The Diary Of Anais Nin Volume 5 1947-1955: Vol. 5 (1947-1955)

by Anaïs Nin

Overview

The author's experiences in Mexico, California, New York, and Paris, her psychoanalysis, and her experiment with LSD. "Through her own struggling and dazzling courage [Nin has] shown women groping with and growing with the world" (Minneapolis Tribune). Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann; Index.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156260305
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/26/1975
Series:	Diary of Anais Nin Series , #5
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

ANAÏS NIN (1903-1977) was born in Paris and aspired at an early age to be a writer. An influential artist and thinker, she was the author of several novels, short stories, critical studies, a collection of essays, nine published volumes of her Diary, and two volumes of erotica, Delta of Venus and Little Birds. 

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

[Winter, 1947–1948]

Acapulco, Mexico.

I am lying on a hammock, on the terrace of my room at the Hotel Mirador, the diary open on my knees, the sun shining on the diary, and I have no desire to write. The sun, the leaves, the shade, the warmth, are so alive that they lull the senses, calm the imagination. This is perfection. There is no need to portray, to preserve. It is eternal, it overwhelms you, it is complete.

The natives have not yet learned from the white man his inventions for traveling away from the present, his scientific capacity for analyzing warmth into a chemical substance, for abstracting human beings into symbols. The white man has invented glasses which make objects too near or too far, cameras, telescopes, spyglasses, objects which put glass between living and vision. It is the image he seeks to possess, not the texture, the living warmth, the human closeness.

Here in Mexico they see only the present. This communion of eyes and smiles is elating. In New York people seem intent on not seeing each other. Only children look with such unashamed curiosity. Poor white man, wandering and lost in his proud possession of a dimension in which bodies become invisible to the naked eye, as if staring were an immodest act. Here I feel incarnated and in full possession of my own body.

A new territory of pleasure. The green of the foliage is not like any other green; it is deeper, lacquered and moist. The leaves are heavier and fuller, the flowers bigger. They seem surcharged with sap, and more alive, as if they never have to close against the frost, or even a cold night. As if they have no need of sleep.

At the beach a child came forward from a group of children, carrying a small boat made of shells. She wanted me to buy it. She was small for her age, delicately molded like a miniature child, as Mexican children often are, more finely chiseled beings with small hands and feet and slender necks, tender and fragile and neat.

Everywhere guitars. As soon as one guitar moves away, the sound of another takes its place, to continue this net of music that maintains one in flight from sadness, suspended in a realm of festivities.

Festivities. Fiestas. Holidays. Bursts of color and joy. Collective celebrations. Rituals. Indian feasts and Catholic feasts. Any cause will do. Even the very poor know how to dress up a town with colored paper cutouts which dance in the wind. What was happened to joy in America? The Americans in the hotel spend all their time drinking by the pool. The men go hunting flamingos, which they shoot for the pleasure of it. Or they fish for inedible mantarayas and weigh their spoils to win prizes.

The eyes of the Mexicans are full of burning life. They squat like Orientals next to wide, flat baskets full of fruit and vegetables arranged with a fine sense of design, of decorative art and harmonies. Strings of chili hang from the rafters. The scent of saffron, and rhythms of Chagall- colored laundry hanging like banners from windows, and in gardens. Warmth falls from the sky like the fleeciest blanket. Even the night comes without a change of temperature or alteration in the softness of the air. You can trust the night.

There is a rhythm in the way the women lift the water jugs onto their heads and walk balancing them. There is a rhythm in the way they carry their babies wrapped in their shawls, and their baskets filled with fruit. There is a rhythm in the way the fishermen pull in their nets in the evening, and the way the shepherds walk after their lambs and cows.

The first night here I showered and bathed hastily, feeling that perhaps the beauty and the velvety softness of the night might not last, that if I delayed, it would all change to coldness and harshness.

When I opened the screen door, the night lay unchanged, filled with tropical whisperings, as if leaves, birds, insects, and sea breezes possessed musicalities unknown to northern countries, as if the richness of the smells kept them all intoxicated, with the same aphrodisiac which affected me. Perfume of carnation and honeysuckle.

Through labyrinthian paths bordered with bushes which caress you as you walk, on stone warmed by the sun, I walk from my room to the large terrace where everyone sits and waits for dinner or to meet with friends.

The expanse of sky is like an infinite canvas on which human beings cannot project images from their memories because they would seem out of scale with the limitless sea, the limitless sky and the stars, which appear nearer and larger. So memory is absent, dissolved. I lie on a chaise longue to watch the spectacle of sunset and the night's first act. Nature so powerful and drugging that it annihilates memory. People seem warmer and nearer, as the stars seem nearer and the moon warmer.

The sea's orchestration carries away half the words and makes talking and laughing seem more like an accompaniment, like the sound of birds. Words have no weight. They float in space. They have a purely decorative quality, like flowers.

Why are people so fearful of the tropics? "All adventurers come to grief." I heard this many times, it was a refrain. Was it because they could not surrender to the overpowering effect of nature? They resisted it. I abandon myself to it and I feel strengthened by it rather than weakened.

La Perla is the hotel's night club. It is built of driftwood, and overlooks the wild part of the gorge between two mountains of rocks, against which the sea hurls itself with fury, defeated by the narrowness, and spilling its fury in high waves and foam. Into this narrow gorge Mexican boys dive for the tourists. First they climb the rocks slowly and laboriously, then they stand at the peak, pause for a moment, and dive like birds into the foaming, lashing waves.

Red ship's lanterns illumine a jazz band playing for a few dancers.

Because the hiss of the sea carries away some of the overtones, the main drumbeat seems more emphatic, like a giant heart pulsing.

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are echoes of the body's music. It is the body's vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.

I feel like a fugitive from the mysteries of the human labyrinth I was trying to pierce. I escaped my patterns. I escaped familiar and inexorable grooves. The outer world is so overwhelmingly beautiful that I am willing to stay outside, day and night, a wanderer and a pilgrim without abode.

I feel at home in Mexico, because I learned Spanish at the age of five, because the exuberance reminds me of my childhood in Spain, the singing reminds me of our Spanish maid Carmen, who sang all day while working. The gaiety in the streets, the children dancing, the flowerpots in the windows, the white-washed walls, the green shutters, the profusion of flowers, the liveliness of the people, all recall Barcelona and Havana. I realize that after years of life in America, I have finally learned to subdue my manners and my dress. I still remember that because my Cuban relatives sent me castoff clothes (and most dressing in Cuba was, as in Mexico, in a festive mood), I wore a red velvet dress to one of my jobs as model for a painter, and his expression when he saw me in a red velvet dress at nine in the morning was unforgettable. The walk with the weight on the heels, which Cubans and Spaniards do, the full-smile greeting, the gift for letting sorrow and worries slide off the shoulders, the predisposition for pleasure, all this is familiar and warm and comfortable.

Dr. Hernandez comes to the hotel several times a day for the tourists. He carries his black doctor's bag. He is my first friend here. After his visits he likes to sit on the terrace and talk a little and sip a drink.

He has written poetry, had a book published. He studied medicine in France. When he was first assigned to intern in Acapulco, he fought malaria, elephantiasis, and other tropical diseases. When his internship ended, he decided to stay on and practice.

He built a house on a protruding rock, extending out to the sea on the left of the Mirador, married, and had children. But his wife hates Acapulco and is always going to Mexico City because there are no schools for their children in Acapulco.

Since more than half of his life is given to the poor of Acapulco, to dramas and tragedies of all kinds, he does not like the tourists. "Because they live for pleasure only, because they pamper themselves, because half of their ills are imaginary. Most of the time they call me because they are frightened of foreign countries and foreign food."

He talks to me at length since he was told I am a writer. He wants to take me on his tour of the people of Acapulco. I plead that I have been deprived of all pleasure and rest for years and have a right to a period without sorrows and burdens.

I met Annette at the Hotel Mirador. I was sitting in the dining room. A stairway leads from the upper terrace to the dining room. It is lighted from above and gives the diners time to see those who are coming down the stairs. My eyes were caught by the brilliant colors and the textures of her dress. I watched her for several evenings. She used the full palette of Mexican colors. She wore barbaric jewelry, copies and fantasies inspired by Mayan and Aztec themes. She had a mass of short, curled hair aureoled around her head, unruly, in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec women, and under this a delicately chiseled face, a small straight nose, fawn-colored eyes, and a slender neck poised on a voluptuous body. Her movements have a flow and sweep and vivacity and seductiveness. She undulates her hips, her breasts heave like the sea, she is never still.

We were introduced. Her liveliness and joyousness incarnated the spices and colors of Acapulco. She sometimes thrust her breasts forward or else she tilted her head backward, or she laughed with a ripple which ran through her whole body. It was as if she lived a semidance which kept the jewelry tinkling and her earrings mobile. She swung into the dining room with a mambo rhythm.

We became friends.

We talked on the terrace at night, after dinner, while waiting to see what the evening would bring. In spite of her children, two boys of seven and nine, men treated her like a young woman. Her laughter was inviting, and as she lay on the chaise longue, her body seemed offered. All its exotic and brilliant covering was a plumage, and she was uncomfortable within it, her natural state was nudity› or a brief bathing suit at the beach.

She was without discrimination about men, so that I found it difficult to go out with her and her friends. I preferred solitude. Acapulco was a beautiful background for her. Her skin was naturally tan. She was like a native and in harmony with her surroundings.

She met Orozco, Diego Rivera, and Siqueiros in New York when taking a master's in fine arts at Teachers College, Columbia. They invited her to work on murals in Mexico. There she met her second husband, who was a powerful industrialist. Now she was married to a composer, Conlon Nancarrow.

She was natural, talkative, fluent, and always effervescent.

When I met her she had become so international, so well traveled, so multilingual, so at ease with all kinds of people, that no one could imagine her childhood, her origin.

Her dream was to build a house in Acapulco and stay there.

The past is dissolving in the intensity of Acapulco. The intense sunlight annihilates thought, and the animation of the crowd, the colors, the smiles, the dances at night, the gaiety of the beach close the eyes of memory. Freedom from the past comes from associating with unfamiliar objects; none of them possesses any evocative power. The hammock, the spectacles of sunrise and sunset, the exotic flowers, are all unfamiliar. From the moment I open my eyes I am in a new world. The colors are all hot and brilliant. Breakfast is a tray of fruit never tasted before, papaya and mangoes. All day long there is not a single familiar object to carry me back into the past.

The first human being I see in the morning is the gardener. I can see him at work through the half-shut bamboo blinds. He is raking the pebbles and the sand, not as if he were eager to terminate the task, but as if raking pebbles and sand were a most pleasurable occupation and he wants to prolong the enjoyment. Now and then he stops to talk to a lonely little girl who skips rope and asks him questions which he answers patiently.

Groups form in the evening on the terrace to plan whether to dance all night at the Americas Hotel, where there is a jazz band, or take an excursion to a little-known cove where one can swim nude and where the waves are phosphorescent. New groups form every night, new arrivals, new introductions.

The pool of the Mirador is another gathering place for those who love the night and a quiet swim before sleep.

Because someone had plunged into it from one of the rooms of the hotel late at night and drowned, the pool was now locked, but we all slipped over the gate. I heard one woman say to her young man: "Will you float me home?"

Tonight I met a young man who hitchhiked all the way from Chicago and was picked up by the patron of the hotel and given secretarial work. His candor, bewilderment, and wonder at everything rejuvenates the most indifferent visitors already accustomed to the beauty. I call him Christmas, because he said his first love-making was as wonderful as a Christmas tree. Annette's freedom fascinated him. She bubbles, her talk is like the foam of the sea, her laughter dispels all concerns.

The doctor and I sit in a hand-carved canoe. The pressure of the hand on the knife made uneven indentations in the scooped-out tree trunk which catch the light like the scallops of a sea shell. The sun on the rim of the carvings and the shadows within their valleys give the canoe a stippled surface like that of an Impressionist painting. As it moves forward in the water it seems like a multitude of changeable colors in motion.

The canoe was once painted in laundry blue. The blue has faded and has become like the smoky blue of old Mayan murals, a blue which man cannot create, only time.

The fisherman is paddling quietly through the varied colors of the lagoon water, colors which range from the dark sepia of the red-earth bottom to silver-gray when the colors of the vegetation triumph over the red earth, to gold when the sun conquers them both, to purple in the shadows. He paddles with one arm. His other arm was blown off when he was a young fisherman of seventeen first learning the use of dynamite sticks for fishing.

The mangrove trees in the lagoon show their naked roots, as though on stilts, an intricate maze of the silver roots as fluent below as they are interlaced above. The overhanging branches cast shadows before the bow of the canoe so dense that I can hardly believe they will open and divide to let us through. The roots look like a grasping giant hand, extending fingers into the water to hold on to a treacherous moving soil, fingers which in turn give birth to smaller fingers seeking a hold on the bank.

Emerald sprays and fronds project from a mass of wasps' nests, of pendant vines and lianas. Above my head the branches form metallic green parabolas and enameled pennants, while the canoe and my body accomplish the magical feat of cutting through the roots and dense tangles.

The canoe undulates the aquatic plants that bear long plumes and travels through reflections of the clouds.

The snowy herons and the shell-pink flamingos meditate upon one leg like yogis of the animal world. Iguanas slither away, and parrots become hysterically gay.

Now and then I see a single habitation by the water's edge, an ephemeral hut of palm leaves wading on frail stilts, and a canoe tied to a toy-sized jetty. Before each hut stands a smiling woman and several naked children.

I see the mud tracks of a crocodile. The scaly colors of the skin of the iguanas is so exactly like the ashen roots and tree trunks that you cannot spot them until they move. They lie as still as stones in the sun, as if petrified, and their tough, wrinkled skin looks thousands of years old.

A flowing journey.

I had a recurrent dream always of a boat, sometimes small, sometimes large, but invariably caught in a waterless place, in a street, in a city, in a jungle or a desert. When it was large it appeared in city streets, and the deck reached to the upper windows of houses. I was always in this boat and aware it could not sail unless I pushed it, so I would get off and seek to push it along so it might move and finally reach water. The effort of pushing the boat along the street was immense and I never accomplished my aim. Whether I pushed it along cobblestones or over asphalt, it moved very little, and no matter how much I strained I always felt I could never reach the sea.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "The Diary Of Anaïs Nin 1947-1955"
by .
Copyright © 1974 Anaïs Nin.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Preface,
[Winter, 1947–1948],
[February, 1948],
[Spring, 1948],
[Summer, 1948],
[Fall, 1948],
[Winter, 1948],
[Spring, 1949],
[Summer, 1949],
[October 20, 1949],
[Winter, 1949–1950],
[Summer, 1950],
[Winter, 1950–1951],
[Spring, 1951],
[June, 1951],
[July, 1951],
[Fall, 1951],
[Winter, 1951–1952],
[Spring, 1952],
[Summer, 1952],
[Fall, 1952],
[Winter, 1952–1953],
[February, 1953],
[Spring, 1953],
[Summer, 1953],
[Fall, 1953],
[December, 1953],
[Winter, 1953–1954],
[February, 1954],
[Spring, 1954],
[May, 1954],
[Summer, 1954],
[August, 1954],
[Fall, 1954],
[Winter, 1954–1955],
[Spring, 1955],
[Summer, 1955],
[Fall, 1955],
Index,
About the Author,
Connect with HMH,
Footnotes,

What People are Saying About This

Karl Shapiro

Anais Nin's diaries live up to our expectations of them. A thrilling piece of work. Truth, perception, artistry.

Herbert Read

An extraordinary book...its egoism is revealed, raised to a high standard of art, by an extremely subtle sensibility, expressed in a prose style of astonishing beauty.

Kojy Nakaea

No other diarist can bring us to the life, experience, the thoughts and emotions with such intensive vividness.
— Kojy Nakaea, Cahier du Livre, Tokyo

Editorial Reviews

One of the most remarkable diaries in the history of letters....with this initial publication, Miss Nin, already assured of a place in contemporary literature, makes this doubly secure. -- Los Angeles Times

Robert R. Kirsch