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

by Anais Nin

  What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.

  Henry and I lie fully dressed under the coarse blanket of his bed. He talks about his own profound joy. "I can't let you go tonight, Anaïs, I want you the whole night. I feel that you belong to me." But later, as we sit close together in a café, he reveals his lack of confidence, his doubts. The red journal made him sad. He read about his sensual power over me. "Is that all, is that all?" he wants to know. Is he only that for me? Then it will soon be over, a passing infatuation. Sexual desire. He wants my love. He needs the security of my love. I tell him I have loved him since I spent those few days with him in Clichy. "At the beginning, yes, it was perhaps purely sensual. Not now."

  It seems to me I cannot love him more than I do. I love him as much as I desire him, and my desire is immense. Every hour I spend in his arms could be the last. I give myself to it with frenzy. At any moment, before I see him again, June could return.

  How does June love Henry?—how much, how well? I ask myself in torment.

  When people are surprised to find him soft and timid, I am amused. I, too, bowed to the brutality of his writing, but my Henry is vulnerable, sensitive. How humbly he seeks to make Hugo like him, how pleased he is when Hugo is kind to him.

  Last night Hugo went to a movie, enjoyed the novelty of the experience, danced in a cabaret with a Martinique girl, felt nostalgia for me when he heard the music, as if we were very far away from each other, and came home eager to possess me.

  After the soft, easy way Henry slips into my body, Hugo is terrible to bear. At such moments I feel I may go mad and reveal everything.

  Henry has a picture of Mona Paiva, the dancer, tacked over his washstand, along with two photos of June, one of me, and some of his watercolors. I give him a tin box for his letters and manuscripts, and inside the lid he pastes the program of Joaquin's concert. On his door he tacks notes on Spain.

  I cut out the top of my box of powder—N'aimez que Moi, Caron, Rue de la Paix. He carries this in his vest pocket. He also carries one of my wine-colored handkerchiefs.

  Last night he said, "I am so rich because I have you. I feel that there will always be a lot doing between us, that there will always be changes and novelties."

  He almost said, "We'll be connected and interested in each other beyond the connection of the moment." And at this thought, my heart tightened, and I felt the need to touch his suit, his arm, to know he was there and, temporarily, all mine.

  I float along, basking in memories of Henry—how his face looks at certain moments, the mischief of his mouth, the exact sound of his voice, at times husky, the firm square hold of his hand, how he looked in Hugo's discarded green coat, his laughter at the movies. He cannot make a movement which does not reverberate in my body. He is no taller than I am. Our mouths are on the same level. He rubs his hands when he is excited, repeats words, shakes his head like a bear. He has a serious, chaste look on his face when he works. In a crowd, I guess at his presence before I see him.

  I realized today, with great amusement, the extent to which Henry has shaken down my old gravity, with his literary pranks, his crazy manifestos, his contradictions, his changes of mood, his grotesque humor. I can see myself as a ridiculous person, because of my constant efforts to understand others. We heard that Richard Osborn had gone mad. "Hurrah!" said Henry. "Let's go and see him. Let's have a drink first. This is rare, superb; it doesn't happen every day. I hope he is really insane." I was at first a bit disconcerted, but very quickly I caught the flavor of the humor, and I asked for more. Henry has taught me to play. I had played before, in my own way, with sandal-footed humor, but his is a lusty humor, which I have enjoyed to the point of hysteria—like the morning the dawn caught us still talking. Henry and I fell on his bed, exhausted, but he was still talking deliriously about the strainer that was thrown by mistake in the water closet, about black lace underwear and coral, etc., out of which he later created that inimitable parody of my novel.

  The other night we talked about the trick of literature in eliminating the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated dose of life. I said almost indignantly, "It's a deception and the cause of much disappointment. One reads books and expects life to be just as full of interest and intensity. And, of course, it isn't so. There are many dull moments in between, and they, too, are natural. You, in your writing, have played the same trick. I expected all our talks to be feverish, portentous. I expected you always drunk, and always delirious. Then when we lived together for a few days, we fell into a profound, quiet, natural rhythm."

  "Are you disappointed?"

  "It is very different from what I expected, yes, less sensational, but I'm satisfied."

  I have lost that tranquil Seine-like rhythm of my adolescence. And yet when Henry and I sit together in the Café de la Place Clichy, we enjoy the profound feverless currents of our love.

  It is June who gives fever. But it is only a superficial fever. The true, indelible fever lies in Henry's writing. As I read his latest book I am almost petrified with admiration. I try to think about it, to tell him how it affects me, and I can't. It is too enormous, too potent.

  Everything is so sweet between Hugo and me. Great tenderness and much deception on my part about my true feelings. I was touched by his behavior the other night and tried to repay it by giving him much pleasure. The way I think of Henry terrifies me: it is so obsessional. I must try and spread out my thoughts.

  When Henry and I talk about June, I do not think of her now except as a "character" I admire. As a woman, she threatens my one great possession, and I cannot love her any more. If June would die—I often think of it—if only she would die. Or if she would cease loving Henry, but that, she will not. Henry's love is the refuge she returns to, always.

  Whenever I have gone to Henry's apartment and he has been writing a letter to June, or rewriting a passage about her in his book, or marking what fits her in Proust or Gide (he finds her everywhere), I have an intolerable fear: He is hers again. He has realized he loves no one but her. And each time, with surprise, I see him drop his book or letter and turn wholly to me, with love, desire. The last test, June's cable, gave me profound reassurance. But each time we talk about her I feel the same terrible anxiety. This cannot last. I will not fight events. The minute June returns, I relinquish Henry. Yet it is not so simple. I cannot relinquish living so closely to Henry as I do in these pages, for the sake of eluding pain.

  Allendy was a superman today. I will never be able to describe our talk. There was so much intuition, so much emotion throughout. To the very last phrase he was so human, so true.

  I had come in a mood of confidence, of recklessness, thinking: I do not want Allendy to admire me unless he can do so when he knows me exactly as I am. My first effort at complete sincerity.

  I tell him first of all that I was ashamed of what I had said last time about his wife. He laughed and said he had forgotten all about it and asks, "Is there anything else which worries you?"

  "Nothing in particular, but I would like to ask you if my strong sensual obsession is a reaction against too much introspection? I have been reading Samuel Putnam, who writes that 'the quickest way out of introspection is a worship of the body, which leads to sexual intensity.' "

  I cannot remember his exact answer, but I sense his connection of the word "obsession" with a frantic search for satisfaction. Why the effort? Why dissatisfaction?

  Here, I feel an imperative need to tell him my biggest secret: In the sexual act I do not always experience an orgasm.

  He had guessed this from the very first day. My talk on sex had been crude, bold, defiant. It did not harmonize with my personality. It was artificial. It betrayed an uncertainty.

  "But do you know what an orgasm is?"

  "Oh, very well, from the times I did experience it, and particularly from masturbati
on."

  "When did you masturbate?"

  "Once, in the summer, in St. Jean de Luz. I was dissatisfied and had a strong sexual urge." I am ashamed to admit that when I was alone for two days I masturbated four and five times a day, and also often in Switzerland, during our vacation, and in Nice.

  "Why only once? Every woman does it and very often."

  "I believe it is wrong, morally and physically. I was terribly depressed and ashamed afterwards."

  "That's nonsense. Masturbation is not physically harmful. It is only the feeling of guilt we have about it that oppresses."

  "I used to fear it would diminish my mental power, my health, and that I would disintegrate morally."

  Here, I add other details, which he listens to silently, trying to coordinate them. I tell him things I have never entirely admitted to myself, and which I have not written in my journal, things I wanted to forget.

  Allendy is piecing the fragments together and talks about my partial frigidity. He discovers that I also consider this an inferiority and believe it is due to my frail physique. He laughs. He attributes it to a psychic cause, a strong sense of guilt. Sixty out of a hundred women feel as I do and never admit it and, most important of all, Allendy says, if I only knew what little difference this makes to men and how unaware they are of it. He always transforms what I term an inferiority into a natural thing, or one whose curse can be easily removed. I immediately feel a great relief and lose my terror and secretiveness.

  I tell him about June, of my desiring to be a femme fatale, of my cruelty towards Hugo and Eduardo, and my surprise that they should love me as much or more afterwards. We also discuss my frank, bold sex talk, how I reverse my true, innate modesty and exhibit a forced obscenity. (Henry says he doesn't like my telling obscene stories, because it doesn't suit me.)

  "But I am full of dissonances," I say, feeling that strange anguish Allendy creates—half relief, because of his exactness, half sorrow for no specific reason, the feeling of having been discovered.

  "Yes, and until you can act perfectly naturally, according to your own nature, you will never be happy. The femme fatale arouses men's passions, exasperates them, torments them, and they want to possess her, even to kill her, but they do not love her profoundly. You have already discovered that you are loved profoundly. Now you have also discovered that cruelty to both Eduardo and Hugo has aroused them, and they want you even more. This makes you want to play a game which is not really natural to you."

  "I have always despised such games. I have never been able to conceal from a man that I loved him."

  "But you tell me profound loves do not satisfy you. You crave to give and to receive stronger sensations. I understand, but that is only a phase. You can play the game now and then, to heighten passion, but profound loves are the loves which suit your true self, and they alone will satisfy you. The more you act like yourself the nearer you come to a fulfillment of your real needs. You are still terribly afraid to be hurt; your imaginary sadism shows that. So afraid to be hurt that you want to take the lead and hurt first. I do not despair of reconciling you to your own image."

  These are his words, crudely restated and only half remembered. I was so overcome by the sensation of his loosening innumerable tensions, of liberating me. His voice was so gentle and compassionate. Before he had finished I was sobbing. My gratitude was immense. I wanted to tell him I admired him and finally did. He was silent while I sobbed, and then he asked me his gentle question: "I didn't say anything to hurt you?"

  I would like to cover the last pages with yesterday's joys. Showers of kisses from Henry. The thrusts of his flesh into mine, as I arched my body to better weld it to his. If a choice were to be made today between June and me, he tells me, he would surrender June. He could imagine us married and enjoying life, together. "No," I say, half teasing, half serious. "June is the only one. I am making you bigger and stronger for June." A half truth; there is no choice. "You're too modest, Anaïs. You do not realize yet what you have given me. June is a woman who can be effaced by other women. What June gives I can forget with other women. But you stand apart. I could have a thousand women after you and they could not efface you."

  I listen to him. He is elated, and so he exaggerates, but it is so lovely. Yes, I know, for a moment, June's rareness and mine. The balance leans towards me for the moment. I look at my own image in Henry's eyes, and what do I see? The young girl of the diaries, telling stories to her brothers, sobbing much without reason, writing poetry—the woman one can talk to.

  JUNE

  Last night Henry and I went to the movies. When the story became tragic, harrowing, he took my hand, and we locked fingers tightly. With every pressure I shared his response to the story. We kissed in the taxi, on the way to meet Hugo. And I could not tear myself away. I lost my head. I went with him to Clichy. He penetrated me so completely that when I returned to Louveciennes and fell asleep in Hugo's arms, I still felt it was Henry. All night it was Henry at my side. I curled my body around him in my dreams. In the morning I found myself tightly entangled with Hugo, and it took me a long time to realize it was not Henry. Hugo believes I was so loving last night, but it was Henry I loved, Henry I kissed.

  Since Allendy has fully won my confidence I came ready to talk very frankly about frigidity. I confess this: that when I found pleasure in sexual intercourse with Henry I was afraid of having a baby and thought that I should not have an orgasm too frequently. But a few months ago a Russian doctor told me it could not happen easily; in fact, if I wanted a child I would have to subject myself to an operation. The fear of having a baby, then, was eliminated. Allendy said the very fact that I did not try to reassure myself on this score for seven years of my married life proved I did not really give it any importance, that I used it merely as an excuse for not letting go in coition. When this fear vanished, I was able to examine more closely the true nature of my feelings. I expressed a restlessness at what I termed the enforced passivity of women. Still, perhaps two times out of three, I kept myself passive, waiting for all the activity in the man, as if I did not want to be responsible for what I was enjoying. "That is to abate your sense of guilt," Allendy said. "You refuse to be active and feel less guilty if it is the other who is active."

  After the previous talk with Allendy I had felt a slight change. I was more active with Henry. He noticed it and said, "I love the way you fuck me now." And I felt a keen pleasure.

  What astonishes me most about June are Henry's stories of her aggressivity, her taking him, seeking him at her own will. When I occasionally try aggressivity, it gives me a feeling of distress, shame. I sense now an occasional psychic paralysis in me somewhat similar to Eduardo's, except that it is more serious for a man.

  Allendy pressed me to admit that since the last analysis I had complete confidence in him and that I had become very fond of him. All is well, then, as this is necessary for the success of the analysis. At the end of the session he could use the word "frigidity" without offending me. I was even laughing.

  One of the things he observed was that I was dressing more simply. I have felt much less the need of original costuming. I could almost wear ordinary tailored clothes now. Costume, for me, has been an external expression of my secret lack of confidence. Uncertain of my beauty, Allendy said, I designed striking clothes which would distinguish me from other women.

  "But," I said, laughing, "if I become happy and banal, the art of costuming, which owes its existence purely to a sense of inferiority, will be mortally affected." The pathological basis of creation! What will become of the creator if I become normal? Or will I merely gain in strength, so as to live out my instincts more fully? I will probably develop different and more interesting illnesses. Allendy said that what was important was to become equal to life.

  My happiness hangs in suspense, and what happens now is determined by June's next move. Meanwhile I wait. I am overcome with a superstitious fear of starting another journal. This one is so full of Henry. If I should ha
ve to write on the first page of the new one, "June is here," I will know that I have lost my Henry. I will be left with only a small purple-bound book of joy, that is all, so quickly written, so quickly lived.

  Love reduces the complexity of living. It amazes me that when Henry walks towards the café table where I wait for him, or opens the gate to our house, the sight of him is sufficient to exult me. No letter from anyone, even in praise of my book, can stir me as much as a note from him.

  When he is drunk, he becomes sentimental in such a human, simple way. He begins to visualize our life together, I as his wife: "You will never seem as beautiful as when I see you roll up your sleeves and work for me. We could be so happy. You would fall behind in your writing!"

  Oh, the German husband. At this, I laugh. So, I fall behind in my writing and I become the wife of a genius. I had wanted this, among other things, but no housework. I would never marry him. Oh, no. I know that he is delighted with the liberty I give him but that he is extremely jealous and would not let me act as freely.

  Yet when I see him so childishly happy with my love, I hesitate at playing the game of worrying him, deceiving him, tormenting him. I do not even want to arouse his jealousy too painfully.

  It is Fred's role, unconsciously, to poison my happiness. He points to the inadequacies of Henry's love. I do not deserve a half love, he says. I deserve extraordinary things. Hell, Henry's half love is worth more to me than the whole loves of a thousand men.