Henry and June: From A Journal of Love -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932)

by Anais Nin

  At the same time I concede to myself that he knows the technique of kissing better than anyone I've met. His gestures never miss their aim, no kiss ever goes astray. His hands are deft. My curiosity for sensuality is stirred. I have always been tempted by unknown pleasures. He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away. Finally I lie still on the couch, but when his desire grows, I try to escape. Too late. Then I tell him the truth: woman's trouble. That does not seem to deter him. "You don't think I want that mechanical way—there are other ways." He sits up and uncovers his penis. I don't understand what he wants. He makes me get down on my knees. He offers it to my mouth. I get up as if struck by a whip.

  He is furious. I say to him, "I told you we have different ways of doing things. I warned you I was inexperienced."

  "I never believed it. I don't yet believe it. You can't be, with your sophisticated face and your passionateness. You're playing a trick on me."

  I listen to him; the analyst in me is uppermost, still on the job. He pours out stories to show me that I don't appreciate what other women do.

  In my head I answer, "You don't know what sensuality is. Hugo and I do. It's in us, not in your devious practices; it's in feeling, in passion, in love."

  He goes on talking. I watch him with my "sophisticated face." He does not hate me because, however repulsed, however angry I am, I have a facility for forgiveness. When I see that I have let him be aroused, it seems natural to let him release his desire between my legs. I just let him, out of pity. That, he senses. Other women, he says, would have insulted him. He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.

  I owed him that; he had revealed a new world to me. I had understood for the first time the abnormal experiences Eduardo had warned me against. Exoticism and sensuality now had another meaning for me.

  Nothing was spared my eyes, so that I might always remember: Drake looking down at his wet handkerchief, offering me a towel, heating water on the gas stove.

  I tell Hugo the story partially, leaving out my activity, extracting the meaning for him and for me. As something forever finished, he accepts it. We efface an hour by passionate love, without twists, without aftertaste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other's arms, lulled by our love, by tenderness—sensuality in which the whole being can participate.

  Henry has imagination, an animal feeling for life, the greatest power of expression, and the truest genius I have ever known. "Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

  Hugo admires him. At the same time he worries. He says justly, "You fall in love with people's minds. I'm going to lose you to Henry."

  "No, no, you won't lose me." I know how incendiary my imagination is. I am already devoted to Henry's work, but I separate my body from my mind. I enjoy his strength, his ugly, destructive, fearless, cathartic strength. I could write a book this minute about his genius. Almost every other word he utters causes an electric charge: on Bunuel's Age d'Or, on Salavin, on Waldo Frank, on Proust, on the film Blue Angel, on people, on animalism, on Paris, on French prostitutes, on American women, on America. He is even walking ahead of Joyce. He repudiates form. He writes as we think, on various levels at once, with seeming irrelevance, seeming chaos.

  I have finished my new book, minus polishing. Hugo read it Sunday and was transported. It is surrealistic, lyrical. Henry says I write like a man, with tremendous clearness and conciseness. He was surprised by my book on Lawrence, although he does not like Lawrence. "So intelligent a book." It is enough. He knows I have outgrown Lawrence. I have already another book in my head.

  I have transposed Drake's sexuality into another kind of interest. Men need other things besides a sexual recipient. They have to be soothed, lulled, understood, helped, encouraged, and listened to. By doing all of this tenderly and warmly—well, he lit his pipe and let me alone. I watched him as if he were a bull.

  Besides, being intelligent, he understands that my type can't be "made" without the illusion. He cannot bother with illusions. O.K. He is a little angry, but ... he'll make a story of it. He is amused because I tell him I know he doesn't love me. He thought I might really be childish enough to believe that he did. "Bright kid," he says. And he tells me all his troubles.

  Again the question: Do we want parties, orgies? Hugo says definitely no. He won't take chances. It would be forcing our temperament. We don't enjoy parties, we don't enjoy drinking, we don't envy Henry his life. But I protest: One doesn't do those things lucidly, one gets drunk. Hugo doesn't want to get drunk. Neither do I. Anyway, we won't go and seek the whore or the man. If she or he comes our way, inevitably, then we'll live out what we want.

  Meanwhile we live satisfied with our less intense life, because, of course, the intensity has died down—after the quickening of Hugo's passion because of my entanglement with John. He has also been jealous of Henry and of Drake—he was miserable—but I have reassured him. He sees that I am wiser, that in fact I never again intend to run into a blank wall.

  I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman. Such a separation may seem childish, but it is possible. Subtract the overintensity, the sizzling of ideas, and you get a woman who loves perfection. And faithfulness is one of the perfections. It seems stupid and unintelligent to me now because I have bigger plans in mind. Perfection is static, and I am in full progress. The faithful wife is only one phase, one moment, one metamorphosis, one condition.

  I might have found a husband who loved me less exclusively, but it would not be Hugo, and whatever is Hugo, whatever Hugo is composed of, I love. We deal in different values. For his faithfulness, I give him my imagination—even my talent, if you will. I have never been satisfied with our accounts. But they must stand.

  He will come home tonight and I will watch him. Finer than any man I know, the nearly perfect man. Touchingly perfect.

  The hours I have spent in cafés are the only ones I call living, apart from writing. My resentment grows because of the stupidity of Hugo's bank life. When I go home, I know I go back to the banker. He smells of it. I abhor it. Poor Hugo.

  Everything is made right by a talk with Henry all afternoon—that mixture of intellect and emotionalism which I like. He can be swept away completely. We talked without noticing the time until Hugo came home, and we had dinner together. Henry remarked on the green fat-bellied bottle of wine and the hissing of the slightly damp log in the fire.

  He thinks I must know about life because I posed for painters. The extent of my innocence would be incredible to him. How late I have awakened and with what furor! What does it matter what Henry thinks of me? He'll know soon enough exactly what I am. He has a caricatural mind. I'll see myself in caricature.

  Hugo says rightly that it takes great hate to make a caricature. Henry and my friend Natasha [Troubetskoi] have great hates. I do not. Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am more preoccupied with loving.

  I am absorbed by Henry, who is uncertain, self-critical, sincere. I get a tremendous and selfish pleasure out of our gift of money to him. What do I think of when I sit by the fire? To get a bunch of railroad tickets for Henry; to buy him Albertine disparue. Henry wants to read Albertine disparue? Quick, I won't be happy until he has the book. I am an ass. Nobody likes to have these things done for them, nobody but Eduardo, and even he, in certain moods, prefers utter indifference. I would like to give Henry a home, marvelous food, an income. If I were rich, I would not be rich very long.

  Drake no longer interests me in the least. I was relieved he did not come today. Henry interests me, but not physically. Is it possible I might at last b
e satisfied with Hugo? It hurt me when he left for Holland today. I felt old, detached.

  A startlingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry's wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth.

  Years ago, when I tried to imagine a true beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman. I had even imagined she would be Jewish. I knew long ago the color of her skin, her profile, her teeth.

  Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me. Henry faded. She was color, brilliance, strangeness.

  Her role in life alone preoccupies her. I knew the reasons: her beauty brings dramas and events to her. Ideas mean little. I saw in her a caricature of the theatrical and dramatic personage. Costume, attitudes, talk. She is a superb actress. No more. I could not grasp her core. Everything Henry had said about her was true.

  By the end of the evening I was like a man, terribly in love with her face and body, which promised so much, and I hated the self created in her by others. Others feel because of her; and because of her, others write poetry; because of her, others hate; others, like Henry, love her in spite of themselves.

  June. At night I dreamed of her, as if she were very small, very frail, and I loved her. I loved a smallness which had appeared to me in her talk: the disproportionate pride, a hurt pride. She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself. There is no June Mansfield. She knows it. The more she is loved, the more she knows it. She knows there is a very beautiful woman who took her cue last night from my inexperience and tried to lose her depth of knowledge.

  A startlingly white face retreating into the darkness of the garden. She poses for me as she leaves. I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, "You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

  "The only power which keeps you together is your love for Henry, and for that, you love him. He hurts you, but he keeps your body and soul together. He integrates you. He lashes and whips you into occasional wholeness. I have Hugo."

  I wanted to see her again. I thought Hugo would love her. It seemed so natural to me that everybody should love her. I talked to Hugo about her. I felt no jealousy.

  When she came out of the dark again, she seemed even more beautiful to me than before. Also she seemed more sincere. I said to myself, "People are always more sincere with Hugo." I also thought it was because she was more at ease. I could not tell what Hugo was thinking. She was going upstairs to our bedroom to leave her coat. She stood for a second halfway up the stairs where the light set her off against the turquoise green wall. Blond hair, pallid face, demoniac peaked eyebrows, a cruel smile with a disarming dimple. Perfidious, infinitely desirable, drawing me to her as towards death.

  Downstairs, Henry and June formed an alliance. They were telling us about their quarrels, breakdowns, wars against each other. Hugo, who is uneasy in the presence of emotions, tried to laugh off the jagged corners, to smooth out the discord, the ugly, the fearful, to lighten their confidences. Like a Frenchman, suave and reasonable, he dissolved all possibility of drama. There might have been a fierce, inhuman, horrible scene between June and Henry, but Hugo kept us from knowing.

  Afterwards I pointed out to him how he had prevented all of us from living, how he had caused a living moment to pass him by. I was ashamed of his optimism, his trying to smooth things out. He understood. He promised to remember. Without me he would be entirely shut out by his habit of conventionality.

  We had a cheerful dinner together. Henry and June were both famished. Then we went to the Grand Guignol. In the car June and I sat together and talked in accord.

  "When Henry described you to me," she said, "he left out the most important parts. He did not get you at all." She knew that immediately; she and I had understood each other, every detail and nuance of each other.

  In the theatre. How difficult to notice Henry while she sits resplendent with a masklike face. Intermission. She and I want to smoke, Henry and Hugo don't. Walking out together, what a stir we create. I say to her, "You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination." She answers, "It is a good thing that I am going away. You would soon unmask me. I am powerless before a woman. I do not know how to deal with a woman."

  Is she telling the truth? No. In the car she had been telling me about her friend Jean, the sculptress and poetess. "Jean had the most beautiful face," and then she adds hastily, "I am not speaking of an ordinary woman. Jean's face, her beauty was more like that of a man." She stops. "Jean's hands were so very lovely, so very supple because she had handled clay a lot. The fingers tapered." What anger stirs in me at June's praise of Jean's hands? Jealousy? And her insistence that her life has been full of men, that she does not know how to act before a woman. Liar!

  She says, staring intently, "I thought your eyes were blue. They are strange and beautiful, gray and gold, with those long black lashes. You are the most graceful woman I have ever seen. You glide when you walk." We talk about the colors we love. She always wears black and purple.

  We return to our seats. She turns constantly to me instead of to Hugo. Coming out of the theatre I take her arm. Then she slips her hand over mine; we lock them. She says, "The other night at Montparnasse I was hurt to hear your name mentioned. I don't want to see cheap men crawl into your life. I feel rather ... protective."

  In the café I see ashes under the skin of her face. Disintegration. What terrible anxiety I feel. I want to put my arms around her. I feel her receding into death and I am willing to enter death to follow her, to embrace her. She is dying before my eyes. Her tantalizing, somber beauty is dying. Her strange, manlike strength.

  I do not make any sense out of her words. I am fascinated by her eyes and mouth, her discolored mouth, badly rouged. Does she know I feel immobile and fixed, lost in her?

  She shivers with cold under her light velvet cape.

  "Will you have lunch with me before you leave?" I ask.

  She is glad to be leaving. Henry loves her imperfectly and brutally. He has hurt her pride by desiring her opposite: ugly, common, passive women. He cannot endure her positivism, her strength. I hate Henry now, heartily. I hate men who are afraid of women's strength. Probably Jean loved her strength, her destructive power. For June is destruction.

  My strength, as Hugo tells me later when I discover he hates June, is soft, indirect, delicate, insinuating, creative, tender, womanly. Hers is like that of a man. Hugo tells me she has a mannish neck, a mannish voice, and coarse hands. Don't I see? No, I do not see, or if I see, I don't care. Hugo admits he is jealous. From the very first minute they hated each other.

  "Does she think that with her woman's sensibility and subtlety she can love anything in you that I have not loved?"

  It is true. Hugo has been infinitely tender with me, but while he talks of June I think of our hands locked together. She does not reach the same sexual center of my being that man reaches; she does not touch that. What, then, has she moved in me? I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the eyes, the hands, the senses that only women have. It is a soft and subtle penetration.

  I hate Henry for daring to injure her enormous and shallow pride in herself. June's superiority arouses his hatred, even a feeling of revenge. He eyes my gentle, homely maid, Emilia. His offense makes me love June.

  I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She
will add the sum of me to her. She will be June plus all that I contain.

  JANUARY 1932

  We met, June and I, at American Express. I knew she would be late, and I did not mind. I was there before the hour, almost ill with tenseness. I would see her, in full daylight, advance out of the crowd. Could it be possible? I was afraid that I would stand there exactly as I had stood in other places, watching a crowd and knowing no June would ever appear because June was a product of my imagination. I could hardly believe she would arrive by those streets, cross such a boulevard, emerge out of a handful of dark, faceless people, walk into that place. What a joy to watch that crowd scurrying and then to see her striding, resplendent, incredible, towards me. I hold her warm hand. She is going for mail. Doesn't the man at American Express see the wonder of her? Nobody like her ever called for mail. Did any woman ever wear shabby shoes, a shabby black dress, a shabby dark blue cape, and an old violet hat as she wears them?

  I cannot eat in her presence. But I am calm outwardly, with that Oriental placidity of bearing that is so deceptive. She drinks and smokes. She is quite mad, in a sense, subject to fears and manias. Her talk, mostly unconscious, would be revealing to an analyst, but I cannot analyze it. It is mostly lies. The contents of her imagination are realities to her. But what is she building so carefully? An aggrandizement of her personality, a fortifying and glorifying of it. In the obvious and enveloping warmth of my admiration she expands. She seems at once destructive and helpless. I want to protect her. What a joke! I, protect her whose power is infinite. Her power is so strong that I actually believe it when she tells me her destructiveness is unintentional. Has she tried to destroy me? No, she walked into my house and I was willing to endure any pain from her hands. If there is any calculation in her, it comes only afterwards, when she becomes aware of her power and wonders how she should use it. I do not think her evil potency is directed. Even she is baffled by it.