Anaïs and the Diary

“I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance, I want drugs, I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, to be torn by it – I’m going to hell, to hell, to hell – wild, wild, wild.” —Anaïs Nin

I just finished reading the biography of Anaïs Nin, not to be confused with The Diary of Anaïs Nin, a multi-volume collection of published diaries written by Ms. Nin from age 11 until just before her death at 72. Anaïs Nin, as she preferred to be called—as opposed to Anaïs Guiler (of New York) or Anaïs Pole (of Los Angeles), two other names by which she was known while simultaneously living two completely separate lives as the wife (wives?) of two different men—died January 14, 1977, precisely 9 months before I was born, a trivial fact not lost on me (an astrojunkie) as I mull the possibility of Anaïs having passed a literary, diaristic torch down to me, little black girl born in October ‘77.

From reading the story of Nin’s entire bedazzled and maddening life, and from many other seemingly random/definitely disparate directions, my whispered imperative continues to be: WRITE.

At 33 ½ years old now, in June, 2011, 4 years post-MFA (that’s 4 years after everything was magically supposed to fall into place a la becoming a Mutha|Fucking|Author), and also 4 years into my current relationship, I feel Anaïs’s torch might be burning a hole through me.

And that’s extreme. But there remains so much unsaid, unwritten, and dreadfully unedited; apparently, my impetus to write is directly connected to a need to first (always first) record what is occurring at whatever given moment I sit down to write. If you’ve read many of my blog entries, you know that I must first work past the guilt and dissonance associated with my so-called life as a writer. I need to document the details of the moment before I can relay the meanderings of my psyche soul (oh, yes, I realized I have one), and then of course, it’s immediately onward into what really plagues me.

But about Anaïs…

According to the biography, Anaïs spent the better part of her life trying her best to gain recognition as a writer, and especially, to publish her diaries, which she considered her most meaningful and whole life’s work. But no one wanted (to publish) them, and for so long, no one wanted her novels either. They were, after all, just reincarnations of her oft scandalous, always self-absorbed diary entries. She had a special (read: disturbing) way of looking at and writing about the many fascinating and notable men and women who passed through her life (and bed); as it suited her purposes, she either put compliments about herself into their mouths, distorted their actual words or relationships, or wrote in shocking detail, accounts of their sexual prowess or weaknesses. When American publishers expressed interest, but ultimately hesitated to risk failure or controversy, Anaïs wrote thinly veiled attempts at fiction, lifting, in many cases, material directly from the diaries. During her struggle for the recognition and “love” she adamantly felt she deserved, she continued to live. And to write. And to seek publication.

Her determination to live life on her terms—bi-coastal, bi-curious, trapeze-walking woman playing helpmate to banker husband #1 while luxuriating in wealth, traveling the world and coming home to scrub floors and build a life with well-meaning, hard-working forest ranger husband #2—and to write and edit and publish the work she thought most important, speak volumes to the emerging and dubious woman/writer in me.

Several things struck me about Anaïs from the beginning of my investigation into her life. Back in graduate school, probably sooner, someone mentioned her to me, urging me to read The Diaries upon discovery of my (then-?) lifelong commitment to penning private truths in diary-form. Something of a renegade (more like a house that was not at home) in my MFA program, I was the only non-fiction writer (oh, and the only Black person) in a sea of (fiction) novelists (…who were white). A non-fiction novel was something of an anomaly back then; certainly few knew how to approach it, much less advise me on it. As it became clear that I was interested in using entries culled from old diaries in my current work, as well as correspondence (letters, emails, etc.), the interest in my collection was piqued and for the first time, I began to look at my work as a diarist more seriously. Having begun the diaries as a teen, I had worked almost 20 years on them consistently, filling book after book after book without stopping

I wrote my first diary entry in a steno pad with a missing cover at age 13 in a household dominated by my Scorpio/Jehovah’s Witness mother. That summer, after earning my last whupping for refusing to participate in a JW religious meeting, I remember feeling compelled to document how very much I disliked my mother and found her to be quite abusive. I recorded, in painstaking and possibly amplified detail (the very beginnings and beauty/flaws of real memoir), the many abuses I perceived myself to suffer on a near-daily basis. My mother’s violent intrusions into my peaceful inner world, the sheer evil of her intolerance, and the deep injustices I (felt I) survived found permanent resting places on early pages of countless spiral notebooks, many of which lost their covers over the years but survived my childhood, my mother, various boyfriends and apartments, drugs, and the first half of my own motherhood. My commitment to writing in my adult collection of gifted, beautifully bound journals waned only slightly in comparison, and only in recent years…these last 4 years…

I spend the bulk of my time tending toward my child; even if I am not doing something for her directly, I am doing something mindful of my responsibility and commitment to her. Always looking for jobs, and thinking my life should be Much Better than what I’ve been able to make it, I am just starting to realize the pain of not writing in those diaries so much. When I look back (God, I fear looking back in 30 years from now and finding it still/more true), the less I’ve journaled (MS Word offered me journeyed as a correct spelling of the apparently-incorrect journaled; perhaps it is right), the less successful I’ve been. I used to write my day-to-day and certainly my emotional interiors; but also, plans and goals were recorded and dutifully checked off, single motherhood be damned.

Nowadays, I tap-tap away on my laptop while my ballpoints dry up where they’re stored stuffed, with yellow highlighters and editor-red pencils, in a nifty Office Depot cup of black metal mesh, and my handwritten entries in ink of every color on every page stand straight behind vertical and closed covers (oh so many new ones! continuously gifted at every birthday, wait for me, nary a word written in any of them!), neat and in tact, parallel to the years of worn books preceding them—those with ragged gold edged pages, nude self-portraits in Sharpie pens outside and within, and ownership declared without rue on spines: “TIFFANY’S SHIT”—shelved tight on a shelf in a room of my house.

When I was in graduate school, after reading some of the diary excerpts I wove into my prose, a professor took enough interest to solicit financial support to have them transcribed. During my final semester, afraid to send my originals off, I was given a faculty copy code and permission to photocopy each and every page of those 30+ diaries and I began the work of transcribing them myself.

Clearly, I have yet to express the dedication of my latest literary heroines, Zora or Anaïs for I never finished the work—but then, I am only 33. I have some time yet (I pray). And many books left to fill. When I sat down to transcribe them, and translate perhaps for the world, that angst-ridden, ever-curious, unabashed voice of Tiffany at 13 and 19 and 27, I immediately and willingly lost myself in worlds that have changed so much externally, but in many ways, remain the same within. I still dream and wish and want and question, constantly. I don’t understand God any better than I did at 13 and it seems I have never been satisfied with more than the current moment. Gratitude is always there, as well as a healthy understanding of reality, but I have never been content with my lot.

Though I pray my success is not earned posthumously (if it should continue when I die, great! But geeezus, can I enjoy it a little while I breathe?), I can only hope that by the time I am as frail as Anaïs was when she made her last entries, or even as Zora (who I neglected to write about after reading her biography; God, how it moved me…), who died in poverty (and obscurity!) although content with her little garden and big slice of a life well-lived…I can only hope that by the end, I have said everything I needed to say. Because as much as I’ve written, in all the places, and to all the people, this still feels so very much like the beginning.