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CHAPTER 1

DECEMBER 1934

My ship broke the speed record sailing toward New York. It was night and not morning when I arrived — fittingly, for the night is now the beginning for me and the root of all days. The band was playing, and the skyscrapers were twinkling with a million eyes, seemingly standing on black air; and a man was whispering: "Listen, honey, I love you, listen to me, honey, I love you. Honey, you're marvelous. Isn't it grand, honey, to arrive in New York while I make love to you. I'm mad about you, honey. You won't do me wrong? You won't forget me, honey? I love your hair, honey. Listen to me ..."

"The music is too loud," I said. "I can only hear the music." But I was looking for Otto Rank, for the other, looking at the lights, the Babylonian city, the wharves, the people, and not "honey" but "darling," and eyes shining like patent leather, with a love taller than the skyscrapers, a love inlaid with a million eyes and windows, and tongues.

His eyes. "Oh, darling!"

But it was a dream. We were wrapped in cotton, in silk threads, in webs, in moss, in fog, in the sea — flavor of distance to be annihilated.

My room. Which, he said, had been the Waiting Room. Laughter begins to flower and tinkle, like a box full of savings. We had been saving it, dime by dime, for use today. That was to be the texture, the perfume and the color of our alliance: humor and a long-saved laughter.

Very slowly, with hands, tongues, mouths, we unwrapped and untied ourselves, laying open gifts. Gave birth to each other again, as separate bodies who enjoy collision. Not the lovers of Paris, whose caresses could not become prolonged indefinitely into space, daily living, daily motions and actions.

I've found the one I can play with, play really, play the woman, play everything in my head or body with a blood rhythm. Not the play of ideas where the instinct rebels against realization. He says, "I have an idea." And he invents, creates, fantastically and magically — life. Every detail of life.

I am not alone, embroidering. He leaps, he directs, he realizes. He is more adept at realizing, more adroit in details; he can be the criminal and the detective, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Don Quixote, June, Louise, or Dr. Rank, analyzing in his strange way, which is generating his own self, born in our love.

New lovers. With all New York pointing to ascension, to exultation, to climax, to heightening. New York, the brilliant giant toy with such soft-oiled hinges. In our hands, in his nervous, quick hands. I have an idea, and in a new and sudden rhythm we began to swim: retorts, answers, response, interplay ... my world, shared.

I knew of the sameness of feeling, but not of the sameness of thinking. The love of embroidery, of complexity, for the love of disentangling.

He read me from Huckleberry Finn. The freeing of the Negro, with the adventurous spirit emphasized. The claptrap of literature. The additions, complications, circuitous manner. We found in there our "coat of arms," the game spirit, the creations and inventions.

One of the first things he took me to see was the "magic door" [at Pennsylvania Station]. All in metal, it opens just when your shadow touches it. He liked to see me glide up to it.

I have never known such a joy. I live continuously in fantasy, yet in human reality too. My instincts are at peace. No control, revolt, distaste, or conflict. And my imagination is free. I am myself. His faith in me gives me wings.

On the clearest, sunniest day, he took me to the Empire State Building.

To be aware of New York because it is our city and it matches our mood, and to be in complete possession of it, too. Not intimidated. Insolently allied, the complicity of New York favoring our pleasures and joys. Acoustics good for laughter.

The theater. It was deficient, and so he began to read all manner of things into it. I said to "write it." We rewrote the plays. We invented the play. And I mentioned my admiration of Ferdinand Bruckner. Coincidence. Someone in a Vienna paper had thought "Bruckner" was Rank's pen name. So I baptized Rank "the playwright."

We sit, equally breathless, before the curtain rising. Only now the magic world does not lie behind the curtain. It has spread into one vast symphony: our talks, our ideas, our love, his work, on all levels at once, as I always wished to live. Living in every cell. Unfolding a thousand new selves.

Broadway. Bath of electricity. The cellophane symphony. The transparent brilliance over all objects. This texture which is not real.

Breakfast in the dim hotel restaurant. I give him the essence of the day's news. That is, humorous juxtapositions by clipping phrases, unexpectedly arranged, giving a hilarious result. That I slip under his door while he is analyzing a patient. As soon as the patient leaves he reads it. He comes to my room, laughing.

With him, I have struck the area of humor, born of the shock of the trip. A trip is like throwing dice. The days are bright and shiny here. One feels new every day. The poetry of smooth motion, of all your desires being answered, of all your needs divined and immediately accomplished.

People I don't dare to look at too closely. They seem a bit deficient. They too are cellophane, a sort of perpetual Christmas morning. I don't know. I'm really in love with Him and with buildings, granite, electricity, 6,400 windows, survoltage, pressure, streets, and crowds. I don't listen to Americans. I play with Him in the city of tomorrow. A good acoustic for laughter!

In a letter to Rank I had said I didn't want to dance; that was acting for the world. I preferred acting all the roles for him.

We began playfully with "The Secretary." The secretary was not so good at first, because of the curse of her Father's severity and his: "Tu n'as pas l'esprit scientifique." So she trembled and shook and made errors born of her panic. But when he saw that she had headed a letter with the date of her sailing instead, he was only amused, even pleased. My mind was obviously on our own story. At his laughter, and tolerance, and tenderness, the secretary was surprised, moved, and magically affected. That is, she became a good secretary. The next day she was cool and applied briskly a certain gift for order and quick action under his dexterous guidance.

The secretary left her work at six. An hour later we were at the restaurant, exchanging the most amazing answers, retorts. It is like the marvelous talking one does with one's self, regretting never to attain the same brilliance publicly.

Ripples and ripples of humor and irony.

The theater.

Broadway. Creamy drinks. Harlem.

Sitting in dusky lights with Negroes unleashed.

Never imagined he could not dance. Never imagined Dr. Rank could have led such a serious life that he had never danced. But he is not Dr. Rank. He's a little man whose blood can throb insanely.

"Dance with me."

I make him forget his fear and his awkwardness. I just dance. At first he is stiff, he trips, is dislocated, lost. But at the end of that first dance he began to dance. Magical. And the joy it gave him. "A new world — oh, my darling, an entirely new world you have taken me into.

His joy gave me joy. The first step of his dancing with all the meaning I give to dancing. All around us the Negroes wild, dancing wildly. And he sauntering, awkwardly, as if he were learning to walk.

I didn't teach. I danced and he danced along with me. He was amazed at my gaiety. I did want to dance with the Negroes, freely and wildly, secretly, but this was so strange, my leading him into a dreamlike freedom of motion, after he had given me the freedom of motion to live. Giving back pleasure, music, and self-forgetting, for all that he gave me. No more thinking. No more thinking. I made him drunk.

Driving home. Radio in the taxi. More music. Laughter in his eyes. Gardenias in his buttonhole and on my fur collar. Gardenias, wild orchids, white Georgian violets, silver paper, and fake-pearl-headed pins.

An orgiastic night. "Still dancing," he said; "love like a dance." Wild abandon.

He wakes at five in the morning, so aware; he is as excited as I was with Henry [Miller], unable to sleep for the wonder. He awakes passionate and brimming with ideas. I am more sleepy, more relaxed. A certain ultimate keenness has worn away. I enjoy lying back, swinging, lulled by happiness. It seems to me he is giving me the great, keen new love I gave Henry, the active love, the leaping, restless, wide-awake love in which I rest as Henry rested in mine. I dream, I sleep, I receive. He is awake, aware, full of activity, leadership, inspiration.

Harlem. He could not forget it. He was eager to return. He dreamed of it. Could hardly come to the end of his hard day's work.

He works in Room 905 [at the Adams hotel], where there is a salon and a bedroom. I have a room next door to his, which is like a sitting room.

Soon we talked about my need of another address. I did not want to have another, did not want to fragment myself again. No. But there was no other practical way. Again, I joked about the two toothbrushes. I resisted it. But all along I was thinking, If I have to have another room it will be at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel. I wanted to see the old place with new eyes, remember John [Erskine] to make certain that I had forgotten him. Rank helped me to decide, first by his natural decisiveness, then because he liked the idea of my being occasionally in another place that would be new for him, and away from his office and from Dr. Rank. He seeks to escape that role as much as I seek to escape being Mrs. Hugh Guiler.

We came together and chose the smallest room, as wide as the bed is long, with a tiny desk and bureau, all in russet brown, very much like the inside of a valise or a jewel box.

I moved, partially, away from Rank the Monday after my arrival. We decided he would help me with the details of, my deceptive games, because he can be more accurate and more realistic, and because he says the woman in me always leaves a clue, wants to be discovered, mastered, wants to lose.

In this room I am now alone, in the evening. He had to go to a dinner and I did not want to go out with anybody else. I wanted my diary, because for the first time my most beautiful game of all has turned into tragedy. I mailed, by mistake, a letter for Hugh to Henry, and one for Henry to Hugh. ("With a desire to let them know, to escape," Rank later said.) At the same hour that I received Henry's cable saying, "Anaïs be careful Hugh received first letter with check envelopes interchanged disregard Bremen letter OK now," Rank had made the following note between two analyses: "Telling to all, wanting all to know. Secret impossible."

All those days before, we had spent our time in our beautiful world. Gilbert and Sullivan plays, the American Ballet, a day in the hotel at Hartford. His letters, early in the morning (I only sleep in his bed on holidays), slipped under the door with a tiny frog.

Letters full of a frightening understanding of me. I lock them in a kind of niche in my desk, which has a little door. That's the castle. Later, he adds to it a tiny penguin, and a small candlestick he stole from the doll house at the Child Guidance Institute. (He wanted to bring me the whole house. He asked the startled directors for it!) In the Gilbert and Sullivan play the soldier gets a cramp trying to play the role of a poet. I feel now that will never happen to me while I am with him.

I went out and sent him a miniature of a Japanese garden, with a little house and bridge. Our garden. As a pre-vision of seeing The Mikado. With an invitation from "Anita Aguilera" to come to Room 703 at the Barbizon Plaza, at eleven, after his lecture. He sends a beautiful red plant, which is shedding its leaves tonight while the radio plays blues.

He came and entered into the playing spirit with his strange, divining love. Came telling, as always, of the magic he had been working during the day.

The night I saw the American Ballet performance: another surrender, another abdication. I cannot take to the stage, always because of a man. Single, not collective performances! I watched the dancing with delight and restlessness and despair. All art, all dancing, all imagining given to love, everything given to love, to love. She turned, turned like a disk, turned, and in the center of the stage, as if she could never stop. Other women touched her, embraced her; she went on turning. Wheel and earth, stars and cycles, turning, watch and wheels turning. A man embraced her and she ceased. At this I dissolved into an inexplicable sadness, which Rank felt without looking at me.

The next day I was asking him questions about his childhood. He suddenly gushed out endless stories. Then stopped to weep. "Nobody ever asked me this before. I have to listen to others all the time ..." I heard about the mischievous and dreamy boy, Huckleberry Finn. His wife had only been able to take care of the sick boy, as Hugh took care of the sick child in me. But we were lonely. we had nobody to play with. The gay child, the inventive child, the spirited and wild child, was lonely.

That night, in the hartford hotel room, we discovered definitely the twinship. He says I think as he does. I guess what he is going to say. I catch it so quickly, the feelings, emotions, all the same, the sense of ecstasy, the extravagance, the quickness, the seeing through, the attitude toward love, the selectivity, the imaginings, the created roles.

The more fantastically we play, the more real the love becomes. And he touches all things with the magic of meaning. Finding the meaning does not wither him as it does others. So he connects all that happens to us with his analysis, synthesizing, creating, interchanging, giving. On the train he writes his lectures. In the hotel room he wrote notes on "Life and play." For this we disguised ourselves, he in my velvet kimono, I in his hat and cigar (The hat we discovered one night on broadway, a huckleberry finn hat, and bought immediately), so that he could penetrate feminine psychology and feelings. I was at the typewriter and wrote my own ideas, with the red ribbon, in between.

JANUARY 3, 1935

The Uncanny Sensitivity And Intuition. I CAN hide nothing from him. He can read every nuance of my moods. He weeps easily, laughs. Oh, to be so alive, to be alive. I'm weeping and laughing. It's marvelous.

Life a dizzy whirling. Rank wooing me with understanding; with his imagination, which is infinite; with his intricate and dazzling mind; with Huck, the Huck who got lost in Dr. Rank — freckled, homely, tattered, clownish, rough hewn. Then Henry, awakening slowly to my trickeries, revealed by the mixed-up letters, and awak ening to his passion for mc, suffering, writing madly, cabling, and treating me as he treated June. I become June and then his love for me becomes like his love for June — passion. So the long mad letters come, and the cables. And Huck, Huck begins to suffer exactly as I suffered when I first loved Henry, when he was still full of June and I tried to spare him, as Henry did not spare me, spare him the confidences, etc. But Rank cannot be deceived. We talked, talked. He knows everything, except that my love for Henry is not quite dead, will not die. He knows everything, except that Henry's love letters move me. A mad life.

He awakens early, at six. He cannot sleep for the wonder, whereas the wonder makes me more and more human, more hungry, more sleepy, more natural. He awakens at six and comes to my room. I love that moment when he comes into my arms; it is Huck then, not Dr. Rank, a natural, spontaneous, impulsive, shiny-eyed Huck, with his everlasting "I have an idea." The brightness, the wakefulness I had for Henry, who was sleepy. Now I am heavy with sleep. I laugh at Huck's new pranks, at his ideas, but I fall asleep again. He is restless and alert. He takes a bath. He feels as I felt when I waited for Henry's awakening. He has figured out the sleep, too: "Child of nature. You belong to the night. I have to give you up to the night." A universe perpetually deepened and embellished. I thought really that it was his snoring that kept me awake, and that for the sake of sleep I had to run away and find another reason. I said I was so aware of him that I couldn't sleep. He feared it was his too-much love, his obsessional attentiveness, his overwhelming worship. We had one evening of misery. He felt I was withdrawing because he was loving too much. I had, it is true, found it strange and even frightening, this never being alone, after I had complained of loneliness. No loneliness ever, with that watchful, keen, uncanny knowing being there, all tentacles, all divination.

Cables: "Eternal love, Henry." Letters: "Anaïs. Cable me immediately that you are my woman, that you are not betraying me, that you will live with me, that we will be together. ... I'm desperate. say something that will reassure me...." cable to henry: "I am your woman always, Henry. We will soon be together. I am working for our freedom. Have faith in me."

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Excerpted from "Fire"
by .
Copyright © 1987 Rupert Pole, as Trustee under the Last Will and Testament of 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.
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