by Anais Nin
Henry came yesterday. A serious, tired Henry. He had not slept for several nights. He was keyed up by his book.
Henry was worn out. I forgot my literary rebellions. "Henry, have some wine. We'll have lunch in the garden. Yes, I have been working too. I have a lot to tell you, but it must wait."
Emilia brought lunch out. Joaquin joined us. And then we were left to talk.
Henry, pale, intense, eyes very blue, innocent.
"While I worked on my book I realized everything between June and me had died three or four years ago. 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."
Later he added, "Certainly I had to live through all that but, precisely because I have lived it through, I am finished with it. I feel stronger than June; yet if June came back, things might start out again out of a kind of fatality. What I feel is that I want you to save me from June. I do not want to be diminished, humiliated, destroyed again. I know I want to break with her. I dread her return and the destruction of my work. I was thinking how I have absorbed your time and attention. You are always asked to solve problems, to help, to be selfless. And meanwhile there is your writing, deeper and better than anybody's, which nobody gives a damn about and nobody helps you to do."
***
The work I have done these days amounts to thirty pages of poetic prose, written in absolutely imaginative manner, a lyrical outburst.*
Henry was mystified by my pages. Was it more than brocade, he asked, more than beautiful language? I was upset that he did not understand. I began to explain. Then he said, "Well, you should give a clue; we are thrown into strangeness unexpectedly. This must be read a hundred times."
Henry was writing about June so realistically, so directly. I felt she could not be penetrated that way. I wrote surrealistically. I took her dreams, the myth of June, her fantasies. But certainly myths are not mysterious, undecipherable.
Henry was about to leave on his bicycle, but with characteristic thoroughness he decided he must stay and get to the bottom of what I had written. He walked up and down the garden while I explained my abstractions.
I see the symbolism of our lives. I live on two levels, the human and the poetic. I see the parables, the allegories. I felt that he was doing the realism, and that I could go up in my stratosphere and survey the mythology of June. I sought to describe overtones. All the facts about June are useless to my visionary perception of her unconscious self. This was a distillation. But it was not mere brocade; it was full of meaning.
The more I talked, the more excited Henry became. He began to say that I should continue in that very tone, that I was doing something unique, that if anyone was writing surrealism, it was me. Later he dwelt on this. He could not classify my work. It was not surrealism. There was a deeper intention, direction, a more determined attitude. He discarded all ideas of clues and preparations. He knew I would do something unique. It was on a second reading that he deciphered the meaning.
He stood by the window saying, "How can I go back to Clichy? It is like returning to a prison. This is the place where one grows, expands, deepens."
He has begun to turn his rich experience into writing, to taste more deeply all that he has lived.
Allendy has lost his objectivity. He is beginning to pass judgments on Henry. I was trying to describe the contrast between Henry drunk, flushed, combative, assertive, destructive, callous, all instinct and animal vitality; and his other self, sober, almost religious in tone, pale, wistful, sentimental, childlike, frail. A complete and amazing transformation. But Allendy has another name for this, a medical name. He says Henry is a dual personality, perhaps schizophrenic.
I quoted Henry's words: "Strange, how blindly I have lived until now."
"You need to be rescued from that milieu," said Allendy. "It is the wrong milieu for you, ma petite Anaïs."
I bow my head so he will not see me smile.
I went to see him again. I asked him to give up analysis and come and visit us in Louveciennes. He said he could not do this until he was sure that I was "cured." We talked about domination. I do feel he has strength, steadfastness. He does guide me. I was particularly distressed about the pages Henry wrote on my thirty pages of poetry. They seemed a parody to me, and not to Henry. A satire. An absurd mockery of it. Why? He is not aware that it is a caricature. If he were, I would accept it as such.
Does he satirize what he does not understand? Was it his way of conquering what eludes him? Allendy could not explain this. Whenever I mention Henry now, he looks severe.
Allendy has written about alchemy; he is an astrologer. He cannot read plays or novels because they seem tame and colorless to him, compared with the lives exposed to him in that small, dimly lit library. I know nothing of his life. Once I accused him of not understanding the artist, of being a scientist. Then he mentioned that I was wrong. He was a friend of many artists, and his own sister-in-law was a painter. She lived in a studio they had built for her on the top floor of his house.
He does have the eyes of a crystal-gazer. His superb teeth gleam in a smile which is rather feminine. He is very proud and sure of himself.
***
Henry tells me how all his talks with June became great battles. June would say such wounding things that Henry would grow irrational and desperate, but that now he realizes all these superb battles were fruitless, frustrating, puerile, left him broken, incapable of working or living. She had a genius for botching, tangling, aborting, in a blind, instinctive way.
The phrase which fired me and made me begin to write on June was Jung's "To proceed from the dream outward..."
Today, as I repeated them to Henry, they affected him strongly. He had been writing down his dreams for me, and then antecedents and associations.
Henry said, in the middle of the dream talk, "I have realized I am a man of value, and it is not believing this which almost led to my self-destruction."
Allendy is mistaken not to take my imagination seriously. Literature, adventure, creativity are not a game with me. I am touched by his paternal protectiveness, but I laugh too. The absolute limited sincerity of men like Allendy is not interesting to me. It is humanly comforting but it is not as interesting as Henry's insincerities, dramatics, lies, literary escapades, excursions, experiments, audacities, rascalities.
I may be basically good, human, loving, but I am also more than that, imaginatively dual, complex, an illusionist.
Allendy talks, perhaps, to ease his own doubts. He stresses my frailness, naïveté; whereas I, with a deeper instinct, choose friends who arouse my energy, who make enormous demands on me, who are capable of enriching me with experience, pain, people who do not doubt my courage, or my toughness, people like Henry and June who do not believe me naïve or innocent, but who challenge my keenest wisdom, who have the courage to treat me like a woman in spite of the fact that they are aware of my vulnerability.
[October, 1932]
JUNE ARRIVED LAST NIGHT.
Henry telephoned me. He sounded grave, bewildered. "June has come in a decent mood, she is subdued and reasonable."
Henry is disarmed. Will this last?
June telephoned me. She wants to come and see me tomorrow night.
What is going to become of Henry's work? What will June do to him?
"I'm bewildered..." He is weak, lost. Will June hurt him again?
I take a walk. The vigne vierge is blood-red on the fences and walls. I walk against the wind, while the dog licks my hand.
How far I have moved from June. When I sensed that she was jealous of what I had done for Henry, I said, "I did it all for you." She lies to me, too, when she says, "I wanted to see you before I saw Henry."
Then she came and the madness returned with her. She said, "Anaïs, I am
happy with you." Immediately she began to tell me that Henry had "killed her." She had read all he had written about her. "I loved and trusted Henry until he betrayed me. He not only betrayed me with other women, but he distorted my personality. He created a cruel me which is not me. I have such a need of faithfulness, of love, of understanding. I had to set up a barrage of self-protecting lies. I need to protect my real self from Henry. And now you, you give me strength. You are calm and strong, and really know me.
As we walked up the hill, through the dark small streets, I saw a confused and tormented June, seeking protection.
"Henry is not imaginative enough, he is false. He is not simple enough, either. It is Henry who has made me complex, who has devitalized me, killed me. He has introduced literature, a fictitious personage from whom he could suffer torments, whom he could hate; because he can only write when he whips himself by hatred. I do not believe in him as a writer. He has human moments, of course, but he is a liar, insincere, buffoonish, an actor. It is he who seeks dramas and creates monstrosities. He does not want simplicity. He is an intellectual. He seeks simplicity and then begins to distort it, to invent monsters, pain, etc. It is all false, false, false."
I was stunned. I saw a new truth. I saw a gigantic tangle. I am mystified and strangely lucid at the same time. I am not vacillating between Henry and June, but between two truths I see with clarity. I believe in Henry as a human being, although I am fully aware of the literary monster. I believe in June, although I am fully aware of her destructive power.
At first, she said she feared that I now believed Henry's version of her character. She wanted to land in London instead of Paris, and ask me to join her there. At the first sight of my eyes, she trusted me again. As Henry trusts me. They both need my faith. She shatters all my protection of Henry: "You have achieved nothing. Henry only pretends to understand, only to turn around later and destroy."
Has not Henry been more human with me, and June more sincere? I who partake of the nature of both, will I fail to destroy their poses, to reach the true essence of both?
I remember being struck with great pity when I read in Henry's notes that when she was working for both Henry and Jean, she exclaimed once, in a frenzy of fatigue and revolt: "You both say you love me but you do nothing for me."
June has become sane. She is no longer hysterical or confused. I realized this change in her today. Her sanity, her humanity is what Henry wanted. They can now talk together. He may understand her better.
June and I, arriving at the house, stand under the light over the front door, the light like a stage light which illumined her the first night I saw her, and we look at each other with lucidity. What has made her clearer about Henry, and clearer about me? What is the fever between us which clarity does not dispel? They are clearer to themselves and to each other. And I? I may suffer from the insanities they left behind. I may pick up their tangles, their insincerities, their complexities.
Will she deprive Henry of his faith in himself? She is seeking to destroy his book. Will she leave him once more dispossessed and reduced? She advises me strongly against helping Henry to get his book published, paying [Jack] Kahane.*
"Anaïs, you are giving me life. You are giving me what Henry has taken away from me."
Our hands are locked, and while I answer her with loving words, I ask myself how will I save Henry.
Who is the liar? Who the human being? Who is the cleverest? Who the strongest? Who is the least selfish? The most devoted? Or are all these elements mixed in each one of us? I feel most human because my anxiety is protective, towards both of them.
June, who is older than I am, yet sees me as the teacher in "Jeunes Filles en Uniformes." † She sees herself as Manuela taking refuge in my serenity.
And then a letter from Henry:
Anaïs, thanks to you I am not being crushed this time. Don't lose faith in me, I beg you. I hate to put in writing what I wish to tell you about the first two nights with June, but when I see you and tell you, you will realize the absolute sincerity of my words. At the same time, oddly enough, I am not quarreling with June. It is as though I had more patience, more understanding and sympathy than ever before. June has come to me in her very best guise, when there should be more hope than ever, if I wanted hope. But I see it all coming too late, I have passed on. And now, no doubt, I must live some sad, beautiful lie with her for a while. And perhaps you will see more in June than ever, which would be right.
Each one has found in me an intact image of himself, his potential self. Henry sees in me the great man he might be, and June sees the superb personality. Each one clings to this image of himself in me. For life and for strength.
June, having no core of strength, can only prove it by her power to destroy others. Henry, until he knew me, could only assert his strength by attacking June. He caricatured her; she weakened him by protecting him. They devoured each other. And when they succeed in destroying each other, they weep. June wanted Henry to be a Dostoevsky, but she did all she could to make it impossible. She really wanted him to sing her praises, to paint her as an admirable character. It is only in the light of this that she judges Henry's book a failure. It failed to aggrandize June.
But when I thought June complained because she was not portrayed poetically, I find that she also quarrels with my description of her in my prose poem! She overlooks its strength and beauty, and says it is not an exact portrait. I did not want to say to June that a writer is not a portrait painter. But I could see by this that she had an image of herself which corresponds to no one else's image, and that she cannot judge writing objectively.
We sat in the Poisson d'Or.
June had told Henry that he was a failure as a writer, that he was a child, dependent on woman. That he could do nothing without woman.
We were drinking.
I said I thought Henry was a powerful writer.
"Let's go and tell him that he's great. You make me believe in him, Anaïs."
"You want to believe. What will you live for, if you lose your faith in Henry?"
"You, Anaïs."
"But loving me is only loving yourself. We are sisters."
"You believe in Henry, don't you?"
"Yes, I do."
"Then he must be good, he must be worthy of it."
I am giving Henry and June to each other. I am the impersonal revealer.
June said wistfully, "I used to be like you, Anaïs. I did not need to drink. I was already over-stimulated. But now I want to make you drunk and drugged. I want to be drunk, because I am intimidated by you, and I want to feel free to say anything, and to feel that you will forgive me. You don't need experience, Anaïs. You were born knowing. I don't want to see you stumbling through experience now—like watching someone learning to walk. I have done the vilest things, foulest things, but I have done them superbly, and I feel I have passed through them, I feel intact, I feel innocent. Do you believe that, Anaïs?"
"I could do the same. I want experience to catch up with you and Henry. I want to catch up with my understanding. I don't want to disappoint you, fail you."
"But you have all I need, an understanding without need of facts, realities. You don't ask questions, as Henry does. You have intuition. What does it matter what I do, it is what I am that matters."
True. What matters is the essence of June, and it is this essence which Henry has not grasped. He is too literal.
Henry and I at a café table. Henry confessing: "June has become a stranger to me. The first two nights with her I could not feel any passion. I cannot even get used to her body again."
I read his last pages on her return, and they are empty of emotion. She has exhausted his emotions, overplayed them. Then the whole thing becomes unreal to me, and it seems as if Henry were the sincerest of the three.
He asks me if June does not bore me. He finds that she talks too much. He would like her to be silent at times, to read.
As I leave June in a taxi, she looks at me like a child. A
s I walk away, I see her face blurred behind the taxi window, a tormented, hungry face, unsure of love, frightened, struggling desperately to wield power through mystery. She is under a great strain. Every gesture is a gesture of frenzied singularity, to compel attention, love. Strain. When she creates disturbances, hatreds, conflicts, jealousies, she believes she is living dramatically. She feels that when she is not there, Henry is not living. She has to make the atmosphere boil. She feels that Henry is dead when he is not raging and fuming.
Beautiful June, who talked to me for three hours, sometimes wise, sometimes boring and empty. Her anxious self, anxious about Henry, believing only in the moment of vertigo, in ecstasy, in war, in fever. And then when she leaves me, she struggles against her distortions. She talks with Henry warily. We always begin by talking clearly and then she ends up confused.
A moment before, she had said, "I see myself in you, as I was before Henry. You have that same strange mixture of utter femininity and masculinity."
I said, "That is wrong, June. As soon as a woman has creativity, imagination, or plays an active role in life, people say: masculinity. Allendy does not call it that. You are active. Henry is passive."
Henry talked to June about my love of truth, my calm. June said, "Henry never wanted those things. I tried to give them to him."
The rain was falling, rolling over the taxi window. As I saw June's pale face through the glass, she looked like a woman drowning. I felt such pity for her. How can I rescue her?