Cities of the Interior
CITIES OF THE INTERIOR
by
Anaïs Nin
The Authoritative Edition
With character descriptions, publishing histories
and
comments by Anaïs Nin
Published by Sky Blue Press at Smashwords
Copyright © 2014 Sky Blue Press
Contents © 2011, 2014 The Anaïs Nin Trust
http://www.skybluepress.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Ladders to Fire
Main Characters
Publishing History
Prologue
This Hunger
Bread and the Wafer
Children of the Albatross
Main Characters
Publishing History
Introduction
The Sealed Room
The Café
The Four-Chambered Heart
Main Characters
Publishing History
Introduction
Beginning
A Spy in the House of Love
Main Characters
Publishing History
Introduction
Beginning
Seduction of the Minotaur
Main Characters
Publishing History
Introduction
Beginning
About the Author
More Titles from Sky Blue Press
PREFACE
The story of Cities of the Interior has never been told, and it is time to clear up misunderstandings. I have never planned my novels ahead. I have always improvised on a theme. My only preconception was that it was to be a study of women. The first book turned out to be Ladders to Fire. All the women I was to write about appeared in it, including Stella, whom I later dropped because she seemed so complete in herself rather than related to the other women. (Stella, with two other novelettes, Winter of Artifice and The Voice, was later published under the title Winter of Artifice by Alan Swallow.)
When Ladders to Fire was accepted by E. P. Dutton, I explained that it was part of a larger design, and that other novels would follow and round out the characters. The editors were aghast. They said the American public would never read a novel which threatened to continue, a “roman fleuve” as it is called in France. In 1946 the book was published as an independent novel, and nothing was said about development and continuity. For that reason, I did not develop a method of linking the various narratives.
I began the next novel, Children of the Albatross, as if it were a new story. Though the same characters appeared, the theme was altogether different. Dutton’s nervousness was dissipated. Children of the Albatross was published a year after Ladders to Fire, but the link had to be made by the reader (or the critics), and naturally it was not.
Then Dutton planned to wait four years before publishing the third novel, The Four-Chambered Heart, and I feared the continuity would be lost in the waiting, so I gave it to Duell, Sloan and Pearce. But it was still to take three years after Children of the Albatross appeared before The Four-Chambered Heart was published. Much was lost by never stressing the continuity and interrelatedness of the novels. Unlike Durrell’s Quartet, which was openly described as a unity, my novels (in a much earlier period) appeared without explanation. Duell, Sloan and Pearce turned down the fourth book, A Spy in the House of Love. It was finally done by British Book Centre four years after The Four-Chambered Heart saw print. The continuity was totally erased by then.
Finally, I published Solar Barque myself, making it a small book with interesting drawings by Peter Loomer, age 11. It focused on an episode of Lillian’s life. At the time I thought it contained all I wished to say, but like a piece of music which continues to haunt one, the theme continued to develop in my head; and I took it up again and carried it to completion.
Now there was a problem for my new and loyal publisher, Alan Swallow. Should we reprint Solar Barque with the new material? No one would notice then that it had been added to, and the reviewers would not review the same title twice. Swallow decided to make a new book with a new title: Seduction of the Minotaur. Some reviewers complained bitterly because they had already read the first part. Generosity was not exactly rampant, and again I could not come forward to explain how I worked. It might have compounded the difficulties.
When all the novels went out of print, and people wrote me asking for them, I published them together under the title Cities of the Interior (1959), and for the first time the continuity was established. This is the book with the addition of the second part of Solar Barque included in Seduction of the Minotaur. Now that the links between the novels are made clear, I hope the journey through the Cities of the Interior will be deeper and less difficult.
—Anaïs Nin, 1974
LADDERS TO FIRE
MAIN CHARACTERS
Lillian: Strong, masculine woman who doubts herself; wife of Larry, mother of Adele and Paul, and friend of Djuna; pianist who becomes pregnant by Jay, whom she works to support. She is unable to be happy unless she is with Jay; lover of Sabina, commits internal suicide at a party she and Jay host. Composite character based on the aggressive, passionate aspect of Anaïs Nin’s character that was reflected in her friend Thurema Sokol (see Mirages).
Djuna: Feminine friend of Lillian; as a child, lived in an orphanage; desires human warmth and tries to avoid pain. Memories of the past keep her from enjoying the present. Based on what Nin called “the mystic Anaïs” (see Mirages).
Sabina: Incendiary woman who dresses in red and silver, meets Jay at a café, and desires Lillian; attends a party hosted by Lillian and Jay. Composite character based on June Miller and the aspect of Nin that sought to emulate her (see Henry & June).
Jay: Hedonistic painter and lover of Lillian and Sabina; paints Sabina as a whore. Based on Henry Miller (see Henry & June).
Descriptions in part from Anaïs Nin Character Dictionary by Benjamin Franklin V
PUBLISHING HISTORY
The journey of Ladders to Fire is somewhat confusing: it contains parts of previously published books, and the book itself has undergone several significant transformations. Many of the passages in the second section of the book, “Bread and the Wafer,” are taken from the novella “Djuna,” which appears in the 1939 edition of The Winter of Artifice. In “Djuna,” the title character is romantically involved with the Henry and June Miller characters (Hans and Johanna, respectively, who are renamed Jay and Sabina in Ladders). This entire novella was scrapped (Nin asserted it was for reasons of censorship, but later claimed it was poorly written) for the 1942 American edition of Winter of Artifice (self-published by Nin’s Gemor Press), but it was rewritten and incorporated in Ladders to Fire. In 1945, Gemor Press published a precursor to Ladders, titled This Hunger, which was divided into three sections: “Hejda,” “Lillian and Djuna,” and “Stella.” When Nin signed with E. P. Dutton, Ladders to Fire consisted of “Bread and the Wafer,” “Lillian and Djuna,” and “Stella.” Nin expressed her final wishes about the content of the novel when she published it in Cities of the Interior (1959), where the text includes “This Hunger” (originally “Lillian and Djuna”) and “Bread and the Wafer.”
—Paul Herron, Editor
PROLOGUE
I have to begin where everything begins, in the blindness and in the shadows. I have to begin the story of women’s development where all things begin: in nature, at the roots. It is necessary to return to the origin of confusion, which is woman’s struggle to understand her own nature. Man struggled with nature, fought the elements with his objectivity, his inventions, and mastered them. Woman has not been able to organize her own nature, her simoons, her tornadoes, her obscurantisms, because she lacked the eye of consciousness. She was nature. Man did not help her in this because his interpretations, whether psychological, or intellectual, or artistic, did not seize her. And she could not speak for herself.
Today marvelous women speak for themselves in terms of heroic action, integrating the woman, mother, wife, inharmonious relation to history, to larger worlds of art and science. But many more, when entering action or creation, followed man’s patterns and could not carry along or integrate within them the feminine part of themselves. Action and creation, for woman, was man—or an imitation of man. In this imitation of man she lost contact with her nature and her relation to man.
Man appears only partially in this volume, because for the woman at war with herself, he can only appear thus, not as an entity. Woman at war with herself, has not yet been related to man, only to the child in man, being capable only of maternity.
This novel deals with the negative pole, the pole of confused and twisted nature.
The mirrors in the garden are the mirrors women must look into before they can go further. This is only the story of the mirrors and nature in opposition, and in the mirrors is only what woman dares to see...so far an incomplete woman.
—Anaïs Nin, 1946 Dutton edition
THIS HUNGER
LILLIAN WAS ALWAYS in a state of fermentation. Her eyes rent the air and left phosphorescent streaks. Her large teeth were lustful. One thought of a negress who had found a secret potion to turn her skin white and her hair red.
As soon as she came into a room she kicked off her shoes. Necklaces and buttons choked her and she loosened them, scarves strangled her and she slackened them. Her hand bag was always bursting full and often spilled over.
She was always in full movement, in the center of a whirlpool of people, letters, and telephones. She was always poised on the pinnacle of a drama, a problem, a conflict. She seemed to trapeze from one climax to another, from one paroxysm of anxiety to another, skipping always the peaceful region in between, the deserts and the pauses. One marveled that she slept, for this was a suspension of activity. One felt sure that in her sleep she twitched and rolled, and even fell off the bed, or that she slept half sitting up as if caught while still talking. And one felt certain that a great combat had taken place during the night, displacing the covers and pillows.
When she cooked, the entire kitchen was galvanized by the strength she put into it; the dishes, pans, knives, everything bore the brunt of her strength, everything was violently marshaled, challenged, forced to bloom, to cook, to boil. The vegetables were peeled as if the skins were torn from their resisting flesh, as if they were the fur of animals being peeled by the hunters. The fruit was stabbed, assassinated, the lettuce was murdered with a machete. The flavoring was poured like hot lava and one expected the salad to wither, shrivel instantly. The bread was sliced with a vigor which recalled heads falling from the guillotine. The bottles and glasses were knocked hard against each other as in bowling games, so that the wine, beer, and water were conquered before they reached the table.
What was concocted in this cuisine reminded one of the sword swallowers at the fair, the fire-eaters and the glass-eaters of the Hindu magic sects. The same chemicals were used in the cooking as were used in the composition of her own being: only those which caused the most violent reaction, contradiction, and teasing, the refusal to answer questions but the love of putting them, and all the strong spices of human relationship which bore a relation to black pepper, paprika, soybean sauce, ketchup and red peppers. In a laboratory she would have caused explosions. In life she caused them and was afterwards aghast at the damage. Then she would hurriedly set about to atone for the havoc, for the miscarried phrase, the fatal honesty, the reckless act, the disrupting scene, the explosive and catastrophic attack. Everywhere, after the storms of her appearance, there was emotional devastation. Contacts were broken, faiths withered, fatal revelations made. Harmony, illusion, equilibrium were annihilated. The next day she herself was amazed to see friendships all askew, like pictures after an earthquake.
The storms of doubt, the quick cloudings of hypersensitivity, the bursts of laughter, the wet furred voice charged with electrical vibrations, the resonant quality of her movements, left many echoes and vibrations in the air. The curtains continued to move after she left. The furniture was warm, the air was whirling, the mirrors were scarred from the exigent way she extracted from them an ever unsatisfactory image of herself.
Her red hair was as unruly as her whole self; no comb could dress it. No dress would cling and mould her, but every inch of it would stand out like ruffled feathers. Tumult in orange, red and yellow and green quarreling with each other. The rose devoured the orange, the green and blue overwhelmed the purple. The sport jacket was irritated to be in company with the silk dress, the tailored coat at war with the embroidery, the everyday shoes at variance with the turquoise bracelet. And if at times she chose a majestic hat, it sailed precariously like a sailboat on a choppy sea.
Did she dream of being the appropriate mate for the Centaur, for the Viking, for the Pioneer, for Attila or Genghis Khan, of being magnificently mated with Conquerors, the Inquisitioners or Emperors?
On the contrary. In the center of this turmoil, she gave birth to the dream of a ghostly lover, a pale, passive, romantic, anaemic figure garbed in grey and timidity. Out of the very volcano of her strength she gave birth to the most evanescent, delicate and unreachable image.
She saw him first of all in a dream, and the second time while under the effects of ether. His pale face appeared, smiled, vanished. He haunted her sleep and her unconscious self.
The third time he appeared in person in the street. Friends introduced them. She felt the shock of familiarity known to lovers.
He stood exactly as in the dream, smiling, passive, static. He had a way of greeting that seemed more like a farewell, an air of being on his way.
She fell in love with an extinct volcano.
Her strength and fire were aroused. Her strength flowed around his stillness, encircled his silence, encompassed his quietness.
She invited him. He consented. Her whirlpool nature eddied around him, agitating the fixed, saturnian orbit.
"Do you want to come...do you?"
"I never know what I want," he smiled because of her emphasis on the "want," "I do not go out very much." From the first, into this void created by his not wanting, she was to throw her own desires, but not meet an answer, merely a pliability which was to leave her in doubt forever as to whether she had substituted her desire for his. From the first she was to play the lover alone, giving the questions and the answers too.
When man imposes his will on woman she knows how to give him the pleasure of assuming his power is greater and his will becomes her pleasure; but when the woman accomplishes this, the man never gives her a feeling of any pleasure, only of guilt for having spoken first and reversed the roles. Very often she was to ask: "Do you want to do this?" And he did not know. She would fill the void, for the sake of filling it, for the sake of advancing, moving, feeling, and then he implied: "You are pushing me."
When he came to see her he was enigmatic. But he was there.
As she felt the obstacle, she also felt the force of her love, its impetus striking the obstacle, the impact of the resistance. This collision seemed to her the reality of passion.
He had been there a few moments and was already preparing for flight, looking at the geography of the room, marking the exits "in case of fire," when the telephone rang.
"It's Serge asking me to go to a concert," said Lillian with the proper feminine inflection of: "I shall do your will, not mine." And this time Gerard, although he was not openly and violently in favor of Lillian, was openly against Serge, whoever he was. He showed hostility. And Lillian interpreted this favorably. She refused the invitation and felt as if Gerard had declared his passion. She laid down the telephone as if marking a drama and sat nearer to the Gerard who had manifested his jealousy.