THE LAST DAYS
A MEMOIR
BY
BARBARA KRAFT
Published by Sky Blue Press at Smashwords
© 2011 Sky Blue Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Barbara Kraft
An intimate and beautiful portrayal of the final years and painful death of Anaïs Nin, interweaving their study of writing together, the publication of Kraft’s diary, and the breakup of the Kraft marriage. This compelling memoir is honest, critical, and full of perceptive insights into the relationships between Nin and her men. “Of all the young women I’ve worked with you are the one most like me,” Nin told Kraft as she lay dying.—Noel Riley Fitch, author of Anaïs: the Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin
Because Kraft’s visits with Anaïs Nin were so frequent during the last two years of Nin’s life, Kraft is the most qualified to write this book, which details the grace with which Nin confronted excruciating pain and the prospect of death from cancer. Kraft does not depict her mentor as a saint, but acknowledges her shortcomings, including possibly dishonest advice that had unfortunate consequences for Kraft. Anaïs Nin: The Last Days will appeal to anyone interested in Nin, but also to readers concerned about relationships between women, the process of dying, and even opera.—Benjamin Franklin V, editor of The Portable Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin died some thirty years ago, but this important new memoir takes us back to the woman herself. Kraft’s moving and deeply personal eyewitness account of Nin’s final months—and her gift for candor and self-revelation—makes her book a must-read. Kraft was there, and the intersection of these two lives makes for sometimes heartbreaking, always lively reading.—Chris Freeman, co-editor of The Isherwood Century
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WITH THE YOUNG, ONE LIVES IN THE FUTURE
SHE WAS FORTUNATE WITH THE MEN IN HER LIFE
THE AUTHENTIC VOICE OF ANAÏS NIN
THE BOOK THAT HER LIVING NOURISHED
PROLOGUE
“Romance, literary and human, depends on partial or imperfect knowledge.”
—Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom
When she died the willow tree outside her window died with her. A few weeks later Rupert cut it down and dug up the stump. He never replaced the willow that had wept over the dark green pool, shedding its fragile leaves into the emerald water, while Anaïs lay dying.
The teahouse is gone as well. The one Rupert built to give her a future while she lay dying. It stood for about a year after she had “crossed over,” as Rupert put it. Then, when the new woman moved in, Rupert took it down. In its place he built a glass and wood room for the new woman, who was working on a graduate thesis exploring diary writing through the ages. It was quite a beautiful room and overlooked the dark green pool where Anaïs had swum daily. Otherwise everything remained the same in the house made of glass and rose-colored concrete and rose-rubbed wood, the house Anaïs called the “house of mirrors.”
Rupert and the new woman slept in the same type of bed that Rupert slept in with Anaïs. It might have been the same bed, for Rupert was loath to part with anything having to do with Anaïs. The bed was low and close to the floor, close to the earth beneath the floor. The new woman and Rupert cooked in the same greenish glass mosaic-tiled kitchen, ate at the same mosaic-tiled table, the legs of which matched the graining of the rose-hued walls. They sat in front of the stone fireplace that Rupert had built with his own hands and that Anaïs said belonged in a castle. She had found it overwhelming but, not wanting to hurt his feelings and being a believer in the transforming powers of the imagination, she labeled it a fireplace fit for a queen and made her place in front of it.
That last year Anaïs sat in front of the fireplace on a garden lounge Rupert brought in from the pool and covered with soft sheepskin throws. The make-shift lounge attested to his unwavering conviction that Anaïs would recover. There she received the stream of visitors who found their way down the long driveway to the tree-enveloped house below. The house that unfolded like a Japanese screen into one large room with glass walls facing the sky, the mountains, and the shining silver lake. The glass was on the west side of the house, and the late afternoon sun inching its way towards the horizon filled the room with violet rays, turning it into a hothouse. But by then, in that final year of her life, Anaïs was always cold and she welcomed the warm embrace of the dying day. Only her visitors squirmed in discomfort, the sweat staining through their clothes, through that turning summer, through that fated fall, through the bondage of her last winter.
* * *
“Barbara—this is Anaïs Nin speaking. I have read your work and I think it is very good. We have many affinities. I would like you to come and see me.” That was how it began. Three years later, this is how it ended: “I can’t tell the world about my illness, but you can, and I want the world to know. I want you to write about this.”
I have chosen to reveal the intimacies of Anaïs’s last days as I witnessed them so that the story of her death is not lost. Everything comes back in the mind’s eye. Everything comes back in the crucible of the heart. She remains in my psyche all these years later as the most refined and rarified human being I have ever encountered. As Marcel Proust observed, “People do not die immediately for us, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life…it is as though they were traveling abroad.”
I met Anaïs Nin February 8, 1974. I know the exact date because it is the first entry in the diary I began to keep that day under her guidance…
“I met with Miss Nin today. It was as if I had always known her, so easy was the dialogue and yet I was conscious of being in the company of a vital presence. In a strange way I feel as if my life has been a preparation for this meeting with this singularly uncommon woman.”
This situation came about through the auspices of International College in Los Angeles, a tutorial college of scholars and professionals whose roster at the time included Anaïs Nin, Buckminster Fuller, and Lawrence Durrell. Two and a half years later, my diary, The Restless Spirit: Journal of a Gemini, was published by Celestial Arts/Les Femmes with a preface by Anaïs.
From the moment of our initial meeting until her death in January 1977, I was captivated by Anaïs, who inspired intense feelings in everyone she came in contact with. No one was left untouched by an encounter with the woman her brother Joaquin referred to as the “steel hummingbird.” It was either love or hate. For me it was love at first sight. Nothing I had read about her had prepared me for this meeting, which was to dramatically change the course of my life.
When she answered the door that balmy February afternoon, the kind we Californians are known to brag about, I was mesmerized by the figure who greeted me. She was Henry Miller’s “Une Être Étoilique.” Dressed in a floor-length, gauzy, cerise-hued Indian gown, the kind popular among the counterculture in those days, but one which she wore regally, she was taller than I had imagined. Perhaps five feet six inches. Her center-parted hair sat on top of her head like a tiny golden crown. There was not a line on the finely-wrought, mother-of-pearl skin to indicate her seventy-some years. She was poetry embodied with a hauntingly accented, slightly husky, flute-like voice. As she led me into the house, I followed in her wake feeling awkward and ungainly while she seemed to glide over the rose-colored carpet like a swan skimming the surface of still water.
Throughout 1974, we met nearly every week, and during those sessions I would read to her from the diary I was writing. It was the story of my life as I lived it from day to day between our meetings in the house of mirrors overlooking Silver Lake. She shared the house with her long-time companion Rupert Pole, who built the house for her. Anaïs never articulated exactly what her relationship to Pole was, and I never asked. He came and went, fetched the mail, cleaned the pool, offered a glass of wine. Husband or companion? At the time, it didn’t matter, and I paid scant attention to him that first year.
The tutorial relationship between us quickly turned into an intimacy. This gift for intimacy with those whom Anaïs perceived as like-spirits, or would convert into like-spirits, was one of her most prominent traits; her work reverberates with references to twin-ship, sisterhood, and like-hood.
At the end of that first year, in December of 1974, Anaïs was hospitalized with advanced cancer. A lengthy and devastating surgery followed. For the next two years she was in and out of the hospital for repeated sessions of chemotherapy, radiation, and additional surgeries. The golden crown fell out in clumps on the bathroom floor, and she was attached, through an incision on her right side, to a series of bags that contained the bilious, acidic fluids draining from her broken body. These years of pain and suffering rendered her a mortal being, made of flesh and bones and blood.
As her illness progressed, my visits became more frequent. During the last six months of her life I went to see her as often as I could, usually three or four times a week. When I was unable to visit we spoke on the phone. During this terrible time I learned that the essence of a human being is resistant to time.
When she died January 14, 1977, Anaïs Nin was seventy-three years old. She so wanted to live, this graceful, elegant, cultivated woman whom Henry Miller called “a masterpiece.”
My memoir is drawn from the last two years of her life, during which time she fought a heroic battle against the cancer that felled her at the very apex of her long-awaited literary success. The artistic renown that she had craved throughout her life finally came in her last decade with the publication of six volumes of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, the first of which was published in 1966.
Illness is the great leveler from which none of us is immune. It flushes out all the old, buried truths and puts us in touch with the essential meaning of things. There is no time, no energy for masks, veils, labyrinths, interior cities, or multiple hearts. Death hovered over her, the one reality that Anaïs could not transcend or transmute or transform or levitate with the magic of words. It was a reality she met with a dignity that tore at the heart of all of us who knew her and were close to her.
I met Henry Miller when he too was nearing the end, and we reminisced fondly about Anaïs. Lovers during the 1930s in Paris when both were struggling to make names for themselves, their paths crossed one last time when they ended up in the same hospital at the same time, separated by a floor or two.
Leaning on his elbows across the dinner table one evening, Henry laughed as he told me that Anaïs was the “greatest fabulist” he had ever known, and one also possessed of the nine lives of the cat. Henry was a tough old bird, rather like a turkey, with his croaky voice, heavily veined hands, parchment-thin skin, wattled throat and naked head. The memory of Anaïs’s shenanigans amused him, spreading across his wrinkled face in a broad smile. Being of a less sanguine disposition than Miller, Anaïs herself referred to her lies as “mensonges vitals” by which she meant “the lies which give life.”
As I was to learn shortly before her death, Anaïs had been married to two men at the same time for a number of years. When she died the obituaries in the East listed Hugh P. Guiler as the husband of the deceased; in the West, Rupert Pole.
Nin married Hugh (Hugo) Guiler in 1923, met Rupert Pole in 1947 (he was sixteen years her junior), and married him bigamously in 1955. Once her dairies were published she was forced to annul the Pole marriage for tax reasons. Her legal husband was and remained Hugh Guiler until the end of her life, while Rupert Pole, her constant companion, cared for and nursed her through her long and terrible battle with cancer. A myth in her own time, the Scheherazade of the diary genre, both of her husbands “spared” her life and by so doing made her creative life possible.
The publication of Nin’s diaries fortuitously coincided with the women’s movement, which catapulted her into the status of an icon. She was thought by her followers to possess an authentic feminine voice, free of male influence. She presented herself as having successfully defied the conventions of a woman’s role, emerging unscathed to tell the tale. It was an unbeatable combination in those idealistic days.
My personal experience with Nin is where I started, but I’ll never know how much of what she related to me about her actual life was true and how much was her “signature” evasive fabrication. In the 1990s two biographies appeared, revealing that Nin’s published diaries were all smoke and veils, that her life as she wrote about it in the diaries was a labyrinth of lies which she edited and rewrote in a never-ending recreation of self. There is no mention in the published diaries of her bicoastal husbands, of her incestuous relationship with her father, published posthumously as Incest by Rupert Pole, of her many abortions.
Does it matter? It can be argued that there is no language without deceit. The diaries are, in a sense, an imagined version of Nin’s life as she wanted us to perceive it, perhaps how she herself wanted to perceive it. My feeling upon our initial meeting was of a woman who had fashioned herself to become the myth of her own design.
In the end, her spirit transcended her human failings. We should all be able to say as much. She was the physical embodiment of poetic lyricism, and in this role, in the role of the creative spirit, she spread light and hope. That is how she will be remembered; that is how I remember her.
MAYBE IT WILL BE NOTHING
December 24, 1974 (diary entry)
I went to see Anaïs today. It was cold and chilly, and the sky bore down a monotonous grey. Even the trees were limp and depressed. Christmas seemed remote. Not just one day away. As I drove down the steep driveway to the house nestled at the bottom I saw Anaïs standing there waiting for me. A slight figure in the dampness. It was odd. She had never come out to meet me before. She must have been listening for the car.
I gathered up the flowers I had stopped to buy on the way over and opened the door of the car, holding them out to her. Ignoring them or perhaps not seeing them, she began to speak in her carefully modulated voice.
“We cannot work today, Barbara. I called you but you had already left. I spoke to your husband. He said you had just left. I’m very sorry that you came all this way for nothing. Rupert took me to the doctor’s this morning and they are putting me in the hospital tomorrow morning for tests.”
“On Christmas Day?” I asked.
“Yes. They say it can’t wait.”
“But why? What’s wrong?”
“It’s the cancer again.”
She spoke dispassionately, uttering the word “cancer” as if it was simply something to be dealt with as efficiently and as quickly as possible. Her attitude suggested a passing inconvenience, not much more than an unexpected trip to the dentist.
“Luckily vaginal cancer is the easiest kind to control. At least we know now. The not knowing is always so terrible. But it will be fine. I have had this twice before. Both times in New York. But you must not worry about me. I have complete faith in my doctors.”
The twist of her reddish gold hair glowed on top of her head. Stunned, I focused on that to avoid looking at her face. What could I say that would match her equanimity?
In a wistful voice she added, “Isn’t that strange—to go into the hospital on Christmas Day? You know, when I was a child, I was very ill one year at Christmas. It was then that my father left us. I was nine years old at the time. I have never liked Christmas.
“Rupert and I have to see the family today and do some errands this afternoon… This has all been so sudden. We weren’t prepared for it. I want to live. I have a great deal to live for. I have many things yet to write.”
I didn’t want to think about her words, only the sound of her voice. It was like listening to the middle range of a flute. Beautiful and flowing.
“This tomorrow is for tests and to decide upon the treatment. I will call and let you know what they decide to do...if we had time I would ask you in for a cup of tea, but we have to leave immediately. You must continue to write. You must work well until we can meet again. Call Rupert. He will let you know what they find. Maybe it will be nothing. At least we will know. I have so much to live for. Continue to work, Barbara. You must write. We will work again when I get home.”
I marveled at her control. It was not human. Was it possible that she could be so calm, so courteous, so concerned about me and my little scribblings? How did she really feel? Was this a pose for me or for her or for both of us? Was she really so cavalier, so brave, so pure of spirit? I was startled at her words because it was the first time she had ever said anything intimate to me—other than at our initial meeting when she had spoken to me about her father. I never thought of her as having mortal feelings because she appeared perfect and that perfection made her remote. She walked in an aura of noli me tangere—touch me not!
Tears gathered in the corner of my eyes and I struggled to hold them back. What would I do without her? How would I go on, having barely started? Suddenly, standing there in the cold grayness and the dripping trees, I recalled that she had complained of stomach pain and not being able to hold anything down on several occasions over the past few months. Her mildly expressed discomfort had not registered in my consciousness because I had been so involved in my own problems—problems that I passionately recorded in my diary day in, day out, and then read to her at our weekly meetings.
I looked at you then directly for the first time, Anaïs. It was something I could no longer avoid doing. I had avoided looking at you because I did not want to penetrate the carefully placed mask that was getting you, me, through this meeting. Masks are like manners. They give us a form with which to deal with the unspeakable. When our eyes did meet, you suddenly seemed small and slight and frail. You were not a myth, a muse, a goddess, a literary legend floating in a dramatic swirl of black cape captured for posterity in a famed photo by the famous Jill Krementz.
Shivering in the damp cold, you were a woman wearing an old, out of style black knit dress with a short white jacket thrown over her shoulders and you had cancer and you were going into the hospital on Christmas Day to be examined and probed and handled and tested and hopefully treated. At the same time there was an agelessness about you, one which you never lost despite all that you were to endure over the next two years.
We embraced one another carefully. I held out the flowers. Purple and magenta and lavender flowers—all your favorite colors. You took them but said nothing. I don’t think you really saw them. It was the only indication of how upset you must have been. Before going back into the house you told me, once again, that I should call Rupert.
“He will let you know what they find. Maybe it will be nothing. At least we will know. I have so much to live for. Continue to work, Barbara. You must write. And when I get home we will work together again.”
With that she turned away and walked back to the house. Her image dissolved, blurring in front of me into a black flame tipped with gold like an El Greco painting. I got back into my bright, little car. It was a little yellow Porsche, which I dearly loved. I tend to drive fast but that day I drove home slowly.
It was sprinkling when Rupert took you to the hospital the next day. I could just imagine the halls decorated with tinsel and somewhere an artificial tree and Christmas cards dangling on a slack string strung under a doorway. How depressing you must have found it.
At home I went through the tired ritual of cooking Christmas dinner for family and friends. We were twelve around the table. My husband, my ten-year-old daughter Jennifer, my two step-sons, my mother, my father, and my three sisters. I can’t recall who else was there. I looked across the length of the table at my husband carving the turkey, at my father working his napkin into the collar of his shirt, at my mother picking up her fork, examining it and, from the expression on her face, approving the gleaming sterling which had been polished for the occasion earlier. I looked at them and saw the remnants of a life I was no longer living. It was not their fault. It was I who had changed. And, you, Anaïs, were the impetus of that change.
By the time everyone left the day’s drizzle had turned into a deluge, lashing out against the ceiling-to-floor glass doors of the house, scarring them with deep slashes that bled down the glass in waves—I, too, lived in a glass house. Doing the dishes, I thought of you lying in the hospital. Was the same rain beating against your windows? Were you alone or was Rupert still with you? What would the tests reveal? How long would they take? Would we really meet and work again?
A week later I heard from Anaïs. It was late in the afternoon and the January sun squatted on the horizon like a blazing temple. Listening to her words, I watched as it slipped over the edge of the world.
“Barbara, this is Anaïs.” Her lilting, slow-paced voice startled me. Every syllable so clear, so perfectly articulated. I had expected a call from Rupert, not from her.
“I tried to phone you earlier today but there was no answer. I promised I would phone you when we knew something definite. I am to have surgery Thursday morning.”
Then she said, “We need eight units of blood. I have a very rare blood type. A-negative. When we got home Rupert took charge and began telephoning our friends, asking them to donate blood. I objected to this, and then it occurred to him to call the Women’s Building where I have spoken many times. I told Rupert that I would call you myself in case you might know of anyone who might be able to donate a unit.”
“I don’t know what type I have, Anaïs, but I’ll find out first thing in the morning.” Eight units of blood seemed like an awful lot of blood for a woman who weighed barely 100 pounds.
“Oh no, not you,” she protested. “You’re too slight. You have to weigh a certain amount and I know you are not heavy enough. But if you have a friend it doesn’t have to be the same type as mine. They have a blood bank that they draw upon. I have to replace the units that we use. Rupert is going to ask at the Women’s Building as well. Stay in touch with Rupert. Call Rupert.”
A few days later I went to give blood as I was not as slight as Anaïs supposed, weighing 112 pounds, two pounds over the mandatory 110. As she was inserting the IV into my left arm, the nurse in charge told me that there had been a steady stream of women all day long and the previous day as well. A pleasant, middle-aged woman, she was perplexed at the turnout.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “Such an odd assortment of women of all ages. Some looked like flowers in long madras dresses and beads and feathers, and others in blue jeans, a tee shirt, and combat boots. You know the type, the raggedy libbers who go braless and don’t shave their legs. It was a carnival in here yesterday. All for this woman writer on the third floor. I can’t remember her name. It has a foreign sound to it. Is she a friend of yours? Who is she anyway? What’s so special about her? Is she famous? I’ve never seen a turnout like this before for anyone and I have been a nurse for fifteen years, ten in this hospital, and we get a lot of celebrities here.”
Lying there that day, glancing up now and again at the bag dangling overhead slowly filling with my blood, I remembered my first visit to you, a year earlier almost to the day.
You opened the door wearing one of your long flowing dresses, your little white poodle Piccolino barking and jumping all over the place. You had the body, the walk, the spirit of a girl. We sat in your small, book-lined study, the shelves stacked with volumes of the Diary in English and various translations, our knees touching for lack of space, and discovered “our many affinities,” to use your phrase.
There was our mutual interest in women such as George Sand and Lou Andreas-Salomé. I told you that I had written a radio play on Salomé, and some months later, when you were asked to write a preface for a biography on her, we discussed her life and relationships with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, and you quoted a passage from my play.
We shared Catholic backgrounds, I more comfortably than you, and musical ones as well. Your father had been a concert pianist and composer and I had been a piano major on scholarship in an all-girl Catholic college. You were amused when I told you that it was there that I met my husband, who had been one of my instructors in the music department. There were only two or three men on the faculty in those days and he was one of them. An adjunct professor, he taught percussion at the school (as music majors we were required to have a working knowledge of all the instruments in an orchestra); his main job was with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he played percussion. He was also a gifted composer although at the time that we met he had not yet received the recognition that would come later. To my parents’ dismay, he was also Jewish, twenty years older than I, and divorced with two small children.
As the afternoon light narrowed that first day in your monastic little writing cell, you spoke to me about your father as if he were still alive and a part of your daily existence. You told me how the diary began as a letter to your father, and in that moment you were a young girl all over again, your voice full of pain, reliving for how many times the abandonment of your father. It was a discordant note in the peace and serenity you exuded. The timbre of your voice was plaintive and hollow, and later that night when I was recording our meeting in the pages of my nascent diary, the image that came to mind was the desolate sound of a metal fitting striking a flagpole in the dark swirl of a windy, starless night.
The talk about your father made me uncomfortable. I was startled and pulled back a bit. It seemed odd for a woman of your age to be revisiting the past with such pained intimacy in the company of a virtual stranger, and I felt a prick of doubt as to the stability of the woman I was about to become involved with. It wasn’t what you said but rather how you said it. There was a moment then when I wanted to leave; it frightened me that you were so involved with a past so far removed and I wasn’t certain whether I wanted to stay. Something wasn’t quite right. But I put this uneasiness out of my mind and saw instead only what you wanted me to see, which matched perfectly with what I wanted to see—for the stronger sensation was that of being transported to another world, to the realm of the possibility of things becoming.
From the first I perceived of you as someone unpossessible, ephemeral, forever beyond my grasp, and yet someone who reached out and shook hands with my soul. There are encounters in which all that can be known is known, and this was such an encounter. Implicit in our meeting was my unconditional acceptance of you as you presented yourself. All those craggy places where we one day might collide were left on the doorstep of your hillside home like the rattler’s shed skin. While we had many affinities, instinctively, I knew even then, although I ignored it, that we were fundamentally very different women with very different values.
The strange thing is that before meeting you, I was only mildly interested in your work. I was not a fan and actually had read very little of it, and what I had read had not compelled me. I was at loose ends and looking for a direction when a friend gave me a brochure she had received announcing that you were teaching privately through an organization called International College. I thought, “Why not?”
I phoned the college and was told to submit some work which they would pass on to you. I sent a radio play which had recently received a national award. It was based on the life of Maud Gonne, the Irish actress, revolutionary and extravagant, if reluctant, muse who haunted the poetry of William Butler Yeats. No two women could have been more diametrically different than you and the pistol-toting, six-foot-tall Maud Gonne, first woman to be a member of the IRA.
A few weeks later, in early January, the phone rang. I remember the time quite distinctly. It was seven p.m. and I was in the midst of a heated argument with my husband. I picked up the phone and heard your voice for the first time, a voice unlike any I had ever heard before or since.
“Barbara, this is Anaïs Nin speaking. I have read your work and I think it is very good. We have many affinities. I would like you to come and see me.”
HOW RUPERT CAME TO KNOW ALL
The surgery was performed at the old Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. The hospital had a fine reputation and was located in a modest residential area not far from Anaïs’s home in Silver Lake, which made it convenient for Rupert as Anaïs was to spend a great deal of 1975 in and out of Cedars. A year or so later, the hospital moved to a new facility in Beverly Hills, which meant Rupert had much farther to travel. The old Cedars is now a Church of Scientology, while another nearby hospital bearing a huge sign atop its main building has been reincarnated as a dream center. Nothing is ever allowed to get old in California, and people still believe in dreaming. Perhaps these were two reasons Anaïs liked living here. A third was Rupert.
The first thing Anaïs saw when she came out of the anesthetic was Rupert’s anxious face peering down at her. When she managed to whisper his name, he wept. He left her side only to go home to shower, to feed her beloved Piccolino, to catch up on the chores and the mail.
When I spoke to him the following day, he told me that the operation had lasted six hours but that Anaïs had come through.
“She survived, Barbara.” His voice was ragged with fatigue and worry. “She’s in intensive care. She’s living for the removal of the tubes.”
“Tubes?”
“Yes, tubes. Through her nose and into her stomach. It’s awful and so painful for her. She’s miserable.”
“But why, what are they for?”
“To drain away the fluids and waste in her stomach. Her tummy just isn’t working anymore. They’re feeding her intravenously. She hates that. She can’t take any liquids through the mouth at all. Her lips are so parched and dry. It breaks my heart to look at her.”
He went on and on, the words running out of his mouth.
“On top of it all, I have a cold and can’t get close to her. I can’t even touch her. I have to sit at the other end of the room. We just sat and looked at one another all morning long. This is all we need, as if things aren’t bad enough.”
You were to remain in the hospital for two months and four days, Anaïs. Rupert was there with you every day. I could see him, Anaïs, as he must have sat there, hunched over in a corner of the room—his worn but still handsome face, unshaven, pale and haggard with concern in the flat light, his outdoor hands, tanned by the sun, large on his lap. When he and I spoke on the phone, his voice exuded utter helplessness and I felt as if I could see into his mind. There was nothing he could do except to be there every possible waking moment. He would never leave you alone. He would devote himself to your recovery. He would pick up your life and live it for you until you were able do it for yourself.
Rupert never uttered the word “cancer” to me, and I didn’t ask. He was not ready to accept the idea of cancer and the dread that word implies. Throughout those two terrible years, I don’t recall Rupert ever using the word until the very end.
“The nights are hard for her so we’ve arranged for private duty nurses around the clock. She feels so terribly alone and abandoned at night. They won’t let me stay with her, you know. It’s against hospital rules.”
He told me I would be able to see her as soon as she regained a little strength. “She will be in intensive care for awhile. I’ll let you know. She doesn’t want anyone to see her like this. Not until she can fix herself a bit. She looks terrible right now. And I’m asking everyone not to phone her. She really can’t speak yet. It is too painful with the tubes down her throat. It takes too much effort. We whisper to one another. If anyone asks please tell them to call me. You can check with me every day if you like. It is fine for you to call. Anaïs wants you to know how she is.”
I’ve lost count, Anaïs, of how many times over the next two years you would tell me to “Call Rupert. He’ll let you know how I am. Stay in touch with Rupert.”
Until now my contact with Rupert had been minimal. When I was at the house for my weekly sessions with Anaïs, he would occasionally wander in and out of the room, most often with the mail, which was Anaïs’s mail, or with some question related to her work or career. The tone between them was tender and intimate and solicitous, punctuated with “darling.” Anaïs took pride in the fact that they still addressed one another, after so many years, as “darling.”
“You know, Barbara,” she once told me, “Rupert and I never let the romance go out of our relationship. We’ve worked hard to keep that. We agreed that relationships had to be dealt with creatively.”
That first year that I worked with Anaïs, before she became ill, Rupert always greeted me pleasantly enough but, in truth, I paid little attention to him. All I knew about him was that he had once been a forest ranger, later a school teacher, and that now he tended to the house and garden and helped Anaïs with her career. I had no idea of the true nature of their relationship and assumed Rupert was her husband.
When Anaïs was moved out of intensive care into her own room, Rupert’s confidence in her ability to recover and resume her life as it had been returned. His voice was strong and upbeat; it was as if he had decided that he could will her back to health.
His devotion to Anaïs was the talk of the ward among the nurses and buoyed her spirits considerably, as did his transformation of that dispirited, aging hospital room into a congenial space with many of her favorite things from home.
First among them was Henry Miller’s Cote d’Azur watercolor, that’s how I have always thought of it, an exuberance of color, joyous yellows and blues, so like his spirit. Miller himself called it Amour Toujours. On the upper right hand side of the painting he had scribbled:
Donnez-moi un peu d’espoir
Donnez-moi un peu du ciel
Donnez-moi beacoup d’amour.
And at the bottom, To paint is to love again, and to love is to live life to the fullest.
On the table next to Anaïs’s bed was the spirit house she and Rupert brought home from their trip a few years back to Bali. And, perched in a corner, was Rupert’s guitar which lent the room a home-like atmosphere. A wall hanging in muted fuchsia tones disguised the blank wall directly in front of Anaïs, and Rupert had swathed the television set in towels. Anaïs hated what she called “that black hole,” and to have had to lie there under its vapid gaze would have offended her.
Rupert’s “television habit” was one of the few areas of disagreement between them. She found it desensitizing to end each day with images of the dead and maimed, with airplane and automobile crashes, with crimes and murders. And she was completely at odds with what she referred to as his “sports mania.” She adamantly refused to watch television with him, retreating to her little studio when he turned it on. I doubt she was aware of Christopher Lasch’s definition of sport as “the utmost concentration of purpose on behalf of activities utterly useless,” but she surely would have been in total agreement with his observation.
The evening before Anaïs entered the hospital, Rupert made a fire in the stone fireplace, and he and Anaïs sat in front of it sipping champagne and making plans for the future. Earlier in the day she had worked a bit in her studio editing the diaries that would comprise Volume VI, which was due at her publisher’s in a few months. When she finished working, in her haste and distress to pack and prepare for the hospital, she forgot to put away the diaries she had been working on. The partially written manuscript and the original diaries from which it was being drawn remained open on the desk in her study in plain view for anyone to see.
It must have been while sorting and answering the mail in that same study that Rupert came upon the diaries and decided to finish editing them as a surprise for Anaïs. He must have realized that, given the severity of her condition, she would never be able to meet the publisher’s deadline. He would do it for her. Editing the diary would be his homecoming present for her.
That was how Rupert came to “learn all,” Anaïs would tell me a year and half later when I too accidentally learned, if not “all,” at least about her bicoastal life. She had always kept the original diaries in storage and brought home only those diaries that pertained to the volume she was currently working on. In all their years together, Rupert had never asked to see the diaries. She told me, “This was not something we discussed; it simply was. Occasionally I would read passages to Rupert as I did to other people, but he never violated my wishes by asking to see the diaries.”
The volumes Anaïs had been working on when she left for the hospital that January morning covered the years 1955 to 1966. While editing the diaries for these years, Rupert was stunned to discover that Anaïs had never separated from Hugo. Sitting in her tree-shaded little study in the house that he had built for her to give her permanent roots, Rupert read in her own handwriting that from the very beginning of their relationship more than twenty-five years earlier, Anaïs had divided her life between the one she shared with him in Los Angeles and the one she lived with Hugo in their Greenwich Village apartment in New York.
The life that Anaïs referred to as her “double life” began in 1947, a few months after she and Rupert met at a party in New York. In the years that followed, Rupert pestered and pleaded with Anaïs to marry him. Finally, in 1955, exhausted by his entreaties, she married Rupert bigamously, claiming that she had divorced Hugo. Because of the tax repercussions that resulted from the financial success of the diaries, the first of which was published in 1966, she was forced to tell Rupert that she had lied to him and was still legally married to Hugo.
Magnanimously, Rupert forgave her, and their marriage was annulled. But during the interim years of 1955 to 1966, Rupert was oblivious to the fact that Anaïs’s constant travel had anything to do with Hugo. Nor had he known about all the others that he now read about in the diaries he had undertaken to edit for her while she lay hovering between life and death—about Gonzalo Moré, her cousin Eduardo Sanchez, Antonin Artaud, René Allendy, Otto Rank, her philandering Papa, and the other men that had come before him.
And then there were the passages in which she had railed against Rupert himself—against his stupidity, his blind and suffocating devotion, the passages where she had lashed out at the mediocrity of his intellectual life, at his dependency on her, at his easy, happy, unquestioning embrace of life, at the very simplicity that had drawn her to him. There were times when she had hated and envied him his innocence, not the least part of which was his total belief in her.
Anaïs told me how Rupert had broken down completely and wept when he told her that he had read the diaries. From her hospital bed she told him everything, all the details of her bicoastal life. Despite this, despite her betrayal of him, Rupert sat at Anaïs’s bedside day and night following her initial surgery (and all the rest to follow) praying for her recovery, implacable in his belief that she would survive. She was an uncommon woman and he an uncommon man.
I had just returned, Anaïs, from my New York trip where I too learned of Hugo’s existence. You told me how Rupert had asked if everyone knew except him, and if Hugo knew of his, of Rupert’s, existence.
You told him that you had been completely happy with him. That you did not want to lose him, but that you could not leave Hugo. “I owe Hugo so much, darling. You know how he took care of me and the family. You have always known that part of the story. I could not turn my back on that. I wanted to protect you, to spare you all of that. But I loved you and I could not give you up. You offered me a new beginning, a new life, freedom from the old, tired patterns. All the wonderful things that have happened to me occurred because you took me away from deadness into a new and joyous way of living. You gave me hope and confidence and taught me how to play and laugh. It was my weakness that I did not trust it.”
And as you spoke I heard echoes of a passage that I had copied out in my diary from your book on Lawrence. You quoted him as writing that “Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down. The greater the love, the greater the trust, and the greater the peril, the greater the disaster. Because to place absolute trust in another human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it goes in company with another ship.”
You told Rupert how happy you were with him and that you had planned to tell him before the surgery but had thought it would be better to wait until after. You told him that you had wanted to spare him another blow just now.
You told him, “Hugo was old and I could not deny everything he had done for me. I did not want the scandal and ugliness of a divorce to leave its mark on our new life together. I could not have borne that. I could not negate the continuity of the life that had been for my own selfish pleasure. It would have destroyed Hugo. What would our life together have been with a beginning that destroyed another human being?
“Darling, I never expected when we went off together that it would last. I thought you would tire of me and leave me for a younger woman. I would not have blamed you. I expected it. These things happen. I had to have a place to go back to if you left me.”
You spoke to him, as you did to me, about how we each betray our own love and that this is what is meant by being human. That at times we all have terribly negative impulses towards those whom we love and lash out at in the anger and frustration of the moment, but that it is only a moment. That we don’t mean it. That it is easier to attack and blame those we love than to look at ourselves, for we know instinctively that those who love us will not reject or abandon us. To look at ourselves would lead us to despair. You told him that was why the diary had always been a private record. That there was much in the diary that was not meant to ever be seen.
And I can just imagine Rupert taking your hands in his, Anaïs, forgiving you and understanding everything. I can hear him saying, “Darling, you must not worry yourself about it anymore. We must concentrate on getting you well again.
“Darling, you have the very best doctors and they are confident you will make a full recovery. When this is behind us we’ll go to one of your favorite places just as we planned the night before your surgery. Nothing has changed. We’ll go to Bali or Mexico. Remember how much you loved Bali? That’s where we’ll go. It’s more tranquil than Mexico. I’ll get some travel brochures and we will plan our trip while you recuperate. We have a whole new life ahead of us.”
WITH THE YOUNG, ONE LIVES IN THE FUTURE
“When Rupert and I began our relationship it started out as a romance and look what happened. I never imagined the romance would last. I was always afraid that Rupert would leave me for a younger woman once the passion was over. But that didn’t happen. It turned into love.”
Anaïs and Hugo had been married for nearly 25 years when Anaïs met Rupert in an elevator on their way up to the same party. The party, given by Hazel Guggenheim McKinley, was one of those glamorous, New York, upper East-side affairs one reads about in the society columns. Hugo, who managed the estate of the Guggenheim heiress for his bank, had been unable to attend that evening, so Anaïs had gone alone.
At forty-four, Anaïs looked much younger, easily ten years younger, while Rupert was a devastatingly handsome twenty-eight-year-old out-of-work actor. As they rode up together in the elevator, Rupert introduced himself, holding out his hands to Anaïs and apologizing for the ink stains on them. He told her that he had just come from his work in a print shop.
An amused Anaïs thrust out her ink-stained hands, turning them palm upwards.
“I too work in a print shop,” she laughed. “I have my own printing press and have spent a good part of the day setting type.”
There was an immediate attraction between the ephemeral writer and the striking, unemployed actor. Always susceptible to youth and beauty, Anaïs had rarely seen such physical beauty in a man. That, coupled with what she perceived as Rupert’s emotional sensitivity, led her to fret in her diary later that evening that he was most likely a homosexual. But such was not the case as she was soon to find out. The attraction Anaïs felt for Rupert was the attraction of youth and innocence and a future. Joyous, optimistic spontaneity. As she was to tell me, “With the young, one lives in the future. I prefer that.”
Anaïs rejected the idea of chronology, which she believed was very destructive and had nothing to do with reality. “Society forces us to these associations with age, which are devastating to women in particular. If I had accepted chronology I would have dressed differently, walked differently, talked differently.” And most importantly, she would have thought differently. She refused to accept the stigma of age, and, as a result, her thinking remained fresh and open.
Years later, Anaïs, I came across one of Montaigne’s essays in which the French philosopher writes about the “calamity” of age, saying, “Let the years drag me along if they will, but backward.” I would have liked to have shared this with you. You would have appreciated his words. Rupert was the force that dragged you back in years.
As a young married woman living in the boredom of Louveciennes, a suburb of Paris, with Hugo and her mother and brother, Anaïs reminds me of the character played by Catherine Deneuve in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. Newly wed, bored, and wanting to taste life to its fullest, the beautiful Séverine Serizy goes to a Paris brothel where she offers her services. And the young Anaïs, in her quest for life and experience during her first period of erotic madness, which she called “a search for the father,” writes of pitting one man against the other, of traveling “from one’s bites to the other’s sperm.”
Even when she was quite ill and bedridden, Anaïs would rise to the occasion of a new young man. One day as I was leaving the house, such a specimen arrived to take my place in the chair next to her bed—a hopeful, thirty-something writer. Immediately, Anaïs was transformed into the enchantress of earlier years and better days. She introduced the handsome young man to me as a Playgirl fold-out and barely noticed my departure.
A great part of Anaïs’s appeal lay in the fact that she never became Americanized. She was a cosmopolitan woman and, as such, possessed the French inclination for privacy, which lent her an air of mystery. She belonged to that enviable tradition of European women, particularly French women, who do not abdicate the notion of themselves as sexual beings as they age. They remain capable of flirtation and seduction, and are not ashamed of their physical urges. And when they are beyond that, there are the memories to be savored. How wonderful to be able to say, “I was a beautiful woman and many men desired me.” The body, in its physicality, is blissfully ignorant of the concept of shame. The mind is another issue.
* * *
When Rupert and Anaïs met that first evening at Hazel Guggenheim’s, they sat together on a little couch, talking. A California native, Rupert was attracted to schools of thought such as mysticism and pacifism and teachers like Kahlil Gibran and the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who lived in Ojai, California.
Two other Krishnamurti enthusiasts were Henry Miller and the American artist and potter Beatrice Wood. Ms. Wood, in fact, moved to Ojai to live close to Krishnamurti. I interviewed Beatrice Wood on several occasions, and during an interview I did with her in 1984 for Architectural Digest, she told me that she first heard about Krishnamurti from “the English actor Reginald Pole, who was the father of Rupert Pole, who lived with Anaïs Nin.” Wood said that Reginald was one of the three great loves of her life, all of whom broke her heart.