Letter from Anaïs Nin to Hugh Guiler:
San Francisco, April 1949
Darling: Our uncertain plans suspended our correspondence and I was happy to have talked with you by telephone—it is so much more real. I hope you are taking care of yourself, resting. I am always worried about you straining.
Your long letter about your adventures in Brazil was fascinating, really like a novel. And you write it all so vividly, so I felt I had been there with you. The funny thing is that what you felt about the man whose will forced you to take the trip under dangerous conditions is what I feel about you. I might say that if I tried to sum up the main characters of the life I lead alone it might be described as “effortless”—seeking to live according to my nature and energy. Of course I realize it is only possible due to the results of your work, but I hope you will strain less later. I do miss you and want to be with you, but in postponing the big move till June, I have an unconscious resistance to “strain.” I always hope that if I wait for you to be farther along in your analysis I won’t return to an experience that characterizes strain. On the one side is the love, the desire to be with you, but on the other is the sense of compulsion, the strain in your life that destroys me. We are now at this moment looking at each other but not at the same goal, or perhaps the same goal but in space. The result of my finding my true self is that I discovered a Cuban who does not like to force nature. Dios gana [God wins]. I admire your courage on your Brazil adventure, but as a woman I would dislike returning from this trip you wanted me to take with you depleted and exhausted. That is why here, though it isn’t the best climate in the world, I become absolutely healthy—by a petite vie, douce et humaine—where I never force myself. I work, but I stop when I have to.
In June I am hoping you will have finished your tense, quick trips and be ready for seven weeks of enjoyment. I do look forward to that. I also know I should be helping you now to entertain, so that gets me in a conflict of guilt. The resolution there seems to be one that I can’t take because of our love: to live on a small income but to live without effort, or forcing, that is the only “other” life I achieve alone. Anyway, I believe you are on your way to achieving a marvelous life and you are now all that I wished you were before: flowing and vital. Once the strain is taken out I believe we will want the same things.
Perhaps I am wrong to hope that the farther you push into analysis the happier you will be. I believe now that the short stays in New York were not good—too intense—and you felt resentful of my leaving so soon. When I come in June it will be different. Your feeling that I am returning for good may make a difference.
Anyway, I told you now about the course in composition I took all this year. It was interesting and strange.
I haven’t heard from Dutton yet. I speak before the Writers Conference April 8th at Berkeley.
You gave me money (cash and credit at bank) for five weeks. If you want me to come now, can I draw the cost of the trip from the bank and if I don’t leave on the 8th or 10th shall I take the allowance from the bank account? I await your plans.
People come to see the “antiques” but don’t buy.
Anaïs
SAN FRANCISCO, MAY 1, 1949
No alarm clock, a week of holiday. But Rupert is recuperating from an acute bronchitis. He needs his sleep. I always awaken earlier. A shaft of light awakens me, or the neighbor’s loud talk on the floor above.
The front room is flooded with sun. This morning it highlighted the newly stained table, in a pale violet blue, the last of our work on the furniture. Rupert has put a great deal of his own substance into the house. He worked on sandpapering the shelves and stained them. He is a perfectionist in craft. He built the coffee table.
But there is an organic weakness in him: the devastating bronchitis, the cough that racks his body. Lying in bed, defenseless, tender, he called me as I passed: “Come here.” His mouth trembled. “I am lucky to have you.” I took care of him with utter devotion. The love I feel is deep. His gestures move me. The fixity of his eyes, rigid with anxiety. The shape of his hands and feet.
Today I made breakfast and had coffee alone. I answered Gore’s letter, Hugo’s letter. On June 1st Rupert takes his summer job and I go to New York. I owe Hugo that.
Then Rupert awakened and began tinting the furniture. He is sad because the job is almost over and then he will have to face his dull, dry, monotonous schoolwork. So he dreams of Bali. But he does not dare to live on what I have because of his conscience and because he wants to be useful.
I wash dishes. I clean the apartment. I wash his socks (the first time I washed his socks was in New Orleans—he had work to do on the car, and I offered to wash his socks because he was suffering from poison oak and needed fresh ones). I go marketing. I buy what he likes. I have become fearfully domestic because the peace, the monotony of housework is broken by our wild lovemaking, our lyrical, stormy, lightning caresses.
Every day I question the mystery of my physical life with Hugo. What happened? What destroyed it? Was it inexperience on his part, and on mine? Was it inadequacy on his part? He has always reached the climax too soon. Was it dissatisfaction, sensual unfulfillment that estranged me from him? Now that I have this fulfillment with Rupert I have become faithful, domestic. I can sew, mend, repair, clean, wash, because there will be a climax, a lyrical moment, a sensation, a certitude of high living. The high living moment must have been absent from my marriage because I always had the feeling I was trapped by such experience, waiting, living en marge with Hugo, that this high moment lay outside, in the night, in the absent lover. Poor Hugo. What could I do? Sometimes I tried, delicately, to impart what I had learned, but his manhood rebelled then. Our lovemaking was tragic, ineffectual. He inhibited me.
A night of fog. Music on the radio. Leave the past alone.
I look at the dressing table I made from four shelves, a mirror, and six glass bricks. Brilliant, multicolored Japanese dolls on the shelves, princesses of a lavish glitter of gestures and clothes, like a Christmas tree of light, tinsel, satin, jewels. Elaborate, iridescent. I bought two of them. Hugo bought me the others, to delight me. When I went to New York in February I took one along for Hugo. I placed it on our dressing table. When we had to entertain wealthy and aristocratic Italians I placed the doll on the mantelpiece. Hugo interpreted it as an assertion of the childlike spirit. His analyst said, “Let her have all the props she needs.” The doll meant something else. It was the poem. It said, “This afternoon people are gathered together because of material interests, because they need each other to add to their power in the world, but they do not like or enjoy each other.” It is a ceremony without iridescence or beauty that I rebel against. I will be hurt in the process. And I was. The Italian woman was cold and arrogant and I lost my confidence. The doll on the mantelpiece pleaded for mercy. The afternoon among the mature, the assured, the cool ones was for me an ordeal. It had the character of torment, judgment, an inspection, a duel, and I felt incapacitated. I felt vulnerable and unequal. I explained this to Hugo. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help him, it wasn’t that I shirked my responsibilities, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to please him, but that I couldn’t, I was unequal to it. I lost my confidence in