Anaïs Nin: The Winter of Artifice

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The café table was stained with wine. His blue eyes were inscrutable, like those of a Chinese sage. He ended all his phrases in a kind of hum, as if he put his foot on the pedal of his voice and created an echo. In this way none of his phrases ended abruptly.

Sitting at the café he immediately created a climate, a tropical day. In spite of the tension in me, I felt it. Sitting in a café with his voice rolling over, he dissolved and liquified the hard click of silver on plates, the icy dissonances of glasses, the brittle sound of money thrown on the zinc counter.

He looked like Prokofieff. Like a Chinese sage. Like a German scholar.

“How did you come to meet Johanna?” I asked, thinking that if she were his wife I could not understand her not being there, why she was not there listening to his voice, looking over the book he brought always in his pocket, forgetting to drink because he had been talking about his book which was getting so enormous that it had to be clipped every day.

“I met her in a dance hall. She was working as a taxi girl in a dance hall on Broadway.”

“She must have seemed so different from the other women there.”

“Not at first, and yet when she began to talk… Her talk and her voice. She sat down and she confessed her whole life to me. And what she confessed was all untrue.”

“Will she come back?”

“I don’t know. She’s often made promises like that. She may never come back. For the moment I don’t want her back. I don’t like what happens to me when she’s around. She humiliates me, paralyzes me, it’s torture.”

He opened his soft animal mouth a little, as if in expectancy of a drink.

“Whereas now, Djuna, I’m happy, I’m too happy.” Then he began to laugh, to laugh, with his head shaking like a bear, shaking from right to left as if it were too heavy a head. “I can’t help it. I can’t help laughing. I’m too happy. Last night I spent the whole night right here. It was Christmas and there were too many bed bugs in the hotel room.”

He’s a man whom life makes drunk. He is like me. I was surprised how gently he had walked into my life, how quietly he seemed to be living, when all the time his writing was whipping and lashing around, coursing like lava with burning bitterness and caricature. His softness of speech could not temper the watchful curiosity of his analytical blue eyes. Beneath the furry human warmth I sensed a non-human purpose. Behind this Hans with his southern roguishness wearing his hat tipped to one side and perpetually calling for drinks, I divined a more austere personage bent upon creation.

“Johanna… Johanna wanted to kill me for all that I wrote about her.”

“It is a very cruel book.”

“But she’s a terribly cruel woman.”

“I admire her courage to hurt… After all, she fed your work. She gave you a tremendous experience.”

“You’re only thinking of me as a writer,” he said, and then I knew that this was not so because while he talked I had been noticing that he was very thin, that although his voice was warm and ample, his body was thin, and that at forty his hair was almost white, and I knew that if Johanna had been good for his novels, I wanted to be good to him, to Hans the man who was hungry, thirsty, abandoned.

“When I read your novel about Johanna and Hildred, do you know what struck me as strange, Hans? That you the husband, lover, writer, should have been such an indistinct personage. You made the portrait of the two women full length, with bold, emphatic strokes. But when it came to yourself, you made yourself out an abstraction, just a writer, observing, noting, suffering, yes, but all of it furtive, modest, self-effacing. Why? It is as if Johanna crowded you out, as if you considered yourself unimportant except as a recorder, unimportant as a man, I mean. I couldn’t find you. I could only find a man who was telling a story.”

“Always thought of myself as unimportant… I’ve lived so blindly. No time to think much. Tons and tons of experience. Johanna always creating trouble, misery, changes, flights, dramas… No time to digest anything. And then she says I die when she leaves me, that pain and war are good for me. All the time I’m with her I’m choking with anger. After scenes with her I get terrible pains in the pit of the stomach.”