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

by Anais Nin

  We talk about physical facts. I am underweight. A few pounds more would give me security. Will Allendy add medicine to the psychic treatment? I confess the fear I have that my breasts are small perhaps because I have masculine elements in me and half of my body may therefore be adolescent.

  Allendy: "Are they absolutely undeveloped?"

  "No." As we flounder in talk I say, "You are a doctor; I'll simply show them to you." And I do. Then he laughs at my fears. "Perfectly feminine," he says, "small but well outlined—lovely figure. A few pounds more, yes," but how disproportionate my self-criticisms.

  He has observed the unnaturalness of my personality. As if enveloped in a mist, veiled. No news to me, except that I did not know it could be so plainly read. For example, my two voices, which have become quite apparent lately: one, according to Fred, is like that of a child before its First Communion, timid, soundless. The other is assured, deeper. This one appears when I have a great deal of confidence.

  Allendy thinks that I have created a completely artificial personality, like a shield. I conceal myself. I have constructed a manner that is seductive, affable, gay, and within this I am hidden.

  I had asked him to help me physically. Was this a sincere action, showing him my breasts? Did I want to test my charm on him? Wasn't I pleased that he should be complimentary? That he should show more interest in me?

  Is it Allendy or Henry who is curing me?

  Henry's new love has me in a state of bliss such as I have never known. He wanted to hold off. He didn't want to put himself in my power. He didn't want to add himself to "the list" of my lovers. He didn't want to get serious. And now! He wants to be my husband, to have me all the time; he writes love letters to the child I was at eleven, who has touched him profoundly. He wants to protect me and give me things.

  "I never thought such a frail little thing could have so much power. Did I ever say you were not beautiful? How could I say it! You're beautiful, you're beautiful!" When he kisses me now I do not hold back.

  I can now bite him when we lie in bed. "We devour each other, like two savages," he said.

  I lose my fear of showing myself naked. He loves me. We laugh at my gaining weight. He has made me change my hair because he did not like the severe Spanish style. I have thrown it back and high over my ears. I feel wind blown. I look younger. I do not try to be the femme fatale. It is useless. I feel loved for myself, for my inner self, foi every word I write, for my timidities, my sorrows, my struggles, my defects, my frailness. I love Henry in the same way. I cannot even hate his rushing towards other women. Despite his love for me, he is interested in meeting Natasha and Mona Paiva, the dancer. He has a diabolical curiosity about people. I have never known a man with so many sides, with such a range.

  To have a summer day like today and a night with Henry—I ask nothing more.

  Henry shows me the first pages of his next book. He has absorbed my novel and written a fantastic parody of it, incited partly by his jealousy and anger, because the other morning when I left him, Fred called me into his room and wanted to kiss me. I did not let him, but Henry heard the silence and imagined the scene and my faithlessness. The pages elated me—their perfection and finesse and sharpness, and the fantastic tone. There is poetry in them, too, and a secret tenderness. He has made a special nook in himself for me.

  He expected me to have written ten pages at least about that night we spent talking until dawn. But something has happened to the woman with a notebook. I have come home and sunk into my enjoyment of him as into a warm summer day. The journal is secondary. Everything is secondary to Henry. If he did not have June, I would give everything to live with him. Each different aspect of him holds me: Henry correcting my novel with amazing care, with interest, with sarcasm, with admiration, with complete understanding; Henry, without self-confidence, so extraordinarily modest; Henry, the demon pumping me, making diabolical notes; Henry concealing his feelings from Fred and displaying to me a tremendous tenderness. Last night in bed, half asleep, he was still murmuring, "You're so wonderful, there is no man good enough for you."

  He has made me more honest with myself. And then he says, "You give me so much, so much and I give you nothing."

  He, too, lacks confidence. He is uneasy in certain social situations if they are the least bit chic. He is not sure of my love. He believes that I am extremely sensual and therefore I could easily leave him for another man and still another. At this I laugh. Yes, of course I would love to be fucked five times a day, but I would have to be in love. That is certainly a drawback, an inconvenience. And I can only love one man at a time. "I want you to stop with me," Henry says. "I love your not being promiscuous. I was terribly worried when you were interested in Montparnasse." And then he begins to kiss me. "You've got me, Anaïs." He has playful, almost childish caresses for me sometimes. We rub noses, or he chews my eyelashes, or runs his thumb over the outlines of my face. And I then see a sort of gnomelike Henry, a little Henry, so tender.

  Fred is sure Henry is hurting me fearfully. But Henry cannot hurt me any more. Even his faithlessness could not hurt me. Besides, I require less tenderness. Henry is toughening me. When I find out he does not like my perfume because it is too delicate, at first I am a bit offended. Fred loves Mitsouko, but Henry likes acrid, powerful perfumes. He always demands assertion, potency.

  It is like his asking me to change my hair style because he likes wildness in hair. When he uttered the word "wildness" I responded to it, as though it were something I had been wanting. Wild hair. His stocky, firm hands go through my hair. My hair is in his mouth when we sleep. And when I clasp my hands behind my head, raising my hair, in a Grecian way, he exclaims, "That is the way I love it."

  I feel at home in Clichy. Hugo is not necessary to me. I only bring to him my weariness from sleepless nights, a joyful weariness. Early in the morning when I slip out of Henry's apartment, the Clichy workmen are awake. I carry away my red journal, but that is only a habit, for I carry away no secrets; Henry has read my journals (this one, not yet). I also carry away a few pages of Fred's book, delicate as a watercolor, or a few pages from Henry's book, which are like a volcano. The old pattern of my life is shattered. It hangs around me in shreds. Great things are going to happen from all this. I feel the fermentation. The train which takes me home to Louveciennes shakes phrases in my mind like dice in a dice box.

  My journal writing breaks down, because it was an intimacy with myself. Now it is interrupted constantly by Henry's voice, his hand on my knee.

  Louveciennes is like a casket, petal-lined, carved, golden, with walls of newborn leaves, blossoms, neatly raked alleys, names of flowers on sticks, old trees, hoary ivy, mistletoe. I will fill it with Henry. I walk up the hill remembering him grave, withdrawn, watching dancers. I ring the bell thinking of one of his humorous corrections of my book. In my bedroom I take off my stained underwear. I remember phrases of his that I will savor in the night. The taste of his penis is still in my mouth. My ear is burning from his bites. I want to fill the world with Henry, with his diabolical notes, plagiarisms, distortions, caricatures, nonsense, lies, profundities. The journal, too, will be filled with Henry.

  Yet I told him that he had killed the journal. He had been teasing me about it, and I had just discovered vegetative enjoyment. I was lying in bed after dinner, rose dress crumpled and stained. The journal was a disease. I was cured. For three days I had not written. I had not even written about our mad night of talking, when we heard the birds, looked out of the kitchen window and saw the dawn. I had missed so many dawns. I didn't care about anything except lying there with Henry. No more journal writing. Then his teasing vanished. Oh, no, that would be a pity, he said. The journal must not die. He would miss it.

  It did not die. I can find no other way of loving my Henry than filling pages with him when he is not here to be caressed and bitten. When I left him this morning, early, he was asleep. I wanted so much to kiss him. I felt despair as I quietly packed my black valise. Hugo wil
l be home in four hours.

  Henry said that in my novel it was curious to note the difference between the me who talks to Hugo and the one who talks to John. With Hugo, I behave youthfully, naively, almost religiously. With John, I show maturity and dexterity. It is the same even now. To Hugo I give idealistic explanations of my actions, because that is what he craves. Quite the opposite of what I give Henry. Henry says that after reading my book he can never again be sure of me. His worldliness helps him to catch every unconscious revelation, every innuendo. I feel that the book would hurt Hugo, whereas Henry feels I have, in the end, glorified him. And it is true. Henry even helped me to discard a few passages which weakened Hugo's character. But I will never again write about Hugo, because what I write for him and about him is hypocritical and youthful. I write about him as one writes about God, with traditional faith. His qualities are precious to me but not the most inspiring. All that is over now. And in dropping the constant effort to exalt my love of Hugo, I also drop the last vestiges of my immaturity.

  I remember the afternoon Henry came to Louveciennes after reading my childhood diary, expecting to find a girl of eleven. He was still moved by its pages. But my deviltry laughed away the child, and very soon I had him stirred up, saying mad things and fucking me. I wanted to triumph over the child. I refused to become sentimental, to retrogress. It was like a duel. The woman in me is strong. And Henry said he was drunk with looking at me. I told him I didn't want him for a husband (why, I don't know). I laughed at his passionateness. And the minute he was gone I wanted to have him back, to love him with ferocity. I had been more moved by his German seriousness and sentimentality than I had wanted to show. Heinrich! How I love his jealous questions, his cynical suspicions, his curiosity. The streets of Paris belong to him, the cafés and the whores. Modern writing belongs to him; he does it better than any. Every potency, from the whip of the wind to a revolution, belongs to him.

  I love his defects, too. One of them is fault finding, a demoniac habit of contradiction. But does it matter, since we understand each other so well that he cannot imagine us quarreling seriously over anything? When I think of him talking about June, I see a very hurt man. This man in my arms is not very harmful to me, because he needs me. He even says, "It's strange, Anaïs, but with you I feel relaxed. Most women make a man feel strained and tense. And I feel at my best because of that." I give him a feeling of absolute intimacy, as if I were his wife.

  Hugo is lying in bed beside me, and I am still writing about Henry. The idea of Henry sitting alone in the kitchen at Clichy is unbearable to me. And yet Hugo has grown these days. We laugh together about it. Now that we are both free of fears, we are living easily. He has been traveling with a man from the bank, a plain, simple, joyous man. And they have drunk together, exchanged obscene stories, and danced in cabarets. Hugo has at last been taken up by men. He has loved it. And I say: "Go away, travel a great deal. We both need that. We can't have it together. We can't give it to each other."

  I think of Fred observing Henry's sacrileges against good taste: lighting a match on the sole of his shoe, putting salt on the pâté de foie gras, drinking the wrong wines, eating sauerkraut. And I love it all.

  Yesterday Henry received a cable from June: "I miss you. I must join you soon." And Henry is angry. "I don't want June to come and torture me and hurt you, Anaïs. I love you. I don't want to lose you. As soon as you left the other day I began to miss you. 'Miss' is not the word; to crave for you. I want to be married to you. You're precious, rare. I see all of you now. I see the face of the child, the dancer, the sensual woman. You've made me happy. Terribly happy."

  We come together with despair and frenzy. I am in such ecstasy I'm weeping. I want to be soldered to him.

  "It is not me," he says. "It's something you've created out of your own wonderful self." I force him to admit it is he himself I love, a Henry I know well. But I know June's power over both of us. I say to him, "June has power over me, but it is you I love. There is a difference. Do you see it?"

  "That is the way I love you," he answers. "And you have power, too, of another kind."

  "What I'm afraid of is that June will separate us not only physically but completely."

  "Don't give in to June," says Henry. "Keep your wonderful mind. Be strong."

  "I could say the same to you," I answer. "Yet I know all of your mind will be of no use to you."

  "It will be different this time."

  The menace. We have talked. We are cpiiet. Fred has come into the room. We are plotting so I can spend a few days with Henry before I go away on vacation. Fred leaves us. Henry kisses me again. God, what kisses. I can't sleep when I think of them. We lie close together. Henry says I am wrapped around him like a cat. I kiss his throat. When his throat shows in the open shirt I can't talk, desire moves me so. I whisper hoarsely in his ear, "I love you," three times in such a tone that he is frightened. "I love you so much I even want to give you women!"

  Today I can't work because yesterday's feelings lie ready to pounce on me out of the softness of the garden. They are in the air, in the smells, in the sun, on myself, like the clothes I wear. It is too much to love this way. I need him near me every moment—more than near, inside of me.

  I hate June, and yet there is her beauty. June and I melted together, as it should be. Henry must have both. I want both, too. And June? June wants everything; because her beauty demands it.

  June, take everything from me but not Henry. Leave me Henry. He is not necessary to you. You do not love him as I do today. You can love many men. I will love only a few. For me, Henry is rare.

  I am giving Henry the courage to dominate and dazzle June. He is filling himself with the strength my love gives him. Every day I say I cannot love him more, and every day I find more love in me for him.

  Heinrich, another beautiful day with you is finished, always too early. And I am not empty of love yet. I loved you as you sat yesterday with the light on your gray-blond hair, the warm blood showing through your Nordic skin. Your mouth open, so sensual. Your shirt open. In your stocky hands you held your father's letter. I think of your childhood in the streets, your serious adolescence—but always sensual—many books. You know how tailors sit like Arabs over their work. You learned to cut out a pair of pants when you were five years old. You wrote your first book during a two weeks' vacation. You played jazz on the piano for the grownups to dance to. You were sometimes sent to get your father, who was drinking in a bar. You could slip under the swinging doors, you were so small. You tugged at his coat. You drank beer.

  You abhor kissing a woman's hand. You laugh at it. You look so fine in all your cast-off suits, shabby clothes. I know your body now. I know what deviltries you are capable of. You are something to me that I never read in your writings or heard about from June or your friends. Everybody thinks of the noise and the power of you. But I have heard and felt the softness. There are words in other tongues I must use when I talk about you. In my own, I think of: ardiente, salvaje, hombre.

  I want to be there wherever you are. Lying next to you even if you are asleep. Henry, kiss my eyelashes, put your fingers on my eyelids. Bite my ear. Push back my hair. I have learned to unbutton you so swiftly. All, in my mouth, sucking. Your fingers. The hotness. The frenzy. Our cries of satisfaction. One for each impact of your body against mine. Each blow a sting of joy. Driving in a spiral. The core touched. The womb sucks, back and forth, open, closed. Lips flicking, snake tongues flicking. Ah, the rupture—a blood cell burst with joy. Dissolution.

  The three of us are on the couch, looking at a map of Europe. Henry asks me, "Are you still gaining weight?"

  "Yes, continuously."

  "Oh, Anaïs, don't gain weight," says Fred. "I like you as you are."

  Henry smiles. "But Henry likes Renoiresque bodies," I say.

  "It's true," says Henry.

  "But I love slenderness. I love virginal breasts."

  "I should really love you, Fred. It was a mistake."


  Henry does not smile. I know his jealous expressions now, but Fred and I continue to banter. "Fred, after I spend a few days with Henry, I'll spend two days with you, in a hotel, so I can take Henry there. He loves to be taken to hotels where I have been before. Two days."

  "We'll have breakfast in bed. Mitsouko perfume. A chic hotel. Yes?"

  Later Henry says, "It's all right to be joking, but Anaïs, don't torment me. I'm jealous, terribly jealous." I want to laugh because I have already forgotten about the Renoir bodies, the virginal breasts.

  When Henry telephones, I feel his voice in my veins. I want him to talk into me. I eat Henry, I breathe Henry, Henry is in the sun. My cape is his arm around my waist.

  Café de la Place, Clichy. Midnight. I asked Henry to write something in the diary. He wrote: "I imagine that I am now a very celebrated personage and I am being given one of my own books to autograph. So I write with a stiff hand, a little pompously. Bonjour, Papa! No, I can't write in your journal now, Anaïs. Someday you will lend it to me, with a few blank pages towards the end—and I will write an index—a diabolical index. Heinrich. Place Clichy. There's nothing sacred about this book except you."

  To encourage him I had said, "There is nothing sacred about this book, and you can even write sideways or upside down in it."

  He was wearing a beret and looked thirty years old.

  Last night when Hugo had to go to a bank function and I realized I could go to Henry, on a soft summer night, I wanted to shout. In the taxi, alone, I sang and rocked my joy, murmuring, "Henry, Henry." And I kept my legs closed tight, against the invasion of his blood. When I arrived, Henry saw my mood. It flowed from my body and my face. Warm white blood. Henry screwing. There is no other word.