La Boheme
A Spy In The House Of Love
by nocturne 17 on Thursday, November 14, 2002 02:32 pmAtmospheric depictions and impressionistic wanderings run through the nocturnal urban labyrinth of the novella A Spy in the House of Love in the 'continuous novel' Cities of the Interior by Anais Nin. These are my own observations and interpretations of the text. Some embellishments added. "Quotes" are not official, and be warned of spoilers!
Nin's Sabina is a beautiful woman lost in the labyrinth of her own lies. One desperate evening she calls a random number and begins to confess her crimes. The man who answers the phone is not only a stranger, but also a "lie detector". She hangs up on him after learning this but he traces her call and leaves his bed to find her. The lie detector enters a small, darkly lit bar later on that evening and sits in the shadows, scanning the room for the strange woman's voice. There, in the center of the bar, stands a beautiful woman, surrounded by captivated men as she tells them fantastical stories of her life in Marrakesh and of her theater days in London. The lie detector recognizes the woman's voice and drinks in her body, her dark eyes and red and silver dress. Her hand motions are nervous and she keeps smiling during the serious parts of her tales. The lie detector knows she is lying. But he is certain he will find out the truth.
Sabina leaves the tiny Harlem bar and proceeds to hail a taxi home to Greenwich Village. Her husband does not expect her back from Provincetown, Massachusetts for another week, but she can no longer stand being in the city another night without him. She returns home and finds the apartment empty. She runs a bath but before she can clean off the scents of other men's desires in the water she hears her husband's key in the lock. It will be yet another evening of pretending to be someone else for Sabina. She is almost used to it now. She is an actress - but in real life and not on the stage. Earlier this evening she was a downtown seductress and a well traveled actress. In the midst of her performance she had almost lost her character when she called the lie detector. She had nearly told him the whole truth of her life. She had almost destroyed the varied fragments of her disjointed self that made her feel somehow whole. She had almost lost control - and she had never slipped up like that before.
Instead she lives out her role of doting, loving wife in her husband's arms. She dresses in white chiffon and puts his feet up after work, cooking exotic meals for him and reading poetry to him by the fireplace. She is gripped by a love so fierce and consuming it lifts her soul whenever she is near him. But somehow it is still not enough - or it's too much altogether.
She feels a childlike devotion to her husband which mirrors her complex girlhood worship of her Don Juan father. Like her own cosmopolitan and remote father, Sabina has become a "Donna Juana" of sorts; seducing countless men in an effort to transfer her father's womanizing experiences onto her own sexual compulsions. Much like Nin's other works exploring her lifelong obsession for her father and his abandonment of her, in another work, Winter of Artifice she writes of her father as a man who "...was offended that she had not died completely, that she had not spent the rest of her life yearning for him. He did not understand that she had continued to love him better by living than by dying for him. She had loved him in life, lived for him and created for him." Sabina feels this way about her father and feels perhaps she has to "die" for him, to create an inner death of herself and to reincarnate as a mirror image of him in order to "win him back" and "seduce" him into "loving her once more" as she feels he 'must' have once upon a time.
Sabina moves through the streets of 1940's New York in search of that insubstantial otherworldly mystical "something". She feels an unknown presence watching her. The lie detector is following her everywhere. He is like the silent confessor who becomes obsessed with his once detached object of study. He is all at once omniscient god, father, priest, judge and psychoanalyst, but he is too far removed from her to make actual contact with her. He is merely a witness to her affairs with a beautiful Italian actor, an afro-Cuban drummer and a shell shocked English army pilot. He watches as Sabina becomes haunted by the pilot, who leaves her sleeping in her tiny rented bungalow on Long Island and disappears into the thick, seashore mist. Sabina searches the streets and all the burroughs for the mysterious pilot. She hunts in every corner, trying to trace his last footprints as the lie detector in turn follows hers. She looks into every new face for any sign of him, any reminder. She is obsessed with the "idea" of him and with the stories still lingering in her head of his tragic, vivid tales of W.W.II combat. In Spy she describes their union as a momentary escape from their exterior realities.
"They fled from the eyes of the world, the singer's prophetic, harsh, ovarian prologues. Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world, where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress, and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments, necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on man's sensual mast."
During their solitary night of passion he described the pungent smells of leaking airplane fluid and burning flesh. He spoke with an eerie calm of his shot down comrades and of the blood he shed in the heat of battle. He brought out the demons of war still raging within him underneath his deadly stillness and penetrates this chaos into Sabina's body during violent lovemaking. She absorbs all his ghosts and hopeless feelings of death and darkness. Here is the vicious, invasive communion with man (god) she has waited for since her first sexual awakening, since the moment her father turned away from her with a cold goodbye. The pilots' poison tastes sweet to Sabina. Instead of looking for an antidote she searches for another injection. She has found her true drug.
Walking aimlessly while her husband is away on another business trip and giving up her search for the pilot, Sabina's childhood memories of her father flood back to her. The lie detector is close by but invisible. Her father's last letter to her read in part that she was, "the only woman (her father) had not conquered" and he writes to her that, "God and society would never allow it. However we can still keep our dreams and share our most intimate secrets with each other... as the only two people who can truly understand each other and our many amours." Her father offers her a relationship with ties, not a regular father-daughter bond but a closed off secret communion where Sabina is only one piece of herself with him... and nothing more.
Sabina's idealized image of her father is slowly breaking into a thousand shards of shattered glass in her newfound disillusionment. The spell of sex and forgetting is not working anymore. She cannot simply have random interludes and re-emerge unscathed. She begins to see the little lies buried within each of her father's stories and the subtle trickery within each one of his "professions of undying 'fatherly' love" for her. It slowly dawns on her she has not only become a warped caricature of her father, copying his own seductions not as an expression of her own desire but as an uninformed means of understanding him and winning his approval and affection - but she also realizes that her father is ultimately incapable of ever being really honest with her (or himself). Despite his recent attention he will forever be the impersonal egoist. He will never be conquered and won.
Sabina sought out the pilot in the ho pes of relief from her lifelong suffering at the hands of her insatiable desire to be loved (transformed into a need for sexual and emotional possession in her adult years). She wishes to recapture again and again the intense pleasure and pain of their brief union because she felt near the brink of not only release of her own demons (by ingesting someone else's) but also the possibility of being psychically jolted out of her own neuroses long enough to feel "alive" again.
She is at the point where she also senses the lie detectors' presence strongly enough she begins to associate him as something of a slightly malevolent guardian angel. She cannot evade him, she cannot hide from herself, from her lies and from the outside world. She decides to face the lie detector (god, father, priest, judge, psychoanalyst). As the lie detector rests in the lobby of the hotel Sabina checks herself into he is startled as a hotel key drops into his lap from behind. He turns around to catch her but Sabina has already disappeared into a closing elevator. He stands up, disheveled, with a mixed look of uncertainty and determination on his face, and walks up the stairs to her room. This is the hour where he becomes a true confessor or he gives up forever and leaves her alone. He walks into the room through the door without knocking, using the key. He finds Sabina lying on the chaise lounge and he awkwardly enters, clearing his throat to make her aware of his presence.
"I'm an official." He says quietly. "I mean you no harm."
"I know." She answers and motions for him to sit at a nearby chair.
"Do you break your own rules often?" She asks.
"No." He answers and sits.
"It's all right. I called you..." She replies and pauses a moment. "I think I understand why now."
They sit in silence for several moments. It is not uncomfortable.
"You're my conscience or my demonic guardian angel or my god or I don't know what. I don't care anymore." She sighs. "You know what I want, don't you?"
"I think..." He answers, looking out the window.
"Say it." She commands.
"You have something to confess?" He asks as he did the first time they spoke.
She breathes deeply and clenches her fists before answering him.
"Yes. Yes, I do... I have many things to confess."
"Are you ready Sabina?"
Nin's Sabina is a beautiful woman lost in the labyrinth of her own lies. One desperate evening she calls a random number and begins to confess her crimes. The man who answers the phone is not only a stranger, but also a "lie detector". She hangs up on him after learning this but he traces her call and leaves his bed to find her. The lie detector enters a small, darkly lit bar later on that evening and sits in the shadows, scanning the room for the strange woman's voice. There, in the center of the bar, stands a beautiful woman, surrounded by captivated men as she tells them fantastical stories of her life in Marrakesh and of her theater days in London. The lie detector recognizes the woman's voice and drinks in her body, her dark eyes and red and silver dress. Her hand motions are nervous and she keeps smiling during the serious parts of her tales. The lie detector knows she is lying. But he is certain he will find out the truth.
Sabina leaves the tiny Harlem bar and proceeds to hail a taxi home to Greenwich Village. Her husband does not expect her back from Provincetown, Massachusetts for another week, but she can no longer stand being in the city another night without him. She returns home and finds the apartment empty. She runs a bath but before she can clean off the scents of other men's desires in the water she hears her husband's key in the lock. It will be yet another evening of pretending to be someone else for Sabina. She is almost used to it now. She is an actress - but in real life and not on the stage. Earlier this evening she was a downtown seductress and a well traveled actress. In the midst of her performance she had almost lost her character when she called the lie detector. She had nearly told him the whole truth of her life. She had almost destroyed the varied fragments of her disjointed self that made her feel somehow whole. She had almost lost control - and she had never slipped up like that before.
Instead she lives out her role of doting, loving wife in her husband's arms. She dresses in white chiffon and puts his feet up after work, cooking exotic meals for him and reading poetry to him by the fireplace. She is gripped by a love so fierce and consuming it lifts her soul whenever she is near him. But somehow it is still not enough - or it's too much altogether.
She feels a childlike devotion to her husband which mirrors her complex girlhood worship of her Don Juan father. Like her own cosmopolitan and remote father, Sabina has become a "Donna Juana" of sorts; seducing countless men in an effort to transfer her father's womanizing experiences onto her own sexual compulsions. Much like Nin's other works exploring her lifelong obsession for her father and his abandonment of her, in another work, Winter of Artifice she writes of her father as a man who "...was offended that she had not died completely, that she had not spent the rest of her life yearning for him. He did not understand that she had continued to love him better by living than by dying for him. She had loved him in life, lived for him and created for him." Sabina feels this way about her father and feels perhaps she has to "die" for him, to create an inner death of herself and to reincarnate as a mirror image of him in order to "win him back" and "seduce" him into "loving her once more" as she feels he 'must' have once upon a time.
Sabina moves through the streets of 1940's New York in search of that insubstantial otherworldly mystical "something". She feels an unknown presence watching her. The lie detector is following her everywhere. He is like the silent confessor who becomes obsessed with his once detached object of study. He is all at once omniscient god, father, priest, judge and psychoanalyst, but he is too far removed from her to make actual contact with her. He is merely a witness to her affairs with a beautiful Italian actor, an afro-Cuban drummer and a shell shocked English army pilot. He watches as Sabina becomes haunted by the pilot, who leaves her sleeping in her tiny rented bungalow on Long Island and disappears into the thick, seashore mist. Sabina searches the streets and all the burroughs for the mysterious pilot. She hunts in every corner, trying to trace his last footprints as the lie detector in turn follows hers. She looks into every new face for any sign of him, any reminder. She is obsessed with the "idea" of him and with the stories still lingering in her head of his tragic, vivid tales of W.W.II combat. In Spy she describes their union as a momentary escape from their exterior realities.
"They fled from the eyes of the world, the singer's prophetic, harsh, ovarian prologues. Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world, where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress, and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments, necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on man's sensual mast."
During their solitary night of passion he described the pungent smells of leaking airplane fluid and burning flesh. He spoke with an eerie calm of his shot down comrades and of the blood he shed in the heat of battle. He brought out the demons of war still raging within him underneath his deadly stillness and penetrates this chaos into Sabina's body during violent lovemaking. She absorbs all his ghosts and hopeless feelings of death and darkness. Here is the vicious, invasive communion with man (god) she has waited for since her first sexual awakening, since the moment her father turned away from her with a cold goodbye. The pilots' poison tastes sweet to Sabina. Instead of looking for an antidote she searches for another injection. She has found her true drug.
Walking aimlessly while her husband is away on another business trip and giving up her search for the pilot, Sabina's childhood memories of her father flood back to her. The lie detector is close by but invisible. Her father's last letter to her read in part that she was, "the only woman (her father) had not conquered" and he writes to her that, "God and society would never allow it. However we can still keep our dreams and share our most intimate secrets with each other... as the only two people who can truly understand each other and our many amours." Her father offers her a relationship with ties, not a regular father-daughter bond but a closed off secret communion where Sabina is only one piece of herself with him... and nothing more.
Sabina's idealized image of her father is slowly breaking into a thousand shards of shattered glass in her newfound disillusionment. The spell of sex and forgetting is not working anymore. She cannot simply have random interludes and re-emerge unscathed. She begins to see the little lies buried within each of her father's stories and the subtle trickery within each one of his "professions of undying 'fatherly' love" for her. It slowly dawns on her she has not only become a warped caricature of her father, copying his own seductions not as an expression of her own desire but as an uninformed means of understanding him and winning his approval and affection - but she also realizes that her father is ultimately incapable of ever being really honest with her (or himself). Despite his recent attention he will forever be the impersonal egoist. He will never be conquered and won.
Sabina sought out the pilot in the ho pes of relief from her lifelong suffering at the hands of her insatiable desire to be loved (transformed into a need for sexual and emotional possession in her adult years). She wishes to recapture again and again the intense pleasure and pain of their brief union because she felt near the brink of not only release of her own demons (by ingesting someone else's) but also the possibility of being psychically jolted out of her own neuroses long enough to feel "alive" again.
She is at the point where she also senses the lie detectors' presence strongly enough she begins to associate him as something of a slightly malevolent guardian angel. She cannot evade him, she cannot hide from herself, from her lies and from the outside world. She decides to face the lie detector (god, father, priest, judge, psychoanalyst). As the lie detector rests in the lobby of the hotel Sabina checks herself into he is startled as a hotel key drops into his lap from behind. He turns around to catch her but Sabina has already disappeared into a closing elevator. He stands up, disheveled, with a mixed look of uncertainty and determination on his face, and walks up the stairs to her room. This is the hour where he becomes a true confessor or he gives up forever and leaves her alone. He walks into the room through the door without knocking, using the key. He finds Sabina lying on the chaise lounge and he awkwardly enters, clearing his throat to make her aware of his presence.
"I'm an official." He says quietly. "I mean you no harm."
"I know." She answers and motions for him to sit at a nearby chair.
"Do you break your own rules often?" She asks.
"No." He answers and sits.
"It's all right. I called you..." She replies and pauses a moment. "I think I understand why now."
They sit in silence for several moments. It is not uncomfortable.
"You're my conscience or my demonic guardian angel or my god or I don't know what. I don't care anymore." She sighs. "You know what I want, don't you?"
"I think..." He answers, looking out the window.
"Say it." She commands.
"You have something to confess?" He asks as he did the first time they spoke.
She breathes deeply and clenches her fists before answering him.
"Yes. Yes, I do... I have many things to confess."
"Are you ready Sabina?"
Linotte: Reflections on the Adolescent Diary of Anais Nin
by nocturne 17 on Thursday, November 7, 2002 11:37 amLinotte: The Early Diary of Anais Nin, 1914-1920 Translated from the French by Jean L. Sherman, with a preface by Joaquin Nin-Culmell. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, London, 1978.
January 11, 1915 "Today went by in the usual way. We went to school, I work as hard as I can but that doesn't interfere with my doing the things I like best. I am now writing a story, 'Poor Little Boy.' I only like things that are sad or funny. "I now hate school and everything American. Why, Maman asked me and my aunt too. Why? Here is the answer. Because I love only silence and here there is noise all the time. Everything here is dark, enclosed, severe, and I love sunny landscapes, I love to see the sky. I love to admire the beauties of nature in silence and here the buildings are so high, so high that one sees nothing, or if one sees a little something out of the window, it isn't a beautiful sky that is pale blue, pale pink or a calm white. No, that isn't what one sees here. One sees a dark sky, heavy, mournful, soiled and darkened by the vanity and pride of modern men and women. I say that because I don't like anything modern. I would like to live in the first century in ancient Rome, I would like to live in the time of grand castles and gracious ladies. I would like to live in the time of Charlotte Corday when every woman could become a heroine, and so on. The truth is I would like to save France from its afflictions, but we are no longer living in the era of Joan of Arc or Jeanne Hachette, and the best thing I can do is keep quiet and out of sight. Where was I when I asked why I don't like America and got into the period when I would like to live? I shall go on and I'm sure my diary has guessed the answer and I can give my imagination free rein. Oh, if I could rise up and annihilate all those ambitious countries that are the cause of Belgium's misfortune and France's tears. But once again I must bow my head and give way to older people who will come along later, perhaps, as I hope. I have to recognize that I am crazy, but since my diary is the diary of a madwoman, I can't write only reasonable things, and if I did they wouldn't be my own thoughts. So while I await the great woman who will save France, I shall go to bed." p. 42-43
This passage is classic early Linotte. Anais is at a period where she loathes school and terribly misses the manners and customs of the old country. She misses her bohemian life in France and Belgium, even her more difficult life in sunny Spain with her beloved granmere and sour granpere. Ofcourse most of all she misses her papa and the "better" life she deludes herself into thinking they had together. She is still in the stage of her early life where she believes in heroines and fables and suppliments her ardor for 'Christ' in mass each Sunday with her secret ardor for her father. Her heart is broken but her mind is also quite awake and active. She is reading books alphabetically in New York Public Library, making friends and spending time with her mother's spillover of expatriate Bohemian musician friends from Europe and South America, especially from her longtime home in Cuba. World War One is striking a heavy blow on France and on Anais, who reads about heroines Charlotte Corday and Jeanne d'Arc fervently into the night by candlelight and imagines herself a grown woman of invincible power, who can swoop down upon France, lead her nation of heroic men and "save France" from the 'German tyrants'. After her reveries she invariably sinks back into reality in her diaries by noting she is "only a girl" a small nothing of a girl who cannot save France. She is limited by her age, size, health and the historical times. For women of her time, most are to be wives and mothers, not heroines (or for the most part, writers and artists as sole occupations, either) and Anais senses this about her future. She examines her life in "dreary oppressive New York" as it progresses. More "womanly duties" are pressed upon her such as cooking, cleaning and above all else sewing, and she is scolded for staying indoors too often and "scribbling" in her "silly book", the Diary.
At the point where Anais is almost 15 years old she still pines for her Papa but has given up hope of him 'magically' appearing in New York for Christmas. They maintain a long correspondance (more fervently and regularly on Anais' part). Joaquin and Thorvald (her brothers) are growing quickly, but Anais still towers over them. They live in the city, in a large house now, renting out rooms to boarders. John O'Connell, a blue-eyed, gentle, well behaved younger boy from school, is Anais' first innocent 'romance'. Anais detests school...she does like the temporary public school right now, except for English Grammar classes and Math. She is learning how to sow, cook, clean and keep the house together. She is still fervent about France and the War but talks about it less. She dicusses the difference between dreaming and reality, and how there are two sides to her nature. Some days she chooses Life [Reality] and some days she chooses Dreaming. She writes stories...she reads Hugo, Eliot and other great authors. An artist wants her to sit for a portrait because of her Catalan features inherited from her father. Anais confides in her diary that she is secretly pleased by this. Rosa (her mother) tries to make life fun for the children while working very hard and she still manages to sing in operas sometimes. Anais writes poetry and dances in a Jeanne d'Arc d'onfrey play. She discovers the real goings-on of backstage life which both enchants and disillusions her. Anais has many little girlfriends now and a club of well wishers and do gooders...and edits a small magazine of poetry, stories and pictures. She prays France wil be saved from the Germans. She still hopes to see her father one day again. She still dreams of meeting her other half, her shadow, a man like the heroes in her books, a blue eyed stranger who will understand her.
Anais, at 16, is very introspective, very full of life, in her joy and in her despair, and she is really growing at this point in her life. She is also very innocent in many ways and very loving and gentle hearted. She is intelligent and writes a diary that is compelling and playful and serious and meaningful and intimate and humourous. She writes with a depth and gravity, even while dreaming of violinists and the French Academie. She writes about her interior life and her impressions above the daily grind.
Linotte is the essence of who Anais was in her early life, a fragment of her self she carried with her her entire life. Her thoughts, her dreams, her beliefs, her doubts, her regrets, her ideals, her problems, her questions. It is a journey of one writer's life as they evolve from child to young woman. Many readers unfamiliar with the breadth of her work picture Anais Nin as a bestselling erotic writer or famed Diary writer with a risque' and bohemian past. Some view her in relation to any number of her friendships with celebrated artists and writers. Some readers (and critics) cannot see past her sexual exploration later in her life, and view her as only writing in a certain vein. But Linotte is a portrait of an immigrant girl in the early part of the 20th century writing a love letter to her absent father which eventually becomes her life's masterpiece; the first chapter in her acclaimed series of Diaries.
January 11, 1915 "Today went by in the usual way. We went to school, I work as hard as I can but that doesn't interfere with my doing the things I like best. I am now writing a story, 'Poor Little Boy.' I only like things that are sad or funny. "I now hate school and everything American. Why, Maman asked me and my aunt too. Why? Here is the answer. Because I love only silence and here there is noise all the time. Everything here is dark, enclosed, severe, and I love sunny landscapes, I love to see the sky. I love to admire the beauties of nature in silence and here the buildings are so high, so high that one sees nothing, or if one sees a little something out of the window, it isn't a beautiful sky that is pale blue, pale pink or a calm white. No, that isn't what one sees here. One sees a dark sky, heavy, mournful, soiled and darkened by the vanity and pride of modern men and women. I say that because I don't like anything modern. I would like to live in the first century in ancient Rome, I would like to live in the time of grand castles and gracious ladies. I would like to live in the time of Charlotte Corday when every woman could become a heroine, and so on. The truth is I would like to save France from its afflictions, but we are no longer living in the era of Joan of Arc or Jeanne Hachette, and the best thing I can do is keep quiet and out of sight. Where was I when I asked why I don't like America and got into the period when I would like to live? I shall go on and I'm sure my diary has guessed the answer and I can give my imagination free rein. Oh, if I could rise up and annihilate all those ambitious countries that are the cause of Belgium's misfortune and France's tears. But once again I must bow my head and give way to older people who will come along later, perhaps, as I hope. I have to recognize that I am crazy, but since my diary is the diary of a madwoman, I can't write only reasonable things, and if I did they wouldn't be my own thoughts. So while I await the great woman who will save France, I shall go to bed." p. 42-43
This passage is classic early Linotte. Anais is at a period where she loathes school and terribly misses the manners and customs of the old country. She misses her bohemian life in France and Belgium, even her more difficult life in sunny Spain with her beloved granmere and sour granpere. Ofcourse most of all she misses her papa and the "better" life she deludes herself into thinking they had together. She is still in the stage of her early life where she believes in heroines and fables and suppliments her ardor for 'Christ' in mass each Sunday with her secret ardor for her father. Her heart is broken but her mind is also quite awake and active. She is reading books alphabetically in New York Public Library, making friends and spending time with her mother's spillover of expatriate Bohemian musician friends from Europe and South America, especially from her longtime home in Cuba. World War One is striking a heavy blow on France and on Anais, who reads about heroines Charlotte Corday and Jeanne d'Arc fervently into the night by candlelight and imagines herself a grown woman of invincible power, who can swoop down upon France, lead her nation of heroic men and "save France" from the 'German tyrants'. After her reveries she invariably sinks back into reality in her diaries by noting she is "only a girl" a small nothing of a girl who cannot save France. She is limited by her age, size, health and the historical times. For women of her time, most are to be wives and mothers, not heroines (or for the most part, writers and artists as sole occupations, either) and Anais senses this about her future. She examines her life in "dreary oppressive New York" as it progresses. More "womanly duties" are pressed upon her such as cooking, cleaning and above all else sewing, and she is scolded for staying indoors too often and "scribbling" in her "silly book", the Diary.
At the point where Anais is almost 15 years old she still pines for her Papa but has given up hope of him 'magically' appearing in New York for Christmas. They maintain a long correspondance (more fervently and regularly on Anais' part). Joaquin and Thorvald (her brothers) are growing quickly, but Anais still towers over them. They live in the city, in a large house now, renting out rooms to boarders. John O'Connell, a blue-eyed, gentle, well behaved younger boy from school, is Anais' first innocent 'romance'. Anais detests school...she does like the temporary public school right now, except for English Grammar classes and Math. She is learning how to sow, cook, clean and keep the house together. She is still fervent about France and the War but talks about it less. She dicusses the difference between dreaming and reality, and how there are two sides to her nature. Some days she chooses Life [Reality] and some days she chooses Dreaming. She writes stories...she reads Hugo, Eliot and other great authors. An artist wants her to sit for a portrait because of her Catalan features inherited from her father. Anais confides in her diary that she is secretly pleased by this. Rosa (her mother) tries to make life fun for the children while working very hard and she still manages to sing in operas sometimes. Anais writes poetry and dances in a Jeanne d'Arc d'onfrey play. She discovers the real goings-on of backstage life which both enchants and disillusions her. Anais has many little girlfriends now and a club of well wishers and do gooders...and edits a small magazine of poetry, stories and pictures. She prays France wil be saved from the Germans. She still hopes to see her father one day again. She still dreams of meeting her other half, her shadow, a man like the heroes in her books, a blue eyed stranger who will understand her.
Anais, at 16, is very introspective, very full of life, in her joy and in her despair, and she is really growing at this point in her life. She is also very innocent in many ways and very loving and gentle hearted. She is intelligent and writes a diary that is compelling and playful and serious and meaningful and intimate and humourous. She writes with a depth and gravity, even while dreaming of violinists and the French Academie. She writes about her interior life and her impressions above the daily grind.
Linotte is the essence of who Anais was in her early life, a fragment of her self she carried with her her entire life. Her thoughts, her dreams, her beliefs, her doubts, her regrets, her ideals, her problems, her questions. It is a journey of one writer's life as they evolve from child to young woman. Many readers unfamiliar with the breadth of her work picture Anais Nin as a bestselling erotic writer or famed Diary writer with a risque' and bohemian past. Some view her in relation to any number of her friendships with celebrated artists and writers. Some readers (and critics) cannot see past her sexual exploration later in her life, and view her as only writing in a certain vein. But Linotte is a portrait of an immigrant girl in the early part of the 20th century writing a love letter to her absent father which eventually becomes her life's masterpiece; the first chapter in her acclaimed series of Diaries.
Anais Nin
by nocturne 17 on Tuesday, November 5, 2002 12:07 amAnais Nin was born February 21, 1903 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, France and died January 14,1977 in Los Angeles, California. She moved to the United States in 1914 with her mother, singer Rosa Culmell and two brothers, Thorvald and Joaquin. Her father was Joaquin Nin, a Spanish pianist and composer, who abandoned the family after leaving his family at various intervals in his career to tour Europe and Cuba, when Nin was eleven. Shortly afterward, on the boat Monserrat, Nin began her childhood diary, "Linotte", written as an extended letter to her papa.
Anais wanted to be an artist from the very moment she could speak. She loved books, stories, artists, musicians, fine music, good food, and grew accustomed to being surrounded by the sounds of late night bohemian laughter from her parents dinner parties heard from the downstairs parlor before the two were separated. Anais was a model for her father's early photographs at this time and used to steal into his study when he was away and read all his books voraciously. She was seriously ill as a child and nearly died twice from various internal organ afflictions. If not for a kind Belgian couple and the care of three Belgian nurses, Ana's Nin might never have made the impact on literature and the feminist movement that she did later on in life, from her work spanning her Diaries written in the the tumultuous 30's to her eventual critical success in the socially aware 60's and 70's.
In New York, Ana's loved writing in her diary, dreaming, philosophizing, and recording her thoughts and reflections as she grew into a beautiful young woman with grand dreams and a host of insecurities. She wrote about her ideal "shadow", a muse, her "prince that will come one day", and about her many concieved shortcomings. She had an active imagination and preferred rainy days of reading curled up with a wonderful book or her diary at the little windowsill seat - and she loved to dance and had a connection to nature heavily influenced by poets like Byron, Blake and the New England Transcendentalists. Her Catholic faith wavered in and out due to philosophical doubts about the meaning of life and suffering, caused by her anguish over her beloved war torn France and the deep rift felt inside her since being uprooted. "I envy those who never leave their native land." she wrote in Linotte, "No one but God knows my bitter sorrow. My dreams are always about Papa. He comes back, I kiss him, he presses me to his heart. That moment is sweet, but afterward sadness comes again with the truth and my heart weeps and weeps again." Her father had let them all down, especially Anaos, and she felt abandoned and unloved in the most important of ways for a child. Gradually her idealized image of him began to fade, though she would have a lifelong fixation on him explored in her writing -and in her myriad of sexual and romantic unions. She was consumed by a tireless examination of her search for the ideal father figure in many of her lovers discussed in psychoanalysis.
After living in New York for nine years, at twenty Anais married Hugh Guiler (later known as engravist and filmaker of "Bells of Atlantis" and "Jazz of lights" Ian Hugo), a banker in the twenties and thirties, and moved back to Paris with him. Nin began writing short stories (later published as Waste of Timelessness) with publication in mind, but felt torn between her duties as a conservative banker's wife and her desire for artistic expression. Nevertheless, it was around this time that Nin published her first work, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932), which was well-recieved.
Then she met self proclaimed gangster-poet Henry Miller, a struggling Brooklyn writer in Paris, through her lawyer. Miller and especially his wife, the mythic June Mansfield Miller, enchanted Anais by their 'hard' bohemian living and their associations with the creme de la creme of Paris' underbelly (including actor and creator of theatre de cruelte, Antonin Artaud). "Henry came to Louveciennes with June." she writes about her first meeting with June in the unexpurgated diary Henry and June, "As June walked towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the door, I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. A startlingly white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes. Years ago I tried to imagine a true beauty; I created in my mind an image of just such a woman. I had never seen her until last night. Yet I knew long ago the phosphorescent color of her skin, her huntress profile, the evenness of her teeth. She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat before her, I felt I would do anything she asked of me. Henry suddenly faded. She was color and brilliance and strangeness."
Anais felt that becoming aquainted with members of Montparnasse's underworld of prostitutes, thieves and drug addicts was going to liberate not only her writing but her sexuality and her mind. Nin began examining her 'suburban' existence more closely and felt she had to reconcile her life as an artist with her bouts of depression and feelings of isolation tucked away in the beautiful prison house of Louveciennes. To resolve her inner turmoil between her married 'proper' life and her burgeoning bohemian tastes, her cousin Eduardo recommended she enter therapy with the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst Rene Allendy. This later led to analyzation and tutorship with former Freud disciple, Otto Rank (Art and Artist). Eventually, Nin studied under Rank, working in his practice in New York City in the mid to late 1930s.
She also became deeply influenced by writers like Lawrence, Proust, and in particular Djuna Barnes' novel Nightwood. Nin channelled her evolving psycho-sexual impressions of the vicious circle/love triangle between her, Henry and June into the surrealistic prose-poem House of Incest and in her Diaries. She also worked along her compatriates on a dollar a page erotica, later the poetic, emotive bestselling Delta of Venus and Little Birds.
In the mid-to-late 1930s, Nin, Miller, Lawrence Durell and other writers in the Villa Seurat circle who experienced difficulty finding publishers founded Siana Editions (Anais spelled backwards!) to publish their own works. Nin in particular could find no one to publish House of Incest (1936) or Winter of Artifice. In 1939 these books were well-received in Europe. However, when Anais eventually moved back to New York City in 1939 with her husband, she found American publishers and the average reading public closed off to her work. Miller achieved critical and commercial success decades before Nin, despite her initial efforts to edit, support and publish him along with her own work. After several years of trying to place her works with American publishers, Nin bought a second-hand printing press with a loan from Bookseller and founder of New York's famed Gotham Book Mart and with the help of Anais' latest paramour, Peruvian political activist Gonzalo More, she began to typeset and print her own books. Nin's work eventually caught the attention of critic Edmund Wilson, who praised her writing and helped her on the road to obtaining an American publisher.
It was Nin's Diary, however, that brought her the greatest success and critical acceptance that she was to recieve. Nin never intended the two hundred manuscript volumes for publication, and many, including Miller, Rank, Alfred Perles, Durrel and Allendy, tried to convince Anais that her obsessive diary writing was destroying her chance at writing the great American novel. However Nin decided she had to "go her own way, the woman's way" and continue her li felong odyssey of self exploration and reflection through the Diaries. To reconcile fiction and fact Nin eventually began rewriting diary entries into her fiction and vice versa, protecting those who wanted to maintain their privacy (usually lovers) while still writing in her preferred medium.
Nin was involved in the some of the most interesting literary and artistic movements of the 20th century including the outskirts of Paris' 1920's Lost Generation, the psychoanalytic and surrealist movements of the 30s and 40s, the Beat movement of the 50's in Greenwich Village, the avant garde crowd in 60's California and the women's movement of the 70's. She maintained relationships (and kept two bi-coastal "husbands" in the later part of her life) with many vital artists and writers over her lifespan and was in great demand as a lecturer at universities across the United States until she died of cancer in 1977.
Anais wanted to be an artist from the very moment she could speak. She loved books, stories, artists, musicians, fine music, good food, and grew accustomed to being surrounded by the sounds of late night bohemian laughter from her parents dinner parties heard from the downstairs parlor before the two were separated. Anais was a model for her father's early photographs at this time and used to steal into his study when he was away and read all his books voraciously. She was seriously ill as a child and nearly died twice from various internal organ afflictions. If not for a kind Belgian couple and the care of three Belgian nurses, Ana's Nin might never have made the impact on literature and the feminist movement that she did later on in life, from her work spanning her Diaries written in the the tumultuous 30's to her eventual critical success in the socially aware 60's and 70's.
In New York, Ana's loved writing in her diary, dreaming, philosophizing, and recording her thoughts and reflections as she grew into a beautiful young woman with grand dreams and a host of insecurities. She wrote about her ideal "shadow", a muse, her "prince that will come one day", and about her many concieved shortcomings. She had an active imagination and preferred rainy days of reading curled up with a wonderful book or her diary at the little windowsill seat - and she loved to dance and had a connection to nature heavily influenced by poets like Byron, Blake and the New England Transcendentalists. Her Catholic faith wavered in and out due to philosophical doubts about the meaning of life and suffering, caused by her anguish over her beloved war torn France and the deep rift felt inside her since being uprooted. "I envy those who never leave their native land." she wrote in Linotte, "No one but God knows my bitter sorrow. My dreams are always about Papa. He comes back, I kiss him, he presses me to his heart. That moment is sweet, but afterward sadness comes again with the truth and my heart weeps and weeps again." Her father had let them all down, especially Anaos, and she felt abandoned and unloved in the most important of ways for a child. Gradually her idealized image of him began to fade, though she would have a lifelong fixation on him explored in her writing -and in her myriad of sexual and romantic unions. She was consumed by a tireless examination of her search for the ideal father figure in many of her lovers discussed in psychoanalysis.
After living in New York for nine years, at twenty Anais married Hugh Guiler (later known as engravist and filmaker of "Bells of Atlantis" and "Jazz of lights" Ian Hugo), a banker in the twenties and thirties, and moved back to Paris with him. Nin began writing short stories (later published as Waste of Timelessness) with publication in mind, but felt torn between her duties as a conservative banker's wife and her desire for artistic expression. Nevertheless, it was around this time that Nin published her first work, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932), which was well-recieved.
Then she met self proclaimed gangster-poet Henry Miller, a struggling Brooklyn writer in Paris, through her lawyer. Miller and especially his wife, the mythic June Mansfield Miller, enchanted Anais by their 'hard' bohemian living and their associations with the creme de la creme of Paris' underbelly (including actor and creator of theatre de cruelte, Antonin Artaud). "Henry came to Louveciennes with June." she writes about her first meeting with June in the unexpurgated diary Henry and June, "As June walked towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the door, I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. A startlingly white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes. Years ago I tried to imagine a true beauty; I created in my mind an image of just such a woman. I had never seen her until last night. Yet I knew long ago the phosphorescent color of her skin, her huntress profile, the evenness of her teeth. She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat before her, I felt I would do anything she asked of me. Henry suddenly faded. She was color and brilliance and strangeness."
Anais felt that becoming aquainted with members of Montparnasse's underworld of prostitutes, thieves and drug addicts was going to liberate not only her writing but her sexuality and her mind. Nin began examining her 'suburban' existence more closely and felt she had to reconcile her life as an artist with her bouts of depression and feelings of isolation tucked away in the beautiful prison house of Louveciennes. To resolve her inner turmoil between her married 'proper' life and her burgeoning bohemian tastes, her cousin Eduardo recommended she enter therapy with the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst Rene Allendy. This later led to analyzation and tutorship with former Freud disciple, Otto Rank (Art and Artist). Eventually, Nin studied under Rank, working in his practice in New York City in the mid to late 1930s.
She also became deeply influenced by writers like Lawrence, Proust, and in particular Djuna Barnes' novel Nightwood. Nin channelled her evolving psycho-sexual impressions of the vicious circle/love triangle between her, Henry and June into the surrealistic prose-poem House of Incest and in her Diaries. She also worked along her compatriates on a dollar a page erotica, later the poetic, emotive bestselling Delta of Venus and Little Birds.
In the mid-to-late 1930s, Nin, Miller, Lawrence Durell and other writers in the Villa Seurat circle who experienced difficulty finding publishers founded Siana Editions (Anais spelled backwards!) to publish their own works. Nin in particular could find no one to publish House of Incest (1936) or Winter of Artifice. In 1939 these books were well-received in Europe. However, when Anais eventually moved back to New York City in 1939 with her husband, she found American publishers and the average reading public closed off to her work. Miller achieved critical and commercial success decades before Nin, despite her initial efforts to edit, support and publish him along with her own work. After several years of trying to place her works with American publishers, Nin bought a second-hand printing press with a loan from Bookseller and founder of New York's famed Gotham Book Mart and with the help of Anais' latest paramour, Peruvian political activist Gonzalo More, she began to typeset and print her own books. Nin's work eventually caught the attention of critic Edmund Wilson, who praised her writing and helped her on the road to obtaining an American publisher.
It was Nin's Diary, however, that brought her the greatest success and critical acceptance that she was to recieve. Nin never intended the two hundred manuscript volumes for publication, and many, including Miller, Rank, Alfred Perles, Durrel and Allendy, tried to convince Anais that her obsessive diary writing was destroying her chance at writing the great American novel. However Nin decided she had to "go her own way, the woman's way" and continue her li felong odyssey of self exploration and reflection through the Diaries. To reconcile fiction and fact Nin eventually began rewriting diary entries into her fiction and vice versa, protecting those who wanted to maintain their privacy (usually lovers) while still writing in her preferred medium.
Nin was involved in the some of the most interesting literary and artistic movements of the 20th century including the outskirts of Paris' 1920's Lost Generation, the psychoanalytic and surrealist movements of the 30s and 40s, the Beat movement of the 50's in Greenwich Village, the avant garde crowd in 60's California and the women's movement of the 70's. She maintained relationships (and kept two bi-coastal "husbands" in the later part of her life) with many vital artists and writers over her lifespan and was in great demand as a lecturer at universities across the United States until she died of cancer in 1977.
Antonin Artaud
by Andrew Lundwall on Friday, August 30, 2002 07:06 pmrather than win the hearts of scholars, i wish to relate to you the mind-lowing experience the writing of antonin artaud... rather than hard facts i shall give you this somewhat poetic account of my reading of and investigation into artaud's works:
when i read antonin artaud, i enter this special region within my mind... like an entrance into the halls of madness... artaud's writing is deep, it cuts, it swerves, it swirls...
artaud was accused of being a madman, but when i read artaud i wonder if those who are typical or normal are really the mad ones... artaud was "mad to live"...
his writing hits you, it digs down to the very bone, the very fabric of one's consciousness...
artaud wished to do away with tradition, to be freed of the hand that feeds and go off on his own, a journey that never ended... artaud, i believe, wants the reader to understand him, whilst a.a. is trying so desperately to understand himself..
his writing is not simple, in fact, it is very painful to read the excruciating details of his despair... but i really must understand, i must, his writing is like no other writing i've ever read...
it has been said that artaud never edited a single word he wrote, how spontaneous! upon investigation unto the furthest limits of his poems, prose, and manifestoes it is as if artaud is explaining every psychic disturbance happening during the creation and blooming of his writing.....
yesterday, i asked markk (member of Litkicks and also editor of the deep cleveland junkmail oracle) what he thought of artaud's writing and markk responded: "he was the bukowski of his time" and i agree... it is no wonder to me that city lights should publish an anthology of his works, so fitting...
artaud was a rebel, a non-conventionalist who wished to reinvent himself and break with a cruel past... but now, dear readers i'll leave it up to you from here on out.... read him and you shall find out this mysterious poetic alchemy of which i speak....
www.antoninartaud.org
Suggested Reading:
The Theatre and It's Double available through Grove Press
The Artaud Anthology available through City Lights Publishers
Watchtower Fiends and Rack Screams available through Exact Change Press (the introduction written by poet Clayton Eschelman is AMAZING).
when i read antonin artaud, i enter this special region within my mind... like an entrance into the halls of madness... artaud's writing is deep, it cuts, it swerves, it swirls...
artaud was accused of being a madman, but when i read artaud i wonder if those who are typical or normal are really the mad ones... artaud was "mad to live"...
his writing hits you, it digs down to the very bone, the very fabric of one's consciousness...
artaud wished to do away with tradition, to be freed of the hand that feeds and go off on his own, a journey that never ended... artaud, i believe, wants the reader to understand him, whilst a.a. is trying so desperately to understand himself..
his writing is not simple, in fact, it is very painful to read the excruciating details of his despair... but i really must understand, i must, his writing is like no other writing i've ever read...
it has been said that artaud never edited a single word he wrote, how spontaneous! upon investigation unto the furthest limits of his poems, prose, and manifestoes it is as if artaud is explaining every psychic disturbance happening during the creation and blooming of his writing.....
yesterday, i asked markk (member of Litkicks and also editor of the deep cleveland junkmail oracle) what he thought of artaud's writing and markk responded: "he was the bukowski of his time" and i agree... it is no wonder to me that city lights should publish an anthology of his works, so fitting...
artaud was a rebel, a non-conventionalist who wished to reinvent himself and break with a cruel past... but now, dear readers i'll leave it up to you from here on out.... read him and you shall find out this mysterious poetic alchemy of which i speak....
www.antoninartaud.org
Suggested Reading:
The Theatre and It's Double available through Grove Press
The Artaud Anthology available through City Lights Publishers
Watchtower Fiends and Rack Screams available through Exact Change Press (the introduction written by poet Clayton Eschelman is AMAZING).
Edgar Allan Poe
by slurpy on Friday, July 12, 2002 04:17 amIn terms of years, William Blake was the first bohemian. However, without Edgar Allan Poe the bohemian movement quite simply would not have flourished.
The original decadent was born January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. The family was anything but happy, and in Edgar's second year his father deserted the family and his mother died. Edgar was adopted by a sea merchant of modest upbringing, John Allen, from whom Poe adopted his new middle name.
Poe attended the University of Virginia for a short time, but became estranged from the University, as he had also become from his adopted father. He moved back to Boston and self-published his first book of poetry, "Tamerlane", when he was eighteen years old.
He married his 13 year old cousin and pursued a career as a writer and editor. He lived a mobile urban life, moving from one city after another to seek writing or editing assignments. He was editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, then of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia, and he also lived in New York City and Baltimore. He seemed at home in all East Coast American cities, but never seemed to find a home in any of them.
He began to publish odd, macabre tales of torture, horror, mystery and obsession, which obviously became his specialty. Among these are "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Tell Tale Heart". His poem "The Raven" is known not only for its gothic resonance but also for it's amazingly lush lines of verse, with phrases like "the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain".
His writings were published or self-published in various journals, and did receive acclaim and interest from a broad American audience. But there was no sense that he would ever be able to make a living from these odd stories and poems, and Poe struggled until his last years to find full-time employment with magazines or journals or newspapers.
Unfortunately his alcoholism and womanizing began to catch up with him, and his social image soon went from bad to worse. He had always been a fastidious dresser, almost a "dandy", but he was unable to keep up his appearance and was often seen in a disheveled, unclean or confused state. This did not help his ability to hold down jobs at respectable publishing companies.
He died in a state of desolation and poverty on October 7, 1849 in Baltimore, Maryland, the city that would claim his final scene. His reputation floundered after his death until it was discovered by the equally disheveled French poet Baudelaire, who fortunately had learned English from a relative. Baudelaire became Poe's champion, and to this date Poe is more highly regarded in France and in the rest of Europe than in his native America.
The original decadent was born January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. The family was anything but happy, and in Edgar's second year his father deserted the family and his mother died. Edgar was adopted by a sea merchant of modest upbringing, John Allen, from whom Poe adopted his new middle name.
Poe attended the University of Virginia for a short time, but became estranged from the University, as he had also become from his adopted father. He moved back to Boston and self-published his first book of poetry, "Tamerlane", when he was eighteen years old.
He married his 13 year old cousin and pursued a career as a writer and editor. He lived a mobile urban life, moving from one city after another to seek writing or editing assignments. He was editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, then of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia, and he also lived in New York City and Baltimore. He seemed at home in all East Coast American cities, but never seemed to find a home in any of them.
He began to publish odd, macabre tales of torture, horror, mystery and obsession, which obviously became his specialty. Among these are "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Tell Tale Heart". His poem "The Raven" is known not only for its gothic resonance but also for it's amazingly lush lines of verse, with phrases like "the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain".
His writings were published or self-published in various journals, and did receive acclaim and interest from a broad American audience. But there was no sense that he would ever be able to make a living from these odd stories and poems, and Poe struggled until his last years to find full-time employment with magazines or journals or newspapers.
Unfortunately his alcoholism and womanizing began to catch up with him, and his social image soon went from bad to worse. He had always been a fastidious dresser, almost a "dandy", but he was unable to keep up his appearance and was often seen in a disheveled, unclean or confused state. This did not help his ability to hold down jobs at respectable publishing companies.
He died in a state of desolation and poverty on October 7, 1849 in Baltimore, Maryland, the city that would claim his final scene. His reputation floundered after his death until it was discovered by the equally disheveled French poet Baudelaire, who fortunately had learned English from a relative. Baudelaire became Poe's champion, and to this date Poe is more highly regarded in France and in the rest of Europe than in his native America.
Jean Cocteau
by novalark on Tuesday, June 18, 2002 05:15 pmJean Cocteau was born in Maisons-Lafitte into a wealthy Parisian family. His father was a lawyer and amateur painter who committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. Cocteau's father had a lasting influence on his son. According to psychoanalytical critics this tragic event also created his awareness of human weakness which he compensated by putting himself in the service of the performing arts and the mysterious forces in the universe. Poetry was for Cocteau the basis of all art, a "religion without hope." In the secondary school Cocteau was only a mediocre student who was unsuccessful after repeated attempts to pass the graduation examination. He published his first volume of poems, 'Aladdin's Lamp', at the age of 19.
Soon Cocteau became known as 'The Frivolous Prince' -- the title of a volume of poems he published at twenty-one. In 1915 he met Pablo Picasso and fell under his spell. "I admired his intelligence, and clung to everything he said, for he spoke little; I kept still so as not to miss a word. There were long silences and Varese could not understand why we stared wordlessly at each other. In talking, Picasso used a visual syntax, and you could immediately see what he was saying. He liked formulas and summoned himself up in his statements as he summoned himself up and sculptured himself in objects that he immediately made tangible."
In 1918, Cocteau formed an intimate friendship with a 15 year old novelist, Raymond Radiguet. Radiguet strongly influenced Cocteau's art and life. The young writer would die from typhoid fever in 1923. His death was a severe blow to Cocteau and drove him to use opium. During Cocteau's recovery from his opium addiction, the artist created some of his most important works including the stage play 'Orphee', the novel, 'Les Enfants terribles', and many long poems.
In 1954, on the death of his novelist friend Collette, Cocteau took her place in the Belgian Academy. In 1955, he was elected to the French Academy.
In 1959, Cocteau made his last film as a director, 'The Testament of Orpheus'. The elaborate home movie stars Cocteau and also features cameos from many celebrities including Pablo Picasso, Yul Brynner and Jean-Pierre Leaud.
The artist died of a heart attack at age 74 at his chateau in Milly-la-Foret, France on October 11, 1963 after hearing the news of the death of another friend, the singer Edith Piaf.
Soon Cocteau became known as 'The Frivolous Prince' -- the title of a volume of poems he published at twenty-one. In 1915 he met Pablo Picasso and fell under his spell. "I admired his intelligence, and clung to everything he said, for he spoke little; I kept still so as not to miss a word. There were long silences and Varese could not understand why we stared wordlessly at each other. In talking, Picasso used a visual syntax, and you could immediately see what he was saying. He liked formulas and summoned himself up in his statements as he summoned himself up and sculptured himself in objects that he immediately made tangible."
In 1918, Cocteau formed an intimate friendship with a 15 year old novelist, Raymond Radiguet. Radiguet strongly influenced Cocteau's art and life. The young writer would die from typhoid fever in 1923. His death was a severe blow to Cocteau and drove him to use opium. During Cocteau's recovery from his opium addiction, the artist created some of his most important works including the stage play 'Orphee', the novel, 'Les Enfants terribles', and many long poems.
In 1954, on the death of his novelist friend Collette, Cocteau took her place in the Belgian Academy. In 1955, he was elected to the French Academy.
In 1959, Cocteau made his last film as a director, 'The Testament of Orpheus'. The elaborate home movie stars Cocteau and also features cameos from many celebrities including Pablo Picasso, Yul Brynner and Jean-Pierre Leaud.
The artist died of a heart attack at age 74 at his chateau in Milly-la-Foret, France on October 11, 1963 after hearing the news of the death of another friend, the singer Edith Piaf.
L’article en Stephane Mallarme
by Gregory Severance on Monday, January 28, 2002 09:05 pmStephane Mallarme
Born: 1842
Died: 1898
January 19, 2002, Brooklyn, New York, USA: I have nothing to say about Mallarme. So I will look for some chance operations to generate a text. Look for an algorithm, as I walk home through the falling snow.
Descendre en silence Falling difficulties notes and la en not in bottles in Syphonie Les lions l'indolence the indolence dress pieds Maries le
January 19, 2002, Brooklyn, New York, USA: I have nothing to say about Mallarme. So I will look for some chance operations to generate a text. Look for an algorithm, as I walk home through the falling snow.
The text opens with an emphatic reminder of the breadth of the task: to resolve problems as to gain full benefit from this opportunity of debuts sacres du Langage, l'Anglais: Langue Contemporaine be discussed, as language can only be used, idiosyncratically. That but in the case of Mallarme it points to the intrinsic life and power of The English language is particularly suited to a study of this kind
January 19, 2002, Brooklyn, New York, USA: I have nothing to say about Mallarme. So I will look for some chance operations to generate a text. Look for an algorithm, as I walk home through the falling snow.
Qui des reves par plis n'a plus le cher grimoire, Which [linen] no longer has the dear writing of dreams in its folds, De l'horloge, pour poids suspendant Lucifer, of the [sky] clock, with Lucifer as a weight Son pere ne sait pas cela, ni le glacier Her father does not know this, nor the fierce glacier Au matin grelottant de fleurs, ses promenades, In the morning shivering with flowers, her walks Le croissant, oui le seul est au cadran de fer The crescent moon, yes the only one is on the iron dial Que, d'laissee, elle erre, et sur son ombre pas [And still] Abandoned, she wanders, and over her shadow no
Born: 1842
Died: 1898
January 19, 2002, Brooklyn, New York, USA: I have nothing to say about Mallarme. So I will look for some chance operations to generate a text. Look for an algorithm, as I walk home through the falling snow.
Descendre en silence Falling difficulties notes and la en not in bottles in Syphonie Les lions l'indolence the indolence dress pieds Maries le
January 19, 2002, Brooklyn, New York, USA: I have nothing to say about Mallarme. So I will look for some chance operations to generate a text. Look for an algorithm, as I walk home through the falling snow.
The text opens with an emphatic reminder of the breadth of the task: to resolve problems as to gain full benefit from this opportunity of debuts sacres du Langage, l'Anglais: Langue Contemporaine be discussed, as language can only be used, idiosyncratically. That but in the case of Mallarme it points to the intrinsic life and power of The English language is particularly suited to a study of this kind
January 19, 2002, Brooklyn, New York, USA: I have nothing to say about Mallarme. So I will look for some chance operations to generate a text. Look for an algorithm, as I walk home through the falling snow.
Qui des reves par plis n'a plus le cher grimoire, Which [linen] no longer has the dear writing of dreams in its folds, De l'horloge, pour poids suspendant Lucifer, of the [sky] clock, with Lucifer as a weight Son pere ne sait pas cela, ni le glacier Her father does not know this, nor the fierce glacier Au matin grelottant de fleurs, ses promenades, In the morning shivering with flowers, her walks Le croissant, oui le seul est au cadran de fer The crescent moon, yes the only one is on the iron dial Que, d'laissee, elle erre, et sur son ombre pas [And still] Abandoned, she wanders, and over her shadow no
January 19, 2002, Brooklyn, New York, USA: I have nothing to say about Mallarme. So I will look for some chance operations to generate a text. Look for an algorithm, as I walk home through the falling snow.
diminution in the level of achievement considered be no been so attracted what might have seemed a which it is the ways in which in the piece of Manet's paintings in 1874 the level of achievement considered there can be the distinctiveness of his own achievement in about its ultimate possibilities be imperfect for if to the aspiring writer him not to despair of literary that the English language is particularly rich in roots showed remarkable instance of the be no such thing as trait aux the text opens with the breadth of the task to to gain full benefit from this opportunity l'Anglais Langue Contemporaine be discussed as language can only in the case of Mallarme it points to the intrinsic of the English language is of this kind
January 19, 2002, Brooklyn, New York, USA: I have nothing to say about Mallarme. So I will look for some chance operations to generate a text. Look for an algorithm, as I walk home through the falling snow.
chez les l'aube blanche et me souviens de ton lait jadis Fenetres fenetre instrument-milk-paradise paramount In Don du music and woman her natural by staying up and greed for private
January 19, 2002, Brooklyn, New York, USA: I have nothing to say about Mallarme. So I will look for some chance operations to generate a text. Look for an algorithm, as I walk home through the falling snow.
admiration for one of his books. In short, the reader, to the cards on the table. The sweeping effects produced by the great people, this new public is never offered a straightforward and a column of silence blossoming alone in some secluded garden it the maddening traditions of Poetry from behind a hedge, from above the wall and, without letting on
SOURCES:
Robert Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarme, expanded edition (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 70, 50, 65.
Judy Kravis, The Prose of Mallarme: The Evolution of a Literary Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 49, 78, 72.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Mallarme, or the Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest Sturm (University Park, Penn.: Penn State University Press, 1988), p. 60.
CONCISE BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Mallarme, Stephane. Collected Poems. Trans. and with a commentary by Henry Weinfield. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994.
Millan, Gordon. A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stephane Mallarme. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994.
Jean Genet
by Niblo Crosby on Friday, August 31, 2001 12:24 amJean Genet was born on December 19, 1910 in Paris, France and soon afterwards abandoned by his unmarried mother. Raised by a family of peasants, he began stealing, and getting caught, at a young age. He became accustomed to harsh reform schools as a child and easily made the transition to prison as an adult.
The seedy life of the professional small-time criminal became his theme, and he described this life with unprecedented realism. His concept of degradation as a aesthetic life-choice anticipated Herbert Huncke and William S. Burroughs, while his raw, lushly scatalogical images of common life present another window into the visions of Henry Miller.
He did not begin writing until 1942, when he wrote 'Our Lady of the Flowers' while in prison. After producing many works of brutalist prose, he began a new phase of conceptual Absurdist drama. In 1968 he made an unusual trip to America to protest the Vietnam War alongside Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Terry Southern at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago.
Genet died on April 15, 1986 in the city of his birth, Paris.
Online excerpts from his writings can be experienced at the Jean Genet Page.
The seedy life of the professional small-time criminal became his theme, and he described this life with unprecedented realism. His concept of degradation as a aesthetic life-choice anticipated Herbert Huncke and William S. Burroughs, while his raw, lushly scatalogical images of common life present another window into the visions of Henry Miller.
He did not begin writing until 1942, when he wrote 'Our Lady of the Flowers' while in prison. After producing many works of brutalist prose, he began a new phase of conceptual Absurdist drama. In 1968 he made an unusual trip to America to protest the Vietnam War alongside Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Terry Southern at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago.
Genet died on April 15, 1986 in the city of his birth, Paris.
Online excerpts from his writings can be experienced at the Jean Genet Page.
Henry Miller
by dwim on Thursday, August 16, 2001 01:23 am
Henry Miller was born on December 26, 1891 in the Yorkville section of Manhattan to first generation German-Americans. It was his mother, Louise, who spurned the writer and the rebel in him. She beat up his sister for the "crime" of being retarded, scolded his father for being a dreamy alcoholic, and hid Henry's typewriter in a closet to hide the embarrassment of having a writer for a son. His childhood was not easy. He was a great reader, reciting Old Testament stories out loud even before he stared elementary school. He graduated second in his class from Eastern District High School in Brooklyn.
He dropped out of City College after two months because he didn't like the reading list they gave him. "If I had to read stuff like that," he said, referring to 'Fairee Queene' by Spenser, "I give up." He went to work at a series of jobs he found himself unsuitable for.
Henry Murger: La Vie De Boheme
by Niblo Crosby on Wednesday, July 4, 2001 02:18 pm
Henry Murger is barely remembered in literary circles today, but he wrote one of the most culturally influential works of all time. Scenes de la Vie de Boheme (Scenes of the Bohemian Life) popularized the idea of the Bohemian: the prototypically rebellious and indifferent young starving artist living on the left bank of Paris.
Murger was born in Paris in 1822, the son of a tailor. His born name was Henri Murger, though he later chose to distinguish himself by modifying the spelling of his first name, as well as placing a meaningless "umlaut" over the "u" in his last name.
He explored various potential careers as a young man. He labored as a messenger boy for a lawyer, experimented with painting and poetry and served as secretary to a mysterious Russian diplomat, Count Tolstoy, during the exciting revolutionary year of 1848. It is still not clear what political activities this Count may have engaged in, and what part young Murger may have played in them.
Mainly, though, Murger was a struggling artist and writer, and he had many friends in the same class, including such notable or soon-to-be notable figures as Champfleury, Nadar and Baudelaire. One group of literary aspirants Murger was close to went around calling themselves the "Water Drinkers", a sarcastic reference to the fact that they could not afford more expensive drinks.
A small newspaper called the "Corsaire-Satan" allowed Murger to begin writing articles about contemporary life, and it is here that he began the series that would later form the basis of his famous novel.
A good starving artist must be filled with revulsion and doubt about his own choices, and Murger was. His early writings and correspondences show much distaste for his friends and for his own lifestyle, and this ambivalence to Bohemian culture gave his articles in the "Corsaire-Satan" a richness and depth that a more superficial participant in this lifestyle could not have captured.
Murger's "Scenes" were noticed but not particularly successful. The big break came in 1849 when a successful play was launched based on these sketches. They were published in book form for the first time in 1851, but the play was more successful and well-known in Murger's time than any of the prose forms of the work.
Most of the characters in Scenes de la Vie de la Boheme were based on his friends and associates. Mimi and Musette were, in real life, Lucille Louvet (who died in 1848) and Marie-Christine Roux.
As often happens to the ambivalently famous, Murger allowed his newfound literary stature to wane. He got sick and died in 1861, poor and unhappy, at the young age of 38.
It is interesting to note how Murger's career would be mirrored a hundred years later by that of Jack Kerouac. Both writers drew highly honest, searingly critical sketches of their "crazy friends" and their own debauched lives. But in both cases the intended ambivalence was ignored and the lifestyle was popularly celebrated, labelled and packaged as a one-word cliche.
However, Murger's own persona never achieved the mythic status of Kerouac's. Today he is mainly remembered in the popular imagination as the author of the original work upon which Puccini's opera La Boheme is based.
His final words were "No more music! No more alarums! No more Bohemia!" Little did he know.
