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.Frances Steloff introduced him to me at the Gotham Book Mart.He took me out to lunch.He was dressed like a businessman, with a collar so tight that it constricted his neck.Yet his poetry was surrealistic and free.He has humor and softness, moss-green eyes, and the hesitancies of an adolescent while he masters a mature job.He came to the press "to breathe."Gonzalo designed a beautiful book of his poems, titled Quinquivara.We went out together last night.French restaurant, French wine, long talk, and he read his new poems.He had been on the stage, and now had a good job, a comfortable home in Mount Kisco, two children.He began to behave like a true southern poet, in spite of his business suit.On Sunday I wrote twenty-five pages.I have done portraits of Stella, Lillian, Hejda.The portraits are interiorized, and then moved outward.Frances dreamed that she looked for me in a little house by the sea, which had been inundated, but I was not drowned.The dream came after her reading about these women.Was it fear that I should go too deeply into the unconscious, and be drowned in it?Writing intensely: on anxiety, on a bicycle ride symbolic of disharmony and mistiming in relationship.It was a memory of a summer in France.Gonzalo and Helba were staying at a beach several miles from Saint-Raphaël, where I was visiting my father.Gonzalo and I agreed that we would each bicycle half of the way, and meet at an outdoor café on the beach.But because he was never on time, because he was lazy, and because he bicycled slowly, it always ended with me arriving ahead of time, and he not at the rendezvous until it was almost time for me to be starting back.Somehow this image seemed the only way to depict Lillian's temperament, active and dynamic, as against that of the man she loved, who was passive.I saw how Lillian's overactive role caused her the pain of not being able to mesh, to find the moment of contact.It seemed to me that this failed meeting told the whole story as it could not be told in hundreds of pages.Thinking of what seems like a trivial fact: Moira did not sew back the button that had come off her blouse.From there to the French "déboutonnage," which has a slight implication of exhibitionism.Unbuttoning.I thought of the oriental woman being too tightly bound and then unbinding herself to extremes.For days I was haunted by the memory of mirrors in a garden.I had seen them in Paris at the Rothschilds' house, where I was invited to a concert.While I listened to music by a vehement Italian pianist, I saw out of the window three full-length mirrors in the garden, reflecting pool and lawn.It was an incongruous sight, enough to arrest attention at the time.But why did it stay in my memory, an indelible image? I decided to write about it, to describe it.While doing so, expanding on it (on the assumption that every image which imbeds itself so deeply in our memory must contain a meaningful key to our unconscious), I arrived at an interpretation of it.The mirror reflected nature.The mirror was art, and the book I am writing is concerned greatly with symbolism, and with the conflict between art and nature.Unconsciously I had arrived at a key to the book, an image which clarified my meaning.Woman as nature, the mirror, poetry and art.At times I describe nature as nature, at other times I use the mirror.The mirror is also an expression of fear.There is a taboo on truth, a fear of truth.The mirror allows us to contemplate nature while out of danger.Through reflection, the story of the bicycle ride, which shows the absurd inequality (emotional or sexual) in the relationship, allows us to see it as ludicrous.We can laugh at her anxiety, a girl riding too fast, driven by the myth demon of anxiety: "I may arrive late, he may have waited and gone, he may think I am not coming." The naked garden in Paris, reflected in the three-faced mirror.People cannot bear the truth.They have placed mirrors where they can see bodies possessing each other (in all the assignation houses of Paris).I asked a friend who was in Belgium if he could find any copies of House of Incest in Bruges, where it had originally been printed.The Gotham Book Mart has requests and is out of copies.Letter from B.A., with the Canadian Army in Europe:Dear Miss Nin: Well, I have had a lot of adventures searching for a copy of House of Incest but unfortunately drew a blank today.Soon after I got your card I started to make inquiries.I first found Desclee de Brouwer, a very large firm but they had a fire a few years ago at their warehouse and all their English books were burned.The manager said there might be copies at certain stores so I followed all these leads for a week or so.Then I met Dr.de Brouwer himself who suggested the Sainte Catherine Press, just outside of town here.So I tried them and sure enough, they had printed it.But all their English books were hidden from the Germans and they would have to search for them.Today I went back to see them and they haven't even a printer's copy.The only place I can try now is Paris.The search was worth the trouble, though.I did meet at least twenty interesting families, one very beautiful girl, and drank three or four litres of fine cognac.I'm not finding it very hard to become Europeanized.When I wrote you last I had not read your books but I've finished them now and read some parts many times.I would be a very biased critic of this type of writing because it has been a weakness of mine for so long.I thought Virginia Woolf had gone as far as anyone in portraying delicate human emotions, but you've gone a head above her.Her emotions are always too refined.She never gets any earth or good wholesome sensuality into her work and you have got both.This style of yours gives you wonderful scope for going beyond even D.H.Lawrence at his best in the portrayal of the unusual and delicate human relationships
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