by Anais Nin
He was going to write June a crushing letter, full of accusations. And at that moment I brought him a document which justifies all her actions. It was as if he had raised his hand to strike her and I had to stop him. I know now June is a drug addict. I have found descriptions in a book that verify what I have vaguely sensed.
Henry was overwhelmed. He can be so easily duped. June talked constantly about drugs, like the criminal who returns to the scene of the crime. She needed to mention the subject while violently denying ever taking drugs (two or three times, perhaps). Henry began to piece the fragments together. When I saw his despair, I grew frightened. "You must not be too sure of what I say. I am sometimes too quick to synthesize." But I felt I was right.
Here, he passed the only ethical judgment I have ever heard him pass on self-destruction, that taking drugs denoted a deficiency in one's nature. This is what made the relationship hopeless.
I felt such pity for him when he began to question how much June loved him, comparing her love with mine. I defended her, saying she loves him in her own way, which is inhuman and fantastic. But it is true that I would not leave him as she does. It is true, as he says, that her greatest love is self-love. But it is her self-love that has made her a great character.
Henry is sometimes amazed by my admiration of June. Last night he said, "At the beginning you very much wanted June to come back. Am I right in thinking you don't want it now?"
"Yes." And I have also admitted other things, after never answering his questions about lovers. Once, in his arms, he pressed me so feelingly, saying, "Tell me you haven't deceived me; it would hurt me terribly, tell me," that I told him I had not. I gave away my mystery, knowing I shouldn't, yet incapable of anything else.
To exasperate a man may be a pleasure; but to lie in Henry's arms and surrender to him so entirely seemed a greater pleasure to me—to feel his body relaxing and to see him falling asleep with his happiness. The day after, I can always recover my feminine shield, take up the unnecessary and hateful war. In broad daylight I can give him back a little anguish, jealousy, fear, because he wants them, Henry, the Eternal Husband. He loved his suffering with June, even though he also loves his relief from suffering with me.
We had an amusing talk about our beginnings. Henry had wanted to kiss me the day we were first alone, the day of our walk to the woods, talking about June.
"But confess it was a game for you, at the beginning," I said.
"Not in the very beginning. In Dijon, yes, I had cruel, cold ideas, of using you. But the day I came back to Paris and saw your eyes—oh, Anaïs, the look in your eyes in the restaurant when I came back. That got me. But your life, your seriousness, your background scared me. I would have been very slow if you hadn't..."
I laugh now, as I think of it—what I read him from the red journal, the dream about his writing. It was I who broke the shell, because I desperately wanted him to know me. And what a surprise I was to him, he tells me. I followed an impulse, daringly, boldly. Was it because I could see more quickly and knew that Henry and I ... Or was it naïveté?
We confess the most humorous doubts about each other. I have imagined Henry saying to June, "No, I don't love Anaïs. I acted as you do, for the sake of what she could do for me." And he has imagined me talking contemptuously about him in a few months. We sit in the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds, which a caress will dissipate in a moment. I am in my pajamas. Henry's hand slips around my shoulder, and we laugh, wondering what will prove to be the truth.
The contrast between Hugo's sensuality and Henry's torments me. Could Hugo, be made more sensual? It lasts so short a time with him. He thinks himself a phenomenon because he took me six nights in succession, but with quick, stabbing movements. Even after a paroxysm Henry's tenderness is more penetrating, more lingering. His soft little kisses, like rain, stay in my body almost as long as his violent caresses.
"Are you ever dry?" he teases me. I confess that Hugo has to use Vaseline. Then I realize the full significance of this confession, and I am overwhelmed.
Last night in my sleep I touched Hugo's penis as I learned to touch Henry's. I caressed it and pressed it in my hand. In my half-sleep I thought it was Henry. When Hugo became excited and began to take me, I awakened fully and was deeply disappointed. My desire died.
I love Hugo passionlessly, but tenderness is a strong tie, too. I will never leave him while he wants me. I believe that this passion for Henry will be burned out.
It is for the men who are not primarily physical that I am the essential woman, men like Hugo, Eduardo, even Allendy. Henry can do without me. Yet it is extraordinary to see how I have changed him, how he has become whole, how he rarely attacks windmills and rails illogically now. It is I who cannot live altogether without Henry. I have changed, too. I feel restless, spirited, adventurous. To be absolutely truthful, I hope secretly to meet someone else, to go on living as I am living, sensually. I have erotic imaginings. I do not want solitude, introspection, work. I want pleasure.
These days I occupy myself with frivolities. I serve the goddess of beauty, hoping she may grant me gifts. I work for a dazzling skin, vibrant hair, good health. True, I have no new clothes, because of Henry, but that doesn't matter. I have dyed and altered and rearranged things. On Monday I'm going to risk an operation which will forever efface the humorous tilt of my nose.
After a night together, Henry and I couldn't separate. I had promised to go home Sunday and spend the evening with Eduardo. But Henry said he would come to Louveciennes with me, whatever happened. I shall never forget that day and night. The maids were out; we had the house to ourselves. Henry explored it and enjoyed it to the utmost. When he threw himself on our big soft bed, the voluptuousness of it affected him. I joined him, and he penetrated me swiftly, hungrily.
We talked, read together, danced, listened to guitar recordings. He read bits of the purple journal. If he felt the fairy-taleness of the place, I began to feel a kind of ensor-cellement, too, in which Henry was an extraordinary being, a saint, a stupendous master of words, with a dazzling mind. I am astonished by his sensitiveness. He wept as he watched me listening to the records; and he refused to read on in the journal, upset by its too intimate revelations—Henry, who holds nothing sacred.
Eduardo came at four o'clock and we let him ring the bell. Henry was enjoying it, but not I. "You're too human," he said, adding, "Now I know how you will feel about me when you put me in the same situation." Henry and I lying in bed, and Eduardo ringing the bell, walking away, and trying again a half hour later.
At half past one Monday Henry left me, thinking I was leaving that night for a vacation. At two o'clock I was at the clinic. I was amazed at my going there, all alone, to take a great risk with my face. I lay on the operating table aware of every gesture of the surgeon. I was at once calm and frightened. I had told nobody about this. My sense of solitude was immense, and with it I felt a sureness which comes to me at all big moments. It carried me through. If the operation failed and my face were marred, I even planned to disappear completely, never see loved ones again. Then came the moment when I saw my nose in the mirror, bloodstained and straight—Greek! Afterwards, bandages, swelling, a painful night, dreams. Would my nostrils ever quiver again?
In the morning the nurse brings me writing paper stamped with the name of the clinic. This suggests an idea. I write to Eduardo, in a faltering hand, that I went to the country, took cocaine and was brought to the hospital because I would not awaken. I play with the idea, chuckling as I write. To make life more interesting. To imitate literature, which is a hoax.
What you imagine is something you want. How would it have been, that day and night in Louveciennes alone with June, if there had been cocaine?
I am home, haunted by the wonder of the hours with Henry and by a belated horror of the clinic. My nose is heavy but beautiful.
I put off seeing Allendy until I am presentable. He tells me he has seen Eduardo and that he is very u
nhappy. I also want Allendy to believe the cocaine story.
There is sunshine on the bed but no feeling of sacrilege because Henry has slept here. It seems natural to me. The house is in order. My trunk is packed and in the entrance. I have Austrian money in my bag and a ticket for Innsbruck.
Henry was in despair the day after our talk, which was supposed to settle everything. We decided we should not run away together. I told him sadly, "You will lose me soon because you don't love me enough." But we are not there yet.
As my passion spreads, so does my tenderness for Hugo. The more distance I create between our two bodies, the more exotic to me his perfection, his goodness, the more keen my gratitude, the more aware I am that he, among all of us, knows best how to love. While he is traveling and I sit alone I do not feel bound to him, I do not imagine myself at his side, I do not wish for him, yet he has given me the most precious of all gifts, and when I think of him I see a vastly generous, warm man who has kept me from misery, suicide, and madness.
Madness. It would be easy for me to again feel the mood I had aboard the ship to New York when I wanted to drown myself. When I write Eduardo my imaginary letter, I say, "I am glad to have escaped the inferno for twenty-four hours of dreams." I mean this. My attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness. When I left Henry the other day, I knew so deeply I was leaving him that I could easily have turned to the taxi driver and ordered him to drive me straight into the Seine.
What I invented for Eduardo will happen someday. How long I will be able to bear the awareness of living depends on my work. Work has been my only stabilizer. The journal is a product of my disease, perhaps an accentuation and exaggeration of it. I speak of relief when I write; perhaps, but it is also an engraving of pain, a tattooing of myself.
Henry thinks the journal becomes important only when I write truths, like the details of my deceptions.
It seems to me that I follow only the most accessible thread. Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage. I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once. I often would have to retrace my steps, because of my vice for embellishment.
Hotel Achenseehof, Tirol. Last night in bed I stretched out my hand desolately and wished to touch that ever lively, sensual Henry. I was sorry when he confessed he had written me a passionate letter from Dijon and then destroyed it because my letter contained some allusion to his hypersexuality, which I had not meant as a reproach, but which he took as one.
Oh, to sleep until I am whole again, to awaken free and light. The idea of the many letters I must write distresses me. Even to Henry I have only sent a small note. Mountains, heavy clouds, mists, quilts, blankets, and me, lying still as a dormouse. Nose normal. I hide my journal in the stove, with the ashes.
For Henry, I awoke and wrote a letter. I awoke to remember my dream: June had arrived. She came to see me before seeing Henry, again looking sullen and indifferent, as in other dreams. I was asleep. She awoke me with a kiss but began immediately to tell me how disappointed she was in me and to criticize my appearance. When she said my nose was too thick, I explained to her about the operation. Then I immediately regretted it because I realized she would tell Henry. I told her that I realized quite well she was more beautiful than I. She asked me to masturbate her. I did so very skillfully and experienced the sensation as if I were doing it to myself. She was grateful for the pleasure and left thanking me. "Now I am going to see Henry," she said.
Letter to Henry: "Last night I wondered how I could show you, by what it would cost me most to do, that I love you; and I could only think of sending you money to spend on a woman. I thought of the Negress. I like her because at least I can feel my own softness melting into her. Please don't go to too cheap, too ordinary a woman. And then don't tell me about it, since I am sure you have already done it. Let me believe I have given it to you."
At the same time with what joy I receive Hugo here. And I have found great pleasure, even frenzy in his love-making. Somehow, in a place like this, I cannot miss Henry, because Henry doesn't belong with mountains, lakes, health, solitude, sleep. Hugo triumphs here, with his very beautiful legs in Tyrolean shorts. I rest here with him, and my life in Paris with Henry is like my night dreams.
Hugo and I take up our tenderness and teasing. A week away from me matures him. I believe we cannot mature together. Together we are soft, weak, young. Depending on each other too much. Together we live in an unreal world. And we live in the outside world, as Hugo says, only because we have this one, ours, to fall back on.
He was distressed by my perfect nose. "But I loved that funny little tilt. I don't like to see you change." Finally I convinced him of the aesthetic progress. I wonder what Henry will say.
In a way I dread receiving a letter from him. It will bring fever. I have fallen back on the security of Hugo's devotion. I rest on his big hairy chest. Occasionally I get a little bored and impatient, but I do not show it. We are happy together over little things. People take us, as always, for honeymooners.
What I wonder about now is whether I stay in Hugo's world because I lack courage to venture out completely, or is it that I have not yet loved anyone enough to want to give up my life with Hugo? If he were to die, I would not go to Henry; that is clear to me.
I feel great joy at receiving a long letter from Henry. I realize that he and June have made Dostoevsky alive and terrible to me. At some moments I melt with gratitude at the thought of what Henry has given me, in just being what he is; at others, I am in despair over the liberated instincts which make him such a bad friend. I remember that he showed more hurt vanity than love when the Hungarian tried to put his hands under my dress that night at the Select. "What did he think I was, a fool?" When drunk, he is capable of anything. Now he has his head shaved like a convict's, in self-abasement. His love of June is self-laceration. In the end, all I know is that he has fecundated me in more than one way and that I will have few lovers as interesting as Henry.
As we again begin our duel of letters—mad, merry, free letters—I feel a physical, gnawing pain at his absence. It looks to me today that Henry is going to be a part of my life for many years even if he is only my lover for a few months. A snapshot of him, with his heavy mouth open, moves me. I quickly start thinking about a lamp that will be better for his eyes, become concerned over his vacation. It makes me acutely happy that he has finished rewriting his second book within the last two months, that he is so energetic and productive. And what do I miss? His voice, his hands, his body, his tenderness, his bearishness, his goodness and deviltry. As he says, "June has never been able to discover whether I am a saint or a devil." I don't know either.
At the same time I find plenty of love to give Hugo. I marvel at this, when we are acting like lovers, cursing the twin beds and sleeping in great discomfort in a too small bed, holding hands over the dinner table, kissing in the boat. It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.
When I ask Henry what stopped him from reading the rest of my purple journal, he answers: "I don't know any more than you why I stopped reading at a certain point. You may be sure I regret it. I can only say that it was an impersonal sadness, things turning out badly not because of evil or maliciousness but through a sort of inherent fatality. Making even the most cherishable and sacred things seem so illusory, unstable, transitory. If you substituted X for a certain character, it would be just the same. As a matter of fact, perhaps I was substituting myself."
No one can help weeping over the destruction of the "ideal marriage." But I don't weep any more. I have exhausted my scruples. Hugo has the most beautiful nature in the world, and I love him, but I also love other men. He lies a yard away from me while I write this, and I feel innocent.
I live in his kingdom. Peace. Simplicity. Tonight we were talking about evil, and
I realized that he lives in complete security about me. He cannot ever imagine that ... whereas I can so easily imagine. Is he more innocent than I am? Or does one trust when one's self is so integral?
The more I read Dostoevsky the more I wonder about June and Henry and whether they are imitations. I recognize the same phrases, the same heightened language, almost the same actions. Are they literary ghosts? Do they have souls of their own?
I remember a moment when I allowed myself to feel petty resentment for Henry. It was a few days after he had told me about being with the whores. He was to meet me at Fraenkel's to talk over the possibility of helping him publish his book. I felt very hard and cynical. I resented being looked upon as the wife of a banker who could protect a writer. I resented my tremendous anxiety, my wakeful nights, turning over ways and means of helping Henry. He suddenly seemed to me a parasite, a tremendously voracious egoist. Before he arrived I talked with Fraenkel, told him it was impossible and why. Fraenkel felt so much pity for Henry; I, none. Then Henry himself appeared. He was so carefully dressed for me, showing me his new suit, new hat and shirt. He was carefully shaved. I don't know why this infuriated me. I did not welcome him very warmly. I went on talking about Fraenkel's work. Henry felt that something was wrong and asked, "Have I come too early?" Finally he mentioned our going to dinner. I said that I couldn't go. Hugo had not left for London as I had expected he would. I had to take the seven-thirty train home. I looked at Henry's face. It gave me pleasure to see he was fearfully disappointed. I left them.
But I was very unhappy immediately afterwards. All my tenderness returned. I was afraid I had hurt him. I wrote him a note. The next day Hugo was gone, and I went to him immediately. That night we were so contented together that, falling asleep, Henry said, "This is heaven!"
