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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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Strangely enough, aside from Harms’ “Witch of Words” in Stars in My Sky, very few critics acknowledge why Anais “by writing ... can examine her wounds privately ... The act of creation itself ... a balm, a tonic.” Spencer in Collage of Dreams refers to Anais’ “occasional moods of despair” although notes in Preface to Anais, Art and Artists: A Collection of Essays of being told, before seeing Anais in “the process of death from cancer,” that “Anais is in control of the mood. She sets the tone. What we have to do is wear our brightest, most exotic clothes and sing and dance for her.’”
As she had lived, apparently unaided by anyone regarding her moods, so Anais died. The posthumous Early Diaries I-IV, however, present sufficient evidence of the writer’s ability to wear two masks: her duality of persona, related directly to her undiagnosed but self-acknowledged, characteristic bipolarity; and the secret in her childhood, either buried consciously or (over time) unconsciously, in any event, hidden in reference to the possible child abuse that may have exacerbated her fiercely, rapid-cycling moods.
According to Noel Riley Fitch in her biography, The Erotic Life of Anais Nin, that Anais’ father “seduced his daughter ... is borne out by her subsequent behavior, which fits the classical patterns of a child who has been seduced.” Fitch quotes a fragmentary entry in Anais’ later diary: “‘Guilt about exposing the father. Secrets. Need of disguises. Fear of consequences.’”
In “The White Blackbird,”* that appeared in The Mystic of Sex (two years after the release of Noel Riley Fitch’s biography), Anais depicts a visit with Carteret to the psyschiatric ward of a Paris hospital. “The white blackbird entered into me and that is why the haddock are pursuing me” is a quote based on what the “mad man” told the doctors during his interview.
The doctor in this entry responds, “‘You see, he’s incoherent. It doesn’t make sense, it isn’t logical ... And I am not telling you a mystery story.’”
A similar exchange precedes Tennessee Williams’ depiction of Blanche DuBois which may be a misinterpretation of a disturbed woman or even his misunderstanding of Anais Nin herself (although she remained supportive of him).
However, the characteristics of the bipolar seem evident to the discerning eye in the Diaries as well as the fiction of Anais Nin, even within the Diary of Anais Nin 1931-1934, the first journal edited for commercial publication.
In Linotte, Anais, at age eleven, includes a photo of her pianist father and notes, “The way he plays tells me whether he is sad or gay.” Describing her own disposition, she writes, “I get angry easily.” At age thirteen, she notes, “For me, life is: noise, madness, amusement or pleasure, bitterness.” Two months later, “... when I am sad everything looks dark ... I feel that everything in me is breaking ... except the thread that keeps me on earth ...” At age sixteen, Anais believes “that the predominant feeling in my heart when I am not melancholy is tenderness and pity for the whole world. That doesn’t prevent me from being afraid of it.” She alludes to her return to the state of “the horrible Serious One of the old days!”
At almost seventeen, Anais writes: “no one can understand my strange feelings and my moods. I don’t even understand them myself.” She notes that her friend Frances writes “about melancholy too, so I am wondering if this strange emotion is just a crisis, at our age — and it may pass away.” Anais adds, “I will be happy some day when I have learned how ...” while wondering “who will teach a little philosopher, poet, and linotte to laugh?” On Valentine’s Day a week before this 17th birthday, “Once again it’s a feeling of sad and absolute loneliness — and without any reason. I can’t sleep and would rather write.”
Even though she has Marcus as a boyfriend, Anais says he could not “really understand my strange Desert, my moral solitude.” This isolation and disassociation from humanity she describes adeptly: “the feeling of being alone on a mountain-top, detached from other people, as I observe them.”
The state of paralysis when a depressed person is incapable of concentrating is also depicted perfectly a few days later when rapid-cycler Anais writes: “The days that have passed without my writing were days of ‘attack.’ I went to bed early so that I would sleep instead of think ...Perhaps it is because I am in this state of mind that a simple accusation seems to me unjust.”
Hypersensitivity is a marked trait of the bipolar as is flirtatiousness and, at times, a “hunger” for sensuality, the “blood connection” Lawrence often referred to.
“They call me a coquette? ... Well, fine, a coquette I am.”
Absent-mindedness is another characteristic of bipolarity. “I always regret the scatterbrained things I do!” Anais said, who, like her father, imagined she had varied illnesses and loathed either being “sick” or around people who were. “Oh, Incurable Sickness, Hypochondria!” Workaholism, another trait, is exhibited in Anais’ Early Diary II: “Whenever I dream I feel sadness creeping into my heart, and so I work all day long and it makes me contented.” However, she had actually and intuitively been engaged in art as self-healing since childhood for reasons of the “traumatic experience” and her desire to be an artist like her father. “This seems to be the list of necessities for a would-be author: Imagination, Industry, Perseverance, Patience.”
Acutely cognizant of her severe moods, Anais rationalized, “I suppose I am sleepless and troubled just because I have been very happy lately.” Mania, that extreme elation known as bliss beyond compare (to the bipolar) often is also the cause of insomnia. She metaphorically notes in the same September 1920 entry: “Were I to be made into a pie, I know that at the time to be eaten, blackbirds would fly out of me ... because my mind is indeed in a sad state of contradiction and ecstasies and doubts,” germinal to “The White Blackbird.”
Only one month later on a “rainy, rainy day,” Anais records: “What a lot of things I burned today,” referring to “Plans for the future, at ten years of age, a mania for charity and ambitions then to erect orphanages, asylums, convents, all this with the money I would earn as a painter ...” as well as “confessions, and long articles describing Father and Mother.” At the end of the same month, “Sometimes my heart overflows with a queer happiness. And yet no one is the cause of it, no incident ... nothing outside of my very own self.” At seventeen, Anais rationalizes, “Just as I create the greatest portion of my sorrows, sometimes I create a happy day ...”
Without any direction or guidance, Anais identified the therapeutic value of nature, “the greatest consolation for human woes that heaven ever gave us ... and ... books.” She labeled abnormal curiosity “a pedantic mania” and granted: “I do believe I am developing bibliomania.” Temporary relief, escape, invented explanations for her fluctuating moods combined to provide Anais solace in “these pursuits” from childhood throughout her life. “God sends us our sorrows, and though we, with our human minds, cannot understand His designs in doing so, we must know that they have a divine cause.”
The young artist tried to convince herself stoically of such a stoic belief, but “when the sorrow does come to me ... it takes possession ... and leaves no space for thankfulness.” The determined Anais truly believed that she could balance her moods through self-education and her art, her diaries, for “... wisdom is, after all, a matter of balance and proportion ... (while) sadness is an illness of the heart, and it should be conquered.”
Like Byron, who Jamison in Touched by Fire says, “exerted extraordinary intellectual and emotional discipline ... over a kind of pain that brings most ... to their knees,” Anais fought to overcome the negative associations of a “Byronic” temperament: theatrical, Romantic, brooding ... heroic ... cynical, passionate” which Jamison asserts “from part of the argument for a diagnosis of manic-depressive illness.”
Anais sought her own intuitive cures also when she urged her mother to let her go to the city (NY): “If I stay home ... I write and read all day and when night comes I want to throw myself into a river ...” Ever the idealist and psychoanalyst of the artist and herself, she adds, “Sadness gives you a greater knowledge of the Soul, and a joy of knowledge of what is tangible and real in life.”
In Journal d’une Fiancee,* from June 1922 to January 1923, Anais further identifies the fear most bipolars have regarding whether the severe mood known as manic (or its opposite, the state of depression), is visible to others. This fear, coupled with Anais’ rebellious and growing feministic attitude, may explain her statement: “If you have a mind, make a secret of it, or bury it in some sort of secret place, but for heaven’s sake do not use it ... my spirit will never bow to these things ... I shall teach my body, and the outer envelope, to endure, and to appear resigned, and neither by word nor by look shall I betray the fire within me.”
At this time, Anais, however, is not only mentally fluctuating but physically burgeoning with her natural desires as a woman which she attributes to her fluctuating moods. “I struggle against ... the animal in life, against which my whole nature rebels violently.” Why? one might ask. She hints at something greater than abandonment by the father, even greater than her moods, always intensified by either insensitive remarks and certainly some traumatic experience as well as evincing the nature of a bipolar.
“The gift of seeing beyond the facts ... into the thing itself ... That is what truth is!” Anais writes. “I am still and shall forever be alone in my sorrows, because they are always deeper than the normal and reasonable and can be neither shared nor communicated to others.” This entry only a few months before she will marry at age twenty.
When Hugh Guiler, her American fiancee, has doubts about Anais, she writes him, “I am intent on dissolving all your fears of the ‘high peaks of life’ habit which so distressed you.”
Towards the end of this second Early Diary (Journal d’une Fiancee), Anais also has doubts about herself: “Will I lose myself in these labyrinths of personalities, assumed yet unassumed, sincere and yet unstable, real and yet fictitious ...?” Anew, however, she rationalizes that her duality may be the result of knowing three languages which may conflict her regarding all thoughts. English poetry brought her “a deep and enduring enchantment besides which all the evanescent qualities of the Spanish, the fire, the passion, the enthusiasm, gradually fade.”
By the end of this diary, Anais still denies that she hides from her journal the reasons that worsen her varied moods, in her mind, “my two personalities,” although she may have known why she had “shame ... courage’s shadow.” Readers only learned of the seductions by her father after Anais’ death which may allude to “self-condemnation” and “I am going to be good.”
Susan Kavaler-Adler says in The Compulsion to Create ...: “From Nin’s descriptions of her father, we can infer that she suffered severe oedipal humiliation, seductive paternal exploitation, and her father’s use of her for his own narcissistic mode of mirroring in which he sought a compulsory reflection of his own grandiosity.” The clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst indicates that “Nin’s anguish, confusion, and manic and depressive reactions to despair” are normal, but she does not acknowledge that Anais herself is a manic-depressive (as Nin’s father appeared to be) in reference to Jamison’s description of the Byronic mercurial Don Juan temperament often associated with bipolars.
April 7, 1921, Anais wrote: “I am suffering still, suffering with the fear of suffocation ...Someday the long pent-up emotions will break forth in some furious, dangerous rebellion. Music doubles the pain.” The next day, “I am so glad to be alive!” She “humbly recognize(s) the fault to lie in me” which shows she has disassociated herself from her father and any memory of a painful experience in her past childhood, conscious only that she had to work more assiduously at becoming “balanced.”
In Early Diary Vol. III, R. Maynard, the painter of Anais’ “Unfinished Portrait” asks if she ever has fears of her diaries “falling into other’s hands.” Anais confides in him that she has used “a sort of protection by generalizing ... by vagueness ... by maintaining a peculiar impersonality.” At 21 she admits she does this less often but that there is “one subject I often long to write about particularly,” although she does not because it “might cause a great deal of trouble.” She also notes that her “idealism has been mixed with fatalism.”
When she sees her father in December 1924, she has forgiven him “for the most illogical of causes ... the heartrendering (sic) pity ... for what I once hated.” Cryptic? Later, she notes her Father “was Paris — intelligent, insidious, cultured Paris.” Her “reaction to sensuality causes ... infinite pain.” And not long after this traumatic event of seeing her Father a decade after the “abandonment,” Anais is “struggling against one of my worst ‘crises’ — a deep, unreasonable, intensely painful melancholy.”
Anais has to cope with her intense moods as well as endure the repressed (or recalled?) childhood event which may combine with inexplicable guilt regarding the pleasure of her punishment, distinctly aggravating to any depression.
“In dancing, I shake off sorrow,” she writes, because the daily act of self-analysis for so long a time only intensifies “dissatisfaction, my doubts, my desires, my restlessness ... a kind of madness.” But Anais was a workaholic obsessed with “not wasting time,” another characteristic of fastidious bipolarity.
Kavaler-Adler commends Anais for “working through her wounds ... Nin used her creative work to express her struggle and navigated her way through it.’ Silently, “Nin gains affective awareness of childhood traumas so that they can be resolved.” Indeed, by the end of the third Early Diary, Anais surely was familiar with the pattern or cycle of her moods: “Have been depressed and self-centered and critical. Such a familiar mood had to come alter a month of insouciance and action and exhilarating fullness.” Returned to Paris, she takes up smoking, “tense with memories of another arrival.”
In Early Diary IV, Anais is preoccupied with another “eternal problem” as the artist who struggles with her best vehicle for her work. “Turn the Journal into a novel? Copy out the Journal as it is?” She acknowledges “Erskine’s own writing” as liberat(ing) my intelligence from scruples” while crediting Sherwood Anderson as the writer “who liberated my feelings and dreams from timidity and self-consciousness ... Dancing (though) has liberated my body ...” Nonetheless, Anais, who describes her life as “rich, beautiful, creative,” confesses that she “continue(s) to suffer” while blaming no one but herself.
“I only mark Time with experience, and learning and suffering.” She is bent on “conquer(ing) faults ... for lying (another bipolar trait); ... jealousy (another form of obsession/compulsion/neuroticism, all bipolar characteristics); desire to outdo everybody;” (perfectionism which is that side of mania that becomes the other side of despair when failure occurs. )
Jamison’s research of artists and writers “in the group with no history of treatment showed mood and productivity curves that more closely corresponded with one another.” (It would be an equally intriguing project for someone to chart Anais’ moods with her work patterns although she may also have been a victim of SAD — Seasonal Affective Disorder, which would have to be figured in along with the rapid-cycling bipolarity.)
“The sunshine healed me, the smells, the colors, the dry air.” Throughout her diaries and fiction, Anais alludes to her healing “sunbaths” a.k.a. D.H. Lawrence’s story “Sun.” April 5, 1928: “An inexplicable sadness, a terrible emptiness, a burning of the blood ... I suffer most of all from a breaking up of myself ... I feel weak, soft, multiple.”
The diary that has been her friend and constant companion is now seen as something much more. “I owe to it what some people owe to psychology: knowledge of myself.” Formally, her cousin had introduced her to psychoanalysis. “Eduardo wants to get rid of the past, as I want to get rid of it ... I have been, until yesterday, my own analyst.” Anais realized she needed help. “I’m sick. I have been too unhappy and too tired ... Winter is here ... my old enemy and tormentor.”
While she waited for the right opportunity or analyst, Anais began “the Second Book drawn from my Journal ... I am beginning to feel the need of fiction, of a disguise.” Hugo commented on the transformation. “You seem to have finished just suffering life and are beginning to dominate it.”
Like Byron, whose poetry Jamison indicates “masks his passion and makes it endurable art,” quoting Byron himself, an extraordinarily disciplined bipolar: “‘Yet — see, he mastereth himself, and makes/His torture tributary to his will, “ Anais too had decided to conquer her temperament. “I possess a power of magic” to “destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny — with my diabolical mind.”
That doesn’t mean she will be the master of her moods. For the artist who is bipolar relishes mania not despair. “I am always afraid when I have reached a peak of life, of its being the highest and the last.” A few pages later, “My sadness is so strong that my body aches.” On October 3, 1929, Anais noted that she wrote “eight stories in two weeks or so” (the posthumously released but approved with her own preface: Waste of Timelessness). While praising her output, she simultaneously chastised herself: “Why must I be so excessive, always leaning one way or another...?”
In spite of this, Anais knew the result of her moods was worth the art she felt balance had to (and for) be sacrificed. “When I write I feel exulted. When I feel exulted and excited mentally I want to act ... Having such a temperament is like having a shameful illness.”
Physicians in her time, of course, knew little about the bipolar temperament. When Anais visits one doctor, he says her problem is “nothing but a strong nervous depression ... and pernicious anemia.” Shortly thereafter, she deduces, “You can only return through the mind, to get your balance again.” This is incredible fortitude and will-power which has been consciously developed by her self-education with hundreds of books as well as her devotion to her journal, her fiction, her study of Lawrence and her “companionship” with cousin Eduardo since he cannot love woman.”
“ I believe in poetic prose. I’m doing it,” Anais writes, gaining strength mentally and emotionally. “My philosophy ... will grow with me, out of my defects and my shame and my madnesses.” She reads Freud and Jung, anything that will help her understand the psyche of the artist, of her Self. She determines though: “consciousness and knowledge of our phantom world, of our neurotic instincts, is perhaps not sufficient for the cure.” Anais believes Eduardo (as herself) should be “urged to an energetic application of consciousness to living.”
She had crafted the key to cracking a narcissist’s shell so that she might connect with others; to intensify her distinct individuality (the bipolarity and the childhood trauma). “A rich personal intensity breaks its own shell and its own obsessions — and touches the mystic whole.” At the end of Early Diary IV, Anais thinks she has “discovered my own illness and am taking care of myself” when she reads Freud’s symptoms for “anxiety neurosis. Cause? Sexual.” And, certainly this particular disorder can indeed be caused by something related to sexuality. But, bipolarity is more than nervous disorder; however, bipolarity intensified, made worse by a severe childhood sexual experience may be exactly what Anais stumbled upon.
Jamison makes “a literary, biographical, and scientific argument for a compelling association, not to say actual overlap, between two temperaments — the artistic and the manic-depressive — and their relationship to the rhythms, cycles, or temperament of the natural world.” That Hugo understood and accepted Anais and her moods throughout their marriage is prophetically acknowledged by Anais in October, 1931:
“We may both be again pulled apart physically. But we know that our marriage stands, our love will accept and understand, and that we will not tell each other until the experience is over, because we cannot know, at the moment we are in it, what the meaning of it is, or estimate its importance.”
With this self-assurance, Anais has resolved that her temperament may be cured with conscious action, i.e. relevant to her past and “the double” (her father); there is nobody to guide her in any other direction (manic-depression was not in her youth seen as a genetic inheritance. Heaven knows there was no consciousness of the gravity of childhood abuse on the bipolar.) “Though I double the dose of my sedatives, it is no use. I’m dancing inside myself with a new bliss.” Awakening to her sexual desires, Anais surely must have felt herself justified to opening the door to anything or anyone that might come her way to remedy her existence as a rapid-cycler writer, weary of her studies and her singular devotion to the diary.
‘THE DOUBLE’
In Linotte, Anais wrote, “It seems that all my gestures are like him (Papa), the way I walk, talk, my profile, etc., etc.” She expressed her “loss of faith in men” and referred to “the selfish attitudes” of her brothers, Thorvald and Joaquinito. She also noted a quote from Heller in her reading: “‘True artists are all a little pagan,’” identifying her Papa as an artist, not herself, while realizing, “I have inherited almost all his ... faults!”
A few months later in the spring of 1920, she reflected on coquetry as “the horrible fault I was born with and that I can’t help.” She was referring to the reason her father abandoned the family, ultimately to wed a younger woman. At 17, her cynicism of men was aided by Rosa when Anais answered her brother why loaves of bread are called “married.” She opened the two loaves and explained, “You see, something is missing. They don’t have a crust on one side.” To her mother, Anais asked, “It’s just like people — they are lacking something when they get married, aren’t they?”
Rosa replied, “that’s true — common-sense!”
Notwithstanding her own cynicism, Anais proclaimed in Early Diary II, “I am not like Mother. I am like Father.” Told that she looks like him and likes being alone like him, “proud and haughty,” Anais reflected that she wanted “a different outlook on life ... I want that passionate temper curbed and that disdain softened.” She did not want “to act like a savage” but wrote that she was “cursed with a strange dream, one I dare not dream too often.”
At 18, Anais appeared to be cured partially of that secret dream when she wrote, “I thought you were lost for a while and would return, but ... you are not loved anymore by anyone under this roof ... and I love you only because you are my father.” Filial love is dutiful and expected; however, only Anais writes her father many letters, aware that he “is a critic and a champion of musical opinions ... using his pen when he is not at the piano. I have ink in my blood.”
At 16 she had acknowledged the flaw of her similarity to her father. “I am my own severest critic!” Looking at her incorrigible brothers, she noted what she observed was necessary to improve her own behavior and spirit, since “... as the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined, unless the faults are corrected.” Anais realized she was her father’s double, “the phantom of the Nin lies.” Or when her moods were deeply fluctuating, “I know that Papa is sometimes sarcastic, skeptical, pessimistic and sullen without any reason.” She called herself “fickle” in more ways than the ordinary definition since Anais, who had been like a mother to her younger brothers and a helpmate to her own mother for years, was really quite weary of being “angelic and compliant” when she would rather express her rage. However, “I will continue to be good, I suppose,” she confessed as Linotte.
When Anais married Hugh Guiler in March of 1923, she may have hoped he would be her Sun, her dream-love, her father in a more perfectly stable and loving role. She had, however, been haunted by “persecution from Man, my only evil and terror up to now on this earth...” while drawn to Hugo because she felt she must atone for why her father abandoned the family. One month before her marriage, Anais wrote: “I am torn by regret, by shame, by pity, by the desire to atone, to soothe, to console,” to escape marrying a man who looked like her father and therefore might be oddly like her self.
Early Diary III reveals that Anais dined with her father in 1924 “and met the little lady he is about to marry.” On the day before when first she and her father had met, she described her feelings in this manner: “I forgave, consoled and deceived him for ... pity! — the heartrendering (sic) pity I feel now for what I once hated.” A day later, she wrote, “My problem just now ... is Father — Father in relation to mother rather than me.” Anais was aware of her father’s temper and moods, because she had been analyzing her own since childhood. “What is this feeling which has pursued me through childhood and now and which I can trace all through my journals?”
Hugo knows only that Anais is the struggling writer at this time. He said to her, “‘... you know that our ideal is the truth, and truer than ourselves. If you don’t believe, I shall not love you any more ...’” in response to her verbal suffering regarding her self-doubt and deep despair. By Early Diary IV, she has recognized, “it is not only the bad qualities which are inherited. Like father, I love a tidy house, filed papers ... no confusion in any detail ...” to rationalize away both the moods and the associations they have with her father.
Nonetheless, Anais, who identifies always the two women in her, has no conscious awareness that she is suffering the disorder of “the Double.” (And, how could she when modern medicine had not even identified manic-depression, now known as bipolarity and more currently, an inherited “mental challenge.”) Anais wrote, “I was tempted today to keep a double journal, one for things which do happen, and one for imaginary incidents ... I live double. I’ll write doubly ... feeling myself split into two women — one, kind, loyal, pure, thoughtful; the other, restless and impure, acting strangely ... seeing life and tasting all of it without fear ...without restraint ... I have the capacity to live several lives — one does not satisfy me.” She still appears to feel unconscious self-doubt regarding her part in the childhood episode, told only cryptically in her Early Diaries (I-IV, 1914-1920, released posthumously).
Married five years, Anais exhibits typical disillusionment; however, added to this is her natural stirring as a woman versus the disciplined writer who must find an outlet for her growing sensuality and an escape from her insular mental activity. “In spite of the dancing and writing I still have this terrible hunger for a friend, the desire to love and be loved. Hugh is never there ... (and if he knew, I am mad most of the time) ...”
When she met Henry Miller, a passionate, intellectual artist, impoverished and in need, Anais confronted the shadow again of “the Double,” her father, whom she will meet for the second time in 1933, two years after Miller and the other side of her self, the other woman who was ready to melt into John Erskine but did not. “I have lost my balance. I feel only my body, its burnings, its languors, its desires, and its defects. I cannot think, but I will find measure.” Consciously and with determination, she wrote in April, 1928, “I never, never want to hurt him ... But I cannot stay at home ... Hugh will forgive me.”
Anais has told us Hugo was “incredibly wise, loyal, whole, balanced,” which means (she adds) that “he knows everything except only one secret.” That secret Anais would keep from Henry Miller as well the world. Conflicted by her desire for passion and her need to create in the torment of fluctuating moods, Anais “concentrated on the art of understanding. I’m going to make a science and a religion of it,” which she did until she agreed to meet her father, three years after she had written: “ — if you think you lie, you lie. If you know what you are doing, you know the real meaning of lie; a lie is not something you tell others, but yourself.”
Piercing “the Double”
Anais had written in Henry&June* (Harcourt 1986) that she “had a terror of being driven again to the point of suicide,” a fate that has befallen many bipolars and manic-depressive artists before, during and after medication. She has mentioned her “neuritis” and pills for same as the only expedient for her moods. Engaged in lying, she knew her “continued craving to be loved and understood is certainly abnormal,” in reference to Henry Miller and other varied meetings, sexually and intellectually stimulating. When she meets Dr. Allendy, her first therapist, because Anais is involved with both Henry Miller and his wife June, Anais confides that she “had imagined seeing ... father at my dance recital in Paris.”
Allendy responds that she wanted “to dazzle” her father yet was “frightened. But because you have wanted to seduce your father since you were a child and did not succeed, you have also developed a strong sense of guilt.” Already, he has explained to Anais that “sometimes the sense of sexual inferiority is due to a realization of one’s frigidity.”
At this time, Anais reported in her diary that “Hugo has at last been taken up by men. He has loved it,” which may explain Anais’ affinity toward homoemotional men (and women) most of her life. Strangely enough, most photographs of her father depict a man who outwardly appears effeminate. Perhaps Anais intends to free both herself and Hugo when she tells him, “Go away, travel a great deal. We both need that. We can’t have it together. We can’t give it to each other.” A few pages earlier, Anais admitted to herself, “My love for Hugo has become fraternal.”
No doubt, there were other reasons why Hugo did not want to be mentioned in Anais’ public diaries or why she chose to stay legally married to him all her life, besides his reputation as a banker, but Anais was not a financially independent writer until very late in her lifetime.*
When she abandoned Allendy, Anais wrote in the expurgated Journal of Love: Incest, “I was fucked by death;” apparently, this psychoanalyst had simulated her father’s brutality or merely verbalized what Anais could not admit: pleasure in punishment (which may have explained her later attraction for Antonin Artaud, originator of Theater of Cruelty). “Allendy accentuates the ambivalence of my desires. He senses that he is also approaching the sexual key to my neuroses, and I realize he is, too, like a deft detective.”
In addition, Allendy had deluded Anais’ “conquest of her father through other men,” no doubt as “The Woman No Man Could Hold.” Afraid to be hurt, Anais hurts instead. Finally, she reveals to herself, “I have remained the woman who loves incest;” perhaps she means this only partially figuratively, disallowing still the impact of the childhood trauma, even disguised in Early Diary II when she writes at 18: “Oh, I must not look back or I will be frightened by what I am.” Recall too that in Linotte,the first volume of Anais’ Early Diaries, she had “decided very firmly only to love boys as little brothers.”
In her (unprofessional) Study of D.H. Lawrence (Paris, 1932) Anais has certainly made a few readers wonder about a particular reference to the subject of incest. “Suppose that psychology contends that a certain incest dream is a wish-fulfillment. According to Lawrence: ‘an incest dream would not prove an incest desire in the living psyche.’ Rather the contrary ...”
Hidden in Early Diary II, however, Anais recalled her “Father ... a mystery, a vision, a dream,” when for her tenth birthday she was allowed to stay at Arachon. Villa les Ruines, “where Father was already staying” to recover from appendicitis. “Strange forebodings caused me to weep uncontrollably the greater part of the night ...” However, “a few months later Father left us ... I kissed him wildly ... weeping hysterically and clinging to him, a scene nobody could understand.”
At 18, Anais still retreat(s) far into my shell and remain(s) sadly brooding there for hours ... Yet it is my true self ... who thinks painful thoughts. Deep down in my heart ... I do not like boys.”
A year before her marriage, she was “haunted by the ugliness ... I feel now when I look at a child’s face that I could ... shield him forever from what I have undergone ... Can I forget all I have learned of ... harsh, unrelenting truth? ... a jungle of ... men waiting to touch me, grasp me.”
Hugo, however, appeared to have the personality opposite of her father. And “Henry’s blue eyes reminding me of my father’s,” in the first published Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1934) (which journal we will see contains all the truth about Anais even if veiled for the sake of public prudency, the possibility of slander and/or genuine compassion towards her family.)
In the posthumously released diary Henry&June, before the meeting with her father, Anais accused herself of being “the most corrupt of all women, for I seek a refinement in my incest ... With a madonna face, I still swallow God and sperm, and my orgasm resembles a mystical climax. The men I love, Hugo loves, and I let them act like brothers.” She seriously sought to rid herself of “the Double” once and for all and was only half-joking when she wrote, “It only remains for me now to go to my father and enjoy to the full the experience of our sensual sameness, to hear ... the obscenities, the brutal language I have never formulated, but which I love in Henry.”
Still, if Hugo was Anais’ anchor and her rock, “June... (was her) adventure and ... passion, but Henry is my love.” What then was her father, “the Double?” In Journal of Love: Incest, Anais quotes Henry Miller as telling her she had “an incapacity for cruelty.” However, on May 5, 1933 Anais wrote in her journal, “I look at my Double, and I see in a mirror ... When I look at him I am sick of my lies.”
She added, “I have lived not to be my Father ... a ghost of my self-doubts, self-criticism, of my malady.” Already she had admitted to herself a few days earlier, “I am aware that in my unconscious there is a fund of cruelty and fear which makes me want to punish and abandon man.”
Allendy’s use of the whip as re-enactment of punishment by her father, to rid Anais of the scar of those beatings “was not really, deeply savage ... I liked that whip ... virile, savage, hurtful, vital. It still stings!” She knew that if she met her father and gave him back a taste of his own seduction, perhaps this Allendy technique would work on him even though she says it did not on her. She wants to punish her father who “used to call me his betrothed after I sent him a photograph of myself at sixteen.”
Jamison reminds us that Byron was “a victim of ‘his restless moods, his sensual appetites, his wild gaieties and glooms,’” as were Poe (recall his marriage to youthful cousin Virginia) and the poet Anne Sexton (who repeatedly slept with her daughter out of loneliness). Include Anais Nin and her musician-father, although in this case the daughter may have intended only to be a coquette with the idea of seducing her father to a certain point (punishment for child-seduction abuse?). However, “lying on his back” and unable to move,” her father asked to kiss Anais’ mouth. “I hesitated ... We kissed, and that kiss unleashed a wave of desire.” (On his or her part?)
Even though the father deceived Anais by admitting, “We must avoid possession,” and Anais “resisted, I resisted enjoyment. I resisted showing my body,” she wrote, “I lay over him ... He uncovered himself ... With a strange violence, I lifted my negligee and I lay over him” to re-enact (more or less?) a reversal of a pose from childhood.
“Still, in some remote region of my being, a revulsion ... I wanted to run away ... But I saw him so vulnerable ...” She then went to her room. “I was poisoned by this union.”
There may have been no one to blame but the Father who had no guilt, no shame, according to Anais who said to him, “You are still a child.” Anais recalled her father, saying at the moment of penetration, “‘I have lost God.’”
This event, no doubt, drives her to seek out a more-known second analyst, Otto Rank. “Is this love of my Double that self-love again? ... Is it always ... my Father, the male half of me?” In the meantime, before and during all doctors, she credits “my journal (that) keeps me from insanity,” because “No one can teach me to enjoy my tragic incest-love, to shed the last chains of guilt.”
Did Anais re-enact the traumatic childhood experience as retribution, or to free herself from the self-doubt and guilt she had felt all her youth regarding her pleasure in the seduction? If she intended merely to “tease” her Double to the point of insane pain, was she forced to follow through with her seduction-plan because she had to rid herself of “the Double?”
