by Anais Nin
"Living a lie which is not a lie but a fairy tale," wrote Henry.
Today I met Fred and we walked towards Trinité together to buy things for the apartment. The sun came out from behind a cloud. I quoted from his writing on a sunny morning in the market, which touched him. He tells me that I am good for Henry.
"You are wonderful," says Fred, "you are beautiful."
Brought Henry a copy of the magazine transition. I like adding to his writing, enriching it.
Reading Proust marked by Henry:
On the other hand, it is not by chance that intellectual and sensitive beings always give themselves to insensitive and inferior women. Such men need to suffer. Such intellectual and sensitive beings are generally little inclined to lie. This takes them all the more by surprise, that even though very intelligent, they live in the world of possibilities, react little, live in the pain that a woman has just inflicted upon them, rather than in the clear perception of what she wanted ... Through this, the mediocre woman that one was surprised to see them love, enriches their universe much more than would have an intelligent woman.
Lies ... All this creates, in the face of a sensitive intellectual, a universe all in depths which his jealousy would like to plumb and which is not without interest to his intelligence.
All this I sensed and said to Henry.
I see similarities between Henry and myself in softness and yieldingness in human relationships. I see his utter subjection to June balanced by continuous revenges upon her in his writing. Henry talks of beating June, but it is only verbal or in writing. He is weak before her. And he is completely lacking in protectiveness towards woman. He has let himself be protected always. That may be why she can say: "I have loved him like a child." Will Henry continue to assert his manhood only by destruction, anger, and then when June appears, bow his head and endure?
Right now only hatred fires him to write. He reads Mabel Dodge Luhan on Lawrence [Lorenzo in Taos] and is immediately aroused. He writes me a long letter which is like a brainstorm. His furies are out of proportion. He wills the whole world to fire and floods because the article Fred writes laboriously for the Chicago Tribune for a pittance is destroyed the next day if it is not printed. Dionysian furies and orgies. "Life is foul, life is foul," he cries.
I guess I must have been sleeping a hundred years in the world of the poets, and did not know about hell on earth.
I had been thinking of letting Henry read all I have written about him. And then I hesitated, because I could hear him saying: "Why are you so grateful?" He would mock my thanksgivings. And then Fred writes about him, "Poor Henry, I feel sorry for you. You have no gratitude because you have no love. To be grateful one must first know how to love."
Henry marks this in Proust:
I was happier to have Andrée near me than I would have been had Albertine been miraculously found again. For Andrée could tell me more things about Albertine than Albertine had told me. On the other hand, the idea that a woman had perhaps had relations with Albertine caused me no more than the desire to have them myself with this woman.
And:
Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer.
Henry says, "Fred and I have terrific arguments. He insists so much. Am I the better writer, or is he? It bothers me sometimes."
"You have more power, more strength, more energy. He is more like a French writer, subtle, wry, witty, oblique."
"But meanwhile it is Fred who has written three wonderful pages about you. He raves about you. He worships you. I am jealous of these three pages. I wish I had written them."
"You will," I said confidently.
"For example, your hands. I had never noticed them. Fred gives them so much importance. Let me look at them. Are they really as beautiful as that? Yes, indeed," said Henry, so naively that I laughed.
"You appreciate other things, perhaps."
Henry said, "I am so sick of the vulgar, drab poverty of my life. You give me something rare."
"The destroyers do not always destroy. June has not destroyed you, ultimately. The core of you is a writer, and the writer is thriving."
Fred draws strength from Henry's torrential writing and tropical furies. And Henry is puzzled and curious about Fred's agile, foxy, oblique remarks. Henry is a loud speaker compared with Fred's timid ways.
"Henry, tell Fred we can go and look for curtains tomorrow." (It is Fred who attends to feminine details of settling in the apartment.)
"I'll come, too," said Henry, who had first said he would not waste time looking for curtains.
"Tell him to meet me at the same place, at the same time as last time..."
"About four o'clock."
Henry's face is sometimes oddly impenetrable, at other times flushed and excited, at others pale and chastened, as if the hot blood had withdrawn from him. He is observant, analytical, watchful, and often suspicious. His blue eyes occasionally turn moist with feeling. Then I remember a story about his childhood. His parents (his father, a tailor) would take him on their Sunday outings, dragging him about all day and late at night. They sat in relatives' and friends' houses to play cards and smoke. The smoke would grow thick and hurt Henry's eyes. They would put him on the bed in the room next to the parlor, with wet towels over his inflamed eyes. And now his eyes get tired of proofreading work at the newspaper, and I would like to free him and I can't.
I have just stood before the open window of my bedroom and I have breathed in deeply all the honeysuckle-perfumed air, the sunshine, the snowdrops of winter, the crocuses of spring, the primroses, the crooning pigeons, the trills of the birds, the entire procession of soft winds and cool smells, of frail colors and petal-textured skies, the knotted snake greys of old vine roots, the vertical shoots of young branches, the dank smell of old leaves, of wet earth, of torn roots, and fresh-cut grass, winter, summer, and fall, sunrises and sunsets, storms and lulls, wheat and chestnuts, wild strawberries and wild roses, violets and damp logs, burnt fields and new poppies.
Henry disturbs the wisdom I seek to maintain, my passion for truth (it is true that June is beautiful and worthy of passion). He mistrusts suavity, prefers explosiveness. The smile I always carry he challenges; he tears it away like a holiday mask.
He shatters the reserve with which I handle my explosiveness so as not to hurt others. He exposes the withdrawn Anaïs who lives several fathoms deep. He likes to churn the ground. His role is to keep everything moving, for out of chaos comes richness, out of upheavals new seeds.
The same thing which makes Henry indestructible is what makes me indestructible. The core of us is an artist, a writer. And it is in our work, by our work, that we reassemble the fragments, re-create wholeness.
I gave myself totally and annihilatingly to my mother. For years I was lost in my love of her. I loved her uncritically, piously, obediently. I gave myself. I was weak, depersonalized. I had no will. She chose the dresses I wore, the books I read; she dictated my letters to my father, or at least read and censored them, revised them. I only began to rebel and assert myself when I went out to work at sixteen. I could not go out with boys as other girls did. I repudiated Catholicism, Christianity. It is my weakness I hate, not her engulfing domination.
It takes character to write a long, lifelong diary, a book, to create several homes, to travel, to protect others, and yet I have no character in human relationships. I cannot scold a maid, tell a hurtful truth, assert my wishes, be angry at injustice or treachery.
I heard Joaquin say: "Anaïs is a dreamer, she has no sense of reality. It is reality she thinks Henry is revealing to her."
I expected to meet Fred, but it is Henry who comes to the rendezvous. He tells me that Fred has work to do. And then he adds, "But that's not altogether true. I didn't let him come. I enjoyed his disappointment. Have you ever noticed, he looks at you with the eyes of a dog you are beating when you are cruel. I enjoyed his misery, to imagine him working and not b
eing able to see you."
For the first time I notice stains on Henry's hat, and the torn greasy pockets. Another day this would have touched me, but his gloating over Fred's misery chills me. He talks marvelously about [Samuel] Putnam and [Eugene] Jolas, and his own work, and the work of Fred. But then the Pernod affects him and he tells me, "Last night I sat in a café with Fred after work and the whores talked to me, and Fred looked at me severely because they were ugly ones, diseased I could say, and he thought I should not be talking to them. Fred is a snob sometimes. But I like whores. You don't have to write them letters. You don't have to tell them how wonderful they are."
"What is Fred like when he is drunk?"
"Merry, yes, but always a bit contemptuous with the whores. They feel it."
"Whereas you are friendly?"
"Yes, I talk to them like a cart driver."
I saw, for the first time, a malevolent Henry. He had come to hurt Fred.
He repeated several times, as if reveling in it: "Fred is working, how it must gripe him." I did not want to choose the curtains without Fred, but Henry insisted. "I found as much pleasure doing evil..." said Stavrogin. And this is for me a pain, not a pleasure.
One of Henry's stories was how he used to like borrowing from a certain man and then spending half the sum he gave him to send the man a telegram. When these stories rise out of drunken mists, I see in him a gleam of deviltry, a secret enjoyment of cruelty.
June buying perfume for Jean while Henry was hungry, or taking pleasure in concealing a bottle of Scotch in her trunk while Henry and his friends, penniless, were wishing desperately for something to drink. What startles me is not what they do, which could be merely thoughtless or selfish, it is the pleasure which they find in doing it. June carried it much further, into blatant perversity, when she wrestled with Jean at Henry's parents' home and willfully shocked them. This love of cruelty must bind them indissolubly. Would they take pleasure in destroying me? For jaded people, the only pleasure left is to demolish others.
Am I facing reality? Am I Stavrogin, who would not act but who watched Stepanovitch with fascination, as if letting him act for him?
Am I, at bottom, still that fervent little Spanish Catholic child who chastised herself for loving toys, who forbade herself the enjoyment of sweet foods, who practiced silence, who humiliated her pride, who adored symbols, statues, burning candles, incense, the caress of nuns, organ music, for whom Communion was a great event? I was so exalted by the idea of eating Jesus's flesh and drinking His blood that I couldn't swallow the Host well, and I dreaded harming it. On my knees, lost to my surroundings, eyes closed, I visualized Christ descending into my heart so realistically (I was a realist then!) that I could see Him walking down the stairs and entering the room of my heart like a sacred visitor. The state of this room was a subject of great preoccupation for me. I fancied that if I had not been good, this room would appear ugly in the eyes of Christ; I fancied He could see as soon as He entered whether it was clear, empty, luminous, or cluttered, dark, chaotic. At that age, nine, ten, eleven, I believe I approximated sainthood. And then, at sixteen, resentful of controls, disillusioned with a God who had not granted my prayers (the return of my father), who performed no miracles, who left me fatherless and in a strange country, I rejected all Catholicism with exaggeration. Goodness, virtue, charity, submission, stifled me. I took up the words of Lawrence: "They stress only pain, sacrifice, suffering and death. They do not dwell enough on the resurrection, on joy and life in the present."
Today I feel my past like an unbearable weight, I feel that it interferes with my present life, that it must be the cause for this withdrawal, my closing the doors.
Until now, I had the feeling of beginning anew, with all the hopes and freshness and freedom which erases the past mysteries and restrictions. What has happened?
And what sorrow, and coldness. I feel as if I carried inscribed over me: my past killed me.
I am embalmed because a nun leaned over me, enveloped me in her veils, kissed me. The chill curse of Christianity. I do not confess any more, I have no remorse, yet am I doing penance for my enjoyments? Nobody knows what a magnificent prey I was for Christian legends, because of my compassion and my tenderness for human beings. Today it divides me from enjoyment of life.
I have suddenly turned cold towards Henry because I have witnessed his cruelty to Fred. No, I do not love Fred, but Fred is a symbol of my past because he is romantic, sensitive, vulnerable. The first time I saw him, he was so shy, and then he became devoted to me. So the day when Henry willfully hurts Fred, my friendship comes to a stop. It seems absurd. But the fear of cruelty has been the great conflict of my life. I witnessed the cruelty of my father towards my mother, I experienced his sadistic whippings of my brothers and myself, and I saw his cruelty towards animals (he killed a cat with a cane).
The sympathy I felt for my mother reached hysteria when they quarreled, and the terror of their battles, of their angers, grew so great it became paralyzing later, when I became incapable of anger or cruelty myself. I grew up with such an incapacity for cruelty that it is almost abnormal. When I should show character, I show weakness because of my fear of cruelty. Seeing a small manifestation of it in Henry brought out an awareness of all his other cruelties (he beat his pregnant first wife). It was to avoid this conflict that I almost became a recluse. Regression. I fell back into early memories, early states of being, into childhood recollections, and all this prevents me from living in the present. I give too much importance to cruelty.
All this sounds very reasonable. Certainly I feel cold and withdrawn, and I need to confide in someone. I need guidance.
The next day I rushed to Clichy and Henry, Fred and I laughed all this away.
All I wanted was humor and wisdom.
Joaquin thinks that Henry is a destructive force who has elected its opposite (me) to test his power on. Joaquin and my mother think I have succumbed to tons of literature (it is true that I love literature), that I may be saved (Joaquin is not sure how), in spite of myself.
I smiled sardonically.
All this is utterly incomprehensible to Henry. For me, he is a living force, not a destructive one.
I am amazed how many streets he can walk through in a day, how many letters he can write, how many books he can read, how many people he can talk to, how many cafés he can sit in, how many movies he can see, how many exhibitions. He is like a torrent in continuous movement.
He confessed that he was only cruel when he was jealous. He had been jealous of Fred's admiration of me.
His concept of morality is simply not to be a hypocrite. He admits he has no loyalties. He admits he is capable of anything, at a given time: to steal, betray, etc.
Henry, with his clowning, whips the world into a carnival.
We are sitting in a monastically simple room where, a moment before, Henry's typewriter crackled like a castanet. Henry is urging me to display the worst in myself, and I am angered that I have so little to tell. (As a girl I went to confession and could not find any reprehensible acts, but highly censurable dreams!)
There was a bottle of red wine on the floor. Fred was reading from my diary.
It touches me when Henry is humble before something he has never seen before.
"Your house, Anaïs. I know I am a boor, and that I don't know how to behave in such a house, and so I pretend to despise it, but I love it. I love the beauty and fineness of it. It is so warm that when I come into it I feel taken up in the arms of a Ceres, I am ensorcelled."
Henry is no Proust, lingeringly tasting all things; he lives by gusts, by leaps. He never stops to understand; he disperses his time and energy with prodigality.
I always run away from the simplest phrases because they never contain all of the truth. To me the truth is something which cannot be told in a few words, and those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.
Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and t
hen there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.
The intention of June's lies is often pointless. The first time we met, she told me a story about a man who followed her so obstinately that she finally went to his apartment. He had a copy of Spengler which Henry had been forced to sell. He gave June beautiful gifts. He wanted her to select clothes for a woman he loved who had no taste, no originality. June tells me she saw him a few times and then stopped for the sake of the other woman. I sensed a distortion in the story, but I could not tell what she meant it to prove. Her Quixotisms? The story, somehow, sounded false. Does she lie because, as Proust says, we lie most to those we love best? Does she lie to embellish her image, or out of fear of consequences, or to romanticize her life? Both she and Henry acted so sensitively with me that I cannot believe in the other aspect of their lives.
Proust:
Of how many pleasures, of what a sweet life she has deprived us, I said to myself, by reason of this savage obstinacy to deny her inclination.
Marguerite'S. is a dark-haired girl whose father is a writer and who earns her living by translating from the English. I met her at the home of my neighbor, Madame Pierre Chareau, one afternoon. She is helping me to copy the diary. She has been visiting Dr. René Allendy for psychoanalysis. After her work, we often sit and talk in the garden. She has a great deal to say about him, and is well read, and we have long talks. Once a week she goes to visit him, and I do notice a change in her.
Her father had known him in the army. At that time he wanted to be a doctor, but he became interested in psychoanalysis and believed in its effectiveness.
