by Anais Nin
I have run away. My pajamas, comb, powder, perfume are in Henry's room. I find a Henry so utterly profound that I am dazed.
We are walking to the Place Clichy, in rhythm. He makes me aware of the street, of people, of reality. I walk like a somnambulist, but he is smelling the street, he is observing, his eyes are wide open. He shows me the whore with a wooden stump who stands near the Gaumont Palace. He does not know what it is to live in a world where the only distinct personage is one's self, as Eduardo and I know. We sit in several cafés and talk about life and death, in Lawrence's sense.
Henry says, "If Lawrence had lived..." Yes, I know the end of the sentence. I would have loved him. He would have loved me. Henry can visualize the changing aspect of my writing room. John's photographs. John's books. Lawrence's photograph and Lawrence's books. Henry's watercolors and Henry's manuscripts. For a moment Henry and I sit and reflect sardonically on the spectacle of our lives.
Eduardo said there is no pattern to Henry's writing or living. Exactly. If there were, he would be an analyst. If he were an analyst, he would not be a living, chaotic force.
When I tell Henry about John Erskine, he is amazed at my sacrilegiousness. John, the man Hugo revered. I say quietly, "It may seem sacrilegious, and yet, look how natural: I loved in John what bound Hugo to him."
We were sitting in the kitchen in Clichy at 2:00 A.M. with Fred, eating and drinking, and smoking heavily. Henry had to get up and wash his eyes with cold water, the irritated eyes of the little German boy. I could not bear this and I said, "Henry, let's drink to the end of your work for the newspaper. You will never do it again. I say so."
This seemed to hurt Fred. He dropped into a black mood. We said good night. I went to Henry's room.
We were enjoying our being together, undressing, talking, placing our clothes on the chair. Henry was admiring my red silk Japanese pajamas, which looked so strange in the plain room, on the rough blanket.
The next day we discovered that Fred had not slept there. "Don't take him too seriously," said Henry. We had breakfast together at five in the afternoon. And then I sewed the gray curtains and Henry hammered on the curtain rods. Later Henry made a hearty dinner; we drank Anjou, and were very gay. Early in the morning I went back to Louveciennes.
When I returned to Clichy, Fred was home and very sad. We had our dinner, but silently, and I was miserable. Fred threw off his mood to please me and exclaimed, "Let's do something; let's go to Louveciennes."
We are off.
I feel the magic of my own house lulling me. We all sit by the fire. This is the moment when the house diffuses a charm, and the fire melts one's nerves. I can sit complete, as though I were part of a mural. Their admiration and love is sweet to me. I lose my sense of secrecy. I open the iron boxes and show them my early journals. Fred grasps the first volume and begins to cry and laugh over it. I have given Henry the red journal, all about himself, a thing I have never done with anyone. I read over his shoulder.
Henry and I are waiting for the train on a high platform. The rain has washed the trees. The earth pours out essences like a woman a man has ploughed and seeded. Our bodies draw close.
At the moment I do not think of how June and I stood pressed against each other in the same way. I think of it now because yesterday, for the first time, he hurt me, although I was prepared for his sarcasm and ridicule. I knew about his love of finding defects, because of all he had written about June. We were reading my red journal. He came to an entry where Fred had said that I was beautiful. "You see," said Henry. "Fred thinks you are beautiful. I don't. I think you have great charm, yes." I was sitting close to him. I looked at him with bewilderment and then swiftly put my head on the pillow and cried. When he put his hand on my face and felt the tears, he was amazed. "Oh, Anaïs, I never thought that could mean anything to you. I hate myself for having said it so cruelly. But you remember, I also told you I didn't think June was beautiful. The most powerful women have not been the most beautiful. But to think I could make you cry, that I could do that, when it is one thing I never wanted to do to YOU."
He now sat in front of me, and I lay sunk in the pillows, hair rumpled and eyes swimming in tears. At that moment I remembered what the painters thought of me, and I told him. And suddenly I kicked him. I pawed him, like a cat, he said. And when that was over, which amused him, we felt strangely closer, until I said teasingly, in the train—because he was telling me that he had thought me beautiful the first day he had seen me, but had begun to think not because Fred insisted on it so much; and because of June, too—I said, "You've got bad taste!"
But all the wonderful things he had said to me about my journal paled now. My confidence wavered. It did not heal me to think what a relative thing beauty is and that each man has his own individual response to it. It is unnatural to be so hurt. Yet I took this hurt into myself and said, "I'm going to bear it. I'm going to live it down, I'm not going to care." And for a few hours I waved my courage about, until we were undressing that night and Henry said, "I want to watch you undress. I've never done that." I sat on his bed, and I was overcome by a feeling of timidity. I did something to distract his attention from my undressing, and I slipped into the bed. I wanted to cry. Only two moments before, he said, "I have the feeling that I am a very ugly man. I never want to look at myself in the mirror." And I found something evasive and lovely to say. I told him what I liked about him. I didn't say to him, "I have needed Eduardo's beauty these days as never before."
At three-thirty the next day I was in Allendy's salon, in terrible need of him.
I went to Henry and found him at work. He received me with a joyous kiss. We worked together. I sat at my table next to his, looking over fragments to be inserted in my book. I was filled with the strength of his writing. When he got hungry, I offered to cook the dinner. "Let me play at being the wife of a genius." And I went to the kitchen in my stately rose dress.
Henry's very voice lifts me. I think of his saying, "When I write about you, I will have to write of you as an angel. I cannot put you on a bed."
"But I don't behave like an angel. You know I don't."
"I know, yes, I know. You've tired me out these past days. You're a sexual angel, but you're an angel just the same. Your sensuality doesn't convince me."
"I'll punish you for that," I said. "From now on I'll behave like an angel."
Two hours later Fred has gone to work and Henry is kissing me in the kitchen. I want to play at resisting him, but even a kiss on my neck melts me. I say no, but he puts his hands between my legs. He charges me like a bull.
When we lie quiet, I love him still, his hands, his wrists, his neck, his mouth, the warmth ofhis body, and the sudden leaping of his mind. Afterwards we sit eating and talking about June and Dostoevsky while the cock crows. That Henry and I can sit and talk about our love of June, about her grandiose moments, is to me the greatest of victories.
The long, tranquil hours with Henry are the most potent. He falls into a thoughtful quietness as he sits over his work, chuckling sometimes. He has in him something of a gnome, a satyr, and a German scholar. There are hard bumps on his forehead, which look as if they were about to burst. His body suddenly appears fragile, bowed.
As he sits there, I feel that I can see his mind as I see his body, and it is labyrinthine, fertile, sentient. I am loaded with adoration for everything that his head contains and for the impulses which blow in gusts.
He is lying in bed, body arched against my back, his arm around my breast. And in the circumference of my solitude I know I have found a moment of absolute love. His greatness fills the wounds and closes them, silences the desires. He is asleep. How I love him! I feel like a river that has overflowed.
"Anaïs, when I came home last night I thought you were here, because I smelled your perfume. I missed you. I realized I didn't tell you when you were here how wonderful it was to have you here. I never say those things. Look, here is a drawer full of your clothes—stockings. I want you to leave your
perfume all through the place."
I think he loves me with tenderness, with sentimentality. It is June who inspires the passions. And I am there to cull his thoughts, his musings, his recollections, his confidences. I stand by Henry the writer, and I am given his other love.
Now alone in Louveciennes, I still feel the imprint of his body asleep against mine. I wish today were the last day. I always want the high moment to be the last. June can come back and blow at us like the simoom. Henry will be tormented by her, and I will be hypnotized.
There will remain, here in my journal, the things Henry has said. I receive them like gifts of jewels, incense, and perfumes. Henry's words fall, and I catch them with such care that I forget to talk. I am the slave fanning him with peacock feathers. He talks about God, Dostoevsky, and the finesse of Fred's writing. He draws a distinction between that finesse and his own dramatic, sensational, potent writing. He can say with humility, "Fred has a finesse which I lack, erudition, the quality of an Anatole France."
And I say, "But don't you see, he lacks the passion, just as France lacked it. It is what you have!"
At the thought of this, as we walk along a boulevard, I want to kiss the man whose passion rushes like lava through a chill intellectual world. I want to give up my life, my home, my security, my writing, to live with him, to work for him, to be a prostitute for him, anything, even to be fatally hurt by him.
Late in the night he tells me about a book I have not read, Arthur Machen's Hill of Dreams. And I am listening with my soul. He says softly, "I'm talking almost paternally to you."
At that moment I know I am half woman, half child. That a portion of me conceals a child who loves to be amazed, to be taught, to be directed. When I listen, I am a child, and Henry becomes paternal. The haunting image of an erudite, literary father reasserts itself, and the woman becomes small again. I remember other phrases, like "I would not hurt you—not you," his unusual delicacy with me, his protectiveness. I feel myself betrayed. Overwhelmed with the wonder of Henry's work, I have become a child. I can imagine another man saying to me, "I cannot make love to you. You are not a woman. You are a child."
I awake from dreams of utter sensuality. And then in anger I want to dominate, to work like a man, support Henry, get his book published. I want more than ever to fuck and to be fucked, to assert the sensual woman. Henry says one day, "Listen, I believe you could have ten lovers and handle them all. You're insatiable." And another day, "Your sensuality doesn't convince me."
He has seen the child!
Hateful, infuriating. I run away from Clichy and think I carry my secret away with me. I have the hope that Henry has not grasped it too well. I fear the uncanny analysis of his eyes. I slip out of his bed and run away while he sleeps. I rush home and fall asleep, deeply, for many hours. I must choke the child. Tomorrow I can meet Henry, face him, be woman.
This would have remained a vague, meaningless incident. Now, because of psychoanalysis, it is heavy with significance. Analysis makes me feel as if I were masturbating instead of fucking. Being with Henry is to live, to flow, to suffer, even. I do not like to be with Allendy and to press dry fingers on the secrets of my body.
When I talk just a little about the fear of cruelty to Eduardo, he says what I say, "But one uses one's weaknesses. One can make something of them." And I have done that. Yet I can see no good in my childish admiration of older men, my adoration of John and Henry. I can see nothing in it but interference with the progress of maturity, the abdication of my own personality. As Henry says, "It is beautiful to see you sleep. You lie like a doll, where one has put you. Even in sleep you do not sprawl and take too much room."
Allendy's questions crackle at me. "What did you feel about our first talk?"
"I felt that I needed you, that I didn't want to be left alone to think my life over."
"You loved your father devotedly, abnormally, and you hated the sexual reason which caused him to abandon you. This may have created in you a certain obscure feeling against sex. This feeling asserts itself in your unconscious in that scene with John. You willed him to a kind of castration."
"Then why was I so unhappy, in such despair when it happened, and why did I love him for two years?"
"Perhaps you loved him more because of what happened."
"But I have despised him since then for his lack of impulsive passion."
"The ambivalent need of dominating man, of being conquered by him and of being superior to him. You really loved him because he did not dominate you, because you were superior to him in passion."
"No, because now that I have found a man who has conquered me I am tremendously happy."
Allendy asks questions about Henry. He finally notes that I dominate him socially. He notes also that I have chosen to put myself in the situation of the rival of a woman I know will conquer, therefore seeking pain for myself. That I have loved men weaker than I and have suffered from this. At the same time I have an extreme fear of pain, and it makes me divide my loves so that each one serves as a refuge against another. Ambivalence. I want to love a stronger man and cannot do so.
He says that I have a sense of inferiority due to my physical frailness as a child. It seemed to me that men only loved healthy, fat women. Eduardo talked to me about fat Cuban girls. Hugo's first attraction was for a fat girl. Everybody used to comment on my slenderness, and my mother quoted the Spanish proverb: "Bones are for the dogs." When I went to Havana, I doubted being able to please because I was thin. This theme continues right down to the moment when Henry hurt me by his admiration of Natasha's body because it seemed rich to him.
Allendy: "Do you know that sometimes the sense of sexual inferiority is due to a realization of one's frigidity?"
It is true I was quite indifferent to sex until I was eighteen or nineteen, and even then, tremendously romantic but not really sexually awake. But afterwards! "And if I were frigid, would I be so preoccupied by sex?"
Allendy: "All the more so."
Silence. I am thinking that with all the tremendous joys Henry has given me I have not yet felt a real orgasm. My response does not seem to lead to a true climax but is disseminated in a spasm that is less centered, more diffuse. I have felt an orgasm occasionally with Hugo, and when I have masturbated, but perhaps that is because Hugo likes me to close my legs and Henry makes me open them so much. But this, I would not tell Allendy.
From my dreams he culls the consistent desire to be punished, humiliated, or abandoned. I dream of a cruel Hugo, of a fearful Eduardo, of an impotent John.
"This comes from a sense of guilt for having loved your father too much. Afterwards I am sure you loved your mother much more."
"It is true. I loved her tremendously."
"And now you seek punishment. And you enjoy the suffering, which reminds you of the suffering you endured with your father. In one of your dreams, when the man forces himself into you, you hate him."
I feel oppressed, as if his questions were thrusts. I am in a terrible need of him. Yet analysis does not help. The pain of living is nothing compared to the pain of this minute analysis.
Allendy asks me to relax and tell him what goes on in my mind. But what goes on in my mind is the analysis of my life.
Allendy: "You are trying to identify yourself with me, to do my work. Have you not wished to surpass men in their own work? To humiliate them by your success?"
"Indeed not. I constantly help men in their work, make sacrifices for them." I encourage, admire, applaud them. No, Allendy is very wrong.
He says, "Perhaps you are one of those women who are friends not enemies of man."
"More than that. My original dream was to be married to a genius and serve him, not to be one. When I wrote my book on Lawrence, I wanted Eduardo to collaborate with me. Even now I know he could have written a better one, only it is I who have the energy, the impulse."
Allendy: "You know about the Diana complex, the woman who envies man his sexual power."
"I have felt that,
yes, sexually. I would have liked to have been able to possess June and other beautiful women."
There are ideas which Allendy abandons, as though he were sensing my susceptibility. Every time he touches upon my lack of confidence I suffer. I suffer when he touches on my sexual potency, my health, or my feeling of solitude, because there is no one man in whom I could confide entirely.
I lie back and I feel an inrush of pain, despair. Allendy has hurt me. I cry. I cry also with shame, with self-pity. I feel weak. I don't want him to see me cry and I turn away. Then I stand up and face him. His eyes are very soft. I want him to think me a superior woman. I want him to admire me. I like it when he says, "You have suffered a great deal."
When I leave him, I am in a dream, relaxed, warm, as if I had traversed fantastic regions. Eduardo says I am like a hen sitting on her eggs.
Allendy: "Why, exactly, were you upset last time?"
"I felt that some of the things you said were true."
I would like simply to talk to him about the days I have spent with Henry. After Henry, analysis is distasteful to me. I begin with docility but I feel a growing resistence. I admit to Allendy that I do not hate him but that I enjoyed, in a female way, his having succeeded in making me cry. "You proved stronger than I. I like that."
However, as the hour progresses I begin to feel that he is arousing difficulties which I could easily live down, that he reawakens my fears and doubts. For that, I hate him. As he reads my dreams he notes that they are written with a more than masculine directness. Now I find him probing the masculine elements in me. Do I love Henry because I identify myself with him and his love and possession of June? No, this is false. I think of the night Henry taught me to lie over him and how I disliked it. I was happier when I lay under him, passively. I think of my uncertainty with women, not being sure of the role I want to play. In a dream it is June who has a penis. At the same time, I admit to Allendy, I have imagined that a freer life would be possible to me as a lesbian because I would choose a woman, protect her, work for her, love her for her beauty while she could love me as one loves a man, for his talent, his achievements, his character. (I was remembering Stephen in The Well of Loneliness, who was not beautiful, who was even scarred in the war, and who was loved by Mary.) This would be a relief from the torment of lack of confidence in my womanly powers. It would eliminate all concern with my beauty, health, or sexual potency. It would make me confident because everything would depend on my talent, inventiveness, artistry, in which I believe.
