The Night I Danced with Anaïs Nin

by

Anatole Broyard

MANY years ago I went to party at Anaïs Nin's house on 13th Street in Greenwich Village. I was very young and rather impressed by Miss Nin. Hers was my first full‐scale literary party, and its smallest details still stand out in my memory.

I was surprised therefore in reading Volume 4 of the paperback edition of her “Diary,” to find myself, on page 182, saying and doing things of which have no recollection. I am described, for example, as dancing with Miss Nin, a pleasure I distinctly remember denying myself out of diffidence.

After dancing with her, I am reported to have said to the girl who accompanied me to the party, “ Anaïs is sensual.” According to the diary, the girl answered, “No, Anaïs is mystic.” Countered with: “No, Anaïs is sensual. Or perhaps she's a harmony of both.”

While I was pathetically eager to cut a figure, it is difficult for me to imagine myself saying these things. I was too much in awe of Miss Nin to pronounce on her sensuality. In fact, sensuality was not one of the things I noticed about her. There were too many other aspects intervening.


Nor do I recognize the diction as mine. “Perhaps a harmony of both." That particular turn of phrase suggests someone who speaks several languages. Also, I don't believe I was aware at the time of the harmony between the sensual and the mystic.


Was Miss Nin being kind in her diary? She may have thought to protect me against the notorious absurdity of youth, the vulnerability of an untried boy who was out of his depth. 

My memory is not infallible, I might have said: “This is a nice apartment,” or “Were you troubled by rats when you lived with Henry Miller on a houseboat in the Seine?”

It is possible that Miss Nin was indulging in poetic license. If I had known that she wanted poetry, I would gladly have accommodated her. I was steeped in the works of Wallace Stevens in those days, and there were all sorts of serviceable things I could have brought into play.

I might have said: “Life is an old casino in a park,” or “These days of disinheritance, we feast /On human heads.”

While we were dancing, Miss Nin might have said, as she did somewhere in her diary: “Think of the ballet exercises. The hand reproduces resistance to water.” She might have said, “It is art which is ecstasy, which is Paradise, and water.”

I would have replied: “My titillations have no footnotes /And their memorials are the phrases /Of idiosyncratic music.”

I can hear her murmuring, as if to herself: “It is possible I have never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire.”

And I'd come right back with: “Canaries in the morning, orchestras / In the afternoon, balloons at night.”

I wish we had danced. I console myself with the thought that, while I do not recall it, we may have. I see us doing a tango. We draw ourselves up to our full height, stare profoundly into each other's eyes. Miss Nin's are black, impenetrable. Is she thinking of something else, of the tango as a metaphor?

Our knees are flexed. Her right hand is flattened against my left. It is small, white and dry. Her left hand grasps my shoulder in an astonishingly powerful grip. My right hand is splayed in the small of her back.

We step out sideways, like Egyptian frontalistic sculpture. We take long, swooping steps, snap our heads right, left, right, plunge into a peristaltic turn. Our deep, forward dip is a dying fall.

The tango is “Caminito.” A woman sings in a hoarse, desolate voice: “Que tiempo ha borrado /Que juntos, un día /Nos viste pasar.” Miss Nin's eyes glitter. They are sad, wise, bottomless.

The next record is a rhumba. Miss Nin's expression is intense, almost painful. Her slender hips swivel to the beat, one‐two, one‐two. I see that her lips are moving. She can't be counting? It appears to me that her feet are not quite synchronized with her hips. The rhumba is an extraordinarily complex harmony of the sensual and the mystic.

Ah, now she has it, everything meshes. She even shakes her shoulders. The effect, however, is not Latin, not rhumba‐like. Her movements strike me as intellectual, even doctrinaire. Someone on the record cries “Agua! “ With a gesture of impatience, Miss Nin breaks off the dance.

We march across the room in a fast one‐step, our bodies locked in rhythmic determination. Miss Nin pumps her elbows ever so slightly. She surges forward, forcing me back. An end‐table and a lamp crash to the floor. The other couples press themselves against the wall to make way for us.

We walk out on the terrace.

Miss Nin plies a Japanese fan. A man called Dick, who has been cruelly rejected by Pablo, makes an insincere attempt to throw himself from the terrace. It is just as the diary says. A man called Vincent seizes Dick around the waist. He looks inquiringly at Miss Nin, afraid of committing a faux pas.

The girl I came with appears on the terrace. She seizes me around the waist, as if I, too, were about to throw myself off. “Let's go, gigolo,” she says. She is drunk.

I am obliged to carry her down the stairs. While she is admired for her 17 inch waist, the girl weighs 116 pounds. I am used to carrying her up, rather than down stairs. She has a bad heart and has been warned by her cardiologist that climbing stairs can kill her. Whenever we go anywhere, I carry her up the stairs. I once carried her up the grand staircase in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Some months later the girl will confess to me that she does not have bad heart, that it amuses her to be carried. But as I don't know this yet, I walk to Seventh Avenue with her in my arms.

It is early in the morning. A taxi passes, and I try to flag it by raising the girl as high as I can. It doesn't stop. When another taxi ignores us quite awhile later, I drape the girl, whose eyes are closed, on the hood of a parked car.

She opens her eyes. She looks over her shoulder to see where she is. Stretching out her arms, palms down, she embraces the car.

 “Hey,” she says, “I'm sensual.”

“Nay,” I say, “you're mystic. Or perhaps a harmony of both."

Credits:  This article was originally published in The New York Times in 1979.  It has been slightly edited for the sake of coherency.