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AGAIN TOWARDS AMERICA

Will I ever reach joy?

ABOARD THE SEAPLANE CLIPPER, DECEMBER 7, 1939

I carried you above the clouds in a little blue cloth bag—you and the volumes not yet copied. So fast we fly over the distance I no longer feel the pain of separation. So fast we fly, it is a dream and not reality, and in the dream pain is short-lived and soon dissolved. Again towards America, as during the other war. From high above the life in Paris seems so small and dark, and I ask myself why I wept so much.

I am still baffled by the mystery of how man has an independent life from woman, whereas I die when separated from my lover. While all these threads of desire and tenderness stifled me, I climbed into a giant bird and swooped toward space. Up here I do not suffer. Distance is magically covered. It is a dream. It is an inhuman bird that carries me to a new destiny. I rise. At last, like Henry, I know detachment, enter a nonhuman world. For this voyage I threw out a great deal of weight, to permit myself to rise. Constantly I am throwing out ballast. I never keep bags or old papers or objects I no longer love. It is not masochism. A spiritual nature is aware of its faults and seeks to perfect itself, and can only achieve this by suffering and accepting. I needed to be humanized. I keep nothing that is dead, only what I wear, love, what is my living décor, my living symbols.

About a week ago I awakened with strange fears. Gonzalo had delayed his trip. I said, “I am afraid now it is I who will leave first.” Two days later Hugo telephoned from London: “Get ready to embark on the Clipper Tuesday from Lisbon. Be ready to take the train to Lisbon Saturday night.”

This was Wednesday at three. When Gonzalo came to see me, I was weeping. Guided by a premonition, I had dressed beautifully for him. Instead of shopping for his winter coat, we went to the United States Lines, to the Portuguese Legation, to the Spanish consulate. All this hurts me less up here in the light, but in Paris, on earth, I suffered to leave Gonzalo behind, Gonzalo with his gift for tangles, his love of difficulties and darkness. I felt too the wrenching from Henry. I had hoped to go to Greece after Gonzalo left for New York and wait there for sailing time, but Hugo fulfilled my wishes with such speed and power. Henry cabled me that he would sail for New York later.

Until I took the plane I felt every cell and cord snapping, the parting from Paris a parting from a form of life, an atmosphere, from rue Cassini, the oriental niche, from a rhythm, a mystical life, from mysterious nights, the menace of war, the sound of antiaircraft guns, of airplanes passing, of sirens...

The time on the train was so long and sad, with a glimpse of the tragic face of Spain, its hunger, its ruins, walking into a square at Fuenterrabia and feeling that there many had died, and seeing afterwards the bullet holes and stains on the walls of the caserne.

The diaries were not examined at the frontier. Jean Cateret had predicted it. “No one can put heavy hands on you, no one can touch you.” No one opened the blue cloth bag where lies hidden the story of four years. In Lisbon, when I felt so uprooted, torn, split, I reread two volumes, and I felt the grandeur and the force of my life, the fire of it. I warmed myself to my own flame because I felt small and sick and powerless at that moment.

Just before taking the Clipper I suffered from nervousness, fears, confusion, doubts, intangible insecurity.

New York Savoy Hotel, Room 1410

We landed at the Azores. So true it is that an island is isolation that I felt absolutely severed from all the world. Our giant bird rested on this fragment of the Atlantide, made of black sand and black rocks, and pastel-colored houses which look uninhabited. People on islands are always ready to disappear. They do not suffer because the separation is already made and they are accustomed to isolation. Walking there I felt like a being whose legs and arms were cut off because Gonzalo was in Paris and Henry in Greece. A misty rain fell on us. The sea was rather stormy. The women who passed us wore long dark capes with enormous stiff hoods, large enough to shelter several heads.

The takeoff was difficult. The bird seemed too heavy, its flanks colliding with the waves, but finally it rose with much faltering and trembling. Everyone went to bed early. Hugo’s bunk was over mine. At midnight I saw lightning illuminating the wings of the plane and the masses of dark clouds. It was then I felt the full loneliness of space and sea and danger, the loneliness of man, his smallness. All the diaries lying at the foot of my bed, encasing so much suffering and passion, so fragile in the immense night, carried by the wings of man himself, made small by lightning and hail. How the plane trembled. I felt its weight struggling against the wind, the strain of its body piercing the storm clouds. I lay back feeling light and unreal and fragile, without fear, only aware of great darkness, of fatality. No fear of death, just awareness. I looked again and I saw the wings emerge from the black clouds as if tearing through them and capturing enormous stars. I thought the plane had lit its lanterns, the way they fixed themselves on the tips of the wings. Then I lay back and slept because of my faith in the stars.

Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street one sees from a window. Will I ever reach joy? It hides behind the turning merry-go-round of the traveling circus. As soon as I approach it, it is no longer joy. Joy is a foam, an illumination. I am poorer and hungrier for the want of it. When I am in the dance, joy is outside in the elusive garden. When I am in the garden, I hear it exploding from the house. When I am traveling, joy settles like an aurora borealis over the land I leave. When I stand on the shore I see it bloom on the flag of a departing ship. What joy? Have I not possessed it? I want the joy of simple colors, street organs, ribbons, flags, not a joy that takes my breath away and throws me into space alone where no one else can breathe with me, not the joy that comes from a lonely drunkenness. There are so many joys, but I have only known the ones that come like a miracle, touching everything with light.

Bermuda should have appeared at dawn, but it only came five hours later because of the storm. The next day the plane took off again and, to elude the stormy area, rose very high above the clouds. We came down gently at Port Washington. Mother was there. My brother Joaquín was in Boston giving a concert. I landed with my diaries but without my soul. I feel like a ghost. I enter a palace of Byzantine luxury. New York. The Bank for the moment takes care of us, so we live in great luxury. The luxury lulls me, but at the same time it makes me more aware of my misery, as a sick person under exceptional care is more aware of his fragility. The more comforts, warmth, luxurious baths, abundance, service, cleanliness, the lonelier I feel, as one can only feel in a palace. Bathe her, scent her, let her feet rest on soft carpets, let her eyes rest on shell pink lamps, let her seashell jewels lie on top of an ivory dresser, let her bells ring for tea, for a regal breakfast, for a letter to be mailed…but she will die. It is a hothouse of magnificence, but my life, my roots, are elsewhere. This is the vase for the marvelous, the rootless. Of course, the Princess is ill. Send for the doctor. I need a medicine man who will demand the return of my soul into my body. He doesn’t sense the missing flame, the empty body. He is too used to the brilliant emptiness of America. It is a grippe, he says. Perhaps, I write to Gonzalo, I will begin to live when you come.

DECEMBER 12, 1939

I made a superhuman struggle and plunged into activity. I saw Thurema Sokol all aglow with her love for a Spaniard. I saw Frances Steloff, the gentle Jewess who bought all my D. H. Lawrence books and House of Incest. I saw Dorothy Norman, who published my “Birth” story in Twice a Year. I met Alfred Stieglitz the photographer, who admires the “Birth” story. I looked at the Babylonian splendors in the shop windows. I unfolded the wings of coquetry and vanity.

I feel nothing. I did not feel the death of Otto Rank, which happened a few weeks ago. It was unreal because I live only in the depths. When I come to the surface for pleasure, I don’t live. I live only in passion, pain, depths, darkness. But I try to breathe above of the deep ocean of sensation. New York gives me fever, the great Babylonian city. Byzance. All gold and glitter and sumptuousness.

The Winter of Artifice is selling, the copies which escaped censorship. I work on the Albertine story (the Mouse) which does not belong in the houseboat book, and which I want to print separately. Gonzalo thought it should be printed in Russia because it revealed the suffering of servants and the injustice of abortion laws.

It is snowing.

DECEMBER 20, 1939

The telephone rings while we have breakfast in shining silver and starched linen. Engagements. Receptions for French War Work, vernissages, the French Ambassador, cocktails, dinners, lunches at the Cosmopolitan Club. Flowers arriving constantly, a package of Pall Mall cigarettes offered graciously at every breakfast with compliments. Steaming radiators, soft rugs, an array of enough starched towels to last a month, immaculate waiters. Blanche and James Cooney telephoned me from Woodstock. We’re going there Saturday. It is a merry-go-round.

Cable from Henry—the consulate advised him to leave Greece, and he is sailing this week. This is a dying, dying love, I know it now. I am desperate for news of Gonzalo. It is now three weeks that we have been separated.

I shook off my anguish. I look beautiful. Luxury enhances me. My body needs it—the hot baths, the care, the soft water, the perfume, the warmth. I take on the colors of the flowers, the bloom, the delicacy. It becomes me. It is true my astrakhan fur coat is molting with old age, but I can look dashing in it.

The shops are a feast, the Christmas decorations are fantastic. The whole spectacle is regal, but the Americans are not—they are the common, commercial types who created this but who cannot wear it. The women yes, they all look like mannequins, but they do not reign over this luxury. They obey a uniform order and all wear the same things. Each work of art is made to be multiplied to infinity and killed, so a million fur coats walk the streets, all shaped alike, a million tiny hats worn low over the nose.

Think only of today. I cannot be as Henry is, a separate entity, fully alive, without the presence of my love Gonzalo.

JANUARY 1, 1940

Great sadness last night as I heard the New Year celebration from my bed—I have lost a world of deep feeling and found one of mere noise and matter. Ever since I came I have lived as you do when you are visiting a fair. I only felt the gravity and harmony of Dorothy Norman, the holy and humble life of the Cooneys, and a moment of cosmic religious emotion before a film of the people of Ceylon, in which they are walking up the mountain to worship a reclining Buddha. Everything else is terrifyingly empty. I did feel, at Kay de San Faustino’s, talking to Yves Tanguy and Caresse Crosby (whom I met with Hugo, who forgot she is the woman I was supposed to have known intimately in Paris and to have stayed with in the country), the poignant regret for the dying France. There was a real sorrow in all of us, Kay wishing she had died there, with them. More of us met at the Gotham Book Shop and admitted how we all had run away from America and now we want to conquer it. But how is it possible to conquer this desert of inanities, this ocean of vulgarity, this abysmal immaturity?

JANUARY 1940

Henry sailed from Greece on the 27th and Gonzalo the 5th from Marseilles—I fear their being on the same boat. I feel such anguish that I cabled the Peruvian consul, begging for the name of the ship on which Gonzalo sailed.

The visit to the Bank was a nightmare. Before the black marble entrance I felt that this is a prison, a tomb of marble, steel, iron, oppressive. In the vaults I was shown a billion dollars in paper bonds. I said I would prefer to see gold, that paper meant nothing to me. The head of the vault must have thought I lacked imagination. Seeing all these heavy, complex iron doors closing upon so much paper gave me the feeling of an illusory, unreal possession, a false, fake, empty activity of man reduced to paper. It all seemed like ideological superstructures, something without humanity or substance, a man’s game, leading always to great disaster.

Hugh sailed for Europe on business January 17, and I moved to the George Washington Hotel. His departure affected me. I feel anxiety about the war, the possibility of danger to him. I broke down when he left.

Arrival of Henry. I waited for his telephone call quietly at the hotel—he landed in New Jersey four hours late, and I didn’t want to wait there in the cold. When I heard his voice I got nervous, and I rushed down to his hotel, nervous but passionless. Henry received me with a passionate embrace and desire, and possessed me quickly, impatiently. I only felt tenderness, but at the same time, I knew I was beginning to live again, deeply. As I was driving down to meet him, New York seemed transformed—it was as if everything else I had been doing was peripheral, that only now was I beginning to feel again. We fell into our familiar rhythm—deep talks.

In a few days Gonzalo will arrive. All his letters are filled with doubts at each delay of my letters, imagining the worst, reproaching me because he met someone to whom I had sent a card when on the same day he had received nothing. “I must sail soon, and put an end to this torture, and all the things I imagine you are doing when I get no news of you. I am angry, I am suspicious, I am jealous, I am sorrowful, I am full of love.”

Letter from Hugo: “Was broken-hearted to leave you this morning but it was better not to come to the steamer. It was very cold, and the departure was silly and formal. I ran into a rather nice fellow from Paris whom I knew there so I will be with him a good deal. I have one of the deluxe cabins and will be terribly comfortable—only wish you were in the other bed. What a connection there is between us—the most delicate—and yet the strongest of all threads, unbreakable, my darling, and partings like this always prove it to us again. I think of you so delicate and so strong. I love you deeply, deeply. Forgive me for leaving you. It is only to come back again soon, soon, remember that and think of when you will be coming to the pier to meet me. I kiss you tenderly, my love, my only love, my sweet one.”

I met Robert Symmes (Duncan) and Virginia Admiral, a painter. He invites me to send writing to the Ritual and says: “In your House of Incest which I read just this last fall I was inspired by the courage you have for the intense visionary experience, the new ritual…I wrote the uncompleted poem ‘Arctics’ after I read your House of Incest… if there is a chain between your story ‘Birth’ and your magnificent House of Incest, it is that, in the profound sense of ritual in the act and in all experience.”

JANUARY 29, 1940

The other morning I awakened at six-thirty to meet Gonzalo’s boat in the freezing cold, half sick. I waited two hours. He didn’t arrive. I was stunned, then anxious, then desperate. I sent cables to Paris, Milan, to Genoa. Then I came back to my room very ill with bronchitis and a fever. Dr. Max Jacobson took care of me. I couldn’t sleep. Gonzalo’s answer only came two days later, “Leaving Monday.” No explanation why he didn’t give me news for nearly a month. What pain, and anger too. What happened, I don’t know. His last letters were full of jealousy. When I thought I had lost him it was like death.

Hugo arrived safely in London.

I rewrote “Houseboat,” the barge story. As I write it, it gets dehumanized and becomes a fairy tale, another House of Incest. It is a process of evaporation.

FEBRUARY 4, 1940

Last night I was able to go to White Plains with Thurema. I packed my valise. We went to dinner together. My chest began to ache again and I came back and went to bed. I have no energy, no desire to go anywhere. I stayed alone all day. I inserted pages on my father’s downfall in my old diary, a development which belonged there.

I felt physically weak but mystically strong. I faced my eternal problem—I want to publish, to give, to communicate, but I can’t publish the diary. I have reached an impasse. I brood over my relationship with Henry. The last two afternoons he took me into his bed, I responded fully, though there is no passion, no tenderness even. Henry is remote, dehumanized. I yearn for Gonzalo’s fire, tenderness. Yet I cannot break the mystical relationship with Henry. His attitude about me is fixed, unmovable. He acts as if it is natural I should always be there. He has a faith which baffles me—Henry, the man of change.

FEBRUARY 7, 1940

Again delays and frustrations—I was all ready to meet Gonzalo’s ship, and it will be a day late, naturally, for he is always late. I am so keyed up it is painful.

One evening I did enjoy myself with Brigitte and Hugh Chisholm. She is flawless, a delight to look at. A Viking, but full-breasted, with rich hair, a rich voice, a wonderful ease. She was sitting cross-legged on a satin divan, wearing slacks, she the natural beauty, I the artificial one, the created one, the one who needs a certain atmosphere, a certain light, a certain mood. That night, in the warmth of their admiration, I too bloomed.

Everywhere now I see people seeking the deep current in me, that which they seek in themselves. I no longer believe it is that they think me beautiful, or that I can dance, or write, but that it is the deeper current they feel. Brigitte showed me her design for a bathing suit. For this she undressed herself completely, which affected me, enchanted me. Later as we were going out and I was powdering in the salon, she called me vehemently to the bathroom where she was absolutely naked, to dress herself again. Only when she was dressed did I feel courage enough to kiss her. I came away filled with colors, flavors, bathed in luxury and beauty.

FEBRUARY 10, 1940

Waiting for Gonzalo at the docks I experienced the wildest feelings and fears. I suffered the bitterest cold for three hours, because I had seen him on deck—he was there. I would die waiting for him in the cold. He was detained, the last one to come out. I thought for a moment he would not be permitted to land. I had to telephone his consulate. We shouted at each other across the pier, looking at each other for three hours, unable to touch each other. I was desperate; Gonzalo was pacing the deck. And then…Helba, the trunks, taxis, hotels, lunch. And then…Gonzalo came alone to my room and kissed me passionately. We were so keyed up, so tense, that we went out and walked the streets together. Later, lying in bed, I felt him so keenly it was painful, and he was so bound up and panicky, as he always is before a climax, that he could not possess me. But what burning caresses, what wildness of feelings, what a bath of passion. Last night we got into bed naked and caressed each other wildly for hours with such hunger as I have never known, moaning with the pleasure, but he could not take me. His emotionalism was overwhelming. He repeated, “I am knotted, as when I was courting you.”

I felt such violent love that I understood the difference between my feelings for Henry and for Gonzalo, the difference between passion and love. We were so exalted, we walked the streets laughing, swimming in space. We needed height. We went to the top of the Empire State Building, looked down on this unique creation and kissed. Gonzalo said, “I have not been happy for months.” And then: “American women look ugly to me. Perhaps because I am with you.” I felt his love, the fire of it. Fire. Fire. Fire. A human fire. Everything was transfigured. All the feelings one has at the beginning of love, a love of the whole world, ecstasy. I was ill again, with the grippe, feverish, but I didn’t care. Now my room is filled with objects from Paris, the Chinese lacquered chest, the Madagascar bedspread, the African leather bottles.

Gonzalo and I together produce fire. My power for ecstasy and his earthy fire produce this white heat all the poets and all the lovers dream of, this raging fire, heaven and hell.

FEBRUARY 14, 1940

We have a quarrel, and then I rage and suffer so…I cannot sleep, and it ravages me. Then I feel my loneliness so acutely, I go nearly mad. I stupefy myself with aspirin because I cannot bear the long night, and I think of Hugo. In the morning I set out in a blizzard, intending to stay out all day, to not see Gonzalo, but then I realize, as I have often before, that it is better to see him, to face the quarrel. I walk back to the hotel just as he is coming to see me. I explain to him about the loneliness, that if he hurts me I fall into an abyss. And Gonzalo is so tender and warm, that soon we are lying in bed and his sex is quivering and leaping at my nearness. It is over. I can work again, sing, sleep. I can even be alone. Why such terrible pain, such desperate suffering at a small incident?

MARCH 25, 1940

During the days after Gonzalo’s arrival, I felt the wholeness of our love and began to plan to tell Henry the truth, to break with him. Henry was in Washington, and when he returned to New York, I would face the danger of losing Gonzalo, and this I could not bear. At the same time the anxiety over Henry made me sick. I felt that there was a bond beyond the human, that Henry was alone without me in spite of his admirers and friends. It was while I struggled with the idea of telling Henry that he lost the Indian love ring he had worn since our “marriage” in New York.

The day he returned I found him so frail-looking and sad, I could not say anything. He was anxious about meeting with his parents, whom he had not seen for eleven years. He was going to see them the next day. His father was ill, and he dreaded the reunion. Perhaps they would need his help and he could not give them any. I offered to give him fifty dollars so he would not arrive empty-handed. He said it was not his to give and asked why he should deceive them. I said: “You ought to give them the illusion. Such illusions are life-giving.” But Henry would not do it. The day he visited them, he found them as he feared—poor, and his father ill with cancer of the prostate. Henry came home and sobbed all night with pity and guilt. The next day when I came, he sobbed again. He was altogether changed, human, quite broken and soft. He said he now understood everything he had condemned in me, my care of my mother and Joaquín, that one could not really escape one’s karma, and that with his evasion all he had done was to accumulate guilt. As it happened that very day, a rich collector had given him fifty dollars for a piece of writing to order, which Henry was now taking to his family. All Henry’s intoxication with Greece has vanished. He suddenly began to see his family every week, taking gifts to the three of them, visiting his cousins, aunts, etc. We passed the days sharing his feelings and pity.

One night I pretended to think he had been unfaithful in Greece and teased him. He teased me about Gonzalo, and said that if he put certain facts together about my behavior, it might seem like treachery. I retorted that I could analyze what he wrote and what I heard about his time in Greece. The whole theme was once again pushed aside, and we resumed our life together.

While visiting Caresse Crosby, I had an intuition that her house would be a good place for Henry to live. Coincidence. Sometime later she informed me that there was a room for rent in the same house. I took Henry to see it and it is just what he wants, the kind of room he can write in, large, spacious, peaceful, secluded. Intuitive too because finding this place dissolved his desire to travel, which would have created a conflict in me because I would not follow him. He settled in this room, where I am now, and began to write. I took a tiny studio on the same street where Gonzalo lives, on West 20th, and as Henry’s place is on Lexington and 54th, it is a completely different quarter where the lazy Gonzalo never goes.

I sleep with Henry, enjoy him sensually. I leave him in the morning and return to my little studio, small and modern.

I went through a black storm because Gonzalo would not stay all night. I discovered the real reason—his liver trouble and its humiliating consequences. Poor Gonzalo, paying dearly for all his drinking. During the scene, he used the identical words Henry once used: “I’m happiest of all with you. I’m so happy with you I no longer care about my friends.” In my anger, I had broken the little blue veilleuse he gave me in Paris, the one whose tiny glass lampshade broke the day we moved out of the houseboat Nanankepichu, and which he had replaced.

When Henry was jealous of Gonzalo for a day, I realized the terrible pattern of his destiny, how I was acting exactly as June did, which prevented me from revealing what does not seem right to reveal, while our relationship is still alive.

Meanwhile Jacobson has to take care of my stubborn anemia, and I have to accept my physical limitations. I cannot enjoy late nights, parties, strain. After one night in Harlem (a magnificent night of dancing until five o’clock in the morning) I was tired for a week. As soon as I feel well and strong I spend my strength as recklessly as I do my money. I cannot save, conserve, reserve.

I have to learn. I refuse invitations. I copy diaries. I waste feelings of anxiety over Hugh being in Europe. The news of the war getting violent causes me anguish. It drags on like a nightmare—ghostly, neurotic.

Gonzalo reads either the newspapers or the Spanish classics and fails to notice the very world in which I breathe.

The grotesque evenings at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s, the self-conscious discussions. All America is still in elementary school, with its catechism, declarations, preparations, definitions, mere prefaces to living.

APRIL 13, 1940

Once a month I get the moonstorm, and it is madness recurring rhythmically, only each time more violently. In a week I get persecution mania, obsession, fears, doubts of all kinds—I feel everything I described in my novel. Each time it is more powerful. It is a reversal of what I usually feel: faith, sense of wonder, illusion. Everyone becomes a monster. I trust only Hugh. Wind in the street appears malicious, people’s slightest words a humiliation. I see desertion all around me. I feel hatred, rebellion, resentment, loneliness. I am very near to absolute despair. It is a lie, it is madness. With it come violent erotic longings. I dream of whorehouses, of being possessed by many men, of being possessed to the point of exhaustion, saturation, of touching the depths of sensuality such as one touches only at the beginning of passion. Strangest of all, I write, I create, and stranger still, I am physically stronger than I have ever been. For the first time, I have gained weight, from 107 to 114. A thread of lucidity saves me from insanity. I see it now. I see the insanity in my loves—the obsessions—in my need of the diary as a proof of reality, of the reality of my life.

APRIL 30, 1940

Gloomy days, darkened by Gonzalo’s bad health, neurosis, insomnia. Gonzalo cannot conquer his laziness. Add laziness to illness, and there is little charm left—big and fat, lying prone on the couch, always reading newspapers and listening to the news.

Very rarely have we recaptured the beauty of our days in Paris. I think it is all dying from inertia and laziness. When there is no spirit to exalt the body, to dominate disease, to force and create, it becomes stagnation, and soon stagnation will overpower Gonzalo—then I will cease loving him because I hate death.

The life of Gonzalo and Helba is nothing but stagnation. They lie like animals, doing nothing all day, complaining, frightening themselves. Gonzalo does not get his teeth fixed, does not answer his letters, does not see the Communist Party or his friends. Everything rots around them in dirt, neglect, sloppiness.

Meanwhile I struggle to write. I wrote pages on the house of Louise de Vilmorin— the glass house. I finally sent the manuscript to Rae Beamish, the editor. But underneath lies despair.

Kenneth Patchen, whose work Henry admires, moves me because his body has some resemblance to Gonzalo’s, but he is too young, too unformed, naïve. Il n’y a personne. I seek escape—new passion. My life has lost its flame.

I have asked myself whether there is something wrong with me. Henry says, “In dissolution there is life,” but I recoil from dissolution. I struggle against the demons—I struggle for light—desperately—against disease, ugliness, fears, madness, monsters, nightmares.

MAY 4, 1940

Hugh sailed today from Genoa. I do not feel happy at his coming, only grateful that he is out of danger. I can only think that I will be separated from Gonzalo and Henry because Hugh wants a vacation.

I am working on 1000 pages of the abridged diary to give to Caresse Crosby. Dorothy Norman was overwhelmed by it.

I am in debt again—America is monstrous. I close my eyes and ears and I write. I wrote pages on June’s way of talking for the diary.

Gonzalo comes to me to eat with me, to fall asleep in my arms. He found me lacing my jacket, and began unlacing it, gently, tenderly, but the fire has died. It lasted four years, a great deal of time for fire, intensity, fever. In Paris I had a superstitious fear of its transplantation, felt something would happen if we left. Something happened to all of us from the uprooting. Something died in all of us. I can see it in the others. We are only surviving.

MAY 20, 1940

When Hugh returned he said: “I want peace. No more separations. I have missed you too much.” For a week he was extraordinarily possessive, jealous. I got desperate. I was cut off from Gonzalo and Henry and thrown into the bourgeois life again. The luxurious hotel, visitors, dinners, cocktails. I suffocated because I was not wise enough to see it as a phase. Hugh himself revolted, said he could no longer live a life tied to routine, working on Wall Street without trips or escape. But when all this was added to the ugliness of life in New York, I became so desperate I wanted to die. I pulled myself out by writing “The Prison of Fear,” the first writing I have done dictated by hatred. I wrote pages on the bus on my way to Henry. Creatively, I have entered the objective writing Durrell and Henry tried to push me into long ago—but emotionally, I have entered the destruction and dissolution from which I struggled to save others. I have struggled too much. I have been sickened by their poison as I sucked it from their wounds to save them from death. I feel and understand for the first time the pleasure in dissolution. I felt this only once before, with June.

Suddenly I have lost my courage and desire to struggle. I have lost all enthusiasm and faith. Perhaps the war has done this. I suffer with Europe and participate in its agony. Everything seems dark and futile. I have lost my appetite for everything. I pray only for passion, a new passion. Passion can give me life again, otherwise I shall descend into the inferno, because I have nothing to live for. Henry is sad, Gonzalo is ill, Helba is nothing but a burden, Hugo is grey. It seems like we are all ending like Europe is ending, perhaps out of love and sympathy because of our roots there. I understand what I struggle to heal: despair and hatred. Hatred of Helba has inspired the “Rue Dolent,” the “Prison of Fear.” May it liberate me from hatred. Dissolution—I fought against it—always. I was the enemy of destruction, but now it is universal horror and despair, as Henry prophesized for years. Perhaps ours is no longer a personal despair, but a deep, universal one.

MAY 24, 1940

Hugh falls asleep early, around ten. I slip out noiselessly to meet Gonzalo at Park. We wander about or sit in one of those impossible American places where the radio jangles my nerves and the faces of the people are like those of a proletarian nightmare. The news is bad, everywhere there is panic and selfishness. Fear makes people evil. All New York is nothing but a school, a clinic, a factory. In Europe there are machines which deal death and terror. Here there are machines which have already dealt death: Americans are robots—nothing else. I live in a machine with robots. Robots are afraid. Robots commit crimes. Robots write Americans books. Not a human voice anywhere, only voices coming through the radio receiver. The dancing is a parody of the negro’s joyous movements. It is all repulsive and monstrous. The machine in Europe is killing people, and here it is canning them. It would have been better for all of us to die in flames, rather than this kind of death. Hugh is cornered in his dying system of capitalism, and the communists utter fanatical, narrow, crystallized statements, as many deformations and falsities as the others, committing the same crimes for their religion as the Catholic inquisitors did for theirs. Everyone is wrong—the pacifists too, for they are weak. The followers of D. H. Lawrence run away to Guatemala or Mexico. I see the twistedness in communists too, the errors and abuses and dogmatism. In the end I return to my mystical concepts. I see only nature, chaos and horror, and I see only one heaven—in the eternal. I know that communism has appealed to the weak, the bitter, and the deformed beings, but they want it as protection, as relief from responsibility. I see so much ugliness, so much horror, so many monstrosities, that I return to god. The communists are those who are born in matter and cannot believe in the eternal, and they are utopians because there cannot be a world without cruelty, envy and jealousy. Europe is being destroyed, but the demons are never conquered.

MAY 30, 1940

Hugh and I took a furnished apartment at 33 Washington Square West, which gives the illusion of a European quarter, smaller and more intimate than the rest of New York. We are struggling to act as if we were alive.

Gonzalo and I used to have a special caress, like that of cats, howling our needs— his need over mine. Now he says, “Let me lean on your neck.” He takes it like a support. He pretends to lean on me, like this, in a caress of utter helplessness. I am afraid I have only augmented his weakness—no strength has come out of Gonzalo, no creation, nothing. I feel my love dying, my passion. And this, happening now with the war, drives me to despair. I see him in his true light, as the clochard he loves to draw: dirty, unkempt, unshaved, sitting all day on a bench, or sleeping, talking with other clochards. Suffering and death everywhere.

JUNE 11, 1940

The Germans are thirty-six miles from Paris, and as if that were not enough, now Italy is invading France. How I feel all my love for her. We are all tense, guilty, angry, cruel to each other—selfish lives, all of ours, saving our own souls only—why? I am absolutely ready to enter the conflict. I would like to have died for France because of my love of it…simply. People everywhere are at war because they do not live by simple human feelings. I feel for the whole world. I have lived a purely individual life, and I am ashamed, but the same laws of pity by which I lived I can easily carry into the drama of war. In loving, I looked for my pleasure and found mostly suffering. So war is a drama no more terrible than the drama of love, and I am willing to serve and die as I have served and died for the love of individuals. My lovers have killed—at least they have killed me— and I return to the feeling I discovered as a girl: personal life is not important.

JUNE 13, 1940

Desperate at the news. Paris is encircled, about to surrender. Ill with pain, sympathy, a desire to die with the past. My cousin Eduardo is saved, but we have only saved our bodies—the darkness of the world is swallowing us.

One still can only cling to immediate human life, the last little bits of love and devotion. That is all there is; everything else is darkness and chaos and horror. Gonzalo upbraids me for not talking like a Marxist. The whole world will soon be at war, all of us engulfed, even the innocent ones—so many innocent ones, so many who never caused war. Henry was saying if people only would behave with love, generosity, unselfishness, as they sometimes do when death is near.

Gonzalo and I are in a little room, where, in the darkness, the dream survives. I tell him I am sad because he wants to be a clochard, and I can’t be a clocharde. Would you like me to be one? Would you like me to become one? Gonzalo protests vehemently, saying that being a clochard is all right, but that clochardes are ugly. He likes lovely nails and fine skin and perfumed hair. And I am consoled by this because it seems to me that in his vehemence there was a little condemnation of Helba’s unkemptness. I had been thinking how the two of them harmonized—but Gonzalo needs a contrast to himself. I have been feeling the death of our love because of its transformation from passion. His bad health has made this transition bitter and cruel. I am six years younger than Gonzalo. He is paying for his extravagances, his excesses. He has aged. For three weeks I was tormented by sensual desires—not satisfied with Henry’s possession, or Gonzalo’s, I yearned for violence and fire, dreaming of negroes, dancing at Harlem, to permit this strength to overflow in the drum beat of the music.