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enjoy this Rochelle Lynn Holt writing in the 2010 RE-release of her book Anais Nin: an Understanding of her Art |
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Enjoy this perfect-bound paperback book! Click on the cover or any linked text to order this book. |
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In Linotte, the Early Diary 1914-1920, Anais reveals “that there are two people in me,” the nun and the writer, both separate and yet related, connected as “Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin et Culmell” who, at age eleven in New York, separated from her father, could confess: “At the moment of Communion, it seems more as though I am kissing and hugging Papa, rather than receiving the body of Christ.” At the same time, a few months later at age twelve, she would rationalize, “I prefer to give myself to my pen, I prefer to write, to let those who want to understand my heart know it, in order to reform it.”
Catholicism traditionally preaches that if one does good deeds or makes sacrifices (a.k.a. Christ), then one is rewarded for such obedience to ideals. Although devoutly Catholic (“Being the Catalan type pleases me, for I think and suppose that Papa would be happy”), the artist is also aware of something more nonconforming and gypsy-like in her soul when at fourteen she began to pose as a model to earn money to help both her mother and two younger brothers (Rosa; Thorvald and Joaquin).
Still, simultaneously, she was writing poetry and fairy tales, her stories of “a mirror,” the word she used to refer to “My diary. Isn’t it a mirror that will retell to oblivion the true story of a dreamer who, a long, long time ago, went through life the way one reads a book? Once the book is closed, the reader can go on his way with all the treasures it had to teach.”
Although Anais admits at age thirteen she has “two companions: my earthly diary and heavenly prayer...(to) hope (while) I plant the virtue that I want to imprint forever on my second soul...,” a year later she is balking at obedience: church, parents, the role of woman, school. “Why must our whole life be a long heavy chain of obedience? ... Nothing but laws, commandments. Why?”
The diary, originally begun as a letter to the father, at this point does not include him in her reasons for “Why am I living? ... Out of love for my mother, I would be useful. Out of love for my creator, I would work. Out of love for eternal peace, I would suffer. Out of love for God, I would serve. And out of love for myself, I would do my duty.”
By age fourteen, she had “found a motto. Let’s live in order to be useful and let’s be useful in order to live,” something she witnessed in her mother, “more than a man at that moment, for joining energy and kindness, courage and beauty, strength and gentleness ... a guardian angel, an incomparable woman;” whereas a year earlier she had challenged her father with the question: “Isn’t there a single man on earth who isn’t selfish? ... if they are all selfish, do you think I shall have to get married when I am grown up?”
Indeed, she was her “father’s own daughter,” her mother noted, probably because Anais had written him: “if I don’t become famous or rich, I shall and can be happy with a pen and a morsel of bread, daily bread.”
Conflicted regarding why she feels her father will never come to America, the child reflected on an array of possible reasons. “Papa is angry with Mama ... Papa was severe, and often Mama tried to intervene ... Could the parting be my fault? ... of all the bad things in the world, divorce is the worst.” Still, she knows “that with my disposition I couldn’t be a good mother and I prefer not to be one.” Because Anais realized, “Dreams are my life, the dream that sustains the solitary person that I shall be, for ... no man will want to be master. A disposition such as mine is made to live in union only with solitude.” Already, she had determined her method of survival amid her circumstances in a broken family and a strange new land. “I think that dreams which so far have helped me to live, will be my only guide.”
II. INSIDE OUT BEHIND THE PAST
Anais, who refers to herself at the end of her first journal Early Diary (Linotte) as “a poor bird without wings!” because of “That brain! ... affected with a sickness as unknown as the patient,” still recognized precociously — “When I am angry, I write and my anger cools; when I am sad, I write and my melancholy wears off; when I am happy, I write,” unaware that she might truly be her father’s daughter and double, not merely because of her temperament, but because of an inherited bipolarity, a disorder not identifiable as such in her youth or even years beyond but said to pass through the mother’s genes, i.e. her paternal grandmother’s.
“I remember Papa’s strong, unshakable, even stern disposition. There is something in me that gives me an impatience and anger that I can’t combat, and it hurts me terribly ... “
Other characteristics of the manic-depressive nature Anais identified almost explicitly in her Linotte wisdom: “they have nicknamed me ‘Miss Absent-Minded.’ I go through the day putting salt instead of sugar in my coffee, hanging my dresses in the kitchen, answering yes to any question or not answering at all, ... putting the plates in the oven ... sewing things backward ... putting the silverware in a flowerpot...” Thus, no matter her promise at beginning of 1917 “to be joyful ... not to suffer without any reason during the entire year ... I am again with my ‘black thoughts’! Black as ink ... “ However, her “‘attacks of sadness,’” part of her disposition, great fluctuations of mood, primarily prevalent and preserved in the Early Diaries (1-4) are minimized when later the mature writer excises many references to same for the first published public Diary.
At sixteen, she nonetheless said: “I have lost my enthusiasm, my energy, my gaiety ... I can’t be ‘good’ for very long ... I am so terribly, terribly tired and that’s why I am sad.” She attributes her melancholy as coming “from indifference, bitterness ... and a liver attack.”
If her father influenced Linotte’s temperament both positively and negatively, so did her mother’s attitude towards marriage and motherhood in Rosa’s silence regarding why they journeyed from France to America without the father, who the artist/child could only interpret as more devoted to his art than the family. “I always compare my career as a bluestocking to a victory and marriage to a defeat,” she wrote, adding, “Maman has such a bad opinion of the masculine sex, and even my brothers are examples of supreme selfishness, in spite of their good qualities.” No wonder Anais is most surprised to learn of her father that “‘He deserted us?’”
Rosa Culmell responds to her, “... he made our life very unhappy because he was very brutal. He would lock me up in one room so as to be able to beat you ... You must remember many scenes of brutality, don’t you?”
Thus, not yet seventeen, a more enlightened Anais writes in her diary, “I have really lost my faith in ... men.” Still, as the dutiful daughter, she continued to write her father, the artist: “I am not yet a cynic ... However, I am full of contradictions because I never stop idealizing all the people around me ... I realize regretfully that it is in vain.”
