by Anais Nin
Henry is correcting my first novel with care. Henry is a demon driven by curiosity, always pumping people. Henry is always pretending callousness. Is that an American disease? They are ashamed to show feeling.
"Anaïs, what you really look like is a Greek. There is something very Grecian about you. But the Greeks, they say, are treacherous! I have not written to June yet. Your book is really beautiful. There are memorable pages in it, and it is sharp and ironic, at times very strong. Most women's writing is so petty. Yours never is."
And then later, "Listen, Anaïs, I know I am worth more than June. I won't stand for anything when she returns. She must be made to suffer. It will be good for her. You will see. I am another man. I won't let her override me. I don't like what she does to me when she is here. She humiliates me."
Henry lacks confidence. He is uneasy in certain places, certain situations, and when he is uneasy, he becomes insulting. If we meet chic people, or enter a chic place, or if the waiter is snobbish, or we run into a celebrity, he becomes contrary and difficult.
We either go to Clichy and have lunch with Fred, or sit in cafés, or he comes to Louveciennes.
Sometimes I see a gnomelike Henry, and I can imagine him as a child, impetuous, restless, mobile, prankish.
Fred looks like someone who has been beaten. He looks sensitive and frightened. His eyes plead, and yet it is like the pleading of a priest, who conceals his humor and mockery. I think he takes pleasure in Henry's "toughness." He likes Henry's caricatures. He laughs with his head bowed. Henry may be teaching us both how to become tougher, how to laugh, how to feel less.
I am dropping my shell. I love those long nights of talk at the café, watching the dawn arrive, watching the sleepy workmen going to work, or having their white wine at the bistro. Children are going to school, with their black aprons and their bags of books on their backs like mountain climbers. I carry away my red journal, but that is only a habit, for I carry away no secrets, as Henry reads the journal. I carry a few pages of Fred's book [Sentiments Limitrophes], delicate as a water color, and a few pages of Henry's book which is like a volcano. I feel like a flower or a fruit. The old pattern of my life is shattered. I live by improvisation, impetus, surrealist whims.
Great things are going to grow out of all this. I feel the fermentation. I look at the workmen carrying their tools and their lunch boxes, and I feel that we are working too, although they may not think so when they see us sitting at a café table with a bottle of wine, talking.
Fred and Henry walk me to the Gare Saint-Lazare. The train which takes me home to Louveciennes is a small, quaky, shaky miniature train, the Proustian train, and it shakes the phrases in my mind for future books. Image of Henry talking to himself. Henry's seven pages about his childhood. Fred's hands held over me like a priest about to give benediction, his sad eyes apologizing for Henry's rough remarks; but what Fred has not divined is my strength.
Image of Henry protruding like a giant. Henry leaning forward. Henry's notes on big sheets of paper, on menus. Diabolical notes, plagiarisms, distortions, caricatures, nonsense, lies, profundities.
The table at Clichy is stained with wine. Henry ends his phrases in a kind of hum, as if he puts his foot on the pedal of his voice and creates an echo. In this way none of his phrases end abruptly.
He immediately creates a climate of ease and slackness. When he laughs, he shakes his head like a bear. He might pass unnoticed in a crowd, with his hat on one side, his step dragging a little, his laughter. He sits like a workman before his drink, he talks to the waiter and everyone is at ease with him. He gives to the word "good" a mellowness which makes the whole room glow. He gives himself to the present moment. He takes what comes.
One afternoon Henry came to Louveciennes after reading pages from my childhood diary. "I still see you as a child of eleven." I felt anxiety. As if this child had been a secret and was now revealed. How could I exorcise it? I saw a sentimental Henry, awed and intimidated. I became ironic and mocking, wise, and teased him.
"Where are the black cotton stockings?" he asked. "And the basket with the diary in it?"
There was no remedy. I had brought this child so vividly before Henry that she had an existence of her own.
Henry said, "It's strange, but with you I feel relaxed. Most women make men feel strained and tense. And I feel at my best because of that."
He had received a cable from June: "I miss you—I must join you soon." And he was angry.
"Why angry?"
"I don't want June to come and torture me."
"What I am afraid of, Henry, is that June will break our friendship."
"Don't give in to her, keep your wonderful mind. Be strong."
"I could say the same to you. Yet I know your wisdom will be of no use to you."
"It will be different this time."
Has Henry really become aware that he is a man of talent, imagination?
I know his deviltries, too, his begging and borrowing and gold-digging; but I know a Henry who is not in his books, who is unknown to June or to Fred. I am not blind. He has shown me a different Henry. When he wears his hat, it hides his thinning hair at the top and he looks thirty and irresponsible. When his hat is off, he looks like a balding professor, with his glasses and his gravity.
Fred comes into the kitchen. The kitchen table is covered with manuscripts, books, notes, and once you sit at the table, there is no room to move again. The three of us were looking at the map of Europe. Fred pointed to the places he and Henry wanted to see.
I asked Henry to write something in the diary.
Henry wrote:
"I imagine that I am now a very celebrated personage and that I am being given one of my own books to autograph. So I write with a stiff hand, a little pompously..."
Dr. Allendy's private house, three floors, with a small front garden and a back garden, the kitchen in the basement, his office and parlor on the first floor, bedrooms on the second floor, resembles the house in Brussels where we lived when I was eight and nine years old. It also resembles the house my father lives in now, in Passy, in a quiet well-bred street where gardeners take care of the plants, where cars wait with chauffeurs in them, where no children play in the street, and no beggars are allowed.
When I first arrive, the window is open and I can see the upper half of his bookcase, which reminds me of my father's bookcase in Brussels and how I spent hours in it when he was out of the house, reading on a chair which was resting on another chair so I could reach the books on the top shelf which were forbidden to us. It was then I read Zola, without understanding half of it, spent hours wondering why the lovers who had been caught in a mine explosion had been found clasped together so tightly they could not be separated, or why the woman who had been given a sleeping draught by Monte Cristo was later found to be pregnant. Impossible to fill in these blank spaces. But I read.
When I first came to Paris we had rented the bachelor apartment of Mr. Hansen, an American who was going away for the summer. It was all we could find. He had left his clothing, his books, his personal belongings in the closets.
Trying to tidy up one day, I was cleaning out the shelves and found the very top shelf, in a very dark corner, stacked with French paperbacks. I took them down, examined them, and then realized from the lurid drawings of naked women that I must read them in secret too, and could not leave them lying around the apartment for Joaquin to see, or my mother.
One by one, I read these books, which were completely new to me. I had never read erotic literature in America. These were the novelettes which were sold on the counters by the Seine, on the bookshelves of the famous quays. They overwhelmed me. I was innocent before I read them, but by the time I had read them all, there was nothing I did not know about sexual exploits. Some were well written, others purely informative, and others sensational and unforgettable. I had my degree in erotic lore.
These books affected my vision of Paris, until now a purely literary one. They opened my eyes and my s
enses, they sensitized me so that I became aware of maisons closes, red-light districts, prostitutes on the boulevards, the meaning of drawn curtains in the middle of the afternoon, hotels by the hour, the role of Parisian hairdressers (the great procurers), and the acceptance of the separation between love and pleasure.
I was far from my other method of education, from the days when I read books from the New York Public Library alphabetically, having no one to guide me.
Mr. Hansen's bachelor books were illustrated, in color: some in eighteenth-century style, some in contemporary style. I became familiar with boots, whips, garters, black stockings, frilled panties, alcoves, mirrors on the ceilings, peepholes in the walls, and the inexhaustible varieties of erotic experiences.
In those days, when a window opened and a couple stood embracing in front of it, I could sense the whole atmosphere, and get vicarious shivers of pleasure. I developed such antennae that when I went to people's houses I could divine which couples were faithful and which ones having love affairs, and often detect the lover or the mistress. It was as if I had developed a sixth sense in matters of vibrations and sexual currents between people. I was often right. I could detect the presence of desire like a sourcier.
I became familiar with the aspect of hotel rooms, the deep-set alcoves still prevalent, the deep quilts, the suppers at midnight, the varieties of luxuries or absence of luxuries.
My knowledge of life had been primarily literary, and it was no wonder that later, when I entered life, there were times when "scenes" seemed like the scenes of novels, not me living my own life, and times when I recognized rooms I had already seen in prints, on the covers of Mr. Hansen's books.
Dr. Allendy's books, alas, as I could see from the covers, covered the same ground but the classification was different. What came under the heading of PLEASURE in Mr. Hansen's library, here was categorized as ABERRATIONS, SADISM, MASOCHISM, PERVERSIONS, ABNORMALITIES, etc. And I wondered whether Dr. Allendy, in having to look upon the sexual habits of his patients as symptoms or clinical problems, did not lose his interest in sex.
Even today I cannot enter a hotel room without feeling that first shiver of delight awakened by the books of Mr. Hansen, and it was then, I believe, that I began to like the prostitutes, as Henry likes them. The blanks in the Zola novel were filled by this exploration of dime novels. The man who was found dead in the embrace of the prostitute had to be pried away from her by a doctor, but the dime novel was far more informative.
I came to see Dr. Allendy in a state of elation. I told him first about the article I am doing for him which I found difficult. I did do the research on the Black Plague which he needed, so he could develop his ideas on death. He told me of a simpler way of doing this article.
My reading of his books has raised him very much in my estimation. He is no poet but he is full of wisdom and insight. Particularly on the theme of fatality being interior and therefore alterable, conquerable. A comforting concept.
I told him a dream: I was in a hall, beautifully dressed. It was the King who wanted to dance with me and who loved me. He whispered loving phrases in my ear. I was very happy and I laughed. I danced alone too, for everyone to see my happiness and lightness. Then I was driving home in a carriage, which could hardly hold my wide fluffy dress. It rained heavily. The rain came into the carriage and spoiled my dress. The carriage began to move slowly, to float in water. I wanted to get back to the castle. But I did not mind the water.
Dr. Allendy says that the love of the King was the conquest of my father. The watery drive is sinking into the unconscious (water is the unconscious) and being at one with it, not minding living in it. Fecundation, perhaps?
I feel loved, fecundated, fecund.
Dr. Allendy says I do not seem to need him any more. But he does point out to me that by entering Henry's world (poverty, Bohemianism, living by expediencies), I have moved in the opposite direction from my father's world (luxury, society life, aesthetics, security, aristocratic friendships, etc.).
Henry's world seems more sincere to me. I never liked my father's worldliness, his need of luxury, his salon life, his love of titles, his pride in his own aristocracy, his dandyism, his elaborate social life.
[May 20, 1932]
The concert hall [Salle Chopin] is all white and gold. The chairs of red plush. It is my brother Joaquin who is playing. He has not come out yet. The hall and the entrance were small, and my father insisted on "receiving" people as if he were the sponsor of the concert. He knew what my mother's reaction would be, but he could not resist the temptation to anger her in public, in front of Joaquin, in front of his friends. Joaquin sent him a message: "Kindly take your seat like everybody else or I will have you thrown out." It had its effect, but it ruined Joaquin's concert for him. It made him nervous and when he first came out, he was pale and tense. But then he warmed up and began to play magnificently. He was wildly applauded.
Henry was sitting in the balcony where I could not see him. I had asked Dr. Allendy to come, although it was not orthodox, and he had accepted. When I saw him walking down the aisle with his wife, I realized how tall he was: he towered over everyone. Our eyes met. There was sadness in his, a great seriousness, which I liked and which moved me.
During the entr'acte, Henry came downstairs. He seemed timid in the crowd. I shook his hand. He seemed strange and distant. When I faced my father, we bowed formally, barely smiling. Would Dr. Allendy give me strength? That night I felt the child in me, still frightened, while the woman appeared radiant to all. There was so much sadness in Dr. Allendy which I had not observed in his office. I saw that he was startled by my evening dress, the hair piled high in ringlets, and my poise. I wanted to hide inside my velvet cape. I felt the weight of my full balloon sleeves. The hypnotic glow of the many lights. Fatigue at meeting so many people, receiving compliments for Joaquin, talking. I observed my father's cold, pale, aristocratic stiffness. The scene at the door has reawakened all the anxieties of my childhood at the battles between my father and mother. I felt the same anxiety. [Many years later my father admitted having done all this "on purpose."—A.N.]
I cut out a photograph of Dr. Allendy from the newspaper. In the car, driving home, Joaquin covers me with his Spanish cape.
Dr. Allendy told Marguerite that I was a very interesting subject, that I responded so sensitively and so quickly. That I was almost cured! But at the concert, I had the certitude that I was trying to dazzle Dr. Allendy, that I was concealing some secret part of my real self. I still find something to hold back. I hold back from everyone a full knowledge of myself. Yet I gave Henry the red journal to read. That was an exception. There must always be a secret, as with June.
Henry wrote me a letter after the concert:
Anaïs, I was dazzled by your beauty. You stood there like a Princess. You were the Infanta of Spain, not the one I was pointed out later. So many Anaïses you have shown me and now this one. As if to prove your Protean versatility. Do you know what [Michael] Fraenkel said to me? "I never expected to see a woman as beautiful as that. How can a woman of such femininity, such beauty, write a book on D. H. Lawrence?" I sought out the father. I think I spotted him. His long dark hair was the clue. He looks like Segovia. You belong in another world. I see nothing in myself to recommend your interest. That seems fantastic to me. It is some divine prank, some cruel jest you are playing on me.
I finally wrote the article for Dr. Allendy. It was a restating from French to English, coordinating Dr. Allendy's notes, excerpts from his book and a magazine article, for an American magazine. I had to be thoroughly familiar with the subject to do this, and as the subject was death, the most profound and difficult theme in psychology, it took me several days to assimilate the material. Several times I wanted to give up, acknowledge myself defeated. I was happy when it was done.
When I brought it to Dr. Allendy, I said: "Don't analyze me today. Let's talk about you. I am enthusiastic about your books. Let's talk about death."
Dr. Allendy
assented. Then we discussed the concert. He said my father looked like a young man. Henry made him think of a German painter, George Grosz. Soft—perhaps dual? Henry an unconscious homosexual?
My article was very good, said Dr. Allendy, but why didn't I want to be analyzed?
Was it because he had won my confidence, because I have begun to lean on him, because I asked him to be at Joaquin's concert as I feared trouble between my father and mother?
Dr. Allendy: "As soon as you begin to depend, you work to reverse the process and want me to need you, depend on you. You feel more comfortable then. You need to conquer because you have been conquered. What were your thoughts about me at the concert?"
Anaïs: "I wondered whether you could give me strength, because there was sadness in your eyes. I thought when I saw you in public that you too were shy. You looked different out in the world, more human, as if you were unhappy at times..."
Dr. Allendy: "You wanted to find my weakness..."
Anaïs: "But to be unhappy is not a sign of weakness! What I felt was sympathy, and that is the way I treat all my friends. It is when they are in trouble that my tenderness is aroused."
To help Henry, I have cut down on clothes, entertaining, gardener, and luxury foods.
I describe to Dr. Allendy, Henry's life, and his friends: Fred working for the newspaper, picking up young girls, making love to them before everyone, how they all accept dinners from anyone at all, how they borrow, and sponge, and live by expedients of all kinds. Michael Fraenkel buys leftover books of no value at all, like outdated dictionaries, and makes his living selling them to nuns in far-off convents in Puerto Rico.
Dr. Allendy began to probe a painful contrast between Henry's life and my father's life, the life I was brought up in. We only saw talented people, people of quality, musicians, writers, professors.