Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (2 page)

We asked ourselves yesterday, in the middle of a quarrel, "What is happening to us? We never said such terrible things to each other?" And then Hugo said: "This is our honeymoon, and we are keyed up."

"Are you sure?" I asked incredulously.

"It may not seem like one," he said, laughing, "but it is. We are just overflowing with feelings. We can't keep our balance."

A seven-year-late, mature honeymoon, full of the fear of life. In between our quarrels we are acutely happy. Hell and heaven all at once. We are at once free and enslaved.

At times it seems as if we know that the only tie which can bind us together now is one of white-heat living, the same kind of intensity one finds in lovers and mistresses. We have unconsciously created a highly effervescent relationship within the security and peace of marriage. We are widening the circle of our sorrows and pleasures within the circle of our home and our two selves. It is our defense against the intruder, the unknown.

I've met Henry Miller.

He came to lunch with Richard Osborn, a lawyer I had to consult on the contract for my D. H. Lawrence book.

When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.

In the middle of lunch, when we were seriously discussing books, and Richard had sailed off on a long tirade, Henry began to laugh. He said, "I'm not laughing at you, Richard, but I just can't help myself. I don't care a bit, not a bit who's right. I'm too happy. I'm just so happy right this moment with all the colors around me, the wine. The whole moment is so wonderful, so wonderful." He was laughing almost to tears. He was drunk. I was drunk, too, quite. I felt warm and dizzy and happy.

We talked for hours. Henry said the truest and deepest things, and he has a way of saying "hmmm" while trailing off on his own introspective journey.

Before I met Henry I was intent on my D. H. Lawrence book. It is being published by Edward Titus, and I am working with his assistant, Lawrence Drake.

"Where are you from?" he asks me at our first meeting.

"I'm half Spanish, half French. But I was raised in America."

"You've certainly survived the transplantation." He appears to be sneering as he talks. But I know better.

He takes up the work with tremendous enthusiasm and speed. I'm grateful. He calls me a romantic. I get angry. "I'm sick of my own romanticism!"

He has an interesting head—vivid, strong accents of black eyes, black hair, olive skin, sensual nostrils and mouth, a good profile. He looks like a Spaniard, but he is Jewish—Russian, he tells me. He is puzzling to me. He looks raw, easily hurt. I talk warily.

When he takes me to his place to go over the proofs, he tells me I interest him. I can't see why—he seems to have had a lot of experience; why does he bother about a beginner? We talk, fencingly. We work, not so very well. I don't trust him. When he says nice things to me, I think he is playing on my inexperience. When he puts his arms around me, I think he is amusing himself with an overin-tense and ridiculous little woman. When he gets more intense, I turn my face away from the new experience of his mustache. My hands are cold and moist. I tell him frankly, "You shouldn't flirt with a woman who doesn't know how to flirt."

It amuses him, my seriousness. He says, "Perhaps you are the kind of woman who doesn't hurt a man." He has been humiliated. When he thinks I have said, "You annoy me," he jumps away as if I had bitten him. I don't say that sort of thing. He is very impetuous, very strong, but he doesn't annoy me. I answer his fourth or fifth kiss. I begin to feel drunk. So I get up and say incoherently, "I'm going now—for me it can't be without love." He teases me. He bites my ears and kisses me, and I like his fierceness. He throws me on the couch for a moment, but somehow I escape. I am aware of his desire. I like his mouth and the knowing force of his arms, but his desire frightens me, repulses me. I think, it's because I don't love him. He's stirred me but I don't love him, I don't want him. As soon as I know this (his desire, pointing at me, is like a sword between us), I free myself, and I leave, without hurting him in any way.

I think, well, I just wanted the pleasure without feeling. But something holds me back. There is in me something untouched, unstirred, which commands me.
That
will have to be moved if I am to move wholly. I think of this in the Métro, and I get lost.

A few days later I met Henry. I was waiting to meet him, as if that would solve something, and it did. When I saw him, I thought, here is a man I could love. And I was not afraid.

Then I read Drake's novel, and I discover an unsuspected Drake—foreign, uprooted, fantastic, erratic. A realist, exasperated by reality.

Immediately his desire ceases to repulse me. A little link has been formed between two strangenesses. I respond to his imagination with mine. His novel conceals a few of his own feelings. How do I know? They are not consistent with the story, not quite. They are there because they are natural to him. The name Lawrence Drake is put on, too.

There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work. I wondered at this last night as I closed Drake's book. I knew it would take me years to forget John [Erskine], because it was he who first stirred the secret source of my life.

There is nothing of Drake himself in the book, I am convinced. He hates the parts I like. It was all written objectively, consciously, and even the fantasy was carefully planned. We settle this at the beginning of my next visit. Very good. I am beginning to see things more clearly. I know now why I did not trust him the first day. His actions are devoid of either feeling or imagination. They are motivated by sheer habits of living and grabbing and analyzing. He's a grasshopper. He has now hopped into my life. My feeling of dislike becomes intensified. When he tries to kiss me, I evade him.

At the same time I concede to myself that he knows the technique of kissing better than anyone I've met. His gestures never miss their aim, no kiss ever goes astray. His hands are deft. My curiosity for sensuality is stirred. I have always been tempted by unknown pleasures. He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away. Finally I lie still on the couch, but when his desire grows, I try to escape. Too late. Then I tell him the truth: woman's trouble. That does not seem to deter him. "You don't think I want that mechanical way—there are other ways." He sits up and uncovers his penis. I don't understand what he wants. He makes me get down on my knees. He offers it to my mouth. I get up as if struck by a whip.

He is furious. I say to him, "I told you we have different ways of doing things. I warned you I was inexperienced."

"I never believed it. I don't yet believe it. You can't be, with your sophisticated face and your passionateness. You're playing a trick on me."

I listen to him; the analyst in me is uppermost, still on the job. He pours out stories to show me that I don't appreciate what other women do.

In my head I answer, "
You
don't know what sensuality is. Hugo and I do. It's in us, not in your devious practices; it's in feeling, in passion, in love."

He goes on talking. I watch him with my "sophisticated face." He does not hate me because, however repulsed, however angry I am, I have a facility for forgiveness. When I see that I have let him be aroused, it seems natural to let him release his desire between my legs. I just let him, out of pity. That, he senses. Other women, he says, would have insulted him. He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.

I owed him that; he had revealed a new world to me. I had understood for the first time the abnormal experiences Eduardo had warned me against. Exoticism and sensuality now had another meaning for me.

Nothing was spared my eyes, so that I might always remember: Drake looking down at his wet handkerchief, offering me a towel, heating water on the gas stove.

I tell Hugo the story partially, leaving out my activity, extracting the meaning for him and for me. As something forever finished, he accepts it. We efface an hour by passionate love, without twists, without aftertaste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other's arms, lulled by our love, by tenderness—sensuality in which the whole being can participate.

Henry has imagination, an animal feeling for life, the greatest power of expression, and the truest genius I have ever known. "Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

Hugo admires him. At the same time he worries. He says justly, "You fall in love with people's minds. I'm going to lose you to Henry."

"No, no, you won't lose me." I know how incendiary my imagination is. I am already devoted to Henry's work, but I separate my body from my mind. I enjoy his strength, his ugly, destructive, fearless, cathartic strength. I could write a book this minute about his genius. Almost every other word he utters causes an electric charge: on Bunuel's
Age d'Or
, on Salavin, on Waldo Frank, on Proust, on the film
Blue Angel
, on people, on animalism, on Paris, on French prostitutes, on American women, on America. He is even walking ahead of Joyce. He repudiates form. He writes as we think, on various levels at once, with seeming irrelevance, seeming chaos.

I have finished my new book, minus polishing. Hugo read it Sunday and was transported. It is surrealistic, lyrical. Henry says I write like a man, with tremendous clearness and conciseness. He was surprised by my book on Lawrence, although he does not like Lawrence. "So intelligent a book." It is enough. He knows I have outgrown Lawrence. I have already another book in my head.

I have transposed Drake's sexuality into another kind of interest. Men need other things besides a sexual recipient. They have to be soothed, lulled, understood, helped, encouraged, and listened to. By doing all of this tenderly and warmly—well, he lit his pipe and let me alone. I watched him as if he were a bull.

Besides, being intelligent, he understands that my type can't be "made" without the illusion. He cannot bother with illusions. O.K. He is a little angry, but ... he'll make a story of it. He is amused because I tell him I know he doesn't love me. He thought I might really be childish enough to believe that he did. "Bright kid," he says. And he tells me all his troubles.

Again the question: Do we want parties, orgies? Hugo says definitely no. He won't take chances. It would be forcing our temperament. We don't enjoy parties, we don't enjoy drinking, we don't envy Henry his life. But I protest: One doesn't do those things lucidly, one gets drunk. Hugo doesn't want to get drunk. Neither do I. Anyway, we won't go and seek the whore or the man. If she or he comes our way, inevitably, then we'll live out what we want.

Meanwhile we live satisfied with our less intense life, because, of course, the intensity has died down—after the quickening of Hugo's passion because of my entanglement with John. He has also been jealous of Henry and of Drake—he was miserable—but I have reassured him. He sees that I am wiser, that in fact I never again intend to run into a blank wall.

I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman. Such a separation may seem childish, but it is possible. Subtract the overintensity, the sizzling of ideas, and you get a woman who loves perfection. And faithfulness is one of the perfections. It seems stupid and unintelligent to me now because I have bigger plans in mind. Perfection is static, and I am in full progress. The faithful wife is only one phase, one moment, one metamorphosis, one condition.

I might have found a husband who loved me less exclusively, but it would not be Hugo, and whatever is Hugo, whatever Hugo is composed of, I love. We deal in different values. For his faithfulness, I give him my imagination—even my talent, if you will. I have never been satisfied with our accounts. But they must stand.

He will come home tonight and I will watch him. Finer than any man I know, the nearly perfect man. Touchingly perfect.

The hours I have spent in cafés are the only ones I call living, apart from writing. My resentment grows because of the stupidity of Hugo's bank life. When I go home, I know I go back to the banker. He smells of it. I abhor it. Poor Hugo.

Everything is made right by a talk with Henry all afternoon—that mixture of intellect and emotionalism which I like. He can be swept away completely. We talked without noticing the time until Hugo came home, and we had dinner together. Henry remarked on the green fat-bellied bottle of wine and the hissing of the slightly damp log in the fire.

He thinks I must know about life because I posed for painters. The extent of my innocence would be incredible to him. How late I have awakened and with what furor! What does it matter what Henry thinks of me? He'll know soon enough exactly what I am. He has a caricatural mind. I'll see myself in caricature.

Hugo says rightly that it takes great hate to make a caricature. Henry and my friend Natasha [Troubetskoi] have great hates. I do not. Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am more preoccupied with loving.

I am absorbed by Henry, who is uncertain, self-critical, sincere. I get a tremendous and selfish pleasure out of our gift of money to him. What do I think of when I sit by the fire? To get a bunch of railroad tickets for Henry; to buy him
Albertine disparue.
Henry wants to read
Albertine disparue
? Quick, I won't be happy until he has the book. I am an ass. Nobody likes to have these things done for them, nobody but Eduardo, and even he, in certain moods, prefers utter indifference. I would like to give Henry a home, marvelous food, an income. If I were rich, I would not be rich very long.