Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (22 page)

Yet I showed courage. When that scene, so unbearably like the one with John, happened, I showed no concern, no surprise. I stayed in his arms, quietly laughing and talking. I said, "Love spoils fucking." But this was more bravado than anything else. The way I suffered was a truer self-revelation.

Despite all this I risked my marriage and happiness to sleep with Henry's letter under my pillow, with my hand on it.

I am going to Henry without joy. I am afraid of that gentle Henry I am going to meet, too much like myself. I remember that from the first day I expected him to take the lead, in talk, in action, in all things.

I thought bitterly of June's magnificent willfulness, initiative, tyranny. I thought, it isn't strong women who make men weak, but weak men who make women overstrong. I stood before Henry with the submissiveness of a Latin woman, ready to be overwhelmed. He has let me overwhelm
him.
He has constantly feared to disappoint me. He has exaggerated my expectations. He has worried about how long and how much I would love him. He has let thinking interfere with our happiness.

Henry, you love your little whores because you are superior to them. You really have refused to meet a woman on your own level. You were surprised how much I could love without judging, adoring you as no whore ever adored. Well, then, are you no happier to be adored by me, and doesn't it make you infinitely superior? Do all men shrink before the more difficult love?

For Henry, everything is flowing as before. He did not observe my hesitation when he suggested we go to the Hotel Cronstadt. Our hour seemed just as rich as ever, and he was so adoring. Yet I had the feeling of making an effort to love him. Perhaps he has just frightened me. I expected him to be impotent again. I didn't have the same wild confidence. Tenderness, yes. The cursed tenderness. I recaptured my happiness, but it was a cold happiness. I felt detached. We got drunk, and then we were very happy. But I was thinking of June.

Driving home after much white wine: Fourth of July fireworks bursting from the tops of street lamps. I am swallowing the asphalt road with a jungle roar, swallowing the houses with closed eyes and geranium eyelashes, swallowing telegraph poles and
messages téléphoniques
, stray cats, trees, hills, bridges....

I mailed my surrealistic piece to Henry, adding, "Things I forgot to tell you: That I love you, and that when I awake in the morning I use my intelligence to discover more ways of appreciating you. That when June comes back she will love you more because I have loved you. There are new leaves on the tip of your already overrich head."

I feel the need of telling him I love him because I do not believe it. Why has Henry become to me little Henry, almost a child? I understand June's leaving him and saying, "I love Henry like my own child." Henry, who, before, was a gigantic menace, a terrorizer. It cannot be!

Cabaret Rumba. Hugo and I are dancing together. He is so much taller than I that my face nestles under his chin, against his chest. An inordinately handsome Spaniard (a professional dancer) has been looking at me like a hypnotist. He smiles at me over the head of his partner. I answer his smile, I stare into his eyes. I drink in their message. I answer with the same mixture of sensual enjoyment and amusement. His smile is lightly sketched on his face. I experience such acute pleasure to be communicating with this man while nestled in Hugo's arms. I am planning, as I smile at him, to return to the place and to dance with him. I feel a tremendous curiosity. I have looked into this man, I have imagined him naked. He has looked into me, too, with narrow animal eyes. The emotion of duplicity releases an insidious poison. All the way home the poison spreads. I understand now how to play for a moment with those feelings I have held too sacred. Next week instead of going out with my quiet "husband," Henry, I'll go and see the Spaniard. And women—I want women. But the masculine lesbians in Le Fetiche cabaret did not please me at all.

I now also understand the carnation in Carmen's mouth. I was smelling mock orange. The white blossoms touched my lips. They were like the skin of a woman. My lips pressed them, opened and closed gently around them. Soft petaled kisses. I bit into the white blossoms. Morsel of perfumed flesh, silkiness of skin. Carmen's full mouth biting her carnation; and I, Carmen.

It is too bad Henry has been good to me, too bad he is a good man. He is becoming aware of a subtle change in me. Yes, he says, I may look immature at first sight, but when I am undressed and in bed, how womanly I am.

The other day Joaquin came downstairs unexpectedly, into the salon, to ask me a trivial question, and Henry and I had been kissing. It showed on Henry's face, and he was embarrassed. I did not feel troubled or ashamed. I was resentful of the intrusion, and I said to Henry, "Well, it serves him right for coming here when he shouldn't."

If Henry realizes that I am becoming shameless, strong, sure of my actions, refusing to be impressed by others, if he realizes the true course of my life now, will he change towards me? No. He has his needs, and he needs the woman in me who was soft, timid, good, incapable of hurting, of running wild. Instead of that, every day I grow nearer to June. I begin to want her, to know her better, to love her more. Now I realize that every interesting move in their life together was made by June. Without her he is a quiet watcher, not a participant. Henry and I combine beautifully for companionship but not for living. I expected those first days (or nights) in Clichy to be sensational. I was surprised when we fell into deep, quiet talks and did so little. I expected Dostoevskian scenes and found a gentle German who could not bear to let the dishes go unwashed. I found a husband, not a difficult and temperamental lover. Henry was, at first, even uneasy as to how to entertain me. June would have known. Yet I was happy and deeply satisfied then because I loved him. It is only these past days that I have felt my old restlessness.

I suggested to Henry that we go out, but I was disappointed when he refused to take me to exotic places. He was content with a movie and sitting in a cafe. Then he refused to introduce me to his rakish friends (to protect and keep me). When he did not take the lead, I began to suggest going here or there.

One night we had gone from Gare St. Lazare to a movie and then to a cafe. In the taxi on the way to meet Hugo, Henry began kissing me, and I clung to him. Our kisses grew frenzied, and I said, "Tell the taxi driver to drive us to the Bois." I was intoxicated by the moment. But Henry was frightened. He reminded me of the hour, of Hugo. With June, how different it would have been! I left him with sadness. There is really nothing crazy about Henry except his feverish writing.

I make an effort to live externally, going to the hairdresser, shopping, telling myself: "I must not sink, I must fight." I need Allendy, and I cannot see him until Wednesday.

I want to see Henry, too, but now I do not count on his strength. That first day in the Viking, he said, "I am a weak man," and I did not believe him. I do not love weak men. I feel tenderness, yes. But, my God, in a few days he has destroyed my passion. What has happened? The moment when he doubted his potency was only a spark. Was it because his sexual power was his unique power? Was it in this way only that he held me? Was it a change in me?

By evening I begin to feel it isn't very important that I am disappointed. I want to help him. I am happy his book is written and that I have given him a feeling of security and well-being. I love him in a different way, but I love him.

Henry is precious to me, as he is. I melt when I see his frayed suit. He fell asleep while I was dressing for a formal dinner. Then he came to my bedroom and watched me adding the last touches. He admired my Oriental green dress. He said I moved about like a princess. My bedroom window was open on the luxurious garden. It made him think of the setting of
Pelleas and Melisande.
He lay on the couch. I sat next to him for a moment and cuddled him. I said, "You must get yourself a suit," wondering how I would get the money for it. I couldn't bear to see the frayed sleeves around his wrists.

We sit close together in the train. He says, "You know, Anaïs, I am so slow that I cannot realize I am going to lose you when we get to Paris. I will be walking alone in the streets, perhaps twenty minutes later, and suddenly I will feel keenly that I do not have you any longer and that I miss you."

And he had told me in a letter, "I look forward to those two days [Hugo is going to London], to spending them quietly with you, absorbing you, being your husband. I adore being your husband. I will always be your husband whether you want it or not."

At the dinner my happiness made me feel natural. In my mind I was lying on the grass with Henry over me; I beamed at the poor ordinary people around the table. They all felt something—even the women, who wanted to know where I shopped for my clothes. Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my make-up, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.

"Spain," said my dinner partner, "is the most wonderful country in the world, where women are really women!"

I was thinking, I wish Henry could taste this fish. And the wine.

But Hugo felt something, too. Before the banquet we were to meet at the Gare St. Lazare. Henry was supposed to have come to Louveciennes to help me with my novel. When Henry and I arrived at the station together, Hugo was not happy. He began to talk quickly, severely about Osborn, "the child prodigy." Poor Hugo, and I could still smell the grass of the forest.

I walked with him so lightly. And where was Henry? Was he missing me already? Sensitive Henry, who has a fear of being disliked, despised, a fear that Hugo should "know everything" or that I will be ashamed of him before people. Not understanding why I love him. I make him forget humiliations and nightmares. His thin knees under the threadbare suit arouse my protective instincts. There is big Henry, whose writing is tempestuous, obscene, brutal, and who is passionate with women, and there is little Henry, who needs me. For little Henry I stint myself, save every cent I can. I cannot believe now that he ever terrified me, intimidated me. Henry, the man of experience, the adventurer. He is afraid of our dogs, of snakes in the garden, of people when they are not
le peuple.
There are moments when I see Lawrence in him, except that he is healthy and passionate.

I wanted to tell my dinner partner last night, "You know, Henry is so passionate."

I failed to go to my last appointment with Allendy. I was beginning to depend on him, to be grateful to him. Why did I stop for a week, he asks. To stand on my own feet again, to fight alone, to take myself back, to depend on nobody. Why? The fear of being hurt. Fear that he should become a necessity and that, when my cure was finished, our relationship would end and I would lose him. He reminds me that it is part of the cure to make me self-sufficient. But by not trusting him, I have shown that I am still ill. Slowly he will teach me to do without him.

"If you dropped me now, I would suffer as a doctor from not succeeding in my cure of you, and I would suffer personally because you are interesting. So you see, in a way, I need you as much as you need me. You could hurt me by dropping me. Try to understand that in all relationships there is dependency. Don't be afraid of dependency. It is the same with the question of domination. Don't try to tip the scales. The man must be the aggressor in the sexual act. Afterwards he can become like a child and depend on the woman and need her like a mother. You are not domineering intrinsically, but in self-defense—against pain, against the fear of abandonment, which perpetually recalls to you your father's abandonment of you—you try to conquer, to dominate. I see that you do not use your power for evil or cruelty, but just to satisfy yourself of its effectiveness. You have conquered your husband, Eduardo, and now Henry. You do not want weak men, but until they have become weak in your hands you are not satisfied. Be careful of this: drop your defensive attitude, drop, above all, your fears. Let go."

Henry writes me a thoughtless letter about the little nineteen-year-old Paulette Fred has brought to Clichy to live with him. Henry is joyous because she is doing the housekeeping and urges Fred to marry her because she is adorable. This letter tore into my flesh. I visualized Henry playing with Paulette while Fred went to work. Oh, I know my Henry. I withdrew into myself like a snail, I didn't want to write in my journal, I refused to think, but I must cry out. If this is jealousy, I must never again inflict it on Hugo, on anyone. Paulette, in Clichy; Paulette, free to do everything for Henry, eating with him, spending the evenings with him while Fred is at work.

A summer evening. Henry and I are eating in a small restaurant wide open to the street. We are part of the street. The wine that runs down my throat runs down many other throats. The warmth of the day is like a man's hand on one's breast. It envelops both the street and the restaurant. The wine solders us all, Henry and me, the restaurant and the street and the world. Shouts and laughter from the students preparing for the Quatz Arts Ball. They are in barbaric costumes, red-skinned, feathered, overflowing from buses and carts. Henry is saying, "I want to do everything to you tonight. I want to lay you on this very table and fuck you before everybody. I'm nuts about you, Anaïs. I'm crazy about you. After dinner we're going to the Hotel Anjou. I'll teach you new things."

And then, inchoately, he feels a sudden need for confession: "That day I left you in Louveciennes, rather drunk—would you believe it, while I was having dinner, a girl came and sat next to me. She was just an ordinary prostitute. Right in the restaurant I put my hand under her skirt. I went to a hotel with her, thinking of you all the time, hating myself, remembering our afternoon. I had been so satisfied. So many thoughts I had, that when the moment came, I couldn't fuck the girl. She was so contemptuous. Thought me impotent. I gave her twenty francs, and I remember being glad it was not more because it was your money. Can you understand that, Anaïs?"