Arrive in New York. I will be here a month.
MY UNWANTED PRESENCE
1951
DECEMBER 1950-JANUARY 1951
New York
JANUARY 27, 1951
Arrival in Los Angeles
SIERRA MADRE, JANUARY 1951
Rupert’s wild pleasure at my arrival. I was sick for two days with bronchitis. We swam though caresses, and clung all night to each other. He took care of me, warmly and completely. In the dark he said, “Separations are painful, but they make us realize how necessary we are to each other. What a life-giving love!” After two days, I got up to clean the house that Rupert had not been able to clean. Emerging out of an electric passion, a charged night, and having gained detachment, I can face the dirty house, the economies, Reginald’s monologues, and Kay and John. Rupert, whom I have imagined wanting this life, reveals he does not want it any more than I do, but he does not know how to go about creating another. This is what he is capable of doing. So much of what one thinks, imagines, far away from the loved one, is false. How carefully one must compare it with reality, retouch it.
I found out that Rupert rebels against forestry and the dullness of the life while I am away. As soon as I return, though, he is content. I can see by the way he lives while I am away, he stops living. He eats monotonously, he does not bathe, change the sheets; he loses his brightness and energy. I saw him come to life. And now at the end of two weeks, he is playing with quartets, he sings. And he has made out of his own hands the couch-benches I planned. At times I feel I am free of my love of Rupert. I see him in another world. I see the enormous areas of our relationship created by my playing a role. It may have been true at one time that in contrast to New York I wanted nature, serenity, an easy rhythm, but now I know that the only nature I like is the tropical one: Acapulco, warmth, languor, beauty and gayety. The Sun. But not California.
It may have been true at one time, after the infernal life in New York with the Press, Gonzalo, and Bill, that I wanted to return to simplicity, to a simple life with the One. But it is no longer true. I hate this kind of simplicity, its emptiness. I hate Rupert listening to “Invitation to Learning” (moronic and vulgar) or the commentators.
But as against all this, Rupert’s face on the pillow in the morning, his sleepiness, his pathetic dutifulness, his tautness, his discomfort in the world, his rough clothes and finely chiseled body, his anxieties, his powerful, wiry embraces, his severities I no longer take seriously. Last night his face was illuminated because he was mischievously eating up the sandwiches I had prepared for his lunch the next day!
I think of all the human bondages, to a human being’s voice, touch, warmth and trustiness. I could not harm him. But could I tempt him, marry him off? Couldn’t I find the woman who would tempt him?
Days when I am happy to live out Rupert’s life as he sees it: a couple who earns $200 a month (his earnings), which means that I must take care of the house (what I “earn” in New York is for our trips or for a house of our own) so I immerse myself in:
1 hour in the kitchen—dishes, cleaning, burning garbage
1 hour of 1 room a day—thorough cleaning, sweeping rug, mopping, cleaning pipes
1 hour of errands—shopping, shoes repaired, cleaning suits, tailor, post office
1 hour sewing or mending socks and underwear
1 hour for myself, bathing, care of face, hair, etc.
A little while for letter writing, reading if I’m tired, and then another hour in the kitchen to cook dinner.
After a week or so I hate the housekeeping, feel stripped and diminished, colorless and empty. No. I cannot live this way. Monday evening a movie, Tuesday Rupert plays with the Pasadena orchestra. Wednesday a movie. Thursday evening he plays quartets with his family and I see Jim. Friday evening a movie, etc., etc.
But then a moment of passion and all the discordances are effaced. I dream of the sea within us, the astonishing levels, variations, shapes, forms of matter, forms of life. The dream of writing the final book that will break my ostracism from the world. I carry in my handbag a letter rejecting A Spy in the House of Love with insults, not politely, with condemnation of the “lie detector” character. Americans are barbarians. I am glad that my identification papers still say “Visitor”; even if I am a permanent visitor at least I am not condemned to stay here. I would like Rupert to live the artist life of Paris. I would like a life in Italy and the rest in the tropics. I want to die in the sea and in the sun.
I cling to the little things that make life so real and warm, when Rupert is sleeping and I bring him his cafécito. Tavi thinks he must defend the sleeper and he growls at me and wants to fight me off. Rupert smiles. His eyes are strange at times, not like a human being’s but like the sea looking at you, nature, something without identity. “If I had not met you I would have continued to be wary of women, be a superficial Don Juan, but not happy, oh, not happy.” When we are drunk he is lost, bewildered, tender. He smiles, his mouth is open; he could be easily possessed. His skin glows with health and ruddiness; his eyes are the sea, not personal.
And meanwhile the problem with his family deepens.
Letter from Anaïs Nin to Helen and Lloyd Wright:
Sierra Madre, 1951
Dear Helen and Lloyd: It was Rupert’s idea, not mine, that if I gave you a chance to know me I could overcome your prejudice against us. I have tried, in spite of the fact that it was very difficult for me to have a good feeling about this attempt when your first words to me were: “You are not the woman we had dreamed of for Rupert,” to which I tried justly to agree, telling you that was why we had waited to get married. However, I now discover through Kay and Reginald that your criticisms of me still continue, and when I examine them sincerely I find them so unjust that I can only conclude that the prejudice is still there, as much as before.
I gather this is what worried you: first of all I was a married woman. Well, now I am divorced.
Secondly: I was an artist and would not help Rupert stick to forestry. Well, I not only helped and took care of Rupert during his forestry studies, but encouraged and collaborated with him. He has not given up forestry for me. I have given up my artist life.
Thirdly: you keep saying I am not domestic. Well, I am not a hypocrite. I am not domestic one hundred percent. But I have been domestic and a good wife to Rupert. I have done all the housework and the garden work and whatever is expected of a Forest Service wife. I have done things I never did for anyone before, to save money.
Next: you still say I am a self-centered writer. Well, in the first place, if I were self-centered Rupert would not be the happy, content, healthy man he is now. I have continued to write because my writing means something to both of us. It adds to our life the kind of friends, atmosphere, and travel both Rupert and I need, and that is what has enabled him to concentrate on his forestry work. Without my writing, if we only lived on his salary, we could never travel or go to concerts or theatres. Rupert would have been unhappy in such a narrow life. If you can call self-centered the fact that I spent one evening at your house finishing a revision of my book, copying out a fragment for a magazine, and showing a passage to Lloyd with the human desire that you should understand my work, then you don’t understand Rupert very well, because a mere hausfrau would not have made him very happy. You would have the right to say that if I had dragged Rupert into my artist life.
I never expected you to understand me, or really love me. But I did expect you to say as parents will: Rupert is happy, healthy, content. And to