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

by Anais Nin

  AUGUST

  When I read Henry's ardent love letters, I am not stirred. I am not impatient to return to him. His defects stand in the foreground. Perhaps I have simply swung back to Hugo. I don't know. I am aware of a tremendous distance between us. And it is difficult for me to write lovingly. I feel insincere. I evade the issue. I write less than I should. I have to force myself to write at all. What has happened?

  Hugo is surprised because I am so restless. I smoke, get up, move about. I cannot bear my own company. I have not learned yet to replace introspection by thinking. I could meditate on Spengler, for instance, but in ten minutes I am again devouring myself. As Gide says, introspection falsifies everything. Perhaps it estranges me from Henry. I need his voice and his caresses. He writes a beautiful letter about our last days in Clichy, Henry desiring me, lost without me.

  Yet it is impossible for me to desire him in Hugo's presence. Hugo's laughter, Hugo's devotion paralyzes me. Finally I write to him, hinting at all this. But as soon as I have mailed the letter, the artificially pent-up feelings overwhelm me. I write him a mad note.

  The next morning I receive an enormous letter from him. The very touch of it moves me. "When you return I am going to give you one literary fuck fest—that means fucking and talking and talking and fucking. Anaïs, I am going to open your very groins. God forgive me if this letter is ever opened by mistake. I can't help it. I want you. I love you. You're food and drink to me, the whole bloody machinery as it were. Lying on top of you is one thing, but getting close to you is another. I feel close to you, one with you, you're mine whether it is acknowledged or not. Every day I wait now is torture. I am counting them slowly, painfully. But make it as soon as you can. I need you. God, I want to see you in Louveciennes, see you in that golden light of the window, in your Nile green dress and your face pale, a frozen pallor as of the night of the concert. I love you as you are. I love your loins, the golden pallor, the slope of your buttocks, the warmth inside you, the juices of you. Anaïs, I love you so much, so much! I am getting tongue-tied. I am sitting here writing you with a tremendous erection. I can feel your soft mouth closing over me, your leg clutching me tight, see you again in the kitchen here lifting your dress and sitting on top of me and the chair riding around over the kitchen floor, going thump, thump."

  I answer in the same tone, enclose my mad note, send a telegram. Oh, there is no fighting against Henry's invasion of me.

  Hugo is reading. I bend over him and pour out love, a love which is acutely penitent. Hugo gasps, "I swear I could never find such joy in anyone but you. You're everything to me."

  I have a sleepless night, with nerve-wracking pain, thinking of Jung's wise words: "Let things happen." The next day I slowly pack, dreaming of Henry. He is food and drink to me. How could I, even for a few days, swing away from him? If Hugo would not laugh like that, like a child, if his warm, furry hands would not reach out constantly for me, if he would not lean over to give chocolate to a black Scotch terrier, if he would not turn that finely chiseled face to me, saying, "Pussywillow, do you love me?"

  Meanwhile it is Henry who leaps in my body. I feel the spurt of him, his thumping and pushing. Monday night is intolerably far off.

  The length of his letters, twenty and thirty pages, is symbolical of his bigness. His torrent lashes me. I desire to be only a woman. Not to write books, to face the world directly, but to live by literary blood transfusion. To stand behind Henry, feeding him. To rest from self-assertion and creation.

  Mountaineers. Smoke. Tea. Beer. The radio. My head floats away from my body, suspended midair in the smoke of Tyrolean pipes. I see frog eyes, straw hair, mouths like open pocketbooks, pig noses, heads like billiard balls, monkey hands with ham-colored palms. I begin to laugh, as if I were drunk, and say Henry words: "cripes," "screw," and Hugo gets angry. I am silent and cold. My head floats back. I cry. Hugo, who has been trying to tune himself to my gaiety, now observes the swift transition and is baffled.

  I increasingly experience this monstrous deformation of reality. I spent a day in Paris before leaving for Austria. I rented a room to rest in because I had not slept the night before, a small attic room with dormer windows. As I lay there I had the sensation of all connections breaking, I parted from each being I loved, carefully and completely. I remembered Hugo's last glance from the train, Joaquin's pale face and fraternal kiss, Henry's last milky kiss, his last words—"Is everything all right?" which he says when he is embarrassed and wants to say something deeper.

  I parted from them all exactly as I parted from my grandmother in Barcelona when I was a child. I could have died in a small hotel room, dispossessed of my loves and my belongings, not registered in the hotel book. Yet I knew that if I stayed in that room a few days, living on the money Hugo had given me for my trip, an entirely new life could begin. It was the terror of this new life more than the terror of dying which roused me. I threw myself out of bed and ran away from the room that was growing around me like a web, seizing upon my imagination, gnawing into my memory so that I would forget in five minutes who I was and whom I loved.

  It was room number thirty-five, from which I might have awakened the next morning a whore, or a madwoman, or what is worse, perhaps, altogether unchanged.

  I am happy with today, so I entertain myself by imagining sorrow. What would I feel if Henry were to die, and I heard, in some corner of Paris, the accordion I used to hear in Clichy? But then, I have wanted to suffer. I cling to Henry for the same reason that June clings to him.

  And Allendy?

  I need his help again, certainly.

  Paris. I needed nobody's help. Only to see Henry again at the station, to kiss him, to eat with him, to hear him talk, in between more kisses.

  I wanted to make him jealous, but I am too faithful, so I dug into the past and created a story. I wrote a false letter from John Erskine, tore it up and pasted it together again. When Henry arrived at Louveciennes, the fire was devouring all the rest of John's letters. Later in the evening I showed Henry the fragment which had escaped destruction, supposedly, through its insertion in the journal. Henry was so jealous that on the second page of his new book he had to throw a bomb at John's writing. Childish games. And meanwhile I am as faithful as a slave—in feeling, in thought, in flesh. My lack of a past now seems good. It has preserved my ardor. I have come to Henry like a virgin, fresh, unused, believing, eager.

  Henry and I are one, lying soldered for four days. Not with bodies but with flames. God, let me thank somebody. No drug could be more potent. Such a man. He has sucked my life into his body as I have sucked his. This is the apotheosis of my life. Henry, Louveciennes, solitude, summer heat, quivering smells, chanting breezes, and, within us, tornadoes and exquisite calms.

  First I dressed up in my Maja costume—flowers, jewelry, make-up, hardness, brilliancy. I was angry, full of hatred. I had arrived from Austria the night before, and we had slept in a hotel room. I thought he had betrayed me. He swears not. It does not matter. I hated him because I loved him as I have never loved anyone.

  I stand at the door when he comes in, hands on my hips. I look out of a savage self. Henry approaches, dazed, and does not recognize me until he comes very near and I smile and speak to him. He cannot believe it. He thinks I have gone mad. Then before he has quite awakened I take him to my room. There, on the grate in the fireplace, is a large photograph of John and his letters. They are burning. I smile. Henry sits on the couch. "You frighten me, Anaïs," he says. "You are so different, and so strange. So dramatic." I sit on the floor between his knees. "I hate you, Henry. That story about [Osborn's girl friend] Jeanne ... You lied to me."

  He answers me so gently that I believe him. And if I do not believe him, it does not matter. All the treacheries in the world do not matter. John is burnt away. The present is magnificent. Henry asks me to undress. Everything is shed but the black lace mantilla. He asks me to keep it on and lies on the bed, watching me. I stand before the mirror, shedding carnations, earrings.
He looks through the lace at my body.

  The next day I run about the house cooking. Suddenly I love cooking, for Henry. I cook richly, with infinite care. I enjoy seeing him eat, eating with him.

  We sit in the garden, in our pajamas, drunk on the air, the caresses of the swaying trees, the songs of birds, attentive dogs licking our hands. Henry's dfesire is always coursing. I am ploughed, open.

  At night, books, talk, passion. As he pours his passion into me I feel that I become beautiful. I show him a hundred faces. He watches me. It all passes like a procession, up to this morning's climax, before he leaves me, when he sees a burnt face, heavy, sensual, Moorish.

  There was a storm last night. Marble-sized hail. Sea fury of the trees. Henry sits in an armchair and asks, "Are we going to read Spengler now?" He sits purring like a cat. He has the yawn of a tiger, all the jungle cries of contentment. His voice vibrates in his stomach. I have put my head there and listened, as against an organ. I am lying on the bed. I wear a lace dress, nothing else, because it gives him pleasure to look at me. "Now," he says, "you look like an Ingres." I cannot bear the space between us. I sit on the floor. He caresses my hair. He gives me winged kisses on the eyes. He is all tenderness, thoughtfulness.

  Sensuality was exhausted in the afternoon. But he looks down and shows me his lanced desire again. He himself is surprised: "I love you; I wasn't even thinking of fucking. But your touch alone..." I sit on his knees. And then we sink into that drunkenness of sucking. For a long, long time, just tongues, eyes closed. Then the penis and the yielding walls of flesh, clutching, opening, beating. We roll on the floor until I cannot bear any more, and I lie still, saying no. But when he helps me off with my dress and embraces me from behind, I leap up to him, all aflame again. What sleep afterwards, lost, dreamless.

  "When it comes to sensuality," Henry says, "you are almost more sensual than June. Because she may be a splendid animal when you hold her in your arms, but afterwards, nothing. She is cold, hard, even. Your sex permeates your mind, runs into your head afterwards. Everything you think is warm. You are constantly warm. The only thing is that you have the body of a girl. But what power you have to keep the illusion. You know how men feel after they have had a woman. They want to kick her off the bed. With you it remains as heightened afterwards as before. I can never get enough of you. I want to marry you and return to New York with you."

  We talk about June. I laugh at his efforts to break with her, in his own mind. We are two against her, two in harmony, in love, in profound fusion, yet she is stronger. I know better than he knows. He has admitted so much against her and in favor of me. But I smile with a wisdom rooted in doubt. I want no more than what I have been given these past days, hours so fecund that a lifetime of remembrance could not exhaust them, wear them thin.

  "This is no ordinary garden," Henry says at Louveciennes. "It is mysterious, significant. There is mentioned in a Chinese book a celestial garden, a kingdom, suspended between heaven and earth: this is it."

  Over all this hangs the joyous probability that his book Tropic of Cancer will be published. When I am alone, I hear him talk. Like Lawrence's snake, his thinking comes from the bowels of the earth. Someone has compared him to an artist who was known as the "cunt painter."

  He is so much clearer to me. Towards certain women, he shows toughness and hard-boiledness; towards others, a naive romanticism. At first June appeared like an angel to him, out of her dance-hall background, and he offered her a fool's faith (June asserts that in nine years she has had only two lovers, and until now he has believed that). I see him now as a man who can be enslaved by wonder, a man who can believe anything of woman. I see him sought out by women (this has been true of all the women he has loved seriously). It is the women who take the initiative in sexual contact. It was June who put her head on his shoulder and invited a kiss the first night they met. His toughness is external only. But like all soft people he can commit the most dastardly acts at certain moments, prompted by his own weakness, which makes him a coward. He leaves a woman in the cruelest manner because he cannot face the breaking of the connection.

  His sensuality, too, directs actions of the most scoundrelly nature. It is only by understanding the violence of his instincts that one can believe any man could be so ruthless. His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that, as he said about June, only angels or devils can catch the tempo of it.

  We have been separated for three days. It is unnatural. We had acquired small habits, sleeping together, awaking together, singing in the bathroom, adjusting our likes and dislikes to fit one another. I am so hungry for the little intimacies. And he?

  I feel a powerful sense of life unimaginable to either Hugo or Eduardo. My breasts are swollen. I hold my legs wide apart in love-making instead of, as before, closed. I have enjoyed sucking to the point of almost coming to a climax while doing it. I have finally eliminated my childish self.

  I push Hugo away from me, exacerbate his desires, his terror of losing me. I talk cynically to him, taunt him, call women to his attention. There is no room in me for sadness or regrets. Men look at me and I look at them, with my being unlocked. No more veils. I want many lovers. I am insatiable now. When I weep, I want to fuck it away.

  Henry comes to Louveciennes on a hot summer afternoon and lays me on the table, and then on the black carpet. He sits on the edge of my bed and looks transfigured. The scattered man, easily swayed, now collects himself to talk about his book. At this moment he is a big man. I sit and marvel at him. A moment before, flushed by drink, he was scattering his riches. The moment he crystallizes is beautiful to watch. I was slow in tuning myself to his mood. I could have fucked all afternoon. But then I also loved our transition into big talk. Our talks are wonderful, interplays, not duels but swift illuminations of one another. I can make his tentative thoughts click. He enlarges mine. I fire him. He makes me flow. There is always movement between us. And he is grasping. He takes hold of me like a prey.

  Here we lie, putting order in his ideas, deciding on the place of realistic incidents in his novels. His book swells up inside of me like my very own.

  I am fascinated by the activity in his head, the surprises, the curiosity, the gusto, the amorality, the sensibilities, and the rascalities. And I loved his last letter to me: "Don't expect me to be sane any more. Don't let's be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes, you can't dispute it. I came away with a piece of you sticking to me; I am walking about swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to our marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a Negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can't see how I can go on living away from you—these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can't picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.

  "Here I am back and still smoldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the papers about suicides and murder and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal.

  "I still hear you singing in the kitchen ... a sort of inharmonic, monotonous Cuban wail. I know you're happy in the kitchen and the meal you're cooking is the best meal we ever ate together. I know you would scald yourself and not complain. I feel the greatest peace and joy sitting in the dining room listening to your rustling about, your dress like the goddess Indra studded with a thousand eyes. Anaïs, I only thought I loved you before, it was nothing like this certainty that's in me now. Was all this so wonderful because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other? Was I less I, or more I, and you less or more you? Is it madness to believe that this could go on? When and where would the drab moments begin
? I study you so much to discover the possible flaws, the weak points, the danger zones. I don't find them—not any. That means I am in love, blind, blind, blind. To be blind forever!

  "I picture you playing the records over and over—Hugo's records. Parlez moi d'amour. The double life, double taste, double joy and misery. How you must be furrowed and ploughed by it. I know all that but I can't do anything to prevent it. I wish indeed it were me who had to endure it. I know now your eyes are wide open. Certain things you will never believe any more, certain gestures you will never repeat, certain sorrows, misgivings, you will never again experience. A kind of white criminal fervor in your tenderness and cruelty. Neither remorse nor vengeance, neither sorrow nor guilt. A living it out, with nothing to save you from the abysm but a high hope, a faith, a joy that you tasted, that you can repeat when you will.

  "While it thunders and lightnings I lie on the bed and go through wild dreams. We're in Seville, and then in Fez, and then in Capri, and then in Havana. We're journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and Arabic and Turkish. We are admitted everywhere and they strew our path with flowers. I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realize. Life and literature combined; love, the dynamo; you, with your chameleon's soul, giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you assert yourself the more you want me, need me. Your voice getting hoarser, deeper, your eyes blacker, your blood thicker, your body fuller. A voluptuous servility and tyrannical necessity. More cruel now than before—consciously, wilfully cruel. The insatiable delight of experience..."