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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 the title story of what was originally Anais’ “Woman No Man Could Hold” book, Alain’s wife says, “There must be a trip one can take and come back from changed forever ... I am tired of struggling to find a philosophy which will fit me and my world. I want to find a world which fits me and my philosophy.”
At age 27, Anais writes in her diary, “When I am less afraid of filling in, between intend and poetical writing, with human, consciously written pages (the diary?), the work will be more complete and have more blood.” Already, her writing is diverging from her mentor’s because of Anais’ subtle sense of the comic.
Thus, in “Waste of Timelessness,” Alain’s wife (Anais) lets readers know that indeed she has been dreaming, creating art for a long time and only now in her twenties awakening to the “real” world and to “the reality” of what her senses need, that to which she has been heretofore oblivious. “I made the sacrifice of marrying a banker and few people know what a misfortune that is!” Anais, the wife, tells her diary.
In “The Song in the Garden,” the narrator “watched herself as an insect,” thinking “she might be growing wings, such as she had seen in holy books.” In keeping with Anais’ growing disenchantment with idealism, this character/narrator reflects: “She needed not the key to the universe; the universe was in her.” Always licking her wounds regarding the father who abandoned her, now Anais wonders if she has erred in her marriage. “If up to now she knew one had to live with fervor, and with intelligence, she soon learned one had not only to live for an idea, or die for it, but also fight for it.” The idea is her independence as an artist.
Valerie Harms, whose Magic Circle Press published her own Stars in My Sky in 1976 (a year before the press published Anais’ youthful stories of Waste of Timelessness) says that Anais’ first novel was written when she was 19 “... about a girl named Aline who poses for artists in order to earn money for her father and brother.
Anais’ next novel, written when she was 25, focuses on “Rita, a muse of the men but a strong believer in the talents of women. The men are rather chauvinistic ... but by the end they learn to be more sensitive.”
Harms says that in this 150 page unfinished novel, Rita’s husband, Joseph, replies: “I can’t say I find our marriage is peaceful or as secure as before. You have shown a spirit which frightens me ... I suppose now it is up to me to keep you from wanting to go.”
Anais’ third unpublished novel, known as the John novel (first identified as Duncan) is about 170 pages long, written when Anais was living in France again; however, the first person point of view makes the writing less Lawrentian and more Anais. “The leading character ... is a woman who paints. She is married to Duncan ... (who) talks about when he will create but cannot match the constant creative force of his wife.”
She was afraid of her body. When she looked at it in the mirror, she observed the mystery of its separate individual life.
Harms interprets this narrator/character as realizing she has deceived herself about Alain (a playwright) and “she dispels the illusion she built” around him. “... she had discovered in several ways that there was no sensuality in Alain, that it was all on the surface.” (Valerie Harms and I both had the opportunity to read unpublished early novels by Anais with Moira Collins at the Northwestern U. Library — Special Collections in Evanston, Illinois in the Seventies.)
Only in 1996 did I realize that Anais had rewritten totally Lawrence’s two stories “The Princess” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.” Anais said of the former story in her Study that it was a “fairy tale of mysterious individuality,” with “The Princess” learning from her father: “in the middle of everybody there is a green demon which you can’t peel away ... and it doesn’t care at all about the things that happen to the outside leaves of the person.”
In “The Princess,” the girl experiences the sensuality she has yearned for, only after her father dies ; but she rejects it as base and false when offered to her by a common man (much like Henry Miller). She prefers instead to marry a man like her father, who will treat her as “The Princess.” Many of the men Anais was attracted to in her life bore a strong physical resemblance to her father, as may be evidenced in photographs within the diaries.
Harms interprets that Anais in the John novel “chronicled death in a relationship and followed it further than she had ever gone before.” Anais, however, may only have chronicled suppression of her own conflict, i.e. the woman as self-contained, solitary artist vs. “the Woman No Man Could Hold.” In any event, Anais therapeutically had worked through her obsession with John Erskine, her husband’s mentor, a married novelist she may have imagined might serve her as Mellors did, Lady Chatterly’s Lover.
In Lawrence’s “the Woman Who Rode Away,” the tragic heroine, a mother and wife who longed for time alone as well as adventure, rides off into the mountains and is sacrificed in a primitive ritual. Of course, she is never to return to the sameness of her routine marriage. However, in “The Gypsy Feeling,” Anais creates a more positive ending to a woman’s desire, also the rudimentary conclusion of the later House of Incest prophesied in the beginning of “The Gypsy Feeling” when Mariette sees Lolita dance.
“She made Mariette think ... of the sun stirring in generous gold bodies an ever rising and spurting sap ... slow undulations ... and then riotous dancing with feet, body and arms all at once ... arms curling and uncurling with joy, spiral movements of the body, turn and swirl ... and a smile of knowing intimate triumph, for the blood of the audience has caught up with her rhythm and they too are panting with ardent joy ...”
Anais also had been dancing, thinking she might become both a Spanish dancer and a writer, “melting more and more into the universal woman, by my physical attributes, my coquetry, my desire to please, my dancing.” She believed she had freed herself from her obsessive attraction to Erskine, “his book, his work, his life, his lack of understanding — and I feel free of him.” Thus, Anais ended her youthful story: “And all the strength she gathered from the freshness and the solitude would burst into dancing, dancing to the rhythm of her blood, and to the climax of her own emotions ... dancing a gypsy feeling.” Ironically and humorously, Marietta is approached by the suitor of her mother named Lolita.
Vicariously, Anais writes, “through the imagination, I am living out those things which are forbidden to me.”
“The Russian Who Did Not Believe in Miracles and Why “ affirms this belief (even though she has not yet met Henry Miller). The Russian says, “I like to imagine I have died, and then suddenly come into a new life.” The woman in the story tells him, “You could do that without dying ... we can throw off yesterday’s man like an old coat we don’t want anymore, and actually enter into a new life ...”
When the Russian says he wants to make love to her, she tells him, “For a change the one woman you won’t have. Isn’t that interesting?” Anais is still at war with the inner and outer woman, the one who would be content to dream of love vs. “the woman no man could hold.”
This is expressed in “The Dance Which Could Not Be Danced,” which is “within herself ... hidden to human eyes” as the dancer wears “shawls and flowers ... a dance within a dance, a dream within a dream ... with the perpetual cadence of inviolate living.”
From drifting on the boat “away from this world down some strange wise river into strange wise places,” in the title story, Anais longs still so very much for “red roses, red roses” that in “Red Roses,” the narrator ordered them to be delivered to herself, symbolic of the fiery passion she feels guilty for craving. However, the protagonist “carries them running to the Church” where she will add them to the flames of “flowers and candles perpetually offered in sacrifice,” the opposite climax that occurred in Lawrence’s “The Woman Who Rode Away,” wherein the woman herself was sacrificed for her secret desire.
Anais writes, “She could add her dead roses ... sent by man to the virgin ... as an offering, of secret joy, and abdication.” In essence, Anais has added her own postscript to Lawrence’s story, allowing this sensual woman to return, to live again and tell her sensuous tale.
Still, Anais feels somewhat guilty for being so “modern as truly an inner feminist (a free woman) when in “Red Roses,” the character says, I cannot bear it when my desires are fulfilled,” just as Lawrence’s “The Princess” could not.
“Our Minds Are Engaged” concerns two people who reunite “after eight years of separation.” In her premonitory way, Anais has written a story that could apply to herself and her love for cousin Eduardo; her husband Hugo; her father; and prophetically, her lover Henry Miller, the latter two whom she would meet in less than two years after this story was written.
“He went to the very edge of the bowl and fell out of it ... He exhausted his physical impulses, and then returned. He did not want that climax ... What he desired was wholeness and normalcy.”
As they “talk ... about their desire for connection with life through love and through creation ... all the while they wished a connection between themselves.” Anais longed for the Prince who would be her equal. However, “She was tired of a man who could fear a woman’s strength.” Yearning to be the liberated woman in contrast to Hugo’s belief that “the test of great love is endurance,” Anais also bemoaned the fact that her type of writing was unrecognized and unappreciated. “Today I swear to continue in my seclusion, never to desire to be known, to go on with my work, as I have always done, without any popular encouragement,” she reveals in Early Diary IV.
In “Alchemy,” an author’s wife receives his visitors, curious to see and know all details depicted in his novel Desperate Caverns. Anais admits her own dalliance with Erskine in this story (probably not consummated, as revealed in The Early Diaries) when she has the author’s wife openly understand her husband’s “illicit passion to ... a lovely woman.” The wife confesses to her guests that she is the plot and substance of her husband’s stories. But the truth falls on deaf ears.
Does the same hold true for modern times and those critics who do not comprehend the gravity of what F. Scott Fitzgerald did when he used his wife Zelda’s life and sometimes even her written words as his own? Harms asks us, as have other critics who happen to be women. (We shall later see how Anais’ words were also used without acknowledgement in reference to Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire, possibly inspired by her “Stella” and certainly followed by her own bold answer with A Spy in the House of Love.)
“Tishnar” may remind readers of a gothic Poe tale with its opening of fog, shadows, rain; a composite of the character’s inner, sorrowful state (Anais’?). The poetic prose is prelude to House of Incest, the prose poem that ended the writer’s private conflict (at least on a public basis because hidden in her diaries) regarding an artist’s need for solitude and a woman’s craving for companionship for others.
Realizing she does not want to leave her life, even as she knows it, the woman cannot exit at the exact moment she sees “the face she had long carved in her mind and wanted to find and to love all her life.” Anais had thought of suicide as any young, spurned woman might (or one swayed dangerously by her bipolar disorder?) However, as always, her words were the process of therapeutic self-healing.
In “The Idealist” Edward says to Chantal, “I suppose you have guessed it. I am obsessed by that woman,” the model they both sketch although he thinks her “a legendary apparition.” The story explains any person’s obsession, i.e. Anais’ for John Erskine (and later Henry Miller’s own insatiable need for whores that remind him of his bisexual wife June, depicted in Henry&June.) Hugo once said to Anais, “You fall in love with people’s minds” (referring to Henry Miller explicitly, but serving also as an acute observation of his artistic partner).
Chantal says to Edward that she understands his obsession. “I know. I know ... I have known all those feelings. My will has been dissolved.” He looks “crushed” because he states that he has “lost my ideal of you.” (his ideal of her as woman, embodiment of pure perfect untouchable illusion, virgin?)
“The Peacock Feathers” is very Lawrentian about “a lady in the white house who had collected birds from all parts of the world.” She invites a singer to her home where “the peacock paced up towards the voice and listened ... The next day the peacock was dead.” The singer is given the peacock’s feathers, but strange calamities begin to befall her: a musician kills himself at a concert when she begins to sing the compositions of others; she writes her memoirs, but they are “misinterpreted ... Many people ... satirized her ... It is the fault of the peacock feathers.”
The singer smokes “a long pipe,” but when “she ceased smoking she was empty of all energy and looked haggard.” Although the singer blames everything on the peacock feathers, she keeps them, “to say to those who observed her ruin: It was the fault of the peacock feathers.”
The theme of this story juxtaposes with Anais’ chapter in her Study titled “Fantasia of the Unconscious” where she quotes Lawrence in his Studies in Classical Literature as saying, “‘Commandments should fade as flowers do ...” Anais notes that Lawrence “expressed the instinct that there was a moment for ... the utmost clarity ... ‘individuals who would create each one his own living formulas ...’”
In “Cocksure Women and Hensure Men,” within Sex, Literature and Censorship edited by Harry Moore, Lawrence said, “It is the tragedy of the modern woman ... cocksure ... without ever listening for the denial which she ought to take into count. She is cocksure, but she is a hen all the time ... Having lived her life with such utmost strenuousness and cocksureness, she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness!” This is precisely Anais’ conflict, cocksure, but henny (at this age) as Hugo’s wife.
In “Faithfulness,” irony abounds when Aline is visited by Alban, the playwright, who tells her, “Nobody talks about the unconscious with fashionable consciousness ... You should be the wife of a writer.” He refers to Sherman, her husband, and to the businesslike milieu of the room. “Here are the pipes ... the office armchair”
as not befitting her temperament.
Another friend visits her and says, “I may be a clumsy old brute, but it seems to me you don’t love him.” Of course, Aline responds, “You’re all wrong there, Mr. Bellows.”
When Sherman returns home, she reports the whole conversation as something totally absurd. “Can you imagine such nerve, such nerve!” He laughs and replies, “You dear, faithful, honest little wife.”
Anais longs to be truthful, but she cannot hurt the man who has been so good to her, to her two brothers and to her mother.
“A Spoiled Party” includes a woman “beautifully costumed in emerald green, watery silk,” (Anais disguised again?) “personification of self-knowledge” as Harms interprets. The stranger, like two faces of Eve or Janus, eye to eye, recognizes herself as a split woman, one who longs for cocksuredness while in the henny state, and this is Anais’ dilemma: whether to be the psychoanalyst of the creator exclusively or to be truly passionate beyond imagination. “The experiences of this woman are imaginary — most of her which fascinates ... is imaginary!”
In Early Diary IV, Anais had written: “I understood Lawrence’s writing for what it was. Someday they will understand mine for what it is.” She proclaimed, “I am a whole woman. I have put my soul into everything my body has done ... I ... have had no need of sophistry, no need of pride to sustain me. I have given, often unwisely, and I have lost nothing!”
The final story “A Slippery Floor” in this early sequence approved for release by Anais, reveals “A new woman, daring and assured.” In (December ‘31 when the author met Henry Miller through Richard Osborn, a young lawyer in the same department of the bank where Hugo was employed, Anais had consulted Osborn regarding the publisher’s contract for her Lawrence book.)*
Anita, the Spanish dancer in the story was “at the end of (her) ephemeral career,” aspirations in that art. “She wanted a fantastic destiny instead of a wise one ... endless voyages, the perpetually shifting ground of stage life, rather than security.” As “a dream-swallower,” she knew Boris was right when he told her, books don’t teach everything.”
Confronting Vivien, the actress who had made Anita’s father unhappy (no doubt representative of Anais’ musician father), she is told her rationale for Vivien’s absence which is stirring in Anais at this time since she too is “growing wings.”
“Passion is exacting ... It never thrives on an idea ... of faithfulness ... I have loved white heat living.”
Anita meets her mother’s lover Norman and is shocked to learn, “I don’t love her anymore ... I love you.” Anita relays this to Vivien who tells her to go with her feelings and not “spoil it all with scruples.” Anita, however, prefers to “resist” the unscrupulous loving style of Vivien; her indecisiveness sends Norman away, back to her mother. The masochistic and/or sacrificial theme is apparent: An artist seeks what is self-destructive, whether consciously or unconsciously. (Possibly a tormented artist more than a mature one, or a bipolar artist who receives no help with a serious mood disorder because schizophrenia and bipolarity were mistakenly identified as the same if even distinguished separately.)
Anais is conflicted about which path she herself will follow. She wants to be a dutiful spouse, yet within her is also the Donna Juana temperament of the artist, associated with her long-lost, moody father.
Anais has a conversation with Hugo, her husband, on this very subject of fidelity versus freedom with its jealous ramifications for either partner. Hugo says that his “jealousy would be stronger than his fancy for anyone.”
Anais responds, “then I must find a way to help you calm your jealousy so you can enjoy yourself — by secrecy. If we say nothing to each other it will not arouse your jealousy ...”
When Hugo says, “No more of this nonsense talk,” Anais repeats, “But I do think it ought to be a secret.”
“I agree,” said Hugo.
Anais thus believes (or wants to believe) everything settled although Hugo has considered the discussion hypothetical. September ‘31 entry includes Anais’ further belief: “But I never wished for our old, peaceful, falsely ideal and unreal marriage.”
Constantly unsettled with this tormenting inner desire, Anais writes: “life is also in desire, also in work. When one fails you the other two can keep you alive.” Of course, she feels this way because of the double standard of that society and her Catholic upbringing, as well as example of her mother, Rosa Culmell, too involved working to even have time for matters of the heart.
“But a man without means can always find an object. The only way out is to eliminate feeling,” Anais wrote. “One man is as good as another, biologically speaking. I write this and I absolutely cannot convince myself.”
While Anais was living “in a quiet house once lived in by Turgenev,” (actually Madame du Barry) according to photographer Brassai* in The Paris Years, Henry Miller was living with Richard Osborn, “the Diary consisting of no fewer than forty-two volumes.” Brassai recalled how Anais “remembered having read an article about Bunuel’s Golden Age by someone of that name ... and been struck by the savage, primitive exuberance of the prose ... his fierce appetite for living, his verile sensuality ...”
Miller, a German-American born in Brooklyn, may be the incarnation for Anais for “The Russian Who Did Not Believe in Miracles and Why.” In Henry&June from the Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, Anais describes Miller, upon their meeting in December 1931. “Henry has imagination, an animal feeling for life ... the truest genius I have ever known. ‘Our age has a need of violence’ he writes. And he is violence.” She adds, “I enjoy his strength, his ugly, destructive, fearless, cathartic strength.”
However, talking to her diary later, Anais reveals, “You don’t know what sensuality is. Hugo and I do. It’s in us, not in your devious practices: it’s in a feeling, in passion, in love.” Anais was now more drawn to Miller’s second wife, June Mansfield. “I was like a man, terribly in love with her face and body ... I wanted to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, ‘You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence ... If I love you, it must be because we shared ... the same madness, the same stage.’”
Influenced by her cousin Eduardo and having read Problems of Destiny, written by Dr. Allendy, Anais goes to see him, with varied conflicts, even though she writes, “Analysis is for those who feel paralyzed by life.” While she does not feel paralyzed, she longs for her Mellors as Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly did to awaken her to everything, including her duality: the lesbianism June knows, made a caricature of by Henry Miller in Crazy Cock “without charity, without feeling.” (Not what Anais has planned to create for June at this time.)
She writes “fifteen little pieces like bits of prose poems” as her beginning “to achieve Debussyism;” after this, she “made a note on the psychoanalysis of the creator: ‘creation by undirected imagining — a trance — produces subconscious poetry.’” She believes herself surrealistically “influenced by transition magazine and Breton and Rimbaud.” She is half-aware also that Henry has cast a spell over her. “My father had icy blue eyes ... I became a child listening to Henry, and he became paternal ... I felt as if he had discovered a shameful secret ...” Anais has often referred to House of Incest as her own “Season in Hell.”
Her apparent bipolarity is overshadowed by a greater childhood trauma; she yearns to be the Don Juan her father was as well as an artist in addition to Hugo’s dutiful wife and Rosa’s “good” daughter, an obsessive notion that had preoccupied her for years. At 18 when she read Sydney Smith on “Female Education,” Anais rightfully interpreted these early nineteenth century essays when she reflected, “they seemed to mean but one thing: Choose between your home and domestic happiness — and your pen and your books.” The choice seemed unbearable, i.e. “to banish ... love ... (for) absolute loneliness in the life of study and labor.”
Anais resolved this conflict with “the key to contentment, the charm which dispels my ‘dark clouds’ .... (as) ‘work for others. Never cease working for others. Do not think of yourself!’” Yet, she admits she could easily be tempted “to hide somewhere, to be left alone with my ‘dark cloud.’” This is not only characteristic of the Nin temperament but also the absorbed artist in conflict with the evolving woman who, even after six months with Miller as her lover, could write: “With all the tremendous joys Henry has given me I have not yet felt a real orgasm.”
She tells Dr. Allendy, “I have imagined that a freer life would be possible to me as a lesbian because I would choose a woman, protect her, work for her, love her for her beauty while she could love me as one loves a man, for his talent, his achievements, his character ... remembering Stephen in The Well of Loneliness.” This is the secret to the mystical prose-poem, first published in 1936 in Paris as Siana Editions (Anais spelled backwards.) However, in Diary of Anais Nin, the first one released in 1966, years before the posthumous Early Diaries, Anais veils the theme as she did those truths that might be painful to others or herself.
On December 31, 1931, Anais writes:
“My descent into the inferno is a descent into the irrational devil of existence, where the instincts and blind emotions are loose ... pure impulse ... my misery is a great joy. It is when I become conscious again that I feel unutterable pain.”
Valerie Harms in The Stars in My Sky has interpreted House of Incest with the added research of early drafts of this work “composed in seven psychologically sequential sections ... narrated in the first person.”
The Preface is germinal:
ALL THAT I KNOW IS CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK WRITTEN WITHOUT WITNESS, AN EDIFICE WITHOUT DIMENSION, A CITY HANGING IN THE SKY.
In Henry&June*(Aug, 1932), Anais wrote: “I have remained the woman who loves incest.” In Incest (from Journal of Love)** she assessed “the schema of my lyrical book ... franker than Lawrence’s treatment of homosexuality ... as, for instance, incest does not mean only possession of the mother or sister — womb of women — but also of the church, the earth, nature. The sexual fact is the lead weight only ...”
The essence of the plot is the narrator (Anais) and Sabina (June), “one woman within another, eternally.” This does not mean only sexually but possibly unconsciously also two personalities joined, the manic with depressive. Anais sought the opposite of Miller’s style: “when he writes, he does not write with love, ... (but) to attack.”
“I AM THE OTHER FACE OF YOU” in House of Incest refers to more than the mystery of love between women that Anais explained in the first released Diary I (Harcourt, 1996) the same as she had in Henry&June; for she was now devoted to Miller’s “intellect and emotionalism” while admitting her affinity to June Mansfield. “I have her in myself now as one to be pitied and protected.” However, Anais added, “I was a fettered etheral being; in spite of my intellect.”
Anais’ words also refer to acceptance/rejection of her two personalities:
“The love between women is a refuge and escape into harmony. In the love between man and woman there is resistance and conflict. Two women do not judge each other, brutalize each other ... They surrender to mutual understanding ... Such love is death.”
Although the narrator (Anais) believes she now knows what it means to love a woman (Lawrence’s Women in Love), she does not, literally, in as much as she does not understand the bipolar temperament.
“There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through ... I am an insane woman for whom houses wink and open their bellies ... I am enmeshed in my lies, and I want absolution ... I prefer fairy tales.”
Harms translates that “through dream imagery she (Anais) tries to understand her birth and the woman she is becoming.”
However, Anais may also be masking the truth of another merging, a childhood trauma she can never reveal to anyone, which we know now may have involved the first seduction by her father when she was barely ten years old.
Anais’ mentor, D. H. Lawrence, said in “The State of Funk” essay published a few years before she began House of Incest, “As a novelist, I feel it is the change inside the individual which is my real concern ... I am going to accept my self sexually as I accept myself mentally and spiritually ... My sex is me as my mind is me, and nobody will make me feel shame about it.” Anais may have created House of Incest to minimize the deep shame she still felt for what happened in her childhood at a time when she also was guilty for betraying Hugo who did not satisfy her physically in the passionate way Miller did or the delicate, poetic facade of June’s persona.
In her Study on Lawrence (Anais appears to have created her prose-poem in the same fashion), she analyzed “Fish” in the chapter “The Poet.” Anais stated, “We are not merely looking at fish ... We are by a kind of magic shedding our human feelings like a costume, to enter ... -the world of the fish.” In the first released Diary of Anais Nin (Harcourt ‘66), July, 1932, she still reveals her affinity to Lawrence and not Henry Miller; however; “I see the symbolism of our lives. I live on two levels, the human and the poetic. I see the parables, the allegories. “
Although the mature Anais who wrote Novel of the Future has said, “All my stories are based on reality,” while prefacing that admission with, “The external story is what I consider unreal,” the psychoanalyst of the artists and herself knows: “Psychoanalysis may be the study of neurosis, but while studying illness, it has given us techniques for discovery of the hidden self.”
At one point Anais had both a housekeeper named Jeanne and a friend, very attached to her brothers, which Anais certainly identified with because of her own admiration for Joan of Arc. Anais had translated one of her middle names Juana as Jeanne. In House of Incest, the narrator says, “But Jeanne ... only the fear of madness will drive us out of the ... sacredness of our solitude,” when Jeanne confesses, “I LOVE MY BROTHER!” *
For BROTHER, substitute FATHER since Anais wrote in Incest (published diary volume of previous expurgated material of October 1932): “I will put pages of my journal into the book but never pages of the book into the journal.” When she visited Dr. Allendy, Anais was also well aware of “The pathological basis of creation!” In June, 1932 in The Diary of Anais Nin (Vol. I, first Harcourt ‘66) she relates a memory when her youngest brother Joaquin was taken to the hospital with appendicitis. “He is not only my brother, he is my child ... I love my brother ... man, my brother. Needing care and devotion.” In the simultaneous (but unpublished until 1992) Incest from Journal of Love:
“I am so absolutely woman that I understand my Father the human being — he is again the man who is also child ... I meet my Father and I am strong ... My Father comes when I have lived out the blind, cruel instinct to punish ...”
This masks the punishment she wanted to return to him for having abused her as a child.
Unlike Henry Miller or anyone who might gaze in horror upon those who love differently, Anais had “compassion” early on as revealed in House of Incest. “We all looked now at the dancer at the center of the room dancing the dance of the woman without arms” who does not grow these wings of flight again until she realizes why “she was condemned not to hold.”
So too, Anais, as Brassai notes when she met Henry Miller, tried “everything: travel, pleasure, creativity, drunkenness, even drugs” while still searching “for the ‘eternal moments’ not in the reminiscence or in the ‘ruminescence,’ but in the very same instant and life as the spirit of photography.”
In House of Incest, the dancer’s arms and hands returned to her because she did not cling; nonetheless, such a conclusion may only describe one facet of Anais and the narrator, who says: “All flowing, all passing, all movement choked me with anguish.” Still, the dancer turns “to light and to darkness calmly, dancing towards daylight.” Anais who took up dancing to escape the pain of her fluctuating moods and insulation as a writer/reader was certainly also turned to the light as the dancer in her prose-poem. However, since Anais may also be the narrator, we know that She looked upon all that was before her as though it were a play on stage.
