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

by Anais Nin

  Am I hypnotized, fascinated by evil because I have none in me? Or is there in me the greatest secret evil?

  My analysis was really over when Allendy kissed me the last time and I felt the nascence of a personal relationship. I took great pleasure in his kiss, and an hour later I was in Henry's arms. Henry is asleep now in my writing room, and I sit a few yards away writing about Allendy's kiss. I loved Allendy's bigness, his mouth and his hand at my throat. Henry was waiting for me at the station afterwards. I know I love him and that with Allendy it is coquetry, a pleasant game I am learning to play.

  Allendy says that if I were to give Hugo several shocks, like my desire for John, I would rouse him, but I cannot do this, and I prefer to put him in Allendy's hands. To awaken him through pain—here is my limitation, my failure. And secretly, I have a fear of plumbing his limitations. I am afraid to find a fund of deep feeling and nothing else. How much mind, how much imagination, how much sensuality is there in him? Can he ever be resuscitated, or am I to continue this course from man to man? Now that I am moving, I am afraid. Where am I going?

  I see what I do not like in Allendy—a certain conventionality, a veneer of conservatism; he is a lightweight being, when what I love are tragic, heavy-souled men, just as Henry said he loved romantic women.

  Today Allendy tried not to acknowledge that I am well. He wants me to need him. His analysis was less perfect insofar as there is now a personal element in it. I could see the crumbling of his objectivity. I marvel that this man, who knows the worst about me, is so strongly attracted. I am his creation.

  Henry reads Hugo's journal and finds it to be that of a cripple. He begins to suspect I was also a cripple when I married him.

  When Henry said this, I brought out my journal of that period, when I was nineteen, and read it to him. He was startled, jubilant, too. He wanted to read more, and to read the novel I wrote at twenty-one.

  Hugo was away on a business trip, and for five days Henry and I lived here together, never going to Paris, working, reading, walking. One afternoon I asked Eduardo to come. They discussed astrology, but secretly they fought each other. Henry told Eduardo he was dead, a fixed star, while he himself was a planet always revolving, always in movement. Eduardo remained composed, superior through his coolness, deftness, courtesy. Henry became confused and lost. Eduardo looked at once faunesque and clever. Henry was slow and Germanic, offering a smile to me, so infinitely moving.

  I was glad it was Henry who was staying at Louveciennes—warm, soft, human Henry. He was in such a chastened, helpless mood. We sat in the garden. He said he wanted to be buried there, never to be sent away, to be metamorphosed into a bear who would come in through my bedroom window when anyone was making love to me. He became child, lulled by my tenderness. I had never seen him so small and frail. There is the weirdest contrast between his drunkenness, when he sits flushed, combative, destructive, sensual, all instinct, a man whose animal vitality lures and subjugates women; and his soberness, when he can sit before a woman and read to her from books, talk to her in an almost religious tone, become wistful, pale, holy. It is an amazing transformation. He can sit in the garden like a gentle Eduardo of fifteen years ago, and then a few hours later, bite with great ferocity and utter the most obscene words while we lie convulsed with pleasure.

  Yet great tenderness wells up in me when Hugo returns. I want to give him joy, I force myself, and I begin to sincerely respond to his passion. I remember that one evening when Henry and I were lying on the couch in my studio, a string of Hugo's guitar snapped, the deepest string, resonant like his voice. It terrorized me, a foreboding of a finality I do not desire.

  I went to Allendy Monday, and I refused to be analyzed because, I said, I had begun to lie to him. So we sat and talked, and he was aware of my hostility. When I first came in I evaded his kiss. What I felt was that he was destroying my relationship with Henry; he was making fissures in it. I resented his strong influence, his domination of me. He answered wisely. Suddenly I again wanted to obey him. I said I was ready for analysis, that I would not lie any more, that I had exaggerated the dangers of my flight with Henry only to see how concerned he was about my life. His strange blue eyes fascinated me. I got up and walked around in my usual way, arms raised behind my head. He stretched out his arms.

  He has a big, overwhelming body, like John's. He holds me so tightly I almost suffocate. His mouth is not as voluptuous as Henry's, and we don't understand each other. But I stay in his arms. He says, "I will teach you to play, not to take love so tragically, not to pay such a heavy price for it. You have made it too dramatic and intense a thing. This will be pleasant. I have such a strong desire for you." Detestable wisdom. Oh, I hate him. While he talks I bow my head and smile. He shakes me, wanting to know what I am thinking. I really want to weep. I had aspired to this sort of relationship, and now I have it. Allendy is poised, powerful, but I have upset him. I have got him to love me first, to betray his love. If this is joy, I don't want it. He is aware of my reaction. "This seems tame to you?" There is only his body to fascinate me. He is the unknown.

  Eduardo, to whom I pour out this story, is glad I am moving towards Allendy. Both of them hate Henry.

  Still, I want Henry tonight, my love, my husband, whom I am going to betray soon with as much sorrow as I felt when I betrayed Hugo. I crave to love wholly, to be faithful. I love the groove in which my love for Henry has been running. Yet I am driven by diabolical forces outside of all grooves.

  Hugo is being greatly helped and strengthened by Allendy. He is beginning to love him, because there is in him a certain element of homosexuality.

  Allendy is now a devil god directing all our lives. Last night as Hugo talked I could observe Allendy's deft and beautiful influence. I laughed riotously when Hugo said Allendy had told him I needed to be dominated. Hugo answered, "Yes, but that is easy. Anaïs is Latin and so pliable." Allendy must have smiled. Then Hugo comes home and throws himself on me with a new savagery, and I enjoy myself, oh, I enjoy myself. It seems to me that at this moment I am blessed with three wonderful men and quite able to love all three.

  I suppose only a scruple keeps me from enjoying them. I wish Allendy were more forceful. He submits to women. He liked my aggressivity in our sexual games. His first sexual experience was a passive one when he was sixteen and an older woman made love to him.

  I went back to see him with great impatience, trembling now with cold, now with fever. We have discarded analysis. We talked about Eduardo, Hugo, astrology. I asked him to come and see me, but he feels he cannot yet because of his analysis of Hugo. We laughed together about the domination question. I like the way he caresses me. He makes none of Henry's obscene gestures, yet I feel the man whose planetary symbol is the Bull. I like it when we kiss standing up and I am made to feel small in his arms. He knows me better than I know him. I am baffled by his enigmatic character. I told him that I trusted him blindly, that we should just let things happen. I refused to analyze. This, he understood.

  From his house I went to a café on the corner, where I had asked Henry to meet me. Before I saw Allendy, I talked with Eduardo. And at eight-thirty I agreed to meet Hugo. When I saw Henry, I felt estranged from him. I hated my capriciousness.

  Now I must keep secrets from Henry, and I can no longer confide everything to Allendy because we are man and woman with passion growing between us. I have lost a father! I cannot tell him I still love Henry. Shall I try to be altogether truthful with Henry?

  Hugo plays his guitar tonight while I write and draws me to him with a new violence, roused by analysis. He has been writing profusely in his journal and talking expansively, and, at last, interestingly.

  Eduardo does not believe my confidences about Allendy. He thinks we have planned to save him by arousing his jealousy—my beloved pathological child, Eduardo, whom I will love in a certain way eternally. The only time we are happy together is when we retrogress to a magical sphere of beauty. He has wiped our sexual hours from his memory, bu
t not my offense. He dreams that I will one day go to him and crawl on my knees, so that he can make me suffer for flaunting Henry before him.

  He fights me blindly, furiously, reproaching me for the night we went out to dance, for my trying to force him to be alive. At the same time his jealousy is obvious, and he shows Allendy a note in which I tell him I love him and will always love him, in a strange, mystical fashion.

  I rush to Allendy for help, because my apparent desire for Eduardo was expressed merely to efface the offense he cannot bear. I wanted him to have the last word, to feel that he had refused me, because he needs to feel his strength. But when Allendy shows me the tenderest, most protective love, I rebel against it. He wants to postpone personal intimacy for the sake of the analysis he feels I still need. As I fight off analysis, I betray exactly what he suspects: that I require extravagant, passionate demonstrations of love, not tenderness or protection. He has sensed that I want his love as a trophy, not for his very own self. Yet as soon as I write these words, I know they are not entirely true.

  I leave him completely shattered. And today I receive my true love, Henry, with great joy, and ardent commingling. How we flash! And then I realize I can only love fully when I have confidence. I am sure of Henry's love, and so I abandon myself.

  Then Henry tells me, because he has been jealous and worried, that he has read about those hysterical women who are capable of loving two or three men profoundly at the same time. Is this what I am?

  The only thing psychoanalysis achieves is to make one more conscious of one's misfortunes. I have gained a clearer and more terrifying knowledge of the dangers in my course. It has not taught me to laugh. I sit here tonight as somberly as I sat when I was a child. Henry alone, the most alive of all men, has the power to make me blissful.

  I had a stupendous scene with Allendy. I brought him two pages of "explanations," which at first bewildered him. I stressed two moments which made me withdraw from him: one, when he said, "And what is to become of poor Hugo if I let myself go? If he finds out I have betrayed him, his cure will be impossible." Scruples. Like John's scruples. They are unbearable to me, because I have suffered too much from scruples, and so I love Henry's unscrupulousness. June's. They create a balance which puts me at ease. But, as Allendy points out, balance is not to be sought by association with others; it must exist within one's self. I should be free enough of scruples not to need to be swept off my feet by the unscrupulousness of another.

  The second complaint: Allendy's great tenderness, aroused by a reading of my childhood journal. I hate all semblance of tenderness, because it reminds me of Eduardo's and Hugo's treatment of me, which nearly wrecked me. Here, Allendy was angry because he misinterpreted my words. Was I comparing him to Eduardo and Hugo? But I had enough presence of mind, although I was weeping, to say how aware I was that my reaction deformed the true sense of tenderness, that there was no weakness in him but, rather, an abnormal craving for aggressiveness and reassurance in me. He talked softly then, explaining how a separation of the erotic and the sentimental was no solution, that although my experience with love, before Henry, had been a failure, I would get no happiness from a purely erotic connection.

  At first he wandered in the maze of ramifications I had created. I wanted to confuse him, to elude the exact truth. To my great surprise he suddenly discarded everything I had been saying and said, "You were under the impression last time, because I talked quietly about Hugo and my work, that I loved you less. And immediately you withdrew from me, in order not to suffer. You hardened yourself. It is your childhood tragedy repeating itself. If, when you were a child, you had been made to realize that your father had to live his own life, that he was forced to abandon you, that in spite of this he loved you, you would not have suffered so terribly. And it is always the same. If Hugo is busy in the bank, you feel he is neglecting you. If I talk about work, you are hurt. Believe me, you are deeply mistaken. I love you in a way which is far deeper and more true than what you seek. I sensed that you still needed an analyst, that you were not well. I was determined that no attraction to you should interfere with my care of you. If I were wildly impatient merely to possess you, you would soon realize what a meager gift I was making you. I want more than that. I want to do away with this conflict which causes you so much pain."

  "You cannot do any more for me," I said. "Since I have begun to depend on you I feel weaker than ever before. I have disappointed you by acting neurotically at the very moment when I should have shown the wisdom of your guidance. I don't want to ever come back to you. I feel that I must go and work and live and forget about all this."

  "That is no solution. This time you must face the whole thing with me. I will help you. I must lay aside all personal desire for the moment, and you must give up this doubt completely today. It always ruins your happiness. If you can accept what I tell you this time—that I love you, that we must wait, that you must realize how entangled I am with Hugo and Eduardo, that I must, first of all, finish my task as a doctor before I take any pleasure in our personal relationship—then we may conquer your reaction for good."

  He talked so fervently, so justly. I lay back in my chair, weeping silently, realizing how right he was, racked with pain, not only because of my struggle to win him but because of the accumulated bitterness of all my unhappy relationships.

  When I left him, I felt dazed. I almost fell asleep in the train.

  To Henry: "Do you remember the time I told you I was in great revolt against Allendy and analysis? He had made me reach a point where, by great effort of logic on his part, he had resolved my chaos, established a pattern. I was furious to think I could be made to fit within one of those 'few fundamental patterns.'

  "For me, it became a question of upsetting the pattern. I set out to do this with the most ingenious lies, the most elaborate piece of acting I have ever done in my life. I used all my talent for analysis and logic, which he admitted I had to a great degree, my own ease at giving explanations. As I hinted to you, I did not hesitate to play with his own personal feelings, every bit of power I had I used, to create a drama, to elude his theory, to complicate and throw veils. I lied and lied more carefully, more calculatingly than June, with all the strength of my mind. I wish I could tell you how and why.... Anyway, I did it all without endangering our love: it was a battle of wits in which I have taken the utmost delight. And do you know what? Allendy has beaten us, Allendy has found the truth, he has analyzed all of it right, has detected the lies, has sailed (I won't say blithely) through all my tortuousness, and finally proved today again the truth of those damned 'fundamental patterns' which explain the behavior of all human beings. I tell you this: I would never let June go to him, for June would simply cease to exist, since June is all ramifications of neuroses. It would be a crime to explain her away.... And tomorrow I go to Allendy and we start another drama, or I start another drama, with a lie or a phrase, a drama of another kind, the struggle to explain, which is in itself deeply dramatic (are not our talks about June sometimes as dramatic as the event we are discussing?). I find that I do not know what to believe, that I have not decided yet whether analysis simplifies and undramatizes our existence or whether it is the most subtle, the most insidious, the most magnificent way of making dramas more terrible, more maddening.... All I know is that drama is by no means dead in the so-called laboratory. This is as passionate a game as it has been for you to live with June. And then when you see the analyst himself caught in the currents, then you are ready to believe there is drama everywhere...."

  My letter to Henry reveals my lies to him, necessary lies, mostly lies meant to heighten my confidence.

  OCTOBER

  I spend a night with my beloved. I ask only that he does not return to America with June, which reveals to him how much I care. And he makes me swear that whatever happens when June comes I must believe in him and in his love. It is a difficult thing for me to do, but Allendy has taught me to believe, so I promise. Then Henry asks, "If I had th
e means today and I asked you to come away with me for good, would you do it?"

  "Because of Hugo and June I would not, could not But if there were no June and no Hugo, I would go away with you, even if we had no means."

  He is surprised. "Sometimes I wondered if it was a game for you." But he sees my face and is moved to silence. A night of clear, calm talk, when sensuality is almost superfluous.

  Allendy is watching over my life. He has hypnotized me into a trusting somnolescence. He wants me to be lulled by my happiness, to rest on his love. We decide, for Hugo's sake (Hugo has become jealous of him), that I should not come to see him for ten or twelve days. It is also like a test of my confidence. Suddenly I relax my fevered desire for him and accept his nobility, his seriousness, his self-sacrifice, his concern for my happiness, and I feel humble. What makes me humble is that he believes I love him, and I feel that I am lying. It moves me to think I can lie to this great, sincere man. I wonder whether he knows better than I whom I love or whether I am deceiving him, as I have deceived them all. In 1921, when I was still corresponding with Eduardo, I was already in love with Hugo. If Hugo knew that in Havana, while we were exchanging love letters, I was stirred by Ramiro Collazo. If Henry knew that I love Allendy's kisses, and if Allendy knew how deeply I want to live with Henry...

  Allendy believes my life with Henry, my low life, is not true or real or lasting, whereas I know I belong to it. He says, "You have traversed shady experiences, but I feel that you have remained pure. They are temporary curiosities, a hunger for experience." Whatever experience I enter I come out unscathed. Everyone believes in my sincerity and purity, even Henry.