The Mystic of Sex

Anais Nin wrote this essay about D.H. Lawrence in October, 1930 under a pseudonym. It became the basis for her first book, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study.

In it, she describes Lawrence as "against tepid living and tepid loves. He resented the lack of feeling in people, or what is worse, the lack of expression of such feelings; he wanted a fulfillment of physical life equal to the mental; he wanted to reawaken impulse, and the clairvoyance of our intuitions." He had an emotional knowledge that appealed to her.

She understood him; she identified with him; his words resonated with her. Even though Lawrence writes about sex, he does so with sensitivity, as a poet would. Anais writes that "he described perfectly two sides of life: the sexual and the mystical." The physical and a second world.

Anais Nin's study of D.H. Lawrence helped her discover herself, both as a writer and as a woman.

A Slippery Floor

This is the last story in the Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories collection. In it, a woman named Anita who seems to represent Anais Nin is a Spanish dancer: "she wanted a fantastic destiny instead of a wise one, brilliance instead of harmony, endless voyages, the perpetually shifting ground of stage life, rather than security."

Anita's mother in the story seems to represent her father in real life: "I had a Mother I have never known who never denied herself of any whim, however much it hurt others. She left home on account of one of them. I just got it into my head I would be as unlike my Mother as possible." Anita's mother is an actress and always uses this as an excuse for her behavior.

After a few months of performances, a woman appears in Anita's dressing room after the show. It is her mother, who goes by her stage name of Vivien and who approves of Anita because of her profession; Vivien feels she and Anita have a bond. Her mother invites Anita to her home for supper. Then, she invites Anita to live in her home. Before long, Anita meets Norman, her mother's lover.

Vivien has affairs with other men but always goes back to Norman. He is about ready to leave her for good and is intrigued by Anita. Before long, Anita is posing for Norman who is an artist. They talk and spend time together and develop feelings for each other.

Anita wants to find out how alike or different she and her mother are. She approaches her mother and tells her there is a man who loves her, but he is with another woman; she asks for advice. Her mother tells her not to think of the other woman, not to let anything get in the way of love.

But Anita doesn't want to be like her mother; she wants to resist the temptation of taking another woman's man. She leaves her mother's home. Vivien believes that Anita has been cruel but can't see the cruelty of her own actions. Norman is hurt by Anita's leaving and tells Vivien he is leaving her to find Anita. Vivien is left alone.

There's A Slippery Floor out there. Take care of the feelings of others or you'll fall down as Vivien did.

A Spoiled Party

Mrs. Stellem wanted her party to be perfect. She dressed for it; she planned for it. Then a stranger - a woman - came to the party, and Mrs. Stellem became obsessed with who this woman was, who invited her, why she was here. The stranger was costumed beautifully and smiled constantly.

As the party wore on, it became ruined by the stranger. No one laughed while she was around; conversations ended in her presence. The party was dying much too soon, so Mrs. Stellem approached the stranger to ask her to leave.

When she looked into the eyes of the stranger, Mrs. Stellem could see that the strange woman could see right through her. She could see that her home, clothes, friends and marriage were a joke and not powerful or successful at all.

Faithfulness

This story has a couple of parts. In the first part, Aline is visited by Alban, a man she met at a party. He notes that her eyes are "tragically discontented," that she makes concessions to her husband (e.g. there are Economic Magazines lying around), and that she is "mentally unaccompanied." He predicts that she is going to have a lonely life of domesticity and that she is already so unhappy. The cure, he says, is friends.

After he left she reflected on what he said. It was true that she spent most days talking to herself. She began to look at her husband differently. She noted that he wore heavy suits and talked little and did things systematically.

In the second part of the story, Aline and her husband go to a party at Mr. Bellows' home; her husband gets tired, and they go home early. Bellows comes to Aline's home when her husband is away and plays musical portraits that he feels resembles various people. For Aline's husband, the music is scholarly and precise. He plays a portrait of Aline and her husband together - a "fantastic strain. In the middle of it he stopped with a violent dissonance." Bellows tells Aline that he could tell she doesn't love her husband.

When her husband comes home, she expresses anger that someone insists she doesn't love him, that she bravely hides her unhappiness. Her husband responds, "You dear, faithful, honest, little wife." How ironic.

The Peacock Feathers

This story is about peacock feathers bringing back luck when kept in the house, a superstition that holds true today, especially for actors and musicians.

A woman singer is given peacock feathers as a gift after a performance. Her husband of many years wrote her a farewell note shortly thereafter. She continued singing, met a composer, and one day at a concert he killed himself while she was singing. The episode ruined the applause she would normally have received.

She kept the peacock feathers and wrote her memoirs. They were received poorly and seen as calculated; she blamed the peacock feathers because she had written the memoirs with a pen made out of one of them.

The woman smoked a long pipe she was offered in a Hindu home. When she stopped smoking, she lost energy, looked old, lost her beautiful singing voice, but she continued smoking because it lulled her.

Her life was destroyed, and she was able to blame the peacock feathers.

The Idealist

They meet in an art class where Edward insists the class is drawing the wrong model; he feels they should be drawing Chantal instead. She agrees that the model has "an awful lot to dispose of" and has drawn a more refined version of her.

Edward criticized Chantal's drawing tools and helped her select more appropriate ones at a shop. They go for coffee at the Viking afterwards where she realizes he views her as someone from another time and place rather than the woman she actually is. He is idealizing, dreaming.

They have discussions about books and art and feel "mental communion."

One day the class realizes the model is cold and hungry. Edward becomes obsessed by the model; he needs her and cannot be satisfied. Chantal is no longer his ideal.

Tishnar

This little story is about a woman who dreams of being invisible, of being left alone, of being in another world, and when her dream finally comes true, she realizes she doesn't want those things at all.

It's a foggy day in Paris; the woman is walking, and things seem as if in a dream. She boards a bus and realizes it is destined for "another world" and won't stop until it gets there. She pleads with the conductor to stop, let her get off the bus. He says that people often make the same mistake she has been: wishing to be taken away.

But when they realize what they are leaving behind, they realize they really don't want to go.