between five or six souls. Sincere according to which one, reconciled to which one?—as I once asked Dr. Allendy.