Anaïs Nin and Rupert Pole at one of many costume parties
1955
NEW YORK, JANUARY 11, 1955
My first day back in New York: At nine I walk to pay an overdue hospital bill, to pay for the telephone, garage, grocer, stationery, drugstore, to get a typewriter ribbon for Hugo, labels, string, to open an account for Film Matters, to call for films at the Lexington Hotel.
I talked with Bogner and Jim over the phone the second day, mailed films, filed bills, bought a present for Millicent’s daughter and new baby, wrote Rupert, fought a cold, got overhauled at Arden’s and restored at Jacobson’s (blood count 65%).
The theme of December was anxiety and jealousy. Soon after I returned to Sierra Madre, Paul and Renate invited us to a Roman party. We had to read the Satyricon (a book for a butcher’s delight), devise a skit for entertainment, and bring a dish.
We worked several days to produce all this. First I made Rupert a fantasy helmet out of silver cellophane that was winged and gorgeous. Then I sewed a silver mesh short gladiator skirt. He wore our Mexican sandals of purple velvet with silver stripes, the anklets on his arms. His belt was a wide band of purple felt held by a narrower belt matching the sandals. He carried a trident and a net—as a gladiator. I wore a Grecian-shaped nylon nightgown, pleated, graceful, over which I threw an orange chiffon draped cape from the shoulders, much jewelry, hair à la Grêque, sandals.
Rupert devised a Latin skit: I held a tiny flower on which he, with an eyedropper, delicately dropped a drop of water, and the flower responded with a jet, all done very stylized and presented as Trimalchio’s dream after the banquet. Part II: the masculine voice of the drum and the feminine tinkle of a music box, but suddenly out of the music box pops a virile-shaped devil. III: Rupert gives me a snake that I domesticate with a gold ribbon tied around its neck. Not subtle but amusing to all. Then we brought a potent punch that we pretended was an aphrodisiac.
Anaïs Nin and Rupert Pole at one of many costume parties
Paul was dressed in a luxuriant salmon-orange cape of Surah silk, Renate in a more authentic Roman dress of pale blue. Peter was a slave boy. Around Tavi’s head we sewed a fiery orange mane, and called him our lion. Paul had painted one wall with columns. The table, all white, was covered with exotic-looking food; each of us had devised a dish that bore no resemblance to familiar food. There were about a dozen people. Rupert served the punch. There was a fire in the fireplace, and a brasero on which incense burned. Renate’s meatloaf was shaped like a phallus.
There was a couple at the back of the room who remained effaced all evening. But Johanna, a boyish girl with short hair, a humorous nose, and humorous behavior was already “attracting” Curtis Harrington. Katie (who was in the film with us) was there, a petite, plump and pretty Viennese, and Samson, a homosexual maiden aunt who survives his homeliness by the illusion that he initiates the young.
Another couple was expected, and I felt the fate of the evening depended on them, as those who were there were not apt to cause me the indescribable tortures of jealousy. I was both intuitive and not mistaken. It was the missing couple who would be the cause of my anguish.
When Raymunda Orselli entered, my heart missed a beat. It was not that she was beautiful, but she was arresting, a personality. She came dressed in black, as Hecate, swinging a long pony tail of black hair. She had a Jewish face but one drawn with a very fine pen, with hard, intense, willful, small eyes, a delicately aquiline nose, a thin mouth, imperfect teeth, but the ensemble, because of the grace of her dancer’s movements (she had just finished dancing in the movie version of Oklahoma), the fixity of her glance, her swift darts, created an illusion of beauty. After Rupert sang a few songs on his guitar, she took up her guitar and sang with a beautiful voice and an actress’s expressiveness. Before the singing, her escort, Douglas Brian, had walked straight towards me when he entered. I wondered why, but I felt his interest. He was very tall, handsome, manly, but not in any conventional way. We exchanged a few words on the Satyricon, playfully. He and Raymunda acted like lovers, but Raymunda watched Rupert. The guitar duets being engaged, singing to each other, or together, they did not cease for the last half of the evening. Seeking consolation, I sat near Douglas, Raymunda beside him, and Rupert in front. Douglas caressed my neck and repeatedly said to Raymunda: “What beautiful shoulders.”
My anguish was increasing so much that I could not enjoy Douglas’s admiration, even his kiss at the end. At two-thirty in the morning I reached the limit of my endurance. Raymunda had a thousand songs in her repertoire. She had her legs wrapped around Rupert’s feet.
Yet in between, she said to me: “I read Under a Glass Bell, in Italy, in Italian. I loved every word.”
As we were getting ready to leave, I felt I was in a nightmare. Rupert, drunk, and packing our props, wanted to kiss me, but I refused violently. By this time Johanna had realized Curtis was running away from her (with me) and wanted us to stay, particularly Rupert. Having Curtis and Samson in the car, I was silent. I asked questions about Douglas (to anger Rupert), but as soon as we were alone, I exploded. To convince me he had not been attracted physically to Raymunda, he spoke of Johanna throwing her body around. We quarreled bitterly on the same theme as always: his obviousness, his lack of control. Why, always, when I am there, why not wait till I’m not there? We quarreled all the way home. I fell asleep at last, lonely, frightened, and he, being drunk, fell asleep being unable to help me.
Two days after the quarrel, we went to visit Cornelia, and there was Raymunda, and the guitar duets began again. She wanted to learn one of Rupert’s songs right then and there. Then I saw, while she was intensely aggressive and Rupert merely passive, that she was not beautiful, but interesting, willful, and in full control of her feelings. I behaved as I would like to behave, but with a cold heart.
Then later, Renate, to help me, told me the truth: it all started with Douglas’s fervor for my books. He and Raymunda were in love. But he came to Renate and Paul and talked obsessively about me. At the party he had said to me: “I never expected you to be as beautiful as your writing!” To Renate he asked: “Why didn’t you tell me she was so beautiful?” I could have drawn close to him, instead of suffering from the guitar duets and feeling as Renate once felt about Paul. Raymunda suffered. She arrived at the party afraid of me! Then, of course, she found Rupert fascinating. The result was a quarrel between them, and Douglas later went to Mexico and Raymunda back to New York.
From November 20th to January 10th, two outbursts of jealousy. Afterwards I feel ashamed. Rupert will not change his interest and pleasure at interplay with women, his naïve enthusiasm rarely followed up, his flirtations so superficial. He is unaware and compulsive. He is so unsubtle that when I said, “All I ask you is not to concentrate on one girl. Be friendly, move about, get her address and see her when I’m gone, but don’t flirt,” at the New Year’s Eve party he was so self-consciously passive that it was absurd and only increased my guilt.
I arrived in New York determined to cure myself. I talked with Bogner, adding other facts: “This is the one time I made the greatest effort to consider my life with Rupert permanent, to settle down in it, to take his family as mine (while we were trimming the Christmas tree, I tried to feel: this is my family now). I felt detached from Hugo and I wanted to be whole.”
Immediately Bogner realized that it was because I had tried to settle down permanently with Rupert that the anxiety grew worse. It was provoked by the fact that I wanted to give Rupert all of myself.
And then panic, terror, helplessness, pain, a feeling of being trapped in a sadistic situation.
And the desperation to escape.
What would happen if I could not run away? To peace?
This time I find a Hugo stabilized because he has found a good job, hopes to make money. As an artistic filmmaker he felt helpless; he admits art cannot be sold, “merchandized.” He turns over to me not only the management of his three films, but suggests I make films myself. I accepted all the responsibilities. I took over a load of work, mailed films, wrote letters, picked up films, kept accounts, cleaned films, repaired splices, paid bills. Last night we entertained his business associates M. and Mme. de Saint Phalles . . . lightly and smoothly . . . assumed the duties of partnership.
But Rupert and I planned a trip to Acapulco February 15.
I had also told Bogner about the problem with the diary. I have to make a will. If I died today the diary would cause a catastrophe. The vaults and storages would ultimately open and they would be sent to the nearest of kin: Hugo. I have no one else I can trust. Jim Herlihy wants to take charge. He is devoted to me and to the diary, and he is my spiritual son, but he is too young and not objective, and he does not love Hugo.
I cannot go on living with Rupert with such an illness. He cannot change because he is not analyzed; I have to change. And I don’t know how much I can change.
For a neurosis such as mine to take root means to be rooted in a situation of pain. So even if I would like to have a beautiful home, a fireplace to sit by, a view, these things are dangerous because they conceal the bars of a cage. To take root means cutting off all avenues of communication with the rest of the world. Against the wish for repose is an impulse to remain mobile, fluid, to change surroundings.
When Hugo ceased to be my “refuge,” I felt like an escargot who had lost his shell, and then I learned to live without it. I felt I could stand alone; but then, if you have claustrophobia of the soul, you have to maintain a vast switchboard with an expanded universe—the international life, Paris, Mexico, New York, the United Nations, the artist world. The African jungle seems far less dangerous than that little, mediocre Forest Service house in Sierra Madre.
Adapting myself to Rupert’s life by force (I do not belong in it) would not be difficult, but because it is done by force I have the feeling of being a fraud, a pretender. It is not sincere. I love Rupert, but not the life he makes.
Over-reaction takes place when too much pressure is put upon an individual, such as my overreaction to spending our last free evening drinking with the family at four in the afternoon after having been there the night before.
NEW YORK, JANUARY 17, 1955
Dream: I am in a locked room. Gonzalo breaks the door down. I am in my slip and it is not very clean. He wants me to walk with him, as I am. At first I resist. Then he wins me over and we walk like lovers. He kisses me, not passionately, but gently. He looks like the good Gonzalo, the one of the mellow moods, not the dark and violent one.
In spite of Jacobson, I got bronchitis. In two days I made a swift descent into weakness, insomnia and suffocation. The heated apartment is airless. If I open the windows, I’m cold.
I called up Rupert and he had a sore throat. He too lives in terror of bronchitis because when he gets it, it is a major illness. We have the same weakness. One day we look vital, radiant, well, and the next we are utterly sick, weak.
I got out of bed to see Bogner because I wanted to face the last (I hope) of that downward spiral. I became aware last night of the anxiety grafted onto the bronchitis, which increased the illness; the weight of it oppressed and sank me. I wanted to catch myself in the act, and once again I did.
I did have a congested chest, throat, nose. It hampered my breathing. But upon this was grafted a multitude of old anxieties. I am helpless, weak, suffocated. I could not sleep (would I die?). I looked for oxygen. Then I had the dream of the room I locked myself in (like Proust). Someone else breaks the door down. All this dramatization of the initial illness, the fatalism, the sinking . . .
Bogner and I talked. I always get a sore throat on the plane, either way. “Because you are shut in, more shut in in a plane than anywhere else.”
I was uneasy, fearful of being deserted, not loved, particularly when ill. My father left when I was at my lowest ebb.
I felt less congested while I talked with Bogner. Then, on the way out, this phrase came to me very clearly: my mother was very nice to me when I was ill.
So is Hugo; it is only when I am ill that he expresses tenderness.
But when I’m ill, I’m locked in, dependent. And I hate this. It stifles me. A conflict sets in. Reading about Proust’s illness last night disturbed me.
Illness makes me depend on Hugo, and I dread this. When I returned I wanted to separate from him.
But . . . my mother was very nice to me when I was ill.
No voice left after Bogner’s, but I’m determined to exorcise this downward pull. At the slightest incline, I shove myself all the way down. I make exaggerated associations: this is like the night at the hospital. No difference between bronchitis and post-surgery insomnia. I do remember the overwhelming gratitude for the silent night nurse watching over me. Midnight, two o’clock, four o’clock. Dawn at last. When I went to the bathroom I could look out the window and see people beginning their day. It seemed as if having lived through the night all would be well, as if one couldn’t die in the morning or at noon as well. No, the night, the solitary night creates ghosts and voodoo.
I have feared Hugo’s hardness. It is there. It was never turned towards me, but it is there. It’s the other face of his weakness.
I came home from Bogner, face red with fever, swollen, and yet shivering with cold. I got into bed, took Jacobson’s pills, and three hours later the fever was down. The next day I was up, cleaning Hugo’s films, filing them away, cleaning his room—eight hours of work. A talk with Jim by phone.
Early to bed. Hugo down with flu also. Another day of working.
So at least I am earning my living and feeling less guilt.
I was given enough time to write, god knows, more than anyone else, and yet I failed at it. Spy has sold barely 1,500 copies, and the British Book Centre is making it hard for me to be paid what I am owed. Felix Morrow is disappointed to have believed it could sell.
I think what I should do is devote the rest of my time to preparing the diaries for publication. No more novels. Earn my living like everybody else around me.
I must find out why I cannot feel the compassion for Hugo I feel for other people. Is it something in him that does not inspire it? His manner? His demands, commands, the naked ugliness of the “business” attitude? In my full maturity I make the same judgment I made at twenty: money is not worth the price you pay for it. It is Faust’s exchange. To have money or make money you have to kill the artist, the spiritual, emotional self.
Hugo has made his choice . . . again.
In the life of the artist he could not wield power.
So once more, breakfast over stocks and bonds, the big portfolio of investment charts, talks in figures of millions, big talk, big schemes; perhaps this time he will succeed and become strong.
Meanwhile, Rupert will never understand that if only he had not made me jealous last month—I had come closer to marrying him than I ever did.
Hugo is struggling with his problems: his unacceptance of any point of view but his own. Why can’t I be patient? Why do I find all his personal habits irritating?
Why? I write about it as if to exorcise it.
Dream: I return to Rupert. He lives in a hay barn. I lie on the hay and wait for him. The three little Campion girls rush over to say hello. Rupert leaps off the truck. It is a sunny, rustic, innocent scene.
Woke up with an acute ache at the base of the neck.
Max Jacobson was called on an emergency by Cecil DeMille, on location in Egypt making The Ten Commandments. Max and Nina lived in one of the set “tents.” His photographs are less of Egypt than Mr. DeMille, the fake sphinx head of papier mâché, the actors, Max himself in an Egyptian costume—Hollywood’s Egypt.
“Didn’t you see Cheops’ ship?” I asked, as all my fantasies have been absorbed with this discovery.
“No. There were too many difficulties, permits.”
Hollywood’s invasion of Egypt, of Yucatan, of Peru, is one of the most monstrous of all invasions, far more terrible than war.
I wonder if I could not leave Hugo and build my own life. I wonder whether it is the dependency that makes his peculiar ambivalence and paradox so painful. But I must put an end to the irritation, one born of thirty years; I must stop caring.
All these pages could be collected under one title: Rebellion against Hugo.
Or truer still, “Rebellion.”
Because I cannot reach a mature control of my own life.
Letter from Anaïs Nin to Rupert Pole:
New York, Tuesday, January 11, 1955
Darling: I want to explain to you a change that has happened to me. I have finally been won over completely to your dream of the house. The last small volcanic eruptions were very small indeed, and right after them I realized they were the last sputterings. I have been finally rid of the restless, romantic, adventurous, homeless nomadic state; I felt this strongly when I got in the plane. I realized that I saw in your father an extreme, negative, destructive form of the flight anxiety. Mine was positive, creative, and bohemian, but still might lead to that non-creation of roots. Now I am quite sure of this, and I was beginning to accept staying in one place, having a family.
So, I am quite willing not to go to Acapulco, quite willing to take a small vacation when I return, a few days, Las Vegas perhaps, or just to play in LA, hear jazz or dance and save the money for the house.
Decided to call you up . . . glad we talked, darling, and I’m glad you’re well. Now I will concentrate on work.
Te quiero mucho . . . A
Letter from Rupert Pole to Anaïs Nin:
Sierra Madre, January 1955
SUBJECT: Shall We??
Love,
Your voice so good and strong, and happy, considering. But you’re terrible—just as I get my mind all made up for Acapulco in Feb., which is just what we need and should do more than anything else in the world, you call and announce you think as I do?? And you really want to stay here and work toward the house??? Women!!!! Such a difficult species to please—you better have your swims—Acapulco will have to be our heated swim pool for the present.
Let’s plan to go anyway and then see about accommodations. Didn’t you say Feb. was fiesta in Acapulco? We’ll see what La Roca and Annette say. We might write Billy Clyde if La Roca is full. Tell him we haven’t much money but are coming anyway (our top for apt. is about 500 pesos a week).
All sorts of wonderful love-things to write you but it’s so cold here I can’t write them now (how’s that for an excuse). I’m saving money by turning the heat off in the afternoon, and now it’s so cold I can’t get the house warm again, or perhaps it’s just that you’re gone and took the warmth with you. So I’m doomed to shiver and chatter until you suddenly fly out of a bright red Mexican cloud and return to me the fire of my life.
R
Letter from Anaïs Nin to Rupert Pole:
New York, January 21, 1955
Darling: That was a sweet letter. But, my love, woman is not so capricious or whimsical or contrary as you may believe. It’s her desire to please her man. The truth is all my “changes” came out of my initial impulse: to go to Acapulco (as a consoling thought after our separation) was not being answered by you with the same impulse, but by your statement: “We should save money.” Then I tried to move towards your wish, to adapt myself—I can’t enjoy wanting something you don’t. By the time I rallied to your mood, you had changed! Then again, after seeing your father, you again wanted to save money! So you see, men are just as changeable as women. We are up to our old tricks again, trying to please each other, and ready to give up our own wishes. The truth is that I don’t deeply want anything you don’t also want—it spoils my pleasure. I think the fantasy about Acapulco helped me to leave for NY this time. As you know, I don’t find leaving easy. But as to a real need, now, well, I told you, what I need is to be sure Acapulco is what you want now. I can wait for it. I couldn’t enjoy it unless we both want it equally. So if we both don’t want it, let’s postpone it. It means the moment is not right. As soon as you measure the cost, it means your desire is not strong, and if it is not strong it is not worth doing.
Jim wants to know if you need paper plates.
Te quiero
A
Jacobson, Bogner and Arden, and once more I escape illness, old age and tragedy and neurosis. Each time a new battle won.
Last night Willard Maas, poet and filmmaker, arrived at our cocktail for James Broughton very drunk, blubbering and slubbering, praising Broughton’s and his own films as the only poetry in cinema, falling asleep between speeches. His second speech was: “My God, Anaïs! I can’t believe it. You look absolutely beautiful! You look younger than you did fifteen years ago. And I know your age more or less. You must be about forty and you look thirty.” Then he fell asleep again, grey hair disheveled, face crumpled, eyes so deep set you wonder how he can see. When he awakened, he began again: “I can’t get over how you look!” Blessed be Jacobson, Bogner and Arden. The racehorse is running again!
Broughton’s description of his four years in Paris made me jealous and envious. He said, “There, you have a right to love life above all else!”
Not here. First of all you love security, work, comfort, wealth, possessions, power, never other people, yourself, or life.
Lawrence Maxwell without his beard would have looked like a small boy who had been inflated with a bicycle pump. When I first met him he had a small bookshop at 45 Christopher Street. He handled my books. He gave me autograph parties. He was fond of little girls, either the pretty ones or the gamines. His wife was actually a handsome man. Brusque. Forbiddingly short of speech. She was as hostile as Larry was friendly. Because he loved to talk, people dropped in and listened. He sold very few books. He gave books to the pretty girls. The only time he appeared as a human being capable of inarticulate suffering was when his wife left him (because of his promiscuous interest in other women), and his bookshop was bankrupt. In money matters he was irresponsible and ruthless. He took over our edition of House of Incest, never paid me, and I had all the trouble in the world getting the remaining 300 copies back (700 are unaccounted for). The only time I felt sympathy was when he destroyed his bohemian life, reached a trap; he was surrounded by lesbians, fell in love with lesbians, was frustrated by lesbians. They treated him like a eunuch, stayed with him when they had nowhere to go. He never uttered a word of understanding of the books. But from the beginning I was, to him, a celebrity. Certain speeches, similar to official reception speeches, were reserved for me when I went to the shop. It took me a year to break the barrier down. My own kiss on the cheek and casual attitude finally brought out a spark of affection.
But under stress he was a loyal friend. When Rupert appeared in New York and Hugo was lying on a hospital bed in traction, Larry was one of the members of my active underground who helped me. He played the role allotted him. He played his own role, and that may have been what gave all he did a performance air. He was of the race of heads of salons. And even if his love of literature or writers was not profound (his heart was in politics), he liked to be Ambassador.
It is amusing that eight years ago Rupert went to Larry’s bookshop by chance to sell him his Henry Miller books (bought in France) so that he might buy new tires for Cleo, and Larry offered so little it made Rupert angry. And Rupert bought my preface to Tropic of Cancer, which caused the first scene between us (we had only been together three times). He was so shocked, and I had to soothe him.
NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 1, 1955
I’m working with Bogner on my hatred of America, prodding its origins. My earliest memory of France is of sociability. I invited everyone on the street for tea. In Germany, I hated our governess, but nothing else. In Belgium, I don’t remember any rebellion. In Spain, I was happy.
America first appeared in my eyes as my father saw it: “Un pays de commerçants. Barbare, sans culture.” He never accepted a concert tour in America. He said the greatest two catastrophes in the world were the birth of Christ and the discovery of America.
“He had a prejudice,” said Bogner.
“He did, since he did not know America, or know English. How much his caricature of America stemmed from his antagonisms towards my mother, I don’t know. My mother was brought up here in a convent. She spoke English. I don’t remember whether she liked it or not. She may have. It may have been a subject of discussion. She had the money. She decided to come here instead of continuing to live in Spain (nearer my father). Interesting contradiction: I inherited completely my father’s prejudice. I arrived with a fear of ‘losing my soul’ in a materialistic civilization. My diary was at once a refuge, a home, a shelter and a jungle adventure.”
Bogner said, “When you have a prejudice, you proceed to pick up proofs, to strengthen your original premise. You proceeded to accumulate proofs of America’s hatefulness. But the anger was already there.”
“Since I persist in generalities, persist in accusing America, I want to look at what I hate, which was, as you say, a projection of my own feeling. Today I added systematically what I hate: America is cold, undemonstrative, inhuman, and incapable of relationship. It is rough, uncouth, and full of hostilities.”
One by one, I am willing to question: “You mean I am unable to make a relationship with Americans? You mean I am the one who is angry, so I tune in on American anger?”
“Yes.”
The paradox is that the one who is truly to blame for my having come to America is my father. Instead of being angry at him, I got angry at America. I identified with the real cause of all my troubles. I took on his prejudice. I identified with my tormentor. No doubt I also shifted a lot of anger towards Hugo who brought me back to America a second time and who has the American obsession with money. Yesterday he expressed real joy at making money, as keen a joy as when he made a good film. But making films did not give him as strong a sensation of virility as making money.
About relationships: “Well, in France I could not make relationships with French writers.”
“Why?”
“So your idea of your life in France was not of a life with the French. You were living with Miller and with Gonzalo.”
“I tried. I remember trying to make friends with Breton, and he classified me as a bourgeois and une femme d’un banquier. I was offended and withdrew.”
Rebellion is an important part of my personality now. I am angry. No matter what America is, even if it is all I say it is, there is still no reason for hating it.
Arthur Miller was saying he was tired of Western movies. I agreed and then added, “We should not have the Indians in the center of a shooting gallery at the fair and the white men and picking them off as they ride in a circle.”
The hatred has increased in violence as I get older because I feel I have only a few years to live and I am still here. I could fall in love now with the man who would take me to France, as I fell in love with the captain of the Spanish ship sailing towards America, because he was the last fragment of Spain and I was losing it.
Activities: Cleaning and filing miles of film
Getting dresses repaired
Mailed films for showing
Changed Hugo’s typewriter ribbon
Bought two bathing suits for Acapulco
Wrote Anne Metzger, my French translator
Gave Under a Glass Bell to Val Telberg
Saw Irina and her husband (who has an important position in the UN; atmosphere of international politics)
Bought stamps
Got two hundred copies of Spy from British Book Centre because they won’t pay Hugo what they owe him; I daringly walked into the bookshop and took the books
Paid electric bill, rent
Changed and bought cases for film reels
Bought two bathing caps
Ordered Lektrosol to clean films
Saw Frances Thomas, a writer
Secretarial work for Hugo, errands, telephone
Paid bills
Wrote letters
Sent corsage to Joaquín’s friend; she sailed to Europe, no marriage
Talks with Jim over telephone
Hair tinted
Letters to Ruth and Rupert
Read Jim’s diary
Read Frances Thomas’s poems and sketches
Histoire de la Littérature Française by René Lalou
René Lalou raises the question of whether “individualism” is obsolete. But no one except the psychologists realize the interior, subjective, irrational life must be dealt with first, cannot be ignored, covered or inhibited. In America, because the masses are not made up of individuals, but of blind, ignorant, irrational subnormals, the total sum of the country is a dangerous, brutal, hysterical ego.
The world will always remember that I went out in the evenings with Henry, Gonzalo, Albert, Bill, etc., but not that Hugo was asleep as soon as he had dinner, that “business” always meant Hugo asleep. He is asleep at eight and I am sitting in the front room to escape his snoring. I wish I had Rupert here.
I am, though, so grateful to Hugo for his determination to “recreate” himself, to lead a new life. I see his effort.
I have lost a great deal of my guilt for not giving Hugo any advantages of success in my own work, because he now admits that indirectly I am responsible for all his important contacts, resulting in his capital, beginning with my relatives to René de Chochor today. So I have, in a way, returned some of Hugo’s giving to me. I have such a desire to return what is given to me. I would like to be useful to the development of psychoanalysis as an experiment, to the development of medical knowledge by giving my body, my eyes, to be useful to the development of art (America could have been taught the art of literature, but those who destroyed this possibility are the “critics” like Max who have no knowledge of art whatsoever).
My desire to place the diary in Bogner’s hands comes out of my respect for her objectivity.
Just as I displaced anger, deflected it from my father, Hugo and Rupert to America, I wonder if one could not deflect depression away from the present. Then to Jacobson where one always waits two hours, yet when I rebelled against this slavery, I got anemia. I bring my diary and correspondence, the “writings” I’m given to read by young writers, which are utterly and hopelessly bad. You cannot teach taste, ear, rhythm.
But Hugo the businessman is succeeding (with Bogner’s guidance), and Jim sold a play. Immediately Jim says, “Will you come to Paris?” “Of course!”
From Felix Pollak at Northwestern University, who has purchased my manuscripts: “I got word from the Film Society that they have decided to pay your and your husband’s transportation—any transportation, plane or Pullman—to Chicago and back, that they are delighted at the prospect of having you come and present your program.”
Dream: I am in a carriage, dressed in a fantasy costume, a veil around my head similar to the Gates of Hell veil. The men in the carriage are intrigued, and want to unveil me. I get angry, get off the carriage, and take another. I am on my way to a festival at which I am to play a part. On the way I stop at a village. My mother and Joaquín are there. Joaquín is weeping quietly at being imprisoned in this out-of-the-way place.
Dream: I look down at my legs and they are covered with vaginal bleeding, brilliant, healthy, abundant blood, but more like a hemorrhage than a period. I examine some records I have been carrying, take them out of the envelope and find I have broken them; all of them are “émietté” (crumbled). They are my father’s music.
I have a feeling of sympathy for Hugo, but I am reacting violently to his abnormal disorganization, his self-defeatism, and self-frustration.
I have to solve this, as I have solved problems of jealousy. Thinking of this, I had this dream: A big man is playing with several little girls. Suddenly he becomes lustful. He carries one of the little girls off and I know he is going to rape her. I am sexually excited. I follow them to a closet. I want to get inside the closet with them. Meanwhile, people are worried about the rape and want to call the police, but I try to stop them, to protect the big man from the law!
The flaw in Geismar’s virtuous preoccupation with politics is that he is frustrated in his personal life (too routine and domestic), so he drinks, is temperamental and moralizes about writers who live freely (such as Hemingway). It would be more honest if he did his political work directly, not under the cover of literary criticism. But when he was asked to join the Civil Liberties Union, he refused.
As soon as I leave the house, I breathe freely and get calmer. I go about my full day harmoniously, swiftly, efficiently. Last night during a film showing I went out to buy more beer (ostensibly) and telephoned Rupert.
“I will be on Air France in Mexico City at eight in the evening.”
“Do you know where the black cover for the camera lens is? I can’t find my yellow bathing suit.”
This obsession with the frustration both men give me and the way they waste my energy has become as obsessional as my hatred of Helba, who stifled and destroyed my life with Gonzalo.
Is part of my habit to deflect angers, or frustration, and then to project the sense of frustration onto the men a deflection of my own personal sense of frustration? Is it that I can’t face my inability for self-fulfillment (except in passion, I have not fulfilled any of my wishes)? But then a woman’s life is secondary in the sense that the man’s profession creates the initial place, frame, atmosphere, design of the life.
Meanwhile Hugo has become aware that he has become the “businessman” completely, in an abnormal way. He has changed his entire personality, his way of dress, his mannerisms. He has closed the door on art. He is hard, tense. I was appalled by the change when I arrived. This was accompanied not by efficiency, but by disorganization and obsessional tension.
But he knows it now.
Our talk in the kitchen, while cooking dinner:
Hugo: “I became aware today of the abnormal tension. I had a diffuse, vague, unsatisfactory talk with Bogner and a terrible sense of inadequacy. My father always said I was not practical, and I was determined to overcome this weakness.”
Anaïs: “But if the practical world is such a torment to you, why don’t you give it up, live simply, like Telberg or Varda, on little money?”
Hugo: “I can’t do that. That for me is failure, and helplessness. I would feel castrated.”
I was able to talk about the effect of this on me, my revolt against being dedicated to a practical life, my suffering from his disorganized mind. He should be, by nature, a sloppy bohemian like Gonzalo and Helba, living in perpetual chaos. But he dreads this.
For the first time we were able to contemplate the frightful deformation brought on by neurosis and my reaction to it. The human Hugo emerged, not the possessed one, tender, honest, seeking, courageous, and aware.
He made me sit on his knees and said, “I am sorry. I have not even had time to love you.”
A completely honest talk. At the same time that he could see the driving anxiety and obsession with which he took up his new business. Hugo could see that I felt the same sense of inadequacy for the enormous tasks he has placed on me, how I would not be able to accomplish them with a more limited physical endurance than his. I became equally obsessed with organization. Hugo’s procedure—errors, loss of memory, changefulness, a hysterical inability to plan or coordinate—destroyed this and increased my work twofold, if not three- or fourfold.
For the first time I was able to feel the sympathy I had not yet felt for Hugo. I realized that the three people I had most rebelled against and felt the least compassion for were my father, my mother and Hugo. This struck me as perhaps originating in their power over my life, my being involved in all their irrationalities by fibers not of my own choice, involved, victimized, but lucid enough to rebel. And so it is with Hugo, only what remained in me was an image of Hugo when he was at the beginning of his illness, just as I might have remembered how Hugo looked in the early stages of tuberculosis—not deteriorated, still roseate, emotional, tender, human. This became buried in distortions, in the ugly personae Hugo built around this, the defenses growing uglier as the “possession” by the neurosis grew stronger.
And this occurred in me too, naturally. Lately I have contemplated honestly the ravages of my “possession”: bitterness and hostility (as, for example, my jealousy is now expressed in wild furies against Rupert rather than secretly as before).
The rebellions against Rupert’s neurotic way of life were less violent because I never believed truly I would submit to it. His way, unlike Hugo’s, was to shrink into a small life that would not disturb him, but I remember how disturbed he was by his TV show for the Forest Service, by our filmmaking with Kenneth Anger, by our masquerade parties (challenges).
My tendency, I said, was to avoid the big life, to avoid strain, but when I lived with someone who has no courage (while Rupert has courage in firefighting, in a speeding car, in cross-country trips, he has none for adventures of a deeper kind), then I realized I could not live in his small, dull, narrow life.
It may be that I control my jealousy by understanding Rupert’s “possession” the same way I control my rebellions against Hugo’s inefficiencies and disturbances.
And my own!
My blaming Hugo is born out of his absolute control of all I do except when I leave—where we live, the car, accounts, our way of life, who we see . . .
Rebellion is a negative expression of independence.
Farewell to René de Chochor, who is leaving for a year-long sabbatical in France.
Lunch at Irina’s with ten women of distinction, wives of UN delegates, a countess, Luise Rainer.
Letter from Joan of James Brown Associates to Anaïs Nin:
New York, March 8, 1955
Dear Anaïs: Herewith our check in the amount of $186.62, which represents:
Royalties from The British Book Centre on A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE as per attached statement, through 12/31/54 $207.35 less: 10% commission $20.73.
I know you will be appalled at the size of this payment, but as far as we can tell the statement is correct, unless you have some different information. I hope that you will not decide to give up writing as a bad job.
Sincerely,
Joan
FEBRUARY-MARCH 1955
Mexico
EN ROUTE TO NEW YORK, MARCH 27, 1955
After five weeks of intense work in New York (for Hugo) I left for Mexico to meet Rupert. I myself could not believe that the ecstasy of the past trips could be repeated. Such high moments could only happen once, and Jim feared it too. But the miracle was repeated. And Jim’s comment was: “I should have known that you are capable of repeat performances.”
But I had worked for it as the Tibetans worked to achieve their religious ecstasies. I had subjected myself to discipline, analysis, Dr. Jacobson and Arden, to emerge one morning at the icy airport all in ivory white wool, leopard belt and bag, festive, calm, strong for life with Rupert.
Once more I waited at the Hotel Genève, and once more he arrived tense and strained by five days of feverish driving (always as if it were the last time). Once more my young lover, our moment of delight and euphoria. The drive to Acapulco is faster now. Can I keep this peace and strength?
Have I overcome my fears, my jealousies, my panics? I was grateful to all those who had healed me. I passed on to Rupert radiations of deep happiness. Once more the modern apartment at La Roca, where it is like a home. This time it was the “season,” and we plunged into social life, not as when we came last April and met no one we knew. I was ready to live more courageously. We swam. We met Annette Nancarrow and her boy satellites, Albert Lewin, Alice and Ed Fitzgerald, their friends, the Miss American Airline queen of 1954. We went to a masquerade ball, to La Perla, to all the nightclubs. We took mambo lessons from two Cuban dancers. We danced every night. We had two days of graceful, beautiful and wild living, and the passion was full and rich. I had only one attack of violent despair: when Rupert felt compelled to tell me he had been coerced into sleeping with a whore in Juarez (because she cried, she was on the spot, and the patronne was bullying her) and could not complete the act, and I rebelled and made a violent scene. “Why do you tell me? Why? Why? You will destroy all the confidence I try so hard to build! I don’t want to know!”
Rupert was aware he had blundered. But I punished him for his blunder by telling him about Bill’s visit before returning to Korea. “At the height of our relationship, I slept with Bill. Do you want to know all the details?” He didn’t want to hear. He was upset. Then I took two sleeping pills and fell asleep and he lay awake all night.
But since all gentleness fails, now I will use violence. I didn’t feel guilt for this.
Then on the way home he began to talk about marriage. It has been an obsession for seven years—first divorce (which he now believes I got) and then marriage. I exhausted all the defenses I could invent—that I was neurotic, that I did not want marriage, that I wanted to stay as we were, that I wanted to protect him from a feeling of responsibility. I know the persistence of his obsession. I also felt tired of resisting, feared the effect of my frustrating him, felt also an ironic mockery of the laws, a feeling that if this was going to be a source of irritation and insecurity, oh well, to hell with the laws, I would gamble once more, one more gamble, I would grant Rupert his wish someday, and gamble on the consequences. It would relieve all the strain at this end.
But then Rupert stopped at Quartzsite, Arizona, before a Justice of the Peace, to inquire, and I let him, thinking there would be some obstacle or other (I don’t have divorce papers). But he came out of the place radiant, his eyes blazing, laughing, his lips humid, his smile incandescent: “Let’s get married!” He was at that moment irresistibly beautiful, so gentle, so happy. I felt like a murderer to kill his joy, yet I did it that time, but that did not discourage him.
One week later we were driving to the same place, and this time we went through with the ceremony. I was moved. Rupert was so sincere. The place could not be more isolated—a remote village, just a few houses, in the middle of the desert. A grey wooden house. Two witnesses—Mr. and Mrs. Truitt. An enormous, fat German man, joyous, talkative. He had a beer-barrel stomach, a thick butcher’s neck. He could not be uglier, nor the place. Its ugliness was so extreme it became humorous. He had a joyous beer sincerity too. He read the words with dignity and simplicity. His name was George Hagely. He wore, for us, a new, freshly starched white shirt without a tie. He had on a small telephone table a huge book of criminal records. I smiled, thinking the world will put my name down, but I knew that I was making one person happy in the present, and that is a great and rare achievement. Rupert was happy, fulfilled, calm and grateful. He had been humiliated, harassed and worried by the situation. He pretended it was only legal protection, but it was security, making peace with conventions.
I was elated by the danger, the adventure, the challenge once more, the overcoming of difficulties, the chess games with the world’s literalness, and although my intelligence saw all the absurdities and dangers of the marriage, emotionally I had lived it with the utmost purity and wholeness, its deeper ritual, having felt deeply married to Rupert so many times—this was one more time.
We were very close then . . . and now, to New York, and the difficulty of leaving.