by Anais Nin
It is ironical that the deepest experience of my life has come to me when I am famished not for profundity but for pleasure. Sensualism consumes me. What is deep and serious I look at with less intensity, but it is that which fascinates Henry, the depths he has not yet lived out in love.
Is this the high moment? If only June would return now, to leave in Henry and me that taste of the climax, never to be reached again, never to be annihilated.
Henry said, "I want to leave a scar on the world."
I write to him how I feel about his book. Then: "There will never be darkness because in both of us there is always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience....If this is so, then think what I find in you, who are a gold mine. Henry, I love you with a realization, a knowledge of you, which takes in all of you, with the strength of my mind and imagination, besides that of my body. I love you in such a way that June can return, our love can be destroyed, and yet nothing can sever the fusion that has been....I think today of what you said: 'I want to leave a scar on the world.' I will help you. I want to leave the feminine scar."
Today, I would follow Henry to the end of the world. What saves me is only that we are both penniless.
Lucidity: There is in Henry a lack of feeling (not a lack of passion or emotion) that is betrayed by his emphasis on fucking and talking. When he speaks about other women, what he remembers of them are the defects, the sensual characteristics, or the disputes. The rest is either absent or implied. I don't know yet. But feelings are fetters. Henry is not to be worshiped as a human being, but as a genius-monster. He may be soft-hearted but only indiscriminately so. He gave Paulette, out of generosity, the pair of stockings I had left in his drawer, my best pair, while I was wearing mended stockings so I could save to buy gifts for him. The money I sent him from Austria, for a woman, he spent on records for me. Yet he stole 500 francs from Osborn's legacy to his girl friend when Osborn left for America. He gives my dog half his steak, yet he keeps the surplus change given to him by a taxi driver. These sudden acts of callousness, which also appear in June, bewilder me and I expect to suffer from them, though Henry swears he could never act thus with me. And so far I cannot see anything in his treatment of me but the utmost delicacy. He has not hesitated to fling out cruel truths—he is fully aware of my defects—but at the same time he succumbs to the spell, the softness. Why do I trust him so, believe in him, have no fear of him? Perhaps it's as much of a mistake as it is for Hugo to trust me.
I crave Henry, only Henry. I want to live with him, be free with him, suffer with him. Phrases from his letters haunt me. Yet I have doubts about our love. I fear my impetuosity. Everything is in danger. All that I have created. I follow Henry the writer with my writer's soul, I enter into his feelings as he wanders through the streets, I partake of his curiosities, his desires, his whores, I think his thoughts. Everything in us is married.
Henry, you are not lying to me; you are all I feel you are. Don't deceive me. My love is too new, too absolute, too deep.
As Hugo and I walked tonight from the top of the hill I saw Paris lying in a heat haze. Paris. Henry. I did not think of him as a man, but as life.
Perfidiously, I said to Hugo, "It is so fearfully hot. Couldn't we ask Fred and Henry and Paulette for a visit overnight?"
This, because I received this morning the first pages of his new book, stupendous pages. He is doing his best writing now, fevered yet cohesive. Every word now hits the mark. The man is whole, strong, as he never was. I want to breathe his presence for a few hours, feed him, cool him, fill him with that heavy breath of earth and trees which whip his blood. God, this is like living every moment in an orgasm, with only pauses between plunges.
I want Henry to know this: that I can subordinate the jealous grasping of woman to a passionate devotion to the writer. I feel a proud servitude. There is splendor in his writing, a splendor which transfigures everything he touches.
Last night Henry and Hugo talked for each other, admired each other. Hugo's generosity blossomed. When we were in our bedroom, I compensated him. At breakfast, in the garden, he read Henry's latest pages. His enthusiasm flared. I took advantage of it to suggest we open our home to him, the great writer. Holding my hand, weighing my words of reassurance—"Henry interests me as a writer, that's all"—he assented to all I wanted. I go to the gate to see him off. He is happy just to be loved, and I am astonished by my own lies, my acting.
I did not come out unscathed from the inferno of Henry's overnight visit. The development of those two days was intricate. Just as I was beginning to act like June, "capable of worship, devotion, but also of the greatest callousness to obtain what she wants," as Henry had said, he fell into a sentimental mood.
It was after Hugo had gone off to work. Henry said, "He is so sensitive, one ought not to hurt a man like that." This roused a storm in me. I left the table and went to my room. He came to watch me weeping, and he was glad to see me weep, showing the absence of callousness. But I became tense, poisonous.
When Hugo returned in the evening, Henry began again to listen to him attentively, to speak his language, to talk gravely, ponderously. The three of us were sitting in the garden.
Our talk was at first desultory, until Henry began to ask questions on psychology. (Sometime during the day, probably out of jealousy of June, I had said something which had aroused Henry's jealousy of Allendy.) Everything I had read the previous year, all my talks with Allendy, my own broodings on the subject, all this gushed out of me with amazing energy and clarity.
Suddenly Henry stopped me and said, "I don't trust either Allendy's ideas or your thinking, Anaïs. Why, I only saw him once. He is a brutish, sensual man, lethargic, with a fund of fanaticism in the back of his eyes. And you—why, you put things so clearly and beautifully to me—so crystal clear—it looks simple and true. You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers—you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You're the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance."
This is the outline of his attack. It was set forth with extraordinary irritation and vehemence. Hugo added quietly, "One feels that she gives you a neat pattern and then slips out of it herself and laughs at you."
"Exactly," said Henry.
I laughed. I realized that the sum total of his criticism was flattering, and I was joyful at having irritated and puzzled him, but then I felt raked by bitterness at the idea that he should suddenly fight me. Yes, war was inevitable. He and Hugo continued talking while I was trying to toughen myself. It was too unexpected for me. Henry's admiration of Hugo, too, was puzzling, after all he had said.
I remember thinking, now the two slow-minded ones, the ponderous German and the unflashy Scotchman, have found solidarity against my nimbleness. Well, I will be more nimble and more treacherous. Henry identifies himself with Hugo, the husband, as I identify with June. June and I would have flagellated the two men with pleasure.
What a night! How one can go to sleep poisoned, heavy with tears, with rage still smoking. Go ahead, Henry, pity Hugo, because I am going to deceive him a hundred times. I would deceive the greatest and finest man on earth. The ideal of faithfulness is a joke. Remember what I taught you tonight: psychology tries to reestablish the basis of life not on ideals but on sincerity with one's self. Hit, hit all you want to. I'll hit back.
I went to sleep full of hatred and love for Henry. Hugo awakened me later with caresses and was trying to make love to me. Half asleep, I pushed him away, without feeling. I found excuses for it afterwards.
In the morning I awoke heavy, britt
le. Henry sat in the garden. He had stayed on to talk. He was worried about the previous night. I just listened. He told me that he acted in his usual way. He said and did things he did not mean. "Did not mean?" I repeat. Yes, he had been carried away by his intention to dissimulate his love for me. He did not admire Hugo as much as he said, not nearly. The truth was he had been swept off his feet by my tirade. He wanted to embrace me. He had never seen me go to the bottom of a subject like that. Most of my thinking was like shorthand to him. He had fought against a feeling of admiration, jealousy of Allendy, also a perverse hatred of the person who can tell him something new. I had opened worlds to him.
It occurred to me that he might be acting, one comedy following another, that now, for some reason, he was playing with me. I told him so. He said quietly, "So help me God, Anaïs, I never lie to you. I cannot help it if you will not believe me."
His explanation sounded weak. What need to dissimulate? I was taking care of Hugo's blindness. Was it not, rather, that he enjoyed difficulties, that our last week of interpénétration, harmony, confidence, now brought on his usual perverse craving for discord. "No, Anaïs, I don't want war. But I lost my confidence. You said that Allendy..." Oh, Allendy. So I had wounded him, started him off. Jealousy inspired him. I said, "I will not deprive you of the pleasure you find in jealousy by answering your questions."
Then he said something which moved me. It began: "What a man wants [what a man wants!] is to believe that a woman can love him so much that no other man can interest her. I know that's impossible. I know that every joy carries its own tragedy." Then we could again have openness? If I were truthful? "Listen," I said awkwardly, "what a man wants is what I have given you to date, with an absolutism you could never imagine."
"That is wonderful," he said, very tenderly, dazed. Our first duel had come to an end.
There was a great deal of insanity in all this, more in his explanations than in his initial actions. Was this really a scene of jealousy or the first expression of his instability in human relationships, his unaccountableness? For once I stand before a nature more complicated than my own. It may be that we have become more interesting to each other at the expense of trust. He is glad to have seen me, like an instrument, giving out all its range of sounds. Humanly, I have lost something. Faith, perhaps. In place of that blind openness to him, I summon my cleverness.
Later, when he weeps while telling me his father is starving, I sit paralyzed and my pity does not flow. I would give anything to know if he has sent his father some of the money I have given him, starving himself to do so. All I need to know is: Can he lie to me? I have been able to both love him and lie to him. I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes. When I loved Henry, as I did those four days, I loved him with a naked body that had shed its costumes and forgotten its lies. Perhaps it is not so with Henry. But love, in all this, trembles like a spear in a sand dune. To lie, of course, is to engender insanity. The minute I step into the cavern of my lies I drop into darkness.
I have had no time to write down the lies. I want to begin. I suppose I have not wanted to look at them. If unity is impossible to the writer who is a "sea of spiritual protoplasm, capable of flowing in all directions, of engulfing every object in its path, of trickling into every crevice, of filling every mold," as Aldous Huxley said in Point Counter Point, at least truth is possible, or sincerity about one's insincerities. It is true, as Allendy said, that what my mind engenders fictionally I enrich with true feeling, and I am taken in, in good faith, by my own inventions. He called me "le plus sympathique" of the insincere ones. Yes, I am the noblest of the hypocrites. My motives, psychoanalysis reveals, possess the smallest degree of malevolence. It is not to hurt anyone that I let my lover sleep in my husband's bed. It is because I have no sense of sacredness. If Henry himself were more courageous, I would have given Hugo a sleeping potion during Henry's visit so I could have gone and slept with him. He was too timid, however, to steal a kiss. Only when Hugo had left did he throw me on the ivy leaves, in the back of the garden.
I once spent four days with a passionate human lover. That day I was fucked by a cannibal. I lay exhaling human feelings, and I knew at that precise moment he was nonhuman. The writer is clothed in his humanity, but it is only a disguise.
My talk the night before about sincerity, about dependence on one another, about the flow of confidence such as one cannot have even with the being one loves, had hit the mark.
Perhaps my desire to preserve the magnificence of those four days with Henry is a wasted effort. Perhaps, like Proust, I am incapable of movement. I choose a point in space and revolve around it, as I revolved for two years around John. Henry's movement is a constant hammering to draw sparks, unconcerned about the mutilations involved.
I later asked him, "When your feeling for June comes back, does it, even for a moment, alter our relationship? Does our connection break? Do your feelings flow back to a source love or flow into two directions?" Henry said it was a double flow. That he had been carrying in his head a letter to June: "I want you back, but you must know that I love Anaïs. You must accept that."
The estrangement between Hugo's body and mine will drive me mad. His constant caresses are intolerable to me. Up to now I could steel myself, find a tender pleasure in his closeness. But today I might be living with a stranger. I hate it when he sits near me, running his hands up my legs and around my breasts. This morning when he touched me, I jumped away angrily. He was terribly taken aback. I can't bear his desire. I want to run away. My body is dead to his. What is my life going to be now? How can I go on pretending? My excuses are so futile, so feeble—bad health, bad moods. They are transparent lies. I will hurt him. How I crave my liberty!
During our siesta Hugo tried to possess me again. I closed my eyes and let go, but without pleasure. If it is true that this year I have reached new peaks of joy, it is also true that I have never reached such black depths. Tonight I am afraid of myself. I could leave Hugo this minute and become a derelict. I would sell myself, take drugs, die with voluptuous pleasure.
I said to Hugo, who was boasting of being a little drunk, "Well, tell me something about yourself that I do not know, tell me something new. You have nothing to confess? And you couldn't invent something?"
He did not get my meaning. Nor did he get my meaning when I jumped away from his caresses. Sweet faith. To be laughed at, made use of. Why aren't you cleverer, less believing? Why don't you hit back, why have you no aberrations, no passions, no comedies to play, no cruelty?
As I was working today I realized that I had given away to Henry many of my ideas on June and that he is using them. I feel impoverished, and he knows it, because he writes me that he feels like a crook. What was left for me to do? To write as a woman and as a woman only. I worked all morning, and I still felt rich.
What Henry has asked of me is intolerable. I not only have to thrive on a half love but I have to nourish his conception of June and feed his book. As each page of it reaches me, in which he does more and more justice to her, I feel it is my vision he has borrowed. Certainly no woman was ever asked as much. Henry would not ask this of primitive June. He is testing my courage to the full. How can I extricate myself from this nightmare?
Henry has watched me for my first weakness, for the first flash of jealousy, and he has caught it, reveled in it. Because I am a woman who understands, I am asked to understand everything, to accept everything. I will demand my dues. I want a million days like those four days with Henry, and I am going to have them even if they are not from him. I'll give Henry and June back to each other, wash my hands of all superhuman roles.
One does not learn to suffer less but to dodge pain. I began to think of Allendy as an escape. His ideas have been underlying many of my acts. It is he who has taught me that more than one man can understand me, that to cling is a weakness, that to suffer is unnecessary. I think my feeling for him crystalliz
ed when Henry described him in the garden that night. He spoke of him as a sensual man. I have a sharp recollection of how he looked on our last day. I was too full of Henry then to notice. The other day I wrote Allendy a very grateful letter and I ended by enclosing a partial copy of one of Henry's letters to me. It fitted in logically with what I was saying and gave proof of what, psychoanalytically, he could consider a successful piece of work. But the truth is, I hoped to make him jealous.
What I have found in Henry is unique; it cannot be repeated. But there are other experiences to be had. Yet, tonight I was planning how to improve his latest book, how to fortify him, reassure him.
But he has also fortified me, so that I now feel strength enough to do without him, if I must. I am not the slave of a childhood curse. The myth that I have sought to relive the tragedy of my childhood is now annihilated. I want a complete and equal love. I am going to run away from Henry as actively as I can.
He came yesterday. A serious, tired Henry. He had to come, he said. He had not slept for several nights, keyed up by his book. I have forgotten my sorrows. Henry is tired He and his book must be nurtured. "What do you want, Henry? Lie on my couch. Have some wine. Yes, this is the room I have been working in. Don't kiss me just now. We'll have lunch in the garden. Yes, I have a lot to tell you, but it must all wait. I am deliberately postponing everything which might disturb the breathing of your book. It can all wait."
And then Henry, pale, intense, eyes very blue, said, "I came to tell you that while I worked on my book I realized everything between June and me had died three or four years ago. That what we lived out together the last time she was here was only an automatic continuation, like a habit, like the prolongation of an impetus which cannot come to a dead stop. Of course, it was a tremendous experience, the greatest upheaval. That is why I can write so frenziedly about it. But this is the swan song I am writing now. You must be able to differentiate between the writer's evocation of the past and his present feelings. I tell you, I love you. I want you to come away with me to Spain, on any pretext, for a few months. I dream of our working together. I want you close to me. Until things work out in such a way that I can completely protect you. I have learned a bitter lesson with June. You and June are women of such personalities that you cannot thrive on drabness, hardships. It is not your element. You are both too important. I won't ask that of you."
