UNDER A GLASS BELL
My own soul has reached into other souls
NEW YORK, DECEMBER 20, 1943
Today we reached page 35 of Under a Glass Bell. I’ve received 56 subscriptions, but am hurt when people do not respond, people who have the means. People expect everything from me as from a priest. They think it natural that I spend 6 hours of backbreaking labor on each page of the book, work 70 times 6 hours or more and give them my work, not only the writing but the complete book!
People to whom I gave Winter do not subscribe to Under a Glass Bell. Ben Abramson, the Chicago book shop man, did not pay me what he owed me for more than a year and a half and still owes me $18. Peggy Guggenheim obliged me to an exchange of books and gave me her gallery catalogue in exchange for Winter! Charles Henri Ford asked for a copy of Winter for review, never reviewed it, and has plenty of money. This list of defections, of selfish grasping without response, is much larger in my mind than my loyal supporters are, and this affects me deeply.
The struggle is full of humiliations. In order to print my work for the few who consider it a breath of life, I have to beg for support that I do not get.
In return, I get the total, sincere allegiance of a few. But the reality is there. Of 500 Winters, I gave away 100, sold 250, and 150 are left. I’m only printing 300 of Under a Glass Bell. Most of the subscriptions were obtained by my writing pressing letters, telephoning, etc. The end result is injury, disillusionment and pain.
The support has been infinitely small, not sufficient enough to sustain me either spiritually or materially. I am going to surrender.
DECEMBER 25, 1943
About a week ago the dreaded depression possessed me again. The happiness with Hugo seemed unreal, and I fell into an abysm of obsessions, brooding and resentment. I had a violent quarrel with Gonzalo like a chess game in which nothing is gained or lost. He accepts Helba’s interpretation, “Anaïs rejects me because I am poor and sick!”
Well, the grotesqueness of this should make me laugh, but instead I quarrel, I defend myself, I see his stupidity.
When I prove to myself that his being influenced by Helba is proof of his lack of love, he defeats me by saying: “If I didn’t love you I would be in Peru and not poor. Because I love you, I’m here, dependent on you and humiliated, mocked by my friends.”
Then he brings out his grief: since his friends can’t come up to the press to see his business, they suspect the worst, and gossip about me is in the air. They all live in the Village. People connect the press with me. No matter what the reality is, he is humiliated and full of guilt, and because the opinion of others matters to him— his pride!—he suffers. I offered to get a true business place, to retire from the press altogether, and to let him show his “business” to the world. I had not foreseen this consequence of our romantic venture. It is the negative aspect of a positive effort to make him work, create.
So that is the end of the press as far as I am concerned, and, besides, the lack of adequate response to my writing and printing is forcing me to withdraw. Another failure, another unrequited passion. The world doesn’t respond or support my efforts. Everywhere except in my life with Hugo lies failure and pain.
I accept the failure of my romantic life, the error of everything into which I put my feelings, my wasted love for Gonzalo. But I don’t know where to turn or what to do…
DECEMBER 26, 1943
It was like a crisis of insanity. I felt the exaggeration and distortion of which I am guilty, I felt the obsession: I want to force love to be unlimited, infinite, from the world, and from Gonzalo, because mine is infinite.
Today the crisis passed, and everything resumed its normal aspect. Gonzalo was tender and close. We spent the afternoon in bed, in the dark, half asleep. He was abandoned, trusting. Hugo is always there, infinite, unshatterable. A bath of love, and I am healed.
To help myself believe in the world’s response, I pasted the letters I received the last week on the wall, all of it a pathetic proof in order to cure a woman condemned to death, a woman without an inner core of faith, without strength or independence, her life depending on outer proof, shipwrecked at the smallest doubt, devoured by a self-destructive demon. I meditated for two days how to kill Helba to save Gonzalo, to free him, describing it to myself as a mercy killing. This is insanity.
JANUARY 1, 1944
The depression lifted. I went to Harlem with Hugo and Lucia, warmed myself to the gayety, felt the caressing hands, captured the vitality and humanity. And now all my mysterious efforts on behalf of Gonzalo have begun to materialize. I talked about printing, writing of political value, about the negroes. I welded the idea of the press with economic independence and service to communism.
Now I end the period of my slavery to be printed, of the sacrifices to my writing, of my personal creation.
The group I condemn and want to break from: Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Reis, patrons of arts; the VVV, the surrealist review; Irina Aleksander because she is a bourgeois; 57th Street Galleries for their snobbism and commerciality; Max Ernst, Breton, Jolas, Zadkine, Léger, Kay Boyle, as dead; Peggy Guggenheim for completing the corruption of the surrealists; Charles Henri Ford for publishing disintegrated and clownish views; Kurt Seligman as false, mimetic, and decadent; Tanguy for stagnant self-repetition.
The group as such is corrupt, malicious, perverse, decadent and stagnant, but still they are a force because of their coalition, certainly the only true art group.
I wanted to break with them, but my work tied me to them: they were my public, and Hugo’s public. None of us could break with them until we found a new group. And I see this new group as the uncorrupted negroes.
To close with the old, I must also turn my back upon my own work. That is what I will do. Make a new start. I will bring my taste and my knowledge of art to bear on political writing.
I am pinning my faith on the negro, because he is not corrupted by our old art development, because he is vital and revolutionary and pure like the workman, because of his character, which has suffered humiliations but without becoming twisted and ugly. The character of the negro is admirable, his sensitivity, feeling, intuition, sincerity, simplicity. I want to give my life to this, to the negro.
The poetic press, the personal press, is to become the political press.
Hugo says, “How creative you are!” It seems like a miracle, but it is the product of much labor, pain, churning and sincere struggle. The opposition between art and communism, between action and my capacities, is resolved.
Next week I start going to the Worker’s School with Frances.
JANUARY 12, 1944
Hugo went through the same breakdown as I did, the same total loss of strength. Jaeger helped him, relieved him of the tension. Our rhythm is changing. As I become more of a realist, I burden him less and less. He had reached the point at which he could go no further. My effort now is to unburden him, to make Gonzalo stand alone, to take some of the strain away from Hugo. My love for him grows.
JANUARY 13, 1944
Dissolution of the Communist Party in America.
For three days Gonzalo was full of poison. He was dependent on the Party, its mature development, its long-range wisdom which he cannot grasp for himself. For three days I hated him.
No matter what I do, there is one demon I cannot conquer, and that is depression. It has haunted me all my life. I can understand why people commit suicide. At such moments it seems very natural to me.
I am killing myself to print this book of stories, and my efforts are unrewarded. There are times when I cease seeing my destiny within myself, and I begin, like Gonzalo, to believe in some external fatality. I have a frightful feeling of having been cheated, deluded, exploited, used. I’ve been nothing but a fountain, and everybody has come only to drink my life. Hugo knows and sees this.
I turn now on people who come to seek my blood.
JANUARY 21, 1944
Working at double speed and time because I am reaching the end—page 64. Tension. Exhaustion.
There is a mystical joy at achievement, at the certainty of the stories’ value as mystical and poetic, and even the severe test of typesetting failed to dissolve them. The words are just as pure, unalloyed and meaningful, after all the scrutiny and the lead concretion.
JANUARY 24, 1944
One week of obsessions, horror and suicidal impulses, then the period of calm, sanity and a definite knowledge of the cyclical nature of my instability. I did not turn to Jaeger because it is a repetitive crisis, and I can come out of it alone because I take an objective medical attitude towards this mal. Astounding.
If I cannot break with Gonzalo, at least I can break with everybody who behaves as he does: the primitive Lucia, Josephine, crazy Mrs. Lipchitz, Lucas Premice, my mother, etc.
Primitive passion causes suffering, but then mystical and romantic élans cause sacrifice, martyrdom and self-destruction. Compassion, art, all these we pay for with our lives.
What alone can give peace, contentment, harmony, felicity?
Realism means to treat each person according to their reality. You can’t treat a primitive with “evolved” ways, or a brute with gentleness, a combatant with passivity.
Duits said, “My god, Anaïs, you give up the diary, you give up the press—what are you going to do?”
Yes, analysis is a cruel process of truth, a truth most people cannot bear. I have ceased to consider passion as the absolute. I see that I confused ecstasy, frenzy and violence with the absolute and suffered because every moment in between showed the relativity of the tie with Gonzalo.
I am aware now of the oriental in my religion (belief in karma, continuity, Buddhism), of the northern fantasy from my Danish origins (fairytales, magic, affinity with Isak Dinesen), from Spain sensuality and fervor, and from France the need of clarity, construction, analysis.
The diary is obviously the diary of neurosis, the labyrinth, and I am in it again, drawn inward.
There is a severity in me, a rigorousness and discipline. It has to do with the will to organize, lead, and create.
Hugo says, “You must know your material, as the artist does.”
I write only invisibly now. As I live, phrases form themselves, and then it all dissolves like a dream, and I have no desire to make efforts.
Effort was the key word. Effort must cease.
JANUARY 27, 1944
I have not seen Jaeger since the beginning of the winter. Alone I surrendered the romantic press, alone I faced the reality of economic problems and the misery they create, alone I faced my recurring obsessions, alone I built up my relationship with Hugo, liberated him, supported him when he was broken. Jaeger guided all this, gave me the principles to adapt to new experiences, to surrender what destroys one, first Gonzalo, then the press.
Now…
“Now,” said Jaeger, “you will do your most important work.”
I complain that we, the evolved ones, had to go back and find our lost primitive natures, and that when we find this nature it revolts against the sacrifice of the self caused by evolution.
I spoke of my revolt against writing.
Martha said: “We return to find the primitive, but to continue and find a higher synthesis. There is an evolved life which combines the pleasure with creation and is not martyrdom. At this point it is difficult to distinguish, but later it becomes clearer. You and Hugo are now ready for the best part of your life…free.”
Suddenly, when Martha spoke of her feelings as she heard of my discouragement in December, she opened her heart to me and confessed it had not been fatigue which strained her, but that Hy, her husband, had tried to commit suicide. And she wept. I held her hand and asked her: “Why didn’t you come to me? I could have helped you.”
“I wanted to. I felt you were burdened.”
She feels Hugo and I are mature. It is strange that no matter how neurotic I was I could always understand the other person and forget myself. It was to give Martha pleasure, not myself, that I invited her to my parties, divining her need.
Transposition of my sexual tragedy with Hugo. He said today (after a complete response from me), “I’m much happier, much happier.”
“Just because I make a bit of noise, that’s all. I was merely a silent cat before. Now I miaw like the cats on the roof, and you like it!”
“Yes,” said Hugo, “I like it.”
Now the crisis is purely material, stripped of all its disguises. Hugo and I are shipwrecked, $1000 in debt, just when we need $1000 to start the new press. Hugo has given his maximum effort. Now it is up to me and Gonzalo, and to whether Sam Goldberg will lend me the money.
During Hugo’s physical collapse he said, “I can no longer cope with the economic problem. It is for you to solve now.” Then, because of his goodness, he felt guilty about his fragility.
My assuming the responsibility means I have to start a new press to give Gonzalo a means of livelihood, and for this I depend on Goldberg, who is elusive and neurotic and resents being depended on.
When I ask Thurema for help, she shifts the talk to a scène de jalousie, that I don’t see her enough, that I see other people, etc. I must be the woman who has inspired the most selfish passions in the world.
FEBRUARY 3, 1944
Jaeger asked, “You remembered the loneliness of neurosis—do you fear the aloneness of individuation?”
“Yes.”
What will happen when I free myself of the incubus? I am full of terror and anxiety.
Gonzalo’s dependence gave me a certain security. Now I have none, none.
Giving up the press as it is—the place—seems like the end of my life with Gonzalo.
Breaks, breaks, surrenders, losses, because I was dying.
The Action. There it is: acting, deciding, advancing. I rejected Thurema’s financial help because it would mean submitting to her possessiveness. I will have to do it alone. Hugo will get a loan from a bank which I will have to return, which will be my responsibility.
FEBRUARY 9, 1944
I have discovered why people refuse to help: because I am not asking for myself, but for others, for Henry and for Gonzalo. Thurema resents Gonzalo, as does Goldberg. They are jealous and envious.
Today I finally broke down with bronchitis, the day before the end of the book. The last straw came yesterday. I went to the press at ten o’clock in the morning, already sick, and worked steadily till five. At five o’clock came Miss Decker of Graphic Arts and a man named Stricker to discuss the cover. He was insolent, patronizing, and said: “In the first place you shouldn’t be doing this. You should get published by a big publisher. No one is interested in an unknown writer. Your book isn’t worth 50¢. Why don’t you offset instead of printing from the plate? It’s easier and cheaper, if you know anything about printing,” he said to Gonzalo. Never looked at the work, flaunted his ignorance, gave destructive “advice.”
But in contrast to the past when I would have controlled my anger, I jumped at him: “You’re insensitive, patronizing, insulting. Why have you come here? I won’t take your bad manners.” And I cowed him.
And earlier, Gonzalo had said, “We’re going to lose the press if we don’t give a deposit tomorrow.”
I didn’t have the money, and here was this man saying, “To do this cover go out and buy yourself a $50 proof press.” I came home, the bronchitis like a fire in my chest, and I sobbed. I have such an exaggerated reaction to people’s brutality, insensitivity, gross ignorance, selfishness, cruelty.
How people hound me. A sample of my days:
Irina: “I must see you. Can you help me?”
Jimmy grabs me one morning on the way to the press, to pour out his sufferings with Thurema.
Thurema comes to the press to tell me about her destructiveness and quarrels.
Gonzalo’s pain at his brother’s death in an auto accident becomes violence, irascibility, disproportionate scenes.
After I visit Jaeger, she leaves me with her husband, who tried to commit suicide, because I am good for him. I get him a job on a barge, like Jimmy’s.
Frances comes to relieve herself of her sister’s cruelties and attacks.
Helen Burlin, having met me only once, wants me to read her poems and give her my opinion.
To talk about the reverse, what I have been refused, hurts me. I have never found anyone who paid for the publication of my books, have never found anyone who made me large gifts, or loans. It has been hard even to get subscriptions. Though the book costs $5, I mark $3 for subscribers, and it is the rich people who take advantage of the reduction.
If I didn’t have Hugo, nobody else today would support me.
It is because I built a legend of strength. We indulge the weakling, but we do not forgive the strong one who has moments of weakness. Why is this? Is it the revenge of those who were under the power of this strength, under its domination, or is it the hatred people have for any change of pattern?
Hugo has also been helped by Jaeger to throw off his burdens…his over-abundant goodness, responsibility and compassion. In some obscure way he does not condemn anything that I have done, first because he perceives that in part his lack of aliveness was the cause for my seeking life elsewhere, and second because when I broke the shell, I liberated him and transmitted life to him, saved him, enriched him. He takes his share of the responsibility as I take mine. So few people have this courage, this honesty, this generosity of not blaming the other.
But now he is free too, has made gains and has earned his freedom. He won it, and he won me.
Gonzalo made the first payment on the new press. It has to be moved by March 1. Jaeger offers to help if we cannot meet the payments on time. This on the terrestrial level!
On the writing level, I’m developing a form of association, such as the one made in psychoanalysis, to form the new psychological structure of the next book. Not James Joyce’s “wanderings,” but a detective game of revelation, a chain which leads to the uncovering of the mystery. The plot of psychoanalysis is always so full of surprises, dramas, changes, paradoxes.
FEBRUARY 15, 1944
Letter from Henry:
Dear Anaïs: I just mailed you back the pictures you lent me for the Hollywood exhibition. Hope they reach you in good shape. Your birthday is about at hand, and I want to send you a sincere message of congratulation. It has been hard to write you, knowing that you preferred silence.
Well, I am about to leave here now, for an extended vacation. I may never return to this place. I have no definite plans—only an urge to get out and relax. The experiences lived through here were of enormous value to me. By a strange irony of fate I was put in a situation which enabled me to realize, as I never could have before, just how I must have appeared in your eyes. It makes your stature even grander. I learned the lesson. Everything (I think) that you wished me to do I have done. I went through a veritable ordeal, for which I am most thankful.
I hope your own struggles have proved as fruitful. I would like to know, if you care to tell me. All my strength came from the example you set me. There is no one on earth I venerate more than you.
My address for the next few weeks will be c/o Jean Varda, 320 Hawthorne Street, New Monterey, California.
I would like to make you a gift of the handsome book which some friends have made for me—“The Angel is My Water Mark.” Would you accept it? You wouldn’t get it immediately—each book is composed individually—but in the course of the next few weeks. Yes? I hope I hear from you. And more than anything I wish you could believe that my only desire is to be of help to you.
I have been waiting most impatiently to see the new book. All the important book stores here have ordered copies and are eagerly awaiting it.
I once—more than once—told you that if ever I had the money I would give it to you to publish the diary. I still mean that. Seventeen books are coming out this year, here and abroad. Should the windfall come you will hear from me. I have repaid my most pressing debts with the unexpected returns from the sale of water colors. I wanted to clear all this off in order to leave a big blank space for you. I hope you won’t deny me this great privilege when the time comes. Bless you, dear Anaïs.
Helba
the poisons expressed physically
vesicule biliaire
pocket of poison
psychic pocket of poison
struggle against toxic anger and hatred
physical illness for every psychic illness
appendicitis
cancer—worry
syphilis—guilt infection
fever—unleashedness
arthritis—unnaturalness
Gonzalo
the poisons absorbed from the outside
Anaïs: when anxiety sets in like ague, cold and hot waves, chills, frissons, as you might feel on the edge of an abysm
be calm
know it is anxiety
Do not explain it away by the last painful incident. Do not attach it to any particular moment, place, person, as then it becomes magnified, and what it fastens on gets devoured as by cancer.
When depression suffocates you like a London fog and enters your lungs, think that the cause is probably not as great as you believe. A small defeat, a small frustration, discord, seem to obliterate the sky for you and to become the absolute. You can never see the transitoriness of the mood, its ephemera. You exaggerate until the obstacle stifles your entire life. Anaïs, beware of enlargement, exaggeration and dramatization. Beware of associating the bad weather, a tactless work, a rebuttal letter, a rejection, with a total picture for despair.
You have courage, but this courage is severely strained by your enlargement of the obstacles and the way you hurl yourself against them as if your life depended on it.
The first copy of Under a Glass Bell is in my hands, a beautiful and exquisite piece of workmanship. Last night I was enjoying its birth. I sent Gonzalo with it to the engraving class and the New School so he would cull the praise of Stanley Hayter (Hugo’s engraving instructor), Lipchitz, etc. He did. He was highly praised. Whether he feels guilt or succeeds, or whether he must destroy every pleasure he gets, I don’t know, but instead of being content, he said: “I don’t get any satisfaction from this, as I got none from writing or drawing. My heart isn’t in it. It is detached from me. It isn’t hard enough. It isn’t my line, my passion.”
“But what was your passion, Gonzalo?”
“I wanted to be a pianist. That I failed to be through circumstances beyond my control.”
I feel utterly sad. Only the other day Hayter was speaking admiringly of Gonzalo’s work, amazed by his gift. Is it merely guilt? Can he not bear to excel in any way? I confess that all my understanding is useless in the face of Gonzalo’s reactions, perhaps because they are all negative and I cannot conceive the negative aspect of all things. My imagination cannot conceive of the NÉANT!
My pleasure was destroyed. I could not respond to him sexually, and he had difficulty reaching the orgasm. His entire attitude is mirrored in our sexual life.
When I came home and saw that Hugo worries when he gets his due as an artist, wanting me to get all he gets, I said to him, “I want you to know that there is no man in the world as generous, as sensitive, as full of beauty as you are, that your work is born of your character, that you deserve everything you get more than anyone I know, that your work and mine are one and the same to me, so that what is given you I feel is the same as if it were given to me. You had an equal part in the birth of my writing because you supported me, sustained me, nourished and protected me on all planes. You gave me all I needed, you played all the roles and tried to balance all the suffering I endured.” (I didn’t say “at the hands of others.”) “So enjoy your success.” (He is being photographed for Vogue, and he is concerned because Vogue never gave me any attention.)
SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 1944
At Wakefield Gallery with Hugo, Lucia, Thorvald, Betty Parsons—hung prints, worked hard, early to bed.
Thurema: “The stories are darling.”
Irina: “The stories, the preface, the engravings are adorable.”
Lucia: “Such imagination and poetry! It seems terrible that people can pay their way into such a magical world.”
MARCH 7, 1944
Great success at the exhibit. Excitement, fatigue, pleasure. I am receiving my due! Affection, response, feelings to answer my feelings, sincere success. No falseness. No hypocrisy. A wonderful harmony with Hugo’s work, his prints and plates, and our book. Telephone calls, letters, praise. I am happy and Martha was there—I shared everything with her. We had dinner together after the exhibit. Spontaneous reactions on all sides. The stories are preferred to Winter… People love “The Mouse.”
I feel immensely stimulated. And strangely, before the response came to the surface, I was walking along a few days before the show and thinking with the utmost certitudes. I know now what I must do: I must be true to this deep psychological investigation, to this bottom layer of consciousness. Dolly Chareau said a very accurate thing: all the stories end in B minor, almost monotonously so. An expression of a secret revolt, despair perhaps. It is my only criticism. (So there is a downward and negative curve in my spirit after all, which is betrayed by the writing, the sudden failure to attain the orgasm as it were, the unsatisfied act. So it is to be thought out.) Success itself makes me sad because it is the story of having to prove your value, to convince, to assert. Just as I wanted to be protected without defending myself, to be loved without doubt of this love, to be treated as I treat others, and to have others see the potential me as I see their potential selves, none of this happened. I had to fight for everything, as if people in general were blind, deaf and dumb. My gratitude goes only to those who believed at first, without proof.
MARCH 9, 1944
Excitement, the exaltation of activity, of greater assurance. I was so charged with electricity that Paul Rosenfeld jumped up and kissed me passionately! Telephone calls. Miss Decker of Graphic Arts: marvelous! From everybody: I love the “Mouse” and “Birth.” I’m a little drunk, exhilarated. To be related to the world at last! To burst the bonds of personal relationships, to overflow. Many voices, moved. The telephone is our modern life, carries all the tonalities of feeling. Gonzalo and I look for the new press place. Fell in love with a little two-story house. The little box with three little drawers in which I put away the money I receive for emergencies: the new machine, rent, moving, the mechanic. Hugo’s exhibit is drawing people. No rest, no repose, no relaxation. The feeling I have is that I am bursting from the shell, the mask of my own persona and becoming visible and audible. When the journalist exclaims: she is moving in the clouds, it is no longer true. J’ai fait enfin mon apparition terrestre—I have finally made my ghostly self earthly.
I cannot fathom the miracle. Is it merely a piercing of the hard crust of indifference, of doubt? Is it the culmination of long, multiple efforts? Contagion, accumulation. Is it Martha’s work on me, this increase in my confidence? I thought people would find the stories esoteric and remote!
MARCH 14, 1944
This time, with Under a Glass Bell, people are stirred and feel with me. The atmosphere is full of feeling and response. My own soul has at last reached into other souls—at last, at last. I do not feel the loneliness.
APRIL 15, 1944
It was a breaking through a shell, a second birth, becoming visible and tangible. The sense of being a mysterious influence ceased. I was brought into daylight. First of all, Rosenfeld mentioned me to Edmund Wilson, who went to the Gotham Book Shop where Frances Steloff talked about me. He went home with a copy of Under a Glass Bell and wrote a review which appeared in April in the New Yorker. The morning the New Yorker appeared I was being photographed by Town and Country. They had telephoned me; I did not seek them out. It started when Jon Stroup wrote a review of Under a Glass Bell. I arrived in my best plumage, a lace blouse borrowed from Barbara Reis, my tuxedo suit, and the Coat, the tailored coat of the woman captain of action. The New Yorker was lying there, the pinnacle of authority, with a review by Edmund Wilson. Then Town and Country appeared with a review (the photo is for the June issue). Then telephone calls and letters. Then the mystical, magic present of a marvelous collage by Jean Varda, with a letter of dreams. Then Washington D.C., 150 visitors at Caresse’s Gallery, praise, autograph signing, etc. When I returned, the edition was sold out (in three weeks) and I was asked to reprint it (orders are pouring in, said Miss Steloff). Then Steloff encouraged me to print one thousand. Sam Goldberg loaned me the money. I begin today a trade edition at three dollars, linotype, not hand set.
When I returned from Washington, something had altered in Gonzalo. He was softer, he was more on my side, he was nearer. His passion burns free. I expect and demand nothing, so we work in harmony. He is healthier, more active, he takes responsibility. It is now his press. He opened a bank account. I give him the money he gets from my book, which is in great part due him for his printing work, and I made him feel it is his, that it is well earned. Hugo is happy. He has my complete love. We feel it is the end of struggle and pain. Gone is my sense of unrequitedness, my feeling that I am condemned to obscurity, to love more than I am loved. My success itself was due to friends, loves, devotion. It was born of warmth. There is a sincerity about it and in my friends’ rejoicing. I have few enemies, only out of jealousy and envy. Most people feel I deserve all I receive. And I have been happy, have known days of serenity, days without anxiety. Gonzalo can again share his troubles with me and talk naturally, and he is full of passion, could not wait when I returned from Washington to take me.
Spring. Work. Serenity. Sense of effectual action.
APRIL 19, 1944
Today the machines were moved to 17 East 13th Street. It is to be called the Gemor Press.
Gonzalo is active, excited, transformed. His pleasure gives me pleasure. He has discovered of his own power and will. He exclaims, “How well I have done things this time.” How well they have worked out because he was up early, he kept his appointments, he was coherent and organized. My creation is over now. I can begin to rest.
There has been a scandal. For Gonzalo’s sake it is necessary that I disappear from the press, surrender it. What is Gonzalo doing? Pretending to be working in a room with a bed. The Spaniards mock him, “The Anaïs Press.” Such a sad scene. Hope, the woman in Paris who wanted Gonzalo and could not have him, always jealous and malicious, showed the Town and Country to all the Spaniards, saying, “Which one is faking, who did the book?” I regret the lie told for the sake of publicity, its boomerang against Gonzalo, who has been saying it is his book. The need is growing to deny the partnership because no one believes it’s a partnership of work. I wept at this negative aspect of my frantic efforts to free him. Gonzalo is very active, devoted, tender, jealous. For myself, I no longer want effort, but peace, the leisure to write.
Tremendous labor, the installation of the press, the work with electricians, window cleaners, movers, packers, packing and unpacking, transferring twelve trays of type into type cases. We are counting paper, beginning to work on engravings (the edition will only have nine engravings instead of seventeen), unpacking twelve boxes of paper, books, plates, tools, etc., buying a scrap basket, bulbs, blotters, files, pasting Gonzalo’s work in a scrapbook to show clients. It was all done in one week. Gonzalo has assumed leadership. He is proud of his place, his machines, his independence. I feel very tired but content, and I am proud of my human creation.
MAY 9, 1944
La Vie en Dehors. My faculty for reliving in the diary, the mirroring inner eye, all this has gone. I see it now. The withdrawal in order to commune, relive, ruminate, conserve, has gone. It is like being constantly out of doors, in the light, in the daylight.
I gave Hugo Henry’s $1000, thinking of the time he gave me the money to publish Tropic of Cancer. Hugo is now rebelling against his own goodness, sense of responsibility and patience. He is going through what I felt before I went to Martha’s, utter exhaustion and rebellion. I help him to rebel, to free himself. Goodness is bondage.
MAY 18, 1944
Printed 1200 pages. Gonzalo has started running the new machine successfully, is very proud of himself. Six o’clock, dinner with Mother. Nine o’clock. Gonzalo, the MacDougal Street place is kept to meet him. It has become again the secret, silent place of secret meetings, the peace after the workshop atmosphere, the reinstated dream.
MAY 19, 1944
Ten in the morning to six at night at the press. Printed 1700 pages. Broke four nails and had to buy false ones. At ten in the evening, the Haitian flag dance, but no longer the dream of Haiti. That ended with Albert.
Returned home with Hugo to find a sneak thief had broken open one of the locked tins in which I kept carbons of the diaries. If Hugo had come before me he would have seen it all, and it would have meant a disaster worse than death.
JUNE 16, 1944
Writing preparations: sent all diaries in a trunk to storage, the overflow, kept only the originals and the Japanese paper carbons in a safe to work with.
JUNE 22, 1944
Harry Herskovitz, Henry’s friend, has the rich voice of Henry, is the son of Henry, the adventurer, the seaman, the dark, lean, ardent Jew. The first night he talked about June, Mona, Alraune. He was writing about Henry, about June as the illusion of love. I rejected him because he was plunging me into the past. I told him so over the telephone. I didn’t want to see him again. He pleaded, wrote me a love letter. After two weeks I let him come again. Now he was filled with me, and Mona-June-Alraune disappeared. Harry loved me, I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, the very image of his soul, his counterpart. I sat silent, moved. Then I let him come again, and now he was free of his identification with Henry’s life. I made him write his own story (we take our identifications for love: they are self-love, self-seeking), to start his own book. He telephones every day, and today I had an impulse towards him. I could have gone to him. I invited him with people. (I must fear him a little, as he feared me. He brought a ballet dancer to his first visit.) His eyes move me; they are aware, fiery. He is violent and primitive. And confused. And perverse. Because of this I did not go to him. But I had the desire.
JUNE 28, 1944
I left for a weekend with Martha and Hy, but I was in such a state of erotic openness, of creative outflow, of exaltation, that the quietness and earthiness of the mountains were torture. I had a choking feeling. I awakened choking. Too much food, too much earth, Martha’s anxiety which is blind, and Hy’s confessions: “I am sexually desperate, hungry. Martha does not live with her body. She cannot go further. I want a response to my sensuality. And she is too sensitive and too complex for me to deceive her.” And Martha’s strange relinquishing: “What you represent for Hy is the symbol of feeling. I want you to have a relationship. You can help him.” In her distress, she places him in my hands.
When Harry came, he was merely writing about the symbol of Mona. A few days later he began his own book, his own story. “Once, in some dingy city, I lay on a couch and read Henry’s article on your diary, and I felt: I must know this woman. My fear was that you were perhaps trapped in Europe. Anaïs, when I first saw you as I came up the stairs of your house, it was fortunate I did not come alone, or I would have become violent. You are the woman the soul seeks and the body desires. I was seized with madness when I saw you.” I let the desire mount like a wave, surge, and then fall, foam, disperse. The new mastery, desire that is not a wound, a defeat, or a bondage, but an exquisite game to be played, an instrument of enjoyment, the new mastery, ruled by pleasure. I want the night lifted and dilated, the summer night, I want the fire to warm all it touches, but not to consume. Impatience and immediacy had come out of fear and anxiety.
JUNE 29, 1944
Harry. He awaits me at the corner of the street with the eagerness of a young lover. He is there before me, young, his hunger immense. Because I am animating his writing, when we reach his room he lays his manuscript on my knees. The pages are of violence, horror, terror, crime and punishment. It is the world of instinct, of the animal. But as with Henry, this animal world has suddenly found its soul in me, and so while he is writing lust and crime and madness, he is before me gentle and soulful. My warmth, my warmth floods us, and I can never resist it. Oh, Anaïs. So now the faces are very close (after he confessed he was looking for the flaws, he had tested this love of his cruelly and found me flawless). He and his writing, like Henry, are full of flaws, falsities. But his soul must be perfect. I too had been seeking ways to defeat the spell. I looked at him to find the ugliness that would kill my warmth. But actually, before me, there is only a man seeking his soul, and a man shaken with desire, a young man who was denied everything. His sincerity is there, and there is a force in him. So the faces are very close, and desire retreats. There are obstacles. My hand on his arm was so light in the street that he could not feel it. There is a point of desire, but without body. It is a trap, I know. How can I walk into it again, knowing? But I do. There is a difference. I am the master for the first time. I am the one who gives, takes, leaves, commands. This is new. It is the sign of the new power. I am not in bondage. I say, “Wait. I am going away four days. I will see you Tuesday.” It is not I who will suffer, or count the days, or fear Tuesday. I will not come. This is new, this power over desire. It is perhaps not love. Finally the mouths touched, and there was frenzy, but not ecstasy. It is a dream, like the encounter with Jean.
JUNE 30, 1944
I am having a second karma, a second relationship to the nature of Henry with Harry (the similarity is amazing. He utters the same phrases: I will destroy Hugo. I must know the woman’s soul. When I know that, I will know all.), but one in which I dominate. I will inflict upon the innocent Harry my new firmness and power. His worship adds to this new power. Here I am the conqueror, not the sufferer. It is not a story of love, it is a story of power. Poor Harry. I should deliver him of myself, for he has a dream of love. I have made all other women distasteful to him, and he is entirely at my mercy. Every gesture I make affects his body and soul. It is an unequal encounter. Yet he feels he is being given heaven itself, the answer to all his hungers. The hunger of the poor Jewish boy born in ugliness and deprivation.
JULY 7, 1944
I stayed away four days at Lucia’s, at Amangansett. In a state not of grace, but of love. Such a state of love that I desire all of them, the day after a full orgy with Gonzalo. As unreality recedes, reality assumes a new strength which produces a different but more powerful ecstasy. It is comparable to the differences between caresses and the orgasm. Reality is the orgasm.
I have never enjoyed more violently the orgasm. The whole body participates, a free body filled with a passion so strong that it is instantly renewed. I have never grasped so strongly the body of Gonzalo. Reality. I have never looked at his brown nakedness, hips, sex, with such voluptuous awareness. I see more. I feel more. Before, it was filtered by the dream, the outlines and the physical flavors were distilled. How clearly I see his body (since I feed myself of the romantic dream of union) and the violence of our physical union, an orgasm divinely timed, a rhythm of equal intensity. My god, how the state of passion continues, embracing Hugo who bathes in it at night, embracing Harry en passant, embracing, embracing.
I am now like pure fire without the vacillations of doubt.
Four days at the beach, of calm, warmth, desire, peace, and the image of Harry lost its haunting aspect. I knew I would not be compelled into a false role, of giving more than I wanted to give. His deep warm voice drew me to meet him, but I told him: “Do not be deceived by my warmth. I have too much feeling for you to obey a passing desire and to hurt you. I am not free. I love someone.” Harry trembled from the shock. I knew this pain was better than the pain of being my lover for a short time and then abandoned.
There is a moment when the person disappears to give way before a cosmic ocean, an emotional and nameless ocean. This is the reversal of my drama with Henry and also its outcome, its finish. The spiritual adventure of meeting with the primitive, the negative, the destructive, and not being submerged, victimized, or led into a long, arduous, cruel combat. It is completed by a test. I am above Harry’s confusion, his crazy statements, his inaccuracies. If I had had this strength when I met Henry, I would not have suffered.
JULY 18, 1944
Depressed, deeply so by my night with Harry. I knew that I had done the wrong thing, that I would be trapped and that I must free myself. The phrase that ran through my head was: “Can you live a lifetime in a moment? That was the moment and there is not to be another.” I wanted to write this and not see him again, but I didn’t. I faced him tonight, so tenderly and firmly, but there is always the same struggle to say anything instead of, “I do not love you.” There is always the weaving a web so as not to injure or wound, to not give him a sense of defeat, of obstacle, of inadequacy, but merely all the other reasons that cannot injure him.
He is too young. I have already lived this. He is an echo of my life with Henry. (Dear diary, haven’t we heard all this before—you don’t really want me to repeat myself with lesser Henrys.)
JULY 22, 1944
Last night I met Gonzalo. When we return together and he enters a shop to buy fruit, I meet Harry—dark, ardent, tormented. I move towards him so tenderly. What did he feel afterwards when he saw Gonzalo join me? At that moment I would have preferred his frenzy to Gonzalo’s sensual well-being. I do not telephone him, call him back, or relent. I do not obey my feelings this time, but my wisdom.
SEPTEMBER 14, 1944
LIBERATION OF FRANCE
Tremendous month of joy, hope, hope of the war ending, hope of returning to France.
I gave myself to the sea and returned with strength. I saw Gonzalo there twice, caressed on the beach, with sweetness and tenderness. But the night before I left for Amagansett, I yielded to Harry’s passion, and we had what for him was a night of love, for me merely a night of sensuality. It took me a lifetime to be able to enjoy a man without love. I also spent an afternoon with Chinchilito, who doesn’t forget me. At last, at last, pleasure, without pain.
I even take a little pleasure in tormenting Harry. I let him dream all month, and then again I exile him because he is disintegrated, chaotic, unbalanced, because he is sick, because he says to me: “I want to read all the diary. I want to know the secret of woman, to incorporate the knowledge in my writing. I feel I must know it. No other woman can give me the truth.” My nature rejects the predatory invader. He complains: “Everything is locked to me. You, and now the diary.” The nakedness of his appetite and greed revolt me. His audacity and demands. He is aware of the shocking rape of the House of Incest Henry committed in his Scenario. The excuse is that what you want to possess is something you love, need, but in them there is ruthlessness, a taking for the self, and there is no tribute, giving, loving. I am to Harry a jewel, and he wants to possess this jewel without ever asking himself: has he ever created a jewel, or been a jewel himself? No, it is greed. Harry wants his dream. I have a feeling of revolt almost when he begins to rant: “You and I will be together someday. We will have a child.” His invasion makes me recoil. He never sensed frontiers, respected my withdrawals. I won’t let my sensuality carry me into the morass of stolen goods. Nothing comes out of his own being. It is all borrowed from others.
The diary as a project. The diary covers the period between 1914 to the present, and the setting moves between Europe and America. It is immensely rich in activities, voyages, relationships, and it encompasses all classes of people and nationalities. It was not written for publication and therefore the quality of complete truth is developed strongly, revealing more than the usual novel does about character and events. It is the diary I wish to convert into a long novel. From it I have already transposed one novel, Winter of Artifice, and short stories, Under a Glass Bell. Many themes are contained in the diary: the theme of emigration of a European child to America, her reactions, drama of adaptation, conflict with language, habits and education; the theme of the father and daughter relationship (partly treated in Winter of Artifice); the theme of the return to Europe, voyages, the artistic life in France, the aesthetic world, international worlds; the development of the world of dance, music, writing; the theme of development of an American writer in Paris; a life of the aristocracy. One volume will deal with drama of psychoanalysis, a full description of it in process, its effect upon the artist, its relation to the present, its significance. Woman will discover her own significance. There is the theme of political conflict in France; the theme of love relationships, developed in multiple directions, encompassing a study of love from a feminine point of view.
There is the conflict of woman with her maternal love, with her creative self, conflict of the romantic and the realist, of expansion versus sacrifice, conflict of woman in present-day society, the theme of development of woman on her own terms, not as an imitation of man. This becomes, in the end, the predominant theme of the novel: the development of woman finding her own psychology and her own significance in contradiction to the man-made psychology and interpretation; woman finding her own language and articulating her feeling, discovering her own perceptions; woman’s role in the reconstruction of the world. The women who will appear in the novel: the masculine objective woman novelist; the chic woman of the world; the maternal woman spending herself on active, devoted love; the dreaming, passive, analytical woman; the sensation-seeker; the unconscious dramatist; the oriental, childish woman; the cold, egotistical, inhuman woman; the healing, intuitive, guiding woman. From subjectivity and neurosis come objectivity, expansion, fulfillment and evolution.
OCTOBER 1944
We have to reprint Berthie Zilka’s book because it was full of errors. Gonzalo had told me he had taken the proofs to be corrected by a French person, and I trusted him, but whoever corrected them did not know French. I struggle to keep press afloat. While I am working the electric company comes to shut off the power. I work from ten to six, and Gonzalo from two to six. He works three times more slowly. One day he is sick, the next day Helba is sick, the third day he has to appear in court for the money he owes Dr. Lopez, on the fourth he has to see a lawyer. Result is that I bear almost the whole burden of the work. To do a whole book over again is demoralizing. When I come home the telephone begins to ring: Thurema, Jimmy, Frances, Elsa de Brun, Berthie, Lee ver Duft, Harry, Duits, Martha, Josephine, Jon Stroup, Henrietta Wegel.
My greatest joy has been Hugo’s blossoming. He has finally come alive. He has a body, and it is alive. He is more alert, more intuitive, more talkative, more emotional, more vehement, more jealous, more relaxed, more irresponsible, lazier, happier. Last night he took me with frenzy and cried: “Oh, I have come into joy at last. I’m happy.” He was a dead man.
And now he says: “With your beauty and your intelligence, how did you bear me before? You would have been justified in leaving me.” So he unknowingly gives me absolution for all my abandonments. My betrayals of the dead Hugo, my quest for life and passion, saved him, ultimately, and returned to him in the form of life.
OCTOBER 11, 1944
I received a letter from England that the English publisher will print Winter of Artifice and Under a Glass Bell, a letter from Print magazine that they cannot review Winter of Artifice because it is improper, a letter from Henry that he is coming to New York because his mother is ill.
With Martha, as with Rank, I entered into a false relationship. She has the marvelous personality of the analyst and the tragic element of her personal life (poor, deprived, loveless, lonely) that led me impulsively to bring her into the life she helped me to create. I wanted her to have a share in the joy. Soon it became apparent that there were two Marthas, absolutely distinct. As the analyst, I felt connected to her compassion, understanding, subtlety, intuition. But the personal Martha is different: she is passive, cold, analytical, critical, detached, willful. By this time Martha, like Rank, wanted to live, to enjoy, and was drawn to us, to our group. We made her more aesthetic, healthier, handsomer. To draw closer to Hy, or to charm him, she entered into our way of life. Lucia invited her to Amangansett, where she was hopelessly out of place. She was the mother, the nurse, the doctor, but for her it was beneficial. She became more alert, more connected. I feel constrained with her because of her unnaturalness. Poor Martha, she is courageously pretending and simulating, is absolutely mechanical, consciously making efforts. It is all terribly conscious, analyzed, a curse, and I am back again at the same point I found myself with Rank. Analysis should be used like a medicine for a crisis and then left alone. Martha cannot leave it alone. I am finished with it, free of it, and now I am living. I do not enjoy the relationship. Analysis should lead to mature naturalness and then fall away like a vehicle. As I once told her, “I am now going back into my submarine.” But Martha cannot do this, to learn, step by step, how to live. She is conscious of every error, every gain. What a curse. Mine is different. I can plunge into unconsciousness, follow it, yield to it, as I yield to the dreams or the impulses. Hy complains, “She verbalizes everything.” I am swimming, I am walking, I am hungry. There is in her the cancer of idealism, the consequence of which is neurosis.
Martha is not content with our becoming “natural.” No, we must behave “evolvedly,” one of her self-deceptions. She suffers anguish each time Hy talks to a woman, no longer listens to Hugo when Hy talks to me, yet she asks me to help him, that I am for him the animal image, that he dreams of me, etc. She does not understand when to avoid catastrophe and pain—Hy will fall in love with me, and I am not interested in him. When I try to explain that I no longer desire the negative, sick person, she is hurt and protests that Hy is making more efforts than all the others, the very opposite of her advice to me during analysis, to keep away from the sick, the negative.
I wage a battle against psychoanalytical language, which I never used—the medical, banal clichés, deadening, powerless. Instead, I tried new words, made deep efforts to be articulate so that the patient could become articulate. A cliché phrase is standardization, neutralization of the experience.
I am at work on a new book. I took the character of Luise Rainer, and gave her my father, my lovers, and my friendship with Thurema.
I am bewildered, lost in the maze of the diary. I cannot disguise myself as Luise, as any other woman. I cannot find the thread of development. I work unconsciously on fragments. I perceive and follow associations such as walled, blind, wall, whorehouse for the blind and blind love.
OCTOBER 26, 1944
When I smother under the weight of the press and Gonzalo’s perverse destructiveness, I can only recover my life by breathing in the climate of love.
Sunday evening I worked on my new book, and while seeking material, I reread the incident on the dunes with Edward Graeffe, the chinchilito. The same evening, he began to think of me and wanted to call me, but didn’t because he thought Hugo might be home. And he called Monday morning. Tuesday evening I let him come. With the Bright Messenger, the myth personage, enters physical beauty, harmony, power. He has been studying astronomy, but as he enters with his powerful voice filling the studio like the sea of sound, he lays in my hand the bouquet of his desire! First desire, and then astronomy. And my fatigue lifts as we stand in Union Square studying the Pleiades. “With Chinchilita,” he says, “I can always talk as I feel. No need of disguise.”
Elation fills me when Pablo comes. Pablo is nineteen, is from Panama, has a Cuban grandmother, a mixed background, and is all openness and naturalness. Last night in a dream I had a love affair with him. My nature responds to his warmth and naturalness, and I have turned against the closed, negative beings: Eduardo, Jimmy, Hy. I want pleasure, openness, naturalness, warmth. I wrote to Albert.
NOVEMBER 1, 1944
How Pablo reminds me of Albert, reawakens my desire for Albert. How I see the full mouth and desire it, and how I recognize the very slender, very feminine hands of the feminine man. Pablo is probably homosexual, but the reaction of the sensitive me has changed: if I answer impulsively in my dream, or in my nature, at least I do not act and let the danger pass.
The way Pablo came was this: One day he telephoned. “You don’t know me, but I have been reading your books and I love them. I love Under a Glass Bell. I am in the navy. I am only in New York for a day. Won’t you let me call on you for just a moment? I have been sitting in a café in the Village, alone, reading the stories, and I got drunk on them, and this gave me the courage to call you.”
The voice was warm, cheerful, elated and young, and sincere. But not knowing him, I said: “You can come for a moment. We are on our way to dinner.”
As he walked up the stairs and I held the door open I saw first of all his irresistible smile, a lithe figure, reddish brown hair, freckles, laughing eyes. As soon as he came in we liked him. He stayed for the whole evening, and we became friends.
NOVEMBER 6, 1944
The reason why I sometimes feel capable of suddenly committing suicide is because when I reach a moment during which I feel awake, I feel everything is delusion and deceit. I have been cheated—that is, I can live when I have faith, but there are moments when I feel my faith is illusion. Today I feel this terrifying sense of reality which makes me doubt everything. I feel I did not make Henry strong—it was I who was strong, because of his strength. I wrote his books. Today, without me, he is again flabby, wasteful, in error, egocentric, lazy, and not creating. When I left him, the Henry I dreamed ceased to be—I never accepted the reality of Henry. Now, I work at the press with Gonzalo merely to give him the illusion of being self-sustaining. In reality, I do most of the work. I give him this illusion that he is capable. He doesn’t really care how much I put into the press, because (like Henry) he thinks I have the strength. Hugo and I have not only denied ourselves comfort and peace, but in addition we have worked for two human beings, of which one is utterly without value.