In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) Read Online Free Page B

matter of poetry versus intellectualization.
    Q: When you were twenty-nine, you wrote that there were two women in you: “one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning, and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, and despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.” How did you master yourself?
    AN: One continually leaps over the negative. I haven’t yet reached a point where I’m courageous every day. And the struggle keeps my diary alive. Now I have a sense of harmony, of integration. I feel free. The two women are there in me, but they don’t tear at each other. They live in peace.
    Q: How did you achieve this integration?
    AN: I started out terribly engrossed in dreams, the spiritual, the reverie. My father’s leaving us when I was nine shattered me. I had lived in books and imagination, so my journey into my self was different. I had to find the earth. My father’s leaving gave me the feeling of a broken bridge with the world that I wanted to rebuild. For me, everything came from literature: the lies, the stories, the dreams. Then, Henry Miller and his wife came into my life. In my thirties, I was concerned with experience, and I wrote my first book on D. H. Lawrence. When I had balanced the two worlds—earth and imagination—then came the period of the greatest creativity. I began to produce almost a book a year. At this stage in my life, the diary and fiction, the poetry and earth, are in harmony. I can work and travel and have relationships without conflict.
    Q: What is the story of your famous diary?
    AN: I began the diary at the age of eleven on the ship coming to America, separated from my father, to describe to him this strange land and entice him to come. It would enable him to follow our lives. The diary was begun to bring someone back. My mother didn’t let me mail it; and it became private, a house of the spirit, a laboratory. It became a refuge, a sanctuary. Now, there are perhaps two hundred volumes. I write perhaps twelve a year. I store them in filing cabinets in a bank vault in Brooklyn that costs fifty dollars every three months.
    Q: In an important sense, you are a revolutionary. What have you learned about yourself and other women through your solitary courage?
    AN: The importance of faith, the great importance of orientation and the inner life to withstand outer pressures. Also, the understanding that increased awareness
will
prevail and cause external changes. The importance of inner conviction. I had the love of my work and nothing could stop it.
    Q: Many critics have been alarmed by the highly charged atmosphere of your writing. Why are mystery, allure, and intrigue so often the weapons of your heroines?
    AN: I think it’s because I believe in communicating by way of the emotions, by imagery, indirectness, the myth. I think all my women have tried to live by the impulses of the subconscious. In all my novels, I have only one heroine in direct action, and even she discovers the necessity of the inner journey. I never believed in action, only in achieving life on a poetic level.
    Q: Love has always been the crucial issue for you in both your novels and diaries, but you seldom speak of it in an uncomplicated way. Why do you find love such an intricate mesh of relationships?
    AN: Love is complex. Because of the obstacles, personas, masks, a relationship is an arduous creation. Human beings construct labyrinths. If we live out all our selves, that becomes a very intricate pattern. But we have to keep a balance perpetually, the constant oscillations I try to describe.
    Q: The intuition is deeply a part of your novelistic method. Can you describe your fascination with divination in all its forms?
    AN: As a child, I was intensely aware of what people felt; I tried to confirm my intuition by studying psychology. My tendency to romanticize made me want