Guest post: "Anaïs Nin: A Pageant of Phantoms" by Rehan Qayoom
"The Grand Guignol (located on the Cité Chaptal in Paris) was a real-life theatre of horrors (as opposed to one of fantasy), founded by the playwright and novelist Oscar Méténier..." - Rehan Qayoom
Occasionally on “when hope writes” I’ll publish guest posts by brilliant artists and writers. If you want to be a guest blogger on my Substack, please connect with me on LinkedIn or my website.
Today I’m sharing the incredible and incredulous experiences of Anaïs Nin at the Grand Guignol by Rehan Qayoom, a meticulous and passionate writer, editor, translator, and archivist.
Anaïs Nin: A Pageant of Phantoms
A potted history - The Grand Guignol (located on the Cité Chaptal in Paris) was a real-life theatre of horrors (as opposed to one of fantasy), founded by the playwright and novelist Oscar Méténier that opened its doors on 13th April 1897. It was originally constructed in the late eighteenth century as a Jansenist chapel attached to a convent:
[Méténier] … especially adored the wicked-looking cherubs with their crooked smiles that were carved into the beams of the vaulted ceilings, and the shallow church-like seats in the balcony. The anxious and cursed atmosphere of a huge confessional booth, mocked and wrongly used, appealed to his sense of the gothic. (Decades later, “Guignolers” would swear that they heard the actual whispers and chants of nuns during frenzied and agonizing segments of the horror plays.)[1]
The 1791 Reign of Terror saw the chapel destroyed and looted after which it was purchased by a blacksmith who repaired and repurposed the remains as his workshop ‘leaving untouched the wooden angels hanging from the paneled ceilings in the foyer, and the pseudo-gothic designs cut into the thick oak doors.’[2] This proved useful when it became a church once again in the late nineteenth century and from its pulpit the Dominican priest Henri Didon preached ‘fire-and-brimstone’ sermons through the 1870s about the inviolable and indissoluble sanctity of marriage, attacking the purveyors of adultery.[3] His unorthodox views soon led to his being banned by the church authorities. Thereafter the painter Georges Rochegrosse purchased the building for his studio in 1880. It was then purchased in 1896 by Maurice Magnier who intended to turn it into a playhouse for small-scale plays under the name Théâtre-Salon. However, the running of the establishment severely tested his mettle and proved short-lived and the following year Méténier (who was associated with the nearby Théâtre Libre) took over the bankrupt venue for his Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.
In the documentary film Ecco/This Shocking World (1963) which depicts the last performance at the Grand Guignol, murals are clearly visible in the auditorium, ‘the ground floor boxes have grills on them, which gives them the appearance of confessionals’.[4] Peche (a frequent visitor during the fifties and sixties), recalls the pervading smell of candle wax and incense suffusing the walls ‘Inside, there was a certain atmosphere and smell…Being an old chapel, maybe the smell was incense or maybe wax—I don’t know. It felt like plunging into a tomb. But the point was, it created a spooky atmosphere.’[5]
The first volume of the unexpurgated journals of Anaïs Nin, published in 1986 as Henry & June: From ‘A Journal of Love’ - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) was edited to read as a novel and is often erroneously categorised as fiction. Anaïs Nin at the Grand Guignol by Robert Levy published in 2019 is a fantasy novel, stylistically posited along the lines of Henry & June as a lost chapter of Nin’s diary but beginning in Paris in 1933, it actually corresponds to the period of the second unexpurgated volume titled Incest: From ‘A Journal of Love’ - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1932-1934). June has just deserted Henry on account of his affair with Nin.
Levy describes the Grand Guignol’s ‘heady and contradictory scents’ as ‘what D.H. Lawrence might refer to as fug: perfume and cigarette smoke, must and alcohol, greasepaint and dry ice. The building was once a chapel, and the space still carries something of the sacred, tapestries hung from the baroque wood paneling and arched beams decorated with carved gods and monsters, angels and demons, the vaulted ceiling thatched with fleur-de-lis and pierced by iron chandeliers.’
In the novel, after dinner on his first night back from London, Hugo (Nin’s husband) asks where she would like to go. She grabs his hand and begs to be taken to the Grand Guignol, remembering when she went there on ‘a certain cold December night’ with Hugo and Henry Miller in front seat of the car while she and June (Henry’s wife) were ‘nestled together in the back, huddled close and whispering shared secrets like schoolgirls.’[6] This conversation is recorded in the diary entry for 30th December 1931.[7] During the intermission they both go out onto ‘the little cobblestone street’ and Nin records their conversation in the diary as their contrasting blonde and brunette features attract the wayward glances of men. June stares into her eyes and tells her “You are the most graceful woman I have ever seen. You glide when you walk.” Nin takes her arm and they hold hands as they come out of the theatre and head to a café nearby. June will be leaving Paris soon and Nin invites her out to lunch at the American Express before she departs.
Also read: Anaïs in London
In his letter to Nin of 29th January 1932, Miller describes his destitution in Dijon, describing the dormitory at the Lycée Carnot where he is sleeping as being ‘cold as hell. The staircase reminds you of a setting for Edgar Allan Poe - or a sort of Grand Guignol tragedy.’[8] Miller would scribble notes on the back of these letters which Nin would sort out for him before the year’s end on the night of Christmas in December, referring to them as ‘Those notes on his adventures, his Bohemianism, his Bubu life, …’ (21st December 1932).
Later in the diary she writes ‘We may all write about sadism, masochism, the Grand Guignol, Bubu de Montparnasse[9] (in which the highest proof of love is for a pimp to embrace his woman’s syphilis as fervently as herself, a noblesse-oblige of the apache world), Cocteau, drugs, insane asylums, House of the Dead, because we love strong colors; and yet when we sit in the Café de la Place Clichy, we talk about Henry’s last pages, …’ (25th May 1932). Just the same, on another occasion in the January of 1933, when they meet at a café, he describes to her ‘his own Bubu life, his bumming life, relation to whores, starvations, etc … his worn shoes, his desperations.’[10]
As Nin explained earlier ‘It is said in Bubu de Montparnasse that a woman submits to the man who beats her because he is like a strong government who can also protect her.’ (March 1932). Marguerite, one of the patients of Dr. René Allendy’s (with whom Nin also had a sexual relationship which she dutifully transcribed in the diaries) referred to his fetish for flagellation when he ordered her to undress and pulled out his whip “Oh Anais, it was such bad theatre! It was Grand Guignol”, (March 1933). On 1st May Nin would describe him as split between a disturbing ghost and a sober idealistic and caring analyst ‘haunting that alcove, that Grand Guignol-French novel scene without grandeur and without sincerity.’ Again, she expresses her feelings of revolt towards him in the entry for 5th May and that she finds him as repulsive a ‘a Grand Guignol scene’.
Nin meticulously records a night of passionate sex with Miller in April of that year in Clichy (after he asks Fred Perlès, who has joined them for dinner and is obviously feeling drawn to Nin, to leave). As Miller drifts off to sleep, she thinks of Bubu de Montparnasse and hotel rooms, the way he ‘pushes up my leg, of his loving my buttocks.’ The dilemma that ‘He lies asleep in my arms and I do not love him.’ She explains to him a few months later, how she is at a loss to witness the ‘hard-boiled’ nature of the relationship between Miller and June in his attitude towards her:
I had hoped to clash with him, to face ridicule, brutality, to learn to fight and hit back and talk louder, but that he had completely failed to give me that experience. I had disarmed the Bubu who was going to make a hard-boiled woman out of me.
(July 1932).
She records another visit to the Grand Guignol in August and enjoying watching ‘the convulsions of a woman tempted by passion, lying naked on a black velvet couch’ as she is approached by another ‘lusty’ lady who proceeds to undress her.
Later, Nin recalls standing in front of 158 West Seventy-fifth Street in New York with Otto Rank, where she lived as a child with her mother and two brothers, remembering her childhood and how they used to live and how ‘It was there that I first invented the theatre of improvisation’ with her brothers and cousins, dressed in Christmas decorations and curtains, mosquito netting and shawls:
I had more success with my storytelling. We would turn off the lights, and I told stories until we terrified ourselves (Grand Guignol stories, horror stories, ghost stories). When we were all frightened enough to turn on the lights I knew I had achieved a good theatrical performance.
(November 1934).
In the diary for November 1941, Nin refers to the illness of Helba Huara, wife of Gonzalo Moré (with whom Nin had an impassioned love affair) as her Grand Guignol as she believes she exaggerated the extent of her illnesses with ‘terrifying performances …, oppressing us with her imminent death.’
In January 1956, she records a Grand Guignol performance (in the USA) by a German Jew by the name of Theodore, ending his show with the words “I am mad … mad … mad … After all it is lucky for me. If it were not for my madness I would have gone crazy long ago.”
In the spring of 1958, Nin revisits her old Parisian haunts - ‘I went to the grimy, soot-covered Grand Guignol Theatre which once gave us all chills of horror, petrified us with terror. On its stage were enacted all our nightmares of sadism, of perversion. It was the last performance. The theatre was empty. As a friend explained: “With the war, concentration camps, occupation horrors, what the theatre presented seemed mild and childish.” Only the words had passed into the dictionary, as an expression of sadism and torture. Only a phrase was left of scenes which took place in a chapel, to increase the feeling of desecration and evil.’ As described in The Four-Chambered Heart, the third of her five-volume novel sequence Cities of the Interior, it was ‘where knowing every scene was overacted to create horror finally created detachment and laughter.’
Nin describes seeing the film The Fugitive Kind (based on the Tennessee Williams novel Orpheus Descending) as ending in a Grand Guignol ‘but the early part is good’. In 1960, she writes to a ‘poet in prison’ telling him she likes Tennessee Williams’ ‘stories and novels better than his last plays which I felt were distorted to the point of vulgarization, what I call the Grand Guignol school … It belongs to the 1800’s. It takes place in a theatre built like a Catholic chapel, all wood and confessionals, and cloistered boxes, etc. Red carpets and old gaslight lamps. It is the old horror story, carried to exaggeration, grotesque and so far beyond belief that it creates laughter … It is always dangerous to go back to these places. One never knows at which point it will die. Well, the Grand Guignol has not died yet.’[11] It would finally close its doors in 1962 and exists today as the International Visual Theatre.
References
Bair, Dierdre. Anaïs Nin: A Biography. (1995).
Didon, Rev. Henri. Jesus Christ. 2 Volumes. (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd, 1893).
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Записки из Мёртвого дома [The House of the Dead]. (1862).
Ecco/This Shocking World. (1963).
Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale. Edited by John Haffenden.
The Fugitive Kind, (1959).
Gordon, Mel. Theatre of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962. (Feral House, 1988, 2016).
Hand, Richard J. and Michael Wilson. Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror. (Exeter University Press, 2002).
www.ivt.fr
Levy, Robert. Anaïs Nin at the Grand Guignol. (Lethe Press, 2019).
Mara, (1991).
Miller, Henry. Quiet Days in Clichy, (1956).
Letters to Anaïs Nin. (1965).
Nin, Anaïs. Linotte - The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1927-1931. (1978).
The Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1931-1934. (1966).
The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume Two: 1934-1939. (1967).
The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume Six: 1955-1966. (1976).
Henry & June: From ‘A Journal of Love’ - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932). Edited by Rupert Pole. (1986).
Incest: From ‘A Journal of Love’ - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1932-1934). (1992).
Cities of the Interior: The Four-Chambered Heart. (1950).
Phillippe, Charles-Louis. Bubu de Montparnasse [Bubu of Montparnasse]. (1901, English: 1932, 1953).
Pierron, Agnès. Le Grand Guignol: Le théâtre des peurs de la belle époque (Robert Laffont, 1995).
Quiet Days in Clichy, (1970).
Stephen, Jones. Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror. (BBC, 1997).
Williams, Tennessee. Orpheus Descending. (1957).
Rehan Qayoom is a poet of English and Urdu, editor, translator and archivist, educated at Birkbeck College, University of London. He lives in London.
For more by Rehan Qayoom, please visit his website at http://www.rehanqayoom.com/.
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[1] Mel Gordon. Theatre of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962. (1988, 2016). 20.
[2] Ibid, 18.
[3] Didon authored the two-volume biography Jesus Christ, which took him seven years to write during which he travelled to Palestine and visited universities in Germany; it was published in the English translation in 1893.
[4] Agnès Pierron. Le Grand Guignol: Le théâtre des peurs de la belle époque. (1995).
[5] Stephen Jones. Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror. (1997).
[6] The Grand Guignol is first mentioned in the fourth volume The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1927-1931 by Nena de la Torre to which she compares a ‘poetry conference’ she is attending along with Nin, her mother, brother and Mme. Varela (17th February 1928).
[7] The chronology of these early encounters between Nin and Hugh Guiler and Henry and June Miller varies. Nin’s biographer Deirdre Bair dates it 2nd January 1932 based on Nin’s diary which she argues is the ‘most reliable source because she noted the details of her developing relationship with HM every single day.’
[8] Henry Miller. Letters to Anaïs Nin. (1965).
[9] The eponymous hero of the novel by Charles-Louis Philippe, a popular figure who became a legend in his own right in the Paris of his time. T. S. Eliot wrote a preface for its English translation. He felt snubbed when he sent a copy to Emily Hale and she questioned why he sent it (ignoring his preface) and expressed her distaste. She later apologised and he said he was not offended by her dislike of it and was actually rather glad that she took offense. (See The Letters of T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale, (21st June and 14th July 1932). Similarly, in his letter to Nin of 22nd April 1932, Miller asks Nin if she likes the book.
[10] See Miller’s 1956 novel Quiet Days in Clichy. A film adaptation was made of it in 1970 and one of the second part in 1991 as Mara starring Juliette Binoche.
[11] Elsewhere in the diaries, Nin refers to the drug addicts that frequented the Grand Guignol and records a dream in which she saw a moving hand behind mountains not ‘like the sun, but like a Guignoll doll, in jerks.’ (Incest, 27th November 1932 and 25th March 1933).
I enjoyed reading this! I’ve never heard of Nin or the Grand Guignol🤔Makes me want to look into this more!
What a madly colorful, raunchy but if history! I walked right into it with this: “perfume and cigarette smoke, must and alcohol, greasepaint and dry ice. The building was once a chapel, and the space still carries something of the sacred, tapestries hung from the baroque wood paneling and arched beams decorated with carved gods and monsters, angels and demons, the vaulted ceiling thatched with fleur-de-lis and pierced by iron chandeliers.”