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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780156272506 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 03/22/1985 |
| Series: | Early Diary of Anais Nin |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
1923
March 20. Richmond Hill. In the same room which held my youth's virgin dreams, bathed in the same soft light which threw a rosy radiance about my fancies, reflected in the same mirror into which I gazed in girlish expectation, questioning and wondering, now sits Hugo, my husband.
A little more than a month ago I was in Havana, still taking part in social life, still the butterfly with gorgeous colors on her fluttering wings, inwardly beginning to tremble at the approach of half-veiled changes.
Somehow, out of a confusion of practical reasoning, romantic impulses, decisions forced by circumstances, Hugo and I emerged one morning, married....
Social pleasures, adulation, luxury and idleness, the last fragments of a brilliant and short season of girlhood, all seemed to melt away as our ship sailed out into the open sea. Days of traveling, our arrival in New York, were all steeped in unreality, which nothing could dispel. Now we live under the shadow of Mother's sorrowing spirit, and our life is difficult, but we are strong together.
March 26. In one room I may spend the most honeyed hours with my Love. Youth vibrates in both of us; our confidences, our growing knowledge of each other, steeped in glowing tenderness, are infinitely sweet and wondrous.
Regretfully I close the door upon my heaven, and I steal softly into another room. Mother lies there, weeping. I fall upon my knees — with a sorrow so piercing that it effaces all other feelings.
Mother clings to me. She murmurs vaguely that she has lost her little girl. Of life, which has been all hardness and pain for her, she expected a sole compensation, and she does not have even that. She tells me through her tears that her life is useless, that she has lost the desire to live. Her faith is broken, her courage, her health, her very heart. The unspeakable cruelty of it overwhelms me. There are times when, in horror of the grief I am causing the mother I love beyond words, I think myself mad.
My Love opens his arms; his eyes shine with love of me and the need of me. Behind him Mother's sorrow looms, immense and terrifying. I see her tear-stained face, her weak, worn figure. I am torn by the choice, torn by conflicting reasoning, by irrepressible sentiments, by pity, by rebellion, by bitterness and self-reproach.
I am impotent to preserve those I love from sorrow. Shall I be permitted to alleviate it? Why has God allowed me to be the instrument of Mother's unhappiness when I prayed night after night to be allowed to suffer for her?
Evening. The Hugo I have described in the past is not the one whose wife I am now. In the first place, I described him as I saw him with my girl's eyes and misplaced idealism. I did not know him then. Now he has truly changed. Whatever I write now alone counts and is alone true. I need to say this because I love to muse on his character and disentangle the diverse discoveries I make day by day.
And Hugo has above all else the quality of constant variety. He evolves continually, so that I can understand him without knowing all of him.
I foresee the exclusion of one generally accepted misfortune befalling the married ones — we shall escape monotony.
March 27. Clinging to Carlyle's teaching and seeking to do the work before me well without thinking or questioning. But I must write because I suffer.
My work is done; and just as I so often sat to rest and dream, writing to fill my aching emptiness and vain expectation, I now sit listening for the sound of Hugo's footsteps upon the gravel path. How sweet it is to meet after a day of separation.
I long for evening, when I can hear his voice again and be folded in his arms. It is only when he is with me that I am contented. As I sit here watching the twilight and waiting for him, I can now say I want nothing else, my life is complete, I know its purpose now.
Evening. Too often now I hesitate before my opened book, tempted to retrace the broken web of my most wondrous past. There is not a day, however bright, which does not suffer from the fading touch of time.
This makes me regretful. I am one who respects the past, who reveres it. A thousand pictures return to me. I see Havana once more; I see society and luxury and beauty of environment; I pass again by the seaside in our soft-rolling car; I move again in that ease and idleness in the brilliant sunshine; I gallop again along the white road at dusk, seeing the palm trees outlined against a fire-colored sky; I meet the peasants and answer their humble greetings; I visit their little huts and witness their abject poverty; and then I again dress in fine, delicate, colorful things and set out to a tea in some luxurious place, deeply struck by the contrast — outwardly the fluttering butterfly, inwardly passing from one deep thought to another.
Through the mist of recollections Hugo's voice reaches me, and as I look into his face I hear something calling to me: Live in the present, live in the present!
March 28. I used to lay great stress upon Hugo's quality of decision, of character. In my hours of profound discouragement I looked up to his strength and self-confidence. It is a curious example of the irony of fate to find that he does not possess these things. I, in my weakness, am the stronger of the two. He gives me happiness, understanding, devotion, the truest companionship, all that I have ever wished for and dreamed of, all but support. I had hoped for that support and leadership; when it failed me, like some frail plant I swayed and trembled, then suddenly I held my head high and held myself straight and firm, and in one moment realized that I had learned to stand alone and struggle alone. Where shall this lead us? I, who believed myself made to cling, thrown upon my own strength.
March 29. I am struck by the manner in which love transforms the most humble work. What once revolted my far too sensitive "artistic sense" has now become invested with sacredness, not for what it is, or means in itself, but for its ultimate end. Whatever I do is done for Hugo. And I love him, so that the ugly becomes beautiful and the coarse fine, only because it is for him.
What joy for me to prove that a mind inclined to occupy itself with elevated, creative thought, to dreaming and solving, to philosophizing, can yet hold sway over the necessary "machinery" of life and equally apply itself to the humbler labor.
This is new language you are listening to. You have listened to my ravings and my raptures. So shall you listen now to my wise and sober discourses upon my preoccupations and interests as woman (still a "prosateur" and still enamored of her books and her pen).
Hugo often talked of these things which he does not possess, and I now understand it is because he thought of them so continuously and strongly. And I used to feel intimidated by his emphasis on them because, as I looked into my own heart, I found them lacking.
Is it not perhaps after all a blessing that it should be thus? What he might have had in his nature he might have expected of me, exacted. Now he admires what is in me, and perhaps I love him more when he confides and clings to me than when he seemed apparently so self-sufficient and self-assertive. How strange the contrast between what I believed of him and what truly is.
How strange our marriage, where union is based on likeness and accord. We begin with similar roots; we both feel deeply, think continuously; we have moods and dreams and visions — and there the similarity ceases, for the results of these, the effects outwardly, the actions and manner of living, are strikingly different. Thus we begin by understanding each other. We meet in a feeling or thought. In acting, we branch out, each in his own way, but we do not lose each other. We criticize and explain each other, we reason, we seek to influence each other — we understand even when we do not approve.
April 3. Now after days of unspeakable torment, I watch on Mother's ravaged face the first signs of fleeting happiness. Her expression too often clouds at mention of the future, but at least the excruciating pain of the first days is softened into the first awakenings of resignation.
Evening. Hugo teased me the night I wrote of Havana, for he said I did it because I loved to dwell on the warmth, it being so cold here. So, without knowing it, on a cold, crisp March night I wrote about Havana to keep myself warm! If I could be happy by writing about happiness.
But for some reason or other, I always come to your pages cold, and I write of warmth to forget. ... Oh, it is sweet to be contented, but it is far more thrilling to be ever dissatisfied and reaching out, for who knows how far and where a great thirst may lead you.
I look up to see Hugo smiling reproachfully at me. He is a little jealous of you, little journal. It is true I should tell all things to him, and I am willing, but how can I when we are together so few hours and when I have so much to tell that even you are not enough, and most of it is turned into soliloquies?
April 7. Hugo was teasing me and among other things said that one could not spend all one's time writing in a diary. He little knows how near that phrase lies to the truth, which torments me. Why can I not do anything else? Why can I not find the class of writing that I am suited for? Am I like Amiel, only capable of this?
Our life is slowly being molded into a close resemblance to our dreams. We have spent two evenings listening to entrancingly fine music. We have renewed our literary talks with Eugene and John. We have taken walks in the woods. Our evenings are restful.
The thought of Mother alone enshadows me, and I can have no taste of happiness without intolerable pangs of regret and self reproach. I should have sacrificed love for her sake.
April 13. Above all else I have desired death these past days. Not even my love of Hugo could alter my despair; it even deepened it, because I could not surrender to the charm of it wholly — always the thought of Mother, Mother holding sway over my feelings.
Hugo begs me to control these feelings, and I could if it were one feeling, but Mother's despair calls out all of them, the deepest, the most enduring and the most heartrending. There is my love for her; there is the pity I always feel strongly even towards strangers and more so when it is my mother who suffers; there is the helplessness to sustain and live for one who needs me, as Mother does; there is the intolerable pain of causing suffering. And Mother sees in our separation only the ruin of all her dreams, her hopes, her needs, her very life.
Sometimes I find strength to communicate my faith to her; at others I am carried away, and together we follow the road of our calvary. And to think that I wrote, some time ago, in the ignorance of my idealism, in the blindness of my dreams: "I see the way to a truer happiness for Mother." I did not know she wanted only me, free of obligations, free to devote myself to her completely.
April 14. Among a thousand other things, I ask myself if it is possible to find completeness in human companionship. In contemplating love, I foresaw the abandonment of my diary. In fulfilling love, I still cling tenaciously to these pages. The reason I need you is to receive the emotions and ideas which overflow from my being.
With mind ravaged by the devouring monsters of revolt, I attended Mass — an offering on the altar of my mother-worship — and was struck into awed and humble silence by a simple sermon on simple faith. With eloquent, contagious trust, the priest laid healing fingers on the burning pulse of my doubts. He made faith beautiful, and he made peace holy and precious.
I did not question my attitude. I knew that at the moment I was good.
"It is not a question of being good or wicked," said Hugo, analyzing this. "It is a question of being right or wrong."
I reflected for a moment. The hesitation was provocative. "I was wicked before, but I was right. And now I am good but I am wrong." He took it humorously. But this is a case of the grain of truth in humor.
April 18. Eugene, Johnnie, Hugo and I the other night discussed religion, superstition, faith and mysticism, and weighed the distinction between thought and feeling.
We agreed there was no distinction, but I well know that the balm on my agonized emotions [I experienced at Mass] was of a different nature and superior sphere.
Detachedly I watched and marveled. Eugene, Johnnie and Hugo were gently puffing their pipes, and through the mist of smoke I could see all our books and, as if arising from them, our discussions and the weighing of one another's ideas. The little room was warm with animation and earnestness.
In the intellect alone there is a strength, balance, happiness ... but there is no peace.
Does peace come only with the death of the flesh? Why can we not have it when the intellect is all-powerful and it is allowed full freedom and sway?
April 20. Eduardo arrived from college. He invited Hugo and me to the performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, and before that, we renewed our former talks, marveled at the change in each, aired our new ideas, exchanged unexpected impressions. Eduardo is still essentially charming, and even his dealing with a more palpable existence is clear, fresh and pure.
Jesting, I begged Hugo to break me of the vice of diary writing. He objected. It was rather a privilege to be endowed with the habit of writing. Besides, he added, it was exercise and preparatory practice.
No. I am caught in a circle. At first I wished only to exercise, to develop, to attain ease and fluency, but now I cannot cease. I cannot fit myself to any kind of writing after so much arduous and sincere preparation. And then I long to give myself wholly to my writing, if at all. A diary is a polite work and easily adaptable to the fragmentary quality of time I have for it.
To willfully ignore sorrow, to guide the thoughts into detached channels — that is the acme of mental weakness, and yet sometimes the result of unbearable pressure. To steady myself, to retain my evenness, I sometimes avoid the subjects closest to me. But now I may again approach them.
It appears as if the solution of our numberless troubles is to be found in a total change, and realizing the state of Mother's mind as I do, I hail as our salavtion a change of country and environment such as we are threatened by. Hugo's affairs may take him to Paris, the city of my most secret and cherished dreams, long thought lost.
And as the feelings surge within me, I again come to you to unburden myself of them. Dearest diary, you are the living symbol of my failure, as the world sees failure, but you are the representative of all I hold most sacred, which is the subtle transition of thoughts and emotions into words, which are to me invested with the holiest of joys.
Oh, the joy, the joy of writing, a joy so intense, so pure, so all-absorbing and free and all-encompassing, flooding the soul in mystical ecstasy, elevating and sanctifying, infusing beauty in the humblest subjects and a purpose in the most wayward life.
April 23. Eduardo has gone, and again the loss of his enchanting presence creates a void.
I had the joy of feeling harmony between Hugo and Eduardo — a joy mingled with gratitude, for Hugo not only sanctions my devotions but participates in them. Eduardo's personal merit perhaps largely influenced the continuity of this response, but not the first expression of it, which is what touched me.
Accepting the theory that I am composed of many selves, of many opposing forces, moods, even reasonings, I shall proceed to classify them as high and low, for this in itself is suggestive of the feelings which accompany the passing of one state into another.
Thus in my highest moments, which I believe to be inspired by a sudden and mysterious kindling of the divine influence, I make statements and laws and utter righteous truths. And in my lower moments, I do not abide by them. I forget. I become an empty skeleton into which, so to speak, no ideas breathe.
These days I have blindly struggled with myself and hungered for purer thoughts and nobler sentiments, for that state I remembered vaguely having visited, in the past, which was beautiful compared with the present one.
Today I remembered my own words, which I wrote with a quivering, triumphant pen: "Happiness is a small consideration and seems of little value. I feel a joy beyond joy in the midst of my sorrow, and what I feel while suffering is far beyond contentment — beyond peace — it is something nameless which approaches the divine. ... In agony, in torment, in despair, through burning tears, I thank heaven that I am suffering, because through the purifying fire of sorrow I shall see the ideal, and I see God. I repudiate ordinary happiness. I want martyrdom and sacrifice, I want something greater than human happiness!"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume Three 1923-1927"
by .
Copyright © 1983 Rupert Pole as Trustee for the Anaïs Nin Trust.
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,
Editor's Note,
List of Illustrations,
Preface,
THE DIARY OF A WIFE (JOURNAL D'UNE ÉPOUSE),
1923,
1924,
1925,
Photos,
1926,
1927,
Index,
About the Author,
Footnotes,