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Mirages. Anais Nin
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NOVEMBER 16, 1940
John has lost his power—I knew this as I heard his voice over the telephone, and when I saw him standing at the door of the hotel room. No more heart-beating and electric currents. I let him take me without responding. It was impersonal and distant. After taking me, he spread on the bed his new drawings and 200 pages of writing, talked about his rebirth, his faith, his strength. The mother of the artist had given birth again, but would I destroy this creation for my own sake because I could no longer act for impersonal reasons? Perhaps I had given John his life, and perhaps he could now breathe and create alone. I praised his work; we talked.
The next day I asked John to come to my place, and I told him: “I no longer feel the same way.” He said, “Don’t be afraid to break me—is it absolutely over?” The manner in which he awaited my answer, as if I were going to break him, prevented me from making the absolute statement. He was so gentle, so full of faith, that I left it in the shadows. The following day I went to his hotel. When I found the room in semi-darkness and everything set for possession, I again spoke to him, never saying the ultimate breaking word. Why cannot I operate lustily, courageously? I undermined John’s faith, but as I did so, the pity I felt for all his hopes, for his imagined life with me in New York, for his new birth, made me offer my mouth and body in attenuation of the truth, and again I left him between awareness and delusion. Another evening, at my place, which provided me a defense, I pled the moonstorm, but I was tender. But yesterday I would not see him at all. So is woman accused of caprice and cruelty! I can no longer be the mother who gives all. I have no longer the strength to act what I do not feel.
I rushed back to Nanankepichu, into my whole love for Gonzalo. He made a violent scene of disguised jealousy, attacking all my friends on the ground that they were Trotskyites. I felt again his jealousy and clutching, but the whole scene falls apart at the touch of our bodies, even when his cheek touches mine. Everything vanishes and is forgotten when Gonzalo falls asleep like a child, with his head on my breast and his hand between my legs. I am here again, Gonzalo, most beloved of all. I want to lock myself up with you and my work. I cannot feel or see the rest of the world, whose nightmare would kill me if I were to become aware of it. The other figures are unreal. Why do they move about, so close to me? Eduardo is in a hotel room taking Robert Duncan like a woman. Kenneth Patchen does not sleep, grappling as all Americans grapple, with too much matter and immediacy and impotent to touch the core of meaning, lost and blind. Virginia Admiral sits on a soapbox, drawing and typewriting in the poorest room of all.
NOVEMBER 19, 1940
A few hours before going to see John I entered the subway at rush hour, which I rarely do, and was pushed by the waves of people, jammed against them, and stood there. Suddenly I remembered pages Henry had written about his adventures in the subway, his pressing against women, their submission, how they stood against each other, and how in a state of excitement he followed one of them out and she eluded him after letting herself be touched. As I remembered this I felt a hand barely touching my dress, as if by accident. My coat was open, my dress very light and this hand was brushing lightly just at the place of the sex. I did not move away. The man beside me was so tall that I could not see his face, but I did not want to know who it was. The hand caressed the dress, then very lightly it increased its pressure, feeling for the sex. I made a slight movement to raise the sex towards the fingers. The fingers became firmer, following the shape of the sex, deftly, lightly. I felt great pleasure. A lurch of the subway pushed us together—I pressed against his hand, and he made a bolder gesture. Now I was frenzied. I felt the orgasm approaching; the fingers seemed to know it and continued the caresses. The orgasm shook my whole body. The subway stopped, and the tight river of people pushed out. The man disappeared.
Again in John’s room, set against possession, saying the words: “I have changed,” but not saying: “I don’t love you.” I wrap every phrase I use in tenderness. Deep down, I feel nothing except irritation at his childish hatred of the world, his criticalness, his blind and blundering talk, his echoes of Henry, his drinking of whiskey before he makes love. I do not find in him the embracing acceptance which drinks and eats of the world in order to create, but rather a child’s petulant affirmation of himself, either out of proportion to his value, or a complete loss of confidence. All that may interest the mother in me, but I am tired of being the mother. Where will I find a man? Break, break, break. My whole being calls for an act of violence, but I still use velvet gloves. My whole being rejects John. I should have rejected him that day when I first responded sexually and then rebelled at his gesture of tenderness because I did not love him. Desire is not enough. Last night when I saw him vulnerable, tender, and I was using all the words one can say in place of “I don’t love you,” again I experienced warmth, a purely physical warmth, and again I let him take me, untouched, like Lilith in The Winter of Artifice. He said, “You cannot be possessed,” and I did not say, “Not by you,” but I smiled and refused to feel the orgasm which a few hours before I felt at the hands of a stranger. I lay on John’s bed and felt nothing. He did not know this; he only thought I was being capricious. How strangely a man must feel after he has taken a woman he does not love and finds that he hates the nape of her neck, her hair, her hands, or worse, any gesture of familiarity on her part. From the beginning I withdrew from every gesture John made that was not of pure desire, but of love. Now I have a feeling of hatred, of rejection, perhaps as a man must have towards a whore sometimes. I want to reject him. I can only hear the foolish words he says, seeking a form to give my hatred.
Mirages. The mother is dying.
What am I now?
If John had come for a week only, I might have acted for the sake of an illusion. One evening Hugo had just given me the five dollars for the next day’s food when John came to the studio and asked directly for money. I said, “This is all I have.” He took it and went down to buy a quart of whiskey. I was angered by his childishness and irresponsibility. “Anaïs, find us a studio. Anaïs, I need a painting teacher. Anaïs, take us to hear some jazz. Anaïs, find us a backer for our magazine. Anaïs, help me to write, help me to become an artist.”
Last night in the street, wanting an absolute break, I told him: “You are forcing me to tell you the truth—I have loved someone for four years, and I still do.”
At last it was done. I was shattered by his face grown pale, by his hurt pride making him suddenly rigid, by all the warmth I had thrown away. I felt not like a woman, but like a murderer. In order not to torment him, I had killed him and his newborn confidence as man, as artist, all at once, and for the first time in my life with a clear-cut knife thrust. Never before. Cutting the umbilical cord clean. Then all night I heard the cries of a woman who was ill and felt they were John’s cries. My first crime, on young John. But I am being sentimental. John—how deep is his being, how deep are the repercussions of pain? Pain is creative too. Mother, give me sex, give me food, protect, feed, encourage me, give me drink. And the mother, weary, weary, weary, struck out, and threw out, and refused to nourish. John’s was the love of a child, not of a man. I have lived this out to its fullest and bitterest, but I am finished with that. The mother has died, was killed, in fact, by cruel, selfish children. No one can revive her.
NOVEMBER 24, 1940
My child Henry returns from his wanderings. We talk about America. I said, “Were you looking for something to love? There is nothing to love here, it is a monster, a huge prosaic monster, buying all the creative wealth of Europe at bargain prices, buying it as they buy paintings, giving jobs to the refugees, yes, but only jobs, only money, no respect or evaluation or devotion, devouring with huge, empty jaws. It is nothing, a void, a colossal robot, a commercial empire, made for caricature, all ugly because it is all materialistic. Every artist born here was killed. You escaped and found yourself, and now you have the strength to grapple with it; it cannot swallow you into its rivers of cement. Look at America for what it is: concrete, iron, cement, lead, bricks, machines, and a mass of blind, anonymous robots. It is a huge monster, but made of papier mâché with marble eyes.”
NOVEMBER 26, 1940
The truth is that when I lose Henry, I lose all the joy