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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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Stella*
In the first Swallow edition of Winter of Artifice (1961), published for a larger audience than earlier private press versions of certain novelettes, Anais included Stella (from This Hunger — 1945), title long story (originally Lilith in 1939 Winter of Artifice); and The Voice (same for all versions.) “I have never planned my novels ahead,” Anais said in 1974 Preface to her continuous novel, Cities of the Interior. “I have always improvised on a theme ... a study of women.”
Stella is a star, the sun, basis of the solar system, an actress whose father “was an actor. In Warsaw he had achieved fame and adulation.” However, she “almost hated ... her ‘double’ (on screen) ... a work of artifice.” Stella may represent Sabina (June/narrator/youthful Anais) of House of Incest as well Lillian and Djuna (moon in all phases) of This Hunger in Anais’ struggle to dance D. H. Lawrence’ s “dance with the elixir of life” (from his essay, “Making Love to Music”).
“For Stella ... love had been born under the zodiacal sign of doubt. For Bruno, under the sign of faith ... Stella consumed with a hunger for love, and Bruno by the emptiness of his life.” Bruno and Philip may be representative of Anais’ father, Henry Miller, Otto Rank, that man who is unaware that “no love (is) ever self-sustaining, self-propelling, self-renewing.”
Stella is conscious, however, of the negative power of “a colorful ballet of lies” (her own, others) and sees how she too is like the men she has been involved with. “The child is passive, yielding and accepts everything, giving nothing in return but affection,” which she employs to give “them the illusion that each was the center of the other’s existence.”
In “On Writing” (1947), Anais wrote, “Naked truth is unbearable to most, and art is our most effective means of overcoming human resistance to truth.” (Her own included?) Stella “is no longer and actress willing to disguise herself ... Yet there is no blindness or deafness as strong as that within the emotional self.”
D.H. Lawrence has said in his essay “Love” that the human must act “creatively” with others and “separately and distinctly” to “have understanding.” In Stella, “Seeing has to do with awareness, the clarity of the senses (as) linked to the spiritual vision, to understanding.” When Bruno walks away (as in reality Anais’ father did from her), taking “everything away with him because he took away the faith, her faith in love,” as Anais had written in Early Diary III, both Stella and Anais were left “the prey of doubts and fears.”
A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams’ play, published by New Directions (1947) in the same year of its presentation at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947, contains elements of Anais’ Stella, even to the point of including certain lines of hers. She first met him in 1941, noted in Diary III (1939-1944): “Tennessee was inarticulate and his eyes never met mine fully. “ She mentions casually in Diary IV (1944-1947) that “Tennessee Williams sent me tickets for his new play.” (Streetcar ...) In Diary V in May 1954 she writes, “Dylan Thomas, Tennessee, Truman Capote ... What support did they give me?” Fall, 1954, she adds: “... in Tennessee Williams, in Proust, the time which counts is the time of the mother’s youth. They like antiques, objects from the past.” Anais had gone beyond this theme she had noted as “the fixation upon the past seems to be a homosexual trait and may be connected with the fixation on the mother.” (Or “father?”)
In 1942, Tennessee Williams, who wore an eye patch after another operation, was doubling as a waiter-entertainer in Greenwich Village and as a night elevator operator in a New York hotel. In 1945 after The Glass Menagerie fame, he had gone to Chapala, Mexico where he wrote “The Poker Night,” later incorporated in Streetcar. Falk in his critical study on Williams (Twayne Series ‘61), determined that “If the third scene was the beginning of the play, then the southern gentlewoman (earlier referred to by Falk as symbolized in Blanch DuBois, “too delicate to withstand the crudeness and decay surrounding her” as well as “clue to theme ... that life is equated with passion, and its opposite is death”) ... must have been a later edition.
Anais’ The Winter of Artifice, third and last volume released by the Villa Seurat/Obelisk Press (1939), again appeared in May 1942 a year after she established the Gemor Press in Greenwich Village; the novel was available through Frances Steloff’s Gotham Book Mart since Ms. Steloff had loaned Anais $100 to start her own letterpress in the Village (New York). Anais’ privately handprinted This Hunger (STELLA, LILLIAN&DJUNA) was “nearly sold out” in late 1945 (according to her letter to Henry Miller in A Literate Passion). The first British edition of Winter of Artifice (1947) originally appeared as “Lilith” in The Winter of Artifice (Paris: Obelisk 1939) released as revised First American edition in 1942 with untitled story and “The Voice.”* The father-daughter theme was extended to conclusion of former long story in Swallow edition (1961 — three novelettes) as “their destiny — the railroad track of their obsessions,” the opening of Williams’ play.
Scene One of Streetcar has Blanche taking “a street-car named Desire, and then transfer(ing) to one called Cemeteries ... (to) Elysian Fields!” The play concerns the rape of Blanche DuBois by her sister’s husband, her brother-in-law Stanley, originally Bruno in “The Poker Night.” Stanley Kowalski, of Polish descent, is “a ruthless exposure of ... dreams and delusions and deceit ... affectations and pretenses,” according to Falk who explains how the brutish Stanley mocks Blanche “to look at herself and her ragpicker outfit (A.N.’s “Ragtime” in Seven ‘38) to recall that she may think of herself as a queen but still has been swilling his liquor.”
In Williams’ play, Blanche tells her suitor Mitch, when he confronts her with the truth of the Flamingo hotel, frequented by prostitutes (information passed on to him by Stanley), “I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth ... I didn’t lie in my heart.” This precedes a symbolic Mexican woman vendor outside who repeats, “Flores, flores. Flores para los muertos ... “ (Flowers, Flowers. Flowers for the dead...) among the last lines of Anais’ Stella, wherein the character acknowledges that she is aware her fans send flowers for a screen star who is not real. Stella is similarly cognizant of her posing and position.
“Flowers for the dead, she murmured. With only a little wire, and a round frame, they would do as well.” Although Oliver Evans (introduced to Anais by Williams) end notes in the first critical study on her work (1968) that there is no other resemblance “between Blanche and Stella.” he may have erred since Ladders to Fire (Dutton ‘46) contains “This Hunger” (Gemor ‘45), whose contents included Prologue; Hedja; Stella; Lillian and Djuna*. In “Stella,” her novelette within Winter of Artifice (Swallow ‘45) “the window of the solitary cell of the neurotic” opens to the “name of the enemy (as) an emotion of helplessness against him! What good was naming it if one could not destroy it and face one’s self?”
Scene 9 in Streetcar ends with stage directions of Blanche “[rushes to the big window ... and cries wildly] ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’” foreshadowing her own real enemy. After “[she smashes a bottle on the table and faces him]” even “[strikes at him with the bottle top but he catches her wrist]” similar to the symbolic broken crystal bowl in the version of Anais’ “Winter of Artifice,” before Stanley, who rapes his half-willing victim, Blanche, says, “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning.” Recall Anais’ “Today she recognizes an inhuman love.” (page 90 in novelette “Winter of Artifice” within same Swallow collection.)
In Ladders to Fire, Djuna hears the same one-note song of a mechanical bird in her dream which “seemed more real to me than the callous hands of the orphan asylum women when they changed me into a uniform.” Streetcar- Scene Eight incorporates Blanche’s parrot story in the same way. “The only way to hush the parrot up was to put the cover back on its cage so it would think it was night and go back to sleep,” before another monologue foreshadowing Blanche’s deliverance to the doctor. “I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in clean white sack and dropped overboard — at noon ... into an ocean as blue as (chimes again) my first lover’s eyes!” (The male character pitted against woman in almost all of Anais’ novels has the color of her father’s eyes, blue.
The comparison of daughter/father veiled in “Stella,” This Hunger, “Winter Of Artifice,” Ladders to Fire is fascinating when juxtaposed against Blanche/Stanley in Williams’ play from Bruno’s double cry of “Stella ! ... Stella ! in Anais’ “Stella” to drunk Stanley’s “baying hound” repetition of his pregnant wife’s name after he has struck her, “Stell-lahhhhh! ... STELL-LAHHHHH.” Both writers were invariably influenced by D. H. Lawrence, using literally and symbolically, elements from “Cocksure Women and Hensure Men” essay from the ribald cock and hen joke in Streetcar to Stella’s “responding with her answering blood rhythms” while desperately struggling to become Lawrence’s “dauntless” as well as “demure” woman.
A Spy in the House of Love
First edition of this novel appeared in 1954 about which Anais said in Novel of the Future, “I wanted you the reader, to know Sabina (Spy) better than you ever knew Tennessee’s Blanche DuBois ... I wanted you to feel as if you had been intimately related to her.” There she identified also that “Stella” was her “first attempt to extend the poem (House of Incest), to carry into prose the poetic condensation and abstraction of the poem.”
Sabina, the main character’s name, may be derived from “Carl Jung’s longtime operatic affair with his patient Sabina Spielrein” of which recently Susan Baur has noted in The Intimate Hour (1997): “However questionable Jung’s behavior was from a moral point of view ... somehow it met the prime obligation of the therapist toward his patient: to cure her.”
Anais must have had her own ideas about her liaison with Otto Rank or similar type relationship between Jung/Sabina, for she has Sabina (herself)imagine a lie detector as a spy who is symbolic of her animus, that inner masculine personality of a woman, more evolved than Stella and unlike Blanche (Streetcar), who does not depend on “the kindness of strangers” but is free “as man ... to enjoy without love. Without any warmth of the heart as a man could ... (to) enjoy a stranger.”*
That is Sabina’s definition and “meaning of freedom. Free of attachment, dependency and the capacity for pain” which was preceded by House of Incest and “Stella,” where both narrator/Djuna, who identified vicariously with Sabina/June, “become the actress who loathed her false image on screen,” and are struggling to accept the external “exact portrait of herself as she felt inside.” Sabina now mirrors Blanche, that “poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives,” to whom she might throw always “an unexpected ladder ... and ordained, ‘Climb!’” even though Sabina knew her “ladder led to fire.”
Although there is no reason for Sabina to feel the guilt of betraying her husband, Alan, since man never feels guilt (a.k.a. Stanley’s more gravely violent lies), Sabina half-conceals from herself mentally, as well as by wearing a long black cape, her “desire to feel the brutality of man, the force which can violate? ... perhaps a need in woman, a secret erotic need” to which Anais adds in Diary II (1934-1939), “I have to shake myself from ... these violent images, awaken.”
However, Sabina (unlike Blanche, who was forced unwillingly and deceptively to a mental asylum at the end of Williams’ play) admits to herself honestly that she lies “to protect one human being from sorrow ... (while) wishing to be that (‘role of a whole woman’) ... not altogether a lie.” Anais’ personal desire echoes in Spy with “Anger ... at this core which will not melt, while Sabina wills to be like men, free to possess and desire in adventure, to enjoy a stranger.”
In Novel of the Future, Anais offered more information about how her “women did not break. They sought by every means to walk the tightrope between various roles, conflicts, and dualities of a personality.” She repeats how she wanted her readers “to know more about Sabina than you were allowed to know about Madame Bovary (Flaubert’s sensual wife protagonist who was punished by the author with suicide!) or Blanche DuBois.” A few pages earlier Anais alluded to her theme in Spy. “Identification and empathy are the opposites of alienation and separation.”
When Sabina says, “I am an international spy in the house of love,” she is Donna Juana, no longer living “according to (society’s) taboos against multiple lives” or multiple loves. She is conscious of her desire for pure sensual freedom, pleasure arising initially out of guilt for loving the father, her “double,” (her self) in every man she unconsciously sought to punish like Stanley (Streetcar) who has no qualms about raping Blanche, blaming his sister-in-law as the seducer and then coupling shortly thereafter with his wife Stella, returned from the hospital with their first baby, to disbelief of Blanche’s tale.)
In Spy, Sabina “wanted to prove to him” (her father, Hugo, John Erskine, etc.) that this guilt was a “distortion, that his vision of her and desire” and of “his hunger as bad, was a sickness.” The parallel of a Sabina more powerful than Blanche in Streetcar spirals to her certain self-knowledge surpassing Stanley’s primitive and cowardly deception which punishes Blanche as the helpless woman-victim (or Blanche herself doubting sanity, allowing herself to be escorted to an asylum!).
Anais through Sabina “wanted to erase” the creation of Portrait of Madonna (Williams’ play of 1947) about the frustrated southern spinster which Falk has described as “a study of repression and a sense of guilt (which) may have inspired (earlier) final scene in Streetcar” to make him (Stanley?) aware “of a mutual guilt which only an act of love could transmute into something else than a one-night encounter with a stranger.”
Anais already told us at the end of the Henry&June diary in Oct, 1932 that she no longer loved “with a child’s blind faith, ... my eyes were opened to reality — to Henry’s selfishness, June’s love of power” and her own realization that “I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly.” This means Anais admits she can never abandon her husband, Hugo, as her father abandoned her and Rosa, his wife, Anais’ mother. “I will not do to others what was done to me, ever.” But she will not be contained either.
No doubt, the theme of all Anais’ fiction as well her diaries which depict the same evolution of one woman (who may be Everywoman under varied names), remains what she determined was her philosophy of life, connected to Lawrence’s “flow,” yet surpassing such mobility with true self-awareness. “Understanding means love.” In Incest, she added, “He (Henry Miller) did not understand me, but he nourished me.” In Spy, Donald (one of Sabina’s young lovers) shares his letter to an actress with her, unlike Blanche who could not share her letters from Alan with anyone because of the guilt she felt that somehow she was responsible for his suicide after he confessed to her his homosexuality.
“... you touched that point at which art and life meet and there is only BEING ... That is why we love the actress. They give us the intimate being who is only revealed in the act of love.”
Sabina knew that disparate lovers had to be taken for what they were, not as alchemical passions “to weld these fragments together ... (which) had failed! ...” for “the mood of lostness persisted.” Anais invented Sabina’s lie detector because “Guilt is the one burden human beings cannot bear alone ... She needed a confessor.” And this animus within Anais, Sabina’s lie detector, assures her that she has only “been trying to, beginning to love. Trust alone is not love ... (because) Some shock shattered you and made you distrustful of a single love.”
The ending of Spy is reminiscent of the beginning of House of Incest, except with a homeopathic panacea offered therein, “a remedy called pulsatile for those who weep at music” (symbolic of Anais’ musician father), chameleon ... as ineffective as her pre-earth birth,” those “water-veiled” memories wherein the eyes of the House narrator “looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self ... Born full of memories of the heels of the Atlantide ... standing forever on the threshold like one troubled with memories, and (but) walking with a swimming stride.”
