THE TREE AND THE PILLAR

1952

NEW YORK, JANUARY 1952

The Tree---------------------->and<--------------------The Pillar

Meet

On one end of the trapeze there was a Tree.

On the other end a Pillar.

La Guardia Field. There was snow on the ground. Hugo was the tallest in the waiting crowd. He did not kiss me on the mouth. He bent down with tenderness. “How are you, little pussy? I was never so glad to see you.”

A few months ago he greeted me less expansively. For five years he has been analyzed by Dr. Bogner. His withdrawn or brooding or sulking moods have disappeared. That was the way he controlled me, punished me and contradicted his verbal goodness. “Go away if you please. You are free,” he would say, but his whole being resented giving me freedom. Now he smiled. He had been alone for a month. Most of his month was spent on business with Roy Archibald, married to Graciella Sánchez (Eduardo’s sister), and my cousin Charles de Cárdenas (in Havana), so he is now part of the clan. He also does business with Thorvald in Mexico. So he drove up and placed my bags in a new Ford convertible, and, as always, began to tell me news of the business, the losses in investments, or the gains or hopes for the future. He now has an income of $1,000 a month of which I get $400 that I spend either on air travel or as “earnings” in New York that I deposit in the Sierra Madre bank as booty from my trips here. Hugo told me about the business and about Dr. Bogner and his various difficulties (no longer with me—we went through that hell together). After years of estrangement, we took up a terrible battle for truth, for our own rights, we tormented each other, and yet we also clung to each other. Once, while considering a separation, we walked around Washington Square observing all the “changes,” the torn down and vanished buildings in which we had lived a part of our lives. The house on McDougall Street where Gonzalo and I had our first printing press, vanished; the old Provincetown Theatre, gone; houses on Washington Square where friends gave parties. And the despair at the idea of parting was so great our battles stopped. Hugo had fought to restrict me, and I to free myself. Imperceptibly, we were reconciled. Each time I come, he is more changed. The opaqueness, the sullenness, the coldness and anger vanished. He began exercises and also changed his body. He lost weight. He took up making 16mm movies. He was less obsessed with business, less angry at my trips.

We were driving in the wide, warm, spongy-springed car, soft-cushioned, silent. The radio was clear. We drove along the East River, passing by the new United Nations building. The feeling I had is that I was tired of my tasks in California, of my household duties, the endless petty rounds, and that all was not well with my body—I had a stiff back, a pain on the lower right side, headaches. As soon as Hugh was there I felt small again and I could abandon the reins. I abandoned myself to his care. He would say immediately: “You must get X-rays.” He had already made an appointment with Dr. Bogner. Other times, if I return with eye strain, I go to the eye specialist—I feel I can. I feel protected. Hugo has solicitude, and concern. He told me about his health. In his last letter he confessed that in his friendships (men or women) he perceives roughness, a lack of consideration of his feelings on their part. He feels protected by me, and in another realm I am a good critic of his films, a good guide in the world of art. My friends have become the public for his films, as they were for his engravings. He benefits from my relationships with colleges and art groups. I have shown Ai-Ye at the Coronet in Hollywood. I showed it in colleges. We now are able to recognize in what way we gave to each other even if at the same time I rebelled against Hugo the businessman and my duties as the wife of a businessman, and even if he rebelled with jealousy of Anaïs the artist, he still made sacrifices as my husband. Today we can thank each other. It is he who has given me the fur coat that keeps me warm, the doctor’s care that keeps me well, the objects that surround me in New York and in California. He bought me the calfskin bag in Mexico, the fur shoes in Hollywood, the dress I wear. It is he who pays to tint my hair so the grey won’t show, for the vacations in Acapulco that keep me slim and firm-bodied. I owe him all, my writing too, an objet de luxe. His care, his work. We talk about his film showing in Hollywood. We came home, entering the apartment I designed, the wall-to-wall grey carpet, the blue-purple felt curtains, the fuchsia bed covers and couch covers. He bought the paintings, the Dan Harris, Alice Paalen, a reproduction of Chagall, figurines like Chagall made in Mexico. The apartment has a sensuous quality I like and that Hugo does not accentuate when he is alone. It extends its enveloping softness. Already I felt pleasure here that I do not feel in Sierra Madre. It is the Chagall setting, the richness of tones, the Japanese dolls.

Mail was on my bed table, publishers saying they will not publish Spy. “A romantic fantasy,” says Pat Covici of Viking. “Brilliant but pornographic,” says Putnam. Farrar and Strauss will not do it. Letters from éventails (I don’t like the word FAN in America, which reminds me of an electric fan, and it has a flavor of Hollywood, so I say éventails). A membership card to the Museum of Modern Art. Announcements of Alice Paalen’s exhibit. A telephone message from Thurema.

Hugo had a small bottle of champagne for me. Already I had that feeling of gratitude, of shelter, of a moment when I can let myself go and be helped, sustained, mixed with anxiety about time, the long time I have to be here separated from my other life. I emptied my valise. I have learned to live with few clothes, keeping light to travel. I have only two winter dresses, one for evening, two good summer dresses, two bathing suits, scarves, two handbags, and a few old dresses for the house.

The moment when Hugo made love to me I withdrew into darkness, for it is his act and I cannot respond. It is, for me, an act of thanks, of tenderness. No change in this—I cannot draw closer, or desire him, or respond. He is a friend, a brother, a father, everything but a lover. The first night, exhausted by the trip and contrary emotions, I fell asleep, and I slept late in the morning.

The second night I had anxiety. Time became enormously extended. In the silence I felt the great distance that separates me from my other life. I felt the pain in my body, and again an irresistible desire to return to Rupert. Then the days began to fill up—intensity, pressure, visitors, duties, pleasures, The King and I with Roy and Graciella, Eduardo talking about his stay in France and Italy. But a strange irony: all the friends I nourished with my tales of life in Europe have gone to Europe—Frances Brown, Bill Pinckard, Woody Parrish-Martin, James Broughton, Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger, Kermit Sheets—but not I.

And now when Hugo says we can go next summer for four months I do not want to go because I don’t want to desert my other life.

In this life the horizons are limitless. I get in touch with France, Italy (where Under a Glass Bell is, as is Hugo’s film), with the insight of Maxwell and Anne Geismar, with the ballet wisdom of George Amberg, with the echoes of Tennessee Williams’ neurosis and creation, with the great gentleman of letters Victor Weybright of Signet Books, with Gore and his Prince Malade poses, his depression and absence of love, his devotion to me disguising the anger against his mother and sudden cruelties towards me when the two images are juxtaposed in his being.

Flavors and scents from many worlds. Hugo sometimes gets up at seven when he goes to Dr. Bogner and lets me sleep. As Jim writes me: “Whether you are Cinderella in the scullion (in Sierra Madre) or Cinderella at the Ball (in New York), the wand is in your hands, Anaïs.” Of course, I never believe this. I feel controlled, dominated and pulled by my two loves at each end of the trapeze, and my ingenuity against catastrophe seems like paper umbrellas held over a precipice. At this end of the trapeze Hugo brings me breakfast in bed. It is eight o’clock and I see nothing but sky from my bedroom window, the curtains open now.

When Hugo leaves, I dress. I see Dr. Bogner and she unfastens the band of iron around my heart. I cannot make a decision. It would be forced. I cannot make a choice. I can only live as I live now in spite of the danger and the pain. Greater pain and greater danger would result from either choice of lives.

Millicent arrives and says good morning, and we exchange news. She knows my life and never blames me, whereas for others she is severe and religious. She does her work mechanically, but she is utterly free to come and go at whatever hour she pleases. Her hair is grey, and my devotion to her and hers to me have lasted for eleven years. “How are the children? Your health? Your eyes? Mr. Hugo got you glasses but you don’t use them.” She was jealous of the laundress, so now she does the laundry just to reign alone.

Now I am smartly dressed in a white woolen dress. Winter white. I will see Lila who shared, for a time, in the other life in California. Writing and analysis are our themes. A love that cannot be fulfilled for her because I cannot love a woman as Lila loves them. I will see Max Pfeffer who, since the death of his wife, has become completely irrational. I should break with him, he is bad for me, yet I can’t, out of loyalty. Hugo will meet me for lunch and we will go to a French bistro or eat a shish kabob in a Turkish restaurant.

We will shop for gadgets, which he loves as children love toys. I will buy something at Brevoort where I have gone for eleven years. I will tell Dr. Bogner a dream. I will pick up a film copy for Hugo. I will see Louis and Bebe Barron, who made my records in San Francisco and now truly live a Village life on 8th Street.

One night William Kennedy, formerly of Duell Sloan and Pearce, came after interviewing me on the radio. We listened to the recording, and then I realized how Kennedy destroys all he touches by his madness. And he was my “editor” for The Four-Chambered Heart. We also looked at Hugo’s film of zoo animals in Acapulco, which will be on television. We went to Harlem, and I danced the mambo wildly. Three evenings a week we study dancing with Lavinia Williams for an hour. She made Hugo lose his extra weight and lose his stiffness. She communicates warmth and joy even though she suffers from a lack of confidence. We do barre work like ballet dancers.

Lawrence Maxwell disguised his blindness and shallowness by having a bookshop but was exposed as a poseur who cavorted with dancers, actors, writers, who live a life he does not understand. I believed him to be devoted, and he is verbally, but in matters of money he has always been ready to exploit me. He keeps my books for speculation and higher sales in the future. Carter Harman I do not see because the impulse that once drew us together was unfulfillable then and caused too much havoc. His wife discovered it. It estranged them. When I no longer desired him, he came to me, but as music critic of the Times, the composer of ballets who sought to continue his marriage, he was unnatural and no longer glowing. He was an echo of my violent desire for Bill.

Hugo takes women out, but apparently he has no love affairs. I no longer think of it as a great tribute to me, but as an unnatural hostility to all but the one woman in whose love he believes. He does not seem to want anyone even when I am away.

Dr. Max Jacobson said I have no more anemia after having it for all my life. Hugo only has a cold now and then, small mishaps. But neurosis still torments us.

Christmas night was spent with unattractive people: a countess in a genuine damask dress, Charles Rolo the monologist (masturbations of the mind) telling me there are no great novels, having made no effort to encompass my work as a whole although he praised The Four-Chambered Heart. But he is included in the first number of the Signet anthology of new writing and I am not. I am not in the Museum of Modern Art series, not in the Poetry Center readings. It is not a neurotic fantasy of rejection. It is a very real, very opaque silence around my work. It is like my father who did not see us children, whose eyes never noticed except to scold or expose a flaw, a father who was either busy working or not at home, or who, when he was at home, read a book at meals and asked us not to talk at the table. Invisible children.

And that is why being the Invisible Woman of Literature hurts me. Dr. Bogner works, with subtle probings and subtle labor, to separate the facts from their association with the past, so that they stand as facts powerless to poison me. In New York you are confronted with your Man of Achievement problem, because here, among millions, in a robot capital, the matter of identity is essential to survival. Either you are someone, or you are a robot of a vast ant organization, and sink into anonymity.

A good month. I saw Victor Weybright again. He is not sure about Spy, he is wavering. I get a negative letter from Hiram Haydn. The telephone rings and it is Christopher Isherwood saying goodbye, not proud of his play I am a Camera, but glad of the money to go to England with and to invite more young boys to share his life. Tennessee Williams appears with Oliver Evans, the writer he protects. He plays a role. I can see today why I did not like him when I met him ten years ago, before his fame. I like his work and not his role, his utterly insincere voice. Oliver brings me bad stories, which he says were influenced by my stories.

Jim Herlihy is moving to New York.

Lila spent New Year’s Eve with us at the Savoy. A frenzy of dancing, humor, genuine gayety, and above all this physical closeness, the currents between people, the reality of the body’s life, the joy of dancing, the interest and tensions and attractions between man and woman. Hugo has become a good dancer. Lavinia arrives in white, dazzling and beautiful, but not believing in herself. She danced and held everyone’s attention. Thurema came. I am pleased that Teddy, the seventeen-year-old spoiled star of the Savoy, a prizewinner, sought out by all the girls, suave and electric, raçé, courts me vehemently, of course. I laugh too, and say to Lila: “It’s only the grandmother complex at work!” Hugo is dancing, smiling, a gay and carefree night. No need to drink or make efforts. At three o’clock, before falling asleep, I think of Rupert because it is midnight in Los Angeles and by contrast the two lives are dissonant. He is having dinner at Henri’s, the best and most expensive restaurant with friends of his family, older and uninteresting people. Then, of course, he will rage at the Ford not flying, stopped by signals.

Hugo is very pleased by my appearance. We are at peace. His shedding of “roles” has brought out a new Hugo I like. Humanized. Present. Vital. A little more and he will possess some of that electric charge I liked in Teddy that made me, for the first time since my return to New York, desire Rupert. Assurance, humor, the qualities of maturity on display at Woody’s and Stanley’s the next evening. Sparkle and ease . . . But this is not the adolescent sparkles in space, the fireworks that strew ashes. It is what happens when you conquer anguish.

At Charles Rolo’s, the guests are intelligent and quick, but not deep. I see Luise Rainer, again married and mother of a little girl. Hugo talks now. He does not efface himself. He is joyous in company. He teases girls and is no longer jealous of the praise I get.

At the post office, where I go every day with a letter for California or a small present, the clerk, who knows me, wants to know who this forester is.

Charles Rolo reviews books for Atlantic Monthly, but it is Maxwell Geismar who truly flares up with enthusiasm over Spy. Rolo had reservations.

No one has given my writing the wholehearted devotion and active continuous service I have given to other writers. Miller urged me to write, inspired me, trained me; he gave very much to my writing. Gore did too. Gonzalo only when he printed. Hugo gave the most. No, I was wrong, I have been given devotion. I forget this when I am still walking the streets with an unwanted Spy. Gore gave me practical devotion, Henry artistic, Hugo human, Gonzalo a physical service not born of faith in the writing; he did not have that.

Today Hugo feels more secure as an artist. He can give big parties alone. He has friends of his own. I believe in his films. They are poetic and very tender and human.

He fell in love with all that I loved in Mexico. Acapulco is my paradise on earth. Hugo filmed it all.

Last night I was treated by the members of the Living Theatre like a celebrity. I wanted to laugh when one said, “If I call up, your husband won’t say no? I know that Steinbeck’s wife had to protect him against too many visitors.”

I gaze at shop windows but I don’t buy because in two weeks I will be at the other end of the trapeze, and there all the money I have is needed.

On mornings Hugo does not have to get up early, we sleep until nine when Millicent brings breakfast with the mail. This, to me, is the height of luxury. The phone rings. Ex-lovers who do not forget. Even the one in Paris years ago who made love to me in an elevator. Or Hugo’s family, the mother insane, on their way to England. Friends from New Orleans.

Larry Maxwell says, “There is a letter for you from California.” By a system of personal chain reportage Larry knows all I am doing.

The black and white calfskin is wearing down after four years, so Hugo gets me a leopard belt—the head has its eyes closed and retains its moustache. I send my children in Hollywood (Jim and George) cologne for their amorous life. They have mentioned a new erotic décor in Hollywood: black sheets. So our yellow ones here and the coral ones in Sierra Madre seem bourgeois now.

Charles Duell pursued me vehemently during our year of partnership. I was truthful and sincere in my refusal. But he turned away in anger, especially after failing as a publisher. I wanted at one time his beautiful wife for Hugo, but her figure was too matronly and my fantasy bore no results. I still dream of a perfect wife for Hugo; then I will be sad but resigned to a fate I deserve, and I will go away to the other end of the trapeze.

Hugo Guiler (l), unidentified man, Anaïs Nin

At 35 West 9th when you ring the chimed bell, the white door opens on a white square entrance room carpeted in grey, with mirrors on the wall. The telephone is ringing. Millicent is ironing in the kitchen. You can see into the large salon, its walls almost all covered by curtains from ceiling to floor that deaden sounds; the grey carpet softens footsteps and makes the deep fuchsia-covered benches around the room the only warm, rich tone, a blending of a masculine color of neutral grey and a feminine color of fuchsia. People are entranced by the colors and textures. The solid color is a wonderful frame for heads.

The telephone is ringing so I shed my fur coat and answer. It is Wifredo Lam, negro-Chinese painter, protégé of Picasso, in New York for a week, from Paris, en route to Havana. His voice is plaintive, anxious, and requesting. He expects that Hugo (Hugo still playing the role of protector) will help him sell his paintings. He needs to show proofs of his activity in Cahiers d’Art. He elaborates intellectual constructions and all his cohabitations take place in space, not on a level of human gravity. Before me he wants to shine only with meteoric lights. As a human being he stands like a Giacometti statue, abstract and distilled in violent contrast to Teddy Brown, the negro of seventeen who says all he has to say with dancing, whose body is charged with fireworks, a magnificent agitation of a million particles and cells. Every negro who imitates our abstract mental language serves to betray its absurdity. Unconsciously Lam presents us with an intelligent burlesque of our theories, concepts, and analysis. The formulas and the jargon. So he cannot dance. He is the painter of white ghostly puzzles subjected to dissociative forces.

My reading from Spy on Sunday, arranged by Ivan Davis in such a childish, ineffectual way, was rescued from total failure by the efforts of Lila, Hugo, Lawrence Maxwell (Ivan was sending typewritten cards that were not even prepared ten days before the reading).

It was a shabby place, like some ex-burlesque hall, without the humorous shabbiness of rococo European places. It was too late to back down, and many wanted to hear the new manuscript that Bobbs Merrill, Houghton Mifflin, Viking, Farrar Strauss and Young have rejected. I wore the same old black jersey dress pictured on the cover of The Four-Chambered Heart because it is a dancer’s dress. It reveals the figure, uncovers shoulders, while swirling and moving in rhythm. I presented an outline of the design of the novel and read fragments of it.

There were about 100 people, of them 80 friends. No official figures, no invited celebrities (no William Carlos Williams, no John Cage, no Oscar Williams, no publishers, no Laughlin, no critics, no Charles Rolo)—but friends—deep, kind, loyal friends. Anne and Maxwell Geismar, Lila Rosenblum, Lawrence Maxwell, Woody Parrish-Martin, Louis and Bebe Barron, Stanley Haggart, Lavinia Williams, Eduardo Sánchez, the Davises, the Kennedys, Max Pfeffer with two admirers, Thurema.

The sincerity of the response, the rapt silence, the stirred faces, the words of praise. I know by this the work was right and deep. The reading itself was praised. It enhanced the writing, made it more comprehensible. The danger of poetry, said Geismar. Some truths were crystallized in the outline, even for Hugo: “I understand it better.” Everyone was moved. I was happy, in good form. I felt what I read. I was happy to be told I looked beautiful. The change in Hugo too, healthy, roseate, shedding a Jupiterean glow, no more jealousy or envy, a certitude of his own value. He is no longer grey and withdrawn. He looks and acts serene, generous, free. He keeps me, but he plays the host, at ease, accepts compliments, performs introductions, enjoys what there is to enjoy.

Ironically I have to cover a “loss”—the reading cost me $25! Ironically the celebrities went to the Living Theatre opening of Rexroth’s Behind the Mountain and were forced to admit the play’s stupidity.

The absurdity of my position in letters was made clear to all that day. I am in a private world, recognized by very few. Suddenly I find my humor, due perhaps to Dr. Bogner. She has me examined physically, and X-rays showed no illness, there was no anemia, no cause for the pain in the abdomen, which I believed to be a tumor, no cause for the pain in my back. So we have to accept I am presenting the symptoms of my father’s illnesses: sprained back, abdominal pain—the twinship continues.

Every day Hugo and I drive up together to Dr. Bogner, to X-rays, to errands, to a coffee and doughnut shop, to see Rollo Williams’ new lighting miracles on Madison Avenue, to see Jungle Headhunters, to see Alice Paalen’s painting exhibit, to have cocktails with Eduardo, and to make new friends: Frances Keene and her husband. We go to Brooklyn to dance with Lavinia.

The telephone rang after the lecture. The Geismars were moved and understood me better. Lawrence Maxwell says, “I worship you.” The telephone rings again. Paolo Milano, the great natural comic and the author of the introduction to Viking Press’s Dante, discoursing on me and refusing to speak of his own writing. “Il y a du vrai et du faux en vous, une naïveté fondamentale. Tout est si jeune en vous.” [There is the real and the false in you, a fundamental naïveté. Everything about you is so young] I finally obtain the secret underlying his buffoonery: his hidden writing. We quarrel in a friendly way; he does not believe in the poetic novel, or in psychoanalysis. But he is delightful and whimsical, elated, and a true mimic.

Reaping emptiness and impotence from Rexroth’s fatuity, we re-write a play, a better one at the Barrons’, and order Hugo to be the messenger, to deliver a message behind the window of their recording room, a mime’s desperate attempt behind the glass of a soundproof room! An image out of the past, out of the dim years of his absences. Hugo was absent while we lived together. I am absent now, intermittently, but so much more present when I am here. He is happy.

My dreams reveal that the other life is cramped; its only flow is erotic. Its beauty is that of the night; the day is ruled by the car, movies, the house and garden, and impossible people.

The coffee at 35 W. 9th is made by Hugo more often than by me. He expresses the need and desire to take care of me. He is vigilant and devoted. I have made an enormous effort to redress this situation, not to be spoiled or pampered. I seek to establish a rhythm. He does not believe I have been a bad wife. No one will believe it. Hugo has felt loved, not deserted or estranged. Such a fast pace, no time for hair washing or manicures, just quick Vapon shampoos and self-manicures. Manuscripts to deliver (Jim’s novel), books (Geismar’s for Mondadori) . . .

Letters from James Broughton in England, Curtis Harrington in Italy. Woody Parrish-Martin brings presents from Italy. Talking about me as his literary godmother to a woman fashion artist who was amazed to find a “young woman.” I say, “Your original expectation was closer to the truth!”

Dr. Bogner exposes the discontent with Rupert’s life. The room is too small. Rupert and Joaquín become interchangeable. Joaquín was the thin child with big eyes who came to my bed when there were storms.

At a Rorschach test I draw whimsical figures, a dancing girl, a wistful boy, a humorous cat, and write a whimsical prose accompaniment, but my reaction is the fear that Dr. Bogner may think I am crazy.

“On the contrary,” said Dr. Bogner, “I think you have a very subtle and very accurate way of distinguishing between fantasy and reality.”

TWA FLIGHT 93 EN ROUTE TO LOS ANGELES, JANUARY 1952

Kathryn Winslow cannot sell my original manuscripts in Chicago for $50. Someone offers Gore $1,500 for the manuscript of City and the Pillar.

Hugo makes a plan to go to Italy for the film festival where his film Ai-Ye was shown last year and his new one may be. Hugo says, “Why do you go away when I like you more than ever?”

The gifts one makes at Christmas also contain messages to be decoded. One leopard is cut up to supply a leopard belt given to me by Hugo, a bracelet and earrings of leopard given by me to Lila, a belt for Rupert from me. Hugo wanted a lighter that shows fluid in a plastic holder and two miniature dice floating in it. A gambler within the functional necessity of fire!

And when the telephone rings again it is Gore who wants to take me to a chichi party, where I find a cocotte’s apartment, a cocotte of the 1800s, and a Balinese shadow theatre, not human beings. So I leave early, and I leave him in a homosexual world that shows none of the splendors of ancient corruption but a deep freeze participation that seems to follow—too long a stay in incubation. In other words, the greatest proportion of America’s population is a breed of artificially nurtured infants who will never reach maturity, symbolized by Truman Capote. Gore himself is “bored with sex and its monotony,” and his work is perishing from leukemia.

Twenty-five years too late, America is discovering surrealism. The American fear of reality is so great that they not only feed on ersatz substitutes, but also on synthetic matter, on preserves and mostly on the food and pottery and ornaments placed in the antique tombs for the delight of the dead.

They can’t wear the Hindu saris, or Siamese silks, but rayon acetates; music must come from machines, the theatre is on TV, books come out of automatic boxes.

Stop, Anaïs.

America is destroying itself. I don’t need to analyze its self-destruction. Zombies of civilization. The process of zombification is apparent to all now. Critics are writing about the necrophilia in literature. What irony.

Useless anger. I have never been able to love America, never.

Half of one’s life is too much to spend in a country one does not love. You don’t love a plumber, an electrician, a microbe hunter, a fabricator of gadgets, a man who, when given a piece of wood and a knife whittles it away, a mechanic. The negroes gave America its only art: dance. The Jews its only intelligence: doctors, analysts, scientists. The Americans plunder the fashion designers of France, imitate, borrow, steal. But aside from science, engineering, construction, mechanics, they utterly cannot contribute anything to creation or humanity. The natural beauty discovered on the trip with Rupert only exposed, by contrast, the unrelatedness of the architecture and the life of the people to the canyons, the deserts.

It is bad to seek reasons for not living. It is always a personal reason.

I am on the plane. At seven this morning I was lying in Hugo’s arms. It was raining. He was troubled by my departure. I was also. I developed a swollen throat. I did not want to leave. I felt if I stayed I could forget Rupert as a moment of intense fire and beauty, of fever and fusion but not happiness. Yet once more, I return to Sierra Madre.

Six-thirty in the evening. I return to a human being, to Rupert, to his needs, his given self, to my promises, to desire, but only to him. The life I do not respect. With Hugo now there is serenity, and comfort of the heart. When I am charming or witty, he is pleased, but I feel no pressure to be. So many barriers have vanished; perhaps the sensual one will too, when he ceases playing role of father, when he regains the virility of assertion. His indecisions, his wavering, vacillations, and permeability have made me aware of his softness. The only hardnesses were the stubbornness, the withdrawals, the anger that he practiced. But the nervous virility of decisiveness and affirmation of direct desire he did not have.

Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:

New York, January 1952

Dear Anaïs,

The theme of your new writing is exciting and wonderful. I’ve read the thirteen pages you sent and have put them away for you. I think it’s a good idea to send them to me; so many things can happen on a trip, and why take chances? I am so anxious to see what the book itself is going to be. It looks like you are going to work on the relationship with Rupert. True? I’m not going to comment at all on what you send me, but just hold it for you, as I don’t want anything I say to have even the slightest effect on what you will do. But, as usual, the writing is beautiful, and I read it with the greatest of pleasure. Last night and this morning I tried to push myself through Djuna Barnes’ Ryder, her first, and had to give it up in despair. I think one of the significant differences between the two of you is that you are readable. Another is that you are doing a better job, a much bigger one, too. Of course I realize there are few who’ve gone as far as Barnes, and can well understand why you think so much of her; she is fearless, also, and plunges into waters that would drown the naturalists. But I really don’t see what it is in her that you identify with, apart from the courage you both have.

I had dinner with Hugo early last week, and one night we went to the Savoy where he is looking for dancers for his 42nd Street film. (I suggested a title for it: Top of the World, which is a nickname for 42nd Street.) I haven’t heard from Hugo since, but we had a fine evening, danced and watched. I love the Savoy.

I’m glad you’re working. People who wonder how you can write so beautifully should know how much time you give to it, how devoted you are to it.

Love,

Jim

JANUARY 24, 1952

Return to New York

Letter from Anaïs Nin to Rupert Pole:

New York, Thursday, January 31, 1952

My love:

Got your letter yesterday on your weekend at home.

I’m writing you two letters today in case you go home for the weekend, but will also phone you Sunday.

My job is secure because the UN is so active and I have a general knowledge of other countries. So, darling, I got my ticket for Feb. 17th so as to be there for your birthday.

If you want a party for your birthday you can plan it. But, my love, I ask you one favor, please, for me, this time. Get the maid in for one day before I come. I arrive so tired, as I did last time, and dream of a clean house. Also it takes me a while to adjust from career to housework. It is worth the $8, believe me. I wasn’t able to clean before I left and I don’t want you to do it. When I work to earn $400 it seems little to ask to spend $8 on housecleaning. Don’t refuse me that. It means a lot to me, more than you can ever guess.

How I wish we could go to Mexico in March! We have earned being together and carefree! I dream of the beach and you very, very close.

A

Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:

Detroit, February 1952

Dear Anaïs:

At home with my family.

Had a letter today from an old friend, Dorothy Styles; she said something which deserves repeating: “Acceptance of your stories will always be much less noisy than opposition to them.” I think you would do well to remember this. I know from personal contact that you are considered, artistically, a phenomenal success by many people, and it would be false and wrong of you to “accept the fact of failure.” It is by no means a fact. I will say that you have not reached as many as you might like to reach, but you must realize you have no idea how many you have reached. I, for example, have never written to an author to express my feelings about his/her work unless I had known or met them previously. One of the major reasons that you question the value of your work is that you have had more contact with the noisy opposition, the crude, empty-headed, frightened, pigeon-hearted, chicken-livered, the sick, than with those who have quietly accepted and in their hearts thanked you for your work.

For many reasons, some of which we can guess, you have reached a kind of intermission during which the people in New York do not wish to publish you. It is only accurate to look upon this as failure if your whole life is based on their standards; otherwise it doesn’t make sense. I have a feeling that you have fallen into the trap of comparing yourself with other writers, like Vidal, when actually each of your careers is unique. For good writers, real writers, bestsellerdom is an accidental state that should have nothing to do with their energies. It would be wrong for you to assume that because you have not produced a bestselling book and therefore do not have publishers clamoring for your manuscripts, that you have failed. For the love of the little gods and the big fishes, do not be afraid to continue in your own way any more than you should be afraid of departure from it. My chief concern is that the binocular vision, artist-woman vision, of Nin is being affected from the outside. I don’t care ten francs what or whom you write about or how, because my belief in you, personally, assures me that you can only produce, in any terms, in any language, fine and beautiful work. By all means write the final book as you suggest you might, as if it will not be read here; if necessary, trick yourself into believing that no one will read it. I remember in one of your pamphlets you suggest this trick as a method of attaining a certain freedom from fears of censorship. It is easy to see why Spy has been turned down. You know as I do that it has made an unpopular statement; it has said that the love to which a human heart must be faithful may have many faces. And to whom are you saying it? To a world that is being slowly and tragically destroyed by the conflict of its legends with its realities. Now can you tell me that the failure is yours? Your opposition falls into two categories. One is the type of person who destroys himself in a greedy effort to use the power of love as though it were a household utility like the phone, to be summoned by dialing and hung up at will. He never realizes that he is the instrument through which the power flows. You tell him that his genitals are a transmitter commissioned by a power bigger than himself, and of course, in his frenzy, he doesn’t know what you’re talking about. The other category consists of human beings who destroy themselves preserving the myths of their grandparents; you tell them that their sorrows and failures are not their own, that the dead must be buried to bring other loves to birth, and they claw at you for sawing their crutches in two. You think the failure is yours?

You mention failure and I shudder; but I have thought about it since your letter arrived yesterday, and when we are together in New York we will talk on and on about this until I have shown you the mistake. Let me go through Spy with you, coldly, objectively, and try to find what needs to be removed or added to make its values more accessible to the idiots. I suppose you should tear this letter up so that no one will ever say to me that I accused Anaïs Nin of being a metaphysician, but secretly I will admit that you have struck some eternal chord inside me that makes even good jazz sound like Chopsticks.

Love, Jim

P.S. My best wishes to Hugo.

FLIGHT 95 TWA EN ROUTE TO LOS ANGELES, FEBRUARY 17, 1952

On February 15th I was with Hugo for his birthday. But his birthday came at the end of an unhappy month. When I arrived (after only a two week absence) I found him tired. In spite of the fatigue he persisted in taking three dancing lessons a week and began to struggle with his film and its mechanical difficulties. He was angry, irritated, frustrated by the mechanics. He got emotional, he overworked. Then he fell ill with sciatica. Bad nights and pain. On the way to the doctor he caught his finger in the taxi door and endured more pain. His nail had to be removed. With all this he was depressed. On my own I had to confront continuous rejections of Spy by publishers (most recent one from Macmillan), complete exclusion from poetry readings, from all critical estimates, debates. Total invisibility and failure. With Dr. Bogner, I worked on this, unearthed rebellious and terrible anger. Appalled by them. Still busy repressing anger. Frances Keene forced me to break with Max Pfeffer (now completely pathological, having lost his balance after his wife’s death and his daughter’s marriage). In an effort to rise above the pain of neglect I worked on an article on the “Necessity of Symbolism” in Modern Novel. Reworked it.

Nursing Hugo: he had to be dressed, bathed, accompanied, both of us truly depressed, and then Dr. Bogner got ill. Hugo had barely recovered when our month together ended and Rupert began to prepare for my return.

Meanwhile, during the process of objectifying with Bogner, I had reached detachment from life with Rupert, not from Rupert himself. But I realized that I have repudiated all of our life together, that it was not for me and I was playing a role to please Rupert. All of it, his love of the countryside, his love of living away from cities; I like to live in cities when I’m active and to go away completely when I’m exhausted. I hate middle-of-the-road places, commuting, half-city, half-country. I hate the hours spent driving. I hate dull people. I hate driving two hours to see a movie. I hate his profession—working for government. Graver still is his dream of a house in Los Angeles. His American boy’s love of pretty people, of America itself, and a total lack of internationalism. I hate his parents who are acute neurotics with bourgeois lack of awareness of themselves, who pretend to be artists but have bourgeois prejudice against true artists. One by one, every element of this life was thus negated. Nothing was left but the moment in Rupert’s arms, the moment of fire and frenzy.

With Hugo it was the opposite. I like everything about him, the life he made, his treatment of me, his artistry in film, his psychological courage, his depth of vision, the harmony between our struggles and of our orientation, his intellectual development, his evolution towards wisdom and mastering neurosis, our stark honesty towards each other, the fundamental respect, the mutual interests.

When I see Rupert again his many human elements will soften the picture of our life together, but basically all of it is distasteful to me, and destructive. Of course, that is no basis for withdrawal, for Rupert would only say, “I will give up forestry. I will do whatever you want. The relationship means more to me.” But that would be a role on his part, merely an exchange of roles. And I know too well what he genuinely wants.

Hugo was disturbed at my leaving. My only justification seemed weak: exhaustion, impossibility of relaxing, unbearable tension in New York. For this is a part of the truth. On the plane, flying away from New York I began to relax, flying towards an obliteration of all that seems so important in New York, towards a provincial, stupid California. Nothing tremendous awaits me.

I am tormented by pity for Hugo and Rupert. Only Hugo gave me a deeper love. When Rupert struggles to write a letter because he finds all writing difficult, he does it badly and with great effort, and I get angry when he offers excuses like a child: “I was busy,” but he does not for one moment identify with how I feel. To make this clear, I have to stop writing him letters and torment him, and then he sees. If I say over the telephone I am tired, he answers that he is tired too, never any pause during which he feels my tiredness. His love is selfish. Yes, this selfish love he has given me wholly, entrusting his happiness and life to me, absorbed as a child is, not separate, dependent, but not to be depended on. I am his balance and his reality and his connection with life. When I am ill, the balance is disturbed, as mine is when Hugo is helpless. I can’t bear the exposure of my helplessness in a sick Hugo.

I have sounded the depth and power of Hugo’s love often enough. I am preoccupied with returning it. I want to surrender Rupert, but how, how? I have grown detached. I see him objectively: possessive, insecure, self-centered. At thirty-three, that is how one loves. It is the extent of his love. Hugo and I have gone farther.

I had to learn, however, to surmount my guilt towards Hugo because it created a wall against my tenderness and compassion. This wall is dissolving.

I began by writing two books for two lives. They were to be separated by twelve hours of air travel, thousands of miles, two volumes unrelated to each other. Only in the simple, white, rugged, modern-furnished office of Bogner did the two meet. The alternate design. But not here. As I wrote, the images began to overrun each other. The boundaries were not as clear. At many points, my feelings flowed from one into another. In an effort to control pain, confusion, conflict, I begin anew. The first three weeks of each life I am more or less tranquil. It is the wish of transition that disrupts me. And timing. How to leave Rupert at the right moment (not during an illness, a crisis, a critical moment), not to leave Hugo when he needs me. To arrive when Hugo wants to work on the film, to leave after Hugo’s birthday and arrive in time for Rupert’s birthday, the 18th of February. Rupert’s vacations and Hugo’s vacations, crises to be resolved at Bogner’s in time for each. Time inflicts pressure on my nerves and on my imagination, and what I cannot foresee makes my calculations frightening (Hugo’s illness, Rupert’s sudden orders to go to a camp where I can’t be, publishers’ delays). So my alibis do not function, the creation of “jobs” as my raison d’être for traveling. I can’t bear this tension anymore.

At first my feelings were with Rupert. The image of Hugo, retracted, severe, kind but withdrawn, was an image of duty, not of love, but today I feel for him and feel less for Rupert. For Rupert, I have a feeling of human responsibility, of tender duty now, of another kind. How can I free him? He flatly does not believe in analysis that would detach him from me as it detached me from him.

Hugo, I discovered (because he finally exposed it), contained a youthful Rupert afraid of life. He deposited (as Rupert does) his troubled dreamer in me, the restless traveler, all the burdens of his own fantasies that cause him unease or guilt (the love of travel, irresponsibility in the practical life, the pursuit of pleasure). Both Rupert and Hugo lured me as would a troubadour (two guitars, two singers, two inarticulate pasts), but then they both equally set about the solidities with exaggerated thoroughness (a concealed inadequacy manifested openly through me, as I am unquestionably unable to be the builder of economic structure). Hugo played a role to please me and to touch all the weaknesses in the other that he could and then disguise them from the world’s eyes.

Endless goodness

Protectiveness

Reassurance

So many falsities—when I deserted Hugo for the sake of my life in Paris while he was in London, for evenings out, he took up art as obsessively as Rupert took up his viola.

Anyway, Hugo began to reveal—to manifest the Rupert I pursued—distress. A struggle to master his life. Anxieties. Confusion. Conflict. The armor had dehumanized him. As the armor dissolves, the revealed human beings bear a likeness to what I finally understand I am weary of: my constant comparing or opposing them, these two faces of my divided body and soul struggling to be made whole. This cleavage I cannot continue to live out. It takes superhuman strength.

Now I understand my obsession with orderliness—to counterbalance a deep, dangerous confusion. Two lives, two lovers, threaten my sanity.

When enormous shocks endanger you, you cling to small objects. The hostess recovering after an airplane crash observes she has a run in her stocking. Her mind could not absorb her own near-death or the death of thirty passengers. I no longer have the irresistible impulse to fly to Rupert. When you learn to avoid traps, dangers, suffering, destruction after much experience, you learn that the pleasure of desire is like the pleasure of a drug: it ultimately kills you. Out of passion I have not yet seen a beautiful life created. It seems to attack couples who are not fitted to create a life together. It seems to be born of illusion, and therefore I cannot create human life, only destruction. Rupert imposed on me his ideal of a domestic, outdoor woman, which I am not. (Could I be his mother? She is partly crippled by a rigid back, almost deformed.)

Halfway through the flight towards Rupert, I ought to be telling of the past month, not of the future.

As soon as I arrived in New York, Hugo worked on the new film. It’s the most poetic one he has done. We took scenes in Acapulco of a shipwreck, very unstudied, as I walked in and out, avoiding all the cliché poses, which was, in part, suggested by the opening passages of House of Incest. Hugo also handled the camera in unexpected ways. I suggested the superimposition of water, which created an extraordinary myth, never done before.

Meanwhile, I am utterly defeated by the negative reactions to Spy; eight publishers refused it. I began to rage. Everybody is getting published except me; Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote are reigning.

The problem is this: these writers have written fantasy and describe poetic situations in plain, naturalistic language. I have telescoped the outer and inner reality with a special poetic phraseology, always a phrase that has a double meaning. There is a transmutation—the external and inner are one. You are a spy in the house of love, a cape can also be a flag of adventure, a dress is becalmed as feelings are; it is more than a symbol, it is the integration of the two into one meaning within the object. It is a house and a prison.

Anyway, whatever it is (relativity of truth), they don’t like it.

Max Geismar is moved, but I doubt if he could say why as clearly as he did with Dreiser.

It hurts.

It shouldn’t hurt. Talking to Hugo in a restaurant, I consider total abdication. I started to weep with a deep sense of loss, the loss of a beautiful language I evolved that contains meaning as well as aspect. Sitting in the restaurant, the image of myself giving up a writing nobody wants appears like a vast fracture of diamonds sinking into the sea. A great loss, I honestly believe.

There are precious words (yes, I know, the word precious is today an insult) that have taken many lives (all of them mine) to infuse with irreplaceable meanings. No one else can do what I have done. I know that because it took the utmost of a spiritual vision allied to the utmost sensuality, to clothe in flesh such deep meaning, and it took a life in hell, and many lives of painful explorations, and it took even a dangerous sojourn in the worlds of madness and the capacity to return to tell what I have told. Centuries of civilization, too; it took birth, tradition and aristocracy of blood, it took freedom from economic slavery (Hugo) to give me my integrity; it took a body to live it out, a soul willing to burn.

Anyway, Hugo cried too. And I cried over the negro problem in Cry, the Beloved Country and wondered once more at the people who sacrifice their human life to create constant proofs of the eternal for the other life: cathedrals, pyramids, works of art.

Meanwhile, the homosexuals are ruling the arts and mechanics of writing. Everyone is so preoccupied with the acceptance (or rejection) of homosexuals on moral grounds that they overlook the only essential basic problem of homosexuality as a symptom of adolescence, a retarded maturity. However, they are not to blame. The entire American cult of the adolescent is responsible. He is a pampered schoolchild of Puritan parents and therefore content with schoolchildren’s sexual activities with those of their own sex. But why should they make an effort to mature when all around them maturity is confused with aging and American literature?

The cult of the child produced the type that pervades American letters—arrogant, narcissistic, intent on destroying the parent as all adolescents are at seventeen when in a struggle to assert their own identities. This is in harmony with an adolescent incapacity to love, admire, respect, or evaluate. All of these are phenomena of adolescence.

The true degenerates are not the homosexuals, for being homosexual, but those who by a process of stunted growth continue to exhibit at fifty all the symptoms of awkward, aggressive, dissonant, unstable adolescence.

An older woman seeking a lover is humiliated by a gigolo (homosexual dreams of punishing the mother for her sensual desire, which a child considers as a betrayal to himself). Love between girls, as in college dormitories—adolescents are reconnecting childhood situations, the imitation of the father (lesbian), identification with mother (homosexual). Identification and imitation are early, undeveloped phases of love. The breakable pseudo-marriage comedies these couples enact are no more than a rehearsal for maturity, but how can we condemn it when our idolatry of youth and parody and shame of maturity persist? (It is only recently America has discovered that mothers and grandmothers could still enjoy a love life, to be beautiful and desirable.)

In literature, writers of seventeen, unless they have the genius of Rimbaud, can only write like the sons of Hemingway, the sons of Faulkner. It is unfair to expect more. It is also unfair to publish them until they have achieved their own identity. Every young writer is a derivation of a mature writer, but these schoolroom exercises should not be published, nor should they be reviewed by classmates. The production of campus magazines is not for adult consumption. The mature readers are fed baby food. It is absurd to publish echoes of Henry James and then to demand that they have the wisdom and depth of whom they are imitating. There was a time when the Europeans spoke of childlike Americans as a source of charm and ingenuousness of a young country. But these children today are more like delinquents, and both our glorification and our severity are equally exaggerated and disastrous.

Meanwhile Hugo is there to love. He has lost his stiffness. Altogether he has come alive after five years of analysis. His skin becomes warmer in tone. He had been truly absent, truly withdrawn. It was not an exaggeration when I entitled one diary “House of the Dead.” He had been so severely repressed as a child. Puritanism and severity. Rebelling against his parents for his rights, to marry me. And then, sensual life crushed him with guilt. Bogner has spent the last five years pursuing a man in a cavern; he was out of contact with all but me, and ours was so tenuous. It is strange that this Hugo—vulnerable, passionate, emotional, of whom I only caught glimpses—was the one I sought in Rupert. Rupert was open; he gave me this self without guile or disguises; he admitted fears, insecurities, inadequacies. When Rupert plays a fatherly role it is never to cover the adolescent. Hugo, to cover the adolescent at twenty-five, played towards me but one role.

Now I understand my sadness the day Rupert moved in to live with me in San Francisco—because it was not only Rupert, it was Hugo at twenty-five years old whom I saw for the first time as he was, not as he pretended to be. Hugo admits today a vast edifice of pretenses, different from mine, a mask of passivity, of negativity that was a tortuous labyrinth of evasions as any built by a woman.

Poor Hugo. I feel now the most immense compassion. Not as free, or as natural as Rupert. And I, at twenty, took his role seriously, never knowing what he thought or felt, baffled, finally ending up being the only one who cried, laughed, decided, talked, revealed.

Hugo was immured. And I was blind to that aspect of him. True, when I came home at midnight and he was already asleep, he did seem childlike and tender, but in the midst of sleep only, and if he awakened completely, it was to say with mock severity, “You are late!”

He was so enmeshed and immured that only through painful and painstaking analysis and my rediscovery of how a young man feels through Rupert’s openness, was the young Hugo revealed. But even today how different it is to know him! We wanted a dog. We wavered between the kind of dog Bogner has and the kind I talked about, a spaniel, like Tavi. It is through the absence of individual desires, likes and choices that I unfortunately established a domination that did not make me happy. I have resented this indecision in Hugo to the point of feeling it was not virile. I associated decisiveness with virility; it still gives me anxiety. He has no assurance, no certainty. What a long travail Bogner had to do. Yet he has a strength of another kind: the courage to confront his neurosis and struggle with it for five years. Strength to persist in his marriage when so much of it was destroyed by neurosis. Strength to persist with the bank for twenty-five years when it meant such a strain. Strength to endure me. Endurance, doggedness. But what he lacked was decisiveness of thought or act—and the act of thrusting I associate with virility. His way was indirect, passive, circuitous, Machiavellian too. To dominate me not openly, but by guilt, to control me not openly, but by sulking, by depression.

It is incredible how little human beings understand each other. And these people dare to say all has been written! They dare to uphold novels written in the distant past, when they would not go to a doctor that old, or drive a car that old, or study sciences and engineering of that period.

SIERRA MADRE, FEBRUARY 1952

Coley Taylor of Pellegrini & Cudahy calls the lie detector “vague and confusing” and Sabina “boring.”

Letter from Anaïs Nin to Coley Taylor:

Sierra Madre, February 1952

I was not angry at your frankness, and everyone has a right to his personal opinions. However, I find that under cover of “honesty” and “personal reactions,” you expressed a lack of human courtesy and a limited insight. The whole cause for the deterioration of publishing and writing lies precisely in this lack of literary objectivity and this substitution of unskilled emotional reactions to writers. It is you who are bored, who failed to see the continuity or the revelation of character. Maturity in evaluation consists precisely in examining your inner subjective reactions so as not to inflict them upon writers as criticism. It does not harm me because I am a veteran, but your so-called honesty harms young writers. Your letter was insensitive rather than honest, destructive and irresponsible if it had been addressed to a beginner who believes that publishers are impartial, objective, mature critics, men of taste capable of evaluating writing.

Anaïs Nin

WESTERN AIR LINE, EN ROUTE TO NEW YORK VIA SAN FRANCISCO, MARCH 16, 1952

Anguish sometimes meets me at the plane, or is present at departures. I never know. A month ago, anguish and guilt filled La Guardia Airport because Hugo had just recovered from a bad bout of sciatica, because he rebelled at my leaving, because his weak state made me feel compassion and desperation too. Other times anguish travels with me to Los Angeles, if Rupert has been ill or lonely. Today it did not torment me because in three weeks I will meet Rupert at Miami and we will have our vacation together. Also, so many times boarding the plane, so many painful departures finally dull the feelings. One cannot always tear or rip; one ceases to feel the breaks. On the way to New York I will visit my mother, so old, so old, and Joaquín, and sometimes I cry: it is intolerable, I must choose one life, one love, I can’t go on. To save myself from such gigantic waves, cyclones, catastrophes, I concentrate on the little things that do not hurt. It is raining. Yesterday Rupert and I drank a zombie at the Beachcombers, which was a fabulous drink, without after-effects, just elation and la ronde, la ronde. Hugo has written me voluminous letters. I look down at my orange cashmere coat, soft and beautiful and warm. I look at my white wool dress bought by Hugo, and a leopard skin bracelet, earrings and belt given to me by Hugo.

We are not flying yet. I am not gone yet. Rupert is standing in the rain, watching me take off. Rupert’s voice and the feel of his thin shoulders and haunches in my hands stay with me in the folds of my clothes. My image of Hugo is never this possessed or desired. Hugo is always visible but not felt except in terms of compassion. Rupert stands now on the shiny wet asphalt and all I can think of is how disturbed I was when Hugo sent me a book on sex. He has been investigating, reading, questioning. Why? He could not learn from me, and that injured his pride.

I remember attempting to transmit what I learned. But later this ignorance suited me. It closed all the areas I did not wish to enter with Hugo. Now he writes me he wants to explore them, with me. At this point should I not confess that the reconciliations, the remarriages, the rediscoveries, the reunions are all possible except the sensual one? That I cannot return to Hugo sensually? I do not desire him. He has lost me irrevocably in this realm. I can only find his quest tragic, too late. Just as my finding Rupert too late is tragic. I ask myself, is this the greatest act of gratitude for Hugo’s love, what I am doing, or is it truly a crime of dishonesty? If I freed him, would he find what I found, a sensual marriage, and should I surrender now, having made every known human effort to return to him and failing at this ultimate marriage of the senses? What woman was ever caught between two such ultimately destructive marriages, one in which I must pretend a physical desire I do not feel, another in which I risk all the sorrows of an aging woman loved by a young man, desertion, and the end of illusion?

Dr. Bogner waits, waits, as Hugo waits. Would he love or hate me for the truth? What would the truth create? What would the truth destroy? There is always one question one cannot ask the doctor. The doctor examines, probes, guides you into your own insights but will not answer the ultimate desperate question unless you can answer it yourself.

When a conflict is worded simply in the form of a question, you are only being a child again, asking a superior guide, “What shall I do? What is right?” The doctor never answers. The doctor is the sphinx. Such an answer is only made to children. I am a woman of forty-nine; I cannot be a child. Yet I do not know what to do. When Dr. Bogner examines my life with Hugo, she finds a good marriage of maturity and works at removing obstacles to a sexual partnership. When Dr. Bogner examines my life with Rupert, she exposes the illusion that sustains it and reveals the greatest mystery in the entire universe: that an illusion can nourish, sustain, and feed with the brightest of all flames a sensual marriage until it appears stronger, more unbreakable than the marriage of two people who have exposed illusion, vanquished it and know each other truthfully, having thus reached the possibility of real love, not romantic love, a deep human love based on friendship.

Illusion welds, burns, and fuses bodies together and produces passion. The truth then, is that true love does not seem to create passion. The truth of Hugo, which I respect and admire, does not arouse desire. Rupert does, even with all his unformed character, his wayward childishness, his whims, unbalances, neuroses, his errors, his weaknesses and inconsistencies.

What should I do for Hugo—set him free? How should I repay his goodness, loyalties, and generosities to me, his patience and his forbearance? Not for myself, since this has suited my twisted and broken self to live as I have, but for Hugo, for Hugo, who gave me all he had to give, who is fumbling in the dark, almost reaching the truth. He has had no help in this exploration, no comparisons; he has known no other woman—does he know that I have spent all but five years of our early marriage eluding him, not wanting him? Will he now pursue the truth until he senses it? He writes so sincerely, so heartbreakingly: “I realize I know nothing about you, that if I failed you, it was through ignorance.”

Those who lack the courage to face the truth often are protecting themselves from the unbearable. Hugo is slowly approaching the truth he did not dare to find or face. Very often I felt that Dr. Bogner did not believe I should be the one to tell Hugo, that the discovery must come from him.

When the marriage was repaired, a friendship established, what remained unsolvable was Hugo’s own quest for a passion I cannot give him.

Letter from Rupert Pole to Anaïs Nin:

Sierra Madre, March 1952

Querida

Do hope you got to NY all right. Storms all along west coast but only trust you escaped them as soon as you headed east. At any rate, after reading Night Flight, anything in a DC6 should seem easy.

Rain, rain, ever since you left but it’s left everything so clean I’ve really enjoyed it. Very cold now too so glad you picked this time to be in NY.

Farther than I thought to Miami—about 2,900 miles, which is about seven driving days at moderate speed—so I’ll have try to get off Saturday or perhaps meet you in Florida Saturday night instead Friday as planned. At any rate I’ll try to be Mexican and just take this one easy, not too much close planning.

Keeping looking at map in front of me, seeing where you are and where I am, and where we’ll first be together again. Much better, this both leaving home and meeting in strange foreign places, much better than waiting and wanting you so much to come back to our home. In a little over a week now I set out to find and to keep my true wife.

Till then—te quiero siempre

R

NEW YORK, APRIL 1952

When I left Rupert three weeks ago we planned for his vacation in April. We were going to explore a possible job in Puerto Rico. He was going to drive to Miami and I was going to meet him there to fly with him to Puerto Rico.

On the way to New York, I thought: my trapeze is working, I have not fallen off, the two lives are kept separate, and I retain my sanity. But when I arrived, Hugo was not at the airport. What he had believed to be sciatica was actually a slipped disk or ruptured cartilage in his back. He had been in bed two days, and the doctor had ordered two weeks flat on his back. When I arrived, I took over a nurse’s duties, endless rounds of cooking meals, serving them on trays, connecting the electric razor, fetching pipes, buying tobacco, pipe cleaners, newspapers twice a day, running to the post office, typing his letters, buying books and magazines, looking for his comb, etc. Fortunately he is not in pain, just when he walks. Two weeks passed. My compassion was defeated by Hugo’s exaggerated demands. He indulged in constant demands. He refused a nurse. I worked hard with Bogner, delving, delving, above all dissolving guilt, but what a struggle to change my feelings towards Hugo.

The day came for the visit to the doctor. He was not satisfied with Hugo’s condition and advised an operation. We saw another doctor. He said an operation would only be 60% successful, and Hugo was not bad enough to resort to this, so we could try two more weeks of traction in a hospital bed at home. By this time, I called up Rupert: “Please don’t leave yet, I am delayed by work. Meet me next Wednesday at Miami instead of Sunday.” As if he guessed that Wednesday I was going to delay again, he sent me a telegram:

March 31, 1952

Phoenix, Arizona

Anaïs Nin, care of Larry Maxwell

44 West 12th Street, NY

Arrive New York Friday night will help with your work. Have fun. Let’s do our waiting together. Nowhere you can reach me so can’t say no. Cancel plane ticket get money equivalent. All goes wonderfully. Desert riot of color. José impatient and in fine fettle. Je t’aime toujours plus.

Rupert

He was on his way! At first I was panicked and trembling. Now comes catastrophe! The situation of a nightmare!

But I quickly called on the “underground” that helps me live my double life: Lila, Lawrence Maxwell, Jim Herlihy, Millicent. I telephoned Jim, trapped by his family in Detroit: “Come and help me.” Then Maxwell’s where I am supposed to be staying: Larry will tell Rupert I am waiting for him at a hotel. Then Lila and Jim will entertain Hugo Friday evening when Rupert arrives. Hugo falls asleep early in the evening. But this cannot last. I could not bear it. Without guilt, fear of tragedy, punishment, failure, these can become games of chess. Only the guilt creates anguish. Today, with Bogner’s help, I am ready. She shrugs her shoulders, denies tragedy, and I almost gaily face the difficulties. After all, Hugo’s state is not serious, and I must merely make great efforts to protect them both.

Rupert in José, driving, driving, always impulsive and unwise, obsessional and headstrong, and Hugo on his hospital bed, in a cheerful room full of sun and sky, well-cared for by Millicent and me; I gave him a Siamese cat today.

I lie in the salon, alone. Hugo has visitors, six filmmakers discussing “society” and its problems.

Spy is in the hands of Random House.

Analysis almost gay today. Bogner: it’s a matter of organization (“Take the tragedy out of it, Anaïs”). Tragedy is guilt, the fantasy that my life will end catastrophically, like my father’s.

I am not my father. Yet after he died, I fancied myself in a tomb. I felt my head on marble or stone. I feel his long hair as mine. He left a diary that Joaquín destroyed.

I count the rarity: a day of lightness.

I count the rare days of peace. The rarer days of joy. Sometimes I feel I am losing my battle against depression, but today I feel courage. I think of the pleasure I will have being close to Rupert again. Perhaps in two weeks Hugo will be well, and perhaps I will be able to go to Puerto Rico.

This meeting of Hugo and Rupert in New York is the one I have avoided for five years. Why should Venus turn against me now? What labor with Bogner, what an effort to find reality, to confront and expose the fantasies. She questions everything, to untangle my life from my father’s, to pursue the traces of guilt everywhere. Why was I ashamed of the Chrysler Hugo gave me, which I allowed Rupert to sell? I cannot take. I am ashamed. I do not have a right to pleasure, possessions, luxuries. I am proud to have reduced my belongings to two valises of books, one painting, one rug, one bed cover.

Poor Hugo, his hair almost all grey, his body heavy and fat for good now, the deep frown between his eyes hardened, impossible to erase. His oscillations between demandingness, severity, indecision, chaos, passivity, confusion. (They are like Rupert’s oscillations between criticalness and impulsiveness, between irritability and passivity.)

Both Hugo and Rupert lose their belongings, mislay, confuse, forget! Bogner said to Hugo: “It is atonement, self-denial.” My method was different: I didn’t lose or mislay, but I gave Henry and Gonzalo all I had.

Now it is spring in New York. My dresses are few, but beautiful and smart and interesting. My bags are always ready. I own nothing superfluous, not a ribbon or a scarf I don’t wear: the better to fly with, my dear!

Toujours prête à voyager.

Rupert drove straight to New York in five days, once driving all night. Impetuous, anxious, too. It was all planned: as soon as Rupert phoned Larry he would be told I was on my way to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, room 1620. At 6 o’clock Larry called me. I went to the hotel (around the corner) and prepared for the greatest crisis of my duplicities.

It was the first evening I had left the house since Hugo’s illness. Hugo was uneasy, but he behaved exactly as he has through the years of our marriage. The night before he had said, “You must go out. You have been shut in with me for six weeks, you must go out. I will be all right.”

Rupert arrived pale, tired and very tense. I made him take a bath and have a drink first. And then I told him half of the truth—about Hugo’s accident and helplessness and Millicent sending for me in a crisis, Hugo’s bad psychological state, etc. I pleaded eloquently while at the same time showing Rupert my love and passion for him, my sympathy for his disappointment, but I realized that he was actually relieved by the truth. He took it well, generous and compassionate. We went out to dinner and a movie, Blithe Spirit. The ex-wife haunts the second wife’s house. I said Hugo was like the ghost, and Rupert said, “But a needy ghost.” For this I love him. We returned to our room and sank into burning caresses. As we fell asleep, I said, “You are generous, and I love you for it.” I pressed no decision on him. I made him see how torn I was between duty and love. At dawn I stepped out of the room, and at six I was home to answer Hugo’s call. But he received me brooding. Of course he had not slept well. He had asked for me at three. Jim had answered I was asleep. He was angry. I nursed him.

I met Rupert at the Museum of Modern Art. We walked down Fifth Avenue. That evening we went out again, to a Spanish nightclub and to the Jour de Fête movie. Rupert himself had decided it was best for him to have a look at the job in Puerto Rico alone.

The Sunday after Rupert arrived was the worst day. Millicent was away, and I could not leave Hugo. Rupert was leaving for Miami and I could not see him. Jim was not available; he had gone to Woodstock. Lila was not free. The desperation of it! Why? Why? Anyway, it was Sunday. I have always hated Sunday.

Finally Lila came, to please me. I saw Rupert and we had lunch together. And after that in his hotel room we made love wildly, and with such passion that I felt now I can marry him. I can marry him because I have tested his love for five years and it is still deep and strong. I can marry him because in this crisis he behaved like a mature man. I can lean on him in a crisis. His confidence in our relationship amazed me, and for the first time I realized how much it means to the other. His doubts at the moment would have only caused three people great suffering. His confidence simplified the situation. I was able to let him drive away alone in his little Ford, with sadness but not desperate sorrow. Rupert drove away, right here on 9th Street, a few doorways from Hugo’s house, and I returned to my nursing job. Jim had prophesized I would lose him. And if, not to lose Rupert, I had been forced to desert Hugo in his moment of utter helplessness, I would have hated Rupert, myself and Hugo.

That Sunday was over. The next crisis would be when I could meet Rupert. Days of nursing. A few visitors, and Jim the only point of lightness during the day, like the moment of dancing after days of crawling. The weights pulling downward on Hugo’s legs. They are only the concrete image of the weights in my life with Hugo.

But at end of ten days of traction, the doctor said he was not well enough and advised us to continue until April 22nd. Rupert continued his trip alone, driving away with my summer clothes, my beach clothes, and I never went back to anything more difficult than this care of a Hugo I do not feel for, for whom I only have tenderness and a sense of duty and gratitude. The worst of the illness was not only that it demanded of me all I do not have to give, patience and time, but that it aggravated Hugo’s defects, as if magnifying his love of being waited on, catered to, served, of having constantly lost objects found, of having errands done that were not absolutely necessary.

I was in hell, longing to be with Rupert, feeling so torn and divided. Now I am hoping to be able to leave the 24th when Rupert will meet me at Miami. Hoping to see Bogner every day. I got rid of the pain of defeat as a writer, but I can’t make my life whole or my love single.

Strangely it was during Hugo’s illness that I felt most definitely that the care came out of compassion, but was not spontaneous; as I dried his body after the bath and bandaged him I did not have the feeling of passion I had when I took care of Rupert. Rupert’s mature behavior also placed him in Hugo’s role and made of Hugo the “needy ghost.”

My bed is in Hugo’s workshop. I hear Hugo in the bedroom rattling papers, smoking, reading. I almost fell off the trapeze. Rupert is not enjoying his trip. He has repressed his rebellion, I know. He hopes this will bring on divorce. I am immensely tired.

Jim Herlihy helped me. And Millicent above all, who stayed all night the second night of Rupert’s visit, devoted, understanding.

APRIL-MAY 1952

Met Rupert in Miami; drove to Los Angeles; returned to New York

NEW YORK, MAY 18, 1952

It was during Hugo’s illness that I was able to make a decision. I cannot tell what made this decision possible. If it was that Hugo’s illness aggravated my feeling of imprisonment in my marriage, if it was that Hugo’s illness demanding my continuous presence made me irrevocably aware that I could no longer bear to live as his wife, or if it was that the illness emphasized Hugo’s characteristics, which I have never adjusted to, accepted, or shared: his exactingness, his slowness, his fussiness with details, his earthy, unliberated mannerisms. Or was it because the danger of losing Rupert made me fully aware that my true life was with him? With Bogner I faced the disastrous truth: I do not love Hugo. I want to separate from him. But I am afraid to be crushed by guilt.

All I know is that when cornered, driven to extremity of anguish and conflict, I could not choose Hugo, but Rupert.

Jim speaks of Hugo’s oldness, too old for me. But he was always old. He was old at twenty-five. He was deliberate and cautious. He studied economics. He was cautious with women. He was withdrawn. He had only one friend who was a mystic and outside of mundane life. He studied the guitar. He led a pleasureless existence. He accepted tedious duties. He played golf. He was shocked when I suggested he walk hatless in the summer night. He did not know how to live. He was a kind of invalid. And now, characteristically, when he dances, he dances too intensely, his rigidity is broken, his back is strained. He chose the conservative cure, not the quick operation. Nothing that he does is for freedom or for joy.

Whenever I speak of him, I condemn. Bogner reminds me that Rupert has similar traits, that he is restrictive and duty-ridden. But Rupert dreams of a carefree existence. Not Hugo.

(I always write about Hugo as if he were in the wrong because I feel I am in the wrong for not loving him. Always feeling I should love him, that he has taken care of me, but that he has been an obstacle to what I most wanted in life, freedom and passion.)

So Hugo symbolizes a static life, more acutely now, more obviously, a slower rhythm, such an ironic and painful truth. It is at this moment that I realize what I have refused to see: that I do not love Hugo, or wish to be with him. That at night, in his apartment, I am still awake expecting life, missing life, disconnected from life.

Why now? I cannot bear to take care of his body. I cannot bear his clothes, his habits. Everything drives me away from him. At every step I have to struggle with guilt. It seems wrong not to love him; I feel like a criminal. On the other hand, in Sierra Madre, I feel that I might cease to look upon my life with Rupert as a crime against Hugo. Why should it be a crime not to love? It seems unjust, unmerited on Hugo’s part. Half of me sees him compassionately. In his awkward gestures there is a tenderness that is revealed in his Mexican film.

Since I am so caught in guilt, in forcing my love, I listen to an objective third view of Hugo by Jim Herlihy. Jim is twenty-five, handsome, mobile, intelligent, talented. When Rupert informed me of his arrival in New York, I telephoned Jim who was imprisoned by his family. (Between love affairs, between jobs, he makes crash landings at his home and then cannot get away.) His father was going to make him deliver telephone books for $50 a week. And anyway, we had a pact to call on each other for help. I called him up and said, “Jim, instead of delivering telephone books please come and help me take care of Hugo and I will share my allowance with you. I need you. Rupert is on his way here. Millicent and I are exhausted.”

Jim came. His atmosphere is playful, but the core is serious. He came and very lightly, very deftly became the understudy for my role, so that later, when I decided I would meet Rupert in Miami so that he would not drive back to California alone and feel utterly deserted, Jim could take over.

Hugo accepted this as naturally as if Jim had been his intimate friend. He used him as a secretary, to run errands, to entertain, to repair things. Hugo bought him a cot worth $10 and thanked him, but when Jim borrowed a tie, Hugo wondered if he would bring it back. Jim was amazed at Hugo’s expectations and demands! Jim found Hugo a sweet man, lovable, but tedious and self-centered.

I struggle with a handful of images of Hugo’s character, seeking probably a justification for not loving. That is the error. There is no need of justification. As Jim put it, “He is not the man for you.” We are not suited to each other.

But the situation aggravates the guilt. Hugo is handicapped. Why didn’t I face this long ago, act long ago, when he was younger and had more resiliency, more capacity for making a new life? Because every impulse I had, every emotion, every desire was restrained by terror, terror of Henry Miller and his cruelties (and his betrayals with other women), terror of Gonzalo’s wildness and betrayal (with Helba), terror of life.

Hugo was the haven.

And terror comes from being dependent, at the mercy of another, vulnerable. This is what denied me freedom, pleasure, and all I have missed.

Today I can no longer control my desire. I want a life with Rupert without the suffocation of guilt. I also want a life with Rupert without terror of his youth, his impulses, his enthusiasm for other women, his future betrayal.

The power of guilt is what almost drove me to madness. I left Hugo in care of Millicent and Jim, with their consent and approval (I had told them I had to visit my ailing mother). I met Rupert in Miami. We had a delirious night. He had prepared for me a basket full of surprises, gifts from Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico. “Because you could not take the trip, I wanted you to have all the flavors.” All the gifts were thoughtfully chosen, ones I loved. Exotic sandals, a jewel box of the finest wood, wooden glasses and an Indian velvet belt embroidered with silver flowers.

He was disappointed because I was pale. It rained in Miami and our morning swim was cold. Rupert said it was time to drive back to Sierra Madre (I had promised Hugo I would be away only a week). We began our trip with the basket of presents, the unused beach clothes, a suntanned Rupert with a new considerateness. Why? Had he feared to lose me? It seems to me that he is kinder. The open road again, which seems to be the motif of our life together. It is when I like Rupert best, on the open road. I get infinitely tired from the driving after eight hours, but he pushes on. Now he is eager to get home. He wants his home. He is only intermittently nomadic. I would like our home too if it were in Europe, not sunk in the oceans of a tedious American atmosphere, uniform and like canned fruit, so externally perfect and flavorless.

We were in the small Ford, in the sun, the top down, stopping to visit monkey farms, tropical flower farms, alligator farms . . . Stopping between Panama City and Pensacola to lie on a salt-white sand beach, bordered by purple heather and a purple sea with white snow fringes, wavelets like froth and lace at the edges of silky waves. Always there is the telephone call to be made to New York and the vision of Hugo lying on his hospital bed with traction, cords pulling down his legs, painless but binding, of Jim there giving me absolution to continue the journey, and the tense, firm lovemaking at night. Rupert’s eyes glistening with infinite dissolutions, and when I asked him what he was thinking, he answered, “Oh, my work, and where will it take us, and us, and whether there’s anyone who has a relationship like ours.”

Later: “The owner of the hotel in Haiti has a French wife, and she reminded me of you just a little, but she was not as beautiful or as interesting.”

Bogner says that I am an accountant, that I keep the strictest Ledger of Guilt with precise mathematics she can hardly follow! I stay home for several weeks, sacrifice invitations, to stay with Hugo so that I may go away for a week with Rupert. A week. I count the days. On Sunday, as we drive along in the sun, I can visualize Millicent, who has sacrificed her freedom, bending over Hugo’s demands. Or Jim longing to go out and writing me: “My real life begins at eleven after I leave Hugo asleep.”

On the seventh day we arrived at Sierra Madre. It was warm and sunny, and there was so much to do to rearrange the house, to weed the garden! And I could not tear myself away from Rupert. So I asked for and obtained a few days to rest from the trip. Hugo told me it would be madness to return tired. I accepted a week. It was a happy week. There was so much to do, and Rupert was passionate and elated and he leapt into his job, and we had a race at night, after the movies, to see which one could get into bed first. This was a happy week, and in the Ledger of Guilt it was written that I had a right to it, that I had done intensive and wearying nursing. But because Rupert’s free days came on the weekend and I wanted those three additional days with him, then I fell conscious-stricken. And those extra three days were stolen by exaggerating an earache and a bleeding sinus brought on by wind during the drive home; these three days were clouded. I ceased to respond to Rupert’s passion. I was frigid and ceased to enjoy the house, garden, beach, Tavi, the sun . . . I was dead. Dead from guilt, by guilt, of guilt.

This was so clear, so exaggerated, so blatant, that I was fully aware of it. And my next thought was: I cannot bear this living like a criminal anymore. I must separate from Hugo and marry Rupert and stop feeling I am stealing my life from Hugo.

The impulse not to return to Hugo became stronger. I had to force myself (only because of his illness) to get on the plane. Hugo is lying on a hospital bed. He needs me. Millicent needs me. Jim has been there for eighteen days.

I told Bogner: I have made my decision. I need to live my life with Rupert.

And I took up my duties again.

“There are safety measures against danger,” said Bogner. “Yours was division. Divide the loves, divide the writing, divide everything for safety measures. It is your only way of achieving balance.”

“But that is cowardice, fear!”

“No. Life does present real dangers. Every human being has to learn safety devices.”

If I had married Henry Miller, I would have been destroyed. If not entirely so, then Helba and Gonzalo would have finished the job properly.

My manuscripts are returned by New Mexico Review, by Kenyon Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Partisan Review. All the doors are closing against my work. It hurts.

René de Chochor, a young handsome Frenchman, now acts as my literary agent. When I wanted to try a new publishing house, Ballantine, he said I couldn’t because I must not antagonize Signet, and Signet’s anthology is nothing but publicity for the books of authors they intend to reprint (the public doesn’t know this). Signet pays Charles Rolo double for writing a piece of “criticism” that praises Mickey Spillane and Simenon (Signet authors). Politics—c’est nauséabonde.

Letter from Rupert Pole to Anaïs Nin:

Sierra Madre, May 1952

SUBJECT:   Her absence again

My darling, that plane looked so dark and lonely standing there waiting to carry you off. Sad trip home with Tavi especially glum. Lots and lots of work since then. Good for me, as long as I have to work I would rather keep going hard, and then if I’m really tired at night the pain of the lonely bed is so much less. These long days help too—I can work in the garden, or on signs or on our furniture till almost nine o’clock, then just get paper work started when it’s time for bed.

The place is beginning to look really beautiful. What a change since last May. Only wish we’d planted more flowers.

Do hope you got Eduardo’s apartment and that you’re not trying to do too much the first few days.

Our relationship is so strong now I have no uneasiness about your absence, no doubt in anything you do, only a sense of utter emptiness, a feeling that all that makes my life rich and full has slipped off into the darkness like your plane and is hiding from me high in the clouds waiting for you to bring it back.

Siempre tu hombre

R

NEW YORK, THURSDAY, MAY 28, 1952

4:40	Dr. Bogner
8:30	Dylan Thomas play at YMHA

Everyone rushes to hear Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. It is Village gossip in nursery rhyme, beer and pub humor—childish. And he looks like an overgrown gnome baby.

Our decadence—Williams, Capote, Thomas.

Decadence of poetry and passion. It is infantilism.

A day of rain. Another one of Hugo’s copper plates polished. Letter to Rupert. Enjoying what I have instead of regretting what I do not have.

Gestation for a new book . . .

To Bogner: “I am afraid to read publically again, for the last time I read at Circle in the Square, only friends came. It was not full.”

“You are easily discouraged.”

I wonder.

I tried so many things. I looked up the woman who was once married to Hugh Chisholm and now works as fashion editor of Vogue. She loves my work, has read all of it. We have lunch together. I showed her A Spy in the House of Love. I suggested a series of descriptions of women dressing from different books. It would have been amusing. Proust on dresses, negligées.

Nothing came of it.

A woman who reads me with deep interest, Lillian Libman, now working for Constance Hope, offered to manage me, but when I call her up, she is too busy, she is out of the office, or raising funds for the Metropolitan Opera.

NEW YORK, MAY 29, 1952

10:00	Bogner
5:00	James Merrill
6:30	Theatre—Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw

NEW YORK, MAY 30, 1952

Errands

4:00	Drove to Anne and Max Geismar’s

My prison . . . Hugo’s recovery so slow. Today he is in traction again, which means helpless. So I telephone Rupert (who expects me next Sunday), clean the rug and work at Hugo’s apartment while I dream of returning to Rupert.

It is Jim and Dick Duane who cheer me, who take me out. Dick is new, so he must be described. He has black hair, a turned-up nose, warm smiling eyes, a warming smile, a nimble figure and a beautiful voice being trained for nightclubs. At twenty-two, he has had experiences of travel, love affairs begun at age of fourteen, and a beautiful woman’s knowledge of being protected, “kept,” managed, etc. He is dressed with utmost chicness, wears perfume, but he has been beaten by thugs and knows the gangsters who rule the nightclubs and exploit entertainers. He is an echo of Pablo and Albert, not as serious as Albert and handsomer than Pablo. He is full of devotion and exuberance and playfulness. We accepted and loved each other instantly. They included me in their love affair. Dick may become another Sinatra.

Scrub, scrub the grey rug with the newest chemicals so that you are permitted to imagine your arrival at Los Angeles, a tense Rupert always nervous at my arrival and departures, an elated Tavi, a fragile, dangerous old José and the night, the beauty of the night with Rupert.

Dream I

I am standing on a narrow island, similar to Fire Island. I can see the sea on both sides. Suddenly I notice that it is covering the island, moving forward and not receding. I can see the shore of the mainland is being covered by the tidal movement. The other people are not identifiable. In desperation I look for a way to escape. I find a sandy, rough road that leads to the mountains. We sit hunched, watching the island being submerged slowly. An old man without teeth is talking through pressed lips (Reginald?). I see there is yet time to rescue some objects from the house, so I go back for all my Mexican scarves.

Dream II

Rupert, Frances Keene and I are in bed together. Rupert is making love to Frances, and I am very unhappy. He is enjoying it and saying how good it is after being sexually frustrated.

Dream III

I am in bed with Gonzalo and making love when Hugo turns on the lights and sees us in the mirror. Hugo sobs and I collapse.

Dream IV

I am sailing down the Seine on a coal barge with Rupert. I am wearing slacks, and I feel free, like a bum. A man seeks to lie beside me, whose identity I don’t know. I say to him, in order to discourage him without showing it is I who wish him not to touch me, “My mother will see you. You’d better move away.”

Bogner points out: the boat is free. The attitude is free. But I am not. My mother is not visible. I have incorporated her into myself. She will put an end to the man’s advances. I am not carefree.

I have to handle a desperate irritability with Hugo. I cannot handle his illness like a temporary handicap. It seems to me to be an extension of his entire temperament. It seems that he has always worn a brace and walked slowly, that he has always dropped things, and has never been able to find things, has always called for Millicent or me, has always been unable to hammer a nail or paint a flower box, that his clothes have always looked limp and unpressed, his room has always been stagnant, that he will never have the aliveness he has never had.

Now I better understand his obsession with money—he is helpless and needs a staff of people to work for him.

My entire nature rejects him, from the smallest to the largest habits; I can only see what irritates me.

He snores.

He has insomnia at four every morning, reads until seven and goes to sleep, so no matter what time we get up he does not act fresh or rested. His breakfast must be elaborate, and just so. Toast must be buttered before the egg is placed on it, the coffee has to be just so . . . Every time he gets into the elevator he has forgotten something so I have to wait with my finger on the button. His main activity is misplacing objects where no one could guess. If he calls the liquor store he is sure to forget one item so that Millicent or I have to go out for it. If there is no spaghetti in the house he won’t dispense with it. He must have it, and that’s another errand. Finances are arranged so that money is never there when we need it and everything is paralyzed. Millicent needs it, the household needs it, I do, he does. He has an elaborate system to frustrate us all! He takes from Jim but does not return. It is I who share my allowance with Jim because he helps me.

Hugo inhibits all my efforts to cook by showing no interest in anything new: we eat chicken and lamb chops, chicken and lamb chops.

He wastes food, lets things spoil. He never knows of the newest theatre in the Village. As soon as I return I find out about it and then he goes there.

He never hangs a picture or beautifies the home. Whatever he buys is a gadget for some of that American obsession to diminish the power of the hand, an automatic cigarette lighter for the car, etc. After a few tries the lighter burns his suit, which he then puts in the closet where it will lie for years.

He is still, after four years, technically deficient in his moviemaking, has no ingenuity, no gift for mechanics, just as he buys the heaviest suitcase, the heaviest “portable” radio on the market, chooses the wrong restaurant, or monologues without variations or color or emphasis. When he should take the lead, he doesn’t. In Acapulco when Annette Nancarrow got in her car with her two children, we were caught in a deluge and the car stalled in a yard of water. Hugo (who knows about driving) was passive. He demands the efficiency of others. His own defect in his handling of objects was symbolized in his buying a defective houseboat that ultimately sank.

He stumbles and fumbles about, hitting his head while grilling meat, setting fire to the paper under the grill, redecorating a simple room into an overcrowded, stuffy one, the opposite of casual. In the one room we have for entertaining in the apartment he would put a dining room set. The bourgeois and the conventional in him are incurable.

Everything he touches takes on that inanimate quality; I struggled so he would not dress like an old man.

But all this is wrong. As he is, he could please another kind of woman. I am still trying to justify my non-love.

His kindness and selflessness camouflaged all this, created a smoke screen. For twenty-eight years I could only see the kindness. He gives me this, he gives me that. He protects my life. But he never gave me life itself, just the care. If he had entered life with me when I began to seek it (in Paris), I would not have sought other relationships. He sulked. If only he had opened the house to people. I was made to feel that every natural wish was unnatural. He did not share my wishes. To this day my anger at his traveling with a Baedeker travel guide still lingers as one of my sins against him. He did not love life. He loved me in place of it.

Six or seven echoes of a past drama are not enough to create a relationship, yet they do. And in love the same transposition takes place. The only reason why I had such a sensual attraction to Gore was because he came when I had just lost Bill Pinckard. Gore was Bill’s age, and like Bill he wore a uniform, was a writer, and he had the same rich voice and the same full, sensual mouth. They both had that pale, frozen quality that tempts my warmth, challenges my passion. This alone explains why a few years later when the reality of his character finally conquered the illusory one, the desire disappeared, and today I cannot understand how I could ever have desired Gore or considered a life with him (especially when he says he doesn’t like people who are too sexually active, that he likes a minimum of gestures).

This illusion even existed in the relationship I considered the most solid of all, the one with Hugo, because we clung to it. It was based on Hugo’s roles. He played the kind, young father. This was fraudulent. He reveals the opposite: he not only acts like a child, he has become acutely egocentric. He has no feeling for people themselves; he only sees them as objects to be won over. When I invited the whole cast of the Circle in the Square players to a party, his only preoccupation was he would not be able to show them the Ai-Ye film.

His permissive (unconsciously possessive) persona was a role, but analysis and his illness have destroyed it.

Illusion begins to weave its trap as soon as some facet of the person’s character (including the role he plays) corresponds to a fantasy another carries, a wish or a need. The conflicts begin as soon as the real character shows its opposition to the fantasy of the other (like Hugo’s lifelong opposition to my way of life, his incapacity to share it).

Hugo gave in to my need of a kind father. I gave in to his fantasy of a Japanese wife (obedient, docile, as opposed to the arrogant, independent American woman he still hates). But we were both frauds: I wanted pleasure and freedom, not servitude. He wanted total, exclusive devotion, but not from an ordinary selfless woman; he also wanted the artist. The Hugo I see today I don’t love.

Yesterday, the party was my wish. I saw the troupe act in Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke. The producer, José Quintero, told me he read my work three years ago in Woodstock, and it was an initiation to his new life. Hugo begins by saying he will make the punch, and since he has given parties before, I decide to obey. I buy what he tells me. I remind him a dozen people are coming, but he is sure he knows. He buys one bottle of rum. The party is in full swing when after only five people have drunk the punch, it is low and weak. We have to telephone for more.

The apartment was beautiful, like a stage setting. The party was joyous. Geraldine Page was utterly beautiful and as interesting as her role, fully sensitive and aware, full of shadings and delicacies.

But when they went away I hated to be left with Hugo.

Bogner says I hate the traction itself as a symbol. I hate the weights tied to cords, from the feet and from a belt around the waist. I hate them as what I most hate in the world, to be bound, and I cannot look at Hugo’s illness but as a part of his character. Why is it I have turned against Hugo so much? His self-centeredness, his willfulness. It is not he who gives Millicent three days off when she has a stiff back.

I’m appalled at the hatred! I can hardly bear to kiss him goodnight. I lie in my bedroom and feel lonely but no desire to go to his room. He can no longer comfort me, or protect me, or reach me. I feel pity for him at times, but that is all. I feel mostly that he has weighed down my life, and by not sharing anything with me has made it appear a child’s whim. Even in Acapulco, no spontaneity or enthusiasm of his own. Always a weight to be dragged. With all his permission to go and live, he has been my ball and chain. I feel like the Siamese cat when she leaps about the room and wants to run away, chase birds on the terrace and play the role of a mysterious jungle cat.

Why must I part from Hugo with hatred?

It is possible that all this is a case against him because I could not bear the guilt of leaving him?

Dream: Geraldine Page appears in California as I am lying in bed with Rupert. A little while later I see them in the sun; Rupert is sunbathing naked.

NEW YORK, MAY 31, 1952

Cleaned and lacquered copper plates.

Cocktail for Bill Nims, Jim Herlihy, John Weldon, Curtis Harrington.

Royalty statements from Duell Sloan and Pearce:

For six months ended January 31, 1952

THE FOUR-CHAMBERED HEART forty-five returns, forty-eight special editions sold. Royalty earned: $8.42 Balance unearned: $107.28

UNDER A GLASS BELL thirteen regular editions sold, one foreign. Royalty earned: $4.05

CHILDREN OF THE ALBATROSS six regular editions sold. Royalty earned: $1.65

Total balance unearned: $101.55

NEW YORK, JUNE 1, 1952

10:00	Dr. Jacobson
11:00	Dr. Bogner

Errands, bank, sale of surplus books

Cocktail

Evening.

I said to Bogner, “After I drove to Sierra Madre with Rupert, I had to take care of him because he was ill, clean the whole house and unload the car. As we had bought many breakable things, there was much to carry, unpack and put away. Yet the first time he was up, he said he would take the laundry to the laundromat because when I took it I paid to have it dried, and bringing it back wet would save money (60¢ or 70¢). But I told him I was already overburdened, not to give me an extra burden (wet sheets are heavy to hang out and we had accumulated much laundry).

“I know he does not intend to lack consideration for me. He is obsessional and self-centered. He felt we spent too much on the trip and that we must begin to save.”

Bogner asks why I cannot be firm about such incidents. What deprives me of this is my secret feeling that if I were stronger I could do it all, and the shame for not being stronger makes me unable to assert myself. Also, there is Rupert’s fanatical need to be always in the right, and to be obeyed. He wants to control me, even in the smallest matters. I must use his kind of soap (which smells of kitchen soap). I must like spicy food (which I don’t like).

Last night I felt, perhaps, we are always forcing others to be what we want, need, imagine, and we never forgive them for being themselves.

Dream: I am passionately desirous to be with Rupert. We have nowhere to go. I have just left Hugo and I have been bad to him. Rupert and I try to make love in a field but find it is the back yard of a house and the family is watching us. We decide to go to a hotel, but there they try to shut out Tavi. Rupert returns joyously saying that the hotel will accept Tavi.

My impatience and irritation with Hugo are very strong. The same traits I endured with lovers, I resent in him. Why? Gonzalo snored. Rupert loses and forgets things.

So I’m bad to Hugo before seeing Rupert, independently of my relationship with Rupert.

This becomes clear.

I relate to Hugo in the same terms others relate to me: in terms of need.

This need is what I regard as my weakness, and I hate my weakness.

So I am angry with Hugo, but Bogner modifies the over-simplification. To need does not exclude love.

Anaïs, a selfish lover.

The need itself, being the state I most resent in myself, is associated with my life with Hugo, Hugo’s presence. It is the need I resent. And it has deeply colored my life with Hugo as to present all of it as constraint, duty, obligation, responsibility (as with parents), eliminating all elements of pleasure, gratuity, spontaneity. I always said Hugo held on to me, but didn’t I too hold on?

But why do I revolt against Hugo?

I have always revolted.

I revolted against Miller’s friends, against Gonzalo’s destructiveness. I’m in revolt against myself.

Peggy Glanville-Hicks. She appears frail and small, but she is physically sharp and incisive too, with a presence full of nervous energy and accuracies. As she talks, her focus is impeccable, her language subtle. Quick-witted and graceful. It was enchanting to find someone with such a luminous structure, a complete inner city of definite values, living and feeling only at the core. I fell under her spell. I sent her my books. She locked herself up one day and night and then wrote me. I think she understands all. Her letter and her words rescued me from the despair of so many doors closed against me.

I wanted to see her alone, but Hugo was there.

Among illuminations on music, on people, the character of Paul, she repeated that I had explored a new territory, that I had said what seemed impossible to say, that I had raised the novel into the realm of the poem.

She invited us to visit her in Jamaica.

I found it difficult to write her, because faced with my own kind of diamond facet, I felt a cognition of light, two people reaching altitude simultaneously: there is a silence. She seems more certain, more able, more capable of navigation while still repudiating the insight of analysis.

“Who was Paul in Children of Albatross? Was it Paul Bowles? I know him so well I was sure it was him, as he was at seventeen.”

Anne and Max Geismar. With them, it is another atmosphere. Earthier. A house. Children, dogs, garden. Earth and mind. But not subtlety.

Max is slow and laborious. His face is aged with anxiety, though he is younger than we are. Anne is small, vital, assertive, but with a humor made of thrusts, honesty like a child’s, all the truths flung out, comically, but they are tragic truths. Anne and Max have reached a high point of irritation in their marriage. Max dreams of a free life like Balzac’s, or the characters in Russian literature, and Anne seeks fulfillment of her intelligence by collaboration with Max on his books. But Max is modest, self-effacing and not as famous as he should be. I respect and admire his work. Even when I do not see writers as he does, he is solid and truthful and sincere, and you accept his interpretation as a work of fiction with a validity of its own. He is truly a novelist who makes novels of his studies of writers. His work reads dramatically and is often better written than the writer he handles, enhanced by his own interpretive imagination.

The four of us have a vigorous interplay. Anne’s humor is a kind of courage. Max is warm and soft. He is not quite contemporary, and certainly has no perception of the future of writing. He belongs to earthy, prosaic, Germanic America. Anne’s eyes are more open.

They should have revered their roles, and they would have been happy. Anne should have been a man and written the books. Max should have been a mother, and a wife.

I see her face on the Mayan sculptures, the lost Hebrew tribes.

The humor converts the anxiety. But it is in the air. They drink too much. They are cut off from the sparkling life of New York by their life in the country, by home and children.

They belong to a period I did not know (I was in Paris). He was encouraged by Edmund Wilson and was a friend of Max Lerner and the leftist intellectuals. When he writes about the young writers he does not know what to say. They lost a “world,” as we lost our art world in Paris, and have not found a new one.

NEW YORK, JUNE 2, 1952

12:00	Bogner
1:30	Peggy Glanville-Hicks

NEW YORK, JUNE 3, 1952

12:00	René de Chochor. Discussion of hopeless Spy mess in Paris, New Story
12:30	Lunch with Herbert Alexander, Business President of Pocket Books, assistant, Max and Anne Geismar, René de Chochor Dinner with Anne and Max

NEW YORK, JUNE 4, 1952

4:40	Bogner
5:45	Café Brittany, where a friend says, “Hugo is marvelous. He is so complete. And he loves you so much!”

NEW YORK, JUNE 5, 1952

11:00

Bogner

Feel free, at ease, open, confident.

Went to see Paris Review for a job. But it’s a struggling little magazine, so I ended up offering my help.

Bogner understands that the diary has saved me, that it was my truth and my reality. But now I also see how I related to people. Taking the best, I called it, and rejecting the rest. But with lovers, friends, it was effective. It is why I did not like, want, or need Henry’s white trash friends or Gonzalo’s destructiveness. But I fought with Hugo. It was a permanent life and I was trying to live with it. The rebellion was active. I also ran away from Hugo’s complete self and into partial loves. Always partial.

I have reached a new honesty. It is not pleasant to face the fact that I did not love wholly, accept completely, but always partially. I see it all clearly now. I can live with Rupert’s desires, dreams, fantasies, directions. I can live as a forester’s wife, have a home in Los Angeles, accept his adolescent patterns.

Moments of joy. An open window on windblown bushes, the cat leaping in, joyful and intense. Serenity. Hugo reads Proust.

Herbert Alexander says I’m a female Proust. Anne and Max get electrical shocks from the diary, life transfusions. I’m told I’m more beautiful in New York. And I then I remember the life in California. No, not life. It is life with Rupert on a desert island. Poor Rupert. When I made fantasies (that could become true) of Rupert acting in Italian and French films (he could be a Gérard Philipe, the hero of Lovers of Verona, a Louis Barrault), at breakfast or dinner time, to enliven our present life (the hikers, the horseback riders, the youth that pass by all look like dairymaids, cheese vendors, milk-fed products, like the road ads and magazine covers nauseatingly standardized), Rupert thinks of all the obstacles.

At Black Mountain College, Richard Lippold, who was teaching there, fell in love with Jim Herlihy and said his next large work would be dedicated to him. In 1949 he created Variation 7, Full Moon, and whether Lippold intended it or not, I saw in it a portrait of Jim. It is the perfect irradiation of swift and slender threads vibrating in all directions. It is a tower of antennas. And to this transmission tower I confided the full radiation from the diary.

Jim reads the diaries avidly, and starts an answering rhythm in the code of today’s language, and it is in his youthful, perfect receptivity that I measure the life-transmitting power of all my life and work. Jim says, “It is the only book I can read that gives me not only life but the knowledge of how to absorb experience, the chemistry itself of love and art perfectly welded and perfectly told. In volume 40, I love the interplay between all the relationships simultaneously, Henry, Hugo, your father, Allendy, Artaud, and the audacities, the courage.”

His words are so volatile, so full of improvisations, that I cannot retain them. It is in talk that he scales all the musical edifices. His writing is constrained by comparison. In talk, he reveals this complete psychic wave receiver and transmitter of all forms of subtle messages.

We meet at the Museum of Modern Art, on a subtly hot afternoon. I wear the light fiber shoes I got in Yucatan with Rupert, a chartreuse handwoven skirt from Vera’s at Cuernavaca, a black cotton blouse. I carry a wicker basket and wear a wicker crown and veil over my hair.

Jim always says, “How beautiful you are,” and by that he means to tell me the elation I cause him, the lift he feels, which he also gives me. With the greatest of ease, we gain altitude. Whether we stare at a Giacometti portrait and both see Rupert’s body, or at a Duffy who makes the darkest night airy and transparent, Jim’s talk, febrile and highly colored, seeks to throw back to their source the waves of illuminations he has been devouring, each one to be returned to its inception, its creator, but enriched by the absolute receptivity.

Jim’s receptivity is closer to me than Max’s. Max is too earthy for me. It is Jim who is my spiritual son. I experience the pleasure of fecundating, as I did when I lived with Henry.

Some of the questions hurt me. “How could such a relationship (with Henry) ever be destroyed? What destroyed it? Will I find out in the other diaries? You know, I believe you know more about love than anyone in the world. Here is the great work of our time. Yet you are not praised as you should be. You are castigated—why?”

We sit in the Café Rockefeller Plaza with iced teas. We sit at White Horse Tavern at eleven o’clock, still talking, after attending a party so incredibly mediocre at Travis Lee’s that I called it a crash landing.

What Jim’s writing will become, I don’t know yet. He is handicapped by the false virility of American action literature. He has difficulties in plunging inwardly. He is further handicapped by a sense of taboos, a reticence about his homosexuality.

He gives me elation. I also feel like working when I return from our feast of words.

Through the growing mists of the last Martini, I tell him, like one last invocation, “Jim, above all do not be trapped by what you need; seek what you truly want, not what you need.”

James Leo Herlihy

Today, I telephoned Rupert, the artist, the poet, the musician, voiceless, wordless, submerged in a trivial and ordinary life. What does he want of me? To be plunged in a larger life, sorrows, experiences? If so, why does he cling so to the shores of his little life? How can I sweep him into anything while he clings to his present life?

“If we had ten thousand dollars, said Rupert, “I would begin to build our own house.”

I asked, “Here in Los Angeles? Without first seeing the other places where life is at its richest?”

By contrast, Jim says, “When I get money from my book’s publication, I will go and buy that castle in Mallorca you told me about.”

SIERRA MADRE, JUNE 1952

When I returned, Rupert was thin and haggard from poison oak and not eating well. A week later he looks rested and relaxed, healthy again. There is no doubt that he is in great need of me. Tonight he did not want to go and play viola with his family because it is one less evening together and we have been separated too much. I lie in bed alone. I hate the silence, the coyotes. I would rather be in a city, in the Village.

But I am rewriting Spy. I started angrily at first—everyone was against the fantasy, the lie detector (Sabina’s conscience). Either I sink now, or I tell the story anew without the help of fantasy. Now I am interested. Half of me, after analysis, is willing to make an effort to be clearer. I do not want to be silenced, to be blockaded. In poetry there is depth. But there is also the danger of misunderstanding.

Now I am less angry. I am interested to see if I can simplify the design and yet keep the richness.

SIERRA MADRE, JUNE 20, 1952

A night of lovemaking, and if not lovemaking just the bodies sleeping together, the warmth and silkiness of Rupert’s skin, the contentment. I woke up bubbling with gayety, rushed to the typewriter (Rupert was asleep) and worked con allegro e vivace on the new version of Spy. At first I was shocked at the universal dislike of the lie detector personage, angry too. René de Chochor said he should not be a personage, even a mythical one. It is Sabina’s guilt and should be inside her. This corresponded to what I was learning from Bogner, the projection of guilt onto others: the policeman, father, confessor, husband, doctor, analyst, critical friend, or art critic, creating this hallucination of condemnation in the eyes of others.

Sabina, being primitive and subjective, would see all of this (as I do). But the novelist . . .

I began to simplify the design, to incorporate the guilt, to reabsorb the lie detector, to take out the fantasy, and to fill out realistically. Now I am no longer angry. I feel that poetry is mystery—if you want to draw close to human beings you cannot speak only in parables. I have raged at the wall growing between myself and others. I don’t want to be alone, exiled, cut off. I wept at being isolated, at the blockade of the publishers. But then I began to wonder how much I was responsible for, that my expectation of miraculous understanding was childlike. I pondered on all that Djuna Barnes did not tell us, on all that Proust left out, and on what Henry James did not reveal. I realized how much I had not told. There is a feeling of protection that is derived from mystery. In poetry and the myth you are always able to escape from a definite accusation.

Elusiveness might be fear.

Evasion would be a safety measure.

You avoid detection, revelation and punishment.

This truth came clearer through my condemnation of homosexual novels because they do not tell all, they do not reveal, they evade all the truths. Jim Herlihy and Gore Vidal do not tell the truth because of the fear of incrimination.

Obviously I could not write more about Sabina’s marriage because it would lead to the revelation about mine to Hugo—I could not tell all.

It is an intricacy of design. Sabina would see guilt as a living personage following her and taking notes on her actions. But one must know that only Sabina saw him, not the rest of us.

This is the first separation I have made, an objective separation of elements entangled within Sabina. I don’t know if this is growth as a human being or an artistic regression, but I must try. I have often enough longed to join the two, the woman of the diary and the artist.

When Rupert woke up I was making a parody of my second version: Mickey Spillane, Mae West, James Cain style. I made him laugh, playing it tough.

Cut out the fantasy, I kept saying angrily. But the only true doubt that finally made me rewrite the book is the knowledge of all I did not say.

There is subjective identification with what Dandieu calls the primitive’s and child’s emotional participation. When Sabina randomly telephones the lie detector and invites him to track her down, inviting pursuit (as the criminal does), the lie detector becomes a reality.

Bogner examines my anger and anxiety when I am asked to explain myself. I expect intuitive, miraculous understanding, or else I’m disillusioned and don’t want to struggle to make things clear. The neurotic expects this.

Once Bogner challenged a statement I made, that the development of the modern novel should be like the unraveling of a character in analysis. She objected to this on the basis that it was only the illness that was examined during analysis, not the total personality. I was immediately disturbed by what she said, not because I failed to see the accuracy of it, but because until then I had taken it for granted that Bogner understood my work, which may not necessarily be so.

At eight the alarm clock radio begins to play Mexican songs. Through the curtain of muslin painted with yellow gouache given to us by George Piffner, no sun shows because of the tall trees surrounding the house.

But in the faint yellow light I see Rupert’s face on the pillow. He is very sleepy and lazy in the morning. He only moves to throw his arms around me. I get up one minute before he does, so that I can comb my hair and brush my teeth, powder lightly, redden my lips. Then I get into jeans (properly weathered, stylishly faded and dirty à la California) and a sweater, to make coffee. Rupert is not interested in breakfast. He looks somnambulistic. “I must have coffee instantly. I feel weak and cold until I have it.” We sit by the window in the kitchen, where we can see the road, the hills beyond, the Forest Service office, the beginning of the road leading to Mount Wilson. I can see the valley; on certain afternoons the valley looks blue and I imagine Acapulco beyond, ocean and mountains, particularly if the sunset is fiery. I have a house and dishes to clean, errands, signs to paint: “No Smoking,” “No Fires,” “Closed Area,” etc.

At the post office I read Hugo’s letters, in which he is gentle, wise, understanding. No sign of his present egomania or his stubborn, sulky, resentful ways. The good Hugo of the past is there, only now I no longer believe in that self, because it was a role. Today it is not that. Today he is completely self-centered.

Whatever he is, he haunts me. He haunts my life with Rupert, particularly in sensual moments, when I feel that I didn’t give this to Hugo. And I wish I could. I feel it is a tragedy, that I cheated Hugo. I want to believe that Hugo did not inspire this, did not summon it forth, that he has a responsibility in this too. But why does he haunt me? Why can’t I get free of Hugo? I am not free. It is like a debt. I owe something to Hugo—I failed to give him myself. No doubt he is in part to blame. He did not give me himself either. He concealed the greater part of himself. He desired me, but he did not give me his thoughts, his natural self. He did not even know how. He was psychologically blind, and still is.

Did I try to say indirectly, by my art: this is who I am?

Today, at least, I am happy when I forget Hugo. Here with Rupert I am healthy. I am no longer jealous, fearful of every girl. I sleep deeply, easily. I can be awakened by the coyotes at midnight or the boy scouts at six but I fall asleep again. I do not lie tense and anguished as I did in New York. I cut the grass. I water the lawn. I wash my hair. I sit in the sun painting my nails. Even when Reginald comes, I have a cure: I work on a rug, and I let him talk about his intestinal vagaries, the color of his feces, his liver, his Lincoln play, repeat his old monologues on Shakespeare and Ibsen . . . He should be in an asylum, actually. He is gently delirious. He talks about his past. I work on the rug. Rupert gets irritable and depressed. After Reginald leaves, Rupert plays with Tavi on the rug, like a boy, plays roughly and wholeheartedly.

Hugo was never open, never spontaneous. I never knew what he felt. He withdrew.

Why can’t I live my life with Rupert alone? Perhaps it is because I cannot desert anyone.

But with Bogner I learned to overcome the complexes I would carry from one life into another. For example, both Hugo and Rupert are exacting and demanding, not easygoing. I resent their criticism and commentaries. I never ask Hugo or Rupert to cook a certain dish in a certain way and none other. If Rupert or Hugo is doing something I do not come to see how he does it and suggest a better way, the only way! Bogner explained that Hugo did this because he himself had long ago rebelled against established order in a such a negative and destructive way (chaos in his belongings, confusion in papers) that any loss of control, carelessness, or inefficiency in another makes him anxious: both he and Rupert need others’ organization. It is their own carelessness they fight in me. It so happens I am extraordinarily organized. For example, Rupert is particularly delighted with my sign painting. I have a steady hand and I don’t smudge. His delight is caused by his own inability to paint—he is impatient and careless. So it has nothing to do with me. If I did it badly he would be hyper-critical (his inability plus mine causes the anxiety of inadequacy).

Now I understand this.

But I began to not care; it is their problem.

I have been exceedingly critical of Hugo’s practical inadequacy. He posed as a banker. He assumed leadership in the practical, economic basis of our life, yet he failed in it (he speculated in Paris with borrowed money and indebted us for years). True, he reached a high position in the bank, a good salary, but he used to say himself: “That’s because I’m a good judge of men. I surround myself with good workers. I know how to make others work.” When he finally made some capital (which was due to Archibald, his partner), he promptly set about speculating with it unwisely and impulsively and lost almost all of it. It was I who insisted the largest share should be in bonds and in the cautious hands of an advisor.

I have never had more than a month’s allowance in my pocket. His “budgets” were pessimistic and always filled with errors. I see now I hated this because it added to my incapacity for making money, making me feel utterly helpless. We hate to be betrayed in our needs.

Letter from Anaïs Nin to René de Chochor:

Sierra Madre, June 22, 1952

Dear René: when I received your letter Thursday I spent three days thinking it over, rereading the Spy manuscript, in all honesty and with care. Believe me, there is nothing more I can change without betraying the inner story as I wish to tell it. Sabina cannot return to Alan with a confession, and I make this very clear, because he loves only one aspect of her. Her talk with Djuna (whose presence I explain clearly: they had met before in Paris) is the only way to reveal the nature of the truth I want to point out. Any other ending would be the classic return to the husband, to an unsolved problem of a new kind of sincerity, which is to recognize the roles people play in regard to each other. I cannot change a word of that ending. I sacrificed the fantasy of the lie detector, simplified the design, made the sequences more obvious. I also clarified, in general, Sabina’s motivation, but that is all I can do. I cannot at this point pretend to be a naturalist—I am exploring the inside, and as you well know, here the ploys and denouements are quite different.

If the novel fails now, well, tant pis. America is not the place for the poetic novel anyway. I’d rather sink with it as it is and retain my feeling of integrity. I am being true to a new form that will evolve out of a new relativism of character.

Anaïs

Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:

New York, June 1952

Dear Anaïs:

Your letter today is tucked away at 256 W. 73rd Street. First of all please believe me, I am very happy, happier than I have ever been over any sustained period, and there seems to be no way to convince you of this. I have enough objectivity in this situation of helping Hugo to last for both of us, and when I have an hour free I’m going to sit down and write you a devastating letter. I’ll say nothing now, except this: I see very clearly that nothing you can possibly do will save Hugo from unhappiness, whether you act out of guilt, love, pity, or whatever; you must live your life and free yourself, and I never have been more certain of anything than this; you have absolutely no cause for feeling guilty. When you feel like that and act out of it, you are responding to legendary moralities and not to reality. You are now a big girl, and are maturing; it’s time to leave home. Naturally Papa is unhappy, but this is not your fault. I wish I had the time now to go into some of these details more thoroughly. I love you so much, Anaïs, and I have observed for a long time the fact that you are tender, conscientious, kind, and loving by nature. But the Catholic part of it is atrocious. Please, for Christ’s sake, take care of your duty to yourself, just this once; and whether or not you feel called upon to return to NY sooner than the end of July, that’s up to you, but do not do it out of a sense of guilt and obligation. You have no debts here. Also, it may come as a shock to you and perhaps puncture slightly your ego, but Hugo is doing quite well without you now. What he needs is deluxe service and companionship, and frankly, Anaïs, you are a damn fool to give up any more of your time and energy and devotion to what he can either learn to cultivate in friends, or buy.

The important thing for you to know is this: I am not burdened! I would feel perfectly free to walk out and never come back again, if I thought I wanted to. Actually, I enjoy being here most of the time, and I can get time for work, plenty of time—I spent thirteen hours last Saturday afternoon and evening, on my own, typing. There is no reason for you to feel that my liberty or my freedom is being sacrificed. After all, if it weren’t for this, I would have to go out and earn food money, but now I take my meals here and am comfortable and without tensions or needs, and you know that I am very happy to perform a few little jobs now and then that will earn the right to enjoy this freedom I have. The traction is no problem to me. Any time I want to make a plan for the evening I’ll simply tell Hugo that Millicent will have to stay or that he will have to spend the night without traction. You know, don’t you, that the doctor said he could do without any traction at all during hot nights. Two nights so far he has gone to bed without it, and Saturday I took the prop out from under his bed so that now it lies flat, and looks much less medicinal than before. He is getting much better every day—he went shopping at length the other day, and was going at it steady for about nine hours yesterday with no ill effects. You seem to feel that this is some kind of a hell for me, but you are mistaken. I like to feel that I am earning my room and board, and that is exactly what I’m doing in the simplest way possible. It just so happens that I would move heaven and earth for you if it would make you happy, but in this circumstance, I am doing absolutely nothing for you that is not benefiting me just as much.

Now about this unpleasant little subject of money: I have hidden away the item you sent last week, and also the little check from this morning’s letter. What I intend to do, if you approve, is this: I’m going to live completely on my slightly undependable income from the gov’t, and from Hugo. Actually, when I think this thing over, I’m amazed. Why should you help me when it is Hugo that I am helping? If I have trouble with the gov’t checks (today two checks came at once, amounting to $50), I will tell Hugo that I am having trouble and ask him for some money. Chances are this will not come up, but if it does, I feel at this point I would be perfectly free and justified to go to him quite openly about the whole thing. I think this is a slightly delicate period of your life financially and I want you to have as much as possible in reserve for emergencies. So I’m keeping the $100 hidden for whichever one of us needs it first. If I have to spend it I’ll let you know, but if you need it, you say so instantly. Is this all right with you? If it is, just tell me quite honestly, whether you think it would be all right to go to Hugo. I see no reason why I shouldn’t if any slight emergency should arise. I have done and am doing a good job for him, and slowly he begins to realize just how good!

I want you, Anaïs, to let me begin to deal with Hugo separately from my relationship with you. The reason for it is this: he must learn to evaluate friendships and services rendered in a realistic way. If I need help and decide to ask him for help, he will, or should, be very glad to give it. If not, I’m going to be extremely cool, and my relationship with him will come to an end for the simple reason that he will not have done his part in the thing. You see, Anaïs, he has no idea that you have helped me, and I begin to see more and more each day that what this is doing is simply building his ego to the extent that he believes he is one of those special people for whom others render services out of awe, admiration, or something. This is poppycock and rubbish. Relationships are two-way affairs, and I want to make him realize that, if I can. If this situation becomes pressed between us, and I decide to stop helping him, I think you should trust my judgment about it, and allow it to happen. Doesn’t this all make sense to you? Please don’t think any more about Hugo being your responsibility while you are in California. Hugo is his own responsibility, and at the present moment I feel strongly impelled to do what I can to make him realize this. I want you to let me do it. Unless of course, I am not thinking clearly about it, in which case you must point that out to me.

You know, you act like one who thinks she is the first woman in the world to ask for a divorce. I am beginning to wish you would get it over with! Thank God you are beginning your schedule of work; I’m terribly sorry you are swamped with housework. Please demand for yourself the time for your writing. You are a great woman, and a great writer, and you have absolutely no business with dust-cloths unless for a few minutes a day. The heavy stuff, never! Every time I imagine that you might possibly, even this morning, be at the typewriter, I feel a tremendous excitement and anticipation. And you must not feel that you are alone. As long as I live I will be devoted to you and to your work, and I will possibly one day be in a position to help you by making people sit up and take notice of it on a larger scale. There is no ceasing of wonders, and anything, literally anything, can happen—but one thing is certain: something will.

Love,

Jim

SIERRA MADRE, JULY 1, 1952

I have been back with Rupert for twenty days. At first I was keenly happy, a physical happiness. The first week we celebrated our reunion, and every outing, a movie or a dinner at Café de Paris, seemed festive and magnificent. And then, slowly, mysteriously, the life began to bear a resemblance to my life with Hugo. Rupert (it is not a hallucination) begins to behave like a younger and more charming Hugo. I think I am a victim of a dream. Hugo once came in and found me cooking spaghetti. He leaned over my shoulder and said, “You did not put enough water in the pan.” Rupert arrives and finds me cooking spaghetti and says, “You must put more water in the pan.” When Jim and I hung up the terrace awning in the wind, a hard job, just before a party and got ourselves all dirty and had barely time for a shower, Hugo came to see, and all he found to say was: “One of them is hung inside out.” When some furniture arrived here at Sierra Madre, the bookcase had to be moved. To avoid having the books on the floor, and as Rupert was overworked, I set about making a temporary construction until Rupert found time to set up the bookcase (a heavy job, but I thought the tidiness would relieve him of feeling he had to set it up immediately). When he came home, all he had to say was: “You didn’t distribute weight right, the shelves are sagging.” So the next morning I spent an hour correcting the sagging. Then he was annoyed because the present arrangement exposed a shelf he had no time to paint.

Even though I know he feels guilty because he feels he should have set up the bookcase, the repetition of such incidents still depresses and angers me.

My memories of similar situations stem from my father’s criticalness, which made me feel humiliated and diminished. Bogner fought to make me realize this was not directed against me but against themselves. They must throw responsibility onto others.

I can throw it all off for a while, but then I begin to feel unworthy, inadequate. I can’t hang on to my own opinion of myself.

Yesterday I was angry.

Before going to sleep he kissed me. When I get angry he acts like a child seeking forgiveness. He does not say it, but he tries, with charm and a kiss, to reconcile me.

It takes Kay Dart’s visit and her extravagant praise to cheer me. “Oh Anaïs, you’re not only a genius, brilliant, and beautiful, but so human, so warm, so giving, so gracious, and I always feel ‘charged’ when I see you. I love John, I’m happily married, yet I can’t live without seeing you! Nothing takes the place of our talks.”

It is this diminishing that Bogner describes as a reversion to a child status. In this I have made little progress. Three weeks after talking to Bogner and feeling strong, I now feel depleted.

When I’m elated about writing, I have to sit through a meal listening to three commentators! When I’m elated about some symphonic passage from Proust I have to listen to Rupert reading aloud from Time magazine. The full irony of escaping from Hugo’s will to Rupert’s tyranny!

If echoes create false relationships, how much weaker will the love they create be? The points of resemblance will be enough to set up a chain of responses. One response (from sheer power of habit) will be enough to awaken the neighboring nerves and create the illusion of a total bond. If the currents of love can be interrupted by certain grooves of resemblance, what hope is there of escaping from repetition even if I change?

I have changed profoundly since the first time I met June Miller twenty years ago, yet June reappeared in my life with Kay, and Kay, as well as June, responded to me in the same way.

Kay has the same very white dazzling skin, the same Amazonian proportions, and in the paleness the eyes burn. June was more beautiful. Kay is marred by fatness, by an automobile accident that gave her false teeth, by a scar on her cheek from a blow on the jaw given to her by her first husband (the jawbone was broken), yet dressed in black, her voluptuous handsomeness shines. But the character is the same. Now I can understand my response: an echo, and Kay’s life is like June’s. But why Kay’s attachment to me?

Is all this in my vision, these analogies, these interpretations? If June had found a kind man (certainly not Henry) as Kay found the saintly John, she might have bloomed this way. The fundamental difference is that Kay is June exposed, June confessional and truthful. Henry would have had no mysteries here. He would have known everything. I wonder now whether one can say “I have given myself” if one has withheld the truth of one’s self. More and more, I feel that if I did not give Hugo my physical self, he in time denied me his emotional self, in the sense that he concealed all of what he considered to be his “weakness,” his fears, his childish longings . . . He played a role (a father role). I wonder now what we did give to each other. Not very much. A façade.

I have spent a week enduring Rupert’s irrational behavior: high irritability, explosiveness, injustices.

So I began in a state of half sleep to yearn for a kind and undemanding Hugo, then suddenly I awakened fully with the shock of a new realization: the Hugo I need no longer exists. He was a good, silent Hugo, selfless and self-sufficient. That was a role. The real Hugo today is just like Rupert. Analysis and illness have unmasked a demanding, exacting, dependent and wearying Hugo. It was having these two lives burdening me that drove me into desperate revolt recently—two children and no husband.

To Rupert:

Beware, my darling, of self-destructive, negative tendencies in you, for as you know, when we harm ourselves we also harm the one we love, and you unconsciously have harmed me. Try to see this objectively. It’s no good saying you won’t do it again. The help is knowing why you do it and then when you understand the mechanism, you will be able to stop.

If you continue doing this, then you must become aware of its destructive effect on me. You are getting rid of your poison by injecting me with it, so that I feel guilty, inadequate, diminished, and unhappy. The result of your preoccupation with your own guilt to the exclusion of the other’s similar problem is that I feel unprotected, lonely, and unjustly treated.

You also have guilt for the presents I make you, and instead of enjoying them you deprive yourself of enjoyment by finding flaws in them.

Let’s stop blaming the other. You see, I don’t blame you ever. If the brakes are bad, you haven’t had time to fix them. If that day I had been seriously hurt on the parkway you would have felt responsible, yet I myself would not have blamed you. I want you to become aware of this big reservoir of guilt you carry, which causes you (in self-defense) to throw blame onto others because you can’t bear to add to it.

You said, “I could shoot you for having my jeans sewn up!”

You blame me for getting your jeans sewn up when you know that you never remember either to get enough jeans, or to get them fixed in time. I didn’t even know your other jeans were shrunk or useless. You know that you are disorganized, and you fear I should say, “But why didn’t you buy other jeans?” You know you can’t have just one pair of good jeans and that at some time or other it will have to be washed or repaired when you need them.

Case of the floor polish: When I ask to use a floor polish that is easier you feel badly because you feel that is your job and that I am indirectly reproaching you for not having done it. Actually you have no time, but you should not refuse me, as you do, getting an easier polish, or insist that I use the one that requires two operations. Then I feel you are not protecting me or saving my energy and that you are being selfish in insisting only one polish is the right one.

Causes of quarrels: When the axle broke you blamed me. Actually, you are so fearful of being blamed or reproached, that before the other person does anything, you make a self-defensive jump and accuse. You can’t bear being accused. A broken axle is no one’s fault, actually. Behind this lies your uneasy feeling about having sold Perseus, the fear that I should say someday ask: “Why did you sell it? Why don’t we have a better car than José?”

The result of the throwing off the blame to save yourself is that you are unaware of its effect on me: I can’t bear being reproached or blamed either, and I know I’m not a very good driver, so when you said it was my fault I believed it and felt awful. This blaming others, you see, turns out to be a selfish act in the end. Let’s divide responsibility. In this case there is none.

These notes on quarrels helped Rupert to understand. He returned tired and gentle. We had a happy week. Museums, quartets, a swim in the neighbors’ (Campions) pool, relationship with Christie Campion (six years old) who says today, “I will be your little girl.” Movies. Dinner at Café de Paris, on a terrace, on Sunset Boulevard and the movie The Wild Heart. Long letters from Jim telling all. A day with Kay in Hollywood helping her to find a job. Pickwick Books asks for more House of Incest. Hugo is working on his film.

SIERRA MADRE, JULY 1952

It was not Rupert who offered to trade in my fifteen-year-old typewriter on which I could no longer type adequately. His obsession with economy does not prevent him from erratic, sudden impulsive extravagances, like buying a book we can borrow from a library. I feel that my life with Rupert would be intolerable without money of my own to combat his enslavement of my time and energy.

I am deeply depressed by this control. I asked a workman to come and fix the lawn mower, which was too stiff for me to push. Rupert caught him and sent him away ($2.50 for adjusting it properly), saying it belonged to the Forest Service, when he knew I was doing this so I could be able to cut grass when he is on a fire crew.

He has chosen a cleaner in Arcadia, a laundromat farther away. If I listened to him I would spend my whole morning on errands. Of course I cheat; I go my own way. I save time, come home, work on my mailing list and get an order for several books each week of $7.50 or $10.

I have grown to dread his questions, his displeasure. I have to justify whatever he discovers I have done. By buying the non-polishing wax, one operation, I buy my liberty. This is what creates my gratitude for Hugo.

Anaïs Nin with Rupert Pole’s boots, Sierra Madre

SIERRA MADRE, JULY 15, 1952

I have made a discovery that puts a different light on my feeling of housework being wearying to me. The doctor believes I had, as a child, rheumatic fever, and that what I believed to be attacks of flu (sore throat, aching bones, fever, fatigue, difficulty in breathing) are actually attacks of rheumatic fever. And I was washing windows, kitchen walls and waxing floors! My longing (seemingly capricious) for warm, dry places, is all explained now. My aches when I was eleven and thirteen—in the diary mal aux jambes, fatigue. I considered it a great sacrifice to walk from school, 91st Street to 72nd Street to save 5¢ to buy my mother lilacs.

Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:

New York, July 1952

Dear Anaïs: Tomorrow Hugo and I are going to the zoo, and because you took your turn at relieving me of guilt, I’m going to spend next week reading and at the museums of modern art and natural history.

I’m sorry, Anaïs, that I must tell you Hugo has still not once asked me if I needed anything; it is incredible to me that it has not occurred to him to do this. He even told me once in conversation about the nurse who wanted $11 a day, which he felt was outrageous, but it never crossed his mind that my help has saved him hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and that I have given him certain services that are purchasable. I’m certain he feels no qualms about asking me to do anything for him, even on a moment’s notice, no matter what I happen to be doing at the moment. You know, Anaïs, it occurs to me that you must have been his conscience all these years, that you must have secretly paid his debts in thousands of ways. You know that I tell you these things only because I want to show you how it seems to someone who is relatively an outsider. I am sincere, though, when I say that I don’t mind this and that I’m really enjoying greater freedom now than ever before. And so you must not think for a minute that I am unhappy about the arrangement; I want you to stay as long as you like, not that I don’t want you here, you know that, but because I think you have a debt to yourself that is much, much larger than any to Hugo. Please remember that if I felt I was being compromised, I would tell you—I know you believe I am possibly over-considerate of you, but I wouldn’t lie to you about something as important as this might be. About that money, I’m going to put the checks in the bank until I need them. Hugo lent me $15 in advance of the arrival of my gov’t check, and I’m simply going to borrow more if necessary and not dip into our secret money until the emergencies arrive. I did expect him to say I needn’t return the money, but he didn’t. I want you to see this clearly, Anaïs, so that you will be in a better position to evaluate what you call your “debt” to him. Hugo is a good businessman, and just as you carry your artistry into your living, so does Hugo carry his “business” into his living. I think that the sentence I just wrote is an important one and I want you to think about it, and read it again. He is incapable of a simple “gesture”; they are not gestures, they are “grandstand plays” and extremely calculated. When Christina Guiler, his aunt, died, he sent a five-dollar bouquet, and then told me on two subsequent occasions that he was billing his mother for it, and also billing her for the cable in which he informed her of the death. I was appalled. And I see this so often; for example, he is giving Len Lye film in return for his services in designing the titles for the picture, and I have never seen such a contrast between the extreme care of deciding how much film to give (when he talks it over with me) and the bravado with which he hands it to Lye. On two occasions we went out to the movies with the plan to stop on the way home and have dinner at a restaurant; the first time he decided he wasn’t hungry and we had a hamburger, the second time we stopped at the Captain’s Table where he ordered fish, and when he looked over the menu, he suggested I’d like a hamburger steak. You may not know these things, because I would imagine that he takes great care to disguise them to you. He has just written a letter that he showed me, a letter to you about Spy. I began to quarrel with the last paragraph, in which he said that neither of you have progressed toward facing reality, even though the book would seem to indicate that you had, and in which he said that we put a statement of our sins into a work of art as if it exonerated us from the sin, and we could go on living it. When I quarreled with this, he said, “I simply have to tell you that it’s true, and that’s all there is to it—we’ll discuss it more another time.” Or, in other words, “I have the answers, the discussion is ended.” He says in the letter that he came to represent reality to you, and in another part, that you fled from reality. I did manage, Anaïs, to point out that there are certain facts, unalterable, about reality, from which a human being has not only the right, but the duty, to flee. Reality, I said, includes a great deal; it embraces all the existing orders, social, economic, climactic, emotional, and if we don’t flee the insuperable, the insupportable, we are nothing but cowards!

I am truly sorry that you don’t have the freedom you require in either place. If I could only feel that you were wrong and that your desires for freedom were irrational, I would like so much to be the one to point them out to you; but always your bondage is the prison of others’ neuroses, and their fears turn the keys on you. Keep your banner high, Anaïs, and always realize, as you seem to now, that freedom is not a sin, it’s a right!

Please tell me this: can I write you at General Delivery with absolute freedom? Do you have to read the letters at the post office and destroy them before you go home? Or do you have the time and place to take care of your secrets? I would like to know this.

Hugo said in conversation that he might possibly postpone his trip to Venice to August 10, depending on whether or not the film was ready for the Festival, and whether or not the directors of the Festival write him that they would be willing to view it at this later date. I hope he doesn’t postpone, but if he does, I thought I might warn you in advance that if you want to stay longer, possibly into August, in Sierra Madre, that you might begin preparing Hugo for it now by telling him that you have been either exhausted or ill, or both, or that you have to go to the dentist or something. He was not at all put off or irritated, it seemed to me, when you postponed your return to the end of July, and I must tell you, as part of the duty of one of the many members of the New York Magic Company, that you can milk the situation bone dry, because I believe he is in a high mood and will accept what you tell him. He does not seem to have suffered at all from the suspension of his analysis, and he is very busy and happy and even elated over the shape the film, its sound and titles are taking.

Love,

Jim

Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:

New York, July 1952

Dear Anaïs:

I think you must actually put a few hundred into a car, invest in some freedom out there. Movies and radio and Time are not enough to keep you writing. You know the prison aspect of the life does actually have something to do with the writing energies, how they are diverted; this I believe. We write under such circumstances because the bars remind us it is impossible to find our excitements elsewhere, or a release from tensions in a world that is closed to us by distance and barriers. I’m glad you’ve accomplished a lot, but I do wish you had more of the kind of companionship you really need; I wish too that I were there to offer it.

Hugo is fine. His spirits are high. I’m giving up the apartment on 73rd Street. I don’t want the place alone, not now when I will be having Hugo’s apartment on August 1st through September. My rent is up the 23rd so Hugo has said I can move in entirely with him and perhaps help him get packed. I don’t like to bring this up, but I do wonder if you plan to go to Europe, Anaïs. Or do you think you’ll stay out there another month or two while Hugo is gone? Hugo is filled, as you say, with the film. I like it, by the way; it’s beautiful and sad; I suggested we call it Bells of the Atlantide, because the Barrons’ music suggests something of this quality, and the whole action might take place on such an undersea continent or nativity, which offers a certain irony when associated with the crucifixion-like shot of you on the plank standing with your arms outstretched. The picture did make me sad, but I want to see it again and think about it some more. You are beautiful, of course, and your movement is wonderful, like a trained actress-dancer; I wish the film were longer.

Don’t worry about Hugo. I keep him in hand and do not permit him to impose. He is basically kind, though occasionally thoughtless, and I straighten him out now and then, which he seems to like, and we get on well. I help him give dinner parties and entertain, accompany him to movies, spend an hour or two talking with him each day, put him in traction about five nights a week. He is practically well, has been going at a tremendous pace lately. The bed will probably be sent back the end of this month.

Do you feel that your “decision” still has its original strength, or have you become wearied by “movies, radio and Time magazine?” These last few weeks have taught me a great deal about your problem. I have a very similar one: of finding a world that will be big enough to hold my heart and my goddamn mind. Wouldn’t it be simple to be brainless, healthy, and contented? Maybe we can find some way of keeping these two parts of ourselves alive simultaneously, though I certainly have nothing to offer on that score now, just the hope that things will settle into a more complete pattern.

All my love,

Jim

SIERRA MADRE, JULY 1952

The meaning of art:

First, I failed to bleach the dark brown walls of the house lighter. Then, having been bored by 24 hour duty on the 4th of July with streams of cars passing, empty faces, Rupert’s activities, roadblocks, signs, homely fireworks, and a visit from a drunken, sloppy, bawdy Kay, two homely young men, a diffident John, the trees, the sight of Sierra Madre, while Rupert sang I fixed my eyes on Varda’s painting. It was as if I had stepped out of my life into a region of sand with tiny crystals, of transparent women dancing, airy dresses, figures whom no obstacle could stop, who could pass through walls but remain accessible to the imagination that escaped the confinement of the brown-walled room, four walls, small screened windows, duties, restrictions, labor, a waste of one’s time and strength. I ceased to think of myself as a caged animal pacing in a fever against limitation, and wanting the impossible, for I acquired in these moments of contemplation of Varda’s painting the certainty that such a state of life was attainable.

The abstract tree is indispensable to man, as nourishing as the tree in the forest of human life, as necessary as the human tree. It is the guiding lookout tower, the indication of an existing oasis, of the hidden treasures lost to man, which he would otherwise cease to believe in, and consequently not be able to find.

With Varda’s painting I can find what the cedar trees and orange bushes have not given me, because they only contain the present and no long-range vision into the fullest expansion of man’s farthest-flung treasure hunts.

Physical beauty deteriorates in one’s eyes as the character of a person emerges. One of Rupert’s most beautiful physical attributes is the narrowness of his face that sets off the largeness of his eyes. But as time passes and the pettiness and narrowness of his character constantly manifests itself, the limitations of his insight superimpose themselves upon the narrowness of the face, which appears less beautiful as it becomes associated in my mind with not only his narrow range of thought, but with his father’s small, shabby habits.

Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:

New York, July 1952

Dear Anaïs,

Your letters have arrived through Dick.

Hugo says you might be coming back to New York the end of this week or the first of next. He is busy with exciting new developments in his film and will probably not get away August 1st. I don’t think he’s made any preparations other than renewing his passport. We are getting along very well. We talked Sunday about his authoritative father-like tone when he talks to me (and you), and he was very understanding and willing to see it from that point of view.

I want you to know your letters are perfectly safe. I have most of them hidden at 73rd Street, and when I can’t get down there, I give them to Dick, who puts them in a secret letter box that he is holding for me. I’m awaiting the arrival of the envelopes and will get the enclosures out of the “locked Pandora’s box” at 35 W. 9th and mail them very soon.

I’m worried about your traps. And I don’t think you should blame yourself for getting into them. I am beginning to feel, however, that you must think very clearly and surely before you let yourself in for the one in the West exclusively, for you do have much more freedom in New York. I only wish that your lives could all melt into one. Love, work, money, play, all in one place. Maybe it will be possible that all these can exist together soon and you won’t have any more traps and cages to contend with! Do you think we can arrange a secret talk next week when you are in New York? Hugo is worried about the fact that you might have rheumatic fever.

Dick and I are staying here at 35 W. 9th during the hot weather, sleeping in the bedroom; the traction bed is in the studio.

I hope you aren’t being tough on yourself because of your dissatisfaction. Remember that none of us could be very happy completely alone in Sierra Madre, and it is only too true that Rupert does not supply all of your needs. And I’ll tell you something else—if you decide to remain in California, I’m going to take a place that’s not a million miles from you. I think Dick wouldn’t mind living in Altadena, or somewhere within shouting distance, and the quiet would probably suit me well, so long as I knew I could talk with you without any trouble.

Meanwhile, write me when you can and know that I love you very much.

Jim

EN ROUTE TO NEW YORK, JULY 26, 1952

Yesterday, the day before leaving, I tried to remember everything to make it easier for Rupert, to clear the icebox, wax the floors, order, cook and cut Tavi’s meat, water the garden deeply, weed the last patch, paint the last sign . . .

At four o’clock Rupert came home. I said I would like to go swimming in the pool next door. He said we had the bookshelves to finish; then after a while he said, “OK, to hell with the shelves. We’ll have a quick swim and finish them later.”

It was 90 degree heat. We got into our bathing suits. He began to look for his terrycloth kimono. I said, “I took it to get washed. It was very, very soiled and I wanted you to have it clean for the pool. Only I didn’t have time to call for it. Reginald came, then you came home. I was hot and tired from weeding, so I let it go. Here is a big towel.”

Rupert got into a fury: “I don’t want it washed! Washing shrinks it. Never send anything to be washed unless I say so. I’ll wash it myself,” and on and on. A completely disproportionate anger.

More than angry, I was appalled, frightened. It reminded me of Gonzalo’s explosions. The injustice and irrationality of it. We went to the pool. I didn’t stay long. I was filled with bitterness. I returned home. Reginald was still there; I couldn’t control the weeping.

When Rupert returned I had closed the bathroom door. Tavi was anxious and licked my hand. Is this the cruelty I fear and cannot free myself of? Is it Rupert who is made to feel such harshness so keenly, or I? Rupert found me. Kissed me vehemently, kissed my eyes. I am afraid that my sorrow aroused him, as it used to arouse Gonzalo. Did I imagine this? He kissed me over and over again.

Because Reginald was there, I fixed dinner. The heat was oppressive. We worked on the shelves all evening. We replaced the books. Rupert turned on the radio and listened to the moronic convention speeches until one-thirty in the morning, and then I talked. I told him I could not take such scolding, that if I were like Kay and drank, talked too much, wasted my days, left the house uncared for, I could understand. But I was doing a great deal, a great deal that I hated to do, out of love, and I would not allow him to scold and nag. I told him the scene about the kimono was irrational, unjustified, even incredible. He is not aware. He was sincere. He was brought up on such harshness and irrationality from Lloyd, so he does not give it importance.

But it is important to me. It’s destructive.

He said, “I can’t be like you. You are good. You never criticize. I can’t do that. I am not that way. You should nag me. It would be constructive.”

(Seeking the angry parent!)

I explained: “We have been nagged and ostracized enough. That’s why you have no confidence. I could destroy what confidence you do have in a week if I acted towards you as you did towards me.”

In the dark, he grew passionate. I recognized the passion and the irrationality, as in Gonzalo. He cannot distinguish between just teachings (such as how to start the car in the morning) and the scene about the kimono.

Well, Anaïs, you’re in for it. All you will achieve is that Rupert will seek to control this irrational fussing, ill temper, without understanding what it means.

The passion, the promises, the wild caresses, the begging for me to treat him the way he treats me, the masochistic-sadistic primitive reactions, the fact that I can’t do this nor will I accept it being done to me—all this will be the death of our relationship. It will get worse (it already has). Rupert is very neurotic, and our relationship is making him more so.

He is so unbalanced, either too tender or too harsh, too kind or too selfish, too yielding or too stubborn.

In the face of neurosis there is absolutely nothing one can do.

Even under the most ideal circumstances (Acapulco, for example), he makes himself unhappy. He lost his money and felt desperate, he was angry when the movie broke down, he hated to be overcharged, or this or that. Was he truly happy in Acapulco?

When I finally rebelled and talked to Rupert about his fault-finding, he failed to understand its effect on me, my effort to find the cause of it, and said in his usual psychological blindness (consisting in repressing whatever presents a problem), “I won’t do it again,” just as he failed to understand the destructiveness of his family’s attitude towards me. I was in distress. For what always creates anxiety in me is the doubt of my own sanity. I always question myself: am I being over-sensitive, am I exaggerating? This weakens me. When, besides this, Rupert is completely unaware of his actions, I feel lost, as I did with Gonzalo. I have occasionally wondered whether Rupert is sane. I wanted something he could not give me. I could not lean on him for a moment. I felt alone, unprotected.

I wanted to weep but didn’t. I was harsh with myself. Well, Anaïs, you wanted Rupert’s aliveness and passion. He is an adolescent. An adolescent can’t protect you when you are in distress. Now you know what it is. You are alone. No Hugo to turn to—no one.

He left me with a passionate embrace. I am glad to be alone and resting from his selfishness.

NEW YORK, AUGUST 11, 1952

When I arrived in New York this was the situation: Hugo was almost well. He walks normally, not too fast. He cannot bend down or carry packages or weights.

He was trying to finish the film for the Venice Festival, which is August 20th.

Hugo was defeated by the technicalities of the film just before his illness. When I left, the film was complete except for smoothing and polishing—technicalities. Immediately Hugo turned to Len Lye, who, being an artist, did not give him technical help, but superimposed his abstractions over Hugo’s film so that by the time I returned, the film, simple and clear at first, was almost entirely obliterated. The Barrons were in despair but found that the slightest criticism made Hugo angry. So when I returned I was the one who had to say, “Your own film was perfect before Len Lye’s abstractions. You should have confidence in yourself as an artist.” Hugo was angry, but I soothed him and we continued to work. Slowly, we rescued some lost passages from the original concept. The Barrons created a very original electronic score. The film began to emerge. The abstractions were better integrated. But how we worked! Hugo leaned on Louis technically. They stayed up all night. Bebe and I gave out and fell asleep all dressed. At six in the morning I got up and made breakfast.

Hugo withstands strain amazingly, but his temper is worse than ever. Bebe feels he has changed.

I help. We get up early. I go on errands. Jim drives me almost every day to Flushing, where the Kodak factory is. We have no visitors. We work at Len Lye’s workshop and here at the apartment tonight. Tonight Louis went on vacation with his family. Both of them are exhausted. So Hugo has a new “crisis” and calls Len.

On July 29th I appeared at Immigration for a preliminary examination to become an American citizen.

Rupert’s letters beg me to return. “I am lonely. I want you back.” His letters are full of promises. “I am fixing the sprinkler so you won’t get wet anymore.”

Between these two relationships I have one island of peace, and that is with Jim. It is the perfect relationship. Jim dreams of how it would be if he were not homosexual, but I warn him it is perfect because we don’t have the love problems.

During the rides to Flushing, Jim and I unburden ourselves.

Dick has become jealous—he opens Jim’s letters, he asks where he is going, he telephones him, he argues. He tries to control Jim’s dress, his friendships. “You must give up the poor artists.” Jim is estranged from Hugo after taking care of him in my absence because Hugo places everything on a business basis, talking in a commanding tone so that Jim feels like a “secretary” or a “servant.” Hugo gives ungraciously, and not generously.

Sometimes I am aware of my immense debt to Hugo for all he gave me, and of my guilt for having lovers, but recently I have been aware that Hugo gave me material things and protectiveness as substitutes for the essential, vital elements he did not give me: aliveness, presence, sensuality and pleasure.

Guilt makes you hate someone. I hate Hugo most of the time. Now and then I feel compassion, but something about his set jaw, clamped mouth, tense face and manner antagonizes me. He is never genuinely humorous, or easy-going, or joyous.

It’s an obsession with me, to justify my leaving him. Jim thinks everyone and everything justify it.

Jim and I plan escapes from control and nagging. I know when I return to Rupert I will be happy for a week and then fall prey to petty, childish tyrannies.

EN ROUTE TO LOS ANGELES, AUGUST 20, 1952

Three weeks of Hell.

It is not the work that was hell, but rather the complications, all due to Hugo’s complex and confused mind. He would make changes to the film and confuse the printers. He made errors and had to send for Louis Barron. Finally, broken down by fatigue, he admitted to his inadequacy, and then I felt compassion and rallied to his aid completely. It is hard to help when you have no faith; I know Hugo’s self-sabotage too well. One night at two in the morning I awakened with anguish. We had an almost satisfactory print, but I knew he would make changes. I begged him not to, or else to give up the Venice Festival. He worked all night, and I got up at five to make breakfast. Out of exhaustion we stopped opposing each other and reverted to the old tenderness, the old relationship, which means I showed weakness and exhaustion and gave in to his way of doing things. Up at seven, errands at the film lab on 54th, to a film supplier carrying equipment, trips to Flushing with Jim, irregular meals, work in the evening, and the final print too dark. Hugo, who is technically unskilled, attempted a job too difficult for him and ended up directing others to do it, putting pressure on Len Lye, on Louis, on Jim, on me.

When a man is honest, resentment is disarmed. Hugo’s terrible inadequacy was the reason for his aggressive, willful marshaling and controlling of others, and he fully admitted it. From this moment on I resumed my loyalty . . . to the weakness. My rebellion subsided. The last few days were given to work.

Now it was too late for me to go to Venice. I was already away from Chiquito for three weeks; so, by an incredible feat, for Hugo had bought my ticket to Milan from an agency, I had to persuade the airline to cancel it and then to go on to LA without letting him know. I finally got Hugo off with his film (so necessary to his ego) and eluded his plan to have me follow a few days later with a more perfect print. My “underground” helped me again. But those who help me have a feeling of being helped by me, loved and lavishly protected in return.

Before Hugo left, in the chaos and tension, I lost my wallet one evening: tickets, $750 in cash for my trip, traveler’s checks, my passport and Rupert’s letters! I didn’t realize this until the next morning. I became hysterical for this reason: If I lose my money, then all is lost. I have a feeling I must hold on for both of us.

Hugo then became very forgiving: “Because I lose and forget everything, you see, I feel sorry for you and know how you feel.”

We went out in the rain, to the police station, and then to the Italian restaurant where I had dinner with Jim the night before. And there was the wallet! The Italian waiter added a human phrase: “If you didn’t discover the loss until this morning, then you only suffered for a few hours!”

Hugo had, at last, a spontaneous gesture. He gave the waiter $100.

The last day Hugo spent most of the night at the laboratory. I packed for him. We looked once more at the print.

Poor Hugo, poor Hugo, poor Hugo.

And now I go to the same pattern in Sierra Madre, the same design and same neurosis, with only one great difference: it includes passion.

SIERRA MADRE, AUGUST 24, 1952

Our estimate of people is in terms of our needs, in terms of the role we arbitrarily assign to them.

Hugo’s pretenses of being an effectual man added to my anger. His admission of inadequacy disarms it. He is as faulty as Miller, Gonzalo, or Rupert, but he pretended to be better, stronger, more powerful. My anger—I called it hatred—has gone. I think of him as he truly is: psychologically blind, inadequate in the world, inadequate as a lover, confused, uncertain, upheld by willfulness rather than true strength.

The day you have compassion for the father, you are mature.

SIERRA MADRE, AUGUST 25, 1952

Rupert and I recovered all our passion and happiness this week.

While I was in New York, he built me a dressing table. He was passionate and intensely happy. He spent his three weeks working on furniture, seeing only the people who come to see him.

Heat. Peace.

Movies. Café de Paris. Martinis. Garden work in the sun. Beach.

Joy at night. Acute and lyrical.

SIERRA MADRE, AUGUST 31, 1952

Hugo (under the pseudonym of Ian Hugo) is in Venice with Bells of Atlantis, inspired by House of Incest.

I am not there.

I gave that up to be with Rupert. We sit now in the room full of the furniture he made, with my “ideas.” Rupert is playing Debussy on the viola with two young male violinists, and a young male cellist. The violinist’s wife sits near me, writing letters. The split of my two lives is acute, and I have to make so great a mental effort to coordinate them that I had to let Jim compose the cables announcing I could not join Hugo because I could not get a travel permit. (The permit I did not receive is in this book.)

Jim calls himself the Spy King. I call him Intelligence Service, Underground, etc. I will never forget how he helped me and how intelligently. He asked me to marry him when I reach the age of seventy, or at least at the end of my sensual life!

As Rupert sits there and we have once more established the communion of mouths, of a high-strung sensuality, I see superimposed images of canals and graceful boats and all I have lost floating in the large water-green of his eyes, laughing; his radiance is greater than all the possible beauty of Venice. There is nothing sadder in the world than places that have a sensual beauty, such as Acapulco and Venice, visited without one with whom to share the love these cities arouse. Acapulco was a caress on the skin, a preliminary to other caresses.

How quickly I recovered here, deep sleep, sun, the garden, the emptiness of the life and people. Peaceful.

My compassion for Hugo is no longer sharpened intolerably by any feeling of self-blame. It is not my fault now that I see and hear him from afar as over-willful, resentful, demanding. There is no longer, as I once believed, a distortion of my own vision. Even for this I always blamed myself. Have I made him angry? I deserted him!

But long ago, his character, for which he is half responsible, drove me away. He did not bloom psychologically, or expand with me. Everything that happened was caused by both. We are both responsible, and both to be forgiven too.

Every one of us, as D. H. Lawrence said, is dangerous to other human beings. Hugo’s constriction stifled me. My desire for pleasure angered him.

SIERRA MADRE, SEPTEMBER 1, 1952

This morning lying open on Rupert’s desk was a poem from a girl violinist referring to her hangover, a kiss, Rupert’s beret forgotten in her car . . .

I began to shake and tremble; when Rupert came I questioned him. “Oh, it was nothing. After the quartet we sat in her car and she was very high, she talked and asked for a kiss”—which he gave her. “Of no importance.” She repulses him. (She is actually coarse-looking and stumpy with hairs on her chin!)

I can’t keep my balance, not for this incident, but for what it presages—if even a girl he does not like can get a kiss from him.

He gets angry because I have promised I have faith in our relationship and I show I don’t. I get angry because I repeat that all I have asked of him is to be secretive and clever so I won’t know. Why didn’t he destroy the silly letter? Why does he have it on his desk? But the shock is there. Immediately I think: I wish I had gone away with Hugo, because that is one pain Hugo never caused me.

I think of the time Jim asked me for a kiss and I turned away from his mouth, risking the loss of his friendship, because, as I said, a kiss on the mouth is for lovers.

My happiness and confidence crumble. I love Rupert less. I work desperately on letters and sending manuscripts, on attaining the freedom that would enable me to run away from Rupert or Hugo. What I crave at this moment is to be where I am not cut off from the world, to find another thread of contact. Neurosis resembles a spider web. It creates such a fragile contact with life that the slightest shock destroys it, and with it life.

Then an hour later Rupert was sent on a fire. I slept alone, hating the solitude. No escape, no world to go to.

Midnight. He is back, exhausted. He wants me to lie beside him until he falls asleep. I am still shaky inside, but convinced once more I cannot break with Hugo.

The last rejection letter from Knopf was another shock: “This is Anaïs Nin’s best book, but the novelty has worn off. We can do more for a new writer.”

I bought all the remaining copies of The Four-Chambered Heart from Charles Duell, and he writes to ask me what we can do about selling them.

Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:

New York, September 1952

Dear Anaïs,

Magic Coordinating Center still in operation, but our offices have moved. Still no worries, however, as real magic is seldom affected by place. One needs simply to stretch his tentacles; also the telephone is a great help in keeping things under control.

Dick has not stopped talking about your letter in which you mention Rupert’s very slight infidelity and your response to it. He is really comforted to know you act the way he does in these matters. As for me, I’m seldom jealous unless the lover is flagrantly indiscreet.

Love,

Jim

SIERRA MADRE, SEPTEMBER 1952

Such irony. With Rupert I can’t bear the married life, and Hugo is in Venice, at the Lido, meeting interesting people, being interviewed about the film I helped to create.

I fuss about women and Rupert’s flirtatiousness. He fusses about picayune things—constant supervision and control. I can’t even make a rug by myself. Rupert makes a design for it. I can’t feed Tavi a canned meal that he likes just as well. Control, control, control. I end up lying and concealing what I do. The doctor in Sierra Madre finds me extremely low in calcium, which could bring on arthritis. This weakens the nerves and brings on the crying jags that I have and had very seriously as a child.

I love to hear news of the world, of Hugo, a bigger world. Rupert is happy in a small world (with Anaïs, of course).

I think I would like to make films of my works with Hugo.

I started to fill in the diary that Kay will sign as hers, not only in hopes of making a success as a Spanish realist, but as a supreme prank to play on a stupid world.

There is an interesting relation between the old-fashioned dictionary definition of neurasthenia (neurosis)—weakness of the nerves—and Jacobson’s research on the lack of calcium in those with an artistic personality.

Dr. Martin: when calcium is low in the blood, the body takes it from the nerves, and leaves the nerves frayed and exposed.

I plan to leave my body to medical researchers. It may help them to prove that if I had been more balanced in my physical alchemy I might not have been an artist, just a happy woman.

The feeling of weakness that haunts me and has driven me to seek protection from the bourgeois world—fear of breakdown, mental and physical—may have an organic cause.

SIERRA MADRE, SEPTEMBER 10, 1952

Rupert is at his family’s for music. Now, at eight o’clock, I sit in an Italian pizzeria next door to Coronet Films, alone with my diary. The people I could call up, alas, do not interest me. They are victims of the Great Standardization, and although restless, bored and even rebellious, they are doomed. They can only escape by drinking, or by reading or seeing me. As Kay says, “Oh Anaïs, you are a shot in the arm.” But I am tired of being a medical stimulant. Also, I run out of supplies. A rich interior life that you cannot share begins to fester. For the artist, bourgeois life is hell. The artist must live according to his own inner dictates. I never had the courage.

The life I wanted: Varda’s life, on a ferry boat in Sausalito, with a sailboat, all made with his own hands, without money. He makes a little by teaching at an art school, but he does not need much. He wears jeans and has enough for red wine. When he invites friends, he does not hesitate to serve only fried potatoes and red wine. But the fries are exquisite and cooked picturesquely in an enormous frying pan (from the flea market), served in enormous spoons (flea market). He is the sublime ragpicker.

If only I could have loved Varda. But he repulsed me physically, and I didn’t like his madness.

Rupert is bound, obsessed with security as Hugo was—first a home, a piece of land.

For me to have the life I want, I would have had to have recognition and acceptance from the world, whereas this year I have had more rejections than any human being can endure.

An unbearable reality is Mother aging, dying very slowly before our eyes, Joaquín enslaved from the age of fifteen to forty-four to her care. Reality is Hugo traveling alone because I can’t love him as a lover, or feel free in his presence. Reality is Joaquín and I yearning for Europe. Reality is Rupert’s neurotic fear of being like his father, an irresponsible artist, shiftless, chaotic, depending on his old age pension of $75 from the California government.

And then comes art, the ridiculed, persecuted art. The great mathematicians lose themselves in intricate calculus, the astronomers in space, the scientists in chemical discoveries, the doctors, chemists, and inventors can all take flight and say they will return with a remedy, a gift for humanity, a discovery, a cure, an evolution—and the artist?

hunger

disease

separation

loss

torture (whether by the Nazis or by the self as Van Gogh)

death (in life or after life—just the same)

disintegration

deterioration

Rejection letter from Stanley Kauffmann, editor of Ballantine Books in which he calls me “an intensely private writer.”

SIERRA MADRE, SEPTEMBER 15, 1952

The people who came to see me, attracted by my work, do not interest me. I feel compassion for the poverty of their lives, for their hunger, for their boredom and restlessness. I see their human lives, and it does not seem like life to me.

I am lonely.

Today I stayed home alone. Read. Wrote letters. Watered the garden. Brushed Tavi’s hair. Did not write because now I am plagued by a new form of illness: it starts with difficulty in breathing, a congested chest, aching bones, a slight fever. I have no energy. A wasted day.

The highest moment was remembering Yma Sumac . . . the voice, the face, the body. The voice has all the richness, beauty, and range of a Myth Woman. It makes her more than a woman. And added to it is the beauty of a legendary figure. I was swept off my feet. For once Rupert and I were welded into one admiration, one fervor. He ceased to be my lover. I looked upon him as half of me, the male half, and wished he would possess her, for me, since I as a woman could not reach her. When some figure is great, in art, in beauty, one transcends the personal and rises into passion.

Strange miracle caused by a great value.

All evening I drank Martinis, a new pleasure.

My mysterious relationship with drink. Either I could not tolerate it physically or rejected it psychologically—I don’t know. It used to harm me, like poison. Either I grew healthier, physically, or I no longer resisted its effect, which I feared and hated, or a combination of both. Anyway, scotch harmed me, and wine. But vodka and gin did not. So I became addicted to Martinis. Rupert makes them perfectly. Then I released my humor. What the neurosis had destroyed, humor, was suddenly released. With Martinis come relaxation, dilation, enjoyment, humor and irony.

I believe that what I have feared so keenly, and resisted in drink, was the same feeling that overpowers me in Acapulco—non-caring, detachment, irony, drifting, passivity. It seems to me even now, that I could drink myself into insensitivity. I would cease to struggle. And I would go to pieces. Evidently I am fully conscious that the destructive tendencies in me are strong and to be watched. However, all it takes is one Martini a day, or a few at the Mocambo, to forget the vulgarity of the place, the most vulgar nightclub in the world, the head waiter peddling and enforcing drinks on those crowded near the bar waiting in vain for a reserved table, drinks when you can’t even stand, or hear the singing, and when the first one we rashly ordered was spilled on our dresses by the jostling!

At least there is this difference between Anaïs and other women. When I behave neurotically (as I reacted to Rupert kissing the violinist), I know it, I acknowledge it, I face it, I combat it, I am honest about it, treat it like bronchitis, an illness. I made it very clear to Rupert what I suffer from, my one defeating, devastating fear, and how he could help me defeat it. So much analysis, so much honesty, and still, at Rupert’s enthusiasm for pretty girls, or his flirtations, I shake, tremble, suffer like a shell-shocked soldier at a blown tire. I reenacted for Rupert the echo of traumatic phrases: my father’s passion for la jolie. Rupert’s similar reaction. A pretty girl on horseback passes by, dismounts, sits on our lawn. Rupert leaves his lunch to go and pretend to be helpful.

He understands. And because of our talk, he expressed his own greatest fear: to be a failure.

I know it is fear that prevents him from attempting a bolder, bigger life, as an actor, as a nightclub entertainer, or even as the lover of a beautiful and wealthy woman. It was paralyzing fear that drove him to seek a more modest life, an easier career, a woman who sustains his faith, guides him, strengthens him.

To conceal your weakness (fear) from the loved one is an error. If you have to pretend to the loved one, then you might as well not live together, but live like Varda on ephemeral love affairs.

I was very kind to Gonzalo’s wild jealousies! I never tormented him . . . I tried to help him. They were unjustly founded for ten years. And even then, the affairs I sought were to escape Gonzalo’s hell, not out of passion for others. Gonzalo drove me into them, as I might well drive Rupert away if we lived exposed to temptations that Rupert cannot resist. That I know. He can’t resist because his weak ego is involved. It flatters him. He enjoys conquest even when the woman repulses him. It is not real, but just the same he could have an affair on this basis: exacting to his narcissism, just as my father ruined his second marriage over a woman he did not want but who had challenged him by refusing him, which made him wonder whether he was growing old, losing his power, and so he was determined to conquer her only to prove he was not old, he had not lost his power.

Not owed even to my father’s love of beauty, but to his need of conquest is my mother’s misery, the loss of a father I loved, the loss of a musical world, an art world, Europe, a crippled childhood, a violent transplantation to a country I hate, the loss of my languages Spanish and French, of my people, the loss of my confidence as a woman, my neurosis.

So much due to what I believed was my father’s interest in pretty women!

No wonder, as I explained to Rupert, that a pretty woman is for me the announcement of catastrophe, a fire alarm, war, death, destruction.

Letter from Anaïs Nin to Jim Herlihy:

Sierra Madre, September 1952

Dear Jim: I see you are disappointed that nothing miraculous happened after the success of your play Moon in Capricorn. But that is New York, and quality and even success are difficult to direct, to crystallize. Have you no agent? In this cold-blooded war between the artist and the salesmen (not the public), you need an agent.

Hugo’s letters from Europe, so glowing, so fulfilled in understanding by others, in the delicacy of relationships, in the abundance of individuals, have made me homesick for Europe. With this, I have a greater and greater awe and respect for those like yourself who persist in their quality and development against so many odds and with so little help from the environment. I do respect you, James Herlihy. It takes guts to be anything but mediocre and middle-class crass or a gangster in this country. The high average of low level is staggering.

Knowing Hugo, you realize the date of his return is unpredictable, but already he is not returning September 25th and will be in London until September 30th. He is now staying with a relative of mine in Paris in a sumptuous apartment, but shivering cold.

How far off do you sit from the sun lamp, and what is the maximum? It is doing me a lot of good. All is well here. I have worked out most of the problems with Rupert. The trouble is I was too gentle and too subtle. Now and then I get mad, and I find it works better. My flare-ups intimidate him.

Tavi is eating his lunch with his license medal tinkling against his plate. Soon Rupert will drive up in his green fire truck and ask for beer. He will have lunch and discuss the movie we will see. A little anesthetic Martini will float me through.

Don’t lose patience with New York. You are the kind of person they will be kind to; your quality is disarming because it’s disguised in charm. They can’t bear it straight. But they will recognize it more readily in you, I predict.

Love,

Anaïs

SIERRA MADRE, SEPTEMBER 21, 1952

I am learning to laugh

to float

to forget

to be carefree

The one pain I cannot bear is the failure of my work. Rejections on all sides. Ostracism, but there is private, sincere devotion from individuals.

I yield to the Martini’s glow. It has helped me to

laugh at my past selves

laugh at jealousy

laugh at much that once hurt me

SIERRA MADRE, SEPTEMBER 1952

Humor. The theme of this year. Discovery of humor. I am weary of emotion and tragedy.

Letha Nims is dark-haired, with Slavic features, is voluptuous, with unexpected dimples in her cheeks, has a disarming smile, but a direct, lurid glance. She is humorous and sharp-witted. Bill Nims is soft, gentle, objective. He handles her sudden excesses gracefully.

Hugo’s letters have awakened all my restlessness, my longing for Europe and Paris. Rupert is too earthy for me. When the conversation soars, he always speaks of prosaic, trite things, incinerators and forest fires . . . I blush for him as I once blushed for Hugo. Rupert’s physical charms blind everyone and he is forgiven, but he is boring. His talk is boring. He is either pedantic, or obvious, or trite, or petty, or else utterly irrational.

I lie in bed, tired after our late night with the Nims. I have surrendered what I once held precious: lucidity. Lucidity was pain. With Martinis, I do not even remember our talks. But no talks here are remarkable. Anesthetic, that is what it is, a blurring of the edges, a stunting of the memory.

Rupert, my vehement lover, crushing me and my breasts, holding my hips with his two strong hands, my vehement musician, why can you not be mute? He talks in opposition to poetry, to all wisdom.

The sprinklers are the fountains of Alhambra, spraying green-grass tiles and a cocker spaniel, emotional, hyper-sensitive, a dog you cannot scold or ask to sit in the back of the car or to eat alone, the long-eared dog who sits on queens’ trains in Spanish paintings. Rupert is a disguised Prince of Wales, the true one whom the world has never met, and I am, or was, the writer of distillations and elixirs of life. Our passion is the flower that only blooms at night, wildly then, charged with our wiry, nervous, stylized extracts of passion, condensed, potent.

Kay reads diaries 31 and 32 and almost says, “Throw away your arty books.” She likes the untransmuted stuff—I meditate, plot, deceive. Having been hopelessly cast-typed as abracadabra, I will reappear under another name in my plain realism—the diary. (Dear diary, it isn’t you who are plain with realism until I change it into surrealism?)

The bedroom is as festive as a Mexican basket. Christie Campion, my occasionally adopted child, gave me ten of her watercolors from which I made a panel, covering a wall between two doors.

The only anxiety is that since last Thursday, my mother has gone to bed ill; but for each other, alas, we died when I married, we died when I ceased to be her child. At my first flight out of the nest my mother cast me away forever.

There is nothing more tragic in the world than the walls of China that grow between human beings, and the real priest is the one who dissolves them.

Kay is as large as her magnificent displays of emotion, as her abundant drinking, luxuriant dramatizations, avalanches of talk. As a chaotic specimen, she is superior to Thurema or June. She is perpetually intoxicated, heaving, swelling, expanding, dissolving, weeping, sighing, mimicking.

Her hair changes color; originally it was dark red-brown. It is strong and thick. It always looks uncombed. She arranges it, and one second later it looks disarranged. Her skin is very translucent, matte white, her eyes a burning fawn color. Her vision is slightly defective, only it should not be termed so, for the slight deviation of her eyes corresponds to her natural absence of emotional focus. She has lived as children paint: the door leans to the right, the windows are asymmetrical, the trees slant as after many storms, dogs and children stand as paper cutouts. She cannot keep an even keel, or a secret. She cannot ever break her impulses. She has to reach the bottom of every bottle, the bottom of every relationship, the bottom of despair, and she is sorrowful when the night ends, her friends fall asleep, the gin has evaporated and not a single drop more of affection or lust is available.

Her shoes wear out five times faster, her dresses tarnish six times faster, her hairnet tears instantly, and when she color-rinsed her hair, she left indelible stains on the four walls and ceiling of our bathroom. She is the champion glass breaker, drink spiller, and utterer

of all that should be censored or reserved. She is of the race of burlesque queens who insist on quoting poetry now and then, who insist on idealization and tender treatment. She has a Rubens body, a pioneer’s language, and still carries in the folds of her large voluptuous dresses a little girl who likes flowers, perfumes, and jewelry in the Woolworth manner. Living in Europe never altered this taste acquired from her Midwest bourgeois origins, and her only rebellion came out of alcohol, in stripteasing habits and language. The uncontrollable emotional climate, in the style of Dostoevsky—shame, repentance, despair—prevented her from becoming a great actress. She has a gift for extracting the maximum drama out of her past, out of her return to America loveless, her caged life as a daughter of a schoolteacher, her “psychotic fugues,” her work as a nurse, her lesbian-tinted camaraderie with other women, her car accidents, her devastating reactions to Rupert’s taboos (to prevent her from being here to see me every day), her father’s recent death. She spends her time confessing to John, winning absolution, and immediately accumulating new reservoirs of guilt like any good Catholic.

Rupert controls her invasions. One cannot have orgies of talk and emotion every day!

Kay loved Rupert, desired him, but her massive bulk and its preponderance to floods, invasions, earthquakes, and volcanic furnaces repulsed him. A man must feel hesitant to sleep with a twelve-armed, twelve-legged goddess whose vast sensual caverns could delight an army. Rupert resisted her flank attacks, feeling the ocean itself was surging around him, and that the undertow was profound. She was prepared to hate me. But when she saw me she loved me. She loves me more today than she loves Rupert, although she would still like to possess him. I have always loved these outsized women on a magnificent scale, who are rudderless and such scintillating failures.

All of us, warmed and kindled, nevertheless make a swift gesture of flight when she telephones: can I come now, can I come tomorrow, can I make dinner for you? One’s instinct is to say no. She is lush and prolific like the tropics, and like the tropics, absorbing. All this I say, resisting like the others, yet knowing that by a strange irony, it is I who have seized upon, overwhelmed, and possessed Kay by giving her the diary. Both Kay and John are so responsive, so vehement. She read, wept, was overwhelmed, haunted. At first we had plotted that she would adopt it, sign it, say it was hers, because it would not harm her, and under this disguise I could overcome the obstacles that prevent me from publishing it openly. But when she read it she said, “That would be like saying I painted a Da Vinci or an El Greco. I can’t do it.” Honest, truthful Kay saying, “Compared with this, my life was tawdry.” Kay, so tumultuous, sensual, rebellious. Her religious gratitude for my saying what she had felt. She relived her own life in a different light.

Her gift to me, in return, was to renew my confidence, my feeling that the diary may yet bring me the freedom I crave. I can’t bear the drudgery anymore, the 365 meals to cook a year, the 1,000 socks, the broom, the waxing, the window washing. I can’t bear it anymore! My love for Rupert has condemned me to this.

Kay’s fervor and John’s sincere respect have given me the impetus (once more!) to make a prison break.

The truth is I hate Sierra Madre, the people, the lives they lead. I hate the life we lead. It is mediocre and filthy and dull. Last night, music at the Rosens’. The level of the conversation was 1,000 feet below animal life, the narrowness and awkwardness below all possible measurements, mostly prosaic, almost totally devoid of imagination. Their worst sin is that they don’t wish to know other lives. They are ensconced in their gopher existence, and when you tell them of other places they almost invariably say, “I prefer hamburgerism, automobilities, drive-in weddings, and good homemade syphilis, Goodrich sprinklers, piethrowing humor, telwithoutvision, robot men American made, women untouched by human hands like the bread, the absence of miracles and chromosomes.”

After one Martini I was delirious: American civilization is functional, purely functional—bridges, water closets, conveyances . . . So out of boredom they drink gin to anesthetize themselves. They can’t bear what they have created. Then the gin stupefies them so they turn to jazz. Jazz wakes them up, makes them feel alive. Gin comes from England, so all in all they have created nothing but a purely functional world. Either this functional world has caused an atrophy of the mind, or America is congenitally moronic. The ones I like, I like as human beings, but never for qualities of mind, perception or wisdom. I can’t bear to live here anymore. Once should never live in a place one hates so deeply. I regret every hour I have spent here. It was wasted, meaningless, unproductive, uninspiring. But how, how can I reach the life I love, with Rupert, and be free of chores, no longer a servant?

Saturday I went to visit Mother. Found her weak from amoebic dysentery. I cared for her. She improved. At last I was able to express devotion, tenderness, to see her purely as a human being. Even to sleep at her side as I did when I was a girl (at sixteen, when I asked for a bed of my own, there was a scene), to hold her hand and let her be my child. I suffered from pity, the revolt against death, but was cheerful, until I got back and wept in Rupert’s arms. So strange, Rupert standing naked in the dark (he was in bed and I got up to go out and walk, ashamed of my tears); he rushed to the door, turned off the Beethoven music that had disturbed me, and held me. He is silently compassionate. And later we had the passion that brings me back to life.

I find life tragic and unbearable. Now I seek forgetfulness. I would never have created the work I have if I had not had that terrible awareness that increased the sense of pain; I never tried to escape. I looked, I felt, I responded. But at last, at forty-nine, I’m tired. I tried to escape the awareness. I drank to fall asleep. I drank on the plane, quietly, enough to stop being aware. I drank last night. I am drinking now. Compassion, for Joaquín so tied down, Mother in bed, shrunken, tired. Thorvald is rough, tactless, without tenderness. Joaquín so tender. Rupert so tender. I lie alone. I didn’t want to go out with Lloyd, Eric and Rupert to a concert. It was my mother’s aggressiveness, possessiveness and tyranny that built a wall between us. But at last I could treat her tenderly, and not as a daughter. I lie alone reading Hugo’s letters, answering them. There is what I call a deterioration of my faculties, but I wonder. This diamond awareness is suspended like the mystic clairvoyance of the Eastern priests—no alcohol, no drugs, no impairment of the seeing faculties. Oh, god. What a painful destiny. Meanwhile all around me, human beings sought and found forgetfulness. I didn’t. I gazed, listened, recorded. Now I am tired. Too much pain. Too much. No wonder people turn away from my writing, an incisive and searching scalpel, the surgeon Anaïs operating without the use of anesthetic. I think I have earned my rest from awareness.

Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:

New York, September 1952

Dear Anaïs,

Your letter at 35 W. 9th rec’d.

The Barrons are angry with Hugo. Bebe said on the phone that he has been writing and cabling them orders from Italy about the film print and she said they feel exploited. But I told her she should simply send a bill for their services and then she would no longer feel that way. I explained that Hugo is honest and pays his bills, but is not thoughtful and forgets. Also, they need money now and Hugo has put off paying them, according to Bebe, and they are also peeved about that. I don’t know what to say to them except that Hugo will make necessary adjustments when he returns. Bebe has a clip from Variety on the film. Glad it was a success. As you know, the Barrons are very fond of you. It is only Hugo they are angry with. Bebe, too, said that his analysis seemed to have made a monster of him. I think she is only temporarily angry because they are low on cash, and because they’re terribly busy, too busy to go the airport or film labs. I thought you might like to give Hugo a reminder about their money, perhaps in some subtle way; I don’t know why they just can’t write him and tell him they need to be paid; but I think Louis is a little backward about it.

You are a wonderful twin, and your letters are beautiful.

Love, Jim

Letter from Anaïs Nin to Jim Herlihy:

Sierra Madre, September 1952

Dear Twin: Let me reassure you quickly about the Barron situation. You did the right thing in warning me, as this is the only way I can neutralize Hugo’s lack of feeling for other people, and if you had not written to me I would have believed that Hugo had taken care of them. This way I may salvage the relationship. He is fond of them, he needs them. I don’t know what makes him such an egomaniac at the moment. I sent them $100 on account for immediate needs. But if they call you, tell them the idea did not come from you so they won’t think you told me what they would not let me know. I was frank about Hugo’s expectation that they would add it all up and ask him. He expects people to be direct and to speak in terms of money. The Barrons usually say nothing and then get furious. I bet you they won’t write me and say what Hugo owes them. In a few days I will send another hundred. Of course, we are saving Hugo from suffering the consequences of his attitude (loss of me, of you, of the Barrons, of other friends, of helpers).

What I have worked out with Rupert is that he now knows the cause of my jealousy (my father’s silly love for every pretty female caused me to lose everything I had) so that he no longer feels it as an effort to control him, but a fear he must help me with.

His control I found the cause of too, and so I no longer resent it. I laugh at it. I make fun of it. When he broke a glass the other day and we had company, I clowned and covered my ears, saying: “Watch, everybody, it’s coming, I will get the blame, listen . . .” And he did blame me, but could not keep it up because everybody started to laugh, and he ended up laughing too. Whoever can laugh first is saved, and usually one can make the other laugh.

Love, Anaïs

SIERRA MADRE, NOVEMBER 1, 1952

The time has come to return to Hugo, and I have no desire to leave Rupert. I have learned to navigate alone through the moment when I have to face a crisis alone, the moment when Rupert cannot help me. The moments I can’t bear, the aspects of my life with Rupert I can’t bear, I now endure with anesthesia, a Martini. These moments of rebellion against the empty life, the dullness, the crassness and prosaic American way of life, which hurt me like a compressing shell, like being cast in too small a mold, I have no remedy against. But still, I do not want Hugo, or closeness to Hugo, or a bigger life with Hugo. He is like a distant brother now. His entire trip to Europe was not seeking love or pleasure, but triumph, power, with his artist self this time. I feel compassion for him, but no closeness to what he seeks so desperately. And yet the Sierra Madre life I can’t bear. Rupert is too afraid; he needs security, or the safe adventure.

When Kay inherited $20,000 from her father, she wanted to sell her house and orange grove and go to Paris. That is what I would have done. But John and Rupert talk about how to make Kay’s and John’s life secure on the inheritance, how to invest it . . .

But in spite of this, Rupert’s efforts and fears touch me. When he realized I had not written all summer, burdened with housework and gardening, he tried to help me, but not by giving me a maid once a week, but by doing the work himself.

I prepare 500 pages of the abridged diary for de Chochor to see if I could make a new start under a new name, open new worlds, as I feel absolutely ostracized in America as Anaïs Nin, the esoteric writer. I must achieve freedom from this life of servitude somehow.

Now I lie in bed. Rupert is practicing his viola to play with a new group. I have three French novels at my bedside. On the “blurb” paper band around the French novel is printed: Il faut toujours voyager, toujours vouloir être ailleurs. The credo of the romantics and the neurotics but also of those who do not wish to be buried alive.

SIERRA MADRE, NOVEMBER 4, 1952

Rupert fights off Kay and her possessiveness, laziness, drinking . . . I am usually more indulgent. But the other night she arrived drunk, and her behavior repulsed me. She becomes sticky, enveloping everyone like an octopus, drinking from other people’s glasses, smoking their cigarettes. Her dress was up above her knees, her lipstick smeared, her mouth obscene. A blurred, inchoate mass of flesh. What I saw this time was the carnivorous appetite to touch, hold, caress, eat. Suddenly I saw her ugliness; it was not only a repellent destructiveness, but an infantile jelly, living by suction. She did everything she could do to make herself repellant. I gave her a chignon because her hair was always straggling and taught her how to pin it on firmly. No sooner did she arrive than it tumbled and she began fixing this already soiled and matted piece before everyone. Then, surrendering, she deposited it on the plate next to where Rupert was fixing drinks. I gave her the best French cheese, a delicacy, and she fed it to Tavi, threw spaghetti on the rug for him. Meanwhile she used the voice and gestures of a three-year-old—a little voice, candied gestures. She then proceeded to tell me that Morton Levine, who interviewed me, does not like my writing; she attacked Letha Nims, interrupted Levine, tried to sing Rupert’s song and couldn’t, never attaining burlesque, so no one could laugh but rather felt ashamed as if she had displayed a soiled diaper. We have charity for this, but this time I felt none. I knew this will be followed the next day by abject apologies, but I knew this was Kay too, and the other Kay, when not drunk, is merely controlled.

I am tired of children of forty. It is without grace or beauty to be infantile at forty, weighing two hundred pounds. Parasites and failures who are capable of something else, but who are too lazy, too undisciplined . . . no, it is because they feel impotent and useless that they destroy. Kay’s only activity is destruction.

I understand now that it is up to me to create an interesting life here. Rupert can’t, does not dare. He feels he was a failure as an actor and fears bohemianism. But to call Kay a “bohemian” is an insult to bohemianism.

Rupert is changing, maturing. At a more sophisticated party at the Campions’, the results of our talks appeared in his defense of modern painting.

But the other night, frenzied by hours of radio election speeches, by Kay’s behavior, by the awareness of stupidity of my life with Rupert, I felt I couldn’t bear it another moment. I have to get away from here.

NOVEMBER 1952

Return to New York

Letter from Anaïs Nin to Charles Duell:

New York, November 10, 1952

Dear Charles: When I last saw you I brought you a card saying that The Four-Chambered Heart is indefinitely out of stock, and you said it was a clerical error. So I left with confidence that all was well and the machine would function smoothly. I hoped you were joking when you asked me not to become a competitor and discouraged me from buying back my own books. I didn’t intend to set up shop, you know. My business is writing. I got the books for friends, for European publishers, for Christmas presents, or for movie producers or for whoever could help me or was genuinely in need of the books. Now, I find that the Satyr book shop ordered four copies of The Four-Chambered Heart about the time I left Hollywood, October 5th or 6th or thereabouts. Here it is November 10, over a month later, and the order has not even been acknowledged. I don’t like to bring details to your attention. If you tell me who is in charge of distribution I will write to him. But I do want you to know that what I brought to your attention is harming both of us, and I want to know whether I will have to attend to the distribution of the books myself. You seemed to be desirous of selling the remaining two hundred copies that you have in stock, but how can you do it this way?

I did not call you again because after we talked I realized in what a deep way you failed me. You treated The Four-Chambered Heart like the ephemeral seasonal fiction, not like one of your art books on dance, not like one of your long-range faith, of continuous or permanent value. For a few hundred dollars, so little really, you revealed your identification with the usual conventional publisher. It was a matter of convenience, balancing books and storage space. It was very naïve of me to believe you had a vision of their future value. My work will sell as long as Wright’s architecture or Graham’s dance, yet you could not see that. So little money involved, and such nearsightedness. But this is on another level, and I am only concerned now with the functioning of that selling machine. At least if human faith and vision are out of order, they can’t be repaired, but selling machines must work. That is all I ask.

Anaïs Nin

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 14, 1952

The physical pain of separating from Rupert makes me feel that I cannot endure it. I will break with Hugo and stay with Rupert at all costs. I thought of this in the plane. Hugo is very strong now, successful, self-confident, having won security as a businessman and recognition as a filmmaker. He is swimming in a big life. He won’t miss me.

But from the moment I unpacked my valises in the light, spacious and graceful apartment, every object and incident conspired to lure and enchant me. White walls, sky, openness. On the table packages of French books from Hugo, announcements of gallery openings, theatres, dancer friends’ shows . . . A big package containing two beautiful Italian dresses. The telephone beside the bed. Millicent’s care. Food already in the icebox, money for Martinis and the theatre. My first errand was to the bank for six months’ allowance all at once. Jim and Dick effusive, dancing around me. Then Hugo’s arrival from Europe, a healthy, triumphant Hugo, amorous and talkative. Ten minutes after he arrives he wants me in bed. He is a friend for whom I feel neither passion nor distaste. It was a gesture of affection. We talked about Italy, France. Bells of Atlantis was described by Abel Gance as the first true film poem, and he compared it to Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. (I once described House of Incest as A Season in Hell.) Magazine articles on the film. Ten people to send my books to. New Story wants to do Spy.

I feel strong and quiet. I have helped Hugo settle down, paid bills, had lamps repaired, changed light bulbs, answered mail, seen Dr. Bogner who finds me well. At night if I can’t sleep I take a Martini and think of Rupert. Now I think of him as one for whom I have to create a life. We talked about how fears narrow life, how anxieties cause shrinking and withdrawing. My child of the brilliant, eager eyes is waiting for me to create our life.

The days are filled.

Lila is transformed by an analysis that gave her the strength to go to Alcoholics Anonymous and cure herself.

With Bebe and Louis there is a good collaborative friendship now, solid and very fecund. He has acute ideas on technology, science. She is musically gifted. The electronic music they composed for Bells of Atlantis was the third part of a perfect triangle of images, sound, words. It is poetic and abstract.

Eduardo, just out of the hospital, pale, worldly, elegant, suave, cool, unentangled, dispassionate, tender.

Hugo is obsessed with filmmaking, and yet, in the middle of this, when he began to describe the preparation they had made for my arrival in Venice (Hugo, James Broughton, Kermit Sheets, Curtis Harrington) and my cable saying I could not, he suddenly wept quietly and added this divine phrase: “I’m weeping, I believe, for what you missed. Analysis believes one can weep for no one except for one’s self, but I don’t think I am weeping for myself, really, I’m sure it is for you.”

After this I could not sleep. At dawn I took a Martini and floated into a fever and the nightmare of being only half a wife to Hugo. But I am beginning to feel less guilt. If Hugo had needed passion as strongly as I did, he would have pursued it, as I did. My guilt was greatly due to my imagining his deprivation of the passion, but it may be that he truly is more tranquil, and has substituted a quest for achievement and power for sensuality. He needs to rule. He does not want to owe anyone anything: he wants to pay. His obsession is not with love.

Is half of Anaïs better than the whole of some other woman? Hugo has to answer this himself.

Jim came, recently devouring volumes 31, 32 and 33. Devouring truly. The effect on him was explosive. He had been losing interest in reading, his eyes would close, he would fall asleep, but he ravenously read the diary until four in the morning and became delirious. I tease him: “You dope fiend! I shall have to ration you!” “More, more,” says Jim. “It is incredible. It is beautiful. It is the most alive thing I have ever read. It is the greatest of all works . . .” and raves, recalling this passage, this phrase, with utter sincerity, truth, depth.

This exultation of Jim’s (with poor Kay’s inchoate but similar reaction, in her case alcoholic fervor) gave me something I am absolutely seeking, the integration of the two works (as I am seeking the one man, the one love) into one work. I read over the volume I gave to Jim; I am myself disturbed.

La science est faite pour rassurer.

L’art est créé pour troubler.

I feel a strange thing. Every now and then, from the age of twenty on we announce pseudo-maturities. Now I am a woman. Now I am mature. It may be relatively true, or true in part. Certain aspects reach maturity. But this year I reached one that permeates mind, feelings, acts, and work with more evenness. I matured politically. I matured musically, and humanly. I owe this to Bogner. Anxiety was choking my growth and limiting my interests.

Letter from Anaïs Nin to Rupert Pole:

New York, November 22, 1952

It is almost as if we wanted to communicate by way of the movies. As I had seen a very dark projection of Los Olvidados in a very poor film house in Mexico, I went to see it again around the corner, and was again overwhelmed with horror. The artist does not lie. It is only that he condenses, telescopes many incidents together and makes it so strong a dose, almost too strong for a human being’s endurance, and yet, darling, I do feel that it is by visiting hell occasionally that we keep alive our gratefulness for heaven, and our compassion for the doomed ones.

I used to fly from the radio (like it was castor oil), but now I am grateful to you for having matured me politically. I find I understand politics and can listen intelligently at the UN. Poor Chiquito! I didn’t take to radio speeches. I guess bringing up a wife is a tough job!

Will phone you Sunday.

Your devoted

Pez Vela

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 23, 1952

A winter evening. All of New York’s exhibitionism in shop windows, orgies of luxury, orgies of glitter, stimulating envy, desire, hunger. Home, surrounded by lush curtains and bed covers, an orange negligée with a wide belt of leopard skin, there exists the illusion of a deep, great luxury that I can create. I am watching dinner cooking while Hugo dictates letters to a secretary. I have just talked with Jim on the telephone. He is living out his life in his twenties, covering up his deep longing to be a child and a woman by allowing Dick to be both for him.

He sustains me at this moment when the world of publishers, reviewers, and other writers ignore me. Kimon Friar does not invite me to his radio program “Magic Casements.” I have seen so many writers obtain the praise I do not get: Carson McCullers, Kay Boyle, and now Isabel Bolton. I have been snubbed many times by James Laughlin in particular. I am excluded from contemporary anthologies, Signet, New Directions, Perspective and Richard Aldridge’s anthology too, from all collections of short stories. Not one big important critic has made a thorough study of me. I have had no devoted publisher. I can’t fill a small theatre when I read. The bookshops won’t carry my books. Anthony Tudor choreographed Auden’s Age of Anxiety, weak and pale compared to my work. Martha Graham ignored me. The Museum of Modern Art ignores me. And yet I know I am one of the great forces in contemporary literature. I know absolutely now, that I am as great a force in new writing as Djuna Barnes, Giraudoux, Anna Kavan, Virginia Woolf, Genet, Rimbaud.

It is a desolate and lonely feeling. I can arouse a sacred fervor, a feverish worship, a fanatical response in a few, but I can’t break through to the world, the immense world, in France, in Italy; it seems to be every artist receives love and praise but me.

And so Jim speaks now in a secret, fervent way about a life-giving, passion-giving work flowing into his veins. What can I do? I can’t publish the diary, my best work. I don’t want recognition when I am eighty like Colette, arthritic, a mummy.

And later the world will wonder why I held my personal, intimate life so precious. The world gave me nothing, no salary, no decoration, no presents, no homage of any kind.

So last night, while Hugo revised Bells of Atlantis with Bebe and Louis, I invented a tapestry made out of a bamboo shade and pieces of colorful textiles collected here and there, read of Genet and felt that if he amplified the work of Rimbaud, he also wrote nothing by variations on the theme of lust, cruelty, jealousy, evil—the criminal poet who told me what Rimbaud did not tell. For this ultimate truthfulness about his own knowledge of evil, I respect him. People should respect those who dare to go all the way on any road they take. But most people prefer the Étoile, to merely look down five or six avenues and never to the end of any one of them. Cowards all. Miller did that for America, but for an America tone-deaf to anything but guns; only gunshots wake them from their moronic lethargy.

Letter from Anaïs Nin to Rupert Pole:

New York, November 25, 1952

Darling, I’m so sorry I awakened you. The reason I call you then is that after that hour the circuits are always busy. It is my lunch hour and usually I have to wait in line for a free booth at the drugstore. Usually I start a call by waiting 15 or 20 minutes in line, then waiting for a free circuit. I snatch a coffee and sandwich in between and get you about two o’clock when it’s time for me to go back. This time no waiting, and poor Chiquito half asleep. It makes me long to be there beside you in our warm bed.

I am so sorry we could not share the Cinerama together—that’s an important experiment—the illusion of reality created by three projectors on a vast rounded screen is so strong that the audience screamed with terror at the roller coaster picture, and you feel you are inside the speeding motorboat. I had to write it up, otherwise it is impossible to get tickets.

Monday citizenship. We were herded into a courtroom, kept waiting for four hours, treated with very bad manners as if were all ignorant and illiterate and given a speech going like this: “I don’t know where you come from or what you were before, but now you must behave yourselves. This is the best country in the world, and USA citizenship the greatest privilege granted to you. Be grateful for it.”

Anyway, you now have an American wife! I will get a diploma in a few days, by mail, and immediately ask for a passport so as to be ready for the next trip, as getting a passport takes time.

De Chochor has hopes of getting Spy to Avon.

You haven’t told me what the doctor is doing about your stomach. I’m glad the sun lamp helped you, darling. Did you get a thermos and do you drink something warm for lunch?

Te quiero más—your new, American wife

Letter from Rupert Pole to Anaïs Nin:

Sierra Madre, November 1952

My darling

I received your wonderful letter today telling of all you have been seeing. I feel so much better when I think you’re doing more in NY than just working, when I realize that much of your work is interesting and that you make good contacts for your writing too.

The terrible thing is that when you’re gone everyone takes pity on me and keeps asking me out, but I’m so bored I only want to stay here and read and practice and get some sleep (very tiring physical job now).

So tired. Must say good night, mi pez vela, and hope that you’ll not jump off when I let the line slack a little—the line will stretch to a star if you wish—just so I can always reel you back to your true home and tu hombre.

R

NEW YORK, DECEMBER 2, 1952

As a result of my efforts Jim’s first story was accepted by Aldridge’s anthology, a book that will reach millions. Such celebration! Jim’s delight. He has been writing for five or six years. We all went to his place to drink a Martini together—Dick, Bill Noble, and two neighbors. Before Hugo arrived, Jim suddenly put his arms around my hips, pressed his head against my hips and stomach and said with passion, “Oh, I love you, Anaïs, I love you.” I saw Dick was frightened by the passion in Jim’s voice, the abandon. So I caressed Jim’s head like a mother, stirred by his fervor. And thus we celebrated the beginning of his life as a published writer.

Jim, drunk, kept repeating: “Before I met you at Black Mountain I was ready to commit suicide. When I met you my real life began.” I strengthened the past in him. I tried to weld his inspired talking to a direct, plain style. His style became richer and the lyrics quickly more original. I’m proud of him. He was utterly sincere, he worked hard, he was receptive, flexible, persistent and now capable of direct and warm gratitude. I never over-praised him.

This underlined my failure to help Gore. I had no influence whatsoever on him. He took nothing; he is very ill, living in utter fantasies, megalomania, lost, and I can’t help him. The contrast was violent. I can’t bear Gore’s venomousness.

Bogner: “You identified with Gore when he was frozen, frightened, shaky, wounded.”

This power of empathy frightens me. I wanted to marry Gore, live close to him. Today this appears like madness, the ultimate self-destruction.

Activity. I love this. Hugo in another room with filmmakers and film distributors. I am in touch with all that is created in experimental films, the ballet world. Writing. I sent A Spy in the House of Love to New Story in Paris today. It will be published in the spring. Now I feel like working again. Two years were wasted on American publishers, a fruitless quest for one intelligent or sensitive or imaginative one, not for me, but for my work.

At eleven o’clock I close the tall, long felt curtains. The room has a velvety texture while the snow falls outside. Hugo is taking a bath. There are French plays stacked on the night table, a Martini. The day has been full. Curtis Harrington, who at twenty-five has already made one memorable film, has been talking about the French filmmaker who proclaims that writing will become more important for its condensation (rather than negligible, as it is here) for film. The distilled phrase will become a necessary element of film. Good writing in films is rare. The dialogue in Kind Hearts and Coronets is unusual.

Then Brand Sloan, filmmaker and distributor, tells us about his feeling that film is one of the many facets of “literature,” branching from it, dependent on it. He is making a film on Varda. I think with sadness of the emptiness of life in Sierra Madre. Alcoholic Kay, frightened, the passive John, the humdrum Campions, Reginald who is like a dusty attic full of yellowed ideas, the isolation from all creature activities. Curtis brings pollen from France, rereads me and rediscovers me. Everyone is working. It is a beehive of activity and discoveries and pollination.

Chiquito, Chiquito. Sometimes I think that instead of considering the divisions and splits as a disease, one might look upon them as merely bigger and more difficult syntheses to make.

Just as Hugo and I finally combined our clashing obsessions, his with money and mine with art, finally ending in a combination that required his money, my creativity, and himself as artist (and to the artist in Hugo I was a good wife).

Perhaps my interest in the film world may bring to Rupert a bigger life in which his particular beauty could be used in art films; he could be fulfilled too. I know it means risking the loss of Rupert, because the world and other women would then possess him, but this dream is the one I first made for him that will bring him the romantic life he does want (if he didn’t, he would not have loved me, but rather a suburban, unimaginative woman).

An ordinary woman might not have made Hugo any happier, might not have helped him to fulfill his dream of creation.

Letter from Rupert Pole to Anaïs Nin:

Sierra Madre, December 1952

My dearest, sweetest (well, most of the time) Spanish wife,

So, so tired—mon dieu, quel, quel jour—too fabulous to try to tell you about now. My father, June, and June’s few-months-old baby who is allergic to everything and who June is sure is Reginald’s, and a completely mad Russian character named Malya who is taking care of the baby, all arrived and informed me they were staying here for the night to go on to Hollywood (and San Francisco) today.

I said no!!!!! Simply but firmly that I would take them to a hotel but they couldn’t stay here, so they agreed to go on to Hollywood, but it rained like hell when they left so they only got as far as Arcadia and arrived at the Aztec Hotel carrying bags, bottles, and what have you and took over three rooms.

June, the baby and Malya arrived here at seven this morning to give the baby a bath and have only just left, joined by my father at four and Kay and John at five—such a madhouse that I thought we were bohemian!!

Malya (who used to be an opera singer) sang Russian songs to the baby, and the baby alternately looked like the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama and cried bloody murder—and June talked incessantly about my father and love and Quakers and India and Gandhi. I finally escaped to the garage.

You sounded good on phone, at least till I said I wasn’t alone, but from the above you can see why.

All my end-of-month reports are still ahead of me, so goodnight, my beautiful Americanized Spanish wife, who is all the music I shall ever need or want. Hurry back—music has only empty sounds without you.

R

Wait till you see your Christmas tree; you have to make the decorations!!!!

NEW YORK, DECEMBER 8, 1952

Jim wrote a story called “Jazz of Angels.”

“Jim,” I say over the telephone, “write me some more Jazz of Angels.” Jim, quick-witted, nimble, alert, is the one I can talk to in writing language. I say “rhythm” and it means as much to him as to me: contemporary rhythm.

Last night at the Downbeat, Candido, the Cuban drummer, drummed himself into an orgiastic frenzy, his legs around the drum occasionally lifting it from the ground—such violence! Max Geismar wrapped his leg around mine and he smiled, a humble, timid smile, a man who has not been fêted, who does not live in the present, who is a serious historian of literature. His work does not give him joy. They are, he and Anne, highly humorous and aware, but unhappy. I like them together, as a couple. I don’t respond to his desire. I don’t know how to discourage it without being cold or cruel. I wish he would not make me say it. The sparkle between the four of us is so evenly distributed, and his desire unbalances it, introduces anxieties and guilt.

Jazz of Angels . . . Rupert writes me lyrically now, about me being all through his music.

Christmas is in the air.

Gathering presents, buying my ticket for Los Angeles, telephoning Rupert. I have always spent Christmas with Hugo. I would like to give one to Rupert. I have less guilt and shame for my desires. If Hugo had been a man of passion, nothing could have prevented him from seeking fulfillment, as nothing will prevent Rupert. Hugo was not interested in interplay with others and, until now, was not even too greatly interested in friendship.

But today he receives the jazz directly, the friendship directly, the pleasures, the praise, the recognition.

TWA FLIGHT EN ROUTE TO LOS ANGELES, DECEMBER 11, 1952

Rupert said over the telephone: “You must come back!”

Hugo, after our good month together, always becomes destructive when I leave. He is still the boy who is in a fit of rage, destroying the red kite he most loved.

I spent three whole days Christmas shopping, to find surprises for Hugo. I prepared a Christmas mobile hanging from the ceiling, and under a Swedish angel are chimes that turn under four candle flames and tinkle merrily. I left so few things undone. I bought presents for his friends. And because of his back, and because he tires easily, I waited on him.

Yet on the way to the airport he looked grim and tight, and he began to express anxiety about the bad weather for flying, and I have said many times on such occasions: “One has to trust the airline’s weather reports. Bad weather here does not necessarily mean bad flying weather.” I have to face the fact that I cannot leave in peace and freedom, that Hugo resents it and will always resent it. I have to accept his bad humor, his revengeful mood. And not mind.

We had our irrational quarrel, because he still, after years of analysis, does not sleep well, and last night after giving him dinner in bed, another present of a Japanese black lacquer teacup and tray, and lovemaking, I found him awake and asked him about what worries and troubles him. He answers: “The problem of Cornillat and Wyss.” This problem of Hugo’s indulgence and affinities with Cornillat, a crooked adventurer, a neurotic, even pathological type, has haunted our life and endangered our economic security for five years. He allows Bogner to probe but resents it when I do. I said, “Don’t you think it might be constructive to dwell on the fact that making movies will allow you to have your own adventurous life?”

Millicent and I sat eating our lunch together in the kitchen. She said, “I had a hard time getting used to Mr. Hugo’s ways when you first began to travel, but I’m used to them now. I keep thinking he’s no different than my children, always asking for this or that, where is this or that, and fussin’.”

“Goodbye, Anaïs,” said Jim. “What a rich month you gave me; you fecundate me.”

“You do too, Jim. We have a writing language. You answer, you know; one wants to be answered in one’s own language. Whatever I gave you to read I feel you take up and improve on, continue or prolong my thoughts.”

Hugo, curiously, I see now, had his own language, the opposite of words: engraving and film, all visual. That is what made him so impenetrable to me.

It’s like a Greek living with a Spaniard, a Spaniard living with a German.

Every human being becomes destructive if he believes himself wounded or attacked, and I become destructive with Rupert when he is so obvious about his interest in young girls. I become destructive with Gore when he humiliates me, when he walks with Curtis after the ballet and I hear him say, “I could have been a ballet dancer, I was very good at it, but I couldn’t bear to touch the women.” Or: “After the ballet you should see the cars with rich men at the stage door waiting to scoop up the boys, while the ballet girls have to go home alone,” like his fantasy in Antigua that the students having a fiesta were homosexuals, when everyone in Guatemala knows the girls are not allowed on the streets alone. I went out that night to challenge Gore’s fantasy and found myself not only among students desperately seeking to dance with me, but saying poetic, vehement, fervent words of desire, becoming so demonstrative that I was forced to re-enter Gore’s house and barricade the door against them. After I went to bed in my own room, in the dark Gore allowed two boys in, and I heard them refuse his advances and ask where his cousin was (he had said I was his cousin); “We want to see her.”

A white world outside the plane window. Clarity. Clarity. Recently I could not bear the white expanse of my lucidities; I sought anesthesia. Last night, after a quarrel with Hugo, I drank; I did not stay awake in misery. I was able to sleep for an hour. The realm of constant awareness I tried to live in was as difficult to bear as the states of grace of Catholic saints or the states of contemplation of the mystics. To see, to hear, to know all. In the process of becoming more human I have been able to descend into inchoateness, into lethargy, into smogs and fogs of the mind. Some links, some bridges, sustained or maintained by great effort, are slipping away from me. I see now what a critic meant when she said Winter of Artifice was unbearable—there was no refuge, no pause, no rest, no escape from the awareness. A diamond lodged in the head, the unblinking eye of the clairvoyant. But altitudes wear out the heart. As the white clouds pass me I think of this state between New York and Los Angeles in which I sit alone and belong to myself . . . a neutral area, a bridge of sighs, white sighs; when I come down again I will resume my humanity. I took flight from a bad night into whiteness.

I wonder why the analysts fought the diary. Lila said fervently, “Oh God, I’m glad you are writing it.” This is my life’s work and I must attend to it.

I had to take my shoes and stockings off, soaked by the rain on earth. The large airport umbrella almost carried me off across the landing fields. I carry Spy, in its final version.

Lila says, “You tend to split everything into various fragments to divide your work into two kinds of writing and then to pit them against each other. Your greatest difficulty is in integrating. It is true that a book can seek the flow of life, but still the novel sought to integrate certain episodes, not to capture fragments.”

But we live in fragments. The design is only revealed later.

But, being a writer, Lila says, “I just think of the diary as a different language, as one thinks of film, dance or music.”

The diary and art. Was I trying an impossible integration? Is it as impossible to integrate my passion Rupert and my husband Hugo?

High above, every large form of life seems possible, at 30,000 feet altitude and in pressurized cabins! Returning to New York the last time, a month ago, I had begun to feel free of pressure. I had to learn not to mind Rupert’s criticalness. “It is not against you. You have to learn that most angers and attacks are not against you, personally.”

If I were to write to Henry, I would say: I am now a forester’s wife—not legally—I don’t like to be legally anything because it means à perpétuité.

If I were to write to Jim, I would say: There are times when as a forester’s wife I answer “Paris branch” because I am so bored with Sierra Madre. Sierra Madre is a community that has been antisepticised and anti-insecticided beyond recognition. It is made up of the healthy American life, which means pool fraus and picnic fraus, variations of the hausfrau.

From one to four, oblivion from a bottle. But the mind persisted in its activity. I thought I must make some of my lies true, such as the alibi for this trip, that Lester Horton is doing my story “Rag Time” in the modern dance.

Anne Lye says my work is a goldmine for filmmakers. I don’t want them to discover me too late.

Now I have a desire to see Rupert, to hold him, to sleep by his side. But I have no desire to get into the life there.

Anaïs, make a wonderful life in California. So I took addresses of jazz places from US Confidential and found places in Redondo Beach, and New Orleans jazz on Western. At an art gallery I chose Gil Henderson, but not for the quality of his painting, but because of his dreaming a life one can’t reach. One grey day we visited Lloyd’s glass Wayfarer’s Chapel, and it was beautiful, on a hill high above the sea, but Lloyd himself is narrow-minded, fanatical and destructive, violent like a white Gonzalo.

There is Christie, next door, a child of poetry, an elf, but secured to earth by her parents. Christie says, “Anis, Anis, look, today I am a cowboy.” And I bring her mobiles to make, and hang up her free and joyous paintings. But already she is taught to “trace” her drawings, and the Catholic school dresses her in a uniform. Her mother worries about her fascination with my dresses, my Japanese dolls, my mobiles, my talk.

The clouds have vanished and with them the shadow of the plane, which was traveling below us, and, depending on the depth of the clouds, it would often come up towards us, growing larger and closer.

Now that the clouds have dissolved (and I remember writing to Jim and Dick about the many vacancies I had seen among the clouds on my last trip), I see rivers, fields, mountains. I see neon lights and car lights. I see a map of a great nation that was misnamed. It should have been called Woolworth. When nature presents a noble, vast spectacle, such as the canyons, the desert, Mr. Woolworth takes care of merchandising it.

I dream of saving Rupert, of revealing his beauty to the artists who are making films, of giving him a wonderful life, of giving him the life of passion he dreams of. In short, to give him his dream.

Twilight. I know what Rupert is doing at this moment. He is tidying the untidy, chaotic house for me. He is late. He is bathing quickly, trying to listen to Chet Huntley and other commentators, drinking beer (because it is cheaper), nursing poison ivy on his legs. He will have rings under his eyes. He will drive tensely, impatiently. He will be misinformed about the plane’s arrival and miss me. Or he might stand, brooding, with Tavi at his feet, his eyes in shadow, and his eagerness kept leashed.

It is strange that as I fly towards Rupert and focus on the passion, the flame, the electric sparks, the life itself, the greater expanses, the international landscapes, the universal worlds of art all recede, and I focus on a dollhouse. I think of Rupert constantly calling my attention to a bare mountain, to the fire-path, a fire break he patrols, and my controlling the desire to say, “It is not beautiful.” America the beautiful is as unstirring as its pink and healthy children.

Nightfall, completely now.

TO DO

Send a set of diaries to Jim for safe keeping in New York

A set of diaries to Sierra Madre

Originals to be copied to Sierra Madre

Put originals copied back into safe in LA

SIERRA MADRE, DECEMBER 17, 1952

Dinner by Henri Charpentier, the famous chef taught by Escoffier, in a motel house, where he presides dramatically over an unsurpassed banquet and monologues incessantly of his dialogues with Queen Victoria, Jim Brady and the Rockefellers, his shenanigans at the age of ten, and all the Ulysses inventiveness of a French Joyce in the kitchen, whose sauces are made of poured words, flavored anecdotes stirred with an enormous spoon-fed ego. Servant, then flatterer, then tyrant, then title-giver, then assertive of his own nobilities and distinctions, he immerses us in a fading world of vainglorious memories, humble bromides, moralization, and the woman who keeps him says, “He is unusually wound up.”

Like all the people greatly concerned with the galleries of the past, painted and sculptured heroes of the halls of fame, he does not see who is there to listen, who might be, for all his astigmatism, a present-day Jim Brady, a descendent of Queen Victoria, a future Rockefeller, or at least contemporary variations of the same themes of human personality. All this is because his memory reverts and remains in the scenes where he played an important role. There is, listening to him, Letha Nims, who resembles Dolores del Rio, who is ironic, mocking, humorously acidic; there is Bill Nims with the soft eyes of tender men who live slightly up-tilted at the corners like autumn leaves that are never able to open completely before the inclemency of weather; there is Kay, sumptuous, florid, a shoulder bare in an orange blouse, her blouses always seeming about to slip off, her eyes burning, her hair now in a permanent, tidy after the stormy critical hangover of her last drunk; there is John, timid and well-behaved like one still obeying firm and gentle parents; there is Jack Powell, tense, willful, sophisticated, and probably cruel to his Latin wife from Panama; there is Rupert at the head of the table, a princely and radiant host.

A few hours earlier Rupert was gathering pine cones and mistletoe at the top of the mountain for the ladies. I feel I am losing some of my artificial plumage and iridescence from New York. The climate of nature in place of the art life does not elate me. But Rupert is so joyous and proud of his Christmas tree, of his first Christmas with me, and our passion burns.

We spent the evening wrapping presents for his family.

The manzanita Christmas tree was decorated the very day I returned from New York with a collection of presents.

Is part of the incurable guilt I feel due to the fact that I owe Hugo all I wear, my trips with Rupert, the vacuum cleaner with which I clean Rupert’s home, the warm fur coat, the care of my hair, nails, the doctor, the dentist, the rest I can have, my book being published, in short, everything that I am, everything I developed? It is good to tell myself that I have replenished and returned all this in other forms, that Hugo could do as my other men did, take all I gave him and share it with other loves, other relationships? I wonder how it would affect my guilt if I could overcome this dependence so that I would not feel all I have was given to me by him. Would it make so great a difference if I had bought all the charming little gifts I discovered for Rupert and his friends out of my own efforts?

Sometimes I feel lonely for Hugo, but all the moments that could give me pleasure with him seem marred by his temperament and his “oldness.” The nights are ruined by his loud snoring. Homecomings are always deflated by his anxieties. Serving him tea during his bath before dinner, because of the absence of joy, becomes a duty. I don’t know why, but these same moments with Rupert are usually joyous, full of teasing, playfulness, pranks, elations. Our disagreements are insignificant, not bitter as they are with Hugo. Hugo’s anxieties continue, and from afar they seem greater.

At a party recently, lost among unidentifiable people, the moment an attractive woman came in (I did not even see her fully but out of the corner of my eye), I could hardly continue socializing. My anxiety had awakened. The rest of the evening was merely an evening to suffer through. Even while drunk and immersed in the music, I was aware of every movement made by Rupert and the red-haired actress. Rupert’s naïveté and obviousness did not help, of course. He found her and her husband an “interesting couple,” when actually the husband was a six-foot lump of flesh who coaches football at UCLA, a bore. (Talk about the humiliation of the artists, there is nothing more hermetic than a football coach. They can only talk in cave man language.)

I have to live with this illusion. It is incurable. I return from New York full of strength from analysis, full of confidence, feeling beautiful. Just before we left for the party Rupert said, “You’re so goddamned beautiful.” And when I said, “Why goddamned?” he said, “Because you’re a temptation, and there is no time for lovemaking, we have to be on our way.” And ten minutes later, I suffered from the constriction of fear, a panic of the body!

The next day I had a cold.

C’est la même chose.

At least I’m proud of one thing: I did not reveal my condition. I did not spoil Rupert’s pleasure. In the middle of the party he kissed me on the neck. To reassure me?

The Peace Dove

It all began with my catching sight of a Swedish peace dove carved out of paper-thin wood, with an iridescent quality of dew. It was tied to a wall, not flying as it should be. I bought several for very special poetic Christmas gifts, gave one to Ann Lye, left one for Hugo to give, brought one to Rupert, and to Lloyd. A symbol, Mr. Freud would have said. You wish to make peace with Rupert’s family. You know Lloyd would understand the symbolism. Peace upon the world, and upon families (neither being truly possible). So we arrived one afternoon while Lloyd and Helen sat having cocktails. There was a fire in the fireplace, Martinis on the table, and I felt the mood was auspicious.

Lloyd did like the peace dove. Immediately, it must be hung over the fireplace, under the diffuse ceiling light. Immediately Helen must rise with her limping, aching, arthritic leg dragging to find thread. Immediately Rupert must bring the ladder from the kitchen and climb up and change the bulbs, rearrange loose wiring. Lloyd and Rupert do not agree on the way to hang the dove. Lloyd says his way will make it rotate now to the left, now to the right. An argument develops. Rupert gets stubborn and angry. The thread breaks. The peace dove falls. I pick it up, uninjured. Lloyd says he will hang it up properly. But the thread breaks again. His wrath flashes on Helen. “Why did you give me such thin thread? If that’s what you sew my buttons with, I can see why they come off all the time!” At last the peace dove is hung according to the mobile principle of Lloyd Wright; Rupert’s hands are now dirty, Helen’s hip hurts her more acutely, and the peace dove is bathed in indirect lighting. Lloyd wants a flock of them gyrating, and while there may be symbolism in everything, there is no peace anywhere!

Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:

New York, December 1952

Dear Anaïs:

Something I came across in today’s reading from Journal 34 made me decide to write you in spite of the fact that I am not “in the mood.” Something you said about the main object of your journal being not to forget, not to omit, to even write badly. You have no idea what an important document your journal is, Anaïs; to me it means more than anything I’ve ever read in my life. And in that little ship I truly intend to sink the Holy Bible, Dostoyevsky, Lawrence, Shakespeare, and all the others, because this is the most entirely un-dehumanized book of them all. Many great books have unmasked certain or even large areas of human deceits, but in nothing I’ve read have I felt that the purpose itself had such a purity and unity apparent in every sentence.

I suppose one of the things that’s kept me mute, or comparatively so, is the fact that I have been in a certain awe of this journal ever since I began it, and feel it was somehow disproportionate to its value that I should comment on it thoughtlessly and quickly or unbeautifully; but the moment the thought crystalized, I was deeply ashamed that any such misgiving could have stopped me even unconsciously. I don’t want to make you unhappy by saying that I am in awe of you—you know this is not the case. It’s just that you have made something beautiful that, as you said yourself, was not intended to be a work of art, but more of a by-product of your living—call it what you will. Now I happen to believe that it is a work of art, but this should not be a frightening thing, or even respectable. Stravinsky said that the trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music: “They should be taught to love it instead.” And you know, Anaïs, that I love you far too much to be in awe of you. They are contradictions in terms. And I also think that I don’t make any separation anymore between you and your journal. You and it are one to me. In certain instances the journal has transcended, gone ahead of you, almost as if the awareness with which you had written certain parts of it was the awareness of a drug addict, or one whose integration was so perfect he must be dead and gone to heaven. But I think that’s fine. Like in Spy when you talk about the high moments, I might be afraid I had lost you to the angels, that my friend had gone to a world where breathing itself was a pure state of beauty—I might be afraid of that if I didn’t know instinctively as I read it that you have written here a description of the potential of man’s spiritual existence. This is something that I have always felt distinguishes the artist from all others who engage in crafts. They assume from the beginning that man is an angel in trouble; they write or paint or carve or whatever about his troubles, but they never forget that he is an angel.

(I think I just said something beautiful. Did I?)

This letter may seem heavy, but actually I am elated, very happy today. This is not very humorous, but humor is sometimes a form of hysteria that overlays unhappiness. I am not humorous today—I’m happy and that’s better. I walk down the street and proclaim wild wild wild and strength strength strength, and love love love.

From Jim, your twin.

Eric and Lloyd Wright, Rupert Pole; Leona Weiss, Helen Wright, Hausi; Anaïs Nin