by Anais Nin
June! There was such a tear in the down. She knew it. So she took my hand against her warm breast. She did this to soothe and console me.
And she talked, she talked about things which did not relate to what I felt. "Would you rather I had said no, brutally, to the man? I am sometimes brutal, you know, but I couldn't be, in front of you. I didn't want to hurt his feelings."
And, as I did not know what angered me, I was silent. It was not a question of accepting or refusing a cocktail. One had to go back to the origin of why she should need the help of that man. One of her phrases came back to my mind: "No matter how badly things are going for me, I can always find someone who will pay for my champagne."
Of course! She was a woman accumulating debts which she never intended to pay as honest prostitutes do, for afterwards she boasted of her sexual inviolability. She was a gold-digger. Great pride in the possession of her own body, but not too proud to humiliate herself with prostitute eyes over the counter of a steamship company.
She was telling me that she and Henry had quarreled over buying butter. They had no money and...
"No money? But Saturday I gave you enough for a month. And today is Monday."
"We had things to pay up that we owed," said June. I thought she meant the hotel room. Then suddenly I remembered the perfume. Why didn't she say to me, "I bought perfume and gloves and stockings Saturday." She did not look at me when she intimated they had debts to pay. Then I remembered other phrases: "People say that if I had a fortune I would spend it in a day and no one would ever know how. I could never account for the way I spend money."
This was the other face of June's fantasies.
We walked the streets and all the softness of her breast could not lull the pain.
I walked into the American Express. The fat man at the door greeted me. "Your friend was here this morning and she said good-bye to me as if she were not coming back."
"But we had agreed to meet here!"
A terrible anxiety overcame me. If I were never to see June walking towards me! It was like dying. What did it matter, after all, what I had thought the day before. But it may have offended her. She was unethical and irresponsible, but my pride about money was absurd and anachronistic. I should not have tampered with her nature. I should not have expected her to be like me, scrupulous and proud. She alone is without fetters. I am a fettered, an ethical being. I could not have let Henry go hungry. I should have accepted her entirely. If only she would come and meet me for half an hour, for a moment. I had dressed ritually for her. If she came I would never again question her behavior.
Then June came, all in black velvet, black cape and her hat with a feather shading her eyes, her face paler and more transparent than ever. The wonder of her face and smile, her smileless eyes.
I took her to a Russian tearoom where, before, I had felt the lack of beauty of most people, their lack of vividness, aliveness. The Russians sang as we felt. June wondered whether they were as emotionally fervent as their voices. The richness and violence of their singing stirred us. June used the word scorch.
"At first I was afraid of being tubercular, but now I am glad because it makes me more aware of life, it has taught me to live more intensely. That is all I want now, a fiery life."
Russian voices and June's incandescent face. Violet rugs and stained-glass windows, dusty lights and the plaintive chant of strings. June is the essence of all these, of candles, incense, flambées, fine liqueurs, exotic foods.
The people around us seem ugly and dead compared with her.
June rushing towards death, smiling. Henry could not keep pace with her recklessness because he held on to the earth. He wants laughter, and food, and plain joys. So he holds her back. But June and I seek exaltations and the madness of Rimbaud.
I always endowed madness with a sacred, poetic value, a mystical value. It seemed to me to be a denial of ordinary life, an effort to transcend it, to expand, to go far beyond the limitations of La Condition Humaine. The madness of June at this moment seemed beautiful. I did not even say to her as one should say to a human being in danger, "You must take care of your health." If she wanted to dissolve like this, in a heightened and burning form of life, I would follow her wherever she wanted to go.
It was time to part. I put her in a taxi. She sat there about to leave me and I stood by in torment. "I want to kiss you, I want to kiss you," said June. And she offered her mouth which I kissed for a long time.
To keep June beside me, I think about her as if she were walking with me. I imagine saying to her: You are a magnificent character, a portentous character. (She was always saying she was like the characters in Dostoevsky.) You have power, freedom. You have kissed away all my scruples, guilts, conscience. Your love of Henry is masochistic. You are responsible for the greatness of his book.
When June left, I wanted to sleep and dream for many days, but I still had something to face, my friendship with Henry. I asked him to come to Louveciennes because I knew he was in pain. I wanted to offer him peace and a lulling house, but of course I knew we would talk about June.
We walked through the forest, walked off our restlessness, and we talked. There is in both of us an obsession to understand June. He has no jealousy of me, because he said, "You brought out wonderful things in June. It was the first time June ever attached herself to a woman of value." He seemed to expect I would have an influence over June's life. When he saw that I understood her and that I was willing to be truthful with him, we talked freely.
Just once I paused, hesitant, wondering if my confidences to Henry were a betrayal of June. Henry caught the hesitation and agreed with me that in the case of June, "truth" had to be totally disregarded because she lived in fantasies and illusions. But that truth could be the only basis of our friendship.
And, as we sat by the fire later, there was an understanding between us: we both craved truth. It was a necessity to us. We should collaborate, with our two minds, in understanding June. What was June? What was June's value? Henry loves her with passion, he wants to know June, the perpetually disguised woman. June, the powerful, fictionalized character. In his love for her he has endured so many torments that the lover took refuge in the writer. The writer is like a detective. But it is the husband, the jealous and betrayed husband, who has written so ferociously about her and Jean, about his efforts to prove her Lesbianism, his fruitless attempts.
I said, "If there is an explanation of the mystery, it is this: the love between women is a refuge and an escape into harmony and narcissism in place of conflict. In the love between man and woman there is resistance and conflict. Two women do not judge each other. They form an alliance. It is, in a way, self-love. I love June because she is the woman I would like to be. I don't know why June loves me."
I gave him the one thing June cannot give him: honesty. There is a strange detachment from the ego in me. I am so ready to admit what an egotistical woman would not admit: that June is a superb and inspiring character who makes every other woman insipid. That I would like to live her life, but for my compassion and my conscience. She may destroy Henry the human being, but she fascinates Henry the writer, and he is more enriched by the ordeals she imposes on him than by happiness.
But like June I have infinite possibilities for all experience, like June I have the power to burn like a flame, to enter all experience fearlessly, decadence, amorality, or death. The Idiot and Nastasia are more important to me than the self-denial of Abéard and Héloïse. The love of only one man or one woman is a limitation. To be fully alive is to live unconsciously and instinctively in all directions, as Henry and June do. Idealism is the death of the body and of the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death.
Yet Henry gets very angry and says June has no value. Her power is great but it is destructive. She has fallen into the weakest, easiest form of life, into fantasy-making. But I love her power of non-resistance, of yielding. Evil is life as well as good. I want to live without idealism and without ethics. B
ut I am not free. I am incapable of destruction.
Henry expected me to impose my strength on June. I do not need drugs and artificial stimulation. That is my natural role. Yet my desire to do these very things with June, to penetrate the evil which attracts me, is the same which lured Henry when he first met her in the dance hall, when they made love in the park at night and she asked him for fifty dollars.
I go out into the world to seek life, and the experience I want is denied me because I carry in me a force which neutralizes it. I meet June, the near prostitute, and she becomes pure. A purity which mystifies Henry, a purity of face and being which is awesome, just as I saw her one afternoon on the corner of the divan, pale, transparent, innocent. June's real demon is a voraciousness for life, a possession by life, the tasting of its bitterest flavors. June, who lives by the impulses of her nature, would not be capable of the efforts Henry and I are making to understand her. Henry tries to impose on her an awareness which, if she accepted it, would close up this flow of fantasies, obscure impulses. He only succeeds in making her aware of a wholeness she cannot live by.
I told Henry: "June destroys reality; her lies are not lies, they are roles she wants to live out. She has made greater efforts than any of us to live out her illusions. When she told you that her mother had died, that she never knew her father, that she was illegitimate, she wanted to begin nowhere, to begin without roots, to plunge into invention. Anyone could be her father. She loved the suspense, the possible surprise. She did not want to be classified, she did not want to be associated with any race, nationality, or background either. Her pallor, her upward curving eyebrows, her cape, her jewelry, her erratic eating, her destruction of the boundary lines between night and day, her hatred of sunlight, are all escapes from rigid patterns."
Henry said: "Nobody can ever say to June: 'Listen, listen deeply and attentively.' I did it occasionally by violence. How did you make her listen? How did you stop the nervous flow of her talk? Talking about you, she was humble."
What had I done? Nothing. Looked at her, felt in sympathy with her quest for the marvelous, her chaos which I did not seek to organize with a man's mind, but which I accepted as I accepted her courage to descend into all experience. She has that courage. She has obeyed every impulse to drink, take drugs, to be a vagabond, to be free at the cost of poverty and humiliation.
"I understand her. She cannot be considered as a whole. She is composed of fragments. Only passion gives her a moment of wholeness. Perhaps, being as she is, she may lose your human love, but she has gained your admiration of June the character."
"Compared with June, all other women seem insipid. She had tears in her eyes when she spoke of your generosity, and kept repeating: 'She is more than a woman, much more than a woman.'"
"She humiliates you, starves you, deserts you, torments you, and yet you thrive. You write books about her. I do not have her courage to hurt even for good reasons, to hurt and to be aware of hurting, and to know its ultimate necessity."
"And the Lesbianism?"
"I can't answer that. I don't know. It was not that, with us."
Henry believes me.
"Her sensuality is far more complicated than yours. So much more intricate."
***
June was always telling stories; June with drugged eyes and a breathless voice:
"One day in summer I left my hotel room with a phonograph I was going to lend to a friend. I was wearing a very light summer dress, and no stockings because I had no money for stockings. I saw a taxi waiting before a bar and got into it to wait for the driver. Instead of the driver, a policeman came. He poked his head inside the window and said: 'What's the matter with you? Are you sick?' 'I'm not sick,' I answered. 'I'm waiting for the taxi driver. I'm carrying a phonograph to a friend. It's heavy and I didn't want to walk with it. I took the first taxi I saw.' But the policeman was worried and stared at my pale face. 'Where do you live?' I got angry and offered to show him where I lived, if he wished, and he insisted on it and carried the phonograph for me. I took him to the basement room where we lived and where Henry was still lying in bed, wearing a red Roumanian embroidered shirt which made him look like a Russian. The table was piled high with manuscripts, books, bottles, ash trays; and he could see we were intellectual Bohemians. On the table there was a long knife which Jean had brought back from Africa. The policeman looked it over, and then smiled and went away."
I sat silent and June began another story.
"A man came to my door one day and asked if I wanted M or O. I said I didn't know what he meant. He said, laughing: 'Of course you do, morphine or opium. I'll bring you ten dollars' worth tomorrow if you want it.' I said I didn't want it, but he said he would bring it anyway. The next day a man forced his way into my place and said: 'You've ordered ten dollars' worth of M and O. I'll get you into trouble for this.' 'No, you won't,' I said. And I called up a man who has influence in the government. When the man heard the name of my friend, he became frightened and begged me not to say a word, said that he would not bother me again, and went away."
I sat silent. I wondered whether her stories, like Albertine's stories to Proust, contained each one of them a secret key to some happening in June's life which it is impossible to clarify. She takes drugs, I know, and she may have had trouble with the police. Some of these stories are in Henry's book. She does not hesitate to repeat herself. She is drugged with her fictions and romances. She hates explanations. I don't know why I feel they are not true. I stand humbly before this spinner of tales and wonder whether I could not invent better stories for her.
At moments she seems non-human, because she is so unconscious of her acts, amoral, unfettered by human considerations or hesitations. She does not hesitate to send Henry to Paris and then leave him without the money she had promised to send him. She imposed on him a sharing of their life with Jean. She lives as if in a dream, in uncalculated impulses and whims, plunging into relationships, destroying unintentionally in her fiery course. One man committed suicide for her. She is so busy just BEING, talking, walking, making love, drinking, that she can achieve nothing else. She had once thought of becoming an actress but could not take the discipline, rehearsals, deadlines, appointments, care of her hair and dressing, etc. She speaks of protecting Henry but does it erratically, spasmodically. She is baffled because she cannot satisfy him, because he rebels against her obsessions, eccentric course, irrational behaviors. In her "possessed" life she is unable to pause, to reflect. She refuses to contemplate the meaning or direction of her life. She lives within chaos.
I may be stopped on my course by all kinds of thoughts, pity, consideration for others, fears for those I love, protectiveness, devotion, sense of duty, of responsibility. But as Gide says, thought arrests action and being. So June is BEING. Nothing can control her. She is our fantasy let loose upon the world. She does what others only do in their dreams. Mindless, the life of our unconscious without control. There is a fantastic courage in this, to live without laws, without fetters, without thought of consequences.
What demonic accounts does June keep so that Henry and I, human beings, look with awe on her impulsiveness and recklessness, which enrich us more than the tender devotions of others, the measured loves, the considerate cautiousness of others.
The other side of June, I see the grandiose side of June the character. I will not tear her to pieces as Henry has. I will love her and enrich her.
The wonder and mystery of June's madness. I feel closer to her than to Henry's earthy simplicities because of my duality. Someday I may follow her to the very end of her voyage.
Gide says: "The characters of Dostoevsky are moved fundamentally either by pride or lack of pride."
Henry's bordellos must seem laughable to June. So easy, so direct, so natural. I am sure her acts are less easily defined, more intricate, more sensuous. It is an erotic light which shines around her. Henry counts on me to understand. I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. To his great surprise, I say t
hings which resemble what June said: "It is not the same thing." There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot possess without loving.
[February, 1932]
I carry about rich, heavy letters from Henry. Avalanches. I have tacked up on the walls of my writing room two big sheets covered with words which he gave me, and a panorama of his life, with lists of friends, mistresses, unwritten novels, written novels, places he has been to, and those he wants to visit. It is covered with notes for future novels.
I stand between June and Henry, between his primitive strength in which he feels secure (this is reality), and June's illusions and delusions. I am grateful for Henry's fullness and richness. I want to answer him with equal abundance and flow. But I find myself keeping certain secrets, as June did. Fear of ridicule? I delay revelations. I know he thinks June seduced me, that through me he will finally know. As in Proust, when he took more pleasure in being with Albertine's girl friend, who might tell him something about Albertine that he did not know, than in being with Albertine, who by this time concealed all her life from him. I did promise to take him into our world, my world. It is quite possible that I may be even more secretive than June. More fearful than June to reveal myself.
I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a WHOLE, whereas I was made up of a multitude of selves, of fragments. I know that I was upset as a child to discover that we had only one life. It seems to me that I wanted to compensate for this by multiplying experience. Or perhaps it always seems like this when you follow all your impulses and they take you in different directions. In any case, when I was happy, always at the beginning of a love, euphoric, I felt I was gifted for living many lives fully. (June?) It was only when I was in trouble, lost in a maze, stifled by complications and paradoxes that I was haunted or that I spoke of my "madness," but I meant the madness of the poets.
