Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (26 page)

The next day I run about the house cooking. Suddenly I love cooking, for Henry. I cook richly, with infinite care. I enjoy seeing him eat, eating with him.

We sit in the garden, in our pajamas, drunk on the air, the caresses of the swaying trees, the songs of birds, attentive dogs licking our hands. Henry's dfesire is always coursing. I am ploughed, open.

At night, books, talk, passion. As he pours his passion into me I feel that I become beautiful. I show him a hundred faces. He watches me. It all passes like a procession, up to this morning's climax, before he leaves me, when he sees a burnt face, heavy, sensual, Moorish.

There was a storm last night. Marble-sized hail. Sea fury of the trees. Henry sits in an armchair and asks, "Are we going to read Spengler now?" He sits purring like a cat. He has the yawn of a tiger, all the jungle cries of contentment. His voice vibrates in his stomach. I have put my head there and listened, as against an organ. I am lying on the bed. I wear a lace dress, nothing else, because it gives him pleasure to look at me. "Now," he says, "you look like an Ingres." I cannot bear the space between us. I sit on the floor. He caresses my hair. He gives me winged kisses on the eyes. He is all tenderness, thoughtfulness.

Sensuality was exhausted in the afternoon. But he looks down and shows me his lanced desire again. He himself is surprised: "I love you; I wasn't even thinking of fucking. But your touch alone..." I sit on his knees. And then we sink into that drunkenness of sucking. For a long, long time, just tongues, eyes closed. Then the penis and the yielding walls of flesh, clutching, opening, beating. We roll on the floor until I cannot bear any more, and I lie still, saying no. But when he helps me off with my dress and embraces me from behind, I leap up to him, all aflame again. What sleep afterwards, lost, dreamless.

"When it comes to sensuality," Henry says, "you are almost more sensual than June. Because she may be a splendid animal when you hold her in your arms, but afterwards, nothing. She is cold, hard, even. Your sex permeates your mind, runs into your head afterwards. Everything you think is warm. You are constantly warm. The only thing is that you have the body of a girl. But what power you have to keep the illusion. You know how men feel after they have had a woman. They want to kick her off the bed. With you it remains as heightened afterwards as before. I can never get enough of you. I want to marry you and return to New York with you."

We talk about June. I laugh at his efforts to break with her, in his own mind. We are two against her, two in harmony, in love, in profound fusion, yet she is stronger. I know better than he knows. He has admitted so much against her and in favor of me. But I smile with a wisdom rooted in doubt. I want no more than what I have been given these past days, hours so fecund that a lifetime of remembrance could not exhaust them, wear them thin.

"This is no ordinary garden," Henry says at Louveciennes. "It is mysterious, significant. There is mentioned in a Chinese book a celestial garden, a kingdom, suspended between heaven and earth: this is it."

Over all this hangs the joyous probability that his book
Tropic of Cancer
will be published. When I am alone, I hear him talk. Like Lawrence's snake, his thinking comes from the bowels of the earth. Someone has compared him to an artist who was known as the "cunt painter."

He is so much clearer to me. Towards certain women, he shows toughness and hard-boiledness; towards others, a naive romanticism. At first June appeared like an angel to him, out of her dance-hall background, and he offered her a fool's faith (June asserts that in nine years she has had only two lovers, and until now he has believed that). I see him now as a man who can be enslaved by wonder, a man who can believe anything of woman. I see him sought out by women (this has been true of all the women he has loved seriously). It is the women who take the initiative in sexual contact. It was June who put her head on his shoulder and invited a kiss the first night they met. His toughness is external only. But like all soft people he can commit the most dastardly acts at certain moments, prompted by his own weakness, which makes him a coward. He leaves a woman in the cruelest manner because he cannot face the breaking of the connection.

His sensuality, too, directs actions of the most scoundrelly nature. It is only by understanding the violence of his instincts that one can believe any man could be so ruthless. His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that, as he said about June, only angels or devils can catch the tempo of it.

We have been separated for three days. It is unnatural. We had acquired small habits, sleeping together, awaking together, singing in the bathroom, adjusting our likes and dislikes to fit one another. I am so hungry for the little intimacies. And he?

I feel a powerful sense of life unimaginable to either Hugo or Eduardo. My breasts are swollen. I hold my legs wide apart in love-making instead of, as before, closed. I have enjoyed sucking to the point of almost coming to a climax while doing it. I have finally eliminated my childish self.

I push Hugo away from me, exacerbate his desires, his terror of losing me. I talk cynically to him, taunt him, call women to his attention. There is no room in me for sadness or regrets. Men look at me and I look at them, with my being unlocked. No more veils. I want many lovers. I am insatiable now. When I weep, I want to fuck it away.

Henry comes to Louveciennes on a hot summer afternoon and lays me on the table, and then on the black carpet. He sits on the edge of my bed and looks transfigured. The scattered man, easily swayed, now collects himself to talk about his book. At this moment he is a big man. I sit and marvel at him. A moment before, flushed by drink, he was scattering his riches. The moment he crystallizes is beautiful to watch. I was slow in tuning myself to his mood. I could have fucked all afternoon. But then I also loved our transition into big talk. Our talks are wonderful, interplays, not duels but swift illuminations of one another. I can make his tentative thoughts click. He enlarges mine. I fire him. He makes me flow. There is always movement between us. And he is grasping. He takes hold of me like a prey.

Here we lie, putting order in his ideas, deciding on the place of realistic incidents in his novels. His book swells up inside of me like my very own.

I am fascinated by the activity in his head, the surprises, the curiosity, the gusto, the amorality, the sensibilities, and the rascalities. And I loved his last letter to me: "Don't expect me to be sane any more. Don't let's be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes, you can't dispute it. I came away with a piece of you sticking to me; I am walking about swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to our marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a Negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can't see how I can go on living away from you—these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can't picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.

"Here I am back and still smoldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the papers about suicides and murder and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal.

"I still hear you singing in the kitchen ... a sort of inharmonic, monotonous Cuban wail. I know you're happy in the kitchen and the meal you're cooking is the best meal we ever ate together. I know you would scald yourself and not complain. I feel the greatest peace and joy sitting in the dining room listening to your rustling about, your dress like the goddess Indra studded with a thousand eyes. Anaïs, I only thought I loved you before, it was nothing like this certainty that's in me now. Was all this so wonderful because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other? Was I less I, or more I, and you less or more you? Is it madness to believe that this could go on? When and where would the drab moments begin? I study you so much to discover the possible flaws, the weak points, the danger zones. I don't find them—not any. That means I am in love, blind, blind, blind. To be blind forever!

"I picture you playing the records over and over—Hugo's records.
Parlez moi d'amour.
The double life, double taste, double joy and misery. How you must be furrowed and ploughed by it. I know all that but I can't do anything to prevent it. I wish indeed it were me who had to endure it. I know now your eyes are wide open. Certain things you will never believe any more, certain gestures you will never repeat, certain sorrows, misgivings, you will never again experience. A kind of white criminal fervor in your tenderness and cruelty. Neither remorse nor vengeance, neither sorrow nor guilt. A living it out, with nothing to save you from the abysm but a high hope, a faith, a joy that you tasted, that you can repeat when you will.

"While it thunders and lightnings I lie on the bed and go through wild dreams. We're in Seville, and then in Fez, and then in Capri, and then in Havana. We're journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and Arabic and Turkish. We are admitted everywhere and they strew our path with flowers. I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realize. Life and literature combined; love, the dynamo; you, with your chameleon's soul, giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you assert yourself the more you want me, need me. Your voice getting hoarser, deeper, your eyes blacker, your blood thicker, your body fuller. A voluptuous servility and tyrannical necessity. More cruel now than before—consciously, wilfully cruel. The insatiable delight of experience..."

It is ironical that the deepest experience of my life has come to me when I am famished not for profundity but for pleasure. Sensualism consumes me. What is deep and serious I look at with less intensity, but it is that which fascinates Henry, the depths he has not yet lived out in love.

Is this the high moment? If only June would return now, to leave in Henry and me that taste of the climax, never to be reached again, never to be annihilated.

Henry said, "I want to leave a scar on the world."

I write to him how I feel about his book. Then: "There will never be darkness because in both of us there is always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience....If this is so, then think what I find in you, who are a gold mine. Henry, I love you with a realization, a knowledge of you, which takes in all of you, with the strength of my mind and imagination, besides that of my body. I love you in such a way that June can return, our love can be destroyed, and yet nothing can sever the fusion that has been....I think today of what you said: 'I want to leave a scar on the world.' I will help you. I want to leave the feminine scar."

Today, I would follow Henry to the end of the world. What saves me is only that we are both penniless.

Lucidity: There is in Henry a lack of feeling (not a lack of passion or emotion) that is betrayed by his emphasis on fucking and talking. When he speaks about other women, what he remembers of them are the defects, the sensual characteristics, or the disputes. The rest is either absent or implied. I don't know yet. But feelings are fetters. Henry is not to be worshiped as a human being, but as a genius-monster. He may be soft-hearted but only indiscriminately so. He gave Paulette, out of generosity, the pair of stockings I had left in his drawer, my best pair, while I was wearing mended stockings so I could save to buy gifts for him. The money I sent him from Austria, for a woman, he spent on records for me. Yet he stole 500 francs from Osborn's legacy to his girl friend when Osborn left for America. He gives my dog half his steak, yet he keeps the surplus change given to him by a taxi driver. These sudden acts of callousness, which also appear in June, bewilder me and I expect to suffer from them, though Henry swears he could never act thus with me. And so far I cannot see anything in his treatment of me but the utmost delicacy. He has not hesitated to fling out cruel truths—he is fully aware of my defects—but at the same time he succumbs to the spell, the softness. Why do I trust him so, believe in him, have no fear of him? Perhaps it's as much of a mistake as it is for Hugo to trust me.

I crave Henry, only Henry. I want to live with him, be free with him, suffer with him. Phrases from his letters haunt me. Yet I have doubts about our love. I fear my impetuosity. Everything is in danger. All that I have created. I follow Henry the writer with my writer's soul, I enter into his feelings as he wanders through the streets, I partake of his curiosities, his desires, his whores, I think his thoughts. Everything in us is married.

Henry, you are not lying to me; you are all I feel you are. Don't deceive me. My love is too new, too absolute, too deep.

As Hugo and I walked tonight from the top of the hill I saw Paris lying in a heat haze. Paris. Henry. I did not think of him as a man, but as life.

Perfidiously, I said to Hugo, "It is so fearfully hot. Couldn't we ask Fred and Henry and Paulette for a visit overnight?"

This, because I received this morning the first pages of his new book, stupendous pages. He is doing his best writing now, fevered yet cohesive. Every word now hits the mark. The man is whole, strong, as he never was. I want to breathe his presence for a few hours, feed him, cool him, fill him with that heavy breath of earth and trees which whip his blood. God, this is like living every moment in an orgasm, with only pauses between plunges.