by Anais Nin
It is too simple for Henry to say June is a faithless woman. We may both be faithful to the living moment, to life, and not to one love. Henry is always painting a portrait of a June scattered in fragments, beyond all reassemblage.
"Passion gives me moments of wholeness."
Perhaps we have built a false concept of wholeness and, under the pressure of an artificial unity, people like June explode and fly in all directions.
Some day we may be reassembled into a more truthful whole.
I never said to June, "You lie," but "You imagined, you invented," as I wish my parents had said to me when I fabricated tales of meeting jungle animals in the street, etc.
Multiple personalities, multiple lives born of an extravagant hunger. Poor June has increased the dose of love as the poor addict increases his dose of drugs.
Henry's background, he told me, is German. To me, he seems like a Slav, or is it that Dostoevsky has been interwoven with their lives. He has the German sentimentality. He goes from sentimentality to callousness. His imagination is German, his writing resembles George Grosz. He has a love of ugliness. He likes vulgarity, slang, apache quarters, squalor, toughness, the bas fonds of everything. He likes the smell of cabbage, of stew, of poverty and of prostitutes.
Henry's letters give me a feeling of plenitude I get rarely. They are extraordinary. I take great joy in answering them, but the bulk of them overwhelms me. I have barely answered one when he writes another. Comments on Proust, lists of books, descriptions, moods, his own life, his indefatigable sexuality, the way he immediately gets mixed up, tangled in action. Too much action, to my mind. Undigested. No wonder he marvels at Proust. No wonder I watch his life knowing I can never live like that, for my life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.
Letter to Henry:
You ask impossible and contradictory things. You want to know what dreams, what impulses, what desires June has. But how could she tell you when she lives like a submarine, sunk always at the deepest level of instinct and intuition. Perhaps I may be able to tell you all that, for I always come up for air, I am not always just living, loving, pursuing my fantasies. I may sit down one day and try to tell you just that I would much rather go on living blindly. And you beat your head against the walls of June's world, and you want me to tear all the veils. You want to force delicate, profound, vague, obscure, mysterious, voluptuous sensations into something you can seize and violate. But will you caricature it? Why do you want such clarity from me? You were the first to say one day: "Chaos is rich. Chaos is fecund." The mysteries of June inspired you. You never gave any other woman so much attention. Then why do you want to dispel this mystery? Will you be content if you find that June is a Lesbian, that she takes drugs, that she may be psychotic, that she has a hundred lovers. I never understood Proust's need to know, to be present almost, when Albertine was loving someone else.
June simply IS. She has no ideas, no fantasies of her own. They are given to her by others, who are inspired by her face and body. She acquired them. Henry says angrily, "She is an empty box." And he adds, "You are the full box." To think of her in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living. Who wants the ideas, the fantasies, the contents, if the box is beautiful and inspiring. I am inspired by June the empty box. The world has never been as empty as since I have known her. Precisely because a world full of ideas, talent, fantasies, is not a full world. June supplies the beautiful incandescent flesh, the fulgurant voice, the abysmal eyes, the drugged gestures, the presence of the body, the incarnation of our dreams and creations. What are we? Only the creators. She IS. What a dull world without June. No beauty. No voice. No presence. All the poetry written, all the erotic imaginings, all the obsessions, illusions, nightmares, manias, what are they if there is no June, the warm being walking and touching us? Sterile, all our cries, all our staggering words, all the heat and fervor of storytelling, sterile our creations, if there were no June passing through, like the supreme materialization of them all, with a demonic indifference to human order, human limitations and restrictions.
I get letters from Henry every day. I answer him immediately. I gave him my typewriter and I write by hand. I think of June day and night. I am full of energy. I write endless letters.
Last night after reading Henry's novel I could not sleep. It was midnight. I wanted to get up and go to my writing room and write to Henry about his first book. There are two doors to open and they creak. I lay still and forced myself to sleep, with phrases rushing through my head like minor cyclones. I could understand and see, as if I had been there, the devastating charade lovers enter upon. Henry's and June's was on the theme of truth and non-truth, illusion and reality. The meshing only took place in the interlockings of desire. Sudden, violent desires. No time to turn down coverlets, to close windows, to turn out the lights. Against the wall, on the carpet, on a chair, on a couch, in taxis, in elevators, in parks, on rivers, on boats, in the woods, on balconies, in doorways at night, they grappled body to body, breath to breath, tongue against tongue, as if to enclose, enmesh, imprison once and forever, essences, odors, flavors which eluded them at other times.
They were locked at least for an instant in a common pulsation. No mysteries concealed in these rites of the body. Palpable rites, hands full of evidence.
I could see them, lying back to back. He still immersed in her. Her breath quieting down. He wants to remain within her, to lie blind in the furls of her flesh. On what wings does she take flight from Henry? As if the sensual act had been but a mouth applied to an opium pipe.
Henry complains, "She was never tender or warm after love-making. She would rise after it, cool and collected." Was it at this moment that Henry attacked her? Attacked a June who separated from him, who denied him a state of friendship? Either passion or war? And who had declared war first?
I have learned from Henry to make notes, to expand, not to brood secretly, to move, to write every day, to do, to say instead of meditating, not to conceal the breaking up of myself under emotion. He arouses tremendous strength in me. I write against and with him. I live against and with him. I am conscious of his life. I feel rich with it. His letters and the notes on the back of them, his wealth of activity, give me a feeling of warmth and fervor which I love, a feeling of expansion, of ampleness, plenitude. I could not live any longer in an empty world. I must have much to love, much to hate, much to grapple with. I am deeply happy. I no longer have the feeling of emptiness around me.
I am so far away from my soft and gentle home. Yet for June too, I was an archangel. They all want to sanctify me, to turn me into an effigy, a myth. They want to idealize me and pray to me, use me for consolation, comfort. Curse my image, the image of me which faces me every day with the same over-fineness, over-delicacy, the pride, the vulnerability which makes people want to preserve me, treat me with care. Curse my eyes which are sad, and deep, and my hands which are delicate, and my walk which is a glide, my voice which is a whisper, all that can be used for a poem, and too fragile to be raped, violated, used. I am near death from solitude, near dissolution. My being was sundered in two by Henry and June, in absolute discord, in profound contradiction. It is impossible for me to follow one direction, to grow in only one direction.
June said to me, "How can I be faithful to Henry when he does not love all of me, when so much of me he passes judgment on, hates, even."
"Yes," I agreed, "the truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest."
To me Henry confesses that he has a haunting fear that June is a creation of his own brain. "She is loaded with riches given to her by others. The only difference between her and other women is that instead of furs and jewels she prefers paintings, poems, novels, compositions, statues, praise, admiration."
"Then she does exist in her selections," I said to Henry. "Doesn't she exist in her selection of you? Of me? What kind of certitude do you seek? She is suspicious of words. She lives by her se
nses, by her intuition. We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds. How are you going to tell about them?"
"For example," said Henry, not hearing, "once she told me that she was tubercular. But she will not say if she is cured, and how long she was ill, and all she concedes is that it taught her to live more intensely."
"Perhaps, Henry, she may think you will love her better if there is the danger of losing her."
"Whenever she comes back from the café with new friends, her introduction always is: 'They talked to me, they sought me out.'" As if she were a passive wax receiving others' imprints. To Henry this always seemed a way to conceal her own interest.
"Perhaps she is telling the truth then. Like an actress, she may need to be nourished by a public, by praise, by admiration. They may be a necessity to her as a proof of her visibility. I know that the idea of June doubting her existence may seem impossible to you. But I feel that many of her efforts are not directed towards experiencing her own existence within herself but in obtaining outward proofs of it, outward proofs of her beauty, power, gifts, etc."
This need (which I have, and would not tell Henry) increases like the addict's need of drugs. June had to increase the dose of friendships, admirers, devotees, lovers.
"What are you seeking, Henry? Are you chafing under your bondage? What will you gain if you discover that June can love more than one person? What are you seeking? To disentangle yourself? They say that people who have more than one self are mad, but you yourself, how many Henrys are there in you? And you think of yourself as the sanest of men!"
"I want the key, the key to the lies."
"Passion and violence never opened a human being."
"What opens human beings?"
"Compassion."
Henry laughed. "Compassion and June are absolutely incompatible. Absolutely absurd. As well have compassion for Venus, for the moon, for a statue, for a queen, a tigress."
"Strange irony, in Spanish, compassion means with passion. Your passion is without compassion. Compassion is the only key I ever found which fits everyone."
"And what would you say aroused your compassion for June?"
"The need to be loved..."
"You mean faithlessness..."
"Oh, no. Don Juan was seeking in passion, in the act of possession, in the welding of bodies, something that had nothing to do with passion and was never born of it."
"A Narcissus pool."
"No, he was seeking to be created, to be born, to be warmed into existence, to be imagined, to be known, to be identified; he was seeking a procreative miracle. The first birth is often a failure. He was seeking the love which would succeed. Passion cannot achieve this because it is not concerned with the true identity of the lover. Only love seeks to know and to create or rescue the loved one."
"And why seek that from me?" said Henry. "I don't even care to feed a stray cat. Anybody who goes about dispensing compassion as you do will be followed by a thousand cripples, nothing more. I say, let them die."
"You asked for a key to June, Henry."
"You also think of June as a human being in trouble?"
This is the kind of image Henry will not pursue. It must be returned quickly to the bottle of wine, like an escaped genie that can only cause trouble. Henry wants pleasure. Drink the wine, empty the bottle, return to it these images of tenderness, recork it, throw it out to sea. Worse luck, it would surely be me who would spot it as a distress signal, pick it up lovingly, and read into it a request for compassion.
Even though Henry laughed at my words, drowned them in a Pernod, he found that when he returned to his writing about June he had lost some of that mythological larger-than-nature proportion which he liked to give to her. What had happened? June seemed less powerful, more vulnerable.
Once June had a fever. The fever, too, he never believed in; he considered it part of her dramatizations, a mere exaggeration of her natural state. That night I saw her, the fever rouged her cheeks and dampened her hair. I believed in it.
The figures in his books are always outsized, whether tyrant or victims, man or woman. Could people change size according to our vision of them?
Henry always saw his mother immense in the scale of the universe. He had been shocked on one of his visits to find her smaller than he remembered her. He believed it was her aging which was shrinking her. If a person continues to see only giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child. I have a feeling that man's fear of woman comes from having first seen her as the mother creator of men. Certainly it is difficult to feel compassion for the one who gives birth to man.
***
Difficult to keep the friendship of Henry, and the friendship of June.
Yesterday at the café he tore bits of our story from me. Henry cannot make me love her less, but he can make her appear unreal. He can persist in proving that June does not exist, that she is only an illusion, an image invented by us, a beautiful jewel casket filled with others' gifts. He talked about how easily June was influenced, how Jean, the mannish woman in New York, affected her talk, her vocabulary, her habits.
And then Henry said, "You mystify me."
What am 1? Is he going to hate me? When we first met, he was so enthusiastic about me.
I am trapped between the beauty of June and the talent of Henry. In a different way, I am devoted to both, a part of me goes out to each one, the writer in me is interested in Henry. Henry gives me a world of writing, June gives me danger. I must choose and I cannot. For me to confide in Henry all the feelings I have about June would be like betraying her, and a secret part of myself. And what does he want? Just knowledge, a ferocious curiosity? No, I cannot believe that. I feel a certain tenderness in him. I do not know when he will turn around and ridicule. Do I fear his ridicule?
Letter to Henry:
Perhaps you didn't realize it but, for the first time today, you shocked and startled me out of a dream. All your notes, your stories about June, never hurt me. Nothing hurt me until you touched upon the non-existence of June. June under the influence of others, yielding. June as she was when you first met her; then June reading Dostoevsky and changing her personality, and June under the influence of Jean. You lived with her, Henry; surely you do not believe that there is no June, just someone who reflects whatever you wish her to be, takes the imprint or her cue from others. Is it your terror too, that she may be a creation of your own brain? But what of her selection of you, and of me? She chose you from other men; she distinguished me. You were delighted when she admired me. You were delighted because she was revealing a side of herself. There is a June who is difficult to identify in the maze of her many relationships, her many roles, but there is a June who is not just a beautiful image. How can she seem unreal to you who had lived with her, and to me whom she kissed? Oh, I do sense another June. But why did you talk to her so much that first night you met her at the dance hall? What was she like then? She must have been far more vivid than all the other women around her?
More letters from Henry, parts of his book as he writes it, quotations, notes while listening to Debussy and Ravel, on the back of menus of small restaurants in shabby quarters. A torrent of realism. Too much of it, too much action. He will not sacrifice a moment of life, eating, walking, movies, people, to his work. He is always rushing and writing about future works, writing more letters than novels, doing more preparation and investigating than actual writing. Yet the form of his last book, discursive, free, associative, casual, reminiscent, like talking, is marvelous.
I get tired of his obscenities, of his world of "shit, cunt, prick, bastard, crotch, bitch," but I suppose it is the way most people talk and live. A symphonic concert today, and reading the poetry and music of Proust, confirmed my mood of detachment. Again and again I have entered realism, and found it arid, limited. Again and again I return to poetry. I write to June. I try to imagine her life now. But poetry took me away from life, and so I will hav
e to live in Henry's world. When I come home, Emilia says, "There is a letter for Madame." I run upstairs hoping it is a letter from Henry.
I want to be a strong poet, as strong as Henry and June are in their realism. What baffles me about Henry is the flashes of imagination, the flashes of insight, the flashes of dreams. Fugitive. And the depths. Rub off the German realist, the man who "stands for shit," as people say of him, and you get a lusty imagist. At moments he can say the most delicate and profound things. But this gentleness is treacherous because when he sits down to write, he denies this; he does not write with love but with anger, he writes to attack, to ridicule, to destroy. He is always against something. Anger incites him; fuels him. Anger poisons me.
Henry feels that he has not got June in his novel. There is one world closed to him. It is the oblique, indirect world of subtle emotions and ecstasies, those which do not take a physical form, a plain physical act. He said he would never stop banging his head against it. I said, "There are some things one cannot seize by realism, but by poetry. It is a matter of language."
Each time Henry describes June in his language, he fails to make her portrait. Elusive, voluptuous, mysterious June. Sometimes while reading his manuscript, I feel there is too much naturalism. It obscures moods, feelings, psychic states.
Café Viking. Henry. He still remembers passages in my novel, wants to have the manuscript, to be able to read it over.* Says it is the most beautiful writing he has read lately. Talks about the fantastic potentialities of it. Talks about his first impression of me standing at the doorsteps.
"So lovely, and then sitting in the big black armchair like a princess. I want to destroy the illusion. At the same time, I am aware of your great honesty. I cannot talk well. I want to write to you."
