Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (32 page)
Authors: Anaïs Nin
"Henry is not imaginative enough," she says. "He is false. He is not simple enough either. It is he who has made me complex, who has devitalized me, killed me. He has introduced a fictitious personage who could make him suffer torments, whom he could hate; he has to whip himself by hatred in order to create. I do not believe in him as a writer. He has human moments, of course, but he is a trickster. He is all that he accuses me of being. It is he who is a liar, insincere, buffoonish, an actor. It is he who seeks dramas and creates monstrosities. He does not want simplicity. He is an intellectual. He seeks simplicity and then begins to distort it, to invent monsters. It is all false, false."
I am stunned. I sense a new truth. I am not vacillating between Henry and June, between their contradictory versions of themselves, but between two truths I see with clar ity. I believe in Henry's humanness, although I am fully aware of the literary monster. I believe in June, although I am aware of her innocent destructive power and her comedies.
At first she had wanted to fight me. She feared that I believed Henry's version of her. She wanted to arrive in London instead of Paris and ask me to join her there. At the first sight of my eyes she trusted me again.
She talked beautifully, coherently last night. She brought Henry's weaknesses into cruel relief. She shattered his sincerity, his wholeness. She shattered my protection of him. I had achieved nothing, according to her. "Henry only pretends to understand, so he can then turn around and attack, destroy."
I will only know the truth through my own experience with each one. Hasn't Henry been more human with me, and June more sincere? I, who partake of the nature of both, will I fail to destroy their poses, to seize their true essence?
Allendy has deprived me of my opium; he has made me lucid and sane, and I am suffering cruelly from the loss of my imaginary life.
June, too, has become sane. She is no longer hysterical or confused. When I realized this change in her today, I was dismayed. Her sanity, her humanness, that is what Henry wanted, and that is what he is being given. They can talk together. I have changed him, mellowed him, and he understands her better.
Then she and I sit together, knees touching, and look at each other. The only madness is the fever between us. We say, "Let us be sane with Henry, but together let us be mad."
I walk into the chaos of June and Henry and find them becoming clearer to themselves and to each other. And I? I suffer from the insanity they are leaving behind. Because I pick up their tangles, their insincerities, their complexities. I relive them in my imagination. I can see June again depriving Henry of faith in himself, confusing him. She is destroying his book. Through her love of me, she is seeking to remove my influence on Henry, to win me away from him, to dominate him again, only to leave him dispossessed and reduced; for this, she will even love me. She advises him strongly against publication of his book by the route I have opened. She resents his having lost faith in her capacity to help him. I see her using my means now—reasonableness, calm—to accomplish the same destruction.
I am in her arms in a taxi. She holds me tightly and says, "You are giving me life, you are giving me what Henry has taken away from me." And I hear myself answering in fevered words. This scene in the taxi—knees touching, hands locked, cheek against cheek—is going on while we are aware of our fundamental enmity. We are at cross-purposes. Yet I can do nothing for Henry. He is too weak while she is there, as he is weak in my hands. While I tell her I love her I am thinking of how I can save Henry, the child, no longer the lover to me, because his feebleness has made him a child. My body remembers a man who has died.
But what a superb game the three of us are playing. Who is the demon? Who the liar? Who the human being? Who the cleverest? Who the strongest? Who loves the most? Are we three immense egos fighting for domination or for love, or are these things mixed? I feel protective about both Henry and June. I feed them, work for them, sacrifice for them. I also must give life to them, because they destroy each other. Henry worries about my walking back from the station at midnight after seeing June off, and June says, "I am afraid of your perfection, of your acuity," and nestles in my arms, to make herself small.
And then a beautiful letter from Henry, his sincerest, because of its simplicity: "Anaïs, thanks to you I am not being crushed this time.... Don't lose faith in me, I beg you. I love you more than ever, truly, truly. I hate to put in writing what I wish to tell you about the first two nights with June, but when I see you and tell you, you will realize the absolute sincerity of my words. At the same time, oddly enough, I am not quarreling with June. It is as though I had more patience, more understanding and sympathy than ever before....I have missed you greatly and I have been thinking of you at moments when, God help me, no sane, normal man ought to.... And please, dear, dear Anaïs, don't say cruel things to me as you did over the telephone—that you are happy for me. What does that mean? I am not happy nor am I greatly unhappy; I have a sad, wistful feeling which I can't quite explain. I want you. If you desert me now I am lost. You must believe in me no matter how difficult it may seem sometimes. You ask about going to England. Anaïs, what shall I say? What would I like? To go there with you—to be with you always. I am telling you this when June has come to me in her very best guise, when there should be more hope than ever, if I wanted hope. But like you with Hugo, I see it all coming too late. I have passed on. And now, no doubt, I must live some sad beautiful lie with her for a while, and it causes you anguish and that pains me terribly.
"And perhaps you will be seeing more in June than ever, which would be right and you may hate or despise me but what can I do? Take June for what she is—she may mean a great deal to you—but don't let her come between us. What you two have to give each other is none of my affair. I love you, just remember that. And please don't punish me by avoiding me."
Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality—to Henry's selfishness, June's love of power, my insatiable creativity which must concern itself with others and cannot be sufficient to itself. I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.
So Henry is coming this afternoon, and tomorrow I am going out with June.
The following abbreviations are used in this index
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AN = Anaïs Nin
HM = Henry Miller
JM = June Edith Miller
Age d'Or
(film by Buñurel),
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Albertine disparue
(Proust),
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Allendy, René Félix (Dr.),
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"Count Bruga" (puppet),
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Debussy, Claude,
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Faithfulness.
See also
Love: and passion
AN on,
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Father.
See
Nin y Castellanos, Joaquin J.
Femmes fatales,
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Guiler, Hugh Parker
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