Philip
Stella's second lover in the first novella: a handsome man who brings her joy and asks nothing, until she waits in his flat one evening and finds the rest of his life laid out on a dressing table.
To be enjoyed without being kept accounts on — the complaint he makes about women is that they compare notes on his performance.
The book
At a glance
- Stella's second lover, in "Stella"
- A Don Juan, and the magician of joy
- A wife, mistresses, and a public
- A different Philip, also a Don Juan, is one of Sabina's lovers in A Spy in the House of Love
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freePhilip is Stella's other lover in the first of the three novellas printed in Winter of Artifice, the 1939 book by the French-born American writer Anaïs Nin. Stella is a film actress who has spent the story tearing herself apart over a married man called Bruno. Philip is the opposite arrangement, and for a while it works.
She laughs at him when she first sees him, because he is too handsome and wearing what she calls Don Juan plumage, which has never impressed her. Then she watches him walk past the next morning and smile at somebody, and the smile is so free that she feels the air change. What follows has no pain in it at all: he arrives, he brings joy, he leaves, and she waits for him without dread.
The section is short and it turns on one evening. He asks her to wait for him in his own flat instead of coming to hers, and while she is alone there her hands go over his things and find that all the fingerprints on them are women's. Then she reaches the dressing table, and what is on it is not a stranger's but her father's.
This profile is drawn from the Swallow Press edition of 1948, read in the Internet Archive's scan of the book. Nin later gave the same name, and the same Don Juan role, to a singer in A Spy in the House of Love.
How the book draws them
- Too handsome to take seriouslyStella's first reaction is to laugh at him and turn away. She calls what he is wearing a wonderful Don Juan plumage, and says the Don Juan plumage has never charmed her.
- The smile that changes the airThe next morning she watches him walk ahead of her with a free, large, lyrical stride, and he smiles at his companion so brilliantly and so sensually that she feels a pang. It is a joy she has not had. She takes a deeper breath and notices the fog has gone out of the air.
- No pain in itNin is explicit that the absence of suffering is what tells Stella this is not love but enchantment. He goes away, she assumes he is off replenishing the supply, and she waits without impatience and without fear.
- Arriving to musicShe always expects him to turn up in a sleigh with bells on it, because as a child she heard sleigh bells and decided they were the sound of joy. She expects his cigarette case to tinkle like a music box when she opens it.
- "Women keep such strict accounts and compare notes to see if you are always at the same level!"Said while confessing his Don Juan fatigues with his head on her knees. She laughs at it, because to her he is only ever the magician of joy.
- The evening in his flatFor the first time he asks her to wait for him at his place rather than coming to hers. Alone and restless, she starts touching his things expecting them to give something of him back. Her fingers find the wife's hairpins, the wife's powder box, books dedicated by women, photographs of women.
- The silver toilet setOn the dressing table stands an immaculate, symmetrically arranged silver set, a replica of the one that charmed her childhood. She is certain the hairbrush will be fragrant. It is. Her father's silver had been her daily barometer: polished when he was happy, clouded when he was about to leave, gone altogether on the worst days.