Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (7 page)

Hugo reads one of my old journals, the John Erskine period, Boulevard Suchet, and almost sobs with pity for me, realizing that I was living in The House of the Dead. I did not succeed in resuscitating him until he almost lost me to John and to suicide.

More letters from Henry, parts of his book as he writes it, quotations, notes while listening to Debussy and Ravel, on the back of menus of small restaurants in shabby quarters. A torrent of realism. Too much of it in proportion to imagination, which is growing smaller. He will not sacrifice a moment of life to his work. He is always rushing and writing about work and in the end never really tackling it, writing more letters than books, doing more investigating than actual creation. Yet the form of his last book, discursive, a chain of associations, reminiscences is very good. He has assimilated his Proust, minus the poetry and the music.

I have dipped into obscenity, dirt, and his world of "shit, cunt, prick, bastard, crotch, bitch" and am on the way up again. The symphonic concert today confirmed my mood of detachment. Again and again I have traversed the regions of realism and found them arid. And again I return to poetry. I write to June. It is almost impossible. I can't find words. I make such a violent effort of the imagination to reach out to her, to my image of her. And when I come home, Emilia says, "There is a letter for the Señorita." I run upstairs, hoping it is a letter from Henry.

I want to be a strong poet, as strong as Henry and John are in their realism. I want to combat them, to invade and annihilate them. What baffles me about Henry and what attracts me are the flashes of imagination, the flashes of insight, and the flashes of dreams. Fugitive. And the depths. Rub off the German realist, the man who "stands for shit," as Wambly Bald says to him, and you get a lusty imagist. At moments he can say the most delicate or profound things. But his softness is dangerous, because when he writes he does not write with love, he writes to caricature, to attack, to ridicule, to destroy, to rebel. He is always against something. Anger incites him. I am always for something. Anger poisons me. I love, I love, I love.

Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives.

I spent a tense, harrowing day yesterday with Eduardo, who resuscitates the past. He was the first man I loved. He was weak, sexually. I suffered from his weakness, I know now. That pain was buried. It was newly aroused when we met again two years ago. It was buried again.

I have had masculine elements in me always, knowing exactly what I want, but not until John Erskine did I love strong men; I loved weak or timorous, overfine men. Eduardo's vagueness, indecision, ethereal love, and Hugo's frightened love caused me torment and bewilderment. I acted delicately and yet as a man. It would have been more feminine to have been satisfied with the passion of other admirers, but I insisted on my own selection, on a fineness of nature which I found in a man weaker than I was. I suffered deeply from my own forwardness as a woman. As a man, I would have been glad to have what I desired.

Now Hugo is strong, but I am afraid it is too late. The masculine in me has made too much progress. Now even if Eduardo wanted to live with me (and yesterday he was tormented by an impotent jealousy), we couldn't do so because creatively I am stronger than he is, and he couldn't bear it. I have discovered the joy of a masculine direction of my life by my courting of June. Also I have discovered the terrible joy of dying, of disintegrating.

Sitting by the fire with Hugo last night, I began to cry, the woman sundered again into a woman-man, begging that by a miracle, by the great human strength of poets, she might be saved. But the animal strength which satisfies woman lies in brutal men, in the realists like Henry, and from him I do not want love. I prefer to move forward and choose my June, freely, like a man. But my body will die, because I have a sensual body, a living body, and there is no life in the love between women.

Hugo alone holds me, still, with his idolatry, his warm human love, his maturity, for he is the oldest among all of us.

I want to write so wonderfully to June that I can't write to her at all. What a pathetically inadequate letter:

"I cannot believe that you will not come again towards me from the darkness of the garden. I wait sometimes where we used to meet, expecting to feel again the joy of seeing you walk towards me out of a crowd—you, so distinct and unique.

"After you went away the house suffocated me. I wanted to be alone with my image of you....

"I have taken a studio in Paris, a small, shaky place, and attempt to run away only for a few hours a day, at least. But what is this other life I want to lead without you? I have to imagine that you are there, June, sometimes. I have a feeling that I want to be you. I have never wanted to be anyone but myself before. Now I want to melt into you, to be so terribly close to you that my own self disappears. I am happiest in my black velvet dress because it is old and is torn at the elbows.

"When I look at your face, I want to let go and share your madness, which I carry inside of me like a secret and cannot conceal any more. I am full of an acute, awesome joy. It is the joy one feels when one has accepted death and disintegration, a joy more terrible and more profound than the joy of living, of creating."

Yesterday at the Café de la Rotonde Henry told me he had written me a letter which he had torn up. Because it was a crazy letter. A love letter. I received this silently, without surprise. I had sensed it. There is so much warmth between us. But I am unmoved. Deep down. I am afraid of this man, as if in him I had to face all the realities which terrify me. His sensual being affects me. His ferocity, enveloped in tenderness, his sudden seriousness, the heavy, rich mind. I am a bit hypnotized. I observe his fine soft white hands, his head, which looks too heavy for his body, the forehead about to burst, a shaking head, harboring so much that I love and hate, that I want and fear. My love of June paralyzes me. I feel warmth towards this man, who can be two separate beings. He wants to take my hand and I appear not to notice. I make a swift gesture of flight.

I want his love to die. What I have been dreaming of, just such a man's desire of me, now I reject. The moment has come to sink in sensuality, without love or drama, and I cannot do it.

He misunderstands so much: my smile when he talks about June at first fighting off all his ideas violently and later absorbing them and expressing them as if they were her own. "It happens to all of us," he says, looking at me aggressively, as if my smile had been one of disdain. I believe he wants to fight. After the violence, the bitterness, the brutality, the ruthlessness he has known, my state of mellowness annoys him. He finds that, like a chameleon, I change color in the café, and perhaps lose the color I have in my own home. I do not fit into his life.

His life—the underworld, Careo, violence, ruthlessness, monstrosity, gold digging, debauch. I read his notes avidly and with horror. For a year, in semisolitude, my imagination has had time to grow beyond measure. At night, in a fever, Henry's words press in on me. His violent, aggressive manhood pursues me. I taste that violence with my mouth, with my womb. Crushed against the earth with the man over me, possessed until I want to cry out.

At the Café Viking, Henry talks about discovering my real nature one evening when I danced the rumba for a few minutes alone. He still remembers a passage in my novel, wants to have the manuscript, to be able to read it over He says it is the most beautiful writing he has read lately. Talks about the fantastic possibilities in me: his first impression of me standing on the doorstep—"so lovely"— and then sitting in the big black armchair "like a queen." He wants to destroy the "illusion" of my great honesty.

I read him what I wrote on the effect of his notes. He said I could only write like that, with imaginative intensity, because I had not lived out what I was writing about, that the living-out kills the imagination and the intensity, as happens to him.

Note to Henry in purple ink on silver paper: "The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have. Excessive living weighs down the imagination. We will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails."

Writers make love to whatever they need. Henry conforms to my image and tries to be more subtle, becomes poetic. He said he could very well imagine June saying to him, "I would not mind your loving Anaïs because it is Anaïs."

I affect their imaginations. It is the strongest power.

I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they never could have. The woman who aroused them romantically holds them. I see the tenacious yearning in Eduardo. Hugo will never be healed of me. Henry can never really love again after loving June.

When I talk about her, Henry says, "What a lovely way you have of putting things."

"Perhaps it is an evasion of facts."

He says to me exactly what I wrote some time ago: I submit to life and then I find beautiful explanations for my act. I make the piece fit into the creative weaving.

"You and June wanted to embalm me," I say.

"Because you seem so utterly fragile."

I dream of a new faithfulness, with stimulation from others, imaginative living, and my body only for Hugo.

I lie. That day in the café, sitting with Henry, seeing his hand tremble, hearing his words, I was moved. It was madness to read him my notes, but he incited me; it was madness to drink and to answer his questions while staring into his face, as I have never dared to look at any man. We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.

He spoke of "Hugo's great kindness, but he is a boy, a boy." Henry's older mind, of course. I, too, am always waiting for Hugo, but leaping ahead, sometimes perfidiously, with the older mind. I try to leave my body out of it. But I have been caught. And so when I come home I extricate myself and write him that note.

And meanwhile I read his love letter over ten or fifteen times, and even if I do not believe in his love, or in mine, the nightmare of the other night holds me. I am possessed.

"Beware," said Hugo, "of being trapped in your own imaginings. You instill sparks in others, you charge them with your illusions, and when they burst forth into illuminations, you are taken in."

We walk in the forest. He plays with Banquo. He reads by my side. His intuition tells him: be kind, be sweet, be blind. With me, it is the craftiest and cleverest method. It is the way to torture me, to win me. And I think of Henry every moment, chaotically, fearing his second letter.

I meet Henry in the dim, cavernous Viking. He has not received my note. He has brought me another love letter. He almost cries out, "You are veiled now. Be real! Your words, your writing, the other day. You were real." I deny it. Then he says humbly, "Oh, I knew it, I knew I was too presumptuous to aspire to you. I'm a peasant, Anaïs. Only whores can appreciate me." That brings out the words he wants to hear. Feebly, we argue. We recall the beginning: we began with the mind. "Did we, but did we?" says Henry, trembling. And suddenly he leans over and engulfs me in an endless kiss. I do not want the kiss to end. He says, "Come to my room."

How stifling the veil about me, which Henry struggles to tear, my fear of reality. We are walking to his room, and I do not feel the ground, but I feel his body against mine. He says, "Look at the carpet on the stairs, it is worn," and I do not see, I only feel the ascension. My note is in his hands. "Read it," I say, at the bottom of the stairs, "and I'll leave you." But I follow him. His room, I do not see. When he takes me in his arms, my body melts. The tenderness of his hands, the unexpected penetration, to the core of me but without violence. What strange, gentle power.

He, too, cries out, "It is all so unreal, so swift."

And I see another Henry, or perhaps the same Henry who walked that day into my house. We talk as I wished we would talk, so easily, so truly. I lie on his bed covered by his coat. He watches me.

"You expected—more brutality?"

His mountains of words, of notes, of quotations are sundered. I am surprised. I did not know this man. We were not in love with each other's writing. But what are we in love with now? I cannot bear the picture of June's face on the mantelpiece. Even in the photograph, it is uncanny, she possesses us both.

I write crazy notes to Henry. We cannot meet today. The day is empty. I am caught. And he? What does he feel? I am invaded, I lose everything, my mind vacillates, I am only aware of sensations.

There are moments in the day when I do not believe in Henry's love, when I feel June dominating both of us, when I say to myself, "This morning he will awake and realize he loves no one but June." Moments when I believe, madly, that we are going to live something new, Henry and I, outside of June's world.

How has he imposed truth on me? I was about to take flight from the prison of my imaginings, but he takes me to his room and there we live a dream, not a reality. He places me where he wants to place me. Incense. Worship. Illusion. And all the rest of his life is effaced. He comes with a new soul to this hour. It is the sleeping potion of fairy tales. I lie with a burning womb and he scarcely notices it. Our gestures are human, but there is a curse on the room. It is June's face. I remember, with great pain, one of his notes: "life's wildest moment—June, kneeling on the street." Is it June or Henry I am jealous of?

He asks to see me again. When I wait in the armchair in his room, and he kneels to kiss me, he is stranger than all my thoughts. With his experience he dominates me. He dominates with his mind, too, and I am silenced. He whispers to me what my body must do. I obey, and new instincts rise in me. He has seized me. A man so human; and I, suddenly brazenly natural. I am amazed at my lying there in his iron bed, with my black underwear vanquished and trampled. And the tight secrecy of me broken for a moment, by a man who calls himself "the last man on earth."