Henry and June: From A Journal of Love -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932)

by Anais Nin

  He sleeps in my arms, we are welded, his penis still in me. It is a moment of real peace, a moment of security. I open my eyes, but I do not think. One of my hands is on his gray hair. The other hand is spread around his leg. "Oh, Anaïs," he had said, "you are so hot, so hot that I can't wait. I must shoot into you quickly, quickly."

  Is how one is loved always so important? Is it so imperative that one should be loved absolutely or greatly? Would Fred say of me that I can love because I love others more than I love myself? Or is it Hugo who loves when he goes three times to the station to meet me because I have missed three trains? Or is it Fred, with his nebulous, poetic, delicate comprehension? Or do I love most when I say to Henry, "The destroyers do not always destroy. June has not destroyed you, ultimately. The core of you is a writer. And the writer is living."

  "Henry, tell Fred we can go and get the curtains tomorrow."

  "I'll come, too," said Henry, suddenly jealous.

  "But you know Fred wants to see me, to talk with me." Henry's jealousy pleased me. "Tell him to meet me at the same place as last time."

  "About four o'clock."

  "No, at three." I was thinking we didn't have enough time together the last day we met. Henry's face is impenetrable. I never know by any sign on it what he feels. There are transitions, yes, when he is flushed and excited, or serious and chastened, or observant and introspective. The blue eyes are analytical, like a scientist's, or moist with feeling. When they are moist I am moved down to my toes because I remember a story about his childhood. His parents (his father was a tailor) used to take him with them on their Sunday outings, visiting, dragging the child along all day and late at night. They sat in the houses of their friends to play cards and smoke. The smoke would grow thick and hurt Henry's eyes. They would put him on the bed in the room next to the parlor, with wet towels over his inflamed eyes.

  And now his eyes get tired with proofreading at the newspaper, and I would like to free him of it, and I can't.

  Last night I couldn't sleep. I imagined being in Natasha's apartment again with Henry. I wanted to relive the moment when he came into me as we were standing. He taught me to encircle him with my legs. Such practices are so unfamiliar that they bewilder me. Afterwards, the joy bursts upon my senses, because it has unleashed a new kind of desire.

  "Anaïs, I feel you, your hotness right down to my toes." In him, too, it is like lightning. He is always amazed by my moisture and my warmth.

  Often, though, the passivity of the woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? It terrifies me. Do women act thus? Does June go to Henry when she wants him? Does she mount him? Does she wait for him? He guides my inexperienced hands. It is like a forest fire, to be with him. New places of my body are aroused and burnt. He is incendiary. I leave him in an unquenchable fever.

  I have just been standing before the open window of my bedroom and I have breathed in deeply, all the sunshine, the snowdrops, the crocuses, the primroses, the crooning of the pigeons, the trills of the birds, the entire procession of soft winds and cool smells, of frail colors and petal-textured skies, the knotted gray-brown of old trees, the vertical shoots of young branches, the wet brown earth, the torn roots. It is all so savory that my mouth opens, and it is Henry's tongue which I taste, and I smell his breath as he sleeps, wrapped in my arms.

  I expect to meet Fred, but it is Henry who comes to the rendezvous. Fred is working. My eyes open wide on Henry, the man who slept in my arms yesterday, and I have chill thoughts. I see his stained hat and the hole in his coat. Another day this would have moved me, but today I realize it is willed poverty, calculated, intentional, out of disdain for the bourgeois who holds a purse carefully. He talks marvelously about Samuel Putman and Eugene Jolas, and his work, and my work and Fred's. But then the Pernod affects him and he tells me of sitting in a cafe with Fred last night after work, and of whores talking to him, and of Fred's looking at him severely, because he had been with me that afternoon and shouldn't have been talking to those women; and they were ugly. "But Fred is wrong," I say, to Henry's surprise. "The whores complement me. I understand the relief a man must feel to go to a woman without demands on his emotions or feelings." And Henry adds, "You don't have to write them letters!" As I laugh he realizes that I understand completely. I even understand his preference for Renoiresque bodies. Voilà. Yet I keep this picture of an outraged Fred worshiping me. And Henry says, "That's the nearest I came to being unfaithful to you."

  I don't know that I so much want Henry's faithfulness, because I am beginning to realize that the very word "love" tires me today. Love or no love. Fred's saying Henry doesn't love me. I understand the need for relief from complications, and I desire it for myself, only women cannot achieve such a state. Women are romantic.

  Suppose I don't want Henry's love. Suppose I say to him, "Listen, we are two adults. I'm sick of fantasies and emotions. Don't mention the word 'love.' Let's talk as much as we want and fuck only when we want it. Leave love out of it." They are all so serious. Just this moment I feel old, cynical. I'm tired of demands, too. For an hour today I feel unsentimental. In a moment I could destroy the entire legend, from beginning to end, destroy everything, except the fundamentals: my passion for June and my worship of Hugo.

  Perhaps my intellect is playing another prank. Is that what it is to feel a sense of reality? Where are yesterday's feelings and this morning's, and what about my intuition that Henry instead of Fred would meet me? And what has it all got to do with the fact that Henry was drunk, and that I, not realizing it, read to him about his power to "break" me. He didn't understand, of course, while swimming in the sulphur-colored Pernod.

  The burlesque of that hurt me. I asked him, "What is Fred like when he is drunk?"

  "Merry, yes, but always a bit contemptuous with the whores. They feel it."

  "Whereas you get friendly?"

  "Yes, I talk to them like a cart driver."

  Well, I had no joy from all this. It makes me cold and blank inside. Once, I joked and said that someday I would send him a telegram saying: "Never meet again because you don't love me." Coming home, I thought, tomorrow we will not meet. Or if we meet, we will never lie together again. Tomorrow I'll tell Henry not to bother about love. But the rest?

  Hugo says tonight that my face is blazing. I can't restrain a smile. We ought to have a banquet. Henry has killed my seriousness. It couldn't survive his changing moods, from beggar to god, from satyr to poet, from madman to realist.

  When he thrusts at me, I am saved from sobbing or hitting back because of my damned understanding. Whatever I understand, like Henry and the whores, I can't very well fight about. What I understand, I also simultaneously accept.

  Henry is such a world in himself that it would not surprise me if he should want to steal, to kill, or to rape. So far I've understood everything.

  Yesterday at the rendezvous I was seeing for the first time a malevolent Henry. He had come more to hurt Fred than to see me. He reveled when he said, "Fred is working. How it must gripe him." I didn't want to choose the curtains without Fred but Henry insisted on choosing them. I don't know whether I imagined it or not but it seemed to me he was exulting in insensibility. "I found as much pleasure doing evil..." said Stavrogin. To me, an unknown pleasure. I had planned to send Henry a telegram while I was with Fred saying, "I love you." Instead, I wanted to go see Fred and blot out the hurt. Henry's pleasure was startling to me. He said, "I used to like borrowing from a certain man and then I would spend half the sum he gave me to send him a telegram." When stories like this rise out of drunken mists, I see in him a gleam of deviltry, a secret enjoyment of cruelty. June buying perfume for Jean while Henry starved, or taking pleasure in concealing a bottle of old Madeira in her trunk while Henry and his friends, penniless, wished desperately for something to drink. What startles me is not the act but the pleasure which accompanies it. Henry was pushed to t
orment Fred. June carries it all much further than he does, blatantly, such as when she wrestled with Jean at Henry's parents' house. This love of cruelty binds them together insolubly. They would both take pleasure in humiliating me, in destroying me.

  I feel my past like an unbearable weight on me, like a curse, the source of every movement I make, every word I utter. At certain moments the past surmounts me, and Henry recedes into unreality. A terrible reserve, an unnatural purity envelops me, and I close out the world completely. Today I am the jeunefille of Richmond Hill, writing on an ivory white desk about nothing at all.

  I have no fear of God, and yet fear keeps me awake at night, fear of the devil. And if I believe in the devil, I must believe in God. And if evil is abhorrent to me, I must be a saint.

  Henry, save me from beatification, from the horrors of static perfection. Precipitate me into the inferno.

  Seeing Eduardo yesterday crystallized my mental chill. I listen to his explanation of my feelings. It sounds very plausible. I have suddenly turned cold towards Henry because I witnessed his cruelty to Fred. Cruelty has been the great conflict of my life. I witnessed cruelty in my childhood—Father's cruelty towards Mother and his sadistic punishment of my brothers and me—and the sympathy I felt for my mother reached hysteria when she and my father quarreled, acts which paralyzed me later. I grew up with such an incapacity for cruelty it amounts to a weakness.

  Seeing a small aspect of it in Henry brought a realization of his other cruelties. And more than that, Fred aroused all the reserve in me, filling me with recollections of my childhood, which is what Eduardo describes as retrogression, falling back again into a childish state, which could keep me from progressing any further into maturer living.

  I had wanted to confide in someone, I even wanted to let myself be guided. Eduardo said the moment had come for me to be psychoanalyzed. He had always wanted this. He could help me by talking things over, but only Dr. Allendy could be a guide, a father (Eduardo loves to tempt me with a father figure). Why did I insist, instead, on making Eduardo my psychoanalyst? That was only postponing the real task. "Perhaps I like to look up to you," I said.

  "In place of the other relationship, which you don't want?"

  Somehow the talk seemed eminently effective to me. I was already singing. Hugo was off at a bank function. Eduardo went on analyzing. He was looking extraordinarily handsome. All during dinner I was affected by his forehead and his eyes, his profile, his mouth, his sly expression—the introvert gloating over his secrets. This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun. My laughter released him from seriousness. I told him about the allure of his face and his green eyes. I wanted him and took him, a casual lover. But a bad psychoanalyst, I teased, because he made love to his patient.

  As I ran upstairs to comb my hair, I knew that the next day I would rush to see Henry. All he does to combat my phantoms is to push me against the wall of his room and kiss me, to tell me in a whisper what he wants of my body today, what gestures, what attitudes. I obey, and I enjoy him to frenzy. We rush along over phantasmagoric obstacles. Now I know why I have loved him. Even Fred, before he left us, seemed less tragic, and I confided to Henry that I didn't want a perfect love from him, that I knew he was tired of all that, as I was, that I felt a surge of wisdom and humor, and that nothing could stop our relationship until we just didn't want to make love any more. For the first time, I think I understand what pleasure is. And I am glad I laughed so much last night, and sang this morning, and moved irresistibly towards Henry. (Eduardo was still here when I left, carrying the package containing Henry's curtains.)

  Just before this, my brother Joaquin and Eduardo were talking about Henry, in my presence. (Joaquin has read my journal.) They think that Henry is a destructive force who has elected me, the most creative of forces, to test his power on, that I have succumbed to the magic of tons of literature (it is true that I love literature), that I will be saved—I forget how, but somehow in spite of myself.

  And as I lay there, already happy because I had decided I would have my Henry today, I smiled.

  On the first page of a beautiful purple-covered diary book Eduardo gave me, with an inscription-, I have already written Henry's name. No Dr. Allendy for me. No paralyzing analysis. Just living.

  APRIL

  When Henry hears Hugo's beautiful, vibrant, loyal, heart-stirring voice over the telephone, he is angry at the amorality of women, of all women, of women like myself. He himself practices all the disloyalties, all the treacheries, but the faithlessness of a woman hurts him. And I am terribly distressed when he is in such a mood, because I have a feeling of being faithful to the bond between Hugo and me. Nothing that I live outside of the circle of our love alters or diminishes it. On the contrary, I love him better because I love him without hypocrisy. But the paradox torments me deeply. That I am not more perfect, or more like Hugo, is to be despised, yes, but it is only the other side of my being.

  Henry would understand my abandoning him out of consideration for Hugo, but to do so would be hypocritical of me. One thing is certain, though: If one day I were forced to choose between Hugo and Henry, I would choose Hugo without hesitation. The liberty which I have given myself in Hugo's name, like a gift from him, only increases the richness and potency of my love for him. Amorality, or a more complicated morality, aims at the ultimate loyalty and overlooks the immediate and literal one. I share with Henry an anger, not at the imperfections of women, but at the foulness of living itself, which perhaps this volume proclaims more loudly than all Henry's curses.

  Henry threatened yesterday to make me absolutely drunk, which became effective only when I read Fred's powdered and crystallized letters to Céline. Our talk breaks and splashes like a kaleidoscope. When Henry goes to the kitchen, Fred and I talk as if we had thrown a bridge from fortress to fortress and there is nothing we can hold back. Words, like a procession, rush across a bridge which is usually drawn up and has even grown rusted from the love of solitude. Then there is Henry, constantly in communication with the world, as if sitting forever at the head of a gigantic banquet.

  In the small kitchen, without moving, we three almost touch each other. Henry moved to put a hand on my shoulder and to kiss me, and Fred would not look at the kiss. I sat bowed under the two kinds of love. There was Henry's warmth, his voice, his hands, his mouth. And there were Fred's feelings for me, touching a more delicate region, so that while Henry kissed me I wanted to extend my hand to Fred and hold both loves.

  Henry was bursting with universal generosity: "I give you Anaïs, Fred. You see how I am. I want everybody to love Anaïs. She's wonderful."

  "She's too wonderful," said Fred. "You don't deserve her."

  "You are a wasp," cried Henry, the hurt giant.

  "Besides," said Fred, "you haven't given me Anaïs. I have my own Anaïs, a different one from yours. I've taken her without asking either of you. Stay all night, Anaïs. We need you."

  "Yes, yes," cried Henry.

  I sit like an idol, and it is Fred who criticizes the giant because the giant does not worship me.

  "Curse it, Anaïs," Henry says, "I don't worship you, but I love you. I feel I can give you as much as Eduardo, for example. I could not hurt you. When I see you sitting there, so fragile, I know I won't hurt you."

  "I don't want worship," says the idol. "You give me—well, what you give me is better than worship."

  Fred's hand trembles when he offers me a glass of wine. The wine stirs the center of my body, and it is throbbing. Henry goes out for a moment. Fred and I are silent. It is Fred who has said, "No, I don't like big banquets. I love a dinner like this, for two or three." Now we are heavily silent, and I feel bowed down. Henry returns and asks Fred to leave us. He has scarcely pulled the door after him when Henry and I are tasting each other's flesh. We fall together into our savage world. He bites me. He makes my bones crack. He makes me lie with legs wide ope
n and digs into me. Our cravings grow wild. Our bodies are convulsed.

  "Oh, Anaïs," he says, "I don't know how you learned it, but you can fuck, you can fuck. I've never said it before, as strongly, but listen now, I love you madly. You've got me, you've got me. I'm crazy about you."

  And then something I say arouses a sudden doubt in him. "It isn't only the fucking, is it? You do love me?"

  The first lie. Mouths touching, breaths mingling; I, with his wet, hot penis in me, say I love him.

  But as I say it I know it is not true. His body has a way of arousing mine, of answering mine. When I think of him I want to open my legs. Now he is asleep in my arms, heavily asleep. I hear an accordion. It is Sunday night, in Clichy. I think of Bubu de Montparnasse, of hotel rooms, of the way Henry pushes up my leg, of his loving my buttocks. I am not myself at this moment, the vagabond. The accordion swells my heart, the white blood of Henry has filled me. He lies asleep in my arms and I do not love him.

  I think I told Fred I didn't love Henry when we sat there silently. I told him I loved his own visionariness, his hallucinations. Henry carries the power to fuck, to flow, to curse, to enlarge and vitalize, to destroy and create suffering. It is the demon in him I admire, the indestructible idealist, the masochist who has found a way of inflicting pain on himself, because he suffers from his treacheries, his crudenesses. It touches me when he is humble before something like my house. "I know I am a boor and that I do not know how to behave in such a house, and so I pretend to despise it, but I love it. I love the beauty and fineness of it. It is so warm that when I come into it I feel taken up in the arms of a Ceres, I'm ensorcelled."