Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  I cannot tell if I am witnessing the echoes of a great love, or a living, incurable obsession on the part of both of them.

  "Henry was talking to me the other day and he seemed like a puppet making absurd and meaningless gestures. He couldn't move me."

  Henry tells June that the sacrifices she makes add to her greatness and that, therefore, there is no debt.

  "What did you feel when you gave him your typewriter and wrote by hand, and he pawned it to buy drinks for all of us? Did you mind?"

  Is there malice behind these questions which stress Henry's thoughtlessness? I remembered Henry's warnings: "She will try to turn you against me."

  Clichy. June, Fred, Henry, and I are eating in the kitchen. Henry attacks one of my phrases as one which cannot be said in English. I defend it. I report a dream in which I was covered with mushrooms.

  "That is not surprising," Henry said, "as you are an esoteric substance."

  June said, "And Henry hates intelligent and exotic women."

  "Le fianceé des bonnes," said Fred maliciously.

  As this reminds me of my father's entanglements with maids, I bristle.

  The talk continued with play on words, banter, teasing, sallies, duels, allusions. Abstract intoxicants. June began to lose her footing, so she drank more often from the bottle of Pernod.

  It seems to me that everyone became cruel.

  At some point in the interplay, Henry said, "Don't turn against me, Anaïs," so humbly, meekly, that he sounded like a child. June talked confusedly, Fred waspishly. Henry was drunk too. He shook his head and looked like a bear which anyone could lead and command to dance. He would dance and grunt. June was fermenting with an inexplicable savagery.

  The talk ended because Henry felt dizzy and had to lie down. June was restless. Henry was lying on his bed and she had not been able to persuade him to drink something which would help his drunkenness. She gave me the glass and asked me to take it to him. I thought that she wanted to test my power over him, but I think now that she wanted to be alone with Fred; for after I gave Henry the drink and I returned to the kitchen, I saw their heads joined together through the frosted glass door, and when I opened the door I heard the rustle of separation. The lipstick was smeared on June's mouth. She sat with her legs wide apart, her skirt up to her knees, and her shoulders slumped. I could not bear the way she looked, disheveled, unkempt, her face coarsened by drink. I looked at her reproachfully. She felt my misery. She raved, "Anaïs, I love you, you are cruel and clever, you are all cruel and clever, that is why I got drunk. I'm terribly drunk." She lurched forward, towards me, and almost fell on me. I held her up. Her eyes watered. I led her to bed. She was too heavy for me. (Oh, someone could laugh at the picture we make, June leaning on me.) We totter into Henry's room. He awakens. He helps me to put June on the bed. She laughs. Then she weeps. And then she begins to vomit. I place a wet towel on her forehead. She tears it off and throws it at me. She raves, "I always wanted to be drunk, Henry, as drunk as you. Now I am. I've taken your drunkenness away from you." But in reality, she is not drunk enough to stop thinking. And what rises to the surface are her fears, her doubts, her suspicions, her childish calls for protection, her self-condemnation. "Oh, Henry, Anaïs, you are both cruel and clever. Clever and cruel. I am afraid of both of you. Where is George? George. I am not afraid of you. I am so sick, I'm putrid. Leave me alone. Anaïs, don't come near me. This is terrible, I'm so terribly sick, and tired. I want rest. Won't you give me peace? I want peace. Anaïs. I love you. Wipe my face. Give me a cold, cold towel. Go away. Foul. Foul smell."

  Henry is totteringly wiping up the floor, rinsing towels. Diffuse, bewildered, not sober yet.

  I feel a sickness of the soul: I wish I could rid myself of my whole life, of all I have heard, seen, illusions, fantasies, adventures, drink, orgies, sensations.

  June believes my seriousness is a reproach, a moral judgment. But it is not that. It is a repudiation of ugliness. Of June rolling in her vomit in her black satin dress. Ugliness and emptiness. The sorrow of emptiness. It is June who vomits, and I who feel I have vomited my whole life. The real wine, the real bodies, the real kisses, the real cafés, the real kitchen, external ecstasies. I yearn for the ecstasies of writing, reading, music, philosophy, contemplation; I yearn for that room I saw through an open window, lined with books, suspended over life, where nothing ever turns to dregs, where landings are not crash landings. June sees in my sorrow a severity, and it is not that. I place the cool towels over her forehead. I soothe her. I say, I am not cruel, I love you, June. June is snoring. I lie beside her, all dressed, coat and all. Henry brings coffee for both of us. June drinks it slowly. It is dawn. She asks me, "You will come back tonight?"

  I want my solitude, my peace, the beauty of my house; I want to find my lightness and my joy again. Ecstasies without hangovers, without vomit. June comes with me to the station. She buys me violets. I throw them under the seat in the train.

  June retracted the story of George. She said she had only invented him because so many interesting things were happening to me, and nothing was happening to her.

  She taunted me when I said I could not return to Clichy the next night, saying it was because I did not have the energy. I could not explain that I came home to the diary, to note my last image of June and me walking towards the station, our two sandaled feet in unison: I could not explain the breaking away, the withdrawal that took place in me.

  Tomorrow I return to Clichy. I return to Clichy but I will not stay there. It will not swallow me. The image of Henry's passivity, watching June act, avoiding the scenes made by June, matched her image of him. I wanted them in my life, but I don't want to live their life. I can no longer watch them actively destroying each other. They negate each other. Henry says June was a promiscuous woman who tormented him and destroyed his romantic faith and love. He describes her boldness, hardness, callousness and his illusions. He describes a June whom he initiated to literature, raised away from Broadway and dance halls, a converted sinner. June asserts that she was romantic and intact when she met Henry, that she was impregnable towards men, that it was she who introduced him to Strindberg, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Élie Faure. June insists that what she learned from Henry she quickly surpassed him in, growing quickly ahead of him; that Henry wished to see her as a child, a woman, a whore, and refused to acknowledge her mind. That she took refuge from his cynical sex talk and whoring in stories of fantastic adventures. That it was his realism and literalness which drove her into invention, to escape from his vulgarizations. June says Henry took from her and never acknowledged her influence. That she served him a rich experience rarely equaled and which, for the most part, he failed to understand, to seize. It is true that Henry's descriptions of their life in the Village, the speak-easies, the friends they had, June's multiple stories, are recorded entirely from the outside and that Henry never looked for their significance. But he is doing that now. It is also true that when June read the poetic descriptions I made of her in my long prose poem, she did not understand them. It is also true that she cannot understand either Henry or herself, that they are both unconscious beings, acting instinctively and blindly. It is also true that June has intermittent intuitions which are acute and deep, but that her mind also goes into eclipses, that her acts need to be translated with a knowledge of symbolism, and that symbolism is something unknown to Henry. They need a translator!

  I was sitting on Henry's bed in Clichy, and doing just that, translating them to each other. June was in a lucid mood, talking quietly. I was telling Henry that he knew very little about himself and that this was the root of his lack of understanding of the world. I quoted June. Henry said, "Now you are telling me something." June applauded when I spoke of his egocentricity, his over self-assertion in his books, his absence of core; so that he lived always guided by his reaction against another person's attitude, never out of a deep self-guidance; lived negatively, I said, and always either over-estimated or depreciated himself. Self-k
nowledge was the root of understanding and wisdom. Henry distorted June because of his neurotic love of his mother and his hatred of her, his need and repudiation of woman. Would he save himself through his work? Would his work have the same ultimate weakness of Joyce, Lawrence, and Proust, a monstrous growth of the ego? I attacked everything, but more tactfully than I write it here. I acted Allendy to Henry, pointed to his dependence on the criticism and opinion of others; to his measuring of himself always not from within but against something; his need of constant experience and no time for digesting it; his need of much talk instead of a struggle for significance. It all had begun with a talk on the confusion of his style. He was, as he said, the man always ahead of himself. He was always going back to his finished books and adding to them, altering them, for each day revealed a new tone, a new accent. I felt he accumulated too many facts and was hampered with the weight of them, that they concealed reality. He was full of dissonances.

  Then Henry left us to get food for dinner, and June and I were left alone. She told me I had been wonderful, that it was the first time she had heard someone talk to Henry, not missing him, striking neither too high nor too low; and that I had done wonderful things for her too. All the fragments of our talks, short encounters, fused into a monologue such as I had always dreamed of hearing June utter, a June no longer hysterical or merely spilling over, but quiet, supple, flexible, aware, clear and wise.

  "Anaïs, I am sexually dead. I have burned myself out, all into a great faith and a great illusion. Henry is losing even his manhood. I see it by his embrace. I sense that it is not because he does not want me, but that he does not want any woman."

  "Perhaps it is because he is writing so much. When I was writing my book on Lawrence, for two weeks my body was dead."

  "Oh, it isn't that. I have seen him in that mood too. This is different. But I don't want to tell him. He is so crushed with complexes, I don't want to add another."

  Whenever June laments, however, I am aware that she is weeping over a dead Henry, that there is another Henry alive and happy. She complains that Henry has never given her any credit for anything. He is inhuman, perhaps, out of self-defense against her will.

  The absence of muscular structure in woman's mind makes Henry suspicious. But just before June came back, he was beginning to trust my intuitions. It is this kind of feminine thinking which psychoanalysis makes clear, and I am better able now to explain what I feel.

  June has a curious way of jumbling values, of mentioning in the same breath Dostoevsky and Greta Garbo, Proust and some Village character like Max Bodenheim. Literature for her is an adornment. Henry wrote: "She wore it like plumage." But this knowledge I derived from Allendy she understands.

  At one moment, when she had spoken movingly of her faith and the wholeness of her love for Henry, I laid my head on her knees and said, "June, I worship you."

  She answered, "I don't want worship. I want understanding."

  Henry's cry, too: "I want understanding!" There is a shortage of understanding. It is as if I had lived my whole life, from childhood on, cultivating the one thing they needed, living within the meaning of everything, in preparation to receive this bulk of facts and experience and be able to understand it, and to clarify it for them.

  Then I became aware of the atmosphere of her talk. It sounded like a testament, an abdication. Why? She was telling me what to do for Henry, and what not to do. What intuition did she reach while she watched me talking to Henry? How little she understood Henry and herself, the hopelessness of their ever understanding each other? Did she become aware of the depth of my friendship with Henry, and was she relinquishing him because their discords had become more and more violent? She mixed perfidious remarks with her generous ones, always in an effort to destroy Henry the writer for me as well as for herself. Was it protectiveness towards me which made her say, "Tonight you showed yourself wiser than Henry. Don't let him destroy your mind and your work. Remember that your work comes first."

  Was it feminine loyalty? Was it prophecy? Did she mean that Henry had destroyed her? But this was different. They were lovers.

  "But he can harm you as a writer, as he harmed me as a woman, by taking and never giving."

  I will never be able to write down all of that night, all of the words we said. It seemed to me that June was climbing into more impersonal spheres, that she was eliminating all personal jealousies, that she was accepting my friendship for Henry and his for me.

  June was wearing her hair loose. She sat on the edge of the bed and smoked.

  "You are so young and so full of faith. Your body is so young, so slim, so white."

  Every statement that night carried a strange weight, a sadness, an admission, a defeat. I could sense a symbolic image haunting her: her own lost youth and freshness reappearing in me. I remember one of her phrases, uttered with desperation: "Why do I have such a coarse, earthy body, Anaïs, I am not earthy and coarse."

  "But June, Henry loves your earthy body. And I love you as you are. I want to be like you."

  She wanted as much to escape from herself as I wanted to inhabit her body, become her. We were both denying our own selves and wishing to be the other.

  We talked until dawn, smoking, June pacing up and down at times.

  Henry said: "I have always thought a great deal, but there was a hub missing. And what was the missing hub? It was, as you said, an understanding of myself. It is your vision of me which keeps me powerfully together. You reject all the unimportant details. You never get confused as June does, and you give my acts and my experiences the correct proportion."

  When I saw him again, he was working on a synthesis, "Form and Language," and I read the pages as he unwound them from the typewriter. We talked endlessly about his work, always in the same manner, Henry flowing, gushing, spilling, spreading, scattering, and I weaving together tenaciously. He ends by laughing at my tenacity. Until I reach a clear finality of some sort, I can't stop. I am always seeking the core, the hub, the center of all his chaotic and abundant ideas. I struggle to coordinate, to tie up loose ends.

  Henry is a mold breaker. He obeys the rhythms, as Lawrence said, and all clear patterns can be damned.

  At any moment he can begin to rant, rave, fume, drink, and the continuity of his thinking is broken by the fermentations of his body. And this is good. It gives a mobility to everything, the mobility of life itself. He accepts absurdities.

  I walked through the streets which Henry taught me to love. Water is being thrown on the sidewalks and swept by an old man with a broom. Dirt is floating down the gutter, windows are being opened, meat hung on hooks, vegetables poured in baskets for display, wheels are rolling, bread is baking, children are skipping rope, dogs are carrying the weight of downtrodden tails, cats are licking off bistro sawdust, wine bottles are being carried up from the cellar. I love the streets I did not know as a child. I always played in houses in Neuilly, Brussels, Germany, Cuba. Henry played in the streets. His world was filled with ordinary people, mine with artists.

  Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his café life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.

  It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on café tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking.

  It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember m
y childhood, and not while reading Freud's "Preface to a Little Girl's Journal."

  Henry teases me about my memory for conversation. Every now and then he says: "Put this down in your diary." He never says, as others do: "Do not put this down in your diary."

  Even his face is changing. I was looking at him in amazement while he explained Spengler. No trace of the gnome or the sensualist. A gravity. An intentness.

  Talk about his work. I feel sometimes I have to hang on to the significance of it while he tosses about, fumbling, stumbling.

  Fred criticizes Henry's reading, his efforts to think, attacks his knowledge of science, interest in movies, in theatre, in philosophy, criticism, biography. A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion. Henry is fulfilling a deep necessity: to situate himself, to adopt values, to seek a basis for what he is to build.

  I laugh at my old fear of analysis. The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

  I have no fear of clarity.

  Henry is lost in a labyrinth of ideas, like an ostrich who has buried its head in a mountain of papers.

  He said, "I crumbled at the end of my six-year war with June, like a man unaccustomed to peace."

  Allendy said: "La fatalité se déplace: plus l'homme prend conscience de lui-même, plus il là découvre intérieure."

  I let Henry and June take care of my tough-minded self. Jung said:

  We must include both the tender-minded and the tough-minded within ourselves because we cannot permanently allow one part of our personality to be cared for symbolically by another...

  And it is Jung, too, who observes that it is usual for a patient to endow the physician with uncanny powers, somewhat like a magician, or a demoniacal criminal, or as the corresponding personification of goodness, a savior.