Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (16 page)

Allendy's questions crackle at me. "What did you feel about our first talk?"

"I felt that I needed you, that I didn't want to be left alone to think my life over."

"You loved your father devotedly, abnormally, and you hated the sexual reason which caused him to abandon you. This may have created in you a certain obscure feeling against sex. This feeling asserts itself in your unconscious in that scene with John. You willed him to a kind of castration."

"Then why was I so unhappy, in such despair when it happened, and why did I love him for two years?"

"Perhaps you loved him more because of what happened."

"But I have despised him since then for his lack of impulsive passion."

"The ambivalent need of dominating man, of being conquered by him and of being superior to him. You really loved him because he did not dominate you, because you were superior to him in passion."

"No, because now that I have found a man who has conquered me I am tremendously happy."

Allendy asks questions about Henry. He finally notes that I dominate him socially. He notes also that I have chosen to put myself in the situation of the rival of a woman I know will conquer, therefore seeking pain for myself. That I have loved men weaker than I and have suffered from this. At the same time I have an extreme fear of pain, and it makes me divide my loves so that each one serves as a refuge against another. Ambivalence. I want to love a stronger man and cannot do so.

He says that I have a sense of inferiority due to my physical frailness as a child. It seemed to me that men only loved healthy, fat women. Eduardo talked to me about fat Cuban girls. Hugo's first attraction was for a fat girl. Everybody used to comment on my slenderness, and my mother quoted the Spanish proverb: "Bones are for the dogs." When I went to Havana, I doubted being able to please because I was thin. This theme continues right down to the moment when Henry hurt me by his admiration of Natasha's body because it seemed rich to him.

Allendy: "Do you know that sometimes the sense of sexual inferiority is due to a realization of one's frigidity?"

It is true I was quite indifferent to sex until I was eighteen or nineteen, and even then, tremendously romantic but not really sexually awake. But afterwards! "And if I were frigid, would I be so preoccupied by sex?"

Allendy: "All the more so."

Silence. I am thinking that with all the tremendous joys Henry has given me I have not yet felt a real orgasm. My response does not seem to lead to a true climax but is disseminated in a spasm that is less centered, more diffuse. I have felt an orgasm occasionally with Hugo, and when I have masturbated, but perhaps that is because Hugo likes me to close my legs and Henry makes me open them so much. But this, I would not tell Allendy.

From my dreams he culls the consistent desire to be punished, humiliated, or abandoned. I dream of a cruel Hugo, of a fearful Eduardo, of an impotent John.

"This comes from a sense of guilt for having loved your father too much. Afterwards I am sure you loved your mother much more."

"It is true. I loved her tremendously."

"And now you seek punishment. And you enjoy the suffering, which reminds you of the suffering you endured with your father. In one of your dreams, when the man forces himself into you, you hate him."

I feel oppressed, as if his questions were thrusts. I am in a terrible need of him. Yet analysis does not help. The pain of living is nothing compared to the pain of this minute analysis.

Allendy asks me to relax and tell him what goes on in my mind. But what goes on in my mind is the analysis of my life.

Allendy: "You are trying to identify yourself with me, to do my work. Have you not wished to surpass men in their own work? To humiliate them by your success?"

"Indeed not. I constantly help men in their work, make sacrifices for them." I encourage, admire, applaud them. No, Allendy is very wrong.

He says, "Perhaps you are one of those women who are friends not enemies of man."

"More than that. My original dream was to be married to a genius and serve him, not to be one. When I wrote my book on Lawrence, I wanted Eduardo to collaborate with me. Even now I know he could have written a better one, only it is I who have the energy, the impulse."

Allendy: "You know about the Diana complex, the woman who envies man his sexual power."

"I have felt that, yes, sexually. I would have liked to have been able to possess June and other beautiful women."

There are ideas which Allendy abandons, as though he were sensing my susceptibility. Every time he touches upon my lack of confidence I suffer. I suffer when he touches on my sexual potency, my health, or my feeling of solitude, because there is no one man in whom I could confide entirely.

I lie back and I feel an inrush of pain, despair. Allendy has hurt me. I cry. I cry also with shame, with self-pity. I feel weak. I don't want him to see me cry and I turn away. Then I stand up and face him. His eyes are very soft. I want him to think me a superior woman. I want him to admire me. I like it when he says, "You have suffered a great deal."

When I leave him, I am in a dream, relaxed, warm, as if I had traversed fantastic regions. Eduardo says I am like a hen sitting on her eggs.

Allendy: "Why, exactly, were you upset last time?"

"I felt that some of the things you said were true."

I would like simply to talk to him about the days I have spent with Henry. After Henry, analysis is distasteful to me. I begin with docility but I feel a growing resistence. I admit to Allendy that I do not hate him but that I enjoyed, in a female way, his having succeeded in making me cry. "You proved stronger than I. I like that."

However, as the hour progresses I begin to feel that he is arousing difficulties which I could easily live down, that he reawakens my fears and doubts. For that, I hate him. As he reads my dreams he notes that they are written with a more than masculine directness. Now I find him probing the masculine elements in me. Do I love Henry because I identify myself with him and his love and possession of June? No, this is false. I think of the night Henry taught me to lie over him and how I disliked it. I was happier when I lay under him, passively. I think of my uncertainty with women, not being sure of the role I want to play. In a dream it is June who has a penis. At the same time, I admit to Allendy, I have imagined that a freer life would be possible to me as a lesbian because I would choose a woman, protect her, work for her, love her for her beauty while she could love me as one loves a man, for his talent, his achievements, his character. (I was remembering Stephen in
The Well of Loneliness
, who was not beautiful, who was even scarred in the war, and who was loved by Mary.) This would be a relief from the torment of lack of confidence in my womanly powers. It would eliminate all concern with my beauty, health, or sexual potency. It would make me confident because everything would depend on my talent, inventiveness, artistry, in which I believe.

At the same time I realized that Henry loved me for these last things, too, and I was becoming accustomed to it. Henry, also, gives a smaller importance to my physical charms. I could be healed by the sheer courage of continuing to live. I could heal myself. I don't really need you, Allendy!

Whenever he asks me to close my eyes and relax and talk, I go on with my own analysis. I say to myself, "He is telling me little that I do not know." But this is not true, because he has made clear to me the idea of guilt. I understood suddenly why both Henry and I wrote love letters to June when we were falling in love with each other. He has also made clear the idea of punishment. I take Hugo to the rue Blondel and incite him to infidelity to punish myself for my own infidelities. I glorify June to punish myself for having betrayed her.

I elude Allendy's further questions. He fumbles. He can find nothing definite. He suggests many hypotheses. He also probes to discover my feelings about him, and I tell him about my interest in his books. I have a mischievous awareness that he expects me to become interested in him, and I don't like playing the game while knowing it is a game. Yet my interest is sincere. I also tell him I don't mind any more whether he admires me or not. And that is a victory over myself.

It humiliates me to confess my doubts to him. So today I hated him. When I stood before him, ready to leave, I thought, "At this moment I have less confidence in myself than ever. It is intolerable."

With what joy I gave myself to Henry the following day.

The house is asleep. The dogs are quiet. I feel the weight of solitude. I wish I were in Henry's apartment, if only to dry the dishes he washes. I see his vest, unbuttoned, because the discarded suit given to him is too small for him. I see the very frayed lapel under which I love to slip my hand, the tie I finger while he talks to me. I see the blond hair on his neck. I see the expression he has when he takes the garbage can away, surreptitious, half ashamed. Ashamed, too, of his orderliness, which forces him to wash the dishes, to tidy the kitchen. He says, "This is what June objected to—said it was unromantic." I remember, from Henry's notes, the royal disorder she affected. I don't know what to say. They are both in me: the woman who acts as Henry does and the woman who dreams of acting like June. Some vague tenderness draws me to Henry, so seriously washing the dishes. I cannot taunt him. I help him. But my imagination is out of the kitchen. I only love the kitchen because Henry is there. I have even wished that Hugo would stay away much longer so that I could live in Clichy. It is the first time I have ever wished such a thing.

"It is this way," says Henry. "I have overdrawn the cruelty and evil of June because I was interested in evil. That is just the trouble; there are no really evil persons in the world. June is not really evil. Fred is right. She tries desperately to be. It was one of the first things she told me the night I met her. She wanted me to think her a
femme fatale.
I'm inspired by evil. It preoccupies me, as it did Dostoevsky."

The sacrifices June made for Henry. Were they sacrifices, or were they things she did to heighten her personality? It is I who question this. She makes no obscure sacrifices. Flamboyant ones, yes. Dramatic ones. I have made obscure sacrifices, whether small or big. But I prefer June's prostitution, gold digging, comedies. In between, Henry can starve. She will serve him unreliably and fantastically or not at all. She urged Henry to leave his job. She wanted to work for him. (Secretly I have envisaged prostitution, and to say it is for Henry is only to find a justification.) So June has found a magnificent justification. She has made heroic sacrifices for Henry. And all of it has contributed to the personality of June.

I say to Henry, "Why are you so savage about her defects? And why do you write less about the magnificence?"

"That is what June says. She repeats, 'And you forget this, and you forget that. You only remember the wrongs.' The truth is, Anaïs, that I take goodness for granted. I expect everybody to be good. It is evil which fascinates me."

I remember a feeble effort at living out one of my own fantasies. I came back to Henry one afternoon after he had teased me, full of the devil. I told him that I was going out with a woman the next evening. In Gare St. Lazare I had seen a whore I wanted so much to talk to, and I imagined myself going out with her. Now, bursting into Henry's apartment, as June might have done, I could have brought about a curious event, which Henry would have liked to have heard about later. But instantly I became aware that he had been writing, he was in a serious mood, I had disturbed him. He had been hoping I would sit down with him and help him organize his book. My mood evaporated. I even felt contrite.

June would have interrupted the writing, precipitated Henry into more experiences, delayed the digestion of them, shone with the brilliancy of a Fate in motion, and Henry would have cursed her and then said, "June is an interesting character."

So I went home to Louveciennes and slept. And the next day when Henry asks me, "What did you do last night?" I wish I had something to tell him. I assume a strange look. He thinks he will read about it later in the journal.

I wonder how it feels to have read the whole of my red journal. Henry did not say very much while he was reading, but he shook his head occasionally or laughed. He did say that my journal was terribly frank, and that the descriptions of sensual feelings were unbelievably strong. I didn't mince my words. I had drawn him well, flatteringly but truly. What I said about June was all true. He expected something like my affair with Eduardo. He was sexually stirred by my dream of June and by other pages. "Of course," he said, "you are a narcissist. That is the raison dêtre of the journal. Journal writing is a disease. But it's all right. It's very interesting. I don't know of any journal more interesting. I don't know of any woman writing so frankly."

I protested, because I thought a narcissist was one who only loved himself, and it seemed to me...

It was narcissism anyway, said Henry. But I feel that he admired the journal. He did tease me about Fred, saying he feared I would give myself to him as I did to Eduardo, out of sympathy, and he was jealous. He kissed me as he said this.

Hugo comes back, and he seems like a young son to me. I feel old, battered but tender and joyful. I am resting on the flesh bed of an enormous fatigue. Everything I carry away from Henry is enormous.

If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, "I have heard Rabelais." And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine.

Instead of cursing he is sprouting, covering all the spaces he missed in his sensational strides with June. He is at rest from torment, venomousness, drama, madness. And he says in a tone I have never heard from him before, as if to engrave it, "I love you."

I fall asleep in his arms, and we forget to finish the second fusion of ourselves. He falls asleep with his fingers dipped in the honey. To sleep this way I must have found the end of pain.