He works at the Satyr Bookshop in Hollywood.
Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:
Hollywood, March 22, 1951
Dear Anaïs:
I wrote your agent on Satyr stationery, telling him of my difficulty in procuring Ladders to Fire from my supplier in Pasadena, which should place you in the clear about its being out of print. Actually, I can’t remember how the idea originated. We have just received copies (and sold them immediately, by the way) and have reordered likewise Children of the Albatross. I would have sent a copy of the letter to you in NY, but thought you would have returned by then.
I have put your copy of The Four-Chambered Heart in the window along with a display of your other work and some other “new writing”—Joyce-Miller-Kafka-Stein, etc. We don’t have much of that, as you know. Am reading Maxwell Geismar and like it very much so far, even though I feel he overrates Hemingway. Lila [Rosenblum] and I listened to your records one night. I don’t like the woman [Josephine Premice] with the drums in this House of Incest. She might do a fine job in the Scenario of Henry Miller, for some background sound, but it is disturbing with your reading. Also don’t especially like Henry Miller’s Scenario, but it might be good on film. He mentions you in his new book The Waters Reglitterized. Have you seen it? Also Berzon has a copy of the Obelisk The Winter of Artifice, which I’d like to borrow.
I got all that spring yearning out of my system for the time being (of course the trouble here is that spring comes to California a dozen times a year) and am beginning to work again. Lila is having a party Friday night (but no one is wearing costumes) and I may go to that. The trouble with my masquerade is that only you and Lila and I would wear masques, and everyone would be uncomfortable.
Anaïs, Pepe [Zayas] is coming to California on his next furlough, but I have a fear something is going to happen to him. He doesn’t know how to kill and I don’t think he can learn. I wish they would only choose those who are hell-bent on destruction anyway and leave Pepe out of it. This Korean War is the most ridiculous of all wars; everyone going through the motions and no one knowing why. I like your theory on the transference of explosions. It’s the only theory that rhymes with the newspapers and the facts. Anti-Communism is only a militarist’s hypothesis designed to disguise the real confusion. I say upward and onward with the explosions you describe of imagination and passion and illumination.
Love,
Jim
MARCH 24 INTO APRIL 1951
Mexico with Rupert
MAY 10, 1951
New York
Letter from Anaïs Nin to Rupert Pole:
New York, June 1, 1951
Work, work, work and wondering how long it will take. Articles are being prepared, and each week I stay means a hundred dollars more into our travel account, but I am wondering how long I can hold out. Now it is a week I have left. No letter from you yet. When I can, I will phone you, as if one is capable of talking only three minutes; after seven o’clock it costs only $2.50, and to hear your voice means so much. I am bringing back a list of long-playing records that we can study together. The best news I have is that I am at page forty-five of the last rewriting of A Spy in the House of Love; each day I do a few pages.
But the time is long, and Doña Juana is dead and her heart is in Sierra Madre; now it is only a shadow of herself walking down Fifth Avenue. I do want you to help me, while I am away, in an examination of ourselves: I want to find out the things I must do to make you happy, and I want you, if possible, to find out what makes you irritable, because later on, alone, I realize how my self-confidence gets low, feeling I do nothing right, or that I am not right for you, and I realize I sort of dread it when you are mad all the way to the airport, wondering if I am at fault. If while I am away there are specific things you think about, realize—will you tell me? It is better to face these things rather than let them accumulate.
Anaïs
Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:
Hollywood, July 28, 1951
Dear Anaïs,
I wanted to talk about your diary but it is not easy to speak in the language of the sixth sense where multitudes are assembled. The idea of making sense even in a letter like this is something of a barrier, but I am determined to try.
You said you would be willing to risk my reading the diaries, and I am mostly disturbed by the fact you could consider that a risk. I would never read them while they caused you any discomfort or embarrassment, and those feelings would not disturb me. What disturbs me is that you can think I might, even conceivably, reject you on the strength of them.
Whether or not I ever read your diaries is inconsequential to the major point I am trying to make. The woman you are is the woman I know, understand, and love. What went before could be the greatest record of prostitution and murder on any level you choose, art, love, religion or all three, but they could never destroy one segment of my present regard for you; they could only throw more illumination on the magical processes that have made you what you are.
Love,
Jim
JULY 1951
Sierra Madre
Letter from Jim Herlihy to Anaïs Nin:
Hollywood, August 13, 1951
Dearest Anaïs:
I wonder if you know that you have shown to me and given to me in every conceivable way a kind of love that I have never known before in my life, and I am completely overwhelmed by it, don’t know how to express to you how it feels and how more than grateful I am for it. It is not (as in the past with other kinds of love) that I am afraid of it, don’t want to accept it, or am thrown into a sea of self-doubt (am I worthy of this, etc.). It is not a question of any of these things. It is a kind of shock, a kind of believing yet unbelieving. I really trust you and believe in you; so I know what you are giving me is real, is felt, is what it is. Yet, at the same time, it is the kind of love I have always believed in (and tried myself to give), but the kind that I have never found anywhere and had begun to despair of. When it finally appears, and appears so completely and so brilliantly, without complications or demands, I don’t know what to do with it. I know that your love demands nothing of me except what I am; yet, of course, I love you so completely that I feel inadequate and want to give something else, something more and completely wonderful; yet I don’t know what or how. All I know to do is what I would do for myself, to go to analysis and make myself healthy, to do my work to the best of my ability, and to be true to the things in which both of us believe. Of course what I am saying, in effect, is that I feel what you ask of me is only what I ask of you: that we not destroy ourselves through neurosis, and are consistently true to what you call the “true self.”
Love,
Jim
Letter from Anaïs Nin to Rupert Pole: