Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (3 page)

Drake no longer interests me in the least. I was relieved he did not come today. Henry interests me, but not physically. Is it possible I might at last be satisfied with Hugo? It hurt me when he left for Holland today. I felt old, detached.

A startlingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry's wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth.

Years ago, when I tried to imagine a true beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman. I had even imagined she would be Jewish. I knew long ago the color of her skin, her profile, her teeth.

Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me. Henry faded. She was color, brilliance, strangeness.

Her role in life alone preoccupies her. I knew the reasons: her beauty brings dramas and events to her. Ideas mean little. I saw in her a caricature of the theatrical and dramatic personage. Costume, attitudes, talk. She is a superb actress. No more. I could not grasp her core. Everything Henry had said about her was true.

By the end of the evening I was like a man, terribly in love with her face and body, which promised so much, and I hated the self created in her by others. Others feel because of her; and because of her, others write poetry; because of her, others hate; others, like Henry, love her in spite of themselves.

June. At night I dreamed of her, as if she were very small, very frail, and I loved her. I loved a smallness which had appeared to me in her talk: the disproportionate pride, a hurt pride. She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself. There is no June Mansfield. She knows it. The more she is loved, the more she knows it. She knows there is a very beautiful woman who took her cue last night from my inexperience and tried to lose her depth of knowledge.

A startlingly white face retreating into the darkness of the garden. She poses for me as she leaves. I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, "You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

"The only power which keeps you together is your love for Henry, and for that, you love him. He hurts you, but he keeps your body and soul together. He integrates you. He lashes and whips you into occasional wholeness. I have Hugo."

I wanted to see her again. I thought Hugo would love her. It seemed so natural to me that everybody should love her. I talked to Hugo about her. I felt no jealousy.

When she came out of the dark again, she seemed even more beautiful to me than before. Also she seemed more sincere. I said to myself, "People are always more sincere with Hugo." I also thought it was because she was more at ease. I could not tell what Hugo was thinking. She was going upstairs to our bedroom to leave her coat. She stood for a second halfway up the stairs where the light set her off against the turquoise green wall. Blond hair, pallid face, demoniac peaked eyebrows, a cruel smile with a disarming dimple. Perfidious, infinitely desirable, drawing me to her as towards death.

Downstairs, Henry and June formed an alliance. They were telling us about their quarrels, breakdowns, wars against each other. Hugo, who is uneasy in the presence of emotions, tried to laugh off the jagged corners, to smooth out the discord, the ugly, the fearful, to lighten their confidences. Like a Frenchman, suave and reasonable, he dissolved all possibility of drama. There might have been a fierce, inhuman, horrible scene between June and Henry, but Hugo kept us from knowing.

Afterwards I pointed out to him how he had prevented all of us from living, how he had caused a living moment to pass him by. I was ashamed of his optimism, his trying to smooth things out. He understood. He promised to remember. Without me he would be entirely shut out by his habit of conventionality.

We had a cheerful dinner together. Henry and June were both famished. Then we went to the Grand Guignol. In the car June and I sat together and talked in accord.

"When Henry described you to me," she said, "he left out the most important parts. He did not get you at all." She knew that immediately; she and I had understood each other, every detail and nuance of each other.

In the theatre. How difficult to notice Henry while she sits resplendent with a masklike face. Intermission. She and I want to smoke, Henry and Hugo don't. Walking out together, what a stir we create. I say to her, "You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination." She answers, "It is a good thing that I am going away. You would soon unmask me. I am powerless before a woman. I do not know how to deal with a woman."

Is she telling the truth? No. In the car she had been telling me about her friend Jean, the sculptress and poetess. "Jean had the most beautiful face," and then she adds hastily, "I am not speaking of an ordinary woman. Jean's face, her beauty was more like that of a man." She stops. "Jean's hands were so very lovely, so very supple because she had handled clay a lot. The fingers tapered." What anger stirs in me at June's praise of Jean's hands? Jealousy? And her insistence that her life has been full of men, that she does not know how to act before a woman. Liar!

She says, staring intently, "I thought your eyes were blue. They are strange and beautiful, gray and gold, with those long black lashes. You are the most graceful woman I have ever seen. You glide when you walk." We talk about the colors we love. She always wears black and purple.

We return to our seats. She turns constantly to me instead of to Hugo. Coming out of the theatre I take her arm. Then she slips her hand over mine; we lock them. She says, "The other night at Montparnasse I was hurt to hear your name mentioned. I don't want to see cheap men crawl into your life. I feel rather ... protective."

In the café I see ashes under the skin of her face. Disintegration. What terrible anxiety I feel. I want to put my arms around her. I feel her receding into death and I am willing to enter death to follow her, to embrace her. She is dying before my eyes. Her tantalizing, somber beauty is dying. Her strange, manlike strength.

I do not make any sense out of her words. I am fascinated by her eyes and mouth, her discolored mouth, badly rouged. Does she know I feel immobile and fixed, lost in her?

She shivers with cold under her light velvet cape.

"Will you have lunch with me before you leave?" I ask.

She is glad to be leaving. Henry loves her imperfectly and brutally. He has hurt her pride by desiring her opposite: ugly, common, passive women. He cannot endure her positivism, her strength. I hate Henry now, heartily. I hate men who are afraid of women's strength. Probably Jean loved her strength, her destructive power. For June is destruction.

My strength, as Hugo tells me later when I discover he hates June, is soft, indirect, delicate, insinuating, creative, tender, womanly. Hers is like that of a man. Hugo tells me she has a mannish neck, a mannish voice, and coarse hands. Don't I see? No, I do not see, or if I see, I don't care. Hugo admits he is jealous. From the very first minute they hated each other.

"Does she think that with her woman's sensibility and subtlety she can love anything in you that I have not loved?"

It is true. Hugo has been infinitely tender with me, but while he talks of June I think of our hands locked together. She does not reach the same sexual center of my being that man reaches; she does not touch that. What, then, has she moved in me? I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the eyes, the hands, the senses that only women have. It is a soft and subtle penetration.

I hate Henry for daring to injure her enormous and shallow pride in herself. June's superiority arouses his hatred, even a feeling of revenge. He eyes my gentle, homely maid, Emilia. His offense makes me love June.

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her. She will be June plus all that I contain.

We met, June and I, at American Express. I knew she would be late, and I did not mind. I was there before the hour, almost ill with tenseness. I would see her, in full daylight, advance out of the crowd. Could it be possible? I was afraid that I would stand there exactly as I had stood in other places, watching a crowd and knowing no June would ever appear because June was a product of my imagination. I could hardly believe she would arrive by those streets, cross such a boulevard, emerge out of a handful of dark, faceless people, walk into that place. What a joy to watch that crowd scurrying and then to see her striding, resplendent, incredible, towards me. I hold her warm hand. She is going for mail. Doesn't the man at American Express see the wonder of her? Nobody like her ever called for mail. Did any woman ever wear shabby shoes, a shabby black dress, a shabby dark blue cape, and an old violet hat as she wears them?

I cannot eat in her presence. But I am calm outwardly, with that Oriental placidity of bearing that is so deceptive. She drinks and smokes. She is quite mad, in a sense, subject to fears and manias. Her talk, mostly unconscious, would be revealing to an analyst, but I cannot analyze it. It is mostly lies. The contents of her imagination are realities to her. But what is she building so carefully? An aggrandizement of her personality, a fortifying and glorifying of it. In the obvious and enveloping warmth of my admiration she expands. She seems at once destructive and helpless. I want to protect her. What a joke! I, protect her whose power is infinite. Her power is so strong that I actually believe it when she tells me her destructiveness is unintentional. Has she tried to destroy me? No, she walked into my house and I was willing to endure any pain from her hands. If there is any calculation in her, it comes only afterwards, when she becomes aware of her power and wonders how she should use it. I do not think her evil potency is directed. Even she is baffled by it.

I have her in myself now as one to be pitied and protected. She is involved in perversities and tragedies she cannot live up to. I have at last caught her weakness. Her life is full of fantasies. I want to force her into reality. I want to do violence to her. I, who am sunk in dreams, in half-lived acts, see myself possessed by a furious intention: I want to grasp June's evasive hands, oh, with what strength, take her to a hotel room and realize her dream and mine, a dream she has evaded facing all her life.

I went to see Eduardo, tense and shattered by my three hours with June. He saw the weakness in her and urged me to act out my strength.

I could hardly think clearly because in the taxi she had pressed my hand. I was not ashamed of my adoration, my humility. Her gesture was not sincere. I do not believe she could love.

She says she wants to keep the rose dress I wore the first night she saw me. When I tell her I want to give her a going-away present, she says she wants some of that perfume she smelled in my house, to evoke memories. And she needs shoes, stockings, gloves, underwear. Sentimentality? Romanticism? If she
really
means it ... Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is just very sensitive, and hypersensitive people are false when others doubt them; they waver. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time it does not seem so very important that she should love me. It is not her role. I am so filled with my love of her. And at the same time I feel that I am dying. Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings.

When I tell Hugo the stories June has told me, he says they are simply very cheap. I don't know.

Then Eduardo spends two days here, the demoniac analyst, making me realize the crisis I am passing through. I want to see June. I want to see June's body. I have not dared to look at her body. I know it is beautiful.

Eduardo's questions madden me. Relentlessly, he observes how I have humbled myself. I have not dwelt on the successes which could glorify me. He makes me remember that my father beat me, that my first remembrance of him is a humiliation. He had said I was ugly after having typhoid fever. I had lost weight and my curls.

What has made me ill now? June. June and her sinister appeal. She has taken drugs; she loved a woman; she talks the cops' language when she tells stories. And yet she has kept that incredible, out-of-date, uncallous sentimentalism: "Give me the perfume I smelled in your house. Walking up the hill to your house, in the dark, I was in ecstasy."

I ask Eduardo, "Do you really think I am a lesbian? Do you take this seriously? Or is it just a reaction against my experience with Drake?" He is not sure.

Hugo takes a definite stand and says he considers everything outside of our love extraneous—phases, passionate curiosities. He wants a security to live by. I rejoice in his finding it. I tell him he is right.

Finally Eduardo says I am not a lesbian, because I do not hate men—on the contrary. In my dream last night I desired Eduardo, not June. The night before, when I dreamed of June, I was at the top of a skyscraper and expected to walk down the façade of it on a very narrow fire ladder. I was terrified. I could not do it.

She came to Louveciennes Monday. I asked her cruelly, just as Henry had, "Are you a lesbian? Have you faced your impulses in your own mind?"

She answered me so quietly. "Jean was too masculine. I have faced my feelings, I am fully aware of them, but I have never found anyone I wanted to live them out with, so far." And she turned the conversation evasively. "What a lovely way you have of dressing. This dress—its rose color, its old-fashioned fullness at the bottom, the little black velvet jacket, the lace collar, the lacing over the breasts—how perfect, absolutely perfect. I like the way you cover yourself, too. There is very little nudity, just your neck, really. I love your turquoise ring, and the coral."