Reunited: The Correspondence of Anais and Joaquin Nin, 1933-1940

by Anaïs Nin

After Rupert Pole, Nin’s “west coast husband” and literary executor, died in 2006, I was asked by members of the Anaïs Nin Trust to help clean and organize Anaïs’s Los Angeles studio, which had fallen into serious disrepair. Among the treasures I found during the cleanup was a manila folder tucked in one of the many crammed shelves with the simple words “Father Letters” written on the cover in Anaïs’s hand.

In 1920, Anaïs began writing her diary in English; no longer limited by her stunted French, her ability to express herself soared. Perhaps the switch to English was also a symbolic break from her father.

I found you whole, adorable, filled with sensitivity, a lyre with a thousand strings vibrating at the slightest breath.

a happiness that may seem so barbaric and primitive that it returns to the very principles of life and existence,

“Toi, Anaïs! Je n’ai plus de Dieu!”[21]

In the moments of love, with his glasses off and his long hair disheveled—it frightened me to see a woman—a Grecian woman. The shortsighted eyes unfocused as a woman’s when she faints with feeling. This strange impression haunted me. I closed my eyes. It arrested me. I closed my eyes.

In that moment when your letter came, it seemed to me that suddenly I was rewarded for all the art and the ingenuity that I have put into loving for all my life. It is sweet to receive, sweet to receive something that comes with so much subtlety, so much tenderness, with a thoughtfulness that enfolds one so skillfully, a quality uniquely yours.

August 30, 1933: Louveciennes. Evening. I am sad, sad. I cannot bear leaving him. I am obsessed with him—only him. I want nothing else, nobody else. He fills my life, my thoughts, my blood. I love him, I love him with wonder, with a turmoil of body and soul. He is alone, there. He walks constantly before my mind. He walks erect and supple, royal and gentle, and my yearning hurts, hurts me… I love him, oh, I love him deliriously…it hurts. I hurt not to be near him. I was happy there…just to see him, hear him. I haven’t loved him enough. He has come upon me like a great mystery. I have been dazed…awed… Before Papa, I feel that life is being ordered, arranged, criticized, judged, understood. Before Henry, I feel that life is being exploded, unleashed, undammed… I was Papa to Henry; I gave him consciousness. June gave Henry tornadoes and inundations. Henry gives me what June gave him. I need the drama with Henry. The turbulence. Papa’s passion for criticism paralyzes me. I feel like a clay being poured into a mould. I feel the tightness of the mould. I feel the beauty of the Greek vase’s contour. But I feel walls. And just as René’s walls “evolved,” serenity drove me to insane rebellions; the walls of Papa’s “measure” terrify me. Fetters. What a horror of walls, of all confinement, of moulds. When I was telling Papa about my first experience as an artist’s model in New York, with warm colors, and while I was describing the Watteau costume, he interrupted me: “Why do you say ‘W...

September 2, 1933:[63] Mort.[64] Like my page after Nestor’s visit when I hear Gustavo say I am my Papa’s only real adventure! I wanted to die with joy. But oh, the tragedy, the tragedy in this love. Death. Age. Papa amazed at the unexpected return of his amazing puissance. At fifty-four possessing me twice without pause, three times a day. But the horror in me when he observes this miracle and becomes thoughtful. “When there will be no more of this, and you will still be young…and you so ardent. Did you know that at my age I should only make love once a week? And see what you do to me—I cannot even kiss your ear without desiring you.” In spite of Papa’s playful tone, I feel chilled. I look at him with fear… I dread to see an old face—but no, no, he looks younger than Henry. Henry, after our orgies, looks ravaged, and under the eyes he is puffed…

A note from my editor after he read my book on Lawrence: “I cannot believe you wrote it. It is more...more (he stammered) powerful than I expected... You look sweet and purely decorative...”

And as for the eccentricity of my wardrobe, it is a way for a timid savage to frighten other savages.

(where you look like an angel who was called to earth to occupy a throne)

It is thundering and raining; the storm is unleashed. Lightning has already struck the hotel twice; everything is shaking, creaking, moaning, swaying...

You must have sensed these lines: “He does not defend himself, but he is defended by an entire past of silence and solitude—a solitude more real than that of living alone.” This past silence still makes me believe that in speaking I do not say enough. I only rely on your divinations. Sometimes, you know, I felt dizzy as I leaned over your silences because I divined not specific facts, but universes, distances, vast regions, infinity, the immeasurable.

I was shocked and sad. I placed the photograph on my desk. It is a face that I only see when he is in my arms—the woman who had startled me in Valescure… And then I realized I was falling in love with a reflection—a shadow—

As soon as one becomes strong you have to accept the consequences. Brave, strong ones are never pitied. People fight them. (June never got pity.) Today I am stronger and therefore I will be less gently treated.

was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down at my feet. I looked at them thoughtfully. Their paleness, their delicacy—the fine shapeliness…toes spread out, naturally, like live fingers, not like the dead, deformed flesh of other toes. The transparent skin, the veins showing. Feet whose tread is assuredly light… My father’s feet. And the first time I looked at some fragment of his body without the mist of fear, of awe. His feet. I have only been able to take into myself his feet. I possess them. They are real. Everything else is a dream, a vague dream of soft skin, of vigourous sensuality, of instrumentation.

Father’s feet. They were tender and stirring…like all that lies within the rigid form and mould. And my eyes remain on the feet—because of my fear…and my fear of looking upon the face and body of the sensual man is all because this unusual man is my father. Why is he not another whom I might love with fear? He strikes terror and cold upon me. His love has not warmed me.

The proof is I did not find my technique and my artistic objectivity until last Saturday, when I could see how the diary stifles the novel, how the rough, human document spoils the very moving tale.

I should tell my father that I do not love him, that the love I give him is narcissistic, as the one he gives me. Love of the one who can understand, answer you, diminishes the solitude. Whatever is truly his and not mine (his science, his order, his reason, his logic) I do not love. Not as I love in Henry all kinds of motley traits that belong to him and with which I have no relation.

I observe him wonderingly, as one looks at one’s image in a mirror. As he leaves us I think: When he gets home he will be regretting not having done this or that. He will think he has not pleased me; he will blush to think of the books which fell on us when we lay together (the horror of something going wrong, the discomfort). He will be wishing he had said this or that. He will forget that he did please me by observing I looked beautiful after our lovemaking (why, but I did look transfigured although I had felt nothing). He may regret that I offered him the opportunity to be honest and that he chose to lie.

For example, he said the stories I wrote as a child about being an orphan were not to be explained merely as criminal desire to do away with Mother out of jealousy and Father out of an inordinate love. I wanted to create myself. I did not want to be born from human parents.

There is no objectivity. There is only instinct. Blind instinct.

Rank said: “Hurt him. You will deliver him from his sense of guilt towards you by hurting him. Then he will feel delivered because he will have been punished. Abandon him as he abandoned you. Revenge is necessary to reestablish equilibrium. There is a law of equilibrium in emotional life. It rules us deep down. It is at the root of Greek tragedies.” “But I have to do those things in my own way, always.”

He makes a screen for himself out of his eloquence. Wit. Smartness. Is there a deeper man? There is a man who weeps, but that’s sensitiveness, not depth. There is a man who has exhausted his love and pain with my mother…

[…] I am ready in June to tell my father the truth. “We are too old and wise now to go on pretending. Let us enjoy our maturity and not romanticize. You will continue to be a Don Juan until you die because you thrive on the foam of conquest. You are made for fluidity, not the absolute. Between us there is only narcissism, and I have grown beyond this. Let us pay each other the compliment of not lying to each other.”

I will not care about the pain in it all. I think only of the book I will write. Oh, the book I write, the hardest, most terrible book. Instead of writing in the diary I rush and add four pages. Reporting our dialogue coldly, accurately. Noting coldly, coldly—everything. Not caring. I sit here and turn the radio on—jazz. Deep down I care—but I do not want to. I want to drown pity. I feel hard and full of cruelty. Immense cruelty. I want to telephone Father and let him hear the jazz and say to him: “Here I am—I have been living a few blocks away from you, with Henry. Under your nose. Under Allendy’s nose. Now I have become the tigress. I will make men suffer. I will not suffer anymore. Suffer, suffer, suffer. I write my book then, observing everything. No wasted emotion. No neurosis. Art. Hardness. The impersonal! I want to write the vilest book on incest—stark, real.”

A nomad, I felt I finally achieved a destination. It is not without sorrow that I resume all my old wanderings.

Will you accept with me the bankruptcy of our dream, since all dreams are bankrupt when pitted against reality, accept it with tenderness, with a little pity for each other, without being hurt, without bitterness?

August 14, 1934: I begin a letter to my father and am stopped by sobbing. Frustration and despair. He is no father. I love an image of him that doesn’t exist. When he is away this image begins to obsess me. I know that when he is near, it is just misery.

When I kiss him goodnight it is a storm. A sudden, powerful intensity. He begins to kiss me like a lover… Holds me like a lover… I feel love, the love of my brother, the body I bathed, took care of. I feel tenderness, but he, passion. He says suddenly: “Go away.”

June 21, 1937: When I see my father now, so gentle, so loving, I marvel at the novel I wrote and begin to think I am insane, that the way I crucified him was undeserved, that the monster I created was an invention, that the deformation was in me. I doubt all I saw, felt. The truth is in the diary. Outside it is insanity. Father is talking about the marvels of the microscope, about the scorpion he saw, the minerals, the gold dust, and I ask myself: was it a nightmare?

I imagine this: My father has taken me up to the little attic room to spank me. He takes my pants off. He begins to hit me with the palm of his hand. I feel his hand on me. But he stops hitting me and he caresses me. Then he sticks his penis into me, pretending to be beating me. Oh, I enjoy it, I enjoy it. In and out, in and out, with my ass exposed, my pants down, he takes me from behind. But my mother is coming up the stairs. We have no time. I clutch at him, suck him in, palpitating. Oh, oh, my mother is coming up the stairs. My father’s hands are on my ass—hot. I am wet. I am eager, eager. Open, close, open, close. I must feel him all before she comes. I must shoot quickly—stab, once, twice—and I have a violent orgasm. I believe this really happened. I do not believe my father penetrated me sexually, but I believe he caressed me while, or instead of, beating me. I remember the attic room where he took us to beat us. I only remember with sureness a time I wept so much he did not have the courage to beat me.

April 19, 1938: I said [to Jean]: “We cannot fall in love because we do not trust each other. We are like two magicians who know each other’s tricks. You are Don Juan and you remind me of my father. You want to be loved. And I want to be loved, and I feel distrust of you. I know you are fluid, vaporous, treacherous. […] For people who are twins, there is always a curse on their love.”

This child, the little girl Maruca, who had worshipped her husband like a teacher, god, great musician, was now as firmly aware and unyielding as she had been indulgent. She believed nothing. She even returned to the past, added up all the facets of his behavior and decided he had never loved her. She slowly added and accumulated reckless remarks, selfish exclamations, thoughtless gestures, the expression on his face when she was ill, when he told his impeccable stories, his outlandish lies, and determined he had never loved her. Until now her own love had covered all the crevices, her own giving stopped all the fissures, her own faith healed all the wounds. But this small, secret, gentle life that had been nurtured on grievances for fifteen years now erupted like a volcano and nothing could prevent its devastation.

A few days before my father left, when I was trying not to think of him at all, when I was trying to remember that I had not pitied him at all actively during his fall, not helped or protected him, or tried to keep him from going to Cuba, that I had been silent, evasive and neutral, keeping control of myself not to utter the last murderous words: “My love for you is dead,” suddenly I pictured him vividly, first when he fainted at the piano during his concert, then when he was lying down on the bench in the artist room, his collar open, and at this remembrance of his slender, elegant effigy, unconscious, such a burning pity lanced through me that I jumped: My God, I love him. Love what? Someone whose every awake word you hate, whose every act and thought you abhor, whose every desire, aspiration, you despise, whose every tic and mania and idiosyncrasy is distasteful and ridiculous—and this figure lies on a couch, this body empty of its consciousness, lies with eyes closed, the supreme comedian’s act, this effigy of my father. And some inexplicable, remote, puerile detail reawakens a love that died a million times and was buried. The figure, the slenderness of the body, the fineness of its form, its essence that every act and reality denied, this escapes still from the dead tomb of the love and is alive in you? “My God, does love ever die?” I ask, and will die asking. For years I buried him. I buried him in the novel, which will appear while he is sailing away. I buried him ...

The weeping. Imagery of weeping. I have always experienced a deeper layer of melancholy. I had to struggle against it. I had long weeping fits as a child after my father left us. I wept at music.