Trapeze. Anais Nin
concealing it from each other under a lot of words, that I have been angry at a whole accumulation of things in our relationship, and you have been too. We admire each other, we have pity for each other, but in our actual actions and attitude towards each other we have both shown that for the time being, at least, anger is stronger than the other emotions. As long as that lasts, we are going to make each other unhappy when we are together, and I for my part do not want to inflict this on you anymore until my anger disappears.
I appreciate the great effort you have made to solve the problem by capitulating (as you think it is) between the life you want and coming to New York. But every sign indicates that you cannot do this without a splitting conflict, even to wait until my analysis is finished, and will, on your part, in spite of every effort to the contrary, result in unconscious acts that show your own real angers.
And there is no need to fool ourselves that these angers on both sides are all out of the past. You began to deal with this honestly when you said there are certain sides of me you just don’t like and have no feeling for at all. That is today and not the past.
I now realize we have always been under cover of one excuse or another, arranging to be apart a good deal of the time, except during the war years when we could not. The truth is we were not together more than momentarily and spasmodically during the years after 1928 when I took over the trust work in Paris and started traveling, with your approval and encouragement, “to preserve the marriage,” you used to say. While I had the Trust Debt in Paris I traveled I suppose about six months out of each year. Then I went to London in January of 1938 and you took the decision not to accompany me, so I paid only weekend visits about once or twice a month over the next year and a half. We did not do this “to preserve the marriage,” but because we were too unhappy living with each other all the time. I probably fooled myself about this more than you did, as I am sure your diary shows. The periods of being together were therefore also charged with exaggerated feelings in an effort to make up for what each of us thought we had been depriving the other of in the intervening period, or what we thought we had the right to receive because we had been deprived of something.
The greatest problem I have, and one that has created a big problem for you also—accentuated by your need to have someone dependent on you spiritually, you in turn being dependent in other ways—is my over-dependence on you. In this respect I have been like a child and now after fifty-one years of childhood, or reversion to childhood, I must have some time and learn how to go out myself, make friends myself without you, and to acquire a whole new attitude that is not at every turn simply another road around you.
You have asked me a hundred times: “Why are you so dependent on me? Why do you have no world of your own? Why don’t you know what you want—colors in this apartment or anything else concerning our personal life? Why don’t you express yourself directly instead of always through me? Why do I always have to be your soul?” You were really saying that you were my soul and were really asking: “Have you no soul of your own?”
All that was in part true, and I have at last awakened to it and all it implies. It has been a terrible burden for you to carry even when you said you liked carrying it and so often said that you were my soul. In the last year or two you have been trying to tell me that you could no longer carry that burden, and now I understand I really agreed with you when I took up the analysis, which represented my effort to carry my own responsibilities.
But then when, as a result of analysis, a soul of my own did start to appear and you began to see the shape of it, you were taken aback. It was not what you had imagined, not what you had wished for, or at least only in part, and it was then that a more serious withdrawal took place on your part.
Dr. Bogner has only last week broken the news to me that I have been deceiving myself into thinking that I am an artist. She says I am obviously primarily a businessman and only secondarily, and on the side, an artist. It came as a great shock to me, but I believe she is right. Much of my artistic endeavor was due to my despising myself as a businessman and feeling that I had to prove in some other way that I had a soul. But the business world represented reality for me and, to the extent that my artistic activities were done in the spirit of a flight from reality, and the forms they took could not be other than exaggeratedly remote, introspective and inhuman. Then on the business side there were corresponding tensions and exaggerations because such activities were under constant attack from within (myself) and from without (you).
And I will probably continue to keep up this combination of unenslaved, flexible business activities and making movies, as well as my general interest in art, for the rest of my days because that is who I am.
I am not going to take this opinion as final because I have found from experience that so-called artistic judgments often conceal neurotic lies.
The artist sometimes has something valuable to contribute and at other times simply sits behind his own kind of defensive barriers, except that he has the nerve to claim that they have something sacred and privileged about them that must be given special consideration. Everyone, I believe, is out for power and achievement in different ways, and you today, for example, are just as ambitious about your books as I am about my business. What is unfair, I think, is that you have tended to act as if your ambitions were in some way exercised for nobler and loftier aims than mine in business. That I now reject completely, and I believe you are honest enough, when you really think about it, to do the same. Childhood neuroses often compel you to act differently from what you really believe.
But you are what you are and certainly I am not the one to criticize your ambition to have a successful career of power and achievement, for I have nothing against that. I realize this furthermore is a structure that has been built up from your earliest days and that is something very real to you, and assumes an importance in your life so great that you feel you have to defend it at all costs.
Your behavior arises from a dissociation in yourself from one kind of business in order to carry on another kind, that the kind of business you chose did not feed you and that you therefore had to take from the one you dissociated yourself from to support the other.
The question you must ask yourself is whether you want to continue to be married to the person I have presented to you as my real self, whether you can continue in such a marriage without the unhappiness that has resulted from each of us keeping before us a false and unreal picture of the other.
But you see, darling, I have had a great shock, really from waking up suddenly and realizing that during my sleep I have been subjected to a long series of shocks, and I must have some time to gather myself together and gain new strength in myself, so that I will no longer be angry, as I will be as long as my confidence has not returned, which will take time after such a violent upheaval. You still write in the sense of being compelled to pay up for something, and I do not feel that you will be all right with yourself or with me until this has changed into something more positive; until you really feel that the two businesses (whether the two between us, or the two in yourself) are ready to go hand in hand towards a common goal, rather than one hand must pay for having taken bank notes out of the other.
For I am now completely disposed to accept the facts as we have discovered in each other, and any forcing at this time will only make it impossible for us ever to work out a relationship on a new and realistic basis.
I think it may be best for you to consider San Francisco as your headquarters and your stays in New York as visits only. As I get back into the foreign field I will be spending more and more time in Brazil and Mexico on business. We can then see how much time the demands of our respective careers permit us to be together.
We never had the peace that comes from being sure that each of us was accepted for himself and herself. We have been always in a state in which that self was threatened.
So now, Anaïs, I know you for what you are and you know me for what I am. There is no need for either of us to make the slightest demands on the other. When I get a little more on my feet I will not feel threatened anymore, and I have no desire to take away from you your individuality as an artist or a woman, or do anything but give you the fullest reins to your career. Let us expect little of each other and perhaps we will get something. And I assure you there will be no more ultimatums