Anaïs Nin – Saturday 21 February 1903 – Friday 14 January 1977

Introduction

A. Nin
Anon
A Nun
Non! Non!

The little bit of alliterate silliness above was written by me sometime in the early 1990s. And sometime earlier, a friend told me about the many diaries of Anaïs Nin, which I promptly began to read – starting with The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume One 1931-1934. People who manage to record their lives for any substantial length of time are incredible. Such discipline. I keep a journal very infrequently – the last stretch of time I wrote down was a five-day trip I took to San Francisco in December of 2008. No journal writing by me since then.


Excerpt from [Winter, 1931-1932] in The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume One 1931-1934

“I had a sense of preparation for a love to come. Like the extension of canopies, the unrolling of ceremonial carpets, as if I must first create a marvelous world in which to house it, in which to receive adequately this guest of honor.

It is in this mood of preparation that I pass through the house, painting a wall through which stains of humidity show, hanging a lamp where it will throw Balinese shadow plays, draping a bed, placing logs in the fireplace.

Every room is painted a different color. As if there were one room for every separate mood: lacquer red for vehemence, pale turquoise for reveries, peach color for gentleness, green for repose, grey for work at the typewriter.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension.

But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.

Unlike Madame Bovary, I am not going to take poison. I am not sure that being a writer will help me escape from Louveciennes. I have finished my book D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study. I wrote it in sixteen days. I had to go to Paris to present it to Edward Titus for publication. It will not be published and out by tomorrow, which is what a writer would like when the book is hot out of the oven, when it is alive within one’s self. He gave it to his assistant to revise.

As soon as I go to Paris too often, my mother looks disapprovingly out of her window, and does not wave good-bye. She looks, at times, like the old women who raise their curtains to stare at me when I take Banquo for a walk. My brother Joaquin plays the piano continuously, as if he would melt the walls of the house.

I take walks along the railroad tracks on bad days. But as I have never been able to read a timetable, I never walk here at the right time and I get tired before the train comes to deliver me from the difficulties of living, and I walk back home. Does this fascination for a possible accident come from the traumatic time when I missed such a death as a child? We had a servant in Neuilly (when I was two years old, and my brother Thorvald just born). My father must have seduced her and then forgotten hear. Anyway, she sought revenge. She took my brother and me on an outing and left the carriage, and me beside it, in the middle of the railroad track. But the signal gateman saw us, and as he had seven children of his own, he took a chance on his own life and rushed out in time to kick the carriage out of the way and carry me off in his arms. The event remained in our memory. I still remember the beds covered with toys for the seven children of the man who saved our lives.”


Yesterday’s writer – Anne McCaffrey
Tomorrow’s writer - Michèle Roberts

Source: Nin, Anaïs. The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume One 1931-1934. Harvest Book, 1966. ISBN 0-15-626025-5. Excerpt: pages 4-6

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume One 1931-1934

Center: Anaïs Nin from the website en.wikipedia.org