“One of the most remarkable diaries in the history of letters” ends as the author wished: not with her last two years of pain but at a joyous moment on a trip to Bali (Los Angeles Times). As she ages, Anaïs Nin reflects on how the deeply personal and introspective nature of her writings intertwines with her public life and her connections with other people, including her devoted readers.
“One of the most extraordinary and unconventional writers of [the twentieth] century.” —The New York Times Book Review
Edited and with a preface by Gunther Stuhlmann
“One of the most remarkable diaries in the history of letters” ends as the author wished: not with her last two years of pain but at a joyous moment on a trip to Bali (Los Angeles Times). As she ages, Anaïs Nin reflects on how the deeply personal and introspective nature of her writings intertwines with her public life and her connections with other people, including her devoted readers.
“One of the most extraordinary and unconventional writers of [the twentieth] century.” —The New York Times Book Review
Edited and with a preface by Gunther Stuhlmann
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Overview
“One of the most remarkable diaries in the history of letters” ends as the author wished: not with her last two years of pain but at a joyous moment on a trip to Bali (Los Angeles Times). As she ages, Anaïs Nin reflects on how the deeply personal and introspective nature of her writings intertwines with her public life and her connections with other people, including her devoted readers.
“One of the most extraordinary and unconventional writers of [the twentieth] century.” —The New York Times Book Review
Edited and with a preface by Gunther Stuhlmann
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780544477803 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Series: | The Diaries of Anaïs Nin , #7 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 24 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
[Summer, 1966]
At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, "Anaïs — Anaïs — Anaïs. You just say 'Anna' and then add 'ees,' with the accent on the 'ees.'" A month of good reviews, love letters, appearances on television. Has the sniping really stopped? I feel like a soldier on the front, amazed by the silence of the guns, wondering if the war is over.
A month which made up for all the disappointments, the poison pen reviews, for all the past obstacles, insults. The sound of opening doors is deafening!
Suddenly love, praise, flowers, invitations to lecture. "Girl Talk" (TV show) with Elsa Lanchester. She and I sat on the couch and let the other aggressive women ramble on. It seems we both had the same expression. How shallow, noisy they are! We did not talk, just looked at each other with the same understanding.
Television interview with Arlene Francis very deep. She knew my work. She is enormously intelligent and wise.
My scrapbook is gaining weight.
The same publishers who turned down my work beg for my comments on new books they are publishing.
Rehearsal for "Camera Three." Stephen Chodoroff wrote the script. They wanted me to read the birth story but I did not have the courage. They blew up photos of Louveciennes for background. I read for half an hour. I read well but had the impression they expected fireworks and I was restrained and quiet in my reading. Partly shyness.
The Diary is selling well. Hiram Haydn thought its sale would be limited. My publisher printed only 5,000 copies. They were sold in a week! Then they printed only 2,500 more.
Book-signing party at the Gotham Book Mart. Overflow of people out into the street.
Hilda Lindley is my publicity director at Harcourt, Brace. She is a charming and clever woman, but we do not agree on the way she spends my publicity budget. She advertises in the New Yorker, which has done everything in its power to annihilate me, reviewing each book destructively and maliciously. Same with Partisan Review, or the New York Review of Books, which ignores me. I ask her if she does not think readers of such reviews will believe the book reviewer rather than the advertisement. It makes no sense to me. She will not advertise in the Village Voice, or in the Los Angeles Free Press, which supports me loyally. She answers that she is trying to move me away from the underground into a more general readership.
"But I was created by the underground, I belong to the underground. I want to remain in contact with them. They are my genuine readers. They supported me. The others tried to destroy my work. Life, Time, Saturday Review, etc."
She cannot see my point of view.
My Japanese publisher invited me to Japan to celebrate the publication of A Spy in the House of Love.
The beauty of Japan began on the Japan Airlines plane. In the pocket in front of me there was a fan, paper slippers, napkins and exquisitely designed writing paper. On the dinner tray the food was shaped like flowers, an orchid rested on the center of the plate. The plastic bottle containing the soy sauce was shaped like a graceful Greek vase.
The book I carried with me was Meeting with Japan by Fosco Maraini, an Italian writer who lived in Japan many years and loved it so deeply that he forgave the Japanese for forcing him to spend the war years in a concentration camp (he was a "foreigner" even though his country was on the side of Japan).
It was dark when we landed in Tokyo. From the taxi I saw the silhouette of the Imperial Hotel built by Frank Lloyd Wright. It seemed like that of an Aztec or Mayan temple. I could see why the Japanese chose Wright to build their most palatial hotel. The sense of aristocracy, the nobility of forms, the sense of many-layered beauty in stone, tiles, wood. It was a romantic floating palace, built on piles riding in mud, which enabled it to survive the great earthquake. As I arrived, the first thing I saw was the pool covered with lotus flowers. The Japanese baron who built the hotel had said there was no money for the pool. But Wright insisted it was essential to protect the buildings from the great fire that would surely follow an earthquake. And this beautiful pool did save the hotel from the earthquake-produced fire, when the city water supply failed and the hotel employees formed a bucket brigade from the pool to the buildings.
The Imperial Hotel became the temple for international celebrities. Everyone stayed there when they came to Japan, and the many beautiful intimate corners became meeting places for the Japanese. The heaviness of the furniture was not in harmony with Japanese austerity, but whatever Wright designed had its own integrity.
Immediately adjacent was the new Imperial Hotel; in violent contrast to the garden-surrounded, romantic Wright buildings, it was a typical international high-rise, sterile, plain, monotonous. From a distance it hung like a sword of death over the last refuge of beauty in downtown Tokyo. Wright's design gave the sensation of living through many centuries; it evoked every palace or temple ever portrayed, from Egyptian to Inca. He restored to man the sense of pride and deep accumulation of experience entirely lost in modern architecture, which reduces man to an anonymous, meaningless being in an anonymous, meaningless abode, like an ant cell. Here the man who moved about in Wright's setting was a being containing memories of all the past, and strong enough to have a vision of the future, and of his metaphysical place in it. The man staying in the modern wing had no face, no identity, no existence. The restaurant was like a cafeteria. Did modern architecture know it would reduce man to a colorless, insubstantial shadow, without memory or power to evoke his own history?
It was not only the invitation of my publisher which led me to visit Japan. I was steeped in Japanese novels, in Lady Murasaki's work, in Japanese films; and one of my most important childhood readings was a volume on Japan from a collection, Voyage Autour du Monde. I dreamed over the illustrations. A need of beauty and meaning led me to Japan, a need of renewal, of an external world I could love. Everything suited me. The muted sounds, the gentleness of manners, the charm and graciousness of the stewardesses on the plane, the taxi driver's immaculate white gloves.
My first day in Tokyo was a Sunday, so I was free to walk about. I visited the Imperial Palace.
We believe that films give us a true image of the countries we cannot see for ourselves, but when faced with reality, I was shocked to see how much I had not been given by films. The texture, smell and tonalities were missing. The Gate of Hell was of a dark, ashy black wood with heavy iron hinges. The palace, placed high on the tip of a hill, was all white and black wood. The walls around it were of huge hand-cut stones. Black swans with yellow beaks glided in the moat water. There were gardeners everywhere in dark blue cotton embroidered with white and in white head kerchiefs. All so neat, working with precision and order, stylized. The strollers carried colorful umbrellas. It was a misty day. The air smelled of damp vines and crushed flowers and freshly cut grass. Another missing element in the films.
It was my first sight of the curved roof, curving upward, ending in a peak adorned with a carved bird seeming about to fly off. This curve, this undulating fine design pointing to the sky, is what the Japanese call "frozen music" [kureku-ongader]. And so it was, though of solid matter, its design vibrating like a stringed instrument.
In the afternoon I visited a shrine, all gold and red. The offerings to the gods were rice on lacquered trays and bottles of sake.
On Monday I met my young publisher, Mr. Tomohisa Kawade, who had just inherited the Kawade Shobo publishing house from his father. He was twenty-eight; he had the smooth, pearly complexion so often seen in the Japanese. The gold skin is tinged with the faintest flush, the eyes brilliant. My translator came too, Mr. Nakada. They took me to a tempura restaurant. A small wooden house with private rooms overlooking miniature gardens. Uncluttered room. A rush mat, a lacquered table, pillows and one ornamental scroll and flower arrangement. The women, elaborately dressed, as in familiar prints; such subtle harmonies of color. They move about on woolly socks, noiselessly. Having tea and contemplating the garden, with its sound of dripping water, creates a mood of serenity and harmony in the heart of Tokyo.
After tea we moved to the tempura bar. A circle of white pinewood, immaculate. In the center is the chef, ruling with precision and skill over big cauldrons of boiling oil. Using three-foot chopsticks like a rapier, he takes up shrimp, or string beans, or eggplant, dips it in a light batter, immerses it quickly in the boiling oil and serves it crisp and airy. Conversation was labored because everything had to be translated.
I visited the publishing house, a small, intimate building. I met the editors.
In the evening we had dinner in a geisha restaurant. A long, low table, and behind each one of us a geisha, solicitous of one's every need. They kept filling the small sake cups, making conversation. Softly, a geisha helped me to handle a small fish with chopsticks. She patted the fish for a few seconds and suddenly pulled out the entire skeleton clean and free. All this in an exquisite dress with floating sleeves, like the wings of butterflies, which would paralyze a Western woman. There was a small stage on which dancers performed after dinner. They exuded an incredible charm, young or old, pretty or not. Faces so smooth, smiles like an offering of flowers. The kimonos had a freshness, an airiness, as if just ironed, starched, never wilted. Every gesture, every modulation of voice was made with intent to please, delight, as if the dancers were born like the genii out of your own dreams to shower you with thoughtfulness. They banish all harshness of voice or color, move like the wind, surround you with the essence of care, solicitude. It is not only directed at men. I felt the benefic effects of it.
One geisha, quite young, gave me her scarf to sign. Near my signature was Ernest Hemingway's. She said, "He signed my scarf when I was fifteen."
It is no wonder men dream of this quintessence of femininity, which never seems more than a reflection of a dream.
The women of Japan are at once the most present and the most invisible and elusive inhabitants of any country I have seen. They were everywhere, in restaurants, streets, shops, museums, subways, trains, fields, hotels and inns, and yet achieved a self-effacement which, to foreign women, is striking. In the hotels and inns they were solicitous, thoughtful. It was as if one's dream of an ever-attentive, ever-protective mother were fulfilled on a collective scale, only the mother is forever young and daintily dressed. They were laborious and yet quiet, efficient, ever present and yet not intrusive or cumbersome.
They stood before you not a moment longer than necessary, not one of them seemed to be saying: Look at me. I am here. The way they carried trays and served food seemed like a miraculous triumph over clumsiness, weight. They had conquered gravitation.
I saw them at work in factories. They wore blue denim kimonos, shabby from use but clean. They kneeled, sitting back on their heels, working with the same precision of gesture as their more glamorous counterparts. Their hair was not lacquered or formed into high chignons, but neatly braided.
In the fields, the peasant women presented the same harmonious dress of coarse, dark blue denim, always soigne, even when worn. Their straw hats, their baskets were uniform, and they worked with such alignment that they seemed like a beautifully designed group dance. I watched them pick weeds, in a row, on their knees, with baskets beside them, and they picked in rhythm, without deviation or fumbling. While the women weeded, the men took care of the trees or cleaned the ponds of surplus water lilies.
The softness, the all-enveloping attentiveness of the women ... I thought of the Japanese films, in which this delicacy could turn into fierceness if challenged, in which women startled you with a dagger or even a sword at times. What kind of modern woman would emerge from the deep, masked, long-hidden Japanese woman of old? The whole mystery of Japanese women lay behind their smooth faces, which rarely showed age except perhaps on peasant women battered by nature. The smoothness remained from childhood far into maturity.
The thoughtfulness could not be a mask; it seemed so natural, a genuine sensitiveness to others.
I collected a large number of Japanese novels, thinking I would then become more intimate with the feelings and thoughts of Japanese women. It was a woman, Lady Murasaki, who wrote the first novel around the year A.D. 1000 [Tale of Genji], and although it is a Proustian work of elaborate and subtle detail, although the feelings and thoughts of the personages at court are described, the author herself remains elusive. But few modern works by Japanese women are translated, and the novels as a whole failed to bring me any closer to them. The same element of feminine selflessness is present. There is a strong tendency to live according to the code, the mores, the religious or cultural rules, to live for a collective ideal. The one who breaks away is described as a monster of evil.
In one of the touring buses there was a young woman guide in a light blue uniform, a small white cap and white gloves. She was in reality homely, but her expression radiated such responsiveness and participation, such warmth and friendliness, that she kept the mood of the travels high through an arduous day. At each village the bus stopped, she sang the folk song of the region. Her voice was clear and sweet like a child's, and yet it had a haunting quality like that of a wistful flute played in solitude. Through heat, through fatigue, through harassing travelers, she remained fresh, buoyant, carrying her modern burden of work as lightly as if it had been a fan.
The children presented a different mystery: the mystery of discipline and love in such balance that they appeared to be the most spontaneous children I had ever seen, and at the same time the best behaved. They were lively, cheerful, charming, outgoing, expressive and free, but their freedom never ended in sullenness or anarchy. I witnessed a group of Japanese schoolchildren being guided through a museum who came upon an American child of their own age. They surrounded him gaily, twittering and speaking the few words of English they knew. The American child looked suspicious and withdrawn.
I thought of the gardens of Japan, the order, the stylization, the control of nature, which presented only an aesthetically perfect image. Had the Japanese also achieved this miracle of aesthetic and ethical perfection in their own nature? No weeds, no dead leaves, no withered flowers, no disorder, no tangles, no mud-splattered paths?
My publisher filled up Monday and Tuesday with interviews. After a few days of homage paid me as a writer, too long to describe, I had a lunch with my translator, Nakada; a young critic, Jun Eto; and a young novelist, Kenzaburo Oe. A lunch of many hours with interpreters, talking to other writers. The talk was recorded and published. Conversation through interpreters is frustrating. It is laborious and heavy, prevents quick interplay and direct contact.
Oe, the most modern of the Japanese writers and a left-winger, was not the writer I wanted to meet. I was far more interested in Kawabata, in Mishima and in the older tradition of Japanese novels. The first thing Oe did when we were introduced was to extend his right hand and say: "This hand shook the hand of Mao Tse-tung." Which made no impression on me at all.
He had written about Norman Mailer, the most uninteresting of American writers. I could see I was in a Japan influenced by the worst of America.
The conversation veered unexpectedly to the American Dream. I said Mailer represented the American nightmare. Oe thought there were two trends in America, one the hero who expresses the American dream, and one who expresses America's illusions. Oe quoted A1 Capone: "I am the ghost of a bad dream in America." The real American dream, said Oe, was Lindbergh and J. F. Kennedy. Kennedy, he felt was a dangerous American, because he showed only an ideal face. He died before he could reveal his other face.
The conversation bored me, and I turned away from it.
Nakada is a brilliant translator and essayist, a critic and theater director. He presented me with a summer kimono and obi. I love the seriousness of the Japanese, their caring, and basic timidity. They are imprisoned in their traditional formalities but it makes intercourse harmonious and suave.
Great repressions create dualities. I feel that the selflessness demanded by their culture creates a seething unconscious.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Diary of Anaïs Nin 1966-1974"
by .
Copyright © 1980 Rupert Pole as trustee under the Last Will and Testament of 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,
List of Illustrations,
[Summer, 1966],
[Fall, 1966],
[Winter, 1966â&8364;"1967],
[January, 1967],
[Spring, 1967],
[Summer, 1967],
[Fall, 1967],
[Winter, 1967â&8364;"1968],
[Spring, 1968],
[Summer, 1968],
[Fall, 1968],
[Winter, 1968â&8364;"1969],
[Spring, 1969],
[Summer, 1969],
[Fall, 1969],
[Winter, 1969â&8364;"1970],
[Spring, 1970],
[Summer, 1970],
[Fall, 1970],
[Winter, 1970â&8364;"1971],
[Spring, 1971],
Photos,
[Summer, 1971],
[Fall, 1971],
[Winter, 1971â&8364;"1972],
[Spring, 1972],
[Summer, 1972],
[Fall, 1972],
[Winter, 1972â&8364;"1973],
[Spring, 1973],
[Summer, 1973],
[Fall, 1973],
[Winter, 1973â&8364;"1974],
[Spring, 1974],
[Summer, 1974],
Epilogue,
Index,
About the Author,
Footnotes,