|
enjoy this Rochelle Lynn Holt writing in the 2010 RE-release of her book Anais Nin: an Understanding of her Art |
 |
Enjoy this perfect-bound paperback book! Click on the cover or any linked text to order this book. |
|
At twelve, Anais wrote that every time she heard the Marseillaise, she felt as though she had wings, “as though a divine force has hold of me. Could it be Joan of Arc ... ?” Perhaps she gained a certain moral strength from this martyred Frenchwoman, “girl who incarnated the soul of courage” (childhood poem Dec 9, 1915.) However, her empathy had intensified the month before when she saw the life of Edgar Allan Poe at the cinema.
“I understood the sorrow he felt in losing Virginia, his wife, and it seems to me that the life he led, full of dreams and illusions, will also be mine. Yes, I shall live in dreams because reality is too cruel for me.”
Two years later, disenchanted with public school, Anais persuaded her mother Rosa to permit her daughter to “drop out.” Anais said, “I go there to learn, but soon I shall leave it and learn what I want to know with my friends, my best companions: my books.” Simultaneously, young Anais was also becoming disillusioned with religion. At sixteen, she knew herself well enough, however, “to realize that all the disillusionments that I find in others, I also find in myself.”
Without using the word reincarnation, the transcendent thinker expresses a rare belief when she says that same year: “There are times when I feel as though I have already been an old, old woman and that I am now in second childhood (without anyone knowing it, of course) and with some ideas still remaining with me from the time of my old age.” With this intuitive wisdom, she adds, “I shall write a book that describes life exactly as it appears...”
In that same year in a letter to her childhood friend Frances, Anais writes, “... it does pay to explore human nature” and “that everything almost that causes loss of faith in others is the lack of faith in ourselves.” Most boldly and much like an adventurous explorer, she proclaims at the end of 1919 in the first childhood diary, Linotte, “My favorite poet is Nature” while consciously berating herself for “liv(ing) the books that I am reading.” In a truly Catholic voice beyond the boundaries of church or school, she states, “I must live for others, and live with my heart and imagination joined.”
Always learning, Anais responds to her father’s gift of modern French books, that she is “bewitched by the language” but that she has difficulty forgiving “the realism.” In spite of these disenchantments, she can affirm, “I still hear the fairies murmur. Everything speaks to me, everything is alive — and simply sublimely simple and beautiful!” She is the explorer of Mother Nature, Human Nature and the Nature of her Self. She parallels “the intransigence of life’s beauty” with “change — like the seasons.”
When her mother calls her “fickle,” Anais responds with a mind of her own as any explorer would. “I have the right to love many people at once, and to change my Prince often.”
Her entries in the diary at this time seem to reveal an unconscious awareness of a possibly undiagnosed and clinically unidentified bipolar nature. “I am here with two fixed ideas in mind: write until I become reasonable (for I am morbid and unhappy), and tell you what is happening.” The romantic vs. the realist is still founded in despised obedience as the dutiful daughter who seems to have inherited tendencies toward manic-depression. “Even if I must search around the world, I shall find my Shadow — tall, and strong, and noble, generous, faithful ... He will be poor, very poor, and he will need me.”
At the end of Linotte,* on Jan. 4, 1920, Anais notes that the “Nin family is always difficult, because they are aristocrats who have never had much money but who have princely tastes...” Still, for Anais, the “Prince of Princes and ... only King on Earth” remained “sir Diary.”
According to executor for the Anais Nin Trust, Rupert Pole says in Note (preceding her brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell’s Preface,) in The Early Diary Volume 2 (1920-1923): “Anais wrote that Spanish was the language of her ancestors, French, the language of her heart, and English the language of her intellect.” Nonetheless, “Journal d’une Fiancee,” written in English is as philosophical as Linotte composed in French. Anais had titled each of her hand-written volumes although “‘Journal’ contains ... first title for a diary book,” Rupert Pole adds.
At seventeen, while discussing religion with her cousin Eduardo, Anais finds herself “calmly expressing my disbelief in Heaven after death,” although adding she was not “certain of the causes of my disbelief...(or) of their accuracy.” If there is no heaven, one must be immortal in another way. “I am going to be useful and do something worthwhile during my life.” In another letter to Frances, she relates her reading of Socrates and Plato and her thoughts “that long before we existed our souls were living and loving in other worlds, then they come to us, then they leave us again when we die ... can I remain a poet and a philosopher in one?”
Still tormented by rapid cycles of shifting mood, the inner explorer within Anais staunchly says, “Happiness is foolish, but sorrow is inexcusable.” What aids her is “the calm one has while studying, the lasting serenity and inward contentment derived from books,” with the conflict haunting her regarding the use and necessity of these very diaries. “Of course, this scribbling is a waste of time, but I could not give it up now for anything in the world.”
She quotes Bossnet as a further rationalization: “‘To become a perfect philosopher, man need study nothing but himself ... in noticing only what he finds within himself, there will he recognize his Maker.’”
This discovery reverses her thought that “Imagination, its fights, passions, and ecstasies, live in the winged, free, immortal soul. But it is apparently all wrong.” The realist in Anais, struggling privately with her idealism about her absent father, says, “I can please father dimly. I know he was always grave and strict and absorbed ... Father was fond of spanking us ... I feared Father was going to kill Mother ... I would do anything to keep him from lifting my dress and beating me ... Father once killed a cat with a broom.” The dutiful and romantic dreamer remains rightfully conflicted about the father who is the musician she would become, only of language.
“Father! Father! All my life has been one great longing for you. A longing for you as I want you to be.” She is as tormented and confused about his nature as her own which she sees as inherited. “I do not believe in Hell at all, however, and still less in hell on this earth of ours. I do believe ... that we expiate our faults on earth, by sacrifice and suffering; that we atone for our great weaknesses every day.”
By eighteen, Anais has “Emerson for a friend! ... Perhaps you understand the great malady in my spirit better than anyone in the world.” The philosopher intends “to prove that true intellectual friendship can exist” between man and woman, contrary to what she’s read by Tolstoy and others. Maybe she feels her mother was never her father’s friend. In any event, she identifies her love for her cousin Eduardo as “a hunger of the spirit.”
Still battling fluctuating moods, ranging from the ecstasy of mania to the dismal swamp of melancholic despair, Anais finds solace in Emerson who “tells us not to allow ourselves to fall into these extremes. There is a medium state of mind, of quiet self-control, when one is not swayed by each mood and is yet keenly living and conscious and sensitive.”
Thus, when the poet/pragmatist Hugh Guiler, known as Hugo, enters her life, she is enraptured with their spiritual conversations. “And poetry, after all, being divine, is another name for the Divine Idea.” This is what Anais believed, symbolized in a dream that night after their discussion, in “the shape of a bird...like the pursuit of happiness in Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird.”
So, even though books have “always answered all my needs,” Anais was “long(ing) for good, wise and true friends ... the most beautiful ... in the world, next to love?” However, two years before her marriage to the American banker Hugo in Cuba and before she was out of her twenties, she admits the meaning of her “vision of truer happiness for mother. God help me!” She has sacrificed herself for the financial security of everyone, despite her premonition about Hugo. “I find him too cold-blooded, too deliberate ... I long for a contradiction. I do not want things to happen according to law and order and plan ... what troubles me: his wisdom, his calmness!”
At nineteen, Anais, the explorer, had stated with certainty: “I worship not so much the actions of men but what moves them to such actions ... I want to know the inner self.” For this reason “like a scientist, I analyze, classify, separate, eager to get at the truth ...”, with all her journals serving as “an honest biography.” Very few writers have given humankind an honest recording of emotions and events, moment by moment, shaped only by the present as opposed to memories of the elusive past.
Whenever self-doubt dwindled her confident spirit, Anais recalled Emerson. “‘Self-trust is the essence of heroism. Self-trust is the essence of heroism.’” While reading her selected books, Anais was also formulating her own beliefs about the “creators with words, the significance of all changes, small or great, deep or superficial” as “in our hands. And so are the new ideals, the changes in love’s forms, the modern demands implied by happiness, the modern interpretation of our freedom.”
Early Diary Volume 2 ends with the resolute Anais stating before her twentieth birthday and marriage to Hugo: “Destiny (is) working out its plan surely and mysteriously toward an end which is to the human mind impossible to devise; the wheel of evolution turning, turning with a blinding swiftness...” She reaffirms that what allows her to accept Hugo’s proposal is not merely divine intervention but intervention of the divine; herself, and her desire to be a writer, an artist.
“God help me, for I am entrusting all to love and binding my very soul to the fulfillment of my human mission. And while the knowing ones whisper: ‘Love passes, Marriage is a failure, Man is selfish,’ I stand unwaveringly, in expectation, my soul filled by visions which elevate me above myself.”
THE PHOENIX AS MENTOR
Anais discovered D. H. Lawrence via Women in Love, two years after her marriage when she was now twenty-two; she wrote of Hugo: “My love for him is tyrannical because it is ideal ... It is with the same puritanical (sic) soul that I look on my father ... to be for me something which he is not in reality ...” She had “sought peace in marriage, and there is none.”
Just as she hoped to invent a new marriage for herself, Anais longed to do the same with literature. “The pure novel does not seem free enough. I have a feverish desire to invent a form for myself, to follow my inclinations, my impulses, to give free play to the queerness within me. For I repress my queerness.” More than a year later she still admits, “My very real self is not wifely, not good. It is wayward, moody, desperately active and hungry.”
In Louveciennes outside Paris, Anais was writing the short stories Waste of Timelessness and other Early Stories (Magic Circle Press ‘77). In the preface, Anais wrote: “I realized that it is valuable for other writers to follow the development of the total work, to observe each step of the maturing process ... Two elements appear here which were to be affirmed in later work: irony and the first hints of feminism.” The influence of D.H. Lawrence, her mentor, is apparent in these early stories, both poetic and philosophical, everything she admired when she read her first novel by the man whom she said understood women so well.
“I read a strange and wonderful book ... concerned only with the description of feelings, sensations, conscious and unconscious, with ideas, and with the physical only as the transcription of spirit — though recognized as having a life in itself ... To do it, Lawrence had to torment and transform ordinary language ... he has an occult power over human life and sees deeper than almost anyone I know.”
Yet, she could even pass judgment on her mentor in her longing to surpass him. “Lawrence is dangerous to the mind ... He knows and he doesn’t know. At least, he doesn’t know what to do with what he knows.”
Interpreting Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Anais’ philosophy was melting and melding into that of her mentor. “Lawrence’s man (Mellors) ... Desire, when selective, ceases to be obscene ... Here is Lawrence the poet and mystic — uncovering the very mystery of true passion, which is half-mystical.”
At this time, Anais was still dancing, yearning to become a Flamenco dancer. “I feel only my body, its burning, its languors, its desires, and its defects.” Five years into her marriage, Anais writes, “... I cannot stay at home. I have a desperate desire to know life, and to live in order to reach maturity ... Unless I am mistaken, Hugo will forgive me.”
In spite of these yearnings, Anais adds, “I can’t live within reality — I must live within stories. Then I will fuse both and surrender the real me to Imagy (her invented, imagined other identity) to the world as One.”
What Anais wrote of D.H. Lawrence in her first published essay, “The Mystic of Sex” (Canadian Forum Oct ‘30) can be said of her as well. “Lawrence was not the man to be defined by one book, and in one moment. He was a language, a setting, a world entirely of his own ... Even within one love there is divided feeling; even within one truth there is divided dual truth ... The poetry and the bare truth exist side by side ... Lawrence knew there was no finality, no solution, no ground one could be certain never to want to move away from ... you will have to shift with shifting truth.”
In “Waste of Timelessness,” title story of Waste of Timelessness, the character Alain Roussel “is the symbol of the unattainable,” Anais’ husband’s own mentor, the best-selling novelist John Erskine. Anais was attracted to the married author, yet he was not the man or the writer to awaken and satisfy all that she craved intellectually and physically.
“The fact is that John is out of my ken because he does not know how to express his feelings, and he is unconscious of mine ... I have made up my mind not to be taken in by imagination again.”
The essay “The Mystic of Sex” was a springboard for the woman ready to dive into sensuality and swimming even deeper into the Mystic’s writing which became her first published book, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (Obelisk ‘32). Anais thus had become the mystic as woman. “He was, like all true poetry, against tepid living and tepid loves ...; he wanted a fulfillment of physical love equal to the mental; he wanted to reawaken impulse, and the clairvoyance of our intuitions.” Exactly what Anais was in the process of doing.
Yet, when her cousin Eduardo told Anais of a marvelous idea he had to write about Lady Chatterly’s Lover and why it should not be banned, generously, Anais replied, “but that is what I have done in my essay ‘Sex or Mysticism?’” Nonetheless, she urged him to try and even offered her notes.
“Lawrence not only gave full expression to the gestures of passion ... he indicated precisely those feelings surrounding sexual experience, and springing from it, which make passion a consummation both of our human and our imaginative life.”
Now, Anais had been reading Marcel Proust, a writer with whom she also identified. “I live too intensely in the Past and outside the usual boundaries of time ... What Proust does not have is an intuition of the future, the power to imagine places never seen, the patience to build up preconceptions ... Proust finds little unity (of past, present, future), besides his central idea of Time and Timelessness, found and fixed by memory, and by observation only. I think I shall find more unity in life.”
She was on the way to this unity when she philosophically allied with Lawrence who said in his “Sex Versus Loveliness” essay (1928): “If you love living beauty, you have a reverence for sex.” Another tenet that became Anais’ was: “The deep psychic disease of modern men and women is the diseased, atrophied condition of the intuitive faculties,” an idea that couldn’t be any more political or ahead of its time, especially in her era. Thus, it was only natural for Anais to support the futuristic poet whose work was banned and misunderstood by many, even after his death, almost a week before she could send “her letter and review of his books.”
Less than a year later, when she had gone to Titus*, a publisher in Paris, with “The Woman No Man Could Hold” akin to Lawrence’s “The Woman Who Rode Away,” Anais then mentioned that she also “had written a book about Lawrence ... a Latin exaggeration,” for she only had “notes, and many ideas.” However, she went home and wrote the study in two weeks since Titus was more interested in the book on Lawrence than in her poetic prose.
“I relied on my instinct. I even wrote the book with my body, as Lawrence would have it — not always intellectually.” Her original title was “D. H. Lawrence: A Study in Understanding,” a totally new criticism that related and identified with the writing as part and parcel of D.H. Lawrence’s identity. “To begin to realize Lawrence is ... to realize philosophy not merely as an intellectual edifice but as a passionate blood-experience ... To him any stability is merely an obstacle to creative livingness ... ‘The secret of all life is obedience ... to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations.’”
Anais recognized the “personages in his book as symbolical” as they would be for her own. If she quoted Lawrence: “‘Love is a relative thing not an absolute,’” it is because she herself was on the path to new human relationships ... Ordinary idealism is composed mainly of dead ideals. And to stick to dead ideals is to die.” What she says about Ursula in Women in Love also befits Anais, “Emptiness in life is more unbearable than death.”
Amazed that “D.H. sought the core of woman ... who has effaced her real self in order to satisfy man-made images,” Anais was aware that her fiction typified exactly this struggle even though she may have erroneously misquoted herself in the first published Diary of Anais Nin 1931-1934 when she said, “The core of the woman is her relation to man.” If she also praises Lawrence’s second talent as a painter (“He would give it (writing) the bulginess of sculpture ... nuances of paint ... rhythm of movement, of dancing ... sound, musicality, cadence,”) the same can be said of her own style since Anais had been a dancer, always was around musicians, created her own fashions and designed the interiors of her abodes with an artist’s mind. In addition, she had tried sculpting and painting after she modeled for both a painter and then a sculptor.
The poet in Anais could easily recognize the poetry in Lawrence’s prose. “Poetry as distinguished from prose is essentially that moment of ecstasy, like a moment in music, in which senses and imagination fuse and flame.” This is precisely what the young writer had set out to do in her unique stories that show she loved and breathed her dead mentor while aiming to create something intrinsically her own and totally distinct from Lawrence.
