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A WEB OF LIES

1950

JANUARY 1950

Return to New York; publication of The Four-Chambered Heart

Letter from Anaïs Nin to Rupert Pole:

New York, February 1950

Darling, you had the hardest task after graduating from forestry school, dismantling our home in San Francisco that we loved because we had each other in it, but that is only the first one and we will have other homes. I’m happy and proud about your good marks but not surprised. Your own concept of your capabilities and reality of them differ, as you see. It is only your faith and confidence that do not pass the test. I would grade you this way:

Personality—the most charming

Character—the deepest

Capabilities—the best

Confidence and Faith—Z, zero, the worst, the lowest

I’m full of confidence for our future, but the praise I get for The Four-Chambered Heart is not going to my head at all as they praise bad things equally, but among the pile there are a few understanding, sincere responses.

No matter how full, how productive the day, there is always one empty moment when I feel an anguish of the heart, and that is when I am aware of your absence. I know what the world gives is insincere and fickle, but what we have is like the sandstone mountains—fortresses. I work for us.

Write me soon.

My four-chambered heart is occupied by One completely. Limoncita

Letter from Anaïs Nin to Rupert Pole:

New York, Tuesday February 7, 1950

My darling, I’m concerned over the difficult thing you have to tell your family, that you want to marry me. If I were you I would not say too much—don’t praise me, don’t reveal the depths—I wish I were there to help you.

I have just gone through another hell—my brother Thorvald arrived on a stretcher from the plane, a hurt back in a cast and bronchial pneumonia, but thank god he is getting well and the hell is over. But I spend half my days at the hospital. My mother came down and I have to take care of her, besides all the rest.

I heard from Ruth the details of all the work you had to do, darling, which you minimized. I felt so badly. I heard even about the rain falling the day you left.

I await your letter from LA anxiously. I sent you two important ones there; I hope you get them.

Read the enclosed and please return it. All my reviews (except Time) are understanding and respectful.

Please tell me how you are, physically and mentally. Don’t fight for me, darling. Don’t be unhappy. We have a rock basis and no one can destroy it, but I don’t want you to be hurt defending our relationship.

I feel as you did during exams: I am almost glad you weren’t here, for I have all my mind set on my “job,” a real career woman, first fulfilling duties—working—and imagining pleasure in March with you. I haven’t even seen a movie or a play.

Write me soon. Your letters are my daily bread. I still risk getting run over reading them while crossing the street, also risk freezing as I forget to hold on to my coat or hood and stand on windy corners reading in zero degree weather!

Te quiero, te beso, tu calor me da vida. Tu A.

Letter from Rupert Pole to Anaïs Nin:

Los Angeles, February 10, 1950

Darling darling darling darling darling,

Miss you so much in so many ways. I too have been busy, but it’s never enough and the nights are too long.

But all goes wonderfully. Finally got off from Ruth’s loaded to the gills with stuff, looking something like a Park Avenue version of Tobacco Road, and of course accompanied by rain. Working like a fiend ever since here to get Perseus in shape and finally today my ad appeared, and what happens—rain—all day—perfect day to sell a convertible—only two people called and only one came. The ad is to run four days, however, so pray for a nice sunny weekend. Fellow today offered $1600 but my price was $1695. Am sure I can get at least $1650. (You’d never know Perseus—he’s really, really sharp and gleaming. I think he’s rather looking forward to showing off here in Hollywood.)

Now, have already bought our new car. It’s a he and I think almost zoot but we’ll fix that. He’s just the opposite of Perseus, very fast and quick like Cleo. He has just the one seat with big compartment in the back and large luggage section that can be locked. He was born in 1936 but has the appearance of being very young. He’s a little brash and needs quite a lot of toning down, but if we keep a firm hand on him I think he’ll serve us well. Let’s call him José. He cost $289 including license. Will spend another $250 putting a new motor and overdrive in him, then $40 for insurance, and we’re set for transportation.

Much more to do here than I realized. Family seems to sense I’m going for good, and they finally asked if I might marry you. Said I hoped so, but that you had held back, wanting all to be sure. Mother seemed to be very understanding and approved more when I explained what kind of person you are and what our relationship has been. (Told her I had spent weekends with you, but not that I had lived with you at SF.) Lloyd I have avoided discussing you with, instead interesting him in other less controversial things.

The write-ups are wonderful, darling. Couldn’t be more understanding. Finally they’re beginning to realize what you’re doing. Here is the Hartford one back.

My god!!! What a thing to go through with Thorvald. So glad he’s strong and vital enough to snap back.

Take care of yourself my darling and don’t try to do too much all at once, just enough and no more each day.

Till we’re one again—R

P.S. No time to read Cocteau, but Mother said it’s very amusing.

APRIL, MAY 1950

First big tour of Mexico with Rupert—Veracruz, Minatitlan. Plane to Merida, Chichen Itza, Minatitlan, Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Acapulco, stayed at Las Palmas.

MAY 22, 1950

New York; Rupert in forestry camp.

JUNE 1950

Rupert begins work in Los Angeles National Forest. Anaïs in Switzer Camp. Anaïs in Clear Creek barracks. Back to New York.

AUGUST 1950

Mexico

SEPTEMBER 1950

New York

Letter from Anaïs Nin to Rupert Pole:

New York, October 16, 1950

Darling Chiquito, I was just going to write you that one of the reasons why our relationship is so good is that you are always willing to make an effort for it (the other reasons are just natural, naturally good, effortlessly good) and I wanted to ask you what I could do, equal to your writing letters, which was not a pleasure for you. You never ask, or scold, or call me up; yet surely I must sometimes disappoint you. Promise me you will be as honest as I am, and tell me when I’m not acting as you wish me to.

You asked me something once, I do remember—not to be jealous. That I have worked on very hard. You won’t have any cause to complain. But when I asked for letters, I feel a little ashamed and selfish; yet I must tell you I’m no longer ashamed, for it has released in you a genuinely charming and far from dull writer. You have the power to give a most life-like image of your life. I felt I had been at the beach with Tavi who was so jealous of the dog who went into water with you! I felt I saw you cut your father’s hair with old-fashioned scissors. Darling, it is magical and abolishes in part the pain of separation. It’s true, it becomes a way to talk and be near.

Now, my love . . . I don’t want to be the problem of the unmarried woman to the Forest Service. The longer I stay the better for the tie-up with Flair magazine. I will wait for your letter. What if I come for your days off? Wednesday the 25th, wasn’t it? I could have days off with you, and keep busy in LA till your next days off. Will take my ticket tentatively for Tuesday, arriving Tuesday night, unless you advise me otherwise.

All my love . . . A

SIERRA MADRE, DECEMBER 7, 1950

After a long absence, Rupert’s tall and narrow silhouette appeared against the lights. Tavi the brown spaniel leaps to meet me. Rupert’s full and eager mouth. Always the firm, the tense and fervent kiss. Always under my fingers, his thin shoulder bones. Always the deep-set, large eyes. Always the sigh of relief, the exclamation: “Oh darling, it was too long.” Tavi demands attention. Rupert is elated and disturbed. He looks distraught, tense.

The 1936 Ford has been painted grey. The lock on the door is repaired. I kiss Rupert in the car with joy. We always lose our way. The metal bags are in the back. They have made this trip so often.

The web of lies is so immense I get lost in it. But now, at this moment, I am happy in a piercing, burning way, which balances all the pain. Tavi, Rupert and I. Like this, we made our first trip across the United States, south and west. Like this, we go to Mexico, we go to New Orleans, we go to the desert, or to San Francisco. I always have surprises in the metal bag: a compass, a Spanish beret. We will have eighteen days together. In the metal case there is a new shirt, or a hammock from Mexico, or sandals, or a wallet of fur, or a folk song book. Rupert always has a surprise of another kind, usually something he built for our home, shelves or a desktop sandpapered and stained. We drive to our various homes. Now we drive toward Sierra Madre, an hour away from Hollywood, where we live in a Forest Service house and Rupert is a ranger. In the summer he fights fires, he patrols with a green car, he rescues people who get lost in the canyon. In the winter he works on flood control, and on Sundays he patrols. He grants fire permits. He lectures on conservation. He examines fire hazards.

We drive towards the mountains and left of the Santa Anita race track. We drive towards very old sycamore trees and a navy blue sign reading “Sierra Madre.” Sierra Madre is a grand mountain behind our house. In the car, we climb. Tavi has his nose on my knee. The little car for two people is a shelter, fragile and a little rickety with tired springs, locks that do not work easily, a top that is difficult to lower or raise, windows that are not rainproof, and parts that break now and then from old-age maladies. But Rupert understands the car. He is confident and adept at repairing it. He is cautious in its care but reckless in his speeding. He is impatient in traffic, has to keep ahead of others, and curses the red lights and believes they are functioning only to frustrate him. He is always a little late and speeding, but he drives adroitly and has no accidents due to quick reflexes and decisiveness; his quick wits save him. Right there, in his care of the car and in his reckless speeding, is one of the million contradictions that form his constellated character. He meets me with fervor and emotional excitement, yet remembers to ask me all the task-master questions: Did you see about your naturalization? Did you find out about the divorce? Did you order the chair? Did you see the doctor?

About the naturalization: I began to use this as one of the myths to justify my departures. Americanization. Divorce. Jobs. Lectures. Magazine work. Publication of books. Christmas holiday with my family. Illness of Thorvald. Problems with the new book (A Spy in the House of Love). Disguises. Metamorphoses to cover my trips, my other life. The questions put by Rupert are answered with more lies. Only the passion and the love are true, so deeply true, and they justify the lies told to protect it.

This should be a joyous moment, a moment of finding each other again after I solved all the obstacles that pull me away. He does not know each return is a victory; each return has taken great efforts, great planning, great lavishness of acting in New York.

The dark mountains, the silhouettes of trees. Tavi is restless because home is at the top of the hill and we are climbing. I have evaded the solemn truths and emphasized the joy. Rupert turns to the left where there is a flagpole, a sign saying “government service only.” The house is plain, standard stucco, green and huge, but it is among large trees and made graceful by foliage carefully and artfully cut by Rupert. Below is the valley, and at our left are lights as if Florence were spread through the pines and sycamores. From here, illusion is permitted.

I get out of the car and Rupert takes out a valise, a red hat box, a toilet bag and the worn, much-traveled grey suede and black leather handbag that, if spilled accidentally, would throw on the ground proofs of my deceptions—traveler’s checks I can’t explain, money, Cuban passport . . . But it is the bag I carry and watch over.

Rupert has cleaned the house, has filled it with flowers and winter bushes, greens . . . He lights the candles. His surprises and mine are exchanged. We are tense with happiness. “It was too long, darling. Too long, too long.” Away from him I cannot sleep. Away from him I feel crippled, incomplete, not alive. It causes me pain. Pain in the body. The warmth of life, of the heart and of the body. It is about eleven at night. He has arranged not to work the next day so we can sleep in the morning if the telephone does not ring at eight o’clock with some tourist asking for information where to gather pine cones or where to find snakes. The bed opens on the French rose sheets I got when I sent for the belongings I had stored in Paris when the war began in 1939. Eleven years later, the same sheets from my life in Paris covered Rupert and me, the same blankets, and we dried our bodies with the same towels. On this bed Rupert does not sleep well without me. “You are my life, my all.”

I believed him at first to be a volatile, elusive, mobile, mercurial character, restless and homeless, unfaithful and unattached. I was wrong. His first wish is for a home. Traveling is secondary. His greatest need is security of the heart. He spends all his time with me. He likes to go out with me alone. He does not ask other people. When I leave for New York he does not rush out to enjoy his freedom. He withdraws. He flows when I am there. A friend describing him while I’m away said, “He becomes automatic, and not alive. He has that ‘where is Anaïs?’ look. He looks schizophrenic.” He comes to life now, his face alight, his smile dazzling. His hands are rough from rough work, but he knows how to caress. He has that sure, determined, even touch of knowing hands. He is a decisive, unfumbling lover. To slip between the sheets body to body gives us a joy we had lost. We make love hungrily and nervously. The keenness of it is almost unbearable. The sharp, clear resonance of skin and blood and nerves. Erotically we bloom, in a multitude of awakened cells, and the climax of pleasure is so prolonged, so far-reaching, that we both cry out. We hold on to each other as if to make the penetration permanent against all the separations demanded by life. I cannot leave again, I cannot leave again. This is so deeply felt, all through the body. I tease him because he has cut his hands and I want him to take care of them for his viola playing. I say, “I have a chipped husband.” He has a touch of poison oak, but only a touch, not as in San Francisco. No more bronchitis either, but there is always lurking the possibility of fragility, of sudden illness, of the bronchitis that sent him out of the army, of the inherited asthma. There is that radiance of health easily destroyed by a vulnerable temperament.

The first day is carefree. We go to Hollywood for a movie. We have dinner at the Café de Paris on Sunset Boulevard where the waitresses are French, as is the food, and there is a miniature, duplicated Tour Eiffel, but where is the subtle sky, the animated face of Paris, the loveliness, the fountains and the beauty of the boulevard? Rupert’s impression of Paris was unhappy. He was with the USO in uniform, sick and tormented by his wife Janie who did not love him. My fantasy about Rupert the great traveler is altered. Because he appeared to me in Cleo ready to cross the continent as casually as if he were driving from Sierra Madre to Hollywood, because he talked about travel, I had believed him a wanderer. “And I would be, if I did not have you,” he said. So I am France, I am Spain, I am Italy, I am New Orleans, I am Mexico. “I am too sensitive to be a real Don Juan,” he said, so I am all his women, too.

Our first day was happy. But the second day we have the problem of his family, Lloyd and Helen Wright. At first, without knowing me, they were fanatically, irrationally against me. They had no genuine accusations: I was a married woman, older than Rupert (they did not know how much older), an artist (and all artists are egocentric), and foreign. Finally I was presented at the court. Rupert believed I would win them. On Thursday nights we would go to dinner and to quartet playing. Cocktails set them both off into complete irrationality. Lloyd’s brilliance of mind, I believed at first, I could connect with until I discovered him insane—sudden rages, rantings. Helen is psychotic, only hypocritically covered by her false goodness. Rupert is equally illogical, hostile, or else masochistic. Nightmare evenings—Rupert’s mother jealous, petty and mean. Once I left weeping. After that I did not talk. Then Helen began pressuring us “to marry,” meanwhile admitting she had not been able to like me. To prove I love Rupert, I must marry him. I had a responsibility. At this I revolted. On returning home I fainted on the doorstop (rejection by the parents again: mine, Hugo’s, Bill Pinckard’s, now Rupert’s). Just before I fainted I said to myself: “Je suis une femme fatiguée.” After this, I refused to go to the house. Helen also said I could not return until we were married. Thursday became a liberation from the insane asylum—my one free evening to see friends who loved me, Jim Herlihy and George Piffner. Rupert at first rebelled against his family, against the split evening. But I said he must not break with them on my account. Their behavior, however, and my rebellion against it, has weakened the bond between Rupert and his parents. He realizes their love is not love, but domination. If he gives up forestry, they threaten to break with him. They opposed his first girl (an affair of five years) and his marriage (to a cousin of Lloyd’s). His mother is obsessed with the fact that there is too much sex in my books.

The nightmare was partly over. I was over-affected and weakened by the conflict. I had been relieved to escape to New York, but now I was so happy to be with Rupert again. He accepted my refusal to be hypocritically “reconciled” to his family. He went for the music. I visited Jim and George, and we had a lively, phosphorescent talk. George had made a mobile, which he gave me. Jim had written a story. Jim, an aspiring writer I met three years ago, loves me. He cannot find with anyone what he has with me. We talk about this and books and Erich Fromm, psychoanalysis and religion. Rupert arrives around midnight. To many people, he gives the impression of moodiness. He is unpredictable and mystifying. He is either too gentle or too aggressive. He is at times strident and tense, or submissive and over-eager to please strangers. He does not like to share me. He sits beside me and rejoices because Tavi barks at my friends as if they were intruders. “Tavi,” he says, “chase away the invaders.”

He was drunk after Thanksgiving dinner and insisted on driving, could not relinquish control even when in so doing he nearly destroyed himself and me. About this need of control, I am helpless. It manifests itself in the choice of which food I should buy and which market, of which cleaner and which laundry, a car that I cannot have filled with gas or oil without permission, control over which friends are invited and at which house. One day I wanted to go to Hollywood to have my hair tinted. He asked me how long that would take. I said it was difficult to say, as sometimes one late person would delay me. About two hours. And then? One hour for a Turkish bath. “So three hours, not including the drive.” said Rupert. “You leave at one and will be home at six,” not allowing for delays, for walking between the two places, for a stroll down the boulevard, a glance at shop windows. Mad, I thought. This is mad. It brought me back to the first days of my marriage with Hugo—the first day when he insisted on going to the hairdresser with me and waiting for me; when I made plans without consulting him he was certain to change them.

There are times when this does not displease me, when it creates an eternity of closeness like a welding, like one night we left Kay and John Dart and Jim and George at the movies to return alone to Jim’s room to make love, to sleep in each other’s arms. But most of the time, I feel stifled. I have to explain and justify all I do. I have to ask for money. He forgets to cash his checks. He believes that by having very little cash in the house, one spends less. With what explosive relief I occasionally spend my own money, which is not really my own, but Hugo’s, and with what gratitude towards Hugo. There is, then, Rupert’s control of what I “earn” in New York during my absences from home.

I spend half of my day on housework (we are saving for a house or a trip). It leaves me half a day for writing. I wrote A Spy in the House of Love. Finished it in June. It is a book of 200 pages, a full-length portrait of Sabina. But on many days after housework I am too tired to do anything but write a few letters, read and take notes, struggle to repair the damage done by mismanagement of my books. Duell Sloan and Pearce folded up, so I was left without a publisher for Spy. Strauss rejected it, Houghton Mifflin too. Viking Press called it a romantic fantasy that would cause trouble with the censors. Scribner’s turned it down. I feel the failure keenly. My other books were remaindered, so they will soon be unobtainable. Total failure. Should I pretend to die to reassure people that they can dare to approach my work without fear? Should I die so that my manuscripts should sell and my value in the market rise as a rare, lost object?

So after the homecoming orgy, after all the delights, the extremes of the pressures of daily life with Rupert—isolated, dull, prosaic—begin to weave a web that has all the suffocating aspects of a prison. The life is small, a small kingdom Rupert feels equal to manage. It is this knowledge that dissolves my rebellions. But after a week of housework and writing without hope of publication or recognition, I begin to contrive some form of escape. I dream of Paris. I dream of the artist life always denied me because I did not marry artists. I dream of earning $200 a month to be able to travel. But if I had $200 a month, Rupert would put it in the bank to build a house in Los Angeles. I cannot see myself in a house in Los Angeles. Resentment against the vacuity of American life gnaws at me. I feel it when Rupert reads the poisonous Time magazine and listens to radio commentators. I dream of Italy, where the Italian edition of Under a Glass Bell, if not I, is traveling. Rupert shares in these fantasies. If his imagination accompanies mine in this roaming, his fears make him clutch at the kind of work he can perform most adequately, at a home and at me with a desperate need of stability.

The nights, though, are always beautiful. Each part of our bodies finds its nook, its shelter, its core of warmth. Even after reading Time, Rupert’s flavor is something so remote. The American boy goes to sleep with the radio on. But when the lover emerges, it is a lover of consummate skill and fervor. The passion is an ocean large enough to dissolve the American boy until tomorrow, when instead of people, he will choose a movie, and then instead of Nathaniel West, he will read Time (having said that reading West was a task), which puts an end to any expansion of his reading. The American boy is there to stay (candy, pretty girls, Time and radio commentators), but the Welshman in him is a musician who listens to Beethoven with absolute maturity. He possesses emotional and physical depths, sensual depths; the mind alone is unawake. But Cornelia Runyon, the sculptor at sixty-five years of age, the woman aware of transcendence in stone, observes that Rupert is growing, maturing, while also observing my regression into youthfulness, greater physical health and sumptuousness.

There is always an apple pie to be baked for the American boy. If he were not so beautiful, one could be overwhelmed by the traits he has in common with his neurotic father Reginald, which are alarming, if not ugly. Rupert cannot throw away anything. He accumulates useless or worn things. He does not like to give. He is chaotic with his belongings. He loses and breaks and forgets. At sixty-five, his father keeps carbons of old medicine bottles, dirty clothes like a ragpicker, never cleans or washes his belongings, never throws away a paper, forgets and loses what he has accumulated . . .

On days when I have ironed, which I hate, baked a pie, which bores me, I feel virtuous and stupid, but Rupert is happy. He does not know that I am his mother in doing this, which appears like devotion, but as with my own mother, it is a devotion that hides the incapacity to love. Feed, clothe, tend as the mother does, but this is not love because it is directed at a dependent child and demands a return in absolute submission, a total surrender of distinct desires, different needs and mature love for others. Rupert eats the pie of which I am not proud except as I was proud at age eleven of having mollified my conscience and earned the right to read Alexandre Dumas for two or three uninterrupted hours. To draw the bath for a naked Pan is a delight. To open a bottle of beer for him is a pleasure, to feed Tavi, who has also a highly developed way to distrust one’s conscience, demanding, with glistening, appealing, hungry eyes, even after a substantial dinner.

The evening will be sweet if only Reginald does not appear, always unannounced in his dilapidated car. The physical resemblance between Reginald and Rupert is very startling, but Rupert is a more sensuous and healthier edition. Reginald was given a woman’s name at Cambridge, and his friendship with Rupert Brooke was suspect. Reginald has an aristocratic air, but now he wears glasses and he does not have Rupert’s full mouth. He is asthmatic, from the age of five. He has all the neurotic symptoms that have been classified: masochism in food, obsession with his health, completely self-centered, breathes with difficulty, gives himself insulin shots while he talks, monologues incessantly and plays a constant comedy of consulting us, asking for advice, confiding, planning, and then doing none of what is suggested. His activity is void of meaning, direction or usefulness. He travels from one place to another in quest of relief. Now it is Riverside where he feels better being near the desert. Endless monotonous monotone discourses, free associations of dead impressions. His recollections of people are uninteresting because he never knows them or sees them clearly. They only exist in a tenuous relation to himself. Martha Graham was a woman he trained to act in a play when she was a young student. Esther Winwood was a woman he once took a walk with and whom he did not kiss. Famous theatre directors were men who rejected or produced his version of The Idiot. Charles Chaplin is a man who invited him to dinner one night and asked him for auld lang zyne’s sake to coach his son on how to read Shakespeare.

Reginald wrote a play about Lincoln because with little makeup, he can easily look like him, and he can portray him easily because he has “Lincoln’s compassion.” His taste in literature is arrested at his contemporaries’ early stages of growth. His responses are merely echoes of his Cambridge enthusiasm. The zombie quality of his speech is fatal. A death-ray, death radiations emanate from him. The static, stagnant atmosphere kills one’s desire to give, help or talk because one knows it is a waste, a total waste. He will linger here, too long always, among the ashes he creates in the evening, get in his car that, like himself, seems incapable of reaching the next destination. He cannot be helped. He can only be served, washed, fed. He can only occupy a parasitic position in the family, whom he visits until people weary of his inordinate demands and escape from him. Now and then he arouses the protective instinct of a woman, and he feeds on it until the woman feels the zombie at her breast and that no life will come of this, only an existence as repulsive as a fish without eyes, with withered fins, who is less than a fish and only a little more than a stone, a static receiver of food who prowls the bottom of the aquarium.

At first I was devoted to Reginald out of an extension of my love for Rupert until his selfishness and madness frightened me, and I began to see him as a human tick. Now I live merely in dread of his appearing when I have friends of my own over and he reads them his play on Lincoln for two hours. Rupert repairs his car, gives him money and clothes, but I have stopped trying to get his writings published or even to get him to fill out his fellowship papers, which he could do impressively due to his Cambridge academic proficiencies. His blindness to others is complete. Decades after his divorce, he still goes to his former wife Helen for mail, for talks, while Lloyd stands there like a porcupine. To Reginald, I am a French writer who has too much sex in her work (as I am for Helen). But he likes my kindness to him, my warmth.

The choice combination of foresters (another sub-human form of life) and Reginald, or Kay and John or Alice and Eyvind Earle (Rupert’s friends)—Kay a mediocre June, John colorless and gentle, Alice prosaic, Eyvind a second-rate painter who was a childhood friend of Rupert’s—and the circle of a small, meaningless world is complete. I have to remind myself that if Rupert is thirty-one, I am living the life I led as a bride of twenty to twenty-five, before Paris widened and deepened and awakened me. Any woman could take my place and this life would satisfy her. But she could not satisfy Rupert because Rupert is not content with ordinary life. He has simply made me the luxury, the travel, the strange and infinitely varied flavor of his life. I am the possibility of other worlds.

One night, after the tumult and excess of lovemaking, I asked out of a lingering jealousy about an incident he had with a girl in the early days of our relationship after our first trip (which, naturally, was exposed by Kay), “You don’t have what we have with other women?” And Rupert answered with great feeling: “Oh darling, nothing approaching it, nothing compared to this, it’s all in another world, it doesn’t count. Nothing like this, as big, as big.” And he supplemented his words with an embrace so strong that it pained me. I know it is so, and I know this is the fusion I never reached with Hugo.

So the short, the lyrical, the intensely heightened moments of passion are isolated by a life altogether colorless, meaningless and limited, having no integration or connection with the nights. What I once considered an essential part of his character—the nomadic impulses, the quest of the marvelous and the strange—has weakened in him, and his main desire now is for a house built out of his own hands.

I wanted him to travel and see and know other lives before taking root in Los Angeles—I felt I would be a suitable guide to his other lives and that later I could relinquish him to the American girl who would match the American boy and read Time with him and fall asleep to the radio’s barbaric lullabies. But when he sees the mythical young woman in the movies, in stories, in other marriages, he observes mainly how selfish she is!

Ruth had warned me: “It will be good for a few years.” But four years have passed and we cannot be separated.

I was writing about the first week: one evening with Jim and George, one evening with Reginald, one evening with Kay drinking a bottle of gin, exposing her large legs up to her thighs with an ex-whore style, frequent references to her past lovers, and John, at twenty-six, hypnotized by Kay who is his first woman. During an evening at home alone I heard the train whistle and a pack of coyotes, with their thin, wailing cry, answering the train as if it were the call of another animal in the night. Tavi answers the coyotes with disquietude. The train and the howling coyotes gave me a feeling of loneliness and a hatred of the mountains and fields and trees that I cannot confess to Rupert, who delights in this space with its isolation and peace. Nature in Acapulco—sun, sea, jungle and warmth—seems festive and joyous, but in America it is the space of separation from life, it is the desert between human beings, it is a vacuum, an obstacle, an automobile route, that is all. It takes an hour to reach a movie, another hour to recover after being with people, weariness, when bed should be nearer. It is what has made Americans autistic, sub-human, unable to relate to other human beings, inarticulate. So the coyotes wail, and there is the awfulness of a nature that is melancholic and empty, monotonous and colorless, mistaking the train whistle for a lonely animal. Another evening of movies carefully chosen by Rupert, but usually a double fare, and to this he responds completely. The American boy responds to The Loves of Carmen of Rita Hayworth, laughs fully at the cartoons, but unlike any American boy, he is moved by the subtleties of La Ronde and La Folle de Chaillot. He is annihilated by deep tragedies of Italian war films. He is vulnerable, weeps over the death of The Lovers of Verona. And at this moment, I love him. No matter what limitations he has intellectually, he has emotional depth. So as we come out of the theatre, I am aware of his response to the desperate sufferings of Blanche, of his hatred of brutality and cruelty, of the fact that he refused to kill in the war.

In the movies sometimes I grow very cold, stiff and stupefied. I meditate on the art of writing becoming an obsolete art. Libraries are getting rid of books to make room for films. Publishers are failing one by one. The 25¢ books are succeeding but only because they are second-rate writing, ephemeral like magazines, easy to reach for or to throw away, not like the inexpensive French book that has a chance of being bound and kept. I think of the film I made with Hugo in Acapulco in August of an old shipwreck, the sea, myself, and movements I composed, and lines from House of Incest. In the movies I am aware that people are becoming more and more intellectually atrophied and that movies and television provide them with baby food—no need to masticate, no need to carve, no need to read a book with effort. People lie down on specially inclined chairs and receive the images. Speech, already inadequate in America, will soon disappear altogether, and the ability to derive significance from printed words will die with it. Rupert’s distaste for reading and writing reminds me of the end of a world of writing, hastened by ignorance of writing in America, and my sitting here several evenings a week with Rupert at the movies is my acceptance, my resignation to a change in the human species as radical as its change from monkey to man, a devolution from man to automaton.

TWA FLIGHT 34 TO NEW YORK, DECEMBER 1950

After leaving Rupert, I flew to San Francisco to see Mother and my brother Joaquín in Oakland. Last night, I could not sleep at first because I was in my mother’s house, in Joaquín’s bed that he relinquishes to a “guest,” and I was tormented by a strong impulse to return to Rupert instead of proceeding to New York. This impulse, which urges me to return to Rupert, to the core of fire, the center of fusion, is human and tragic, for it runs in absolute opposition to what my wisdom and intelligence tell me. It is the irrational impulse, the primitive impulse that drives me to a body I desire, a hairline and neck that stir me, a hand that melts me, a mouth that makes its designs within my flesh, eyes that direct the tides of my blood, eyelashes that play on my nerves, a voice that commands my heart and haunts me in its absence, words of need and hunger that pursue me: “You are my life.” I hear him rustling papers in his room while I am reading in bed, forcing himself to write forestry reports with the forced concentration of a child applying himself to a hated task—numbers, figures, statistics. His gravity gives him a false responsible air. People thrust responsibilities on him. He fulfills them adequately, so he gets more, but he hates it. His mother asks him to do big landscape jobs at a house she owns and rents out, where he spent his childhood in an American paradise on a hill above Hollywood, born of artificial plants and moving pictures. The house was designed by Lloyd Wright, and it is beautiful. We sacrifice Rupert’s days off to this task and the fantasy of living in the house that he will inherit, but that I know I will never inhabit. Because my father was an erudite musician, I believed he would understand my particular form of music—my writing—but he didn’t, and he didn’t understand my life. Because Lloyd is an imaginative and original architect, I believed he would understand the architecture of my writing, but he does not.

Writing in the diary, I can condense a little of the elusive aspects of this mobile we call our life. And all the while I write, its aspect changes; I find that both my passion for Rupert and my anger at our petty life together distort the truth I seek. If Rupert, because of his neurosis, of his youth, cannot achieve the life we want, only the life he wants, isn’t it true that I cannot achieve it either, that I am still dependent on others to feed, clothe, protect me, and that I therefore must accept what the husband or lover creates for me? I am still only stealing what I want, being unable to create it. I have nothing of my own. From my writing I received perhaps $250 a year, the advance on each book, and no more. I never get paid for my lectures. My records don’t sell, and if they did, Louis and Bebe Barron, who recorded them, would not pay me, not out of dishonesty, but out of mismanagement.

The magazines reject my stories. Those who read me or are devoted to me are concealed from me, a secret society who will not buy the books. And so how can I speak of my life unless it is within the framework made by Hugo or Rupert? Rupert chose a profession before he met me. I did not know him when he was struggling to be an actor in New York (this while I was seeking vainly in Bill what Rupert gave me generously later). The first time Rupert and I were together we became lovers immediately. The second time he drove me out to show me a tree as other young men would accompany me to see a painting in a museum. This tree was beautiful, but it was an ordinary tree. There was also the painting of a tree by Eyvind Earle, his friend who painted many trees. Five years after starting out to be an actor, Rupert printed Christmas cards that sold successfully and kept him fed and Eyvind and Alice in a house of their own in a forest. But this painting of a tree was an ordinary painting. Like finding Rupert’s hands stained by print ink and his nails broken and his skin rough, it touched me, I don’t know why, when neither Miró nor the trees of mythology touched me. It touched me in the same way that two ordinary poplars did when I was seventeen. They stood as sentinels to the path into our house in Richmond Hill, and I addressed them as friends, conversed and sustained a relationship with them. There was, at that time, an Anaïs who could love an ordinary tree that was neither symmetric, nor exotic, nor rare, nor historic, nor unique. This Anaïs led a timid life under the protection and control of her mother, absolutely incapable of building any life at all, except one in writing, enclosed in a diary, nurtured on fantasy, derived of literature and entirely separate from her life on earth, which consisted of playing the role of substitute mother to her younger brothers when the real mother was not at home.

Anaïs was seventeen again when she met a Rupert of twenty-eight, whom promiscuity, an actor’s life, college, or drifting did not mature or spoil, who was lost, defeated, but with his fantasies intact. He failed at marriage, and also, he felt, as an artist. And so together we began again with the tree he drove me to see, the first of many. He was on his way to study them, name them, to get a degree in the knowledge of trees, in the same Ford Model A in which we were going to cross the United States. He would go to college again for a forestry degree. In San Francisco, we were going to spend weekends visiting Big Trees. In Mexico, we were going to take photographs of the oldest trees in the world, two thousand years old. We were going to film cotton trees, orange jacarandas, palms, cactus giants, tequila trees, dead trees. We were going to bring back samples in our pockets. We were going to laugh at the obscenities of the Latin names for trees. We were going to make frenzied love under a pepper tree, make love under a big redwood tree. In the deserts of Utah, by the river, after a swim in the cold water, naked, after making love on the banks, in a place so primitive that we felt as if we were the first man and woman on earth, Rupert packed up a small, one foot high tender child tree from the forest and planted it at the edge of the river, the young tree of our relationship. The tree of life. Our adolescent passion—would it take root, bear leaves, bear fruit, bear flowers, harden, strengthen, become strong? At the moment, in that first year, its fragility, the tree, Rupert, his work, our relationship, seemed utterly fragile. I asked the name of the river. Rupert said, “It’s called Dolores.” Dolores, Dolores, Dolores, Dolorous. Why should it be Dolores?

The tree. The little one grew, at least within us. The roots grew strong, at least within us, wrapping roots that carried the vital sap between the two bodies. Anaïs of seventeen communicating with two ordinary poplars invested with mythological voices can live here in this little house of candor.

The other Anaïs, who moves at times in a bigger and more complex world, does so with effort and with difficulties.

When out of the bed of iridescent desires, I look out the window at trees that belong to a tasteless, empty, and homely America, to one of its communities that could disappear without depriving the world’s reserves of either beauty or human life in their most developed forms. One that truly represents one of the lowest forms of life, one of emptiness in obese upholstery, void in comfort, a vacuum in functional plumbing. The cypresses that do not orchestrate the lights of the valley, cypresses with no history, no dignity conferred by the soul’s convolutions, but only a community of robots producing robots, invading robots. Still, I look upon this from a bed that contains everything concentrated in one jewel, the princess jewel of sensual accord and ecstasy. Then the cypresses without history seem to be looking down not at an ordinary city, but at all the lovers, containing them all, extending them, concentrating in two bodies all the joys of the earth.

Two books were born during our life together. In San Francisco I wrote The Four-Chambered Heart. In Sierra Madre I wrote A Spy in the House of Love.

Rupert did his college work well. He had a four year job to do in two years. We had very little time for friends, for pleasure. He had so many examinations. I helped him with the typing, which was a heavy load, almost a whole book. We had a beautiful apartment on a hill. We had the Chrysler Hugo gave me in which I learned to drive. We had a fireplace in which Rupert liked to cook, to grill meat. Varda’s painting and Eyvind’s tree hung in the same room. We were very happy there in a different way.

I was deeply jealous and panicked by a very pretty girl who appeared. I felt uncertain of the future. I did not feel Rupert’s clutchingness, although it was there, and for the first time, he expressed the pain caused by my absence. But he did not seem as possessive. Our only difficulties were a few scenes of jealousy from me, once when he stared back at a girl at a concert who had come up and planted herself before him, staring at him, and another time when he asked Ruth for a typist to keep up with his typing while I was gone and asked that she be beautiful.

The only times I wept were at a defect he has that I cannot accept: he is a faultfinder. After always putting the car in the garage, one day I felt tired and left the old Ford outside. Rupert immediately commented: “You must not do that as it might get wet and be difficult to start later.” If I make the salad with lettuce leaves not cut as fine as some people do: “Salad must be cut small. Oh, you forgot the lime.” One day the car broke down. Rupert blamed me. The garage man said no one could be blamed, that it was worn and would have broken down sooner or later. He gets irrationally critical, but always shifts the blame. I do not understand the meaning of this. If he can’t find a book, someone has mixed them up—I have. This makes me nervous and causes me to lie when accused. He gets angry at the traffic. He gets angry at the movies if they advertise the wrong hour and speaks very loudly against the film—misplaced anger.

I do exactly the opposite. I seek to excuse or justify all he does. I never blame him. I know he carries an abnormal burden of guilt and the slightest addition makes it unbearable. I have tried to explain how I feel, but I’ve lost my confidence. Fearing criticism, I postpone discussions. He leaves the venetian blinds he took down on the floor. I wrap them up in an old curtain until we decide where to keep them. He says, “That’s not good. I will put them in the closet. The curtains will get dirty.” Of course, he also directs this perfectionism against himself. He treats himself as critically, as negatively. Hostility. To look for the flaw! My father did this. Hugo too. However, Hugo did not direct it at me, only at others, other women. Rupert loves me crazily, yet he also demolishes my self-confidence. When I left him at the airport, he noticed my low-heeled shoes. He said, “I like high heels with a fur coat.” I don’t feel free. I never feel free with him. “Your neckline is askew.” Yet I know he is suffering at my leaving.

Suddenly, while planning a Christmas party, he observes the mediocrity of our friends. But they are his.

It’s strange. Rupert’s passion does not make me feel free or valuable. As the month passed I felt diminished, shrunken almost. As if the only moment of fulfillment were in the sensual fusion, but outside of that, I am not happy. I do not enjoy racing nervously to a movie. I do not enjoy so many movies. I do not enjoy parties when we go together. I don’t know why. I don’t enjoy my lectures if he is there. When friends come, he is not carefree. He is bound up in dancing, rigid. Why?

Early in the morning he is desperately sleepy. He craves each minute more he can sleep, so I bring him what the Mexicans call a “cafécito,” a small cup of black coffee heralding a fuller breakfast.

When I leave him for New York, after the first stabbings of pain, after I master the deep impulse to return, then I begin to feel free and stronger. In New York I enter a larger life, and when I return I always return stronger, enriched, filled with confidence.

I am afraid to be ill with Rupert. The third week I wrenched my back helping him at gardening, and for several days found it hard to make the bed, empty the garbage pail, etc. One night I went to bed early after a hot bath. We had received chairs by mail order unassembled and therefore cheaper. Rupert was disappointed in the chairs (things are never as he imagined them). He spent the evening fretting. He turned the light on, awakened me to show me what was wrong. The word in Spanish is majadero. Ay, qué majadero, they always say about children. Fussing is the nearest equivalent—fretful. Fundamentally there is a great selfishness, which he recognizes. He only admits it when he speaks of children. On our first trip he talked about Bach’s nine children continuously. Finally I used that as a reason for not marrying him—I cannot give him children. But then he exclaimed, “I don’t really want children. I’m too selfish for that.” I think he talked about them because it made him feel manly. It was bad for Rupert’s manliness that a screen test revealed that he looked like an adolescent and could only play young boys’ roles. He had no “sex appeal,” they said. This made a lasting scar. Also, his New York stage notices emphasized his “boyish awkwardness.” When he smokes his pipe and speaks sententiously, he is playing a part. During our first trip I was disturbed by some of his attitudes until I understood he was playing the part of an older man. And yet I would turn the plane back if I could. For four years I have turned back, feeling elation, fever and delight at returning, impatient for his presence, to sit beside him in the car, with Tavi on my lap, to feel his strong hands. What I bring back is renewed faith in him, the passion to carry us farther. I return to my prison, understanding not only that it is a world in proportion to Rupert’s abilities, but knowing too that in the larger one I am not at ease. It was a strain to meet Maxwell Geismar and his wife because they were so brilliant and so mature. It is a strain to meet Anthony Tudor, to go to Charles Rolo’s parties and talk with representatives of Knopf, with older people of accomplishment.

Rupert’s eyes twinkled at me with his joyousness. “We are so fortunate, darling. We have each other. I would give anything up for our relationship: my parents, or forestry. One month apart is too long, too long. Make it only ten days. Do your job fast and come back for Christmas.”

Tavi wanted to climb into the plane. Tavi gets blue when I leave. They were driving on to see Rupert’s family. He would play the viola not too exactly, but with fervor and brilliance. He does not practice. He has the temperament for music, the bravado and the impetus. He can be defined and described as Joaquín defined romanticism: strangeness added to beauty.

The plane is an hour late. Beneath me, while I was writing, the mountains and plains lay blanketed white, this West Rupert took me to, where aside from the Grand Canyon, the desert, the South, there was nothing to discover but monotony. In one day I fly over all these roads we traveled the first time for eighteen days to a life more in harmony with my maturity, my physical age, my achievements, my development. Yet for four years I have surrendered the more brilliant friends, the greater recognition I get in New York than I do in antiquated, provincial California. I surrender the care of the best doctors, the comfort, the luxury, the freedom from housework, the power, the possessions, and above all the love to whom I owe my life, all I am, my existence, and my creation, to return to Rupert. How has he bound me, enslaved me? I see him sitting in his bath, his slender, freckled shoulders, his dark hair and his eyes illumined at the thought of my divorce from Hugo: “You will be all mine.”

A web of lies, lies, lies, necessary to this life. I am torn in two when I have to leave. Parting from Rupert, I always feel it is the last time, which I cannot bear again. Yesterday, listening to Joaquín delivering a witty lecture on Von Weber and Brahms, I felt the compulsion to return to Rupert. And then there is the fear if I return, I return without money. We have $200 a month to live on. I will have to take an ordinary job, which may bring us another $200 to save. I will not have the strength to work all day, to clean the house, shop, cook, iron, and live Rupert’s life, not the strength—the strength. I am forty-eight years old. In appearance, I deceive everyone. I am alive and keen and inspiring to others. But I get so tired, so deeply tired. I cannot return, powerless as I am, to earn what we need. Fear. Fears of illness, of loss of energy, of inadequacy. Rupert expects so much of me. He cannot understand my economies of strength. To shut the garage door, to pull the hand brake on the old Ford seems difficult at times, to carry the laundry to the laundromat, to garden in the summer. I feel humiliated, inadequate. My impulse to run back is stifled. I got up at seven o’clock and was driven by Joaquín to the airport.

I could be happy with Rupert in that core of fantasy and sensual fusion that we enter at night, but I know that only one life will ultimately destroy me. I must make a decision I have eluded after years of lies and games, of living on a trapeze, of fear of falling in between, or of one love getting hurt; I have been incapable. I went for help when the divided lives became maddening. I crave peace, a choice, a simplification. Which one? Whatever I choose seems to demand a sacrifice I cannot make. With Rupert it is the life I do not want, with the certainty of tragedy at the end.

Arrive in New York. I will be here a month.