Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (20 page)

Today Allendy drives his questions relentlessly. I cannot escape. When I try to change the subject, he answers me but returns to the subject I am eluding. He is confused by what I tell him about Eduardo, about wanting to be cruel to Hugo the same day, and about the bracelets. Henry is obviously the favored one just now. But since Allendy proceeds from the assumption that I love Eduardo, he is certain to get lost, although he does see quite clearly the struggle between my wanting to conquer and my wanting to be conquered. I sought domination in Henry, and he does dominate me sexually, but I was deceived by his writing and his enormous experience.

Allendy did not understand the bracelets. I bought two of them, he says, in contradiction to my feeling of satisfaction at hurting Eduardo and Hugo. As soon as I achieve cruelty, I want to prostrate myself. One bracelet for Hugo and one for Eduardo.

This, I do not believe. I chose the two bracelets with a feeling of absolute subjection to Henry and liberation from the tenderness which binds me to Hugo and Eduardo. When I showed them to Henry, I stretched out both my wrists as one does in being handcuffed.

Allendy is probing the moment at the concert when I imagined him sad and troubled. What exactly did I imagine? Did he have financial worries, concern over his work, emotional troubles?

"Emotional," I said quickly.

"What did you think of my wife?"

"I observed that she was not beautiful, and it gave me pleasure. I also asked your maid if it was your wife who decorated your house, because I liked the decoration. I think I was making comparisons between us. I am sorry I said that about your wife not being beautiful."

"That is not very wicked, if that is all you thought."

"But I also felt that I was beautiful the night of the concert."

"You certainly were
en beauté.
Is that all?"

"Yes."

"You are repeating the experience of your childhood. Identifying my wife, who is forty years old, with your mother and wondering if you can win your father (or me) from her. My wife represents your mother and that is why you dislike her. You must have been, as a child, very jealous of your mother."

He talks a great deal about a woman's need to be subjugated, the joy I do not know yet, he believes, of letting go entirely. Physically first, because Henry has aroused me so deeply.

I begin to find flaws in his formulas, to be irritated at his quick filing away of my dreams and ideas. When he is silent, I analyze my own actions and feelings. Of course, he could say that I am trying to find him defective, to make an equal of him, because he obtained my confidence about his wife. At the moment I feel he is distinctly stronger than I, and I want to balance this by doing some independent analysis about the bracelets. I am therefore half submissive, half rebellious.

Allendy accentuates the ambivalence of my desires. He senses that he is also approaching the sexual key to my neuroses, and I realize he is, too, like a deft detective.

To test Hugo I have mentioned once or twice the idea of an "evening off'—once a week, perhaps, when we might each go out separately. It is understood that he finds no pleasure in going out with Henry because of an obscure jealousy.

Finally we agreed that I could go to the movies with Henry and Fred while he went out with Eduardo. At the last moment Eduardo could not go. I offered to postpone my engagement. Hugo would not hear of it. He said he would go out anyway, and that it was a good thing for both of us. He said this in a normal tone of voice. I don't know for sure whether he was secretly hurt by my request for independence. He maintained that he was not. Whether he is hurt or not, it is necessary. I feel that gradually he will make good use of his own liberty.

"Do you think liberty simply means that we are growing apart?" he asked anxiously. This, I denied. Certainly I have grown away from him sexually, and if there is any jealousy in me now, it is not due to physical passion for him but to sheer possessiveness. And since I do not give him my body in the complete sense, he has a full right to his liberty and more. It would only be fair if he should find elsewhere the same joys I have found with Henry. If what Allendy says is true, both of us must find passion outside of our love. Naturally, this costs me an effort. I could keep Hugo for myself. The idea of liberty had not occurred to him. It is I who have suggested it. Natasha would call me a fool.

What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.

Henry and I lie fully dressed under the coarse blanket of his bed. He talks about his own profound joy. "I can't let you go tonight, Anaïs, I want you the whole night. I feel that you belong to me." But later, as we sit close together in a café, he reveals his lack of confidence, his doubts. The red journal made him sad. He read about his sensual power over me. "Is that all, is that all?" he wants to know. Is he only that for me? Then it will soon be over, a passing infatuation. Sexual desire. He wants my love. He needs the security of my love. I tell him I have loved him since I spent those few days with him in Clichy. "At the beginning, yes, it was perhaps purely sensual. Not now."

It seems to me I cannot love him more than I do. I love him as much as I desire him, and my desire is immense. Every hour I spend in his arms could be the last. I give myself to it with frenzy. At any moment, before I see him again, June could return.

How does June love Henry?—how much, how well? I ask myself in torment.

When people are surprised to find him soft and timid, I am amused. I, too, bowed to the brutality of his writing, but my Henry is vulnerable, sensitive. How humbly he seeks to make Hugo like him, how pleased he is when Hugo is kind to him.

Last night Hugo went to a movie, enjoyed the novelty of the experience, danced in a cabaret with a Martinique girl, felt nostalgia for me when he heard the music, as if we were very far away from each other, and came home eager to possess me.

After the soft, easy way Henry slips into my body, Hugo is terrible to bear. At such moments I feel I may go mad and reveal everything.

Henry has a picture of Mona Paiva, the dancer, tacked over his washstand, along with two photos of June, one of me, and some of his watercolors. I give him a tin box for his letters and manuscripts, and inside the lid he pastes the program of Joaquin's concert. On his door he tacks notes on Spain.

I cut out the top of my box of powder—
N'aimez que Moi, Caron, Rue de la Paix.
He carries this in his vest pocket. He also carries one of my wine-colored handkerchiefs.

Last night he said, "I am so rich because I have you. I feel that there will always be a lot doing between us, that there will always be changes and novelties."

He almost said, "We'll be connected and interested in each other beyond the connection of the moment." And at this thought, my heart tightened, and I felt the need to touch his suit, his arm, to know he was there and, temporarily, all mine.

I float along, basking in memories of Henry—how his face looks at certain moments, the mischief of his mouth, the exact sound of his voice, at times husky, the firm square hold of his hand, how he looked in Hugo's discarded green coat, his laughter at the movies. He cannot make a movement which does not reverberate in my body. He is no taller than I am. Our mouths are on the same level. He rubs his hands when he is excited, repeats words, shakes his head like a bear. He has a serious, chaste look on his face when he works. In a crowd, I guess at his presence before I see him.

I realized today, with great amusement, the extent to which Henry has shaken down my old gravity, with his literary pranks, his crazy manifestos, his contradictions, his changes of mood, his grotesque humor. I can see myself as a ridiculous person, because of my constant efforts to understand others. We heard that Richard Osborn had gone mad. "Hurrah!" said Henry. "Let's go and see him. Let's have a drink first. This is rare, superb; it doesn't happen every day. I hope he is really insane." I was at first a bit disconcerted, but very quickly I caught the flavor of the humor, and I asked for more. Henry has taught me to play. I had played before, in my own way, with sandal-footed humor, but his is a lusty humor, which I have enjoyed to the point of hysteria—like the morning the dawn caught us still talking. Henry and I fell on his bed, exhausted, but he was still talking deliriously about the strainer that was thrown by mistake in the water closet, about black lace underwear and coral, etc., out of which he later created that inimitable parody of my novel.

The other night we talked about the trick of literature in eliminating the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated dose of life. I said almost indignantly, "It's a deception and the cause of much disappointment. One reads books and expects life to be just as full of interest and intensity. And, of course, it isn't so. There are many dull moments in between, and they, too, are natural. You, in your writing, have played the same trick. I expected all our talks to be feverish, portentous. I expected you always drunk, and always delirious. Then when we lived together for a few days, we fell into a profound, quiet, natural rhythm."

"Are you disappointed?"

"It is very different from what I expected, yes, less sensational, but I'm satisfied."

I have lost that tranquil Seine-like rhythm of my adolescence. And yet when Henry and I sit together in the Café de la Place Clichy, we enjoy the profound feverless currents of our love.

It is June who gives fever. But it is only a superficial fever. The true, indelible fever lies in Henry's writing. As I read his latest book I am almost petrified with admiration. I try to think about it, to tell him how it affects me, and I can't. It is too enormous, too potent.

Everything is so sweet between Hugo and me. Great tenderness and much deception on my part about my true feelings. I was touched by his behavior the other night and tried to repay it by giving him much pleasure. The way I think of Henry terrifies me: it is so obsessional. I must try and spread out my thoughts.

When Henry and I talk about June, I do not think of her now except as a "character" I admire. As a woman, she threatens my one great possession, and I cannot love her any more. If June would die—I often think of it—if only she would die. Or if she would cease loving Henry, but that, she will not. Henry's love is the refuge she returns to, always.

Whenever I have gone to Henry's apartment and he has been writing a letter to June, or rewriting a passage about her in his book, or marking what fits her in Proust or Gide (he finds her everywhere), I have an intolerable fear: He is hers again. He has realized he loves no one but her. And each time, with surprise, I see him drop his book or letter and turn wholly to me, with love, desire. The last test, June's cable, gave me profound reassurance. But each time we talk about her I feel the same terrible anxiety. This cannot last. I will not fight events. The minute June returns, I relinquish Henry. Yet it is not so simple. I cannot relinquish living so closely to Henry as I do in these pages, for the sake of eluding pain.

Allendy was a superman today. I will never be able to describe our talk. There was so much intuition, so much emotion throughout. To the very last phrase he was so human, so true.

I had come in a mood of confidence, of recklessness, thinking: I do not want Allendy to admire me unless he can do so when he knows me exactly as I am. My first effort at complete sincerity.

I tell him first of all that I was ashamed of what I had said last time about his wife. He laughed and said he had forgotten all about it and asks, "Is there anything else which worries you?"

"Nothing in particular, but I would like to ask you if my strong sensual obsession is a reaction against too much introspection? I have been reading Samuel Putnam, who writes that 'the quickest way out of introspection is a worship of the body, which leads to sexual intensity.' "

I cannot remember his exact answer, but I sense his connection of the word "obsession" with a frantic search for satisfaction. Why the effort? Why dissatisfaction?

Here, I feel an imperative need to tell him my biggest secret: In the sexual act I do not always experience an orgasm.

He had guessed this from the very first day. My talk on sex had been crude, bold, defiant. It did not harmonize with my personality. It was artificial. It betrayed an uncertainty.

"But do you know what an orgasm is?"

"Oh, very well, from the times I did experience it, and particularly from masturbation."

"When did you masturbate?"

"Once, in the summer, in St. Jean de Luz. I was dissatisfied and had a strong sexual urge." I am ashamed to admit that when I was alone for two days I masturbated four and five times a day, and also often in Switzerland, during our vacation, and in Nice.

"Why only once? Every woman does it and very often."

"I believe it is wrong, morally and physically. I was terribly depressed and ashamed afterwards."

"That's nonsense. Masturbation is not physically harmful. It is only the feeling of guilt we have about it that oppresses."

"I used to fear it would diminish my mental power, my health, and that I would disintegrate morally."

Here, I add other details, which he listens to silently, trying to coordinate them. I tell him things I have never entirely admitted to myself, and which I have not written in my journal, things I wanted to forget.

Allendy is piecing the fragments together and talks about my partial frigidity. He discovers that I also consider this an inferiority and believe it is due to my frail physique. He laughs. He attributes it to a psychic cause, a strong sense of guilt. Sixty out of a hundred women feel as I do and never admit it and, most important of all, Allendy says, if I only knew what little difference this makes to men and how unaware they are of it. He always transforms what I term an inferiority into a natural thing, or one whose curse can be easily removed. I immediately feel a great relief and lose my terror and secretiveness.