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

by Anais Nin

  I thought she meant the hotel room. Then suddenly I remembered the perfume, which cost 200 francs. 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 the rent to pay. Then I remembered another thing she had said. "People say to me that if I had a fortune, I could spent it in a day, and no one would ever know how. I can never account for the way I spend money."

  This was the other face of June's fantasy. We walked the streets, and all the softness of her breast could not lull the pain.

  I went home and was very heavy in Hugo's arms. I said to him, "I have come back." And he was very happy.

  But yesterday at four, when I was waiting for her at American Express, the doorman said to 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." If I were never again to see June walking towards me—impossible. It was like dying. What did it matter, all I thought the day before. She was unethical, irresponsible—it was her nature. I would not tamper with her nature. My pride about money matters was aristocratic. I was too scrupulous and proud. I would not change anything in June which was basic and at the root of her fantastic being. She alone was without fetters. I was a fettered, ethical being, in spite of my amoral intellect. I could not have let Henry go hungry. I accepted her entirely. I would not fight her. If only she would come and meet me for that last hour.

  I had dressed ritually for her, in the very costume which created a void between me and other people, a costume which was a symbol of my individualism and which she alone would understand. Black turban, old rose dress with black lace bodice and collar, old rose coat with Medici collar. I had created a stir as I walked, and I was lonelier than ever because the reaction was partly hostile, mocking.

  Then June came, all in black velvet, black cape and plumed hat, paler and more incandescent than ever, and carrying Count Bruga, as I had asked her to do. The wonder of her face and smile, her smileless eyes...

  I took her to a Russian tearoom. The Russians sang as we felt. June wondered if they were really burning, as it seemed from their voices and intense playing. Probably they were not burning as June and I were.

  Champagne and caviar with June. It is the only time one knows what champagne is and what caviar is. They are June, Russian voices and June.

  Ugly, unimaginative, dead people surround us. We are blind to them. I look at June, in black velvet. June rushing towards death. Henry cannot rush on with her because he fights for life. But June and I together do not hold back. I follow her. And it is an acute joy to go along, giving in to the dissolution of the imagination, to her knowledge of strange experiences, to our games with Count Bruga, who bows to the world with the weeping willowness of his purple hair.

  It is all over. In the street, June says regretfully, "I had wanted to hold you and caress you." I put her in a taxi. She sits there about to leave me and I stand by in torment. "I want to kiss you," I say. "I want to kiss you," says June, and she offers her mouth, which I kiss for a long time.

  When she left, I just wanted to sleep for many days, but I still had something to face, my relationship with Henry. We asked him to come to Louveciennes. I wanted to offer him peace and a soothing house, but of course I knew we would talk about June.

  We walked off our restlessness, and we talked. There is in both of us an obsession to grasp June. He has no jealousy of me, because he said I brought out wonderful things in June, that it was the first time June had ever attached herself to a woman of value. He seemed to expect I would have power over her life.

  When he saw that I understood June and was ready to be truthful with him, we talked freely. Yet once I paused, hesitant, wondering at my faithlessness to June. Then Henry observed that although truth, in June's case, had to be disregarded, it could be the only basis of any exchange between us.

  We both felt the need of allying our two minds, our two different logics, in understanding the problem of June. Henry loves her and always her. He also wants to possess June the character, the powerful, fictionlike personage. In his love for her he has had to endure so many torments that the lover has taken refuge in the writer. He has written a ferocious and resplendent book about June and Jean.

  He was questioning the lesbianism. When he heard me say certain things he had heard June say, he was startled, because he believes me. I said, "After all, if there is an explanation of the mystery it is this: The love between women is a refuge and an escape into harmony. In the love between man and woman there is resistance and conflict. Two women do not judge each other, brutalize each other, or find anything to ridicule. They surrender to sentimentality, mutual understanding, romanticism. Such love is death, I'll admit."

  Last night I sat up until one o'clock reading Henry's novel, Moloch, while he read mine. His was overwhelming, the work of a giant. I was at a loss to tell him how it affected me. And this giant sat there quietly and read my slight book with such comprehension, such enthusiasm, talking about the deftness of it, the subtlety, the voluptuousness, shouting at certain passages, criticizing, too. What a force he is!

  I gave him the one thing June cannot give him: honesty. I am so ready to admit what a supremely developed ego would not admit: that June is a terrifying and inspiring character who makes every other woman insipid, that I would live her life except for my compassion and my conscience, that she may destroy Henry the man, but Henry the writer is more enriched by ordeals than by peace. I, on the other hand, cannot destroy Hugo, because he has nothing else. But like June, I have a capacity for delicate perversions. The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure.

  My conflict is going to be greater than June's, because she has no mind watching her life. Others do it for her, and she denies all they say or write. I have a mind which is bigger than all the rest of me, an inexorable conscience.

  Eduardo says, "Go and be psychoanalyzed." But that seems too simple. I want to make my own discoveries.

  I do not need drugs, artificial stimulation. Yet I want to experience those very things with June, to penetrate the evil which attracts me. I seek life, and the experiences I want are denied me because I carry in me a force which neutralizes them. I meet June, the near-prostitute, and she becomes pure. A purity which maddens Henry, a purity of face and being which is awesome, just as I saw her one afternoon in the corner of the divan, transparent, supernatural.

  Henry speaks to me of her extreme vulgarity. I know her lack of pride. Vulgarity gives the joy of desecrating. But June is not a demon. Life is the demon, possessing her, and their coition is violent because her voraciousness for life is enormous, a tasting of its bitterest flavors.

  After Henry's visit I began to tiger-pace the house and to say to Hugo I had to go away. There were outcries. "You are not really sick—just tired." But Hugo, as usual, understood, consented. The house suffocated me. I couldn't see people, I couldn't write, I couldn't rest either.

  Sunday Hugo took me out for a walk. We found some very large, deep rabbit holes. He playfully incited our dog Banquo to stick his nose in them, to dig. I felt a terrifying oppression, as if I had crawled into a hole and were stifling. I remembered many dreams I have had of being forced to crawl on my stomach, like a snake, through tunnels and apertures that were too small for me, the last one always smaller than all the others, where the anxiety grew so strong that it awakened me. I stood before the rabbit hole and shouted angrily at Hugo to stop. My anger baffled him. It was only a game, and with the dog.

  Now that the feeling of suffocation was so crystallized, I was determined to go away. At night, in Hugo's arms, my decision wavered. But I made all the preparations, careless ones, unlike my usual self. I didn't care about my appearance, clothes. I left hurriedly. To find myself. To find Hugo in myself.

  Sonloup, Switzerland. To Hugo I write: "Believe me, when I talk about living out all instincts, it is only steam. There are a lot of instincts that should not be lived out because they are decayed and p
utrid. Henry is wrong to despise D. H. Lawrence for refusing to plunge into unnecessary misery. The first thing June and Henry would do would be to initiate us into poverty, starvation, drabness just to share their sufferings. That is the weakest way of enjoying life: to let it whip you. By conquering misery we are creating a future independence of being such as they will never know. When you retire from the bank, darling, we will know a freedom they have never known. I'm a bit sick of this Russian wallowing in pain. Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.

  "I came here to seek my strength, and I find it. I'm fighting. This morning I saw young, tall, thick silhouettes of skiers, with heavy boots, and their slow, conquering walk was like a gust of power. Defeat is only a phase for me. I must conquer, live. Forgive me for the suffering I inflict on you. At least it will never be useless suffering."

  I lie in bed, half-asleep, playing possum. This fortress of calm which I erect against the invasion of ideas, against fever, is like down. I sleep in the down, and the ideas press in on me, insistently. I want to understand slowly. And I begin: June, you have destroyed reality. Your lies are not lies to you; they are conditions you want to live out. You have made greater efforts than any of us to live out illusions. When you told your husband that your mother had died, that you never knew your father, that you were a bastard, you wanted to begin nowhere, to begin without roots, to plunge into invention....

  I seek to illumine June's chaos not with man's direct mind but with all the deftness and circumlocution known to woman.

  Henry said, "June had tears in her eyes when she spoke of your generosity." And I could see he loved her for that. In his novel it is clear that June's generosity did not go out to him—she constantly tortured him—but to Jean, because she was obsessed with Jean. And what does she do to Henry? She humiliates him, she starves him, she breaks his health, she torments him—and he thrives; he writes his book.

  To hurt and to be aware of hurting, and to know its ultimate necessity, that is intolerable to me. I do not have June's courage. I struggle to spare Hugo every humiliation. I do not ride over his feelings. Only twice in my life has passion been stronger than pity.

  An aunt of mine taught our cook how to make a soufflé of carrots, and the cook taught our maid Emilia. Emilia serves it for every festive meal. She served it to Henry and June. They were already hypnotized by the oddness of Louveciennes, the coloring, the strangeness of my dressing, my foreignness, the smell of jasmine, the open fires in which I burned not logs but tree roots, which look like monsters. The soufflé looked like an exotic dish, and they ate it as one eats caviar. They also ate purée of potatoes which had been made airy with a beaten egg. Henry, who is thoroughly bourgeois, began to feel uncomfortable, as if he had not been properly fed. His steak was real and juicy, but cut neatly round, and I am sure he did not recognize it. June was in ecstasy. When Henry knew us better, he ventured to ask if we always ate like that, expressing concern for our health. Then we told him about the origin of the soufflé and laughed. June would have wrapped it in mystery forever.

  One morning when Henry was staying with us, after all his starvation, sloppy meals, café-counter slobbery, I tried to give him a beautiful breakfast. I came down and lit the fire in the fireplace. Emilia brought, on a green tray, hot coffee, steaming milk, soft-boiled eggs, good bread and biscuits, and the freshest butter. Henry sat by the fire at the lacquered table. All he could say was that he longed for the bistro around the corner, the zinc counter, the dull greenish coffee and milk full of skin.

  I was not offended. I thought that he lacked a certain capacity for enjoying the uncommon, that is all. I might be down in the dumps a hundred times, but each time I would clamber out again to good coffee on a lacquered tray beside an open fire. Each time I would clamber out to silk stockings and perfume. Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.

  June is a storyteller. She is constantly telling stories about her life that are inconsequential. I tried at first to connect them into a whole, but then I surrendered to her chaos. I didn't know at the time that, like Albertine's stories, to Proust, each one was a secret key to some happening in her life which it is impossible to clarify. A lot of these stories are in Henry's novel. She does not hesitate to repeat herself. She is drugged with her own romances. I stand humbly before this fantastic child and give up my mind.

  In the hotel last night a baby's feverish crying kept me awake, and my thinking was like a high-powered machine. It wore me out. In the morning a monstrously ugly femme de chambre came in to open the shutters. A man who had red hair standing in a bush around his face was sweeping the hall carpets. I telephoned Hugo, begging him to come sooner than he had promised. His letters had been soft and sad. But over the telephone he was reasonable. "I'll come immediately if you are ill." I said, "Never mind. I'll come home Thursday. I can't stay any longer." Fifteen minutes later he called, now fully aware of my distress, to say he would be here Friday instead of Saturday morning. I was in despair over the sudden and terrifying need of Hugo. It would have led me to commit any act. I sat in bed, shaking. I am definitely ill, I thought. My mind is not altogether in power.

  I made a tremendous effort to write Hugo a steady, clear letter, to reassure him. I had made the same effort to steady myself when I came here to Switzerland. Hugo understood. He had written to me: "...how well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me—full rich lives from birth to death, and you will just have to have these rest periods in between.

  "Do you realize what a live force you are, just to speak of you in the abstract? I feel like a machine that has lost its motor. You represent everything that is vital, live, moving, rising, flying, soaring...."

  June objects strongly to Henry's frank sensualism. Hers is so much more intricate. Besides, he represents goodness to her. She clings desperately to it. She is afraid he will be spoiled. All Henry's instincts are good, not in the nauseating Christian sense but in the simple human sense. Even the ferocity of his writing is not monstrous or intellectual but human. But June is nonhuman. She has only two strong human feelings: her love of Henry and her tremendous selfless generosity. The rest is fantastic, perverse, pitiless.

  What demoniac accounts she manages to keep, so that Henry and I look with awe on her monstrosity, which enriches us more than the pity of others, the measured love of others, the selflessness of others. I will not tear her to pieces as Henry has done. I will love her. I will enrich her. I will immortalize her.

  Henry sends a desperate letter from Dijon. Dostoevsky in Siberia, only Siberia was far more interesting, from what poor Henry says. I send him a telegram: "Resign and come home to Versailles." And I send him money. I think about him most of the day.

  But I would never let Henry touch me. I struggle to find the exact reason, and I can only find it in his own language. "I don't want just to be pissed on."

  Do you do such things, June, do you? Or does Henry caricature your desires? Are you half sunk in such sophisticated, such obscure, such tremendous feelings that Henry's bordellos seem almost laughable? He counts on me to understand, because, like him, I am a writer. I must know. It must be clear to me. To his surprise I tell him just what you say: "It is not the same thing." There is one world forever closed to him—the world which contains our abstract talks, our kiss, our ecstasies.

  He senses uneasily that there is a certain side of you he has not grasped, everything that is left out of his novel. You slip between his fingers!

  The richness of Hugo. His power to love, to forgive, to give, to understand. God, but I am a blessed woman.

  I will be home tomorrow night. I am finished with hotel life and solitude at night.

  FEBRUARY

  Louveciennes. I came home to a soft and ardent lover. I carry about rich, heavy letters from Henry. Avalanches. I have tacked up on the wall of my writing room Henry's two big pages of words, culled here and there, and a panoramic map of h
is life, intended for an unwritten novel. I will cover the walls with words. It will be la chambre des mots.

  Hugo found my journals on John Erskine and read them while I was away, with a last pang of curiosity. There was nothing in them he did not know, but he suffered. I would live through it again, yes, and Hugo knows it.

  Also while I was away, he found my black lace underwear, kissed it, found the odor of me, and inhaled it with such joy.

  There was an amusing incident on the train, going to Switzerland. To reassure Hugo, I had not painted my eyes, barely powdered, barely rouged my lips, and had not touched my nails. I was so happy in my negligence. I had dressed carelessly in an old black velvet dress I love, which is torn at the elbows. I felt like June. My dog Ruby sat at my side, and so my black coat and velvet jacket were covered with his white hair. An Italian who had tried all during the trip to catch my attention finally, in desperation, came up and offered me a brush. This amused me, and I laughed. When I was through brushing (and his brush was full of white hairs), I thanked him. He said very nervously, "Will you come and have coffee with me?" I said no, as I thought, what would it have been like if I had painted my eyes?

  Hugo says my letter to Henry is the slipperiest thing he has ever seen. I begin so honestly and frankly. I seem to be June's opposite, but in the end I am just as slippery. He thinks I will disturb Henry and upset his style for a while—his raw strength, his "pisses and fucks," in which he was so secure.

  When I wrote to Henry, I was so grateful for his fullness and richness that I wanted to give him everything that was in my mind. I began with great impetus, I was frank, but as I approached the final gift, the gift of my June and my thoughts about her, I felt reticent. I employed much craft and elusiveness to interest him, while keeping what was precious to me.