Anais Nin and Jean Varda

By Larry Clinton
Before settling in Sausalito, legendary artist, boatsman and partier Jean Varda visited
Big Sur and decided to move there, making friends with Henry Miller and Anais Nin.
Anais would write about Varda frequently, including a slightly fictionalized profile of him in her novel “Collages.”
In her diaries, Nin wrote: “Varda is the only artist I know leading a free life today. He has reduced his needs. He only needs to teach once a week. The rest of the time visitors buy a collage now and then. He has no jealousy, envy, or competitiveness…
“Varda made his fantasy come true. His life is the one I admire. When I left San Francisco he had already acquired a ferryboat [the Vallejo] from which the motors and wheels had been extracted, leaving a pool-like center to look into. He was beginning to make windows for the deck. With time the ferryboat grew in beauty. It is moored in Sausalito, and attached to it is a sailboat. Everything is made by his own hands, with little or no money. He makes a little income by teaching at an art school. But he does not need much. He wears jeans, takes showers army bucket style. If money is low he does not hesitate to serve only fried potatoes and wine. He cooks in an enormous frying pan from the flea market, with enormous wooden spoons from Mexico. He is a poet, sublime ragpicker who turns everything into an object of beauty.”
In “A Woman Speaks,” Nin noted, “I learned from him this creating out of nothing. I learned from Varda, who made collages out of bits of cloth...Varda also went to the junkyard, and from discarded boats made himself a beautiful Greek sailboat. This is the power to create out of nothing we need to restore ourselves...being able to create something out of clay, out of glass, out of bits of material, out of junkyards, out of anything is the proof of the creativity of man and the magic of art.”
Later she recalled a visit from Varda in the ’60s.: “He came with three young women dancers, the three Graces I called them. He looks ruddy and strong, although he had a stroke. He tells me this stroke delivered him of the fear of death. ‘I saw wonderful colors, like an LSD vision. It was beautiful. I had no sense of parting from the world, just dissolving in colors’.”
Varda died in 1971.  In her diary, Nin recalled that he was well known for his “outrageous parties, with topless dancers and many lovely young girls.” Varda developed a reputation as a dirty old man, but Anais defended him, “The comment on Varda was absurd. Women have always courted men and there is nothing offensive about Varda’s courting of women.”

These quotes were found on the Web at www.vallejo.to/artists/varda_anais.htm.
    

Jean Varda near the end of his life.    Photo courtesy of Sausalito Historical Society