Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (8 page)

Writing is not, for us, an art, but breathing. After our first encounter I breathed some notes, accents of recognition, human admissions. Henry was still stunned, and I was breathing off the unbearable, willing joy. But the second time, there were no words. My joy was impalpable and terrifying. It swelled within me as I walked the streets.

It transpires, it blazes. I cannot conceal it. I am woman. A man has made me submit. Oh, the joy when a woman finds a man she can submit to, the joy of her femaleness expanding in strong arms.

Hugo looks at me as we sit by the fire. I am talking drunkenly, brilliantly. He says, "I've never seen you look so beautiful. I have never felt your power so strongly. What is the new confidence in you?"

He desires me, just as he did that other time, after John's visit. My conscience dies at that moment. Hugo bears down on me, and I instinctively obey Henry's whispered words. I close my legs about Hugo, and he exclaims in ecstasy, "Darling, darling, what are you doing? You're driving me wild. I've never felt such joy before!"

I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh.

After a concert, Hugo and I left together, like lovers, he said. That was the day after Henry and I acknowledged certain feelings at the Viking. Hugo was so attentive, so tender. It was a holiday for him. We were having dinner in a restaurant in Montparnasse. I had invented a pretext to call at a friend's for Henry's first love letter. It was in my pocketbook. I was thinking of it while Hugo asked me, "Do you want oysters? Take oysters tonight. It's a special night. Every time I go out with you I feel as if I were taking my mistress out. You are my mistress. I love you more than ever.

I want to read Henry's letter. I excuse myself. I go to the washroom. I read the letter there. It is not very eloquent, and I am touched by the fact. I don't know what else I feel. I return to the table, dizzy. This was where we met Henry when he returned from Dijon and where I realized I was happy he had returned.

On another occasion Hugo and I go to the theatre. I am thinking of Henry. Hugo knows, and he shows the same old tender uneasiness, the desire to believe, and I reassure him. He himself had given me a message that I should call Henry at eight-thirty.

So before the play we go to a cafe, and Hugo helps me to find the number of Henry's office. I joke about what he is going to hear. Henry and I do not say very much: "Did you get my letter?" "Yes." "Did you get my note?" "No."

I have a bad night after the play. Hugo gets up in the early morning to bring me medicine, a sleeping pill. "What is the matter?" he asks. "What do you feel?" He offers the refuge of his arms.

The first time I come back from Henry's room, stunned, I find difficulty in talking in my usual lively way.

Hugo sits down, takes up his diary book and writes wildly about me and "art" and how everything I do is right. While he reads this to me, I bleed to death. Before the end he begins to sob. He doesn't know why. I get on my knees before him. "What is it, darling, what is it?" And I say this terrible thing: "Do you have an intuition?"—which, because of his faith and his slow senses, he cannot understand. He believes Henry only stimulates me imaginatively, as a writer. And it is because he believes this that he sits down to write also, to woo me with writing.

I want to cry out, "That is so young of you; it's like the faith of a child." God, I'm old, I'm the last
woman
on earth. I am aware of a monstrous paradox: By giving myself I learn to love Hugo more. By living as I do I am preserving our love from bitterness and death.

The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and warmth of the house, I return with a deep contentment, as if this were the only condition for me. I bring home to Hugo a whole woman, freed of all "possessed" fevers, cured of the poison of restlessness and curiosity which used to threaten our marriage, cured through action. Our love lives, because I live. I sustain and feed it. I am loyal to it, in my own way, which cannot be his way. If he ever reads these lines, he must believe me. I am writing calmly, lucidly while waiting for him to come home, as one waits for the chosen lover, the eternal one.

Henry makes notes on me. He registers all I say. We are both registering, each with different sensors. The life of writers is another life.

I sit on his bed, with my rose dress spread around me, smoking, and as he observes me, he says he will never take me into his life, to the places he has told me about, that for me all the trappings of Louveciennes are right and fitting, that I must have them. "You couldn't live otherwise." I contemplate his sordid room and exclaim, "I think it is true. If you put me in this room, poor, I would start all over again."

The next day I write him one of the most human notes he has ever received: no intellect, just words about his voice, his laughter, his hands.

And he writes me: "Anaïs, I was stunned when I got your note this evening. Nothing I can ever say will match these words. To you the victory—you have silenced me—I mean so far as expressing these things in writing goes. You don't know how I marvel at your ability to absorb quickly and then turn about, rain down the spears, nail it, penetrate it, envelop it with your intellect. The experience dumbed me; I felt a singular exaltation, a surge of vitality, then of lassitude, of blankness, of wonder, of incredulity, everything, everything. Coming home I kept remarking about the Spring wind—everything had grown soft and balmy, the air licked my face, I couldn't gulp down enough of it. And until I got your note I was in a panic. I was afraid you would disavow everything. But as I read—I read very slowly because each word was a revelation to me—I thought back to your smiling face, to your sort of innocent gayety, something I had always sought for in you but never quite realized. There were times when you began this way, at Louveciennes, and then the mind crashed through and I would see the grave, round eyes and the set purse of your lips, which used almost to frighten me, or at any rate, always intimidated me.

"You make me tremendously happy to hold me undivided—to let me be the artist, as it were, and yet not forego the man, the animal, the hungry, insatiable lover. No woman has ever granted me all the privileges I need— and you, why you sing out so blithely, so boldly, with a laugh even—yes, you invite me to go ahead, be myself, venture anything. I adore you for that. That is where you are truly regal, a woman extraordinary. What a woman you are! I laugh to myself now when I think of you—I have no fear of your femaleness. And that you burned. Then I remember vividly your dress, the color and texture of it, the voluptuous, airy spaciousness of it—precisely what I would have begged you to wear had I been able to anticipate the moment.

"Note how you were anticipating what I wrote today—I refer to your words about caricature, hate, etc.

"I could stay here all night writing you. I see you before me constantly, with your head down and your long lashes lying on your cheeks. And I feel very humble. I don't know why you should single me out—it puzzles me. It seems to me that from the very moment when you opened the door and held out your hand, smiling, I was taken in, I was yours. June felt it, too. She said immediately that you were in love with me, or else I with you. But I didn't know myself that it was love. I spoke about you glowingly, without reserve. And then June met you and she fell in love with you."

Henry is playing with the idea of saintliness. I am thinking of the organ tones of voice and the expressions and admissions I get from him. And I am thinking of his capacity to be awed, which means to sense divinity. When I have been most natural, most womanly, rising from bed to get him a cigarette, to serve him champagne, to comb my hair, to dress, he still says, "I do not feel natural with you yet."

He lives rather quietly, almost coldly at moments. He is absent from the present. Afterwards, when he is writing, he warms up, begins to dramatize and to burn.

Our bouts: he in his language, I in mine. I never use his words. I think my registering is more unconscious, more instinctive. It does not appear on the surface, and yet, I don't know, for he was aware of it, of the weight of my eyes. The slipperiness of my mind against his relentless dissection. My belief in wonder against his heavy, realistic notes. The joy, when he does seize upon wonder: "Your eyes seem to be expecting miracles." Will he perform them?

Does he make such notes as: "Anaïs: green comb with black hair on it. Indelible rouge. Barbaric necklace. Breakable. Fragile."

That second afternoon, he waited for me in the café and I waited for him in his room, through a misunderstanding. The
garçon
was cleaning his room. He asked me to wait in the other room across the hall, a very small drab one. I sat on a plain, homely chair. The
garçon
came with another chair covered in red plush velvet. "It will be better for you," he said. I was touched. It seemed to me that Henry was offering me velvet-covered chairs. I was happy as I waited. Then I got a little tired and went to sit in Henry's room. I opened a folder entitled "Notes from Dijon." The first page was a copy of a letter to me which I had not yet received. Then he came in, and when I said, "I do not believe in our love," he silenced me.

I felt humble that day, before his strength. Flesh as strong or stronger than the mind. His victory. He held me with a kind of fear. "You seem so breakable. I am afraid I'll kill you." And I did feel small in his bed, naked, with my barbaric jewelry tinkling. But he felt the strength of the core of me, which burns at his touch.

Think of that, Henry, when you hold my too-fragile body in your arms, a body you scarcely feel because you are so used to billowing flesh, but you feel the movements of its joy like the undulations of a symphony, not the static clay heaviness, but the dancing of it in your arms. You will not break me. You are molding me like a sculptor. The faun is to be made woman.

"Henry, I swear to you, I find joy in telling you the truth. Someday, after another one of your victories, I'll answer any question you put to me."

"Yes, I know that," said Henry, "I am sure of it. I wait quite patiently. I can wait."

What I could have found ridiculous only touched me with its humanness: Henry crawling to find my black silk garters, which had fallen behind the bed. His awe on seeing my twelve-franc necklace: "It is such a fine, rare thing you wear."

When I saw him naked, he appeared defenseless to me, and my tenderness welled up.

Afterwards he was languid, and I was gay. We even talked about our craft: "I like," said Henry, "to have my desk in order before I begin, only notes around me, a great many notes."

"Do you do that?" I said excitedly, as if it were a most interesting statement. Our craft. Delight in talk of techniques.

I guess, Henry, that you are suffering from the effort at complete revelations about yourself and June, inexorable frankness but painfully obtained. You have moments of reserve, of feeling you are violating sacred intimacies, the secret life of your own being as well as of others.

At moments I am willing to help you because of our common objective passion for truth. But it hurts, Henry, it hurts. I am trying to be honest in my journal, day to day.

You are right, in one sense, when you speak of my honesty. An effort, anyway, with the usual human or feminine retractions. To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? Will June die? Will our love die, suddenly, instantaneously if you should make a caricature of it? Henry, there is a danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. That is why people will hate you.

And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magic forces of the world.

I want to both combat you and submit to you, because as a woman I adore your courage, I adore the pain it engenders, I adore the struggle you carry in yourself, which I alone fully realize, I adore your terrifying sincerity, I adore your strength. You are right. The world is to be caricatured, but I know, too, how much you can love what you caricature. How much passion there is in you! It is that I feel in you. I do not feel the savant, the revealer, the observer. When I am with you, it is the blood I sense.

This time you are not going to awake from the ecstasies of our encounters to reveal only the ridiculous moments. No. You won't do it this time, because while we live together, while you examine my indelible rouge effacing the design of my mouth, spreading like blood after an operation (you kissed my mouth and it was gone, the design of it was lost as in a watercolor, the colors ran); while you do that, I seize upon the wonder that is brushing by (the wonder, oh, the wonder of my lying under you), and I bring it to you, I breathe it around you. Take it. I feel prodigal with my feelings when you love me, feelings so unblunted, so new, Henry, not lost in resemblance to other moments, so much ours, yours, mine, you and I together, not any man or any woman together.

What is more touchingly real than your room. The iron bed, the hard pillow, the single glass. And all sparkling like a Fourth of July illumination because of my joy, the soft billowing joy of the womb you inflamed. The room is full of the incandescence you poured into me. The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.