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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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Djuna, Lilith, and The Voice in 1939 Paris edition of Winter of Artifice were revised to include Stella, Winter of Artifice and The Voice in Swallow Press 1961 edition. In between was the 1942 release by Gemor Press of Lilith and The Voice before Ladders to Fire (1945) with “Hejda” of Under a Glass Bell stories, Stella, Lillian&Djuna.
Although Anais has said that she found the name Djuna in an anthology of Welsh names and that “it’s actually a man’s name” as response to the “angry letter” she received from Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood (1937) for using her name as a character, Anais may have reversed that order (neither here nor there) since originally “Djuna” was Anais’ “Henry&June” novel, her “Hans&Johanna” (before that “Hans&Alraune” manuscript) which evolved simultaneously with the more disguised “poetic version of The House of Incest ...” wherein the narrator admits, “The only thing I do not tell Hans is that I too am a Johanna ... I want to live out the evil in me.” However, Anais had written in April, 1933 Journal titled Henry&June that she deemed her deception necessary for varied reasons. “But, lying, too, is living, lying of the kind I do.” A month before this, she had equated herself with Miller. “I am like Henry. I can love Hugo and Henry and June.”
In “Hans&Johanna,” Anais identities herself as “the witch of words ... forgetting myself, my human needs, in the unfolding of the tale ... — a watcher who never let life flow into herself because this life belonged to another.” This was Anais’ winter of artifice (Rimbaud’s Season in Hell)* where she was engaged in loving myriad people. The narrator (Anais) described both June as well herself: “Everything which composed the external Joanna was a concealment of her, not an expression ... for lies have that power that they create solitude ...You are the face of my unmasked self.”
(Intriguing that the name Johanna if lexigrammed includes Hans=Henry; June and Anna each literally a jo or sweetheart of the other while Djuna includes June and You (Henry?) as well Una=One, first person as well as all combined.) The face/phase of June was not only the “daring, fiery, manifesting in acts. My free self! The incarnation of my imaginations” for the narrator but “the desired, unrealized half of my self,” that type woman Anais longed to be: “Johanna, the born whore, who would triumph as a whore” although “the soul will not be traded!”
“Chaotica,”* a working title for what became “The Voice” was the name “Anais Nin had christened her work space where she saw her analytical patients,” says a March 1935 editorial footnote in Fire where Anais writes, “My next book will be called White Lies,” while she was living at the Barbizon in New York. “The Voice” is the story of a therapist who becomes troubled by the complicated problems of her patients as did Anais, a lay analyst who assisted her own therapist Dr. Rank in America, while empathizing with the difficult profession of The Voice, “an alchemist who could always transmute the pain” until Djuna realizes she cannot become like him (or Proust), lost in “the labyrinth of remembrance.” Djuna’s choice is to live for “the eternal moments” instead.
The patients in this novelette are extensions of Djuna who has had not
“a lot of affairs with women” (but bonding/identification/understanding of June): Lillian, the violinist who clings out of loneliness (recall the dancer without hands in House); Mischa, the cellist whose assumed limp is a decoy for his crippled hand (Anais’ persona with a hypochrondriacal as well as theatrical penchant for costumes); Lilith Pellan, ill and pale, who “loves only a mirage in The Voice” (Anais before her own epiphany regarding Rank).
Lilith “found the absolute only ... in multiplicity ... lived in the myth.” When she asks The Voice if she is “like the first Lilith,” Anais is cryptically referring to herself as Stella, originally “Lilith” as well as the Biblical woman who is said to have existed before Eve as a more powerful first wife, unsatisfied with her mortal role because she was “seeking a belief, a God, a father who is God, a God who is father. “* Anais echoes her own (and/or) The Voice’s (Rank) wisdom, when the Voice tells her “a woman can find her way alone ... In the world of feeling ... not in the world of interpretation” which is a circular spiral that leads always back to the original obsession.
By the end of Voice, Djuna is still June/Lilith/Stella, “the layers and all the things that she was not yet “ in spite of and because of the spiral labyrinth wherein a troubled woman has sought to evolve, rise to heights above but not yet truly away from the foundation of House of Incest, much like Poe’s House of Usher which will devour Roderick (or Djuna) in the cursed swamp that yields ghosts every time a foundation is built over it just as coiled tower is attached always to its dangerous base (Tarot allusion). “On the first layer of the spiral there was awareness ... where the sails of reverie could swell while no wind was felt.” In the middle, “There was no time ... a stage surrendered to fragments ... At the tip of the spiral I felt passive, felt bound ...”
Thus, at the conclusion of The Voice, the same boat from “Waste of Timelessness” returns as an immovable symbol; for there is nothing to guide Anais or all her characters, women who are reflections and fragments of herself, away from the memory within her past, which may be as simple as abandonment by a father or as complex as a double trauma, one from childhood and the successive reunions with her father, especially in 1933. Nonetheless, Djuna/Anais will recreate and translate that event into art as she had been doing all her life.
The Winter of Artifice
In Early Diary III Oct. 1926, Anais expressed her disappointment in Hugo, because he seemed to escape into “coarsely beckoning nakedness” when he examined prurient photographs of women that were in direct opposition to her “belief in love as the ‘poetry of sex’ — sex without love I hate.” She had preceded this perturbance with the idea that “In the end his love of the body will estrange us.”
A month later Anais personified Paris as “the city ... full of sounds that tell stories ... faces that scream tragedies ...whispers that reveal secrets.” Of a ragpicker, she asks, “Where does he come from, where does he sleep at night when his bag is full of rags?” which may have been the seed of “Rag Time” wherein broken objects (fragmented personality) “could be transformed ... the beginning of transmutations” for both narrator and author. “Nothing is lost but it changes” is seminal, remaining in Anais’ unconscious when she rereads Marcel Proust with a more discerning eye two years later after initially not being drawn to his work.
“Proust may be right; there is no unity ... broken necklaces, dead leaves, scattered mosaics, a kaleidoscope.” However, Anais insists she “see(s) things ... the opposite of Proust.”
In Early Diary IV, she writes on June 30 about a child in a yellow dress whom she chases playfully before the child runs away, then back before the mother calls. “I felt a second of struggle, as if the child were demanding a kind of surrender. And though my body was sore with passion, with hunger, with pain, I smiled ...&will never escape from myself, neither by love, by maternity, by art ... and can never escape the vision that haunts ...”
With that realization, Anais confronts herself and her double, the father, while she was having a relationship with Miller in Clichy who wrote her on Oct 17, 1933, “Do you want to express yourself as a child? Is that sufficient?” In her response to him from her home outside Paris in Louveciennes, she replied on Nov 1 in a letter that she had decided to transform “Alraune ... the dream-like book” into “the human book .... more reality ... I will refer from now on to ‘Alraune One’ (House of Incest) as the fantasy, and ‘Alraune Two’ (Winter of Artifice) as the human book.” Instead of escaping into the traumas of her broken past, Anais consciously decided she would transcend experience to make something new of what she could never deny or escape.
Anais intended to conquer her obsession regarding her father in an imaginative confrontation which she believed might rid her forever of this ubiquitous living ghost father and her fixation with John Erskine while at the same time creatively yielding to her sensual Donna Juana urges for both June and Henry Miller. Miller wrote her a week after she had been with Joaquin J. Nin Y Castellanos (her father) that: “You do need each other. You never had a proper relationship.” A month later, Miller’s letter reveals a different opinion with perhaps greater understanding. “Jesus, he’s courting you with a vengeance,” Miller wrote, aware now that Anais “wanted to spare him (Miller) something.”
Yet, only “the journal shares (her) duplicities,” and Dr. Rank, to a certain extent, for Anais was now seeing him because she knew from Dr. Allendy that “to lie, of course, is to engender insanity” and because she was “beginning to love (the Voice) ... there is in him a certain element of homosexuality” (which may refer to Hugo/Eduardo) since she could no longer love her former and first analyst, since he represented “the father” to her. “I have lost a father.”
Although Anais wrote in Journal of Love: Incest May 18, 1934 that she was upset Dr. Rank did not appreciate Miller’s ongoing work on D. H. Lawrence; and “This is all the more tragic to me because it comes at the same time as the discovery that I carry in my womb the seed of Henry’s child,” a year later in Fire, the third volume of the “Journal of Love” series following Henry and June and Incest,* Anais revealed she could not tell Rebecca West “about my love affair with my Father, and that I killed my child ... (abortion) I do not show the chaos, ever, outwardly.” Rebecca West “in her analysis ... uncovered a memory — her father raped her ... Rebecca said it was real but now she did not know.”
One might speculate why Anais could not reveal her own past to West, but perhaps there was a hint of guilt she was still concealing beneath a public mask of serenity. No matter. On Oct. 16, 1933, Anais said, “I write my Neptunian book (House) at the same time as the human ‘story,’ and I also add fuel to the journal.” This line and the last one that follows three days later might have been written to instill doubt in any reader regarding Anais’ connection with her father at any time. “I have had a great yearning for absolution. It is nonsense.” Nonetheless, on May 18, 1934 she also had written, “Henry doesn’t want it. I can’t give Hugh a child of Henry’s.” August 29, 1934 she continued, “You are a child without a father ... You are born of man, but you have no father. This man who married me, it was he who fathered me.”
Now, Anais already had revealed that after Allendy introduced Antonin Artaud to her (the one who took drugs to induce or escape his fantasies and/or reality), she felt an “extraordinary twinship” with him, as well to “use” him as “using everything, of turning all things into nourishment ... imaginative writing!” She admit(s) ... “abnormality” with her “neurosis” related to the fact that “I elude my own detection. I do not tell all my lies.” adding: “I am aware in my unconscious there is a fund of cruelty and fear which makes me want to punish and abandon man.” This desire linked her emotionally, if not physically, to June: “Her duplicities and my enigmatic/symbolic, hieroglyphic words. Her inventions and my mad fantasies, through which nobody can trace the fact.”
But, when Anais wrote on May 10, 1933, after her sexual dream about the father she is again meeting, following “another interim of a decade,” readers are appropriately engaged in the author’s technique. “I jerk backward suddenly and push the crystal bowl against the wall. The bowl breaks and the water splashes all over the floor. The meaning of this I don’t know. “ Her Early Diaries had indicated that Anais read Edith Wharton; in Diary III, Anais referred to The Glimpses of the Moon as a novel “exactly as I would like to write ... in the manner of a clever woman” to become “more mature in (her) writing,” as Hugo urged would only happen, he said, when she “stopped being surprised by evil.”
Anais then may have incorporated the symbolism of Wharton’s own crystal bowl, using it as foreshadowing in her human book, “Winter of Artifice,” first titled “The Double” which she had to retitle, remembering Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same name. In Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911), Mattie, the housekeeper, accidentally breaks the wedding dish belonging to Ethan’s wife, her distant relative gone to the doctor. This universal broken symbol foreshadows not only the climax of the Wharton novella but the first physical union of Ethan and Mattie after they attempt to glue back the pieces of the broken bowl. Anais also may have used the shattered bowl that flows water onto the floor as she confronts her father, as a womb-like symbol, sexually maternal and daughterly dutiful, but also the opportunity for rebirth of a new relationship with her father.
Before the entry in Journal of Love: Incest that may or may not be a combination of fabrication and “fuel” for diary and fiction, Anais admitted, “the evil I do not act out, I write out.” which leads readers to wonder about the purpose of the “strange violence” possibly placed in the diary for superimposition on the novel. Still, Anais also may have been sincere when she wrote, “Now I will live as in the journal, and write as I live.”
For, if Anais is living as she writes and writing as she lives, which is the truth and what the fantasy? August 30, 1933, her father says, after meeting Henry Miller who has just left, “‘What more can you want than a gentlemanly husband and an ardent lover?’” Three months later, Anais writes in her journal: “sitting near him (Father) while he was reading, I felt the melting liberation of my sensuous feelings. It was my first going out to him since our sensual bond, because until then I had yielded. My love was yieldingness, submission, with a mixture of fear and joy.” (almost a re-enactment of the childhood seduction?)
Grist also for the human book with confrontation to punish and abandon her father in the same way he abandoned her? Violation to reproduce childhood trauma and therefore be rid forever of this neurotic obsession that had plagued Anais since her youth, along with the other side of that emotion, jealousy? However, in August 1932 Anais had written in the Henry&June diary (half-fiction , half-fact): “I am not the slave of a childhood curse. The myth that I have sought to relive the tragedy of my childhood is now annihilated ... I am going to run away from Henry as actively as I can.”
We know that she did not flee so easily or quickly, either from Miller or her father. On December 21, 1932, Miller, Hugo and Anais together read Rank’s Art and Artist when Anais wrote, “I am an artist, but I am not living as an artist.” She was still longing for the freedom of Miller, of Hugo, of man. Five days later, she was “experience(ing) the need of making it (diary) more artistic, or a notebook for my creation.” Development of the crystal bowl symbol may have even begun in January 1, 1933 diary entry when Anais referred to her mental preoccupation, talking to herself, about how she would use her home as a setting for her fiction: “Louvenciennes ... some laboratory of the soul.”
She talks to herself internally about the process of making art out of the mundane while “nailing down a torn carpet,” seeing the loss of “the goldfish ... in the cement pond outside ... replaced by glass monsters swimming in an electric bowl — psychologic fish that have no problems ... Fish who swim motionlessly — as a substitute for living ...”
What began as a need for passion and experience with Henry Miller turned into “Mothering” which Anais knew she was weary of from her childhood and adolescence in New York. “Winter of Artifice,” originally titled “Lilith” was begun in 1933 and completed in 1934, according to Spencer in Collage of Dreams. Nonetheless, in Early Diary II, Anais wrote at age 18, “If I were a man, I would certainly make love to someone, like Don Juan.” The character’s name “Lilith” may then also refer to John Erskine’s mistress and a character in his novel. “Pauline knew about Lilith. She knew John was returning to New York to see her.” Anais met Lilith and said, “We clasped hands like two real, honest friends, elated by a moment of understanding,” the dark woman, counterpart to Eve, “her docile replacement.”
In Walker’s Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, “Admission into the underworld was often mythologized as a sexual union. The lily or lilu (Lotus) was the Great Mother’s flower-yoni, whose title formed Lilith’s name.” Lilith,” originally narrated in the first person was revised deliberately by Anais to the third person point of view in the 1939 publication of “Winter of Artifice” with a specific intended change because of the association that “She” and “He” have to each other sexually, woman and man, not daughter and father.
“I am waiting for him ... He is coming today.” versus “She is waiting for him ... He is coming today.” “She” is more definitely the dark, devouring disobedient Lilith of the original version, transmuted beyond the “I” of the daughter who realizes she is or can be like Don Juan not “the mouse, the tin, cold mouse of Richmond Hill ... (who) is dead.”
Anais has masked the relationship of daughter to father, often referred to by critics as “a mystical rather than a physical relationship,” because there is art in artifice. “This was the winter of artifice,” a line from Winter of Artifice novelette. Anais has said in the Henry&June diary that, “The Journal is a product of my disease, perhaps an accentuation and exaggeration of it” after acknowledging that Hugo had kept her “from misery, suicide, and madness.” Thus, we know Anais chose to stay with Hugo at this time (and, in fact, was legally married to him all her life) not only because she “heard Hugo tell Allendy he’d kill himself if he lost her,” but because Hugo was “the father-figure/brother” she could depend upon always to understand and to accept her no matter where her manic-depressive moods and artist’s will took her.
Winter of Artifice is “dreaming spiral of desire” where the ghost of her potential father who tormented her (Anais) is buried like a hunger for something which she was not certain had been invented or created solely by herself ... Where was the man she really loved? ... She was coming out of the ether of the past ... The little girl in her was dead too. The woman was saved. And with the little girl died the need of a father.”
Reading all of Anais’ published diaries to date is like never reaching the end of a non-stop continuous novel as she intended all her fiction to be although Cities of the Interior Vol. 1 was not published until 1959. In December 7, 1932, Journal of Love: Incest entry, Anais wrote that she had “believed my own lies, as my father believed his own lies” even though she added, “I hate lies, double lives ... this keeping up of many lives and loves, this living on three or four levels.”
Nonetheless, what Anais said of D. H. Lawrence, she, no doubt, hoped might be said of her: “his convictions were the emanations of a life deeply lived through all its failures and contradictions.”
