Volume 4 of Anais Nin’s Journal
I’m through volume 4 of Anais Nin’s Journal. I wish I could have begun with her childhood diaries, or at least 1931 in Louciennes, Paris.
I can commune with an ageing lady who evidently attracted much attention from younger followers.
One thing which could soon influence this journal of mine will be an increasingly descriptive stance on the world and the people around me, rather than deep and tedious introspection—no longer the book of self-analysis but the book of observations.
As a teenager, I was clear in my mind that I was an observer.
I frequently stood back from the world, the better to observe it. I would attend parties not only to participate, but also to add another experience to my list and then write about it. (Don’t all teenagers do the same?)
Adulthood brings with it a crusting over of earlier enthusiasms
Adulthood brings with it a crusting over of earlier enthusiasms, unless of course the indulgent world encourages and develops those early desires.
Character sketches. Like drawings.
Can I do them? I must. Can I picture the people I am familiar with, let alone newcomers? Dad, for instance, (give me two years and several million words), or Mum, neither of them is a simple person in analytical terms. Are any of us?
The traumas of his current break-up with wife No. 3 could turn into a Hardy-esque catastrophe.
If only he wasn’t so public school and conservative. He stamps his foot and thinks P will return to him to cook his meals and do his washing. He sulks and becomes ill to persuade N to give up things which matter to her so that she will nurse him.
I don’t have the nerve to be as blasé about money as Henry Miller
What in fact I crave is enough money to do more of this, precisely this, whether it makes a bean or not!
A diary is not book keeping with words
Finding Anais Nin and Henry Miller (at last) has allowed me to escape the bookkeeping approach to my previous diaries. Then the intention was to do little more than catalogue the events of the day, the week, the year (the cycle). Now, I can do much more. Here, I can let off steam, discuss, record, consider, practice my observations, try out lines, invent words and phrases. Now, as a graduate, I can add notes here (not in the Arch lever files).
As before, I will dip in years later and find (or not find) reflections on those years gone by.
[This visit comes over seven years after the entry was written – 9th January 2000]
[Then this visit in August 2010 comes another ten years on]
- Do I change my mind?
- Have I learnt owt?
I wish I hadn’t driven over to a second-hand book shop in Hay on Wye and sold my collection of Anais Nin diaries and the Henry Miller books I hadn’t graffiti-ed with notes.
Dare I compare myself with the likes of Anais and Henry?
In my teens and early twenties, I shared much of Anais’s sexual hunger (I adored the erotica she wrote and knew her for this alone for a decade or more). Today, I relish the gutsy frankness of Henry Miller, flavoured by sticky fingers and his insatiable appetite for cunt. He didn’t have to intellectualise about loving a person the way we did.
I don’t enjoy intimate sex for sake of having sex.
There must be a person at the other end. “There’s nothing wrong with it if both people enjoy it,” offered Suzi on one of our very few affair like reprieves in September 1989. She was justifying her repeated infidelity, a trait I worried about in her when I first met her aged 15, cared less about when we starting going out together a year later … until we started to hurt each other another five years on from that.
If I’d known Anais Nin in my youth (20’s)
I would have been her Hugo, making money not in the City, but in the cash crazy world of advertising in the 1980s. It was hard when I was inclined to scrap it all and do a Henry Miller. If only my hunger had been to find a personal voice rather than a public one (and paid).
Though I’m struggling with “Tropic of Capricorn” after the narrative and journalistic rumpus of “Tropic of Cancer” I am still inclined to pick out a few truths. I am still keen to hear someone else’s voice justifying and provoking my difference:
“At this a faint smile paned over his face. He thought it extraordinary that I should remember such things. He was already married, a father, and working in a factory making fancy pipe canes. He considered it extraordinary to remember events that happened so far back in the past.”
And so Henry Miller goes on to indulge his memory on a rock fight that killed a boy when they were only 8 years.
Like Henry Miller, I relish dredging up, reliving and reviving childhood events. (And Nabakov, some to think of it). Courtesy of a diary I started at the age of 13, it is easy for me to relive many moments from days and years ago. An adequate entry, as no one had seen the contents of these diaries until 2000, was enough to bring the moment alive, to trigger the memory, to tag that moment, wherever it might have been. As an exercise, I went back to my earliest memories, scrambling around the recesses of my mind to recall events from when I was four, five, and six. These included my first day at school, my first day at boarding prep school, my parents’ split-up, and the three-day week.
I love to dissect the pain and pleasure of past relationships too, especially the passion and punches of yours truly and ‘Suzi Bean’.
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