Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 4 by Anais Nin

Author:Anais Nin [Stuhlmann, Gunther]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Gore came.

We slide easily into a sincere, warm talk. He dropped his armor, his defenses. "I don't like women. They are either silly, giggly, like the girls in my set I'm expected to marry, or they are harsh and strident masculine intellectuals. You are neither."

Intellectually he knows everything. Psychologically he knows the meaning of his mother abandoning him when he was ten, to remarry and have other children. The insecurity which followed the second break he made, at nineteen, after a quarrel with his mother. His admiration, attachment, hatred, and criticalness. Nor is it pity, he says. He is proud that she is beautiful and loved, yet he condemns her possessiveness, her chaos, her willfulness, and revolts against it. He knows this. But he does not know why he cannot love.

His face, as the afternoon light changed, became clearer. The frown between his eyes disappeared. He was a child thrust out too soon, into a world of very famous, assertive, successful, power personalities. His mother confesses her life to him. He moves among men and women of achievement. He was cheated of a carefree childhood, of a happy adolescence. He was rushed into sophistication and into experience with the surface of himself, but the deeper self was secret and lonely.

"My demon is pride and arrogance," he said. "One you will never see."

I receive from him gentleness and trust. He first asked me not to write down what he would say. He carries his father's diplomatic brief case with his own poems and novel in it. He carries his responsibilities seriously, is careful not to let his one-night encounters know his name, his family. As future president of the United States, he protects his reputation, entrusts me with state secrets to lighten his solitude. Later he wants to write it all down, as we want to explore his secret labyrinth together, to find the secret of his ambivalence. To explore. Yet life has taken charge to alter the situation again. He, the lonely one, has trusted woman for the first time, and we start the journey of our friendship, as badly loved children who raised themselves, both stronger and weaker by it.

He suffers the consequences of his wartime frostbite, great malaises and neuritis. He suffers from black depressions. He is nearsighted. A boy without age, who talks like an old man. My other children do not accept him, understand him.

While all the society mothers are looking for him for their cocktails, dances, we may be talking quietly somewhere in a restaurant, a night club. A debutante wrote him: "Why are you so detached?" Gore attends the functions, bows, dances, leaves. Dear mothers and debutantes, can you give this boy back his childhood, his mother, his security, the warmth and understanding he needed then? Can you answer his thoughts, dialogue with his brightness, keep pace with his intelligence?

He came at four and left at midnight. He made me laugh with the most amazingly well acted pastiches of Roosevelt, Churchill, a southern senator, a petition at the House of Commons.

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