Beginning with the author’s arrival in New York, this diary recounts Anaïs Nin’s work as a psychoanalyst, and is filled with the stories of her analytical patients—as well as her musings over the challenges facing the artist in the modern world. The diary of this remarkably daring and candid woman provides a deeply intimate look inside her mind, as well as a fascinating chapter in her tumultuous life in the latter years of the 1930s.
Beginning with the author’s arrival in New York, this diary recounts Anaïs Nin’s work as a psychoanalyst, and is filled with the stories of her analytical patients—as well as her musings over the challenges facing the artist in the modern world. The diary of this remarkably daring and candid woman provides a deeply intimate look inside her mind, as well as a fascinating chapter in her tumultuous life in the latter years of the 1930s.
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Overview
Beginning with the author’s arrival in New York, this diary recounts Anaïs Nin’s work as a psychoanalyst, and is filled with the stories of her analytical patients—as well as her musings over the challenges facing the artist in the modern world. The diary of this remarkably daring and candid woman provides a deeply intimate look inside her mind, as well as a fascinating chapter in her tumultuous life in the latter years of the 1930s.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547543628 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Series: | The Diaries of Anaïs Nin , #2 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 372 |
| File size: | 749 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
[November, 1934]
My ship quite fittingly broke all speed records sailing towards New York. It was night when I arrived. The band was playing, and the skyscrapers were twinkling with a million eyes. I was looking for Dr. Otto Rank on the wharf, staring at the Babylonian city, the tense people, New York a dream wrapped in fog and sea smells.
Rank was there. Through the influence of a powerful patient of his, the formalities were quickly disposed of and I was whisked away, baggage and all, into a taxi and to a room reserved for me at what I immediately called the "Hotel Chaotica."
We sat at the bar. His pockets were filled with theatre tickets, his arms with books for me. He had plans for every evening in the week. He had made an appointment for me with George Balanchine because I had spoken once wistfully of wishing to take up dancing again.
From where we sat I could see all of New York pointing upward, into ascension, into the future, to exultation, New York with its soft-oiled hinges, plastic brilliance, hard metal surfaces, glare and noise, New York gritty, sharp and windy, and the opposite of Paris in every possible way.
For Rank it is a new life. His days are already overfull.
The very next morning I was at the Adams, where he has his office, both to learn and to help him. Famous people came there, sat in his waiting room. Presents came from grateful patients, tickets to opening nights, the opera, invitations to new restaurants, new schools. He displayed these with pride, as if he had gained control of the life of the city, and I felt immediately at the center and inside of all activities, where I love to be.
In the evening he took me to see the magic doors at Pennsylvania Station, which opened as one approached them, as if they could read our thoughts, and then the Empire State terrace, which seemed to sway in the wind, so that I could see the panorama. It was beautiful and strong, the whole design a thrust into space, arrogant sharp pointed arrows piercing the sky as if seeking to escape from the earth into other planets.
In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action. No memory of the past, no looking back, no doubts, no questions.
The plays were one-dimensional and prosaic. Rank and I played at an imaginary rewriting of them as they should have been. In between he talked a great deal about his love of Mark Twain, of Huckleberry Finn in particular, on the theme of freeing of the Negro with emphasis on the adventurous spirit. Rank admired Mark Twain's parody of literature, Huck's search for complications, additions, circuitous ways. "No, that would be too simple, it's not the way it's done in books."
Rank's office is a three-room apartment on the East Side, near the Park. I became familiar with each patient who came, studied their charts with Rank, and he taught me how to handle each case. He explained his method of dynamic attack, his seizing of the present conflict, immediacy, a quick-moving progression from present conflict. He demonstrated every step, every pattern. Every talk was full of suspense. He believed the neurotic was like a paralytic, emotionally, and that he should not be allowed to stand still dwelling on his impotence.
Perhaps because the life of New York was so intensely active, events seemed accelerated and the atmosphere changed from day to day, but the temperament of Rank's dynamic analysis also seemed to accelerate his patients.
Suddenly I was in the heart of political intrigues, at the core of the life of the opera, the theatre, the millionaires, the movie stars, the Foundations and Fellowships. I could not reveal their names (it would have been unethical) but their stories fascinated me as a novelist.
Curtains rise on plays far deeper and more terrifying than any play or film. Behind the great powers, tragedy, frustration, fears, bitterness. Death by suicide, death by psychological murder. All day I hear them whispering in the closed office. I sit in the smaller room, studying and making notes. A symphony. I open the door to a man who holds in his hands the destiny of the opera, another who is building a chain of hotels, another who can influence Wall Street stocks. A thousand stories.
Rank is beginning to love his life here, but more, as he said, when I look upon his work as a novelist, when I respond to the dramas and surprises. His delving reveals new plots and new aspects of character.
The deeper I enter, through him, into the lives of these characters, the more like a synthetic symphony they seem outside, in the streets, in the restaurants.
The transparent brilliance over all things, from shop windows, to cars, to lights. A texture which is not real, and not human. Days all bright and glossy. One feels new every day. The poetry of smooth motion, of quick service, a dancing action, at counters, changing money for the subway. Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. After knowing what seethes within them, I do not dare to look at the people too closely, for they seem a bit artificial, like robots, parts of concrete and electric wiring. A million windows, high voltage, pressure, vitamin-charged, the city of tomorrow, and the people of tomorrow who cannot be human beings, and who, perhaps knowing it, come to Dr. Rank to weep and complain for the last time, for they too may be a vanishing race. Just as the aristocrats are a vanishing race in Europe, perhaps here the human being who thought this was to be his world, is also being sacrificed to something else. Here in Dr. Rank's office I hear protests, revolts, sorrow, but outside they seem a part of the white-enameled, sterile buildings.
I gave up the idea of dancing with Balanchine's class, to concentrate on this new art, the art of exploring human beings at a deeper level, archeology of the soul.
Anaïs, the assistant secretary, is not very efficient. But Rank is tolerant because I make up for it by understanding his ideas. In fact, I understand them so well that now he wants me to work on the translations made of his books, to work on elucidations, because in some of these rough, direct translations from the German there is a ponderous quality which makes his ideas obscure.
My small desk is weighed down with huge books with German titles. Work for a lifetime. Every day the translator brings what he has done and I rewrite it in a clearer way.
At six o'clock all work ends. We go to a restaurant. We talk about the patients. Rank cannot help teaching all the time, for his interpretative mind is constantly at work. I tire of abstractions after a while, so I suggest Harlem.
Harlem. The Savoy. Music which makes the floor tremble, a vast place, with creamy drinks, dusky lights, and genuine gaiety, with the Negroes dancing like people possessed. The rhythm unleashes everyone as you step on the floor.
Rank said he could not dance. "A new world, a new world," he murmured, astonished and bewildered. I never imagined that he could not dance, that he had led such a serious life that he could not dance. I said: "Dance with me." At first he was stiff, he tripped, he was confused and dizzy. But at the end of the first dance he began to forget himself and dance. It gave him joy. All around us the Negroes danced wildly and gracefully. And Rank sauntered as if he were learning to walk. I danced, and he danced along with me. I would have liked to dance with the Negroes, who dance so spontaneously and elegantly, but I felt I should give Rank the pleasure of discovering freedom of physical motion when he had given me emotional freedom. Give back pleasure, music, self-forgetting for all that he gave me.
Driving home the radio in the taxi continues the jazz mood. New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essentially a city of rhythm.
Rank could not forget Harlem. He was eager to return to it. He could hardly wait to come to the end of his hard day's work. He said: "I am tempted to prescribe it to my patients. Go to Harlem! But they would have to go with you."
My room at the "Hotel Chaotica" is as wide as the bed is long, with a tiny desk, a bureau, all in russet brown. Rank had selected it because it advertised a "Continental" breakfast. The "Continental" breakfast was slipped through a slot in the door with the sound of a revolver shot, at seven in the morning. It was a carton which contained a thermos full of watery, lukewarm coffee, a quarter of an inch butter patty in silver paper and a tough roll a day old. But there was a radio at the head of the bed.
When Rank has a formal dinner or other invitations, I either stay in my room and write in my diary or go out with my own friends.
Rank told me that women practiced deception very badly, that many of the women he had analyzed, when involved in any kind of intrigue, love or politics, always left a "clue," wanted to be discovered, mastered, wanted to lose. It was almost as if they continued to re-enact the old primitive forms of love-making, in which woman was overpowered by the strength of the man. To feel themselves conquered, in a more abstract situation, they enjoyed losing.
In Gilbert and Sullivan's musical the soldier gets a cramp trying to play the role of the poet. Rank says everyone gets a cramp, physical or mental, when playing roles. Cramps of the soul, cramps of the body, arthritis of the emotions.
The radio plays blues. Paris, New York, the two magnetic poles of the world. Paris a sensual city which seduced the body, enlivened the senses, New York unnatural, synthetic; Paris-New York, the two high tension magnetic poles between life, life of the senses, of the spirit in Paris, and life in action in New York.
Rank working magic all day, magic with pain, words which heal like the hands of the old religious healers, and in the evenings entering into my realm in which I rule, life and the present.
We sat in a restaurant and I began to ask him questions about his childhood. He suddenly launched into endless stories. Then he stopped suddenly and his eyes filled with tears. "Nobody ever asked me about myself and my life before. I have to listen to others all the time. Nobody ever asked me what I was like as a child."
I now understood why he loved Huckleberry Finn so deeply. He must have been like him as a boy, freckled, homely, tattered, rough-hewn, mischievous, adventurous, inventive. He liked to remember catching fish with his bare hands in a shallow river, proud to have been swifter than the fish. He must have been spirited and humorous.
The next day I caught him staring at the children skating in Central Park. They wore bright-red wool caps, red, white or blue coats. They screamed and laughed against the white snow. "I would like to be out there with them, laughing."
But he was locked up with the desperate and distressed, with people trapped in tragedies, and peculiar tragedies for which the rest of the world had very little compassion. Rank, that morning, the bowed, heavy way he stood by the window, looked like a prisoner of his work, his profession and his vocation. The sick came endlessly, each one who was cured brought father, mother, sister, brother, friend. They multiplied in an alarming degree. Was this a new illness, born of our own times? No time for love, no time for friendship, no time for confidences.
Rank touches all things with the magic of meaning. Those who come to him are like the blind, the dumb, the deaf. When he discovers the "plot" of their life, they become interested. This interest saves them. This plot created by the unconscious slowly reveals itself to be more interesting than any detective story. Rank uncovers the links, webs, patterns. It is endlessly interesting, full of surprises.
He writes his lectures on the train, on his way to Philadelphia or Hartford.
He insists psychologists know little about woman. "Because she has not created enough, she is not articulate, she imitates man." So he insists that when he is dictating a lecture I should make my own comments on the margin, in red ink. "That way we will hear both sides of the story."
Every other phrase uttered by Rank begins with: "I have an idea." The discovery of significance is what deepens and embellishes experience. No object, no gesture, no action which is not illumined with meaning.
We were standing in front of the brownstone house, 158 West Seventy-fifth Street, where I lived several years of my childhood, where I had known the greatest difficulties, humiliations, poverty.
There was always some member of our huge Cuban family staying there. When none came, my mother rented the top floor and the second floor to artists we knew. The daughter of Teresa Carreño, the great pianist, lived in the basement. We lived on the first floor. In what was once a parlor and dining room. Enrique Madriguera (the violinist who later became a famous conductor but was then a sixteen-year-old prodigy) lived on the top floor. The house was full of gaiety, music, distinguished visitors. José Mardones came to sing, Miguel Jovet played the guitar, my mother sang, my brother Joaquin studied his piano, Enrique practiced his violin.
Whenever there was a revolution in Cuba (and there were many) some uncle would be exiled and would come to stay with us. While the relatives stayed with us they took us on automobile rides, to the theatre, and we had a taste of luxury. And when they were gone we went back to housework, and public school. An eventful, picturesque, dramatic and comic life for us, but we were always in debt.
The house, at that time, was only in the second cycle of its history. Its first owners had lived sumptuously, with a kitchen in the basement, a pantry for the butler, maids' rooms on the top floor, a formal dining room overlooking a garden, a parlor full of mirrors, bedrooms with dressing rooms and luxurious bathrooms on the second floor. Past bourgeois comfort was still visible in the elaborate lamps, rugs, and mirrors. But when they sold it, it was partitioned into separate rooms with a bathroom to each floor. My mother and my two brothers and I all slept in what was once the dining room. We washed our faces in what was once the pantry, and used what was once the servants' shower next to the kitchen in the basement. We had two folding beds which became sedate bureaus by day, when we turned the room back into a dining room. The big bay window overlooked a backyard which I promptly turned into a garden. The desk was in front of this window. The heavy woodwork, the scallops, the friezes, made the house seem like the home of a family who had once been wealthy and had fallen into poverty with distinction.
It was there I first invented the theatre of improvisation. Though a writer, I insisted that we act out of our imagination, without script, premeditation or plan. I would merely give a theme. We would get into costumes in one of the unrented rooms, and then I would wait for my brothers or my cousins to start acting. But none of them would collaborate. They would stand paralyzed on the improvised stage in their improvised costumes of mosquito netting, Christmas ornaments, curtains and shawls, look at me and say: "Tell us what to do, what to say."
I had more success with my storytelling. We would turn off the lights, and I told stories until we terrified ourselves (Grand Guignol stories, horror stories, ghost stories). When we were all frightened enough to turn on the lights I knew I had achieved a good theatrical performance.
Rank knew about this period of my life, and he wanted to see where it had taken place. But after a while he began to talk about himself.
He was rebelling against his profession. He talked about his own imprisonment.
"I have always been a prisoner of people's need to confess. I do not want to receive confessions any more. I am tired of giving myself, of being used by others. I want to begin to live for myself. I am rebelling against sitting all day in an armchair listening to people's confessions. I want to be free, Anaïs. I am never permitted to be a human being, except with you. When people do not deify, idealize me, they make me a demon, or a father, a mother, or a grandmother! Whatever they need to love or revenge themselves against. I am tired of sitting in an armchair when I feel so full of unused life, and I have so much to give in life."
I had awakened in Rank a hunger for life and freedom, as Henry [Miller] and his wife June had awakened it in me! What ironies!
He had become aware that he had not lived enough. He was rebelling against the pattern of his life, against all the giving, the annihilation, the immolation of a doctor's life. Even at night, he tells me, when he is asleep, they call him up. Cries of distress, threats of suicide, runaways.
That was why he had wanted me to become a dancer rather than an analyst.
I helped him through this crisis. I suggested merely a better balance between his work and pleasure, between work and leisure. He began to control the flow of his patients, to give more time to the theatre, to book- collecting, to his own writing.
To unburden himself, he also sent me my first patients.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Diary of Anaïs Nin 1934-1939"
by .
Copyright © 1967 Anaïs Nin.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Table of Contents,
Copyright,
Preface,
[November, 1934],
[January, 1935],
[February, 1935],
[March, 1935],
[April, 1935],
[June, 1935],
[July, 1935],
[August, 1935],
[October, 1935],
[January, 1936],
[April, 1936],
[May, 1936],
[June, 1936],
[July, 1936],
[August, 1936],
[September, 1936],
[October, 1936],
[November, 1936],
[December, 1936],
[January, 1937],
[February, 1937],
[March, 1937],
[Summer, 1937],
[August, 1937],
[Fall, 1937],
[October, 1937],
[November, 1937],
[January, 1938],
[March, 1938],
[Summer, 1938],
[October, 1938],
[January, 1939],
[February, 1939],
[Spring, 1939],
[Summer, 1939],
[September, 1939],
Index,
About the Author,
Footnotes,
What People are Saying About This
Anais Nin's diaries live up to our expectations of them. A thrilling piece of work. Truth, perception, artistry.
An extraordinary book...its egoism is revealed, raised to a high standard of art, by an extremely subtle sensibility, expressed in a prose style of astonishing beauty.
No other diarist can bring us to the life, experience, the thoughts and emotions with such intensive vividness.
— Kojy Nakaea, Cahier du Livre, Tokyo
