Mother to the Sixties: Anais Nin Remembered
Crutcher, Anne
mQg0goQQii00QI9g~4oO0~qgm~ii8iogqi~iQQ9iQgg06~4mQQg~tvqg~g~QIi44iQQggg~QiQQ0Qggg6064~IU1~gq0~tW~w~Q~0~4~q~Q~Q~06~IQ~g~i~iQ~ Anne Crutdser Mother to the Sixties: AHais Ni# Remembered I f she wash...
...something of an icon to women's groups...
...President Roche's first assumption, as explained to HEW Secretary David Mathews, was that it was all the "result of a bureaucratic oversight...
...The biggies are never much help...
...The President of Harvard, Derek Bok, is positively slavish in his obeisance to HEW's snoopers...
...Anais disengaged herself, noting in her diary that memories of her mother's distress over her father's infidelities kept her from ever making another woman jealous...
...Only you, my diary, know that it is aere I show my fears, weaknesses, my complaints, my disillusions...
...He liked heroin, too...
...In picking on Hillsdale College, the Health, Education and Welfare bureaucrats are really reaching for it...
...Furthermore, she had done the Rolling Stone things with Harper's Bazaar people...
...But the biggies, fortunately, don't happen to be everybody...
...She was t~sychoanalyzed, trained to be a psychoanalyst herself under Freud's deviating disciple, Otto Rank, and actually treated patients in New York for several months...
...This is what working in analysis has done to me...
...mQg0goQQii00QI9g~4oO0~qgm~ii8iogqi~iQQ9iQgg06~4mQQg~tvqg~g~QIi44iQQggg~QiQQ0Qggg6064~IU1~gq0~tW~w~Q~0~4~q~Q~Q~06~IQ~g~i~iQ~ Anne Crutdser Mother to the Sixties: AHais Ni# Remembered I f she wash 't talking surrealism with Salvador Dali in the Virginia h n t country, she was comparing LSD experiences with Aldous Huxley...
...Lawrence, and drifted into the constellation of artists, writers, slumming aristocrats, and expatriate connoisseurs of/a vie Boh~me that made Paris what it was in the twenties and thirties...
...One is tempted to say, as one Peter deVries character said of another, "Down deep, she's shallow...
...She had the ineffable ~.ooI of a trilingual woman whose good looks magnified people's regard for her brains while her brains were magnifying the impact of her looks...
...people...
...The publication of the fast volume of her diaries in 1966 rescued her from mere coterie celebrity, which she had enjoyed for a good quarter century before that, and raised the possibility that her bejeweled prose might speak to people other than the Beautifuls of Bohemia...
...At least, whenever he remembered he said he'd be there...
...I have depicted the malady of today's soul...
...It is necessary to stress this because at this time critics favored pure abstractions and advised her to impose her will on difficult materials...
...Ecstasy...
...As Max 16 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 ~eerbohm said of some great lady of the stage, she never stoops to mpersonation...
...There was, for example, a Latin American named, in real life, Gonzalo, and in The Four-Chambered Heart, Rango...
...The actor, Canada Lee, who gave so electrifying a performance in the stage version of Richard Wright's Native Son, was showing an interest in her at a party to the clear discomfiture of a semi-official girlfriend...
...She could convey the jazz beat of Harlem nightclubs in the thirties...
...Au contraire...
...It is probably at its most grandiose in the section ,f the diaries dealing with her psychoanalytic period...
...The diary suggests that ler cure rate was 100 percent...
...As with all the other themes and situations she used, Anais Nin's relations with her father come out in both fiction and the diaries--the chief novel, in this case, is Winter of Artifice...
...When the lady of the houseboat was Anais Nin, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, the preternatural insights did not suggest therapeutic alternatives to giving Gonzalo and Helba whatever they asked for...
...I f all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty," observes the reluctant saint...
...I am playing the mother to all of them, sewing together the :ragments of the worlds they want, mending their tattered dreams, ~ewing together their shattered souls...
...There were periods when a large part of her earnings came from pornographic sketches she wrote for a private collector of erotica...
...Admitting the ambiguity of the law, it said that "one of the unmistakable purposes of these student aid programs is to make educational opportunities readily available by supporting the financial stability of educational institutions...
...He came for sure only when he needed money or services for his wife, which the lady of the houseboat invariably gave...
...Born in Paris, the daughter of a Spanish composer and a singer of French-Danish descent, she oscillated between romantic riches and romantic poverty in New York after her parents separated when she was a child...
...It is, in fact, a facade for narcissistic contemplation...
...Living so much or others gives me a fear of becoming a saint...
...After a second lapse of four months, HEW tried to be "helpful in explaining" its own tortuous reasoning for assuming jurisdiction over Hillsdale's hiring practices, particularly as they affected women...
...He seems not to have done as much for her, giving her, instead, merely the uncritical adoration rogue males sometimes feel for such mentors as Anais Nin was to him...
...Her work, I believe is the opposite of an act of will...
...The fact is that practically everybody in America is forced to take government money indirectly...
...So is good sense on drugs...
...Nor does a man buying gasoline with money received from a welfare check mean that the service station is necessarily compelled to hire a Hindu gas pumper or a Chicano secretary to make it "affirmatively" acceptable to Washington...
...That is one thing that is wrong with our country...
...O D I D . . . . . . . . . I I J @ O . . . . . . . . . 4 ~ Q U ~ m . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 J . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I I . . . . Q . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . @ . . . . . . . . . ~@@ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I . . . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . John Chamberlain The Hillsdale Affair A little college in Michigan is fig hting one of HE IV's most preposterous abuses of authority...
...Hillsdale's position is that it would be unfairly discriminating if the college were to refuse a veteran who has GI money coming to him as a matter of right...
...By the time she died a few weeks ago, Anais Nin had been in the literary mainstream for 10 years--a name to collect an audience on campuses...
...Anais Nin irritated Huxley by saying what he got out of LSD was better the way an artist gets it...
...She was not, herself, Everywoman in having much of the average and ordinary in her life...
...indeed, inclined to be particularly appreciative of their qualities...
...She watched, mused, observed, to allow the potential in the stone to reveal its hidden qualities, color, texture, bulk, half-born animal or man...what came through was not some abstraction torn away from its basic roots, its textures, its organic growth but something her tender, maternal organic hands allowed to grow organically without losing its connection with the earth or the sea...
...a good seller in paperback...
...The mirror had come to an end...
...In this role, whether she's playing it as the Anais of the stories ,r the Anais of the diaries, she projects a humorless ego the size of ~orman Mailer's...
...It gave her unique vulnerabilities to the possibility of rejection, often realized in hauntingly metaphoric ways...
...She knew everybody...
...And Anais Nin's conceit did enable her to express the unabashedly feminine consciousness she is now famous for...
...There were other episodes, too, in which girlhood sufferings over her father sensitized her to a compassionate awareness of other people's feelings...
...Her unhappy experience of maternity gave rise to a poignant story, Birth, and in no way darkened her appreciation of how central a woman's fecundity is to her perceptions of the world and her powers in it, no matter how many brains she has...
...Her writing began in the form of letters to her father, designed to lure him back to the family...
...She pitied his weakness, and, when he tried to pull his life together by becoming a revolutionary, she listened respectfully to the nitwit Marxism that emerged from the sculptured lips...
...His singing was offered to her in this cup of his mouth and she drank it intently, without spilling a drop of this incantation of desire..his eyes thrust into her vet 3 ' being...he had made of her body a bush of roses of Sharon, exfoliating pollen, each prepared for delight...
...Colette would never do that, and neither would Virginia Woolf...
...HEW, at the moment of writing, hasn't tried to close in on Hillsdale College for the kill...
...Similarly, her self-confidence was such that she was always pleasingly free of bitchiness toward other women...
...We are all in debt, too, for her part in civilizing Henry Miller and making his prose the marvel of controlled vitality it is...
...Anais Nin was sinuously slender, with a delicate, mask-like face and a wardrobe partaking of both haute couture and the mamhd aux puces...
...I rebuilt shattered lives, esuscitated, led, taught...
...As she tells it, blocked writers become creative, the frigid warm ~p, the compulsive get so they can take it or leave it alone...
...That she could bring out all this, and much, much more, with a verbal flair that seemed m imply depths of insight and erudition enhanced the gloss...
...Her description of Theodore Dreiser telling her, in the course of an unsuccessful seduction ploy, that her hands were like celery stalks, lingers in memory...
...It took Henry Ford II twenty-five years to discover that the Ford Foundation, set up by his grandfather in 1936, was more often than not anti-business...
...We are all "recipient institutions" whether we want to be or not...
...Whatever name she answers to at the moment, she's very, very attraCctive to men, an accomplished artist, a dashing cosmopolite, and, above all, an angel-sibyl-mother figure whose true vocation is to understand and heal others...
...Nevertheless, time was on her side...
...She confides to the diary that her selflessness frightens her...
...Drugs, she called " . . . a solitary vice, a passive dream, which alienates the dreamer from the whole world, isolates him, ultimately destroys him...
...When OSHA agents invade properties without search warrants and slap on fines without a semblance of willingness to accept court procedure, the large corporations say nothing...
...He did something that, although the candors of the diary don't go so far as to include details, was identified as brutal and sordid...
...She married Ian Hugo, a fdm-maker, when she was 20, went to live in an ancient house in Louveciennes, outside Paris, had a stillborn baby, wrote a book on D.H...
...Meanwhile, more of Anais Nin's work than one would wish consists of empty stylishness tied in with posturing pseudointrospection: "Did I recover this Anais once lost among the symbolic trees and swamps of Max Ernst, the skeletal trees of Tanguey, the trees of Utrillo, Suzanne Valodon, Matisse, Rousseau...
...One is also grateful for .many images of wonderful communicative power, such as the one of a demoralized woman seeing another woman walking beside her, wearing the same kind of black cloak, but walking with strength and confidence...
...And, even when he wasn't drunk, bombed, or busy elsewhere, there was furniture-smashing jealousy to comphcate things...
...She discovered and completed the image so that it became visible and clear...
...Speaking of a sculptor's "essentially feminine attitude toward her materials," Anais Nin says, "She never imposed her own will over the image tentatively begun by nature...
...Male intellect and force didn't frighten her or betray her into the groveling paranoias of today' s feminists...
...HEW waited four months before reasserting its claims...
...This is something to be grateful for...
...A snowstorm made Anais and her friends late, and, when they arrived, they could see through the windows all the assembled guests having a good time without them...
...She has a single heroine for her creations: Sabina, Lilhan, Djuna, Anais...
...However, for all the pretense of candor, this is by no means a tell-all diary...
...Sometimes the results of this outsized benevolence included situations that less reverent interpreters of Anais Nin than Anais Nin might have described in terms of playing sucker to the parasitism of some pretty crazy people...
...I am writing with a sensitivity which our modern world is intent on destroying not knowing that this is the only antenna we have to our psychic nature...
...That, and writing about them in novels, short stories, and the diaries she kept for more than 40 years...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 17 "The fireworks were mounted on wire bodies waving amorous arms, tiptoeing on the purple tongues of the Holy Ghost, leaping out of captivity, Mercury's wings of orange on pointed torches hurled like javelins into space spearing through the clouds, the purple vulvas of the night...
...Martin Gerry, the Acting Director of HEW's Office for Civil Rights, that his school has no intention of kowtowing to Washington by submitting an Affirmative Action program for HEW approval...
...In her teens, she was an artist's model and a dancer...
...She assisted the birth of chaotic masses into recognizable forms...
...But in any event, Hillsdale and HEW have been playing a catand-mouse game ever since, in November of 1975, the college found itself reclassified as a "recipient of federal funds...
...a n d then she vanished...
...The heads of big universities tumble over each other to attract federal funds --and, some ten years after the "affirmative" acceptance of poorly qualified minority students has become part of the campus way of life, President Kingman Brewster of Yale is pained when the federal quid pro quo for medical school grants turns out to be a requirement that transfers from foreign schools be accepted without questions about academic competence...
...Not that she was, or tried to present herself as, entirely happy and secure...
...It has no business coming between the individual and his government...
...So our system, which once really exalted voluntarism, defers to the bureaucrats who come bearing manacles...
...It was the spring of 1935, and she was seeing six to eight ~atients a day, sent to her by Dr...
...feel I cannot be weak outside because others depend on me...
...To her credit, she did not go along with it, intellectually anyway...
...There was, for example, the time she was going with friends to a party which was to be given in her honor...
...Bill Barlow, a smalltime electrical contractor and plumber in Pocatello, Idaho, invoked the Fourth Amendment guarantee against warrantless searches, and, after an agonizing wait of six months, a three-man court justified his refusal to let OSHA inspectors conduct a fishing expedition in his back shop...
...He was married to either Helba or Zora, depending on whether you're reading the diaries or the novel, but he was really in love with a lady who lived on a houseboat in the Seine...
...Particularly, she knew Henry Miller, with whom she was to exchange ideas about life, love, and literature, in person and by letter, for some 40 years...
...Her recollections included having a homosexual friend tell her she must be reincarnated as a boy so he could have an affair with her...
...The bureaucrats did this by claiming that veterans' benefits and other government-supported grants or loans to students who happened to choose Hillsdale made the college a "recipient institution" subject to federal control...
...And Anais Nin had done it all...
...Indeed, to Everywoman...
...Rank...
...President Roche replied promptly that he had "not felt it appropriate for the college to judge the sources of student funding, since those sources should be primarily a concern of the individual involved...
...Fine," he kept saying, "but cut the poetry and get to the action...
...The loss of her father from the family in her childhood was the incurable psychic wound that set off her lifelong effort to comprehend human emotion...
...A feeling of desolate exclusion swept over her...
...If she wasn't talking surrealism with Salvador Daft in the Virginia hunt country, she was comparing LSD experiences with Aldous Huxley in California...
...So did her personal picturesqueness...
...The besequinned verbiage can out-Durrell Laurence Durrell and reach confession-magazine levels...
...She simply went her way, courting dream, symbol, intuition, and physical sensation as avenues to wisdom...
...The biggies in business put up with the most flagrant idiocies of Ralph Nader...
...She could analyze, down to the last nuance, the relative merits of making love in a Venetian gondola and on a pile of blankets in a Greenwich Village artist's loft...
...I handed out the key to the room where overs met, consoled the deserted ones, restored faith, aroused the nteUect, opened new worlds...
...While it attracted adulation in her circle, the stir it made outside was so variable that, as late as the fifties, she had moments of considering herself a failure...
...I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way...
...Gonzalo-Rango's inability to remember what time it was kept him from being much of a revolutionary outside caf6 talk, but Anais continued to be a soft touch, at least until there was an explosive end to the affair...
...After that, her life moved back and forth between France and those parts of the United States where the medley of beaux-arts-chic types who were her friends and lovers congregated...
...The background was one to bring out that forties word, "glamorous...
...Many, many times, he was detained at the cafA where he spent most of his time, drinking...
...Her literary method is a curious one, weaving back and forth from notquite-fact to not-quite-fiction, according to whether she's writing a diary entry, a novel, or a short story...
...For 18 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977...
...If, so Dr...
...Anais Nin was a Cosmo Girl with class...
...Roche said, the "expansions of federal authority under Title IX are now to use such individual funding as a means of assaulting the independence of Hillsdale College as a whole, we reserve the right to re-evaluate the programs involved...
...statutes...
...Since George Roche has been absolutely scrupulous about rejecting even the most innocent-sounding governmental aid, HEW had to go all around Robin Hood's barn to make it appear that Hillsdale was "subject to the requirements of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and other civil rights John Chamberlain, author of The Enterprising Americans and many other books, writes a regular column for the King Features Syndicate...
...Her curriculum vitae tells some of the reasons, although not all...
...But, clearly, when, in her 60s, she began to be widely known, she was a persona whose time had come...
...Hillsdale isn't responsible for the laws that entitle individuals as citizens to government help...
...There's also a lot of philosophical poetastering worthy of Khalil Gibran...
...It can be a strain, though...
...I have entered the dream with a powerful beam of light, to interpret, reveal its influence on our life to focus on its influence and the interdependence of fantasy and reality...
...Some of Anais Nin's fiction was printed privately and some by commercial publishers...
...Sometimes the fancy turgidities are downright embarrassing...
...A family getting food stamps doesn't make the grocery store in which the stamps are used a "recipient institution...
...It is like masturbation...
...Maybe the bureaucracy is waiting to see how the Carter Administration will react to the ridiculous claim that when an individual spends a federal benefit, it automatically makes the secondary recipient of the cash a ward of the government...
...To be sure, many a fine woman has made a fool of herself over a no-good man, many a fine writer has had a big ego, and many a psychoanalyst has been imperfect in self-interpretation...
...Others in this group include Rockford, Wabash, and Pepperdine among the " l i t t l e s , " and Utah's Brigham Young University whose 25,000 students can count on financial support from the Church of Latter Day Saints...
...I gave the key to it too, and feel it now because my lame ducks are dancing...
...Hillsdale happens to be one of a small number of colleges that have refused, out of philosophical conviction, to take federal money...
...The introspections alternate with inventories of compliments received, and the introspections themselves tend to be merely the kind of self-praise even the unself-conscious know they'd better not say out loud...
...It is an act of creativity which remains rooted in nature, more like an act of giving birth...
...Love in the Arabian bed in the houseboat was idyllic...
...And in education George Roche, the President of little Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan (1,010 students), informed Mr...
...The sixties--spiritually a decade that went on into the early seventies, as the 19th century was, in historical and cultural time, really 1814 to 1914--were the era of open marriage, the sensuous woman, the liberated woman, astrology, occultism, the rediscovery of intuition, drugs, Greenwich Village bohemianism for a whole generation of young Anne Crutcher is an editorial wrfter for the Washington Star...
Vol. 10 • March 1977 • No. 6
