by Anais Nin
I am suffering from their conflicting image of each other. They seem distorted to each other, and it makes me wonder if they see me as distortedly as they see each other. I wonder whether I can succeed in making them see each other without distortion, love each other again. I see her making efforts to regain her power. She wants to get Henry's books published, does not approve our plan. She complains that Henry does not take her advice.
"Only four persons have really disturbed me in my life: Henry, Jean, you and another person you don't know."
Is this other person the lover Henry suspects she has, the one who made it possible for Henry to get to Paris?
I was amazed to see Henry showing a new protectiveness. For him June is now a pathological child.
I was amazed to hear from June that Henry was hurt that people should think he can only write "cunt portraits." Is this why he has been so intense about his Lawrence book?
I told him that it was true he had sacrificed June to a "fiction," made use of her as a character he needed to create (creation of a cruel woman because he needs pain and violence to create at all, or because he enjoys being the "victim" of woman, I don't know). He says he is fascinated with evil, yet all he does is chastise June for living as freely as he does.
How glad I am to be a writer, making my own portrait, concerned with his work as writing and not as a portrait of anyone I care about.
Superimpositions. The impish face of Henry. A sudden flash into his multilateral nature. Behind him I see a severe Dr. Allendy, condemning him. Then I see June's face falling away behind the taxi window, and the whole world confuses me.
Henry writes: "Because I am a monster. A monster, you understand! A necessary monster. A divine monster. A hero. A conqueror. A holy destroyer. A destroyer of dying rhythms. A maker of living rhythms."
The important thing is to set the passions free. The drama is everything, the cause of the drama nothing. Élie Faure: "The hero is the artist."
For the first time, Henry fixed upon his interior life with poignant attention.
Will Allendy's wisdom block my desire to move on, to disperse myself; or will he hold my hand as I travel through hell?
Henry is writing about Proust and Joyce. He sends for me, asks me to roll up my sleeves, give him help and criticism. June is a hindrance, and suddenly I feel her as a hindrance too. Henry exclaims, "If only June would go back to New York. I need freedom!"
[November, 1932]
Last night I went to Clichy. Henry and June tried to use me as a referee to one of their battles.
I sat silent. I said quietly that whatever I had to say I would say to each one separately. Henry was impatient with June's flood of talk. And June was saying: "He is like a steel wall."
Henry was in a high-powered writing mood. He was working on two books at the same time. I read what he had written on Joyce and on D. H. Lawrence. We discussed it. Henry told June that she did not let him work.
I understood his abstract mood. His eyes were hard and bright. June's beauty was suddenly submerged in a wave of creation.
Instead of spending the night out, as she did whenever they quarreled, June returned that night meekly, to tell Henry that she now understood him. The next day she reported this reconciliation to me. "I've got Henry working and happy."
Does June really love Henry? This is impossible to find out because of June's lies.
That night, too, she was ill. She awoke in the middle of the night shivering with fever. Henry said: "I knew why she was being ill. I felt sorry for her, but that's all. I was more annoyed than anything." June could not arouse his pity. The brutality of their life together frightens and appals me.
It is a barbaric jungle.
I think that is why I return to Allendy. His window is open, like a haven. I see the bookcases. I stand in the street imagining his quiet voice, his gentle laughter, his compassion. I feel a yearning for peace, as if the world of Henry and June were a glimpse of hell.
A half of me escapes Allendy, rebels against him. I rebel against wisdom, against sublimation. The conflict is all the greater because each man is strong within his own role and symbolic value. Allendy is truly a kingly man, an intrepid scientist, a scholar, a man who is seeking to relate science and mysticism; he is a leader, a teacher, a healer. And Henry is his opposite. Henry is a sensualist, an anarchist, an adventurer, a pimp, a crazy genius. I feel despair before the austerity of Allendy's life. I walk up and down before his house as other people might walk up and down before a church. I am smoking. My face is pale. I feel like June. He is in there talking from higher spheres, cooler spheres, shedding compassion and clairvoyance. He is there bottling dramas into alchemist's bottles, distilling, annotating.
I must let myself flow unilaterally.
"J'ai été bon quelquefois. Je ne m'en félicite pas. J'ai été mé- chant souvent; je ne m'en repens pas," writes Gauguin.
Clichy. June, Henry and I. June and I are sitting on Henry's bed. Henry is sitting before his table, which is covered with paper, books, and notebooks. We are discussing the financial problem of his book's publication. Kahane wants to be paid. I promise to raise the money. June makes pointless and illogical remarks. The talk breaks down, becomes irrational and confused. As I suspect that June may be jealous of my backing Henry's book, I suggest she try and raise the money in New York. Henry begins patiently, "Now, June, listen. You are confused about this."
June says, "It is you who are confused."
When they have thoroughly irritated each other, we drop the subject. Then Henry asked very quietly, and gently, "June, I can't work here. I want to go to Louveciennes for a few days. You understand. This is the most important period of my life as a writer."
"You don't have to leave, Henry, I'll leave. I'll go back to New York as soon as I can get the money. Tonight I will go and stay with friends." There are tears in her eyes.
Henry said, "It is not a question of that. I am not asking you to leave, only to leave me alone. I can't work when you are around. I can't work, June. And at this moment, I must be hard in self-protection. To finish this book I could commit a crime."
After this the thread was lost again. June was weeping hysterically, her whole body shaking, raving wildly about Henry not being a human being, that she must fight him to protect herself against him, that if she stayed, she would kill herself or do something mad.
I console June. I stroke her arm. Henry is weeping too, sentimentally. Suddenly June's intuition flashes, terrifyingly acute. "Henry, you are better in some ways that I cannot understand, and worse in some ways which affect me. There is something in you I cannot seize. I can't be a slave to your ideas, you're too spiritual a man. I'm the wrong woman for you."
She is sobbing uncontrollably. She leaves the room. I follow her. In the dark, windowless bathroom she is convulsed with sobs. I take her in my arms. I caress her hair as if she were a child. Her tears are falling on my neck. I am overwhelmed with pity. She clings to me. I caress her until she grows quiet. I leave her to wash her face. I return to Henry and we take up the talk about his work. June returns, quiet. I prepare to leave. She asks Henry to buy some food and to take me to a taxi stand. Henry and I walk for ten blocks talking about June the child, and how to protect her. I offer to take her out often to give Henry peace. He now knows that June's talk bores me. He tells me how he would have given his life before to hear and see a submissive June begging for his love, and that now it means nothing to him. All she says to please him only reveals how confused she is, in her own mind, about his significance and value, how she misses the point whether she is praising or cursing him. He tells me how she came home the other evening and said, "I believe you are the sincerest man on earth."
I cannot forget how beautiful June looked, sitting on Henry's bed with her blonde hair tumbled about her shoulders, and I felt that it was a curse that such beauty could utter words Henry would answer with: "That is stupid of you, yes, and that is why I cannot take it seriously."
June
and I were walking together over dead leaves crackling like paper. She was weeping over the end of a cycle. How one must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap the most difficult to make—to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and re-create the passion. The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might lean as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end, in our cursedly repercussive being...
I could see the crumbling of her love for Henry.
It tormented me to see June unequal to life, and watch her pitiful efforts to rationalize it, to set her emotions in order, to understand. She talked feverishly. She told me, "One night I went to Henry intending to confess to him as to a priest. I was in a holy mood. I saw him as a saint. His attitude silenced me. From that moment on, if he had been brought back to me dead on a stretcher, I would not have cared. He cannot hurt me any more."
As we walked, she became more alive and less submerged by pain. "I feel such harmony with you, Anaïs," she said, using Henry's own words. Am I only a medium of clarity and harmony through which others find themselves, each one finding his potential self, his vision? June added, "It is not I who am shrewd, but Henry. He talks about my shrewdness, but it is he who is shrewd and baffling."
Then I saw the ravages which Henry's literary inventions have caused in June's poor vacillating mind. Everything he has written, said, distorted, exaggerated, has confused her, disintegrated her personality, her own sincerity. Now she stands before the bulk of Henry's writing and cannot tell whether she is a prostitute, a goddess, a criminal, a saint.
Henry has buried himself in his work; he has no time for June. I fall back into my own work. Henry telephones me. Mails me the bulk of his work, and I try to follow his ideas, but what a tremendous arc he is making. D. H. Lawrence, Joyce, Élie Faure, Dostoevsky, criticism, nudism, his creed, his attitude, Michael Fraenkel, Keyserling. He is asserting himself as a thinker; he is asserting his seriousness. He is tired of being considered a mere "cunt painter," an experimentalist, a revolutionary. Fred tells him his books would mean nothing but for the obscenities.
I feel sadness when I look at Allendy's photograph. I am always between two worlds, always in conflict. I would like sometimes to rest, to be at peace, to choose a nook, make a final choice, but I can't. Some nameless, undescribable fear and anxiety keeps me on the move. On certain evenings like this, I would like to feel whole. Only a half of me is sitting by the fire, only my hands are sewing. I am concerned with the sorrow of June, and yet I am aware that June does Henry more harm than good.
A bar. June in a gay mood, making fun of Henry's abstract mood, of his passivity in life, of his writer's esprit d'escalier. "He is quite dead, you know, Anaïs, dead emotionally and dead sexually," How they love to contemplate their mutual murder of each other! I have to interest June each time in other things, to take her mind off drugs. I tell her my whole life, and she tells hers. What stories! She is amazed that I could have been staying near where D. H. Lawrence was, in the south of France, and that I never dared to call on him. "But who am I? What did I have to bring him?" I asked June. And at the house of René Lalou I met André Gide for a moment, clad in his dark cape. And June tells me about Ossip Zadkine and his strange statues, and how he desired her, and gave her a statue to sell in America.
We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.
"I love you in your simple raincoat and your felt hat, Anaïs." She kissed my neck in front of Allendy's house. And always, when we part, she gives me that look of a drowning woman.
June said, "I am now looking for someone to bow to, now that I can no longer bow to Henry."
As I bow to Allendy? A daughter's respect? I tell her about Allendy. "I don't want to give up my madness."
I try to explain to her that the writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is a weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure. To judge a writer it is necessary to have an equal love for writing as for the man. Most women only love the man.
When I talk like this, I know June will rush to Henry and say all this to him (unsigned work of art, for I am sure she tells it as a thought of her own).
A flippant evening. Ideas exposed tonight to June, not to be considered tomorrow. Influence of jazz. When I step into a bar or a cabaret, before I have handed my coat to the waiter, I assimilate such a draught of sensations, wonder at the beauty of women, the magnetism of men, the starriness of the lights, that I am ready to slip under the table like a drunkard. How quickly I slide down the slope of a snowy voice, plunge into smoky eyes, diffuse into music.
June and I sink into this need of warmth and love. Gifts, praise, words, admiration, incense, flowers, perfume.
We entered a dance hall. Found an unexpected chicness and formality. Evening dresses, champagne in pails, white-coated waiters, a mellow jazz. Should we leave? I saw defiance in June's eyes. She wanted to defy the world, insult society, because Henry had given himself to a book, turned away from both of us.
We forgot the formality of the place. We talked, leaning over the small table. June luminous, prophetic, and eloquent. A match, a beautiful match for each other. I want to know if she has a lover in New York.
We need each other. We do not know, at times, which one is the child, which one the mother; which one the sister, which one the older wiser friend; which one dependent, which one protective. We maintain a maddening oscillation, and we do not know what we want of each other. Tonight it is June who says, "I want to dance with you." It is June who leads me, she heavy and I light and willowy. We glide on the last beat of a jazz piece which is descending and gasping and dying. The men, in stiff evening shirts, stiffen even more in their chairs. The women close their lips tightly. The musicians smile, benign and malicious, rejoicing in the spectacle, which has the effect of a slap in the face of the pompous diners. They cannot help exclaiming that we are beautiful together. June dark, secret under the brim of her Greta Garbo felt hat, heavy-caped, tragic and pale, and I a contrast to her in every way. The musicians grin. The men feel insulted. At the table a waiter is waiting to tell us we cannot dance again. Then I call for the bill like a grand seigneur and we leave. I have the acrid taste of rebellion on my lips. We go to the Cabaret Fétiche. There the men and women are unmasked, at ease. We are not outcasts. Men struggle to catch our attention. June responds. I bristle with jealousy. June talks. She tells me each story Henry has told me, but the reverse of the story. They never fit together at any point. Every scene is reconstructed differently. It is Henry who vulgarizes her and toughens her. She is delicate and sensitive. It is Henry who was unfaithful, and made love to women right before her eyes. It is Henry who wanted to think of her as a femme fatale, incited her to do her worst. It is Henry who taught her how to speak in slang. "Henry does not want a human life, Anaïs, a human happiness. I know he does not want it. He wants performances, wildness, fever, fermentations. I had to do all that Henry did not dare to do. He was timid. He was meek. I had to bring him his Dostoevsky characters. But he is no Dostoevsky. He could not see them. Henry is nothing as a human being; he is disloyal. He hates me because of all he owes me; he has made a bad use of all I have given him. He has been neither realistic enough, nor fantastic enough."
Her fortune-teller's eyes, and that forward, eager thrust of
her profile.
Both of us drunk now, and she is talking about someone in New York. An exceedingly handsome man. Does she love him? She is so uneasy every moment, as if each word she utters were a surrender to the enemy. Does she fear that I will use this knowledge to detach her from Henry?
She complains of having found no great love, but great egotists, seeking only an expansion of themselves through her.
It seems to me, through the fumes and incoherence, that she is talking about a past Henry, that I know another Henry.
"I expected Henry to do wonderful things with my life, my stories, my friends, to heighten them, add to them. But instead he reduced it all, vulgarized it, made it shabby and ugly..."
She had wanted to be restored to literature as a character, in all her magnificence and abundance and wildness.
"I will make a great character out of you, June, I will make a portrait you will like."
"But not like the poem, House of Incest, I didn't understand that. It was not me."
Henry cannot impose a pattern on me, because I make my own. And I can make my own portrait too.
June said suddenly, "When I first came from New York, I thought that you had certainly become Henry's friend and that you would pretend love for me in order to find out everything for Henry."
I remembered saying to Henry: "If I ever find out that June does not love you..."
"And now?" I ask, looking into her eyes, and my own fill with tears of guilt. June takes them for a sign of love, and is moved, and clasps my hand.
"I trust you."
Later she talks ramblingly about her two years with George, who is as beautiful as a god, but not deep. "I wanted to love him madly, but I can't. And anyway, Henry needs me so very much. Without me he stagnates."