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

by Anais Nin

  Allendy wants me to see my love for Henry as a literary or dramatic excursion and my love for him as an expression of my true self, whereas I believe it is exactly the opposite. Henry has me, mind and womb; Allendy is my "experience."

  There is continuous music from our new radio. Hugo listens while he beatifically contemplates the benefits of Allendy's help. The announcer talks in a strange language from Budapest. I think about my lies to Allendy and wonder why I lie. For example, I have worried inordinately about Henry's troubles with his eyes. If he should become as blind as Joyce, what would become of him? I say to myself, "I ought to give up everything and go and live with him and take care of him." When I tell Allendy about my fear, I exaggerate the danger Henry is in.

  Lies are a sign of weakness. It seems to me that I do not have the courage to tell Allendy openly I do not love him, and so, instead, I want him to see what I am ready to do for Henry.

  An afternoon with Henry. He begins by telling me that our conversation the other night was the deepest and closest we have had, that it has changed him, given him strength. "To run away from June, I feel now, is no solution. I have always run away from women. Today I feel that I want to face June and the problem she represents. I want to test my own strength. Anaïs, you have spoiled me, and now I cannot be satisfied with a marriage based on passion alone. What you have given me I never imagined I could find in a woman. The way we talk and work together, the way you adapt yourself, the way we fit together like hand and glove. With you, I have found myself. I used to live with Fred and listen to him, but nothing that he said really hit me until I lived with you those few days during Hugo's trip. I realize how insidiously you have affected me. I had scarcely felt it, yet suddenly I realize the extent of your influence. You made everything click."

  I said, "I will accept June as a devastating tornado while our love remains deeply rooted."

  "Oh, if you could do that! Do you know my greatest anguish has been that you might begin to battle with June, that I would be caught between you, not knowing what to do for you, because June paralyzes me with her savagery. If you could understand and wait. It may be a tornado, but I will take my stand once and forever against what June represents. I need to fight this battle out. It is the great issue of my whole life."

  "I will understand. I will not make it more terrible for you."

  And here we are, Henry and I, talking in such a way that the end of the afternoon finds us rich, eager to write, to live. When we lie down together, I am in such a frenzy that I cannot wait for our unison.

  Later we sit in the dim light of the iridescent aquarium, bowed with turmoil. Henry gets up and walks about the room. "I cannot go away, Anaïs. I should be here. I am your husband." I want to cling to him, to hold him, to imprison him. "If I stay another minute," he continues, "I will do something mad."

  "Go away quickly," I say. "I can't bear this." As we go down the stairs he smells the dinner cooking. I bring his hands to my face. "Stay, Henry, stay."

  "What you desire," said Allendy, "is of lesser value than what you have found."

  Because of him, tonight I even understand how John loved me in his own way. I believe in Henry's love. I believe that even if June wins, Henry will love me forever. What tempts me strongly is to face June with Henry, to let her torture us both, to love her, to win her love and Henry's. I plan to use the courage Allendy gives me in greater schemes of self-torture and self-destruction.

  No wonder Henry and I shake our heads over our similarities: we hate happiness.

  Hugo talks about his session with Allendy. He tells him that love is now like a hunger to him, that he feels the desire to eat me, to bite into me (at last!). And that he has done so. Allendy begins to laugh heartily and asks, "Did she like it?" "It's strange," said Hugo, "but she seems to." Whereupon Allendy laughs even more. And for some queer reason this arouses Hugo's jealousy of Allendy. He had the impression that Allendy took delight in this talk and would have liked to have a bite at me himself.

  At this, it is I who laugh madly. Hugo continues seriously, "This psychoanalysis is a tremendous thing, but what a still more terrific thing it must be when the feelings get involved. What if, for instance, Allendy took an interest in you."

  Here I get so hysterical that Hugo is almost angry. 'What do you find so funny about all this?"

  "Your smartness," I said. "Psychoanalysis certainly puts new and amusing ideas into your head."

  I realize it is nothing but coquetry with Allendy, coquetry and little feeling. He is a man I want to make suffer, I want to make him wander, to give him an adventure! Born of men who sailed the seas, this big healthy man is now imprisoned in his book-lined cave. I like to see him standing at the door of his house, eyes glowing like the blue Mallorcan sea.

  "To proceed from the dream outward..." When I first heard these words of Jung's, they fired me. I used the idea in my pages on June. Today as I repeated the words to Henry they affected him strongly. He has been writing down his dreams for me, and then antecedents and associations. What an afternoon. It was so cold in Henry's place that we got into bed to warm each other. Then talk, mountains of manuscripts, hills of books, and rivulets of wine. (Hugo comes over while I write this, bends down and kisses me. I had just time enough to turn the page.) I am in a great fever, frantically pulling at the bars of my prison. Henry smiled sadly when I had to leave, at eight-thirty. He realizes now that his not knowing he was a man of great value almost led to his self-destruction. Will I be given time to place him on his throne? "Are you really quite warm enough?" he asks, closing my coat around me. The other night he was stumbling against obstacles on the dark road, his weak eyes blinded by automobile lights. In danger.

  At the same time I lead Hugo to Allendy, who not only saves him humanly but awakens in him an enthusiasm for psychology, which makes him interesting.

  As I look at Henry talking I realize again that it is his sensuality I love. I want to go deeper into it, I want to wallow in it, to taste it as profoundly as he has, as June has. I feel this with a kind of desperation, a secret resentment, as if Hugo and Allendy and even Henry himself all wanted to stop me, whereas I know that it is I who stop myself. I am terribly in love with Henry, so why doesn't restlessness, fever, curiosity become attenuated? I am steaming with energy, with desires for long voyages (I want to go to Bali), and last night during a concert I felt like Mary Rose in Barrie's play, who hears music while visiting an island, walks away and disappears for twenty years. I felt that I could walk out of my house like a somnambulist, forgetting utterly, as in that hotel room, all my connections and go forth into a new life. Each day there are more demands from me that deprive me of the liberty I need, Hugo's growing demands of my body, Allendy's demands on the noblest in me, Henry's love, which makes me a submissive and faithful wife—all this, against the adventure I must constantly renounce and sublimate. When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.

  Hugo's reading of Allendy's books has convinced him that I do not love Allendy, nor he me. It is simply a mutual attraction born of the analysis, the intimacy, certain strong currents of sympathy.

  I spend an hour in a café with Henry, who has been reading my journal of 1920, when I was seventeen, and sobbing over it. He was reading about the period when Eduardo did not write to me because he was going through a homosexual experience. Henry said he wanted to write me a letter for each day of disappointment, answer all my expectations, make up to me for every gift denied to me before. I told him it was precisely this he had been doing.

  Later, he wrote about my love at seventeen: "And so she exclaims: 'All my heart is singing with my longing for love.' She is in love with love, but not as a mere adolescent, not as a girl of seventeen, but as the embryonic artist that she is, the one who will fecundate the world with her love, the one who will cause suffering and strife because she loves too much...."

  "In the hands of an ordinary individual the journal may be regarded as a mere refuge, as an escape fro
m reality, as the pool of another Narcissus, but Anaïs refuses to let it sink into this mold...

  The man who understood this, who wrote these lines, at one blow accepts the challenge of my love and shatters the idea of narcissism.

  I lay on the couch rereading Henry's letter many times, with acute pleasure, as if he were lying over me, possessing me. No longer do I have to fear loving too much.

  After drinking a bottle of Anjou last night, Henry talked about his difficulty in passing from a gentle treatment of women to courtship. He either conversed with them or threw himself on them and ran amuck. He had his first sexual experience at sixteen in a whorehouse and caught a disease. Then came the older woman whom he dared not fuck. He was surprised when it happened and promised himself not to do it again. But it happened, and he went on fearing it was not right. He wrote down the number of times, with dates, like the record of so many conquests. Tremendous physical exuberance, games, stunts, roughhousing.

  He told me about his talk with a whore the other night. He was at a café reading Keyserling. The woman approached him, and because she was unattractive, he at first repulsed her. But he let her sit down and talk to him. "I have a hard time attracting men, but when they get to know me they realize I'm better than most whores, because I enjoy going with a man. What I want now is to put my hand in your pants and take it out and suck it."

  Henry was affected by the directness of her words, the image she left with him, but he ran away from her. He could not understand why he should have been so susceptible when he was in another world a moment before and when he didn't even like the woman. He prefers aggressivity in women. Was this a weakness? he asked. I didn't know, but I had to learn to be aggressive, to please him.

  After he had talked thus, flushed, exultant, dancing before me, illustrating his raving and biting a woman's ass, he was suddenly quiet, thoughtful, and a great change came over his face. "I have outgrown all this," he said. And I, who was clapping at his show, was tempted to say, "I have not outgrown it. I have yet to run amuck."

  I look at Hugo's tormented face (a period of torment and jealousy in his analysis) and experience great effusions of tenderness. And Henry says, "When you and I get married, we will take Emilia with us." As we climb the stairs to my "cave" he puts his hands between my legs.

  I am rushing again into June's chaos. It is June I want and not Allendy's wisdom, not even Henry's love of aggressivity. I want eroticism, I want those moist dreams I dream at night, four more days like those summer days with Henry when he was constantly throwing me down on the bed, the carpet, or the ivy. I want to wallow in sexuality until I outgrow it or become as sated as Henry.

  I arrive at Clichy for dinner, drunk and feverish. Henry has been writing about my writing. The last page is still in the typewriter. And I read these extraordinary lines: "It was presumptuous of me to want to alter her language. If it is not English, it is a language nevertheless and the farther one goes along with it the more vital and necessary it seems. It is a violation of language that corresponds with the violation of thought and feeling. It could not have been written in an English which every capable writer can employ.... Above all it is the language of modernity, the language of nerves, repressions, larval thoughts, unconscious processes, images not entirely divorced from their dream content; it is the language of the neurotic, the perverted, 'marbled and veined with verdigris,' as Gautier put it, in referring to the style of decadence....

  "When I try to think to whom it is you are indebted for this style I am frustrated—I do not recall anyone to whom you bear the slightest resemblance. You remind me only of yourself...."

  I rejoiced because it seemed to me Henry had written the male counterpart to my work. I sat with him at the kitchen table, drunk and stuttering: "It's wonderful, what you've written!" We got ourselves more drunk, we fucked deliriously. Later, in the taxi, he takes my hand as if we have been lovers only a few days. I come home with two of his phrases engraved on my mind: "surcharged with life" and "saturated with sex." And I will give him greater and more terrifying riddles to unravel than June's lies!

  There is in our relationship both humanness and monstrosity. Our work, our literary imagination, is monstrous. Our love is human. I sense when he is cold, I am anxious about his eyesight. I get him glasses, a special lamp, blankets. But when we talk and write, a wonderful deformation takes place, whereby we heighten, exaggerate, color, distend. There are satanic joys known to writers only. His muscular style and my enameled one wrestle and copulate independently. But when I touch him, the human miracle is accomplished. He is the man I would scrub floors for, I would do the humblest and the most magnificent things for. He is thinking of our marriage, which I feel will never be, but he is the only man I would marry. We are greater together. After Henry, there will never again be this polarity. A future without him is darkness. I cannot even imagine it.

  Allendy admits to Hugo that there is danger in my literary friendships because I play with experience like a child and take my games seriously, that my literary adventures carry me to milieus where I don't belong. Big, cornpassionate Allendy and faithful and jealous Hugo, anxious over the child who has such a dangerous need of love.

  Allendy has not taken my literary-creative side seriously, and I have resented his simplification of my nature to pure woman. He has refused to cloud his vision with a consideration of my imagination.

  The absolute sincerity of men like Allendy and Hugo is beautiful but uninteresting to me. It does not fascinate me as much as Henry's insincerities, dramatics, literary escapades, experiments, rascalities. When Henry and I are lying in each other's arms, all games cease, and for the moment we find our basic wholeness. When we take up our work again, we instill our imagination into our lives. We believe in living not only as human beings but as creators, adventurers.

  That side of me which Allendy discards, the disturbed, dangerous, erotic side, is precisely the side Henry seizes and responds to, the one he fulfills and expands.

  Allendy is right about my need of love. I cannot live without love. Love is at the root of my being.

  He talks to ease Hugo's burning jealousy, perhaps to ease his own doubts. His passion is protective, compassionate, so he underlines my frailty, my naïveté; whereas I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

  JUNE ARRIVED LAST NIGHT.

  Fred telephoned the news. I was stunned, although I had so often imagined the scene. I have been aware all day that June is in Clichy. I choke over work and food, remembering Henry's pleading words: to wait. But the period of waiting is unbearable. I swallow large doses of sleeping medicine. I jump when the telephone rings. I call up Allendy. I'm like a person drowning.

  Henry telephoned me yesterday and again today, grave, bewildered. "June has come in a decent mood. She is subdued and reasonable." He is disarmed. Will this last? How long will June stay? What must I do? I cannot wait, here, in this room, face to face with my work.

  I go to sleep with pain oppressing me. When I awake in the morning, it lies at the back of my head like a stone. Hugo's love, at this moment, is tremendous, superhuman. And Allendy's. They are fighting for me. I almost died, as a child, to win my father's love, and I let myself die psychically for the same reason, to torment and tyrannize those I love, to obtain their care. This realization has whipped me. I am fighting now to help myself.

  I should not give up Henry simply because June is reasonable. Yet I must give him up temporarily, and to do this I must fill the immense vacancy his absence creates in my life.

  June telephoned me, and I felt no pang at the sound of her voice, no bliss, none of the excitement I expected to feel. She is coming to Louveciennes tomorrow night.

  Hugo drove me to Allendy's. I had planned a trip to London, where I would meet new people and find salvation, sanity. By the time I saw Allendy
, I had control of myself. He was so happy to have saved me from masochism. He imagined the end of my subjection to Henry and June. While he kissed my hands continuously he talked eloquently and humanly. The jealous Allendy versus Henry. He is so deft. I happened to say that Henry's great need of woman was due to his being such a man, a hundred-percent man; glory be to the pagan gods that there was no femininity in him. But Allendy said it is precisely the sexually mature man who contains tender and intuitive feminine qualities. The true male has strong protective instincts, which Henry does not have. Allendy is a sage except where Henry is concerned. He, the great analyst, is so jealous that he made the insane statement that perhaps Henry is a German spy.

  He wants me to be liberated of the need of love so that I can love him of my own volition. He does not want the need of love to push me into his arms. He does not want to use his influence over me to possess me, as he could. He wants me, first, to stand on my own feet.

  He said that Henry enjoyed the power of a love such as I gave him, that he would never again possess such a precious gift in his life, that this happened only because I had no sense of my own value. He hoped, for my sake, that it was over.

  I accepted all this rationally. I trust Allendy, and I am drawn to him. (Particularly today, when I saw the sensual modulation of his mouth, the possibility of savagery.) But underneath, I felt, like all women, a strong, protective love for Henry—the more imperfect, the more to be loved.