by Anais Nin
I read him what I wrote on the effect of reading his notes. He was interested, said I could only write like that, with that imaginative intensity, because I had not lived out what I was writing about. "The living out in excess kills the imagination and the intensity," said Henry. But at the contact of my fervor, he felt like going home and writing with that imaginative power.
Henry misunderstands so much. My smile when he talks about June "at first fighting all my ideas, fighting them off violently, and later absorbing them and expressing them as if they were her own." When I smiled, he looked at me aggressively, as if my smile had been critical and said, "It happens to all of us!" My smile meant: I have done that too. But I believe he loves to quarrel. My mellowness is strange to him. He finds that, like a chameleon, I change color in the café. I lose the colors I had in my own home. I do not fit into the café life. I do not fit into his life.
His life. The lower depths, the underworlds. Violence, ruthlessness, gold-digging, debauch. What a torrent of bestial life. His language, descriptions of a world I never knew. The streets of Brooklyn. Broadway. The Village. Poverty. Associations with illiterates, with all kinds of people.
Mine was, from childhood, growth in an atmosphere of music and books and artists, always constructing, creating, writing, drawing, inventing plays, acting in them, writing a diary, living in created dreams as inside a cocoon, dreams born of reading, always reading, growing, disciplining myself to learn, to study, skirting abysses and dangers with incredible innocence, the body always sensitive but in flight from ugliness. The eroticism of Paris awakened me but I remained a romantic. I studied dancing, painting, sculpture, costuming, decoration. I created beautiful homes.
When I talk about June, Henry says, "What a lovely way you have of putting things."
"Perhaps it is another way of evading facts."
"No, perhaps you see more."
"You and June wanted to protect me, why?"
"Because you seemed so utterly fragile."
Henry's older mind watching me.
Henry talks about Saint Francis, meditates on the idea of saintliness. Why, I ask him.
"Because I consider myself the last man on earth."
And I am thinking of the sincere admissions I get from him, of his capacity to be awed, which means he is not corrupt, not cynical. When I have been most natural, serving food, cooking, lighting a fire, he still says: "I do not feel natural with you yet." He says this humbly, delicately, and I see such a different Henry from the one in the notes.
He lives rather quietly. He is sometimes not in the present. The writer registers. His feelings are not always in the moment. Afterwards, when he is writing, he seems to realize, to warm up; he begins to react and dramatize.
Our talks: he in his language of the streets, I in mine. I never use his words. His watchfulness and my candid impulsiveness. I think that my "registering" is more unconscious, more intuitive, more instinctive. It does not appear on the surface as his does.
The slipperiness and agility of my mind against his relentless dissection. My belief in wonder against his crude, realistic details. The joy when he seizes upon my essence.
"Your eyes seem to be expecting miracles."
Will he perform them?
Second afternoon at the café.
"I take pleasure in telling you the truth, Henry. I have told you all I know about June."
"Yes, I know that," said Henry. "I am sure of that."
We talked about writing. Henry said, "I like to have my desk in order before I begin; only my notes around me, a great many notes."
"I work the same way. My diary is my notebook. Everything goes into it that I may use for novels." Delight in talk of techniques. Our craft.
Does he suffer from his own inexorable frankness? Does he have no moments of feeling he is violating sacred intimacies? He seems full of delicacies with me.
"We have a common objective passion for truth," I said. "I have been trying to be honest, day by day, in the diary. You are right when you speak of my honesty. I make an effort, at least. It is feminine to be oblique. It is not trickery. It is a fear of being judged. What we analyze, will it die? Will June die? Will our feelings die suddenly, if you should make a caricature of them? There is a danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. You will be hated because of this. There are truths human beings can't bear. And sometimes I do feel your relentless analysis of June leaves something out. You go about it like a surgeon with a scalpel. And as you cut, you kill what you cut into. What will you do after you have exposed all there is to expose about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. At times I'm sure you want to resuscitate your blind worship, your blindness. In some strange way, I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. When you caricature, tear apart, I hate you. I want to fight your realism with all the magic forces of poetry."
He carries one vision of the world as monstrous, and I carry mine. They oppose each other, and also complement each other. If at moments I see the world as he does, will he sometimes see the world as I do?
Henry said, "Would you like me to take you to 32 Rue Blondel?"
"What will we see there?"
"Whores."
Henry's whores. I feel curious and friendly towards Henry's whores.
The taxi drops us in a narrow little street. A red light painted with number 32 shines over the doorway. We push a swinging door. It is like a café full of men and women, but the women are naked. There is heavy smoke, much noise, and women are trying to get our attention even before the patronne leads us to a table. Henry smiles. A very vivid, very fat Spanish-looking woman sits with us and she calls a woman we had not noticed, small, feminine, almost timid.
"We must choose," says Henry. "I like these well enough."
Drinks are served. The small woman is sweet and pliant. We discuss nail polish. They both study the pearly nail polish I use and ask the name of it. The women dance together. Some are handsome, but others look withered and tired and listless. So many bodies all at once, big hips, buttocks, and breasts. "The two girls will amuse you," says the patronne.
I had expected a man for the demonstration of sixty-six ways of making love. Henry barters over the price. The women smile. The big one has bold features, raven black hair in curls which almost hide her face. The smaller one has a pale face with blonde hair. They are like mother and daughter. They wear high-heeled shoes, black stockings with garters at the thighs, and a loose open kimono. They lead us upstairs. They walk ahead, swinging their hips.
Henry jokes with them. They open the door on a room which looks like a velvet-lined jewel casket. The walls are covered with red velvet. The bed is low, and has a canopy which conceals a mirror on the ceiling of the bed. The lights are rosy and dim. The women are at ease and cheerful. They are washing themselves in the bidet which is in the room. It is all done so casually and with so much indifference that I wonder how one can become interested. The women are joking, between themselves. The big woman ties a rubber penis around her waist. It is of an impossible pink. They lie on the bed after slipping their shoes off, but not the black stockings.
And they begin to take poses.
"L'amour dans un taxi."
"L'amour à l'Espagnole."
"L'amour when you do not have the price of a hotel room." (For this, they stand up against the wall.)
"L'amour when one of them is sleepy."
The small woman pretended to be asleep. The big woman took the smaller woman from behind, gently and softly.
As they demonstrate they make humorous remarks.
It is all bantering and mockery of love until ... The small woman had been lying on her back with her legs open. The big woman removed the penis and kissed the small woman's clitoris. She flicked her tongue over it, caressed it, kissed. The small woman's eyes closed and we could see she was enjoying it. She began to moan and tremble with pleasure. She offered to our eyes her quivering body and raised herself a l
ittle to meet the voracious mouth of the bigger woman. And then came the climax for her and she let out a cry of joy. Then she lay absolutely still. Breathing fast. A moment later they both stood up, joking, and the mood passed.
I feel that when Henry talks to me he seeks another language. I feel him evading the words which come easier to his lips and searching for more subtle tones. I feel I have taken him into a new world. He walks cautiously into it, gently.
I said to him: "Don't think that when I talk so much about beauty and poetry in relation to June that I am merely trying to romanticize, to make it all appear innocent or ideal. I am only trying to describe feelings which are not so simple to describe. For you the sexual act is everything. But sometimes the senses can make a great deal of the mere touch of a hand."
Henry observes that it is impossible for me to hurt or destroy. He had tears in his eyes when he said this.
It gives me far more pleasure to see him working, and I cannot understand wanting to use one's power for destruction when it is so much more pleasurable to watch Henry writing a hundred pages after our talks together.
With me he explores the symphonies of Proust, the intelligence of Gide, Cocteau's fantasies, Valéry's silences, the illuminations of Rimbaud.
He said, "I have never made friends with an intelligent woman before. All the other women were inferior to me. I consider you my equal.
"With June," he said, "the battles began immediately."
Literature has fallen away. We are entirely sincere with one another.
Joaquin questions my giving to Henry. Why curtains for Henry? Why shoes for Henry? Why writing paper and books for Henry? And me? And me? Joaquin does not understand how spoiled I am. Henry gives me the world. June gave me madness. They gave me two beings I can admire. How grateful I am to find two people who interest me unreservedly. They are generous to me in a way I cannot explain to Joaquin. Can I explain to Joaquin that Henry gives me his water colors, and June her only bracelet?
Henry reproaches June for falling down in her acting because once she gave herself away in a café. Men who knew me made flippant remarks about wanting to sleep with me. June stopped them in an angry way which revealed her love of me. As if I were sacred.
[April, 1932]
I met Fred Perlés today. He is timid, sad-eyed, a sad clown. He echoes Henry, mimics him.
We were sitting in the kitchen of their new home. Fred works for the Tribune and he took this small workman's apartment in a workman's quarter, Clichy, next door to Montmartre and the Place Blanche. It is a plain, bare house. One walks up the uncarpeted stairs, and the thin walls let all the noises through. Fred and Henry have two rooms and a kitchen. It is barely furnished, with only essentials, beds, tables, chairs. In the kitchen there is a round table. Once we are sitting down there is no room to walk around.
This is a sort of housewarming. Henry is opening a bottle of wine. Fred is tossing a salad. Fred seems pale beside Henry, pale and sickly.
Henry said, "Here is the first woman with whom I can be absolutely sincere."
"Laugh, Anaïs," said Fred. "Henry says he loves to hear you laugh, that you are the only woman who has a sense of gaiety, a wise tolerance."
A few pans, unmatched dishes from the flea market, old shirts for kitchen towels. Tacked on the walls, a list of books to get, a list of menus to eat in the future, clippings, reproductions, and water colors of Henry's. Henry keeps house like a Dutch housekeeper. He is very neat and clean. No dirty dishes about. It is all monastic, really, with no trimmings, no decorations. Plainness. The white and light grey walls.
Yesterday Henry came to Louveciennes. A new Henry, or, rather, the Henry I sensed behind the one generally known, the Henry behind the one he has written down. This Henry can understand: he is sentient.
He looked so serious. His violence has burnt itself out. The coarseness, in the alchemy, became strength. He had received a letter from June, in pencil, irregular, mad, like a child's moving, simple cries, of her love for him. "Such a letter blots out everything." I felt the moment had come to expose the June I knew, to give him June, "because it will make you love her more. It's a beautiful June. Other days I felt you might laugh at my portrait, jeer at its naïveté. Today I know you won't."
I let him read all I had written about June.
What is happening? He is deeply moved, torn apart. He believes.
"It is in this way that I should have written about June," he says. "The other is incomplete, superficial. You have got her."
"You leave softness, tenderness out of your work, you write down only the hatred, the rebellions, the violence. I have only inserted what you leave out. What you leave out is not because you don't feel it, or know it, or understand, as you think. It is left out only because it is more difficult to express, and so far, your writing has come out of violence and anger."
I confide in him completely, in the profound Henry. He is won over. He says, "Such love is wonderful. I do not hate or despise that. I see what you give each other. I see it so well. Let me read on. This is a revelation to me." I tremble while he is reading. He understands too well. Suddenly he says, "Anaïs, I have just realized that what I give is something coarse and plain, compared to that. I realize that when June returns..."
I stop him. "You don't know what you have given me! It is not coarse and plain." And then I add, "You see a beautiful June now."
"No, I hate her."
"You hate her?"
"Yes, I hate her," Henry says, "because I see by your notes that we are her dupes, that you are duped, that there is a pernicious, destructive direction to her lies. Insidiously, they are meant to deform me in your eyes, and you in my eyes. If June returns, she will poison us against each other. I fear that."
"There is a friendship between us, Henry, which is not possible for June to understand."
"For that she will hate us, and she will combat us with her own tools."
"What can she use against our understanding of each other?"
"Lies," said Henry.
We were both so aware of her power over both of us, of the friendship which bound Henry and me, of the friendship which bound me to June. When Henry realized that I had trusted him because I understood him, he said, "What penetration you have, Anaïs, how wise you are."
It was I who defended June against one of Fred's remarks to Henry.
"June is evil," Fred said. "June is bad for you."
"She is not bad for you, Henry," I said. "Her lies, her unnecessary complications as you call them, interest the writer in you. Novels are born out of conflict. She was so busy living that she never took time to listen to you, to understand you. June will be good for your novels, and I will be good for you."
Henry was in a subdued mood.
"If I had the means to help you get June back to Paris, would you want me to do it?"
Henry winced.
"Don't ask me, Anaïs, don't ask me." He was suffering.
The full body of June would triumph over creation.
"How you get at the core of everything," said Henry.
"What feeling," he exclaimed, while he read the diary.
To sneer, to rebel, to revolt; that has been his only work so far. And not to care. To destroy is easy.
When we talked once about my writing in the peace of my house, I said, "Perhaps you could not work with peace, you need excitement, interruptions, noise."
"It would be a different writing," said Henry.
Does he want the peace and delicacies I am seeking to escape from? Does he hunger for gentleness and subtlety? Will he turn around and betray all this, destroy it?
I teased him. "Perhaps all I have written is untrue, untrue of June, untrue of me, all illusion and delusion."
"No," he said. "Whatever you see, or whatever you do is right."
"Am I not the Idiot?"
"No, you see more, you just SEE more," said Henry. "What you see is there all right. Yes. For the first time I see some beauty in it."
Dostoevsky was a portentous author for Henry and for June. When I first met them, I felt they were living in his climate, with the same fervors, extravagances, and impersonations of his characters. Today Henry seemed completely Henry and no one else.
"I cannot express tenderness," mused Henry. "Only extravagance. Only passion and energy."
Henry says, "It is quite clear, of course, that I am a failure."
"But I don't want you to be. I won't let you be one. I want you to write, to live and be recognized."
If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.
I think I have an immediate awareness in living which is far more terrible and more painful. There is no time lapse, no distance between me and the present. Instantaneous awareness. But it is also true that when I write afterwards, I see much more, I understand better, I develop and enrich.
I live more on time. What is remembered later does not seem as true to me. I have such a need of truth! It must be that need of immediate recording which incites me to write almost while I am living, before it is altered, changed by distance or time.
We sit in the Clichy kitchen having lunch. Books pile up, records on the floor. Charts and drawings on the walls.
The talk is about Proust and it brings out this confession from Henry: "To be entirely honest with myself, I like to be away from June. It is then I enjoy her best. When she is here, I am morbid, oppressed, desperate. I am satiated with experience and pain."
June has worn him out, worn out his jealousies, and his capacity for suffering. What he has left is a capacity for enjoying peace.
I palliate the sufferings of others. Yes, I see myself always softening blows, dissolving acids, neutralizing poisons, every moment of the day. I try to fulfill the wishes of others, to perform miracles. I exert myself on performing miracles (Henry will write his book, Henry will not starve, June will be cured, etc.).
