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American suffering

“For a long time I have sought the justification for Henry [Miller’s] angers, hostilities and revenges. I believed it was a reaction to unusual suffering. So many American writers show this bitterness and hatred.

"But when I compare their lives and suffering with the lives of European writers (Dostoevsky, or Kafka) I find that the Europeans suffered far more, and all knew greater poverty, greater misery, yet they never turned into angry, hostile men like Edward Dahlberg, or Henry. Suffering became transmuted into works of literature, and into compassion. The asthma of Proust, the Siberia of Dostoevsky, contributed to their compassion for humanity. In some American writers any deprivation, any suffering, turns into mutiny, criminal anger and revenge upon others. There is an almost total absence of emotion. They hold society responsible and writing becomes an act of vengeance.

"It seems to me that the answer lay in the attitude towards suffering. To some American writers anything but paradise was unacceptable. To the European it was part of the human condition, and something shared with other human beings.”

–Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume Two

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The real artist is never concerned with the fact that the story has been told, but in the experience of reliving it; and he cannot do this if he is not convinced of the opportunity for individual expression it permits.

Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume 1. 

[She writes this in the context of her analysis with Otto Rank. How he, unlike other analysts, doesn’t seek to fit the individual’s story into a pattern in a textbook, a case of X or Y neurosis, but rather delights in each individual’s story, including the ways in which it mirrors an archetype or “textbook case”, in its own unique way. Her example – that he approaches like “an artist when he is about to paint, for the thousandth time, the portrait of the Virgin and Child”.]

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Somehow or other I always lose my guide halfway up the mountain, and he becomes my child. Even my father.

Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume 1
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This has always amused me. Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments.

Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume 1 (commenting on how Antonin Artaud tried to slut-shame her after she turned down his advances, circa 1933…)
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“Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born”

“Henry [Miller] understands me when I say: ‘I have known motherhood. I have experienced childbearing. I have known a motherhood beyond biological motherhood – the bearing of artists, and life, hope, and creation.’ It was [D.H.] Lawrence who said: Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born.”

–Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume 1

She did not have children, and I don’t sense any anxiety about this in her diary. She felt in touch with her maternal side, nonetheless, and channeled it into generosity and support for her brother and mother, her unstable, broke writer and artist friends… (For example, it seems she was actually quite influential in editing Miller’s books, pushed him to take out incoherent rants, accounts of bickering with his wife. Supported Artaud, both financially and morally, etc.)

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“Never have I seen as clearly as tonight

that my diary-writing is a vice. I came home worn out by magnificent talks with Henry at the café; I glided into my bedroom, closed the curtains, threw a log into the fire, lit a cigarette, pulled the diary out of its last hiding place under my dressing table, threw it on the ivory silk quilt, and prepared for bed. I had the feeling that this is the way an opium smoker prepares for his opium pipe. For this is the moment when I relive my life in terms of a dream, a myth, an endless story.“

–Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume 1

What’s coming through in my reading is that even as she was writing the diary, she did not think of it in the traditional mode as a secret, an intimate diary. She hired a young woman to transcribe what she wrote with a typewriter, she showed it to the people she was hanging out with. She used parts of it in her fiction writing. The diary was the place for everything, her "realism” as she called it. But she wrote it conscious that others might read it, though it is very intimate at times.

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Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume 1
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There are some things one cannot seize by realism, but by poetry. It is a matter of language.

Anais Nin, the Diary, Volume 1
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I have a feeling that man’s fear of woman comes from having first seen her as the mother creator of men. Certainly it is difficult to feel compassion for the one who gives birth to man.

Anais Nin, the Diary, Volume 1
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“I have learned from Henry [Miller]…

…to make notes, to expand, not to brood secretly, to move, to write every day, to do, to say instead of meditating, not to conceal the breaking up of myself under emotion.“

Anais Nin, from the Diary, Volume I

Sounds like sound activity to keep writing…