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

by Anais Nin

  I sat dazed. "Certainly," he added, "I had to live through all that, but precisely because I have lived it through, I am finished with it and I can experience a new kind of love. I feel stronger than June, yet if June comes back things might start again out of a kind of fatal necessity. What I feel is that I want you to save me from June. I do not want to be diminished, humiliated, destroyed by her again. I know enough to know I want to break with her. I dread her return, the destruction of my work. I was thinking how I have absorbed your time and attention, worried you, hurt you, even; how other people's troubles are poured on you, too; how you are asked to solve problems, to help. And meanwhile there is your writing, deeper and better than anybody's, which nobody gives a goddamn about and nobody helps you to do."

  At this I laughed. "But, Henry, you do give a goddamn, and besides I can wait. It is you who are behind time and must be given a chance to catch up."

  I told him a little of the storm I had been through in the past days. I felt like someone condemned to die and then suddenly paroled. It didn't seem to matter any more how often June might take Henry back. At this moment he and I were indissolubly married. The fusion of our bodies that followed was almost extraneous—for the first time, only a symbol, a gesture. A fusion so swift that it seemed to take place in space, and the movements of the body followed at a slower pace.

  I have written thirty pages about June in an intense and wholly imaginative manner, the best I have done so far. It is good to see all the laboratory experiments culminate in a lyrical outburst.

  Last night I deeply enjoyed myself at the Grand Guignol: the convulsions of a woman tempted by passion, lying naked on a black velvet couch. A lusty woman takes her pajamas down. I felt tremendous sexual excitement.

  Hugo and I visited another house, where the women were uglier than those at 32 rue Blondel. The room was lined with mirrors. The women moved like a herd of passive animals, two by two, turning to the phonograph music. Beforehand, I had been roused to high expectations. I could not believe the ugliness of the women as they came in. In my head, the dance of the naked women was still a beautiful and voluptuous orgy. As I saw the sagging breasts with their large brown leather tips, the bluish legs, the protruding stomachs, smiles with teeth missing, and that brutish mass of flesh turning lifelessly, like wooden horses of a merry-go-round, my feelings collapsed. Not even pity. Just cool observation. Again we see monotonous poses, and in between, when most uncalled for, the women kissed each other dispassionately, sexlessly. Hips, valleyed buttocks, the mysterious darkness between the legs—all exposed so meaninglessly that it took Hugo and me two days to separate the association of my body, my legs, my breasts from that troupe of turning animals. What I would like is to join them for one night, to walk naked into the room with them, to look at the men and women sitting there and to see their reaction when I appear, I and my halo of illusion.

  Cruelty to Eduardo. When he has elaborated a plan of intellectual domination of his pain, I sit very near him on the couch and make him read Henry's writing, which he hates. He says I am breeding a little giant. I see him looking at my more aggressive breasts. I see him turn pale and rush away on an earlier train.

  Today I almost lost my mind craving Henry. I cannot live three days without him. Joyful, terrible slavery. Oh, to be a man, capable of satisfying one's self so easily, so indiscriminately.

  I have returned, by very devious roads, to Allendy's simple statement that love excludes passion and passion love. The only time Hugo's love and mine turned to passion was during our desperate quarrels after our return from New York, and in the same way June has given Henry the maximum of passion. I could give him the maximum of love. But I refuse to because at the moment passion seems of greater value. Perhaps I am blind just now to deeper values. There was danger in my reconciliation with Henry the other day, the danger of falling in love. I should not only have let him be jealous of Allendy, but I should have deceived him with Allendy. That would have raised our love to passion. Even Henry's vocabulary changes when he writes to me or about me; his tone is less extravagant, more profound. And I am opposed to this treatment, because I myself am whipped up to a paroxysm. Nothing less than passion can satisfy me now. Yet I cannot act according to my ravings. Allendy has made me afraid of premeditated acts. My instincts lead me to love over and over again.

  After a long weekend, Henry telephones that he will not come to see me until Wednesday. I had been expecting him all day. I told him I couldn't see him until Thursday, that I was working for Allendy. I wanted to hurt him. And when I mentioned our plans for Spain, he said, "Under the circumstances it is better not to go."

  I knew then that he loved me only to console himself for his loss of June, to help himself to live, only for the happiness I could give him. Even the trip to Spain was planned to save himself from June, not to be with me. As soon as Allendy returns, I will give myself to him.

  Hugo reads my thirty pages on June and exclaims they are good. Again I wonder if he is only half alive or simply inarticulate. I ask him this and hurt him. He makes a remarkable statement: "If this is your real self, the one you are asserting, I say it is a very hard self."

  Yes. This assertion is the beginning of June, of another volcano. I have been sweetly asleep for a few centuries, and I am erupting without warning. The hardness in me, an inexhaustible amount, has slowly accumulated through the efforts I made to subdue the voraciousness of my ego. Henry is going to suffer, too. I asked him to come today.

  He came immediately, on his bicycle, soft and anxious. I let him read over a long letter I wrote, containing all the things I told my journal. He did not protest. He laughed, half sadly. Then he sat on the couch, completely absorbed by the terror of knowing how easily everything could crumble. I waited, baffled by his brooding. Finally he awoke to say, "I am only what you imagine me to be." I don't know what else we said. I realized both the extent and the limits of Henry's love, of his being possessed by June against his will, just as I am, and of his loving me deeply, as I do him. When he said to me, in torment, "I need to know what you want," I told him, "Nothing more than this closeness. When all is right between us I can bear my life."

  He said, "I realized that a holiday in Spain for a few months is no solution. And I know that if we took it, you would never return to Hugo. I would not let you return." I answered, "And I cannot think any further than a holiday because of Hugo." We looked at one another and knew how much each of us was paying for his weakness: he, for his slavery to passion, and I, for my slavery to pity.

  The days that followed were unique, resplendent. Talk and passion, work and passion. What I need to keep, to hold warmly against my breast, are the hours in that top-floor room. Henry could not leave me. He stayed two days, which culminated in such a burst of sexual frenzy that I was left burning for long afterwards.

  I have ceased worrying. I lie back and just love him, and I get such love from him as would justify my whole existence. I stutter when I mention his name. Each day he is a new man, with new depths and new sensibilities.

  I received a photograph of him today. It was a strange feeling to see so clearly the full mouth, the bestial nose, the pale, Faustian eyes—that mixture of delicacy and animalism, of toughness and sensibility. I feel that I have loved the most remarkable man of our age.

  Most of my life has been spent in enriching as well as I could the long, long waiting for the great events which fill me now so deeply that I am overwhelmed. Now I understand the terrific restlessness, the tragic sense of failure, the deep discontent. I was waiting. This is the hour of expansion, of true living. All the rest was a preparation. Thirty years of anguished watchfulness. And now these are the days I lived for. And to be aware of this, so fully aware, that is what is almost humanly unbearable. Human beings cannot bear the knowledge of the future. To me, the knowledge of the present is just as dazzling. To be so acutely rich and to know it

  Last night Hugo put his head on my knees. As I looked at him tenderly I said to myself,
"How can I ever reveal to him that I no longer love him?" And what is more, I realize that I am not wholly wrapped up in Henry, that Allendy preoccupies me, that the other night I was sentimentally stirred by Eduardo's presence. The truth is that I am capricious, with sensual stirrings in many directions. I see Allendy on Thursday. I am very keen on this meeting. In imagination I have been out with him to the Russian restaurant, and he has visited me here in Louveciennes. Henry can well be jealous of Allendy. Allendy himself has freed me of the sense of guilt.

  Henry was mystified by my new pages. Was it more than brocade, he asked, more than beautiful language? I was upset that he did not understand. I began to explain. Then he said, as everybody else has said, "Well, you should give a clue, you should lead up to it; we are thrown into the strangeness unexpectedly. This must be read a hundred times."

  "Who is going to read it a hundred times?" I said sadly. But then I thought of Ulysses and the studies which accompany it. But Henry, with his characteristic thoroughness, would not stop there. He walked about and raved that I must become human and tell a human story. Here, I faced my lifelong problem. I wanted to go on in that abstract, intense way, but could anyone bear it? Hugo understood it, nonintellectually, as poetry; Eduardo, as symbolism. But for me there was meaning in those brocaded phrases.

  The more I talked about my ideas, the more excited Henry became, until he began to shout that I should continue exactly in that same tone, that I was doing something unique. People would have to struggle to decipher me. He always knew I would do something unique. Besides, he said, I owed it to the world. If I didn't do something good I should be hung; after nurturing this work with a lifetime of journal writing, the orange squeezer, where all the seeds and rinds are left behind.

  He stood by the window saying, "How can I go back to Clichy now? It is like returning to a prison. This is the place where one grows, expands, deepens. How I love this solitude. How rich it is." And I stood behind him, clinging to him, saying, "Stay, stay."

  And when he is here, Louveciennes is rich for me, alive. My body and mind vibrate continuously. I am not only more woman, but more writer, more thinker, more reader, more everything. My love for him creates an ambiance in which he is resplendent. He becomes ensorcelled and cannot leave until Fred telephones that there are people asking for him and mail to be read.

  How extraordinarily our thinking leaps along with opposition of themes, contrasts, and fundamental accord. He mistrusts my swiftness, slows down my rhythm, and I plunge into his creativeness as into unlimited wealth. Our work is interrelated, interdependent, married. My work is the wife of his work.

  Often Henry stands in the middle of my bedroom and says, "I feel as if I were the husband here. Hugo is just a charming young man whom we are very fond of."

  More and more I realize that his life with June was a dangerous, shattering adventure. I understand it when he wants me to save him from June. When he begins to talk about renting a place like Louveciennes somewhere and I say, "When your book comes out, you'll send for June and do all that," he smiles sorrowfully and tells me that is not what he wants. I know it, or, rather, I know he wishes a life like mine and Hugo's were possible with June.

  Last night because Henry was tired and looked for a moment less lusty, less truculent, such a tenderness for him welled in me that I almost walked over to him in front of Hugo and Mother to embrace him, to ask him to come downstairs to our big soft bed and rest. How I wanted to care for him. He was almost crying as he talked about women loving each other in the movie Jeunes filles en uniforme.

  Then he said, in front of Mother, "I must talk to you a few minutes. I have corrected your manuscript." We went downstairs and sat on my bed. I was so moved by the work he had done. We began kissing. Tongues, hands, moisture. I bit my fingers so as not to scream.

  I went upstairs, still throbbing, and talked to Mother. Henry followed, looking like a saint, creamy voiced. And I felt his presence down to my toes.

  Hugo is playing and singing as he used to play and sing in Richmond Hill, fumbling, hesitating. His fingers are not skillful, and his voice wavers. The sadness I experience as I listen to him shows how deeply his songs and sweetness have receded for me, into a past linked to the present hour only by the continuity of memories. Memories alone hold Hugo and me together; and my journal preserves them. Oh, to be able to leap forward without this web around me.

  SEPTEMBER

  I look into Allendy's face with newborn power, I see his intensely blue, fanatic eyes melt, and I hear the eagerness in his voice when he asks me to return soon. We kiss more warmly than the last time. Henry is still between me and a full tasting of Allendy, but the deviltry in me is stronger. I repeat our kiss in space, holding my head up to it as I walk through the streets, my mouth open to new drink.

  All evening his eyes, his mouth, and the ruggedness of his beard stay with me.

  I torment Eduardo and arouse his jealousy by awakening the admiration of a young Cuban doctor, whose eyes linger on the lines of my body. We have gone dancing, Hugo, Eduardo, and I. Eduardo wants to draw me back to him, to destroy my exuberance. He is cold, withdrawn, malevolent. He fights against the sinuosity of my body during our dance, the brushing of my cheek, the purring voice in his ears. He kills my joy with his green-eyed fury, and when he has killed it he is unhappy. I see the veins swelling on his temples. He ends the evening with: "What you did to me a few months ago!"

  Allendy points out that I abandon myself to the consuming cruelty of life with Henry. Pain has become the ultimate joy. For every cry of joy in Henry's arms, there is a lash of expiation: June and Hugo, Hugo and June. How fervently Allendy now talks against Henry, but I know he is not only discoursing on my plan for self-destruction but that he is moved by his own jealousy. At the end of the analysis I see that he is profoundly disturbed. I have been exaggerating purposely. Henry is the softest, kindest man alive, softer even than I am, though in appearance we are both terrorizers and amoralists. But I enjoy Allendy's concern for me. The power he has nurtured in me is dangerous, more dangerous than my former timidity. He must protect me now by the deftness of his analysis and the strength of his arms and his mouth.

  I do not believe men ever had, in one woman, such a potential enemy and such an actual friend. I am full of inexhaustible love for Hugo, Eduardo, Henry, and Allendy. Eduardo's jealousy last night was also my jealousy, my pain. I accompanied him the short distance he wanted to walk, to clear his head, he said. My eyes were blank, my hands cold. I have such a knowledge of pain that I cannot inflict it. Later, at home, Hugo almost threw himself on me, and I opened my legs passively, like a prostitute, empty of feeling. Yet I know that he alone loves generously and selflessly.

  Yesterday I told Allendy that I would love to have a dangerous life with Henry and to enter a more difficult, more precarious world; to be heroic and make enormous sacrifices like June, knowing full well that, with my fragility, I would end up in a sanatorium.

  Allendy said, "You love Henry out of excessive gratitude, because he has made you woman. You are too grateful for the love given you. It is your due."

  I recall the sacrilegious communions during my childhood at which I received my father in place of God, closing my eyes and swallowing the white bread with blissful tremors, embracing my father, communing with him, in a confusion of religious ecstasy and incestuous passion. Everything was for him. I wanted to send him my journal. Mother dissuaded me because it might have gotten lost on the way. Oh, the hypocrisy of my lowered eyes, the hidden bursts of tears at night, the voluptuous secret obsession with him. What I remember best of him at this moment is not paternal protection or tenderness, but an expression of intensity, animal vigor, which I recognize in myself, an affinity of temperament which I recognized with a child's innocent intuition. A volcanic life hunger—that is what I remember and still participate in, secretly admiring a sensual potency that automatically negates my mother's values.

  I have remained the woman who loves incest. I still pra
ctice the most incestuous crimes with a sacred religious fervor. I am the most corrupt of all women, for I seek a refinement in my incest, the accompaniment of beautiful chants, music, so that everyone believes in my soul. With a madonna face, I still swallow God and sperm, and my orgasm resembles a mystical climax. The men I love, Hugo loves, and I let them act like brothers. Eduardo confesses his love to Allendy. Allendy is going to be my lover. Now I send Hugo to Allendy so that Allendy will teach him to be less dependent on me for his happiness.

  When I immolated my childhood to my mother, when I give away all I own, when I help, understand, serve, what tremendous crimes I am expiating—strange, insidious joys, like my love for Eduardo, my own blood; for Hugo's spiritual father, John; for June, a woman; for June's husband; for Eduardo's spiritual father, Allendy, who is now Hugo's guide. It only remains for me now to go to my own father and enjoy to the full the experience of our sensual sameness, to hear from his lips the obscenities, the brutal language I have never formulated, but which I love in Henry.