A letter from Anaïs Nin to Michael Fraenkel, November 15, 1936
Dear Michael:
Just got your note today when the sale is all over! I thought I had written you that it was to take place on Saturday…
So Louveciennes is dead. Until the last moment, even during the drabness of an auction sale in a darkening courtyard, it perished in shining with a peculiar glow. The lights were turned on in the empty house, curtainless, furnitureless, and because of the color on the walls, the light was beautiful, beautiful and exotic shining on a bunch of peasants and furniture dealers like the light of a Mosque..I had no regrets, except for the joys I knew there, but as the sorrows exceeded the joys by far I was full of anger and relief that it should die. Every home I make is the same way. It is a creation, but it is also a spider web, it shines, glows and also chokes me. I should like without a home, yet I am constantly building up a warm corner, the sensuality of velvet and curtains and pillows and rugs envelops me over and over again. Conflict between the adventurer and the woman..always. But I have learned ..to make the home less important, very light now, this place we have, like the carcass of a turtle, just enough to cover one..
I got drunk on selling, on the humor of seeing each object I lived with exposed to the eyes of strangers, discussed, gambled on..I wanted to go on and sell everything, wake up without possessions. Sell the Diary, per volume, two or three francs. Sell everything and wake up light! Without possessions. But here I am in a nest, Arabian bed and your table which I like so much to work on, curtains and soft lights, and choking in a silver spider web of affections, human attachments, homes and husbands and lovers and friends and children and dogs and cats and so many things to be loved!
To have few possessions helps you to live in the present. Alors.
Quoique..
You have been very good to us, more human, more good than Hugh’s own family, and I am grateful, you know that..
Eduardo is in London to meet the surrealists there and forget the boy..Hugh is putting felt around the window edges..You should not go to New York if it makes you unhappy, spiritually..just to be settled somewhere. One can only settle down in a place one is in harmony with.
Anais