Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (25 page)

At the same time with what joy I receive Hugo here. And I have found great pleasure, even frenzy in his love-making. Somehow, in a place like this, I cannot miss Henry, because Henry doesn't belong with mountains, lakes, health, solitude, sleep. Hugo triumphs here, with his very beautiful legs in Tyrolean shorts. I rest here with him, and my life in Paris with Henry is like my night dreams.

Hugo and I take up our tenderness and teasing. A week away from me matures him. I believe we cannot mature together. Together we are soft, weak, young. Depending on each other too much. Together we live in an unreal world. And we live in the outside world, as Hugo says, only because we have this one, ours, to fall back on.

He was distressed by my perfect nose. "But I loved that funny little tilt. I don't like to see you change." Finally I convinced him of the aesthetic progress. I wonder what Henry will say.

In a way I dread receiving a letter from him. It will bring fever. I have fallen back on the security of Hugo's devotion. I rest on his big hairy chest. Occasionally I get a little bored and impatient, but I do not show it. We are happy together over little things. People take us, as always, for honeymooners.

What I wonder about now is whether I stay in Hugo's world because I lack courage to venture out completely, or is it that I have not yet loved anyone enough to want to give up my life with Hugo? If he were to die, I would not go to Henry; that is clear to me.

I feel great joy at receiving a long letter from Henry. I realize that he and June have made Dostoevsky alive and terrible to me. At some moments I melt with gratitude at the thought of what Henry has given me, in just being what he is; at others, I am in despair over the liberated instincts which make him such a bad friend. I remember that he showed more hurt vanity than love when the Hungarian tried to put his hands under my dress that night at the Select. "What did he think I was, a fool?" When drunk, he is capable of anything. Now he has his head shaved like a convict's, in self-abasement. His love of June is self-laceration. In the end, all I know is that he has fecundated me in more than one way and that I will have few lovers as interesting as Henry.

As we again begin our duel of letters—mad, merry, free letters—I feel a physical, gnawing pain at his absence. It looks to me today that Henry is going to be a part of my life for many years even if he is only my lover for a few months. A snapshot of him, with his heavy mouth open, moves me. I quickly start thinking about a lamp that will be better for his eyes, become concerned over his vacation. It makes me acutely happy that he has finished rewriting his second book within the last two months, that he is so energetic and productive. And what do I miss? His voice, his hands, his body, his tenderness, his bearishness, his goodness and deviltry. As he says, "June has never been able to discover whether I am a saint or a devil." I don't know either.

At the same time I find plenty of love to give Hugo. I marvel at this, when we are acting like lovers, cursing the twin beds and sleeping in great discomfort in a too small bed, holding hands over the dinner table, kissing in the boat. It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.

When I ask Henry what stopped him from reading the rest of my purple journal, he answers: "I don't know any more than you why I stopped reading at a certain point. You may be sure I regret it. I can only say that it was an impersonal sadness, things turning out badly not because of evil or maliciousness but through a sort of inherent fatality. Making even the most cherishable and sacred things seem so illusory, unstable, transitory. If you substituted
X
for a certain character, it would be just the same. As a matter of fact, perhaps I was substituting myself."

No one can help weeping over the destruction of the "ideal marriage." But I don't weep any more. I have exhausted my scruples. Hugo has the most beautiful nature in the world, and I love him, but I also love other men. He lies a yard away from me while I write this, and I feel innocent.

I live in his kingdom. Peace. Simplicity. Tonight we were talking about evil, and I realized that he lives in complete security about me. He cannot ever imagine that ... whereas I can so easily imagine. Is he more innocent than I am? Or does one trust when one's self is so integral?

The more I read Dostoevsky the more I wonder about June and Henry and whether they are imitations. I recognize the same phrases, the same heightened language, almost the same actions. Are they literary ghosts? Do they have souls of their own?

I remember a moment when I allowed myself to feel petty resentment for Henry. It was a few days after he had told me about being with the whores. He was to meet me at Fraenkel's to talk over the possibility of helping him publish his book. I felt very hard and cynical. I resented being looked upon as the wife of a banker who could protect a writer. I resented my tremendous anxiety, my wakeful nights, turning over ways and means of helping Henry. He suddenly seemed to me a parasite, a tremendously voracious egoist. Before he arrived I talked with Fraenkel, told him it was impossible and why. Fraenkel felt so much pity for Henry; I, none. Then Henry himself appeared. He was so carefully dressed for me, showing me his new suit, new hat and shirt. He was carefully shaved. I don't know why this infuriated me. I did not welcome him very warmly. I went on talking about Fraenkel's work. Henry felt that something was wrong and asked, "Have I come too early?" Finally he mentioned our going to dinner. I said that I couldn't go. Hugo had not left for London as I had expected he would. I had to take the seven-thirty train home. I looked at Henry's face. It gave me pleasure to see he was fearfully disappointed. I left them.

But I was very unhappy immediately afterwards. All my tenderness returned. I was afraid I had hurt him. I wrote him a note. The next day Hugo was gone, and I went to him immediately. That night we were so contented together that, falling asleep, Henry said, "This is heaven!"

When I read Henry's ardent love letters, I am not stirred. I am not impatient to return to him. His defects stand in the foreground. Perhaps I have simply swung back to Hugo. I don't know. I am aware of a tremendous distance between us. And it is difficult for me to write lovingly. I feel insincere. I evade the issue. I write less than I should. I have to force myself to write at all. What has happened?

Hugo is surprised because I am so restless. I smoke, get up, move about. I cannot bear my own company. I have not learned yet to replace introspection by thinking. I could meditate on Spengler, for instance, but in ten minutes I am again devouring myself. As Gide says, introspection falsifies everything. Perhaps it estranges me from Henry. I need his voice and his caresses. He writes a beautiful letter about our last days in Clichy, Henry desiring me, lost without me.

Yet it is impossible for me to desire him in Hugo's presence. Hugo's laughter, Hugo's devotion paralyzes me. Finally I write to him, hinting at all this. But as soon as I have mailed the letter, the artificially pent-up feelings overwhelm me. I write him a mad note.

The next morning I receive an enormous letter from him. The very touch of it moves me. "When you return I am going to give you one literary fuck fest—that means fucking and talking and talking and fucking. Anaïs, I am going to open your very groins. God forgive me if this letter is ever opened by mistake. I can't help it. I want you. I love you. You're food and drink to me, the whole bloody machinery as it were. Lying on top of you is one thing, but getting close to you is another. I feel close to you, one with you, you're mine whether it is acknowledged or not. Every day I wait now is torture. I am counting them slowly, painfully. But make it as soon as you can. I need you. God, I want to see you in Louveciennes, see you in that golden light of the window, in your Nile green dress and your face pale, a frozen pallor as of the night of the concert. I love you as you are. I love your loins, the golden pallor, the slope of your buttocks, the warmth inside you, the juices of you. Anaïs, I love you so much, so much! I am getting tongue-tied. I am sitting here writing you with a tremendous erection. I can feel your soft mouth closing over me, your leg clutching me tight, see you again in the kitchen here lifting your dress and sitting on top of me and the chair riding around over the kitchen floor, going thump, thump."

I answer in the same tone, enclose my mad note, send a telegram. Oh, there is no fighting against Henry's invasion of me.

Hugo is reading. I bend over him and pour out love, a love which is acutely penitent. Hugo gasps, "I swear I could never find such joy in anyone but you. You're everything to me."

I have a sleepless night, with nerve-wracking pain, thinking of Jung's wise words: "Let things happen." The next day I slowly pack, dreaming of Henry. He is food and drink to me. How could I, even for a few days, swing away from him? If Hugo would not laugh like that, like a child, if his warm, furry hands would not reach out constantly for me, if he would not lean over to give chocolate to a black Scotch terrier, if he would not turn that finely chiseled face to me, saying, "Pussywillow, do you love me?"

Meanwhile it is Henry who leaps in my body. I feel the spurt of him, his thumping and pushing. Monday night is intolerably far off.

The length of his letters, twenty and thirty pages, is symbolical of his bigness. His torrent lashes me. I desire to be only a woman. Not to write books, to face the world directly, but to live by literary blood transfusion. To stand behind Henry, feeding him. To rest from self-assertion and creation.

Mountaineers. Smoke. Tea. Beer. The radio. My head floats away from my body, suspended midair in the smoke of Tyrolean pipes. I see frog eyes, straw hair, mouths like open pocketbooks, pig noses, heads like billiard balls, monkey hands with ham-colored palms. I begin to laugh, as if I were drunk, and say Henry words: "cripes," "screw," and Hugo gets angry. I am silent and cold. My head floats back. I cry. Hugo, who has been trying to tune himself to my gaiety, now observes the swift transition and is baffled.

I increasingly experience this monstrous deformation of reality. I spent a day in Paris before leaving for Austria. I rented a room to rest in because I had not slept the night before, a small attic room with dormer windows. As I lay there I had the sensation of all connections breaking, I parted from each being I loved, carefully and completely. I remembered Hugo's last glance from the train, Joaquin's pale face and fraternal kiss, Henry's last milky kiss, his last words—"Is everything all right?" which he says when he is embarrassed and wants to say something deeper.

I parted from them all exactly as I parted from my grandmother in Barcelona when I was a child. I could have died in a small hotel room, dispossessed of my loves and my belongings, not registered in the hotel book. Yet I knew that if I stayed in that room a few days, living on the money Hugo had given me for my trip, an entirely new life could begin. It was the terror of this new life more than the terror of dying which roused me. I threw myself out of bed and ran away from the room that was growing around me like a web, seizing upon my imagination, gnawing into my memory so that I would forget in five minutes who I was and whom I loved.

It was room number thirty-five, from which I might have awakened the next morning a whore, or a madwoman, or what is worse, perhaps, altogether unchanged.

I am happy with today, so I entertain myself by imagining sorrow. What would I feel if Henry were to die, and I heard, in some corner of Paris, the accordion I used to hear in Clichy? But then, I have wanted to suffer. I cling to Henry for the same reason that June clings to him.

And Allendy?

I need his help again, certainly.

Paris. I needed nobody's help. Only to see Henry again at the station, to kiss him, to eat with him, to hear him talk, in between more kisses.

I wanted to make him jealous, but I am too faithful, so I dug into the past and created a story. I wrote a false letter from John Erskine, tore it up and pasted it together again. When Henry arrived at Louveciennes, the fire was devouring all the rest of John's letters. Later in the evening I showed Henry the fragment which had escaped destruction, supposedly, through its insertion in the journal. Henry was so jealous that on the second page of his new book he had to throw a bomb at John's writing. Childish games. And meanwhile I am as faithful as a slave—in feeling, in thought, in flesh. My lack of a past now seems good. It has preserved my ardor. I have come to Henry like a virgin, fresh, unused, believing, eager.

Henry and I are one, lying soldered for four days. Not with bodies but with flames. God, let me thank somebody. No drug could be more potent. Such a man. He has sucked my life into his body as I have sucked his. This is the apotheosis of my life. Henry, Louveciennes, solitude, summer heat, quivering smells, chanting breezes, and, within us, tornadoes and exquisite calms.

First I dressed up in my Maja costume—flowers, jewelry, make-up, hardness, brilliancy. I was angry, full of hatred. I had arrived from Austria the night before, and we had slept in a hotel room. I thought he had betrayed me. He swears not. It does not matter. I hated him because I loved him as I have never loved anyone.

I stand at the door when he comes in, hands on my hips. I look out of a savage self. Henry approaches, dazed, and does not recognize me until he comes very near and I smile and speak to him. He cannot believe it. He thinks I have gone mad. Then before he has quite awakened I take him to my room. There, on the grate in the fireplace, is a large photograph of John and his letters. They are burning. I smile. Henry sits on the couch. "You frighten me, Anaïs," he says. "You are so different, and so strange. So dramatic." I sit on the floor between his knees. "I hate you, Henry. That story about [Osborn's girl friend] Jeanne ... You lied to me."

He answers me so gently that I believe him. And if I do not believe him, it does not matter. All the treacheries in the world do not matter. John is burnt away. The present is magnificent. Henry asks me to undress. Everything is shed but the black lace mantilla. He asks me to keep it on and lies on the bed, watching me. I stand before the mirror, shedding carnations, earrings. He looks through the lace at my body.