by Anais Nin
He is rewriting his first book [Crazy Cock], He lives from day to day, borrowing, begging, sponging. He wants a set of Proust. I add railroad tickets to them so that he can come and see me when he wants to. He has no typewriter. So I give him mine. He likes big meals, so I cook sumptuous ones. I would like to give him a home, an income, security so that he could work.
Henry came again today. He talked about his second wife, June. June was full of stories. She told him several versions about her childhood, birthplace, parents, racial origins. Her first version was that her mother was a Roumanian gypsy, that she sang in cafés and told fortunes. Her father, she said, played the guitar. When they came to America, they opened a night club, mostly for Roumanians. It was a continuation of their life in Roumania. But when Henry asked her what did she do in that environment, did she sing, did she tell fortunes, did she learn to dance, did she wear long braids and white blouses, she did not answer. Henry wanted to know where she had learned the beautiful English she spoke, like English spoken on the stage by English actors. He took her to a Roumanian restaurant and waited for her response to the music, the dances, the songs, to the swarthy men whose glances were like dagger thrusts. But June had forgotten this story by then and looked on the scene with detachment. When Henry pressed her for the truth, she began another story. She told him that she was born on the road, that her parents were show people, that they traveled all the time, that her father was a magician in a circus, her mother a trapezist.
(Had she learned there her skill in balancing in space, in time, avoiding all definitions and crystallizations? Had she learned from her father to deal in camouflage, in quick sleight of hand? This story, Henry said, came before the one in which she asserted her father had been anonymous. Not knowing who she was, he might turn out to be the man she most admired at the time.)
Henry said that another time she had told him her father was a Don Juan, that it was his faithlessness which had affected her childhood, giving her a feeling of impermanency, distrust of man. He reminded her of this when she talked about her "magician" father. This did not trouble her. "That was true, too," said June. "One can be a faithless magician."
From the very first day I could see that Henry, who had always lived joyously and obviously outside, in daylight, had been drawn into this labyrinth unwittingly by his own curiosity and love of facts. He only believed in what he saw, like a candid photographer, and he now found himself inside a row of mirrors with endless reflections and counter-reflections.
June must be like those veiled figures glimpsed turning the corner of a Moroccan street, wrapped from head to foot in white cotton, throwing to a stranger a single spark from fathomless eyes. Was she the very woman he had been seeking? He felt a compulsion to follow her, from story to story. From a mobile, evanescent childhood to a kaleidoscopic adolescence, to a tumultuous and smoky womanhood, a figure whom even a passport official would have difficulty in identifying.
Henry has the primitive urge of the conqueror. From the first day, he was trapped by what he believed to be a duel between reality and illusion. It was difficult to conquer and invade a labyrinth. The brain of man is filled with passageways like the contours and multiple crossroads of the labyrinth. In its curved folds lie the imprints of thousands of images, recordings of a million words.
Certain cities of the Orient were designed to baffle the enemy by a tangle of intricate streets. For those concealed within the labyrinth, its detours were a measure of safety; for the invader, it presented an image of fearful mystery.
June must have chosen the labyrinth for safety.
In seeking to understand Henry's talk about June, and his obsessional curiosity, I gave him the feeling that I understood her. Yet he said, "You are not at all the same."
"Perhaps she felt," I said, "that once her stories were finished, you would lose interest."
"But it was just the opposite, I felt that the day she would tell me the truth I would really love her, possess her. It was the lies I fought."
What was she seeking to conceal? Why had he assumed the role of detective?
Henry seems so candid. He talks without premeditation. He seems the incarnation of spontaneity. He seems direct, open, naked. He never withholds what he thinks or feels. He passes no judgment on others, and expects none to be passed on him. But he is a caricaturist. June may have feared his sense of caricature.
Even I could see the danger of his angers. He paints savagely those who do not give him what he asks of them, whether it is the truth, or help. He is suspicious of poetry and beauty. Beauty, he seems to say, is artifice. Truth only lies in people and things stripped of aesthetics.
Was he the lover of June's body but curious about its essence? And frustrated in the knowledge of this essence?
While he talked, I remembered reading that the Arabs did not respect the man who unveiled his thoughts. The intelligence of an Arab was measured by his capacity to elude direct questions. This was true of Indians, of Mexicans. The questioner was always suspect. June must have been of such races. Did she truly originate thousands of years ago from the people who veiled their faces and their thoughts? Where does she come from, that she understands well this racial dedication to mystery?
Henry has a habit of asking naive questions, of prying. When his curiosity is satisfied he seems to be saying, "You see, there was nothing behind that." He is one who would walk behind the magician's props; he would expose Houdini.
He hates poetry and he hates illusion. His own savage self-confessions demand the same of others. This passion for unveiling, exposing, must be the one which compels him to enter June's smoke-screened world.
When he first talked, it seemed like the natural preoccupation of a lover: does she love me? does she love me alone? does she love others as she loves me? does she love anyone?
But there is more. He marks in Proust the passages referring to Albertine's habit of never saying: I love, I want; but others wanted, others loved her, etc.; thus she eluded all responsibility, all commitments.
He treats the whole world as men are said to treat prostitutes, desiring, embracing, and then discarding, knowing only hunger and then indifference.
He is a gentle savage, who lives directed entirely by his whims, moods, his rhythms, and does not notice others' moods or needs.
We sit at the Viking Café. It is all of wood, low-ceilinged, and the walls are covered with murals of the Vikings' history. They serve strong drinks which Henry likes. The lighting is dim. One has a feeling of being on an old galleon, sailing Nordic seas.
Henry talks about June and I listen and seek to understand.
Was he a very hurt man? Hurt men were dangerous, like wounded animals in the jungle.
June may fear to see a distorted image of herself in him. He has already written about her in a way which I would find intolerable. Without charity, without feeling. I see distorted images of others in his talk. They are all like Hieronymus Bosch. Only the ugliness appears. I can understand, when I listen to him, the Oriental fear of letting others paint you or photograph you.
Poor June is not like me, able to make her own portrait. Henry, I can see, is already suspicious of my quickness of mind, my pirouettes, even though I answer his questions directly.
While Henry is so concerned to know whether June has other lovers, whether she loves women, or takes drugs, it seems to me that he overlooks the true mystery: why are such secrets necessary to her?
In spite of the seriousness of these talks, pondering the mysteries of June, each meeting we have is like a holiday. Henry arrives in a workman's suit one day, another time in Richard's discarded suit, which is too big for him.
He shows me the black sooty angel who guards the house called The Well. It is a round house with a small medieval courtyard, dark as a well and as dank. The angel is all black with time. The rain can only clean his eyelids, and so he stares at the darkness with white eyes. Henry is in love with Mona Paiva, a reigning courtesan of a hundred years ago whose photograph
he found on the quays. His pockets are full of notes on the meals he would like to eat one day:
Merlans à la Bercy
Coquilles de Cervelles au Gratin
Flamri de Semoule
Galantine de Volaille à la Gelée
Anguilles Pompadour
Selle de Mouton Bouquetière.
I don't think he knows what the dishes really are. He is fascinated with the sound of words. He notes fragments of conversation on menus, toilet paper, envelopes. He takes me to the Mariner's flophouse to eat an omelet with pickpockets. He plays chess at the café where old actors meet for a game to the tune of tired classical musicians playing quartets. At dawn he likes to sit and watch the tired prostitutes walking home.
He has an eagerness to catch everything without make-up, without embellishment, women before they comb their hair, waiters before they don artificial smiles with their artificial bow ties. His quest for naturalism must have come to a stop before June's heavily painted eyes, and I can well see her as he talks, a woman whom daylight cannot touch.
"She hates daylight."
In Henry's glaring, crude daylight upon externals, and in her preference for the night, I can see the core of their conflict.
From his novel I see, too, that until he met June, women confounded themselves in his mind; they were interchangeable; his desire never became a desire to know them intimately; they were faceless, without identity except as sexual objects.
He was never concerned about the identity or individuality of his women, but because June would not acknowledge any, he began to search for one.
Why did she fix his attention? Did she have a more voluptuous body, a more penetrating voice, a more dazzling smile than other women? He paints her in his novel in opulent colors.
I wonder if it is not so much that June hides a great deal from him, but that he fails to see what is there, as I begin to see a June who does not baffle me. Perhaps when she talks so much about the others who love her, it is not to conceal whether she loves them or not, but because this is what interests her. Her desire to BE loved. Among the chaotic confessions, the rambling talks, the flow of fiction, I detect a June who escapes direct questions but who offers other clues.
His first letter to her was delirious. She showed it to her mother. June wanted to know if Henry was a drug addict. This question startled Henry, because his intoxications come from images, words, colors. It occurred to him that June must have taken drugs if the idea of wild flights of imagination was linked in her mind inevitably with the use of drugs.
He asked her how the idea had come to her. As an artist he held the proud notion that every image came out of his own spontaneous chemistry, not from any synthetic formula.
June eluded the question. "She often talks about drugs but never acknowledges any intimate experience with them." This became one of Henry's obsessional mysteries to unravel.
I can see that, up to the moment of his encounter with June, he was at ease in his physical, evident world, and how she made him doubt all of it.
They must have been drawn together by his need to expose illusion, her need to create it. A satanic pact. One of them must triumph: the realist or the mythmaker. The novelist in Henry turned detective, to find what lies behind appearance, and June creating mysteries as a natural flowering of her femininity.
How else to hold his interest for a thousand nights? And I feel he is already drawing me into this investigation.
I can see her symbolic resistance to the revelations of her thoughts and feelings creating in Henry a suspense similar to that of the strip-tease women who expose on the stage certain areas of their bodies and vanish when they are about to be seen completely nude.
He enters the labyrinth with a notebook! In her place I might close up too. If he annotates enough facts, he will finally possess the truth. His notes: black stockings, overfull bags, missing buttons, hair always falling down or about to topple down, a strand always falling over the eye, hasty dressing, mobility, no repose. Will not tell what school she went to, where she was raised as a child. Has two distinct manners, one refined, gracious, the other (when she loses her temper) crude like a street urchin. They correspond to her attitude about clothes. At times she has holes in her stockings, wears unwashed jeans, uses safety pins to hold everything together. At other times she rushes to buy gloves, perfume. But all the time her eyes are carefully made-up, like the eyes on Egyptian frescoes.
"She demands illusion as other women demand jewels."
For Henry, illusions and lies are synonymous. Art and illusion are lies. Embellishment. In this I feel remote from him, totally in disagreement with him. But I am silent. He is suffering. He is a man with a banderilla stuck in his body, a poisoned arrow, something he cannot rid himself of. He sometimes cries out, "Perhaps there is nothing at all, perhaps the mystery is that there is no mystery at all. Perhaps she is empty, and there is no June at all."
"But, Henry, how can an empty woman have such a vivid presence, how can an empty woman cause insomnia, awaken so many curiosities? How could an empty woman cause other women to take flight, as you tell me, abdicating immediately before her?"
He notices that I smile at the obviousness of his questions. For a moment his hostility turns against me.
I said, "I do feel that perhaps you did not ask the correct questions of the Sphinx."
"What would you ask?"
"I would not be concerned with the secrets, the lies, the mysteries, the facts. I would be concerned with what makes them necessary. What fear."
This, I feel, Henry does not understand. He is the great collector of facts, and the essence sometimes escapes him.
From his notes for a future novel:
June brings to the studio a treasure house of curios, paintings, statues, with vague stories as to how they had been acquired. Just recently I found that she had obtained a statue from Zadkine saying she would sell it and, of course, never did. She makes use of the soft part of the bread for a napkin. She falls asleep at times with her shoes on, on unmade beds. When a little money comes in, June buys delicacies, strawberries in the winter, caviar and bath salts.
[December 30, 1931]
Henry came to Louveciennes with June.
As June walked towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the door, I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. A startlingly white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes. Years ago I tried to imagine a true beauty; I created in my mind an image of just such a woman. I had never seen her until last night. Yet I knew long ago the phosphorescent color of her skin, her huntress profile, the evenness of her teeth. She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat before her, I felt I would do anything she asked of me. Henry suddenly faded. She was color and brilliance and strangeness. By the end of the evening I had extricated myself from her power. She killed my admiration by her talk. Her talk. The enormous ego, false, weak, posturing. She lacks the courage of her personality, which is sensual, heavy with experience. Her role alone preoccupies her. She invents dramas in which she always stars. I am sure she creates genuine dramas, genuine chaos and whirlpools of feelings, but I feel that her share in it is a pose. That night, in spite of my response to her, she sought to be whatever she felt I wanted her to be. She is an actress every moment. I cannot grasp the core of June. Everything Henry had said about her is true.
By the end of the evening I felt as Henry did, fascinated with her face and body which promises so much, but hating her invented self which hides the true one. This false self is composed to stir the admiration of others, inspires others to words and acts about and around her. I feel she does not know what to do when confronted with these legends which are born around her face and body; she feels unequal to them.
That night she never admitted, "I did not read that book." She was obviously repeating what she had heard Henry say. They were not her words. Or she tried to speak
the suave language of an English actress.
She tried to subdue her feverishness to harmonize with the serenity of the house, but she could not control her endless smoking and her restlessness. She worried about the loss of her gloves as if it were a serious flaw in her costume, as if wearing gloves were enormously important.
It was strange. I who am not always sincere was astonished and repelled by her insincerity. I recalled Henry's words: "She seems perverse to me." The extent of her falsity was terrifying, like an abyss. Fluidity. Elusiveness. Where was June? Who was June? There is a woman who stirs others' imagination, that is all. She was the essence of the theatre itself, stirring the imagination, promising such an intensity and heightening of experience, such richness, and then failing to appear in person, giving instead a smoke screen of compulsive talk about trivialities. Others are roused, others are moved to write about her, others love her as Henry does, in spite of himself. And June? What does she feel?
June. At night I dreamed of her, not magnificent and overwhelming as she is, but very small and frail, and I loved her. I loved a smallness, a vulnerability which I felt was disguised by her inordinate pride, by her volubility. It is a hurt pride. She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself. There is no June to grasp and know. She knows it. The more she is loved, the more she knows it. She knows there is a very beautiful woman who took her cue last night from my inexperience and concealed the depth of her knowledge.