Metro Stop Paris Page 6

  Other planets included a beloved cousin from Cuba, Eduardo Sanchez, an astrologer who spent a lot of time at the house in Louveciennes; Antonin Artaud, the actor and playwright who was another frequent guest at Louveciennes; Dr. René Allendy, who had made a faint-hearted attempt to psychoanalyse Anaïs in 1932; and a certain Mr. Turner, a businessman, in whom Anaïs seemed to have more than a passing interest. Louise de Vilmorin provided advice; Princess Natasha Troubetskoia lent her artist's studio for secret liaisons; Chana Orloff, the sculptor, provided similar services. Then into the whole system burst the asteroid, Dr. Otto Rank, the man of willpower, the artistic creator.

  It was "impossible to analyse his way of analysing, because of its spontaneity, its unexpectedness, its daring, nimble opportunism." "There is a pre-Rank vision, and there is an after-Rank swimming." He had made her "swim in life," Nin wrote in her diary after two months of analysis. It was a mental adventure. After she had outlined her complicated system of relationships and alliances, Rank said, "I can't help you unless you break away from all of them, isolate yourself until you are calm." She slowed down her round of the planets, and she did get Henry to move from his down-and-out lodgings in Montmartre to Rue des Maronniers.

  But what really changed her life was the discovery, in May 1934, that she was six weeks pregnant: "I know it is Henry's child, not Hugh's, and I must destroy it." She could not awake herself as an artist unless she did away with this child, because Henry was the child. Her pregnancy was a mark of failure: "When Henry and I have failed to bring forth works of art, we create a child." Having his child would at once destroy her love for Henry and break the tie with Hugh. But Rank's analysis on this point was telling. "When the neurotic woman gets cured, she becomes a woman," he said. "When the neurotic man gets cured, he becomes an artist. Let us see whether the woman or the artist will win out. For the moment you need to become a woman." There was the dilemma.

  Her reaction was to create yet further complication. "On Tuesday I decided to become an analyst, to become independent." It was six months since her analysis had begun; Rank was "end-setting," forcing his patient to confront her inner will. She put on her new hyacinth blue dress and on the last day in May she rushed to Rank. "I couldn't talk. I got up from my chair, and I knelt before him and offered my mouth. He held me tightly, tightly; we couldn't speak." On i June 1934—there had been riots in the streets that spring but Anaïs Nin never noticed; Rank himself was the object of vicious attacks from America—Rank "dragged me toward the divan and we kissed savagely, drunkenly... I had not imagined his sensual accord." His hand thrust out. "I like the hardness. I like the animal thrust forward."

  On 6 June she woke up after dreaming all night of an orgy with Henry She went round to his bed and found him "depressed and desirous," and "I swallowed his sperm for the first time." Up she got, quickly powdered herself, and rushed off to Rank's. They kissed voraciously, she lay under him and kissed again; and "in our drunkenness I found myself drinking his sperm, too." With that tender operation completed, he threw himself once more over her, crying, "You! You! You!"

  "Hugh tortures me, Henry uses me, Father is cruel; but I have the jewelled tower with Rank." 12 June 1934: "After this moment of darkness, I began to dream again. I was going to see Rank, to see Him; I was going to see Him, I wanted to see Him." Rank in fact got quite ill; on the day they planned a naughty weekend in Louveciennes he turned up at the agreed café pale in the face and speechless. Nin offered to come round to his Boilly apartment, and there she tucked him into bed. The naughty weekend occurred the following week, but was somewhat cooled by the prospect of Hugh turning up early in the morning. Rank needed a sexual education: "Too swift, he is too swift, and so unaware of the woman's response." The gardens outside were snowed with withered blossoms.

  Henry was moved out to Mother's apartment, also in the Seizieme. Rank was having difficulties making financial ends meet; there was the possibility that he might have to do something drastic, like move to America—Jessie Taft had contacts. Rank was however making headway that summer with the English-language Psychological Centre he had set up with Dr. Harry Bone and his colleague, a Dr. Frankenstein, at the Cité Universitaire, just south of Hell's Square. Between orgiastic feasts with Anais, Rank managed to get a successful seminar running, attended by fifteen American female schoolteachers and three male writers. Anaïs came along but found the discussions to be "pragmatic, dull, like all American craft talk." Rank managed to stand above it all, making brilliant and dangerous talk about Freud. "There are two Ranks," Nin observed; "Rank the philosopher and psychologist, and Rank the human being." She knew what she needed, "the power of love. It is what I want. I want wine."

  Rank's "end-setting" was getting rather intense. His finances still didn't look good. He knew that if he went to America to teach he would also be moving among his very worst enemies, the members of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Jessie Taft offered the prospect of the Pennsylvania School of Social Work in Philadelphia and a practice in New York; the APA had a hold on all the positions at Harvard, Yale, and the main universities in New York. "I'm falling in love with your books. Are you jealous?" asked Nin. "That depends how far they take you away from me," he replied. Or again: "I have finished my creation without you, I can love you as a woman"—just a woman.

  All the while Nin was carrying this child, an unwanted child. Her taut breasts were full of milk, bitter milk; every morning she looked down at her rounded white stomach. Abortion was illegal—though that in itself was no problem; she could find the sages-femmes, the midwives, as well as a good German doctor, through the astrological people who revolved round her cousin Eduardo Sanchez. But the sages-femmes were having trouble with their instruments; Anaïs Nin's pelvis was too small for an effective operation; the German doctor told Nin that if she were to give birth it would require a Caesarean. Nin hesitated and delayed. In late August she was carrying a foetus of six months. Rank was away in London laying plans for what looked like an increasingly probable departure for the United States. Henry was at her mother's apartment, sulking in his jealousy.

  On the evening of 29 August 1934 Anaïs Nin was in Rank's empty apartment, alone, awaiting the arrival the next morning of the terrifying German abortionist and his sages-femmes; alone for her last night with her child.

  She told the child: "You should be glad not to be thrust into this black world in which even the greatest joys are tainted with pain, in which we are slaves to material forces." The child replied by kicking against her womb. The room was dark, just as dark as her child's little room. "So full of energy, oh, my child, my half-created child that I will thrust back into the neant again. Back into the paradise of nonbeing." All the child represented at this moment was a future, a future that Anaïs did not want. "You are the abdication," she whispered to her child. "I live in the present, with men who are closer to death. I want men, not a future extension of myself into a branch." The child again kicked and stirred in response.

  "You ought to die before knowing light or pain or cold. You ought to die in warmth and darkness. You ought to die because you are fatherless." Anaïs sighed to her child, telling it of the solar system she had created. Not a true father was there. First there was the Sun, Joaquin Nin, "it was he who fathered me . . ." She wasn't going to go through all that a second time, "I should be an orphan again." Then there was the war: "I wept for all the wounds inflicted." Then a thousand injustices: "I struggled to return life, to re-create hope." Then there was Hugh. Well, he was taking care of her—all those apartments! "Now, if you came, you would take him for a father and this little ghost would never let me go"—what would be left of me? Then there was Henry: "This man is not a father; he is a child, he is the artist. . . There is no end to his needs . . . He is my child and he would hate you." There was then Rank. Rank could be a father. But how could Rank be both an artist and a father? It would be his death. "There is no father on earth. The father is this shadow of God the Father . . . This shadow you would w
orship and seek to touch, dreaming day and night of its warmth, the shadow of a magic father which is nowhere to be found: it would be better if you died inside me, quietly, in the warmth and in the darkness."

  The fourteen pages Anaïs Nin devoted to her abortion, under the date 29 August 1934, are the most extraordinary of her entire multi-volume unexpurgated diary They are the most powerful, with a tension far more gripping than the thousand plus pages detailing her sexual exploits. To whom is she addressing this diary entry? Her dying child? Her sadistic German doctor? The violent, ugly sages-femmes, worthy of the Bureau General on Rue Sainte-Apolline. Her diary? God the Father? The style is religious, the mood one of ecstasy, like that of a seventeenth-century saint. One is not even sure where she is or who knows what, who knows whom. "Hugh drove us to the clinique." So Hugh was eventually told? There is no other reference in the diary to such a major event. Who is us} Was she really introduced to the German doctor as "Princess Aubergine"? The name seems a little ridiculous. And where is this clinique? There are many cliniques in the Seizieme, hidden behind the public spectacle of the Trocadero.

  We cannot even picture where she first meets the German doctor. At Rank's apartment? At the clinique} "While he operates we talk about the persecution of the Jews in Berlin. I help him wash the instruments." Anaïs wears the ring Rank gave her, the ring that Freud gave Rank, the ring that symbolizes the alliance of the secret psychoanalytic Committee Rank helped set up in Vienna in 1911, the Committee that eventually purged him. In his most famous photograph one sees Rank at thirty-four—the last year of the war—seated authoritatively, well dressed, staring out of his horn-rimmed spectacles, while holding high the right hand which sports Freud's secret ring.

  Anais is shaved and prepared for the major operation. She is resigned, yet terrified of the anaesthetic. Anxiety The high birth trauma begins.

  The German doctor has the face of a woman, his eyes protruding with anger and fear. For two hours she makes violent efforts, the child inside her too big, the veins inside swelling with the strain. "Push! Push with all your strength!" yell the gaggle of women. One of them bangs down on her stomach. "Push! Push!" With all her strength? She has none left. She has nowhere to put her bent legs.

  "Push! Push!" Her bones are cracking. A curtain is torn, bare light bulbs seem everywhere, heads, heads, heads hung with the lamps, a chorus of screaming voices, the words turning as on a badly wound phonograph disc; the doctor is in a frenzy, he wants to kill; the women all laugh—there is no more bandage! No more bloody bandage! They wash instruments. They talk. They talk. "Please hold my legs! Please hold my legs! Please hold my legs! PLEASE HOLD MY LEGS!" They start again. "Push! Push!" The bare lamp is shining white. "It sucks me into space." "Push! Push!" The ice in the veins, the cracking of bones, this pushing into blackness.

  The German takes hold of some long, medieval type of instrument and thrusts it into her. Along animal howl: "That will make her push." He smiles to the sage-femme. "If you do that again I won't push. Don't you dare do that again! Don't you dare!" The doctor bends down to look. She's dying. The child's dying. The doctor is baffled, furious. He wants to take a knife. "Let me alone!" Is that its head? "I want to die in its grasp." The ice. The doctor takes up his long instrument again. "Don't you dare! Don't you dare! Leave me aione all of you!" The sage-femme places her fat knees on the stomach. "I push into this tunnel, I bite my lips, my eyes, blood, blood." "Push! It is coming! Push! It is coming!" "For God's sake, don't sit up, don't move!" "Show me the child!" The sages-femmes force her down. "Show it to me!" The doctor holds it up: a small, diminutive man, but it is a little girl, perfectly made, glistening with the water of Nin's womb. "A dead creation, my first dead creation."

  Anaïs then experiences what must be described as a mystical vision. She had, as she puts it, abdicated one kind of motherhood for the sake of a higher one. Nature had shaped her body for passion alone, for the love of man. The child, such a primitive connection with the earth, had been cast off, thrown aside. She had killed the child, she had sustained the lover. "Man the father I do not trust. I do not want man as father. I stand by man the lover and creator." She sat on the operating table, looking at "that little Indian," the dead child. It was a penis, "swimming in my overabundant honey."

  Then appeared the planets. Hugh came to her bedside; she wept. Henry and Eduardo; Henry and Hugh; poor old Henry had been suffering stomach pains all night. Henry and Eduardo again. They all passed by as if in a dream. Then in came Rank at eleven o'clock, just back from London; "We said very little." But it had been Rank who provided the vision, the trauma of birth, the "end-setting."

  And end-setting it was. In four weeks Rank was gone. He would take the ship for Baltimore from Le Havre. "Dr. and Mrs. Rank" spent the night together in Rouen, then he left.

  But the end-setting proved a drawn-out business, as bad as any in Freudian psychoanalysis. Nin did not let Rank disappear so easily; in December 1934 she followed him out to New York, where the old passion was revived. But, ironically, her departure for New York ultimately strengthened her tie with Henry who, madly jealous, turned up on a pier in New York in January.

  Gradually her love for Rank turned into physical revulsion. Writers on the affair, leaning on the censored versions of the Nin diary, have said that for Nin it was always "Rank." This is not so. When Rank set himself up in America in late 1934 he became known to his friends as "Huck," thanks to Rank's rereading of Mark Twain, this time in English: he saw that "Huck" was the embodiment of the "roguish boy" that Freud had characterized him as being at the moment of their rupture in 1926; he was a fun-loving, spontaneous artist. Huck bought black panties and bras for Anaïs and, during their naughty nights in Atlantic City and at the Barbizon-Plaza in New York, they played Huck and Puck together, Huck sometimes dressing up as Puck and vice versa— the meaning of the psychoanalytic rhyme on the words being all too obvious; in Harlem they danced with the Negroes, which Huck was convinced every patient in analysis should do. But Anaïs yearned for Henry and not Huck, especially after Henry's arrival in New York.

  The sex games with Huck frankly disgusted her. Henry of course was only too eager to help her along that route: "Oh, the ugliness, the vulgarity," said Henry. "A most unprepossessing guy" One of Nin's women friends wrote to her, "I saw an ugly Uttle man with bad teeth." On meeting him in Pennsylvania Station as he returned from his teaching post in Philadelphia, Nin noted in her diary: "I dreaded the moment when he would kiss me. I eluded it." She hated the bad breath, the perspiration.

  Huck could not accept Anais's lies, the mensonge vital; he would not—unlike Father, Hugh and Henry—believe them. "Twice now a black pall came over Huck," Anaïs noted in May "His depressions are terrible and like an animal's. He lies there sighing, collapsed, with an earth-colored face, with a breath like death. Death all over his face." It only made Anaïs angry.

  In June she boarded the boat for France; Henry followed that autumn. "No one will ever come so near to me, to my soul and being," Anaïs wrote in her farewell note to the greatest beast in her life. "I just wanted you to know." "Where will I meet Rank again?" she wondered, sitting by the petal-strewn lawn of Louveciennes. 'At the café du Rond Point, where we met on our way to the room? At Villa Seurat, while walking with Henry, or carrying Henry's market bag? Paris is like a second-rate fair."

  The political situation was getting increasingly uncomfortable and Rank, in New York, made more and more references to it. "Times are difficult all over the world," he had written to Jessie Taft while still in France: "people in America have no money to come over and besides Europe seems to be threatened by war!" In a postscript he added: "Jung has gone overtly 'Nazi' and propagates now a 'Germanic' psychology against the 'Jewish.'" It was perfectly true, and is a fact deliberately overlooked by Jung scholars. Carl Jung took over the presidency of Berlin's New German Society for Psychotherapy and used it shamelessly to disseminate his own Aryan ideas. Yet in 1936 he received an honorary doctorate at the Harvard Tercente
nary celebration and, a year later, he received another honorary doctorate at Oxford. Hitler marched into Vienna in 1938 and Freud, through the aid of the British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, marched out. At the age of eighty-two he still had his sense of humour. Signing the paper required by the authorities certifying that he had been properly treated, he wrote: "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone."

  Psychoanalytic politics also got increasingly vicious. There were no honorary doctorates for Rank. He had shocked colleagues in Washing- ton for an International Congress on Mental Hygiene by announcing that there was no single psychological truth and that psychoanalysis could never be a science. In his book, Art and the Artist, which is probably his best, he took the idea further by claiming that the creative impulse had to be put directly at the service of individual personality, unique for each man. At the peak of life, he said, we confront the vale of death; one is most aware of finiteness at moments of great joy If art is the loan, he taught, death is the repayment. He repeated a childhood theme he had pinched from Schopenhauer: one must will ayes to the must—an idea not far from Blaise Pascal's "thinking reed" bending to the wind.

  It was not a very satisfactory analysis for the scientific Freudians, who shrouded everything in the unprovable unconscious, refusing to recognize physical birth trauma in the formation of human personality (an exterior and thus measurable phenomenon). A. A. Brill had taken control of the New York Psychoanalytic Society from which he excluded all lay analysts, such as Rank. The Boston Psychoanalytic Society threw out the Rankians after 1929. The Americans may have been selective in their comments about Freud—hadn't he said after his one visit to the United States that 'America is a gigantic error?"—but by 1930 the main faculties of the East Coast were run by orthodox Freudians. For Rank the worst insult came when Erich Fromm, a young psychoanalyst of high standing in New York, published in the May 1939 issue of Psychiatry an article that argued that the philosophy of "will therapy" was fascistic, akin to the authoritarian ideologies of Mussolini and Hitler with its "concept of the necessity of submission and sacrifice." The vast majority of American psychoanalysts agreed with Fromm, whose books remained required reading in university curricula until the 1970s. The rumour went around that Rank was "sick, sick, sick."