Trapeze. Anais Nin
do it at home. There is only one good brand of mustard and I am expected to look around for it in various shops. There is only one good brand of coffee. He becomes hard to please. All his frustrations with forestry make him exigent, whimpering, and I wear myself out. At such times the redeeming trait is that he is fully aware that he becomes impossible (as a woman during her menstruation) and is ready to acknowledge it. When he goes too far I get depressed or rebellious, but he soon wins forgiveness.
He is ready to do anything, to make any sacrifice for the relationship. He takes pains to efface the wounds. When we went skiing in Yosemite I became neurotic and discouraged because I could not keep it up. After I said, “You’d better find yourself a wife who can ski,” he replied, “Well, but then I’d have to teach her to make love as you do.”
The Rupert ordinaire, Rupert the American boy is there, but then he suddenly transcends it; he is more than that, he is an imaginative Welshman. He is touched with genius at times, at moments with intuition, with poetry never reached by his companions. He is more sensitive and complex. He is unique, and everyone recognizes his personality. Among the foresters he is known for his folk singing and his guitar. At their parties he entertains them with grace and without egocentricity. He invites them to sing with him or he willingly accompanies a song he does not know, a singer who can’t sing. Gently and without vanity. He moves me. When he is bad, it is eruptive, nervous, something merely to re-establish his exaggerated goodness the rest of the time, his control. Again I play the role of interpreter.
We have similar impatience. He scolds me for mine. But he loves that during the trip he never had to wait for me. I dress, make my face up, fix my nails and eyelashes, and my hair, all in the time it takes him to shave. And I can pack in five minutes.
Once in Paris I had a record of Erik Satie that I loved. I remembered it in New York and tried to find it. I couldn’t remember the title. It was the ever-recurring song of remoteness, the one that appears in Debussy, in Chansons d’Auvergne, in Carillo’s Cristobal Colon. It was a theme I wanted to hear again. It was the beginning of my new book I could not find.
Today sitting by the radio after breakfast I heard it and identified it. The other day driving to Berkeley I heard Debussy’s Sonate Pour Violon et Piano, and again I wept and experienced the fullest, wildest sorrow.
I am invited out by Varda, by Ruth Witt Diamant, but it means leaving Rupert alone in his room. So I either refuse, or if I do appear it is only for a moment, and only for enough time to realize I am lonely in the world. I am not close to anyone. I am closest to Rupert. I am happy at home. I am happier alone with Rupert. At ease. Satisfied. The world is complete. Wherever my love is, the world is complete. Our true connection took place in Denver, on the sand dunes. I don’t know why, but that lovemaking contained all we were, are, and would be to each other. It was a ring-like circle, it was soldering. There is lovemaking that has that definitive binding element. I felt it as such. Beyond lovemaking it was a marriage, because it gave us both a sense of gravity. Suddenly a man and woman discover the axis of the world. It revolves on this conjunction of male and female, the rotations of love become the rotations of earth, sun and moon, and gravity is achieved.
There is a sense of effortlessness in my life with Rupert because my feelings are with him; while he is working my love flows to his sturdy hands, to his warm-blooded skin, copper-toned when he is sunburned. Even when he is ill, his ears are roseate, his face has a warm color. Once during bronchitis, after I had made him perspire abundantly, I rubbed his body with Vicks, and his sex rose in excitement. He said, “I always feared this would happen in Harvard Hospital, or in the Army hospital, when I was washed or massaged, but it never did.”
But it happened with my hands on his body. Excitement.
RETURN TO NEW YORK, JUNE 1949
Letter from Anaïs Nin to Rupert Pole:
New York, June 8, 1949
Darling Chiquito: The first nights here were like 100,000,000 years long. I felt better when I got your letter. That is all I need, to know you’re well and still love me. I’ve thrown myself into my work day and evening. Not only reading manuscripts but writing on any subject, theme or item to prove versatility, and secretly investigating assignments with eyes and ears alert. I have hopes of seeing you one weekend in July, between the 20th and 30th if my publisher will let me attend the writers’ and printers’ conference near LA. I’m working for this, as it makes the three months seem lighter.
Dutton (and this is a compliment for you as well, my collaborator) thinks The Four-Chambered Heart is the best book I’ve done (it has more of a story to follow). Thursday they have the final conference. Following your advice, I also showed them the diary that they had earlier refused without reading it, but now they are laughing over it and getting interested. Oh darling, I’m trying everything, seeing everyone I should. Just a career woman now to fulfill our dream, and this is the dream I have when I can’t sleep. In February, on our birthdays, we will go around the world before you settle down to forestry—one long, good, fulfilling voyage—and I am working for this.
Sending you money to deposit into my account, from sale of books. Or if you need it for Cleo.
Te quiero profundamente. Please do not burn or scratch for my sake, so I will have something to caress!
Tu Limoncita
| June, 1949 | Dutton rejected The Four-Chambered Heart |
| July 16, 1949 | Return to Los Angeles |
| August 4, 1949 | Acapulco |
| August 11, 1949 | San Francisco |
| September 1949 | New York |
SAN FRANCISCO, OCTOBER 20, 1949
Father died this morning. The hurt, the shock, the loss, as if I had died with him. I feel myself colliding with death, breaking, falling. I wept not to have seen him, not to have forgiven him, not to have held him in my arms. He died alone and poor in a Cuban hospital. He collapsed Thursday. That is all I know. I received the telegram from Joaquín in the morning. I didn’t want to weep. It seemed as if I would die with him. Then I wept. I felt the loss in my body. This terrible, unfulfilled love. Never to have come close to him, never to have truly fused with him. I envisioned him asleep. I wept. I had to meet Rupert, my slender one, my lover of women, but near and warm. I wept on his thin shoulder. He was tender and human. So tender. We came home. It is strange. Life continues. You eat. You clean the house, but the death is there, inside you. The loss. The absence, the truth you cannot believe, you feel it but you don’t believe it, the pain attacking, dissolving the body. Guilt. I should have overlooked his immense selfishness as Rupert overlooked the great selfishness of his father. I should have sacrificed my life for him. Oh, the guilt. At other moments a destructive sorrow, the wish to die. The worst of me died with him, a craving for sainthood, the presence of madness, his madness. I fought not to be as he was, disconnected from human beings. I fought those who were like him, Henry, Bill, all the remote ones. I fought to be near, to fuse. From this death I will never heal. Rupert took me out to a movie. When I came home he sat in his room to work and I sat on my bed and sobbed. I can’t accept his death. It hurts. I wrote to Hugo. I don’t feel for Hugo anymore. It’s the death in me, the unbearable thought that to have integrity, to survive the destructiveness of others, we strike out, harm them, we are revengeful. I wish I had been a saint. Joaquín was sweeter, yet he writes me: “I tried to get close and failed.”
To work, to work. I feel the pain like a blow bowing my shoulders. Back in the pit.
Now I see the crime of loving young Rupert when I am closer to death and detaching myself from all he wants, all he seeks. Life with Rupert in San Francisco is coming to an end in January when he gets his forestry degree. It seems I have barely finished fixing up the apartment and we must leave it. Again to carry a trunk full of diaries to Ruth Witt Diamant’s cellar as I carried two valises full of originals to a vault. Again throwing away letters, papers, manuscripts. Again meditating, ruminating a new book, gestating, again flying to New York in two weeks, unable to bear separation from Rupert.
I see this looking inward now as a great act of