Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (11 page)

"I have been on my good behavior with you. But I warn you, I am no angel. I think principally that I am a little drunk. I love you. I go to bed now—it is too painful to stay awake. I am insatiable. I will ask you to do the impossible. What it is, I don't know. You will tell me probably. You are faster than I am. I love your cunt, Anaïs—it drives me crazy. And the way you say my name! God, it's unreal. Listen, I am very drunk. I am hurt to be here alone. I need you. Can I say everything to you? I can, can't I? Come quickly then and screw me. Shoot with me. Wrap your legs around me. Warm me."

I felt as if I were reading his most unconscious feelings. I felt all life embracing me, in those words. I felt the supreme challenge to my worship of life, and I wanted to yield, to give myself to all life, which is Henry. What new sensations he arouses in me, what new torments, new fear and new courage!

No letter from him after our day. He felt a tremendous relief, satisfaction, fatigue, just as I did.

And then?

Yesterday he came to Louveciennes. A new Henry, or, rather, the Henry sensed behind the one generally known, the Henry beyond what he has written down, beyond all literal knowledge, my Henry, the man I love tremendously now, too much, dangerously.

He looked so serious. He had received a letter from June, in pencil, irregular, mad, like a child's, moving, simple, cries of her love for him. "Such a letter blots out everything." I felt the moment had come for me to release my June, to give him my June, "because," I said, "it will make you love her more. It's a beautiful June. Other days I felt you might laugh at my portrait, jeer at its naïveté. Today I know you won't."

I read him all I had written in my journal about June. What is happening? He is deeply moved, torn apart. He believes. "It is in that way I should have written about June. The other is incomplete, superficial. You have got her, Anaïs." But wait. He has left softness, tenderness out of his work, he has written down only the hate, the violence. I have only inserted what he has left out. But he has not left it out because he doesn't feel it, or know it, or understand (as June thinks), only because it is more difficult to express. So far his writing has only issued from violence, it has been whipped out of him, the blows have made him wail and curse. And now he sits and I confide in him completely, in the sentient, profound Henry. He is won.

He says, "Such a love is wonderful, Anaïs. I do not hate or despise that. I see what you give each other. I see it so well. Read, read—this is a revelation to me."

I read, and I tremble as I read, up to our kiss. He understands too well.

Suddenly he says, "Anaïs, I have just realized that what I give you is something coarse and plain, compared to that. I realize that when June returns..."

I stop him. "You don't know what you have given me! It is not coarse and plain! Today, for example..." I am choking with feelings that are too entangled. I want to tell him how much he has given me. We are oppressed by the same fear. I say, "You see a beautiful June now."

"No, I hate her!"

"You hate her?"

"Yes, I hate her," Henry says, "because I see by your notes that we are her dupes, that you are duped, that there is one pernicious, destructive direction to her lies. Insidiously, they are meant to deform me in your eyes, and you in my eyes. If June returns, she will poison us against each other. I fear that."

"There is something between us, Henry, a tie which is not quite possible for June to comprehend or to seize."

"The mind," he murmured.

"For that she will hate us, yes, and she will combat with her own tools."

"And her tools are lies," he said.

We were both so acutely aware of her power over us, of the new ties which bound us together.

I said, "If I had the means to help bring June back, would you want me to do it?"

Henry winced and suddenly lurched towards me. "Ah, don't ask me such a question, Anaïs, don't ask me."

One day we were talking about his writing. "Perhaps you couldn't write here at Louveciennes," I said. "It's too peaceful, nothing driving you."

"It would just be a different writing," he said. He was thinking of Proust, whose handling of Albertine haunts him.

How far we are from his drunken letter. Yesterday he was disarming; he was so whole. How he absorbed! June rarely confided in him. Will he turn around and deny all his feelings? I teased him. "Perhaps all I have written is untrue, untrue of June, untrue of me. Perhaps it's hypocrisy." "No! No!" He knew. Real passions, real loves, real impulses.

"For the first time I see some beauty in it all," says Henry.

I am afraid of not having been truthful enough. I am amazed at Henry's emotion.

"Am I not the Idiot?" I ask.

"No, you
see
, you just see more," says Henry. "What you see is there, all right. Yes." He reflects as he talks. He often repeats a phrase, to give himself time to reflect. What goes on behind that compact forehead fascinates me.

The extravagance of Dostoevsky's language has re-leased both of us. He was a portentous author for Henry. Now, when we live with the same fervor, the same temperature, the same extravagance, I am in bliss. This is the life, the talk, these are the emotions which belong to me. I breathe freely now. I am at home. I am myself.

After being with Henry, I go to meet Eduardo. "I want you, Anaïs! Give me another chance! You belong to me. How I suffered this afternoon, knowing you were with Henry. I never knew jealousy before; and now it is so strong it is killing me." His face is terrifyingly white. He always smiles, as I do. Now he cannot. I am not yet accustomed to the sight of misery given by me; or, rather, given to Eduardo. It upsets me. Yet, deep down, I am cold. I sit there, seeing Eduardo's face distorted with pain, and I really feel nothing but pity. "Will you come with me?"

"No." I employ all the excuses that will not hurt him. I tell him everything except that I love Henry.

Finally, I win. I let him take me in a taxi to the station to meet Hugo. I let him kiss me. I promise to come and see him Monday. I am weak. But I don't want to hurt his life, maim him, deprive him of his newborn self-confidence. Enough of my old love for him survives for that. I warned him that I could destroy him, although I hated to destroy, and that I had found a man I couldn't destroy, that he was the right man for me. I tried to make him hate me. But he said, "I want you, Anaïs." And the horoscope says: we are complements.

The important thing is the response to life. June and Henry respond extravagantly, as I do. Hugo is dimmer, more listless. Today he came out of the dimness to a realization of
The Possessed.
I made him write down his thoughts, they were so wonderful. His best moments are very profound.

He represents truth. He is Shatov, capable of love and faith. Then what am I? That Friday, when I lay in three men's arms, what was I?

To Eduardo: "Listen,
cousin chéri
, I'm writing you in the train, going home. I am trembling with pain over this morning. The day seemed so heavy to me I couldn't breathe.... You have been beautiful with activity, life, emotion, strength. It is a tragedy for me that you should be at your highest moment when I love you best, only not sensually, not sensually. We are destined never to meet with equal feelings. Just now it is Henry who owns my body.
Cousin chéri
, I tried today for the last time to direct life, according to an ideal. My ideal was to wait for you all my life, and I waited too long, and now I live by instinct, and the flow carries me to Henry. Forgive me. It isn't that you haven't the strength to hold me. Would you say that you didn't love me before because I was less lovable? No. It would be as untrue to say you lacked the strength as to say I have changed. Life is not rational; it is just mad and full of pain. Today I have not seen Henry nor will I see him tomorrow. I give these two days to the memory of our hours. Be a fatalist, yes, as I am today but have no mean or bitter thoughts such as the idea that I played with you for my vanity's sake. Oh, Eduardo,
querido
, I accept pain which comes not from such motives but from real sources—real pain, at the treachery of life, which hurts us both in different ways. Do not seek the
because
—in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."

I came home and threw myself on the couch; I found it hard to breathe. In answer to Eduardo's plea I met him early this morning. He had spent two days feeling jealous of Henry, realizing that he, the narcissist, was at last possessed by another. "How good it is to come out of one's self! I have thought of you continuously for two days, have slept badly, have dreamed that I struck you hard, oh, so hard and that your head fell off and I carried it about in my arms. Anaïs, I am going to have you all day. You promised me. All day." All I want is to dart out of the café. I tell him so. His pleadings, softness, intensity vaguely stir my old love and my pity, the Richmond Hill love, with its vague expectancies, the old habit of thinking: of course I want Eduardo.

I fear he might shut himself up again in narcissism because he cannot bear pain. "To think I have come to worship your very bones, Anaïs!" I am faintly, faintly stirred, yet I want most of all to run away from him. I don't know why, I obey him, follow him.

I feel hurt while reading
Albertine disparue
, because it is marked by Henry, and Albertine is June. I can follow each amplification of his jealousies, his doubts, his tenderness, his regrets, his horror, his passion, and I am invaded by a burning jealousy of June. For the moment this love, which had been so balanced between Henry and June that I could not feel any jealousy, this love is stronger for Henry, and I feel tortured and afraid.

Yet I dreamed of June last night. June had suddenly returned. We shut ourselves up in a room. Hugo, Henry, and other people were waiting for us to dress and have dinner together. I wanted June. I begged her to undress. Piece by piece I discovered her body, with cries of admiration, but in the nightmare I saw the defects of it, strange deformations. Still, she seemed altogether desirable. I begged her to let me see between her legs. She opened them and raised them, and there I saw flesh thickly covered with hard black hair, like a man's, but then the very tip of her flesh was snow-white. What horrified me was that she was moving frenziedly, and that the lips were opening and closing quickly like the mouth of the goldfish in the pool when he eats. I just watched her, fascinated and repulsed, and then I threw myself on her and said, "Let me put my tongue there," and she let me but she did not seem satisfied while I flicked at her. She seemed cold and restless. Suddenly she sat up, threw me down, and leaned over me, and as she lay over me I felt a penis touching me. I questioned her and she answered triumphantly, "Yes, I have a little one; aren't you glad?" "But how do you conceal it from Henry?" I asked. She smiled, treacherously. All through the dream there was a sense of great disorder, of movements which accomplished nothing, of everything being late, of everybody waiting, restless and defeated.

And yet I am jealous of all the suffering Henry experiences with her. I feel that I am sinking away from all wisdom and all understanding, that my instincts are howling like jungle animals. When I remember the afternoons with Henry in the Hotel Anjou, I suffer. Two afternoons which are branded on my body and on my mind.

When I came home from Eduardo yesterday I took refuge in Hugo's arms. I was loaded down with feelings of anxiety for Eduardo and yearning for Henry, and at the same time, lying in Hugo's arms and merely kissing his mouth and neck, I found a feeling so sweet and so profound that it seemed to conquer all the darkness and baseness of life. I felt as if I were a leper and that his strength was so great he could heal me instantly by a kiss. I loved him last night with a sincerity that surpasses all the climaxes my fever makes me crave. Proust writes that happiness is something from which fever is absent. Last night I knew happiness and I recognized it, and I can truly say that only Hugo has ever given it to me, and it runs undefeated by the leapings of my fevered body and mind.

Now, when I am living the richest period of my life, again my health fails me. All the doctors say the same thing: no illness, nothing wrong but general weakness, low stamina. The heart barely beats, I am cold, I am easily tired out. Today I was tired out for Henry. How precious the moment in the Clichy kitchen, with Fred, too. They were eating breakfast at two o'clock. Books piled up, the ones they want me to read and the one I brought them. Then in Henry's room, alone. He closes the door, and our talk melts into caresses, into deft, acute core-reaching fucking.

The talk is about Proust, and it brings this confession from Henry. "To be entirely honest with myself I like to be away from June. It is then I enjoy her best. When she is here I am morbid, oppressed, desperate. With you—well, you are
light.
I am satiated with experiences and pain. Perhaps I torment you. I don't know. Do I?"

I can't answer that very well, though it is clear to me that he is darkness to me. And why? Because of the instincts he has aroused in me? The word "satiation" terrified me. It seemed like the first drop of poison poured into me. Against his satiation, I match my fearful freshness, the newness in me, which gives intensity to what for him may be of less value. That first drop of poison, poured so accidentally, was like a foretelling of death. I don't know through what crevice our love will suddenly seep out and spend itself.

Henry, today I am sad for the moments I Him missing, those moments when you talk with Fred until dawn, when you are eloquent or brilliant or violent or exultant. And I was sad that you missed a wonderful moment in me. Last night I was sitting by the fire and talking as I rarely talk, dazzling Hugo, feeling immensely and astonishingly rich, pouring out stories and ideas which would have amused you. It was about lies, the different kinds of lies, the special lies I tell for specific reasons, to improve on living. One time when Eduardo was being overanalytical I poured out the story of my imaginary Russian lover. He was in rapture. And by it I conveyed to him the necessity of folly, the richness in emotion which he lacks, because he is emotionally impuissant. When I am sorely in trouble, perplexed, lost, I invent the acquaintance of a wise old man with whom I converse. I tell everybody about him, how he looks, what he said, his effect on me (someone to lean on for a moment), and by the end of the day I feel strengthened by my experience with the wise old man, and as satisfied as if it were all true. I have also invented friends when the ones I had were not satisfying. And how I enjoy my experiences! How they fill me, add to me. Embroidery.