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

by Anais Nin

  And then Hugo drives me home in the car, and he says, "Last night I was awake, and I thought of how there is a love which is bigger and more wonderful than fucking." Because he had been ill for a few days and we had not made love, but slept in each other's arms.

  I felt as if I would burst from my fragile shell. I felt my breasts heavy and full. But I was not sad. I thought, Darling, I am so rich tonight, but it is for you, too. It is not all for myself. I'm lying to you every day now, but see, I give you the joys I am given. The more I take into myself, the greater my love for you. The more I deny myself, the poorer I would be for you, my darling. There is no tragedy, if you can follow me in that equation. There are equations which are more obvious. Such a one would be: I love you and therefore I renounce the world and life for you. You would have a prostrate nun before you, poisoned by demands you could not answer and which would kill you. But see me tonight. We are driving home together. I have known pleasure. But I do not shut you out. Come into my dilated body and taste it. I carry life. And you know it. You cannot see me naked without desiring me. My flesh seems to you innocent and entirely your possession. You could kiss me where Henry bit me and find pleasure. Our love is inalterable. Only knowledge would hurt you. Perhaps I am a demon, to be able to pass from Henry's arms into yours, but literal faithfulness is for me empty of meaning. I cannot live by it. What is a tragedy is that we should live so close together without your being able to perceive this knowledge, that such secrets should be possible, that you should only know what I wish to tell you, that there should be no trace on my body of what I live through. But lying, too, is living, lying of the kind I do.

  Fred's presence restrains me, as though my very own eyes were watching the extension of myself into spheres I should renounce. With Fred I could live out something delicate and intricate. But I do not want to live with myself. I am flying from myself. Still, I am not deforming my true nature but manifesting the sensuality which exists in me. Henry answers a strength in me that had not been answered before. His sexual vitality is in accord with mine. When I took up dancing it was a Henry I craved. It is a Henry I sought, erroneously, in John.

  My thoughts, like elastic, are stretched to their tensest meaning. With Henry one does not talk to the depths of things. He is no Proust, lingering and stretching. He is in movement. He lives by gusts. It is the gusts I enjoy in Henry. I may sit for a whole day after a gust and sail my river boat slowly down the feelings that he has dispersed with prodigality.

  Eduardo says I have never really entirely given myself, but that seems impossible when I see how I submit to the nobility and perfection of Hugo, to the sensualism of Henry, to the beauty of Eduardo himself. The other night at the concert I stood transfixed before him. He has learned not to smile, which is what I must learn. The color of his skin alone attracts me. He has the golden pallor of the Spanish but with a Northern glow, too, a rosiness under the tan. And the color of his eyes, that changeful green, unbearably cool. It is the mouth and nostrils which promise. But again I have the sensation of Eduardo and me walking through the world and knocking our heads together. Our heads alone meet and knock. I would have nothing else. I like his mind, which is like a sanctuary, very rich with his continuous plumbing and analysis. He seems without will because he obeys his unconscious, and, like Lawrence, cannot always tell why.

  Henry has noticed what neither a Hugo or an Eduardo would notice. I was lying in bed and he said, "You always seem to be taking poses, in an almost Oriental way."

  He demands strong words from me when he fucks, and I cannot give them. I cannot tell him what I feel. He teaches me new gestures, prolongations, variations.

  Eduardo asked me the other day if I would like to try June's way: plunge into an absolute denial of scruples, to lie (to one's self, principally), to deform one's nature so as to allow no impediment, like my incapacity for cruelty. Yesterday, in the very paroxysm of sensual joy, I could not bite Henry as he wanted me to.

  Eduardo is afraid of my journal. He is afraid of an indictment, and that I should not have understood. He confessed this fear to his psychoanalyst.

  I have a sense of all that I leave out—the lacunae, especially the dreams, the hallucinations. Also, the lies are left out, a desperate necessity to embellish. So I do not write them down. The journal is therefore a lie. What is left out of the journal is also left out of my mind. At the moment of writing I rush for the beauty. I disperse the rest, out of the journal, out of my body. I would like to come back, like a detective, and collect what I have washed off. For example, the terrible, divine credulity of Hugo. I think of what he could have noticed. The time I came back from Henry's room and washed myself, he could have seen the few drops of water that fell to the floor; stains on my underclothes; rouge rubbed off on my handkerchiefs. He could have questioned my saying to him, "Why don't you try and come twice?" (as Henry does), my excessive fatigue, the rings under my eyes.

  I keep my diary very secret, but how often I have written in it while sitting at his feet by the fire, and he has not tried to read over my shoulder. When Eduardo made Hugo lie down, close his eyes, and respond to words—"love," "cat," "snow," "jealousy"—his reactions were amazingly slow and vague. Jealousy alone brought an immediate response. He seems to refuse to register, to realize. That is good. It is his self-protection. It is the basis of the odd liberty I have in spite of his powerful jealousy. He does not want to see. This arouses such a pity in me that at times it maddens me. I would like him to punish me, beat me, imprison me. It would relieve me.

  I go to meet Dr. Allendy to talk about Eduardo. I see a handsome, healthy man, with clear, intelligent, seer's eyes. My mind is alert, expecting him to say something dogmatic, formulistic. I want him to say it, because if he does, this will be another man I cannot lean on, and I will have to go on conquering myself alone.

  We talked first about Eduardo, how he had gained in strength. Allendy was glad I had noticed a keen difference. But now we came to a difficult point. "Did you know," asked Allendy, "that you have been the most important woman in his life? Eduardo has been obsessed with you. You are his image. He has seen you as mother, sister, and unattainable woman. To conquer you means conquering himself, his neuroses."

  "Yes, I know. I want him to be cured. I do not want to deprive him of his newborn confidence by telling him that I don't love him sensually."

  "How do you love him?"

  "I have always been attached to him ideally. I am now, but not sensually. There is another man, a more animal man, who really holds me strongly."

  I tell him a little about Henry. He is surprised that I should divide my loves thus. He asks me what my true feelings were about my experience with Eduardo.

  "I was entirely passive," I say. "I felt no pleasure. And I am afraid that he might realize this and blame himself for it. It will be worse than ever, worse than if I say now, 'Listen, I love Henry and so I can't love you.' Because if it goes on it becomes like a competition, as if I had allowed rivalry and comparison and then abandoned him. It seems more dangerous to me. But then," I ask laughing, "do men know when they give a woman pleasure or not?"

  Dr. Allendy laughs, too. "Eighty percent of them never know," he says. "Some men are sensitive, but many more are vain and they want to believe they do, and many otl' do not really know." (I remembered Henry's question the hotel: "Do I satisfy you?")

  Then I say, "Rather than continue the sexual comedy, would it not be better to tell him I am ill, neurotic, that there is something wrong with me?"

  "And, of course, you may be," says Allendy. "There is something strange in the way you divide up your loves. It is as if you lacked confidence."

  He touches a sensitive spot now. A few minutes ago he had made a mistake, when I talked about the separation between animal and ideal love. He had jumped to the banal conclusion that at the age of puberty I may have witnessed some brutal aspect of love and been disgusted and turned to the ethereal. But now he approaches a truth: lack of confidence. My father did not w
ant a girl. He said I was ugly. When I wrote or drew something, he did not believe it was my work. I never remember a caress or a compliment from him, except when I nearly died at the age of nine. There were always scenes, beatings, his hard blue eyes on me. I remember the unnatural joy I felt when Father wrote me a note here in Paris which began: "Ma jolie." I got no love from him. I suffered with my mother. I remember our arrival in Arcachon, where he was vacationing, after my illness. His face showed he did not want us. What he meant for Mother I also took for myself. Yet I felt hysterical sorrow when he abandoned us. And all through my schooldays in New York I craved for him. I was always fearful of his hardness and coldness. Yet I repudiated him in Paris. It was I who was severe and unsentimental.

  "And so," said Allendy, "you withdrew into yourself and became independent. Instead of trustingly giving yourself entirely to one love, you seek many loves. You even seek cruelty from older men, as if you could not enjoy love without pain. And you are not sure..."

  "Only of my husband's love."

  "But you need more than one."

  "Always his, and an older man's."

  I was amazed that a child's confidence, once shaken and destroyed, should have such repercussions on a whole life. Father's insufficient love and abandonment remain indelible. Why was it not effaced by all the loves I inspired since then?

  Eduardo wanted Dr. Allendy and me to talk for the sake of what I would write down. And I am willing, but on my own terms. That is, I go to him infrequently, which gives me time to absorb the material and work inspirationally and which also makes me less dependent. Yet yesterday when he said, "You seem very well equilibrated, and I don't believe you need me," I suddenly felt a great distress at being left alone again. My work stabilizes me, I utilize my sufferings, but I would like to confide to a human being what I confide to my journal. There is always something barred from my relationships. With Eduardo I cannot talk about Henry. I can only talk about my illness. With Henry I cannot talk about analysis. He is not an analyst, he is an epic writer, an unconscious Dostoevsky. With Fred I can be surrealistic but not the woman who wrote a study of Lawrence.

  Allendy said, "You acted beautifully towards Eduardo in all this, as few women would act, for, in general, a woman considers man as an enemy, and she is glad when she can humiliate him or demolish him."

  Joaquin says that when he read my journal he became aware that there was more in Henry's gift to me than just a sensual experience; that he did answer to some needs which Hugo could not satisfy. He still thinks that I lose myself in Henry, give myself to experiences which are not really true to my nature.

  Allendy, too, begins to imply that I normally should not love a Henry, and that the cause of my loving him must be removed. Here I turn fiercely against science and feel a great loyalty to my instincts.

  Psychoanalysis may force me to be more truthful. Already I realize certain feelings I have, like the fear of being hurt. When Henry calls up, I am suspended to every inflection of his voice. If he is busy at the newspaper office, if there is somebody there, or he sounds casual, I am immediately distressed.

  Today Henry awoke and said to himself, "To hell with angelical or literary women!" Then he tells me he has written me two letters since Sunday, which are waiting for me at Natasha's, and I am so elated. I despise my own oversensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance, but which also makes me so aware of other people's sensitivity. Hugo's great love should have given me confidence, and my continued craving to be loved and understood is certainly abnormal.

  Perhaps I reassert my confidence by trying to conquer older men. Or am I courting pain? What do I feel when I see Henry's rather cold blue eyes on me? (My father had icy blue eyes.) I want them to melt with desire for me.

  There is now a great tension between Fred and me; we cannot bear each other's eyes. He wrote something about me so exact, so piercing that I felt invaded in the most secret precincts of my being. His writing about Henry also terrified me, as if he had come too close to my own fears and doubts. He writes occultly. I could barely talk after reading those pages. And he was reading my journal. He said, "You should not let me read this, Anaïs." I asked why. He seemed stunned. He bowed his head, his mouth trembled. He is like a ghost of me. Why was he stunned? Did I reveal the similitude, the recognition? He is a part of me. He could understand my entire life. I would put all my journals in his hands. I do not fear him. He is so tender with me.

  Henry talks beautifully to me, in a cool, sagelike mood. He says, "I love you," while I lie in his arms, and I say, "I do not believe you." He realizes I am in a devilish mood. He insists: "Do you love me?" And I answer vaguely. When we are sensually bound together I cannot believe that we are close only physically. When I awake from the deliriousness and we talk quietly, I am surprised that he should talk about our love so seriously.

  "Sunday night after you left I slept a while, then I went out for a walk, and I felt so happy, Anaïs, happier than I have ever felt before. I realized a terrible truth: that I don't want June to come back. I need you terribly—absolutely. At certain moments I even feel that if June should come back and disappoint me and I should not care any more for her, I would be almost glad. Sunday night I wanted to send her a cablegram telling her I did not want her any more."

  But my wisdom prevented me from believing. He, too, knows, because he adds, "I'm weak in June's hands, Anaïs. If, when she comes back, I act exactly as she wants me to act, you must not feel that I disappoint you or fail you." This surprises me, because it seems to me that when I first rushed into my passion, with characteristic intensity, and sensed the instability, the tragedy in the situation, I pulled back and diminished the importance of our relationship. I exhausted my capacity for tragedy with John Erskine. I suffered then to the limit. I don't know if I can ever suffer as much again, and I believe Henry's feelings are similar. I want to enjoy the present hour deeply, thoughtlessly. Henry bending over me, desirous, Henry's tongue between my legs, Henry's vigorous, torrential possessiveness.

  "You are the only woman I can be faithful to. I want to protect you."

  When I see June's photograph in Henry's room, I hate June, because at this moment I love Henry. I hate June, and yet I know that I also am in her power, and that when she comes back...

  "What I feel with you that I don't feel with June is that beyond love, we are friends. June and I are not friends."

  One cannot escape from one's own nature, although Henry said yesterday, "There are flaws in your goodness." Flaws. What a relief. Fissures. I may escape through them. Some perversity drives me outside of the role I am forced to play. Always imagining another role. Never static. When Henry wants to read my journal, I tremble. I know he suspects that I betray him constantly. I would like to, and I cannot. Since he has come to me I have practiced instinctively the faithfulness of the whores: I do not take any pleasure except with him. My greatest fear is Hugo's desiring me the same day, and it happens frequently. Last night he was ardent, ecstatic—and I, obedient and deceptive. Simulating enjoyment. He thought it an exceptional night. His pleasure was tremendous.

  When I seem to be overflowing and calling for all the sensual pleasures obtainable, do I mean it? If I felt attracted to some woman in the street or a man I danced with, would I really be able to satisfy my desire? Is there a desire? The next time such a feeling overtakes me, I will not resist it. I must know.

  Tonight I surrender to a craving for Henry. I want him, and I want June. It is June who will kill me, who will take Henry away from me, who will hate me. I want to be in Henry's arms. I want June to find me there: it will be the only time she will suffer. After that it is Henry who will suffer, at her hands. I want to write her and beg her to come back, because I love her, because I want to give up Henry to her as the greatest gift I can make her.

  Hugo undresses me every night as if it were the first time and I a new woman for him. My feelings are in a chaos I cannot clarify, cannot order. My dreams tell me nothing except that I have a terror
of being driven again to the point of suicide.

  One does not get healed just by living and loving, or I would be healed. Hugo heals me at times. We walked out in the fields today, under cherry trees, sat down on the grass, in the sun, talking like two very young lovers. Henry heals me, takes me up in his vital arms, his giant's arms. And so some days I believe myself well.

  Hugo has gone away on a trip, and he kissed me so desperately and sorrowfully. I am surrounded by signs of him, small things which sing his habits, his defects, his divine goodness: a letter he has forgotten to mail, his worn-out underwear (because he will never buy anything for himself), his notes on work to be done, a golf ball—which reminds me that he said yesterday, "Not even golf is pleasure for me, because I prefer to be with you. It is all part of my damned work"—a toothbrush, an open jar of brilliantine, a half-smoked cigarette, his suit, his shoes. I have hardly kissed him good-bye, and the green gate is barely closed after him when I say to Emilia, "Clean my rose dress and wash my lace underwear. I may go and visit a friend for a few days."

  I did not forget yesterday to be so good to Eduardo that he must have grown at least two feet. And the same evening I wanted to dissolve into Hugo's body, to be imprisoned in his arms, in his goodness. At such a moment passion and fever seem unimportant. I cannot bear to see Hugo jealous, but he is sure of my love. He says, "I have never loved you as much, I have never been as happy with you. You are my whole life." And I know that I love him as much as I can love him, that he is the only one who possesses me eternally. Yet for three days I have visualized life with Henry in Clichy. I say to Hugo, "Send me a telegram every day, please." And I may not be home to read them.