by Anais Nin
I sit down before a letter or my journal with a desire for honesty, but perhaps in the end I am the biggest liar of them all, bigger than June, bigger than Albertine, because of the semblance of sincerity.
His real name was Heinrich—how I prefer that. He is German. To me he seems like a Slav, but he has the German sentimentality and romanticism about women. Sex is love to him. His morbid imagination is German. He has a love of ugliness. He doesn't mind the smell of urine and of cabbage. He loves cursing, and slang, prostitutes, apache quarters, squalor, toughness.
He writes his letters to me on the back of discarded "Notes"—fifty ways of saying "drunk," information on poisons, names of books, bits of conversation. Or lists like this: "Visit Café des Mariniers on river bank near Exposition Bridge off Champs Elysées—sort of boarding house for fishermen. Eat 'Bouillabaisse,' Caveau des Oubliettes Rouges. Le Paradis, rue Pigalle—rough point, pickpockets, apaches, etc. Fred Payne's Bar, 14 rue Pigalle (see the Art Galerie downstairs, rendezvous of English and American show girls). Café de la Régence, 261 rue St. Honoré (Napoleon and Robespierre played chess here. See their table)."
Henry's letters give me the feeling of plentitude I get so rarely. I take great joy in answering them, but the bulk of them overwhelm me. I have barely answered one when he writes another. Comments on Proust, descriptions, moods, his own life, his indefatigable sexuality, the way he immediately gets tangled in action. Too much action, to my mind. Undigested. No wonder he marvels at Proust. No wonder I watch his life with a realization that my life will never resemble his, for mine is slowed up by thought.
To Henry: "Last night I read your novel. There were some passages in it which were éblouissants, staggeringly beautiful. Particularly the description of a dream you had, the description of the jazzy night with Valeska, the whole of the last part when the life with Blanche comes to a climax.... Other things are flat, lifeless, vulgarly realistic, photographic. Still other things—the older mistress, Cora, even Naomi, are not born yet. There is a slapdash, careless rushing by. You have come a long way from that. Your writing has had to keep pace with your living, and because of your animal vitality you have lived too much....
"I have a strange sureness that I know just what should be left out, exactly as you knew what should be left out of my book. I think the novel is worth weeding out. Would you let me?"
To Henry: "Please understand, Henry, that I'm in full rebellion against my own mind, that when I live, I live by impulse, by emotion, by white heat. June understood that. My mind didn't exist when we walked insanely through Paris, oblivious to people, to time, to place, to others. It didn't exist when I first read Dostoevsky in my hotel room and laughed and cried together and couldn't sleep, and didn't know where I was. But afterwards, understand me, I make the tremendous effort to rise again, not to wallow any more, not to go on just suffering or burning. Why should I make such an effort? Because I have a fear of being like June exactly. I have a feeling against complete chaos. I want to be able to live with June in utter madness, but I also want to be able to understand afterwards, to grasp what I've lived through.
"You ask contradictory and impossible things. You want to know what dreams, what impulses, what desires June has. You'll never know, not from her. No, she couldn't tell you. But do you realize what joy I took in my telling her what our feelings were, in that special language? Because I am not always just living, just following all my fantasies; I come up for air, for understanding. I dazzled June because when we sat down together the wonder of the moment didn't just make me drunk; I lived it with the consciousness of the poet, not the consciousness of the dead-formula-making psychoanalysts. We went to the edge, with our two imaginations. And you beat your head against the wall of our world, and you want me to tear all the veils. You want to force delicate, profound, vague, obscure, voluptuous sensations into something you can seize on. You do not ask it of Dostoevsky. You thank God for the living chaos. Why, then, do you want to know more about June?"
June has no ideas, no fantasies of her own. They are given to her by others, who are inspired by her being. Hugo says angrily that she is an empty box and that I am the full box. But who wants the ideas, the fantasies, the contents, if the box is beautiful and inspiring? I am inspired by June the empty box. To think of her in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living. The world has never been as empty for me since I have known her. June supplies the beautiful incandescent flesh, the fulgurant voice, the abysmal eyes, the drugged gestures, the presence, the body, the incarnate image of our imaginings. What are we? Only the creators. She is.
I get letters from Henry every other day. I answer him immediately. I gave him my typewriter, and I write by hand. I think of him day and night.
I dream of an extraordinary extra life I am going to lead someday, which may even fill another and special diary. Last night, after reading Henry's novel, I couldn't sleep. It was midnight. Hugo was sleeping. I wanted to get up and go to my writing room and write Henry about his first novel. But I would have awakened Hugo. There are two doors to open, and they creak. Hugo was so exhausted when he went to bed. I lay very still and forced myself to sleep, with phrases rushing through my head like a cyclone. I thought that I would remember them in the morning. But I couldn't remember, not even half. If Hugo did not have to go to work, I could have awakened him, and he could have slept on the next morning. Our whole life is spoiled by his work in the bank. I must get him out of it. And that makes me work on my novel, rewriting, which I hate, for a new book is boiling in my head—June's book.
The conflict between my being "possessed" and my devotion to Hugo is becoming unbearable. I will love him with all my strength but in my own way. Is it impossible for me to grow in only one direction?
Tonight I am full of joy because Henry is here again. The impression is always the same: one is filled with the weight and lashing of his writing, and then he comes upon you so softly—soft voice, trailing off, soft gestures, soft, fine white hands—and one surrenders to his indefatigable curiosity and his romanticism towards women.
Henry's description of the Henry Street joint (where June brought Jean to live with them):
Bed unmade all day; climbing into it with shoes on frequently; sheets a mess. Using soiled shirts for towels. Laundry seldom gotten out. Sinks stopped up from too much garbage. Washing dishes in bathtub, which was greasy and black-rimmed. Bathroom always cold as an icebox. Breaking up furniture to throw into fire. Shades always down, windows never washed, atmosphere sepulchral. Floor constantly strewn with plaster of Paris, tools, paints, books, cigarette butts, garbage, soiled dishes, pots. Jean running around all day in overalls. June, always half naked and complaining of the cold.
What is all that to me? A side of June I will never know. And the other side, which belongs to me, is full of magic and dazzling with beauty and fineness. These details only show me the two-sideness of all things, my own two-sideness, now craving abject living, animality.
To Henry: "You say, 'Gide has mind, Dostoevsky has the other thing, and it is what Dostoevsky has that really matters.' For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love. We have lost our minds to June....
"Tell me something. You have a feeling for the macabre. Your imagination is attracted by certain grim images. Did you tell Bertha that living with June was like carrying a corpse about? Do you really mind June's neuroses and illness, or are you merely cursing at what enslaves you?"
I have an acute struggle to keep Henry, whom I don't want to give up, and to keep the relationship between June and me a precious secret.
Yesterday at the cafe he tore bits of our story from me. It hurt and maddened me. I came home and wrote him a long, feverish letter. If he showed this letter to June, I would lose her. Henry cannot make me love her less, but he can torment me by making her appear more unreal, more selfless, by proving that there is no June, only an ima
ge, invented by us, by Henry's mind, and my poetry. He talked about influences on her. The influence of Jean, the woman in New York. This was torture to me.
And then he said, "You mystify me." And I said nothing. Is he going to hate me? When we first met he was so warm and so responsive to my presence. His whole body was aware of me. We leaned over eagerly to look at the book I had brought him. We were both exultant. He forgot to drink his coffee.
I am trapped, between the beauty of June and the genius of Henry. In a different way, I am devoted to both, a part of me goes out to each of them. But I love June madly, unreasoningly. Henry gives me life, June gives me death. I must choose, and I cannot. For me to give Henry all the feelings I have had about June is exactly like giving my body and soul to him.
To Henry: "Perhaps you didn't realize it, but for the first time today you shocked and startled me out of a dream. All your notes, your stories of June never hurt me. Nothing hurt me until you touched on the source of my terror: June and the influence of Jean. What terror I have when I remember her talk and sense through it how loaded she is with the riches of others, all the others who love her beauty. Even Count Bruga was Jean's creation. When we were together June said, 'You will invent what we will do together.' I was ready to give her everything I have ever invented and created, from my house, my costumes, my jewelry to my writing, my imaginings, my life. I would have worked for her alone.
"Understand me. I worship her. I accept everything she is, but she must be. I only revolt if there is no June (as I wrote the first night I met her). Don't tell me that there is no June except the physical June. Don't tell me, because you must know. You have lived with her.
"I never feared, until today, what our two minds would discover together. But what a poison you distilled, perhaps the very poison which is in you. Is that your terror, too? Do you feel haunted and yet deluded, as by a creation of your own brain? Is it fear of an illusion you fight with crude words? Tell me she is not just a beautiful image. Sometimes when we talk I feel that we are trying to grasp her reality. She is unreal even to us, even to you who have possessed her, and to me, whom she has kissed."
Hugo reads one of my old journals, the John Erskine period, Boulevard Suchet, and almost sobs with pity for me, realizing that I was living in The House of the Dead. I did not succeed in resuscitating him until he almost lost me to John and to suicide.
More letters from Henry, parts of his book as he writes it, quotations, notes while listening to Debussy and Ravel, on the back of menus of small restaurants in shabby quarters. A torrent of realism. Too much of it in proportion to imagination, which is growing smaller. He will not sacrifice a moment of life to his work. He is always rushing and writing about work and in the end never really tackling it, writing more letters than books, doing more investigating than actual creation. Yet the form of his last book, discursive, a chain of associations, reminiscences is very good. He has assimilated his Proust, minus the poetry and the music.
I have dipped into obscenity, dirt, and his world of "shit, cunt, prick, bastard, crotch, bitch" and am on the way up again. The symphonic concert today confirmed my mood of detachment. Again and again I have traversed the regions of realism and found them arid. And again I return to poetry. I write to June. It is almost impossible. I can't find words. I make such a violent effort of the imagination to reach out to her, to my image of her. And when I come home, Emilia says, "There is a letter for the Señorita." I run upstairs, hoping it is a letter from Henry.
I want to be a strong poet, as strong as Henry and John are in their realism. I want to combat them, to invade and annihilate them. What baffles me about Henry and what attracts me are the flashes of imagination, the flashes of insight, and the flashes of dreams. Fugitive. And the depths. Rub off the German realist, the man who "stands for shit," as Wambly Bald says to him, and you get a lusty imagist. At moments he can say the most delicate or profound things. But his softness is dangerous, because when he writes he does not write with love, he writes to caricature, to attack, to ridicule, to destroy, to rebel. He is always against something. Anger incites him. I am always for something. Anger poisons me. I love, I love, I love.
Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives.
I spent a tense, harrowing day yesterday with Eduardo, who resuscitates the past. He was the first man I loved. He was weak, sexually. I suffered from his weakness, I know now. That pain was buried. It was newly aroused when we met again two years ago. It was buried again.
I have had masculine elements in me always, knowing exactly what I want, but not until John Erskine did I love strong men; I loved weak or timorous, overfine men. Eduardo's vagueness, indecision, ethereal love, and Hugo's frightened love caused me torment and bewilderment. I acted delicately and yet as a man. It would have been more feminine to have been satisfied with the passion of other admirers, but I insisted on my own selection, on a fineness of nature which I found in a man weaker than I was. I suffered deeply from my own forwardness as a woman. As a man, I would have been glad to have what I desired.
Now Hugo is strong, but I am afraid it is too late. The masculine in me has made too much progress. Now even if Eduardo wanted to live with me (and yesterday he was tormented by an impotent jealousy), we couldn't do so because creatively I am stronger than he is, and he couldn't bear it. I have discovered the joy of a masculine direction of my life by my courting of June. Also I have discovered the terrible joy of dying, of disintegrating.
Sitting by the fire with Hugo last night, I began to cry, the woman sundered again into a woman-man, begging that by a miracle, by the great human strength of poets, she might be saved. But the animal strength which satisfies woman lies in brutal men, in the realists like Henry, and from him I do not want love. I prefer to move forward and choose my June, freely, like a man. But my body will die, because I have a sensual body, a living body, and there is no life in the love between women.
Hugo alone holds me, still, with his idolatry, his warm human love, his maturity, for he is the oldest among all of us.
I want to write so wonderfully to June that I can't write to her at all. What a pathetically inadequate letter:
"I cannot believe that you will not come again towards me from the darkness of the garden. I wait sometimes where we used to meet, expecting to feel again the joy of seeing you walk towards me out of a crowd—you, so distinct and unique.
"After you went away the house suffocated me. I wanted to be alone with my image of you....
"I have taken a studio in Paris, a small, shaky place, and attempt to run away only for a few hours a day, at least. But what is this other life I want to lead without you? I have to imagine that you are there, June, sometimes. I have a feeling that I want to be you. I have never wanted to be anyone but myself before. Now I want to melt into you, to be so terribly close to you that my own self disappears. I am happiest in my black velvet dress because it is old and is torn at the elbows.
"When I look at your face, I want to let go and share your madness, which I carry inside of me like a secret and cannot conceal any more. I am full of an acute, awesome joy. It is the joy one feels when one has accepted death and disintegration, a joy more terrible and more profound than the joy of living, of creating."
MARCH
Yesterday at the Café de la Rotonde Henry told me he had written me a letter which he had torn up. Because it was a crazy letter. A love letter. I received this silently, without surprise. I had sensed it. There is so much warmth between us. But I am unmoved. Deep down. I am afraid of this man, as if in him I had to face all the realities which terrify me. His sensual being affects me. His ferocity, enveloped in tenderness, his sudden seriousness, the heavy, rich mind. I am a bit hypnotized. I observe his fine soft white hands, his head, which looks too heavy for his body, the forehead about to burst, a shaking head, harboring so much t
hat I love and hate, that I want and fear. My love of June paralyzes me. I feel warmth towards this man, who can be two separate beings. He wants to take my hand and I appear not to notice. I make a swift gesture of flight.
I want his love to die. What I have been dreaming of, just such a man's desire of me, now I reject. The moment has come to sink in sensuality, without love or drama, and I cannot do it.
He misunderstands so much: my smile when he talks about June at first fighting off all his ideas violently and later absorbing them and expressing them as if they were her own. "It happens to all of us," he says, looking at me aggressively, as if my smile had been one of disdain. I believe he wants to fight. After the violence, the bitterness, the brutality, the ruthlessness he has known, my state of mellowness annoys him. He finds that, like a chameleon, I change color in the café, and perhaps lose the color I have in my own home. I do not fit into his life.
His life—the underworld, Careo, violence, ruthlessness, monstrosity, gold digging, debauch. I read his notes avidly and with horror. For a year, in semisolitude, my imagination has had time to grow beyond measure. At night, in a fever, Henry's words press in on me. His violent, aggressive manhood pursues me. I taste that violence with my mouth, with my womb. Crushed against the earth with the man over me, possessed until I want to cry out.