Читать книгу Mirages - Anais Nin - Страница 12

JOHN

I believe I have defended myself against suffering

NEW YORK , JUNE 16, 1940

One night Caresse said, “You must meet two young poets who have come all the way from Des Moines to meet you and Miller.” I had dinner with Henry first. I thought this would be another bore—young, immature hero-worshipping. I felt lifeless and old. We first met Lafayette Young, who looked a little like Rank behind his big glasses, and who was stuttering with nervousness at meeting us. His worship for John Dudley, his friend, was amazing, a complete devotion like a woman’s. Then came John, a young man of about thirty, looking like a young English aristocrat, tall, blond, with a beautiful voice. I sensed vitality, a leaping quality, faith, fervor, craziness, and great humility. We looked at his drawings, which were interesting. I was not prepared to meet Dudley as an equal, and his age separated us at first. I was merely touched by his enthusiasm. Caresse had begged us to be nice to them, so I asked them to come see me. Impulsively, I suggested we all go to Harlem because he loves jazz and is a fine drummer. Instead of dancing we talked, John and I. He was full of vision and penetrations—uncannily so. We sat alone by a window and forgot about Harlem. At the end of our talk he said, “I love you” with great warmth and impulsiveness, but it was a love like Durrell’s. I felt his warmth and charm. The next day he telephoned while we were visiting with Eduardo. He was depressed by a day full of failures (he was struggling to get help for a magazine called Generation)—could he come? I said come. The four of us went out and sat in a café, and came back. By the time he left I felt moved by the force and fire of John. I could only talk to him, dance with him, but I was getting a little intoxicated. The next evening, when I went with Eduardo to see Henry, John and Lafayette were watching for me on the stoop (they live next door to Caresse and Henry). We again spent the evening together, listening to a beautiful talk between Henry and Eduardo, which lifted our minds beyond the present to its cosmic meaning again.

When we returned from the restaurant, Henry, Lafayette and Eduardo went to get a beer, so John and I went up to the room alone—this I felt like an explosion. I felt his excitement, the suspense. I talked to break the unbearable tension. Across the philosophic airiness of the conversation, our emotions flashed signals at each other. I loved his utter absence of passivity.

The next day, while Hugh was home, John called up and asked, “Can I come up and draw your picture?” I said no because we had to go to Kay de San Faustino’s housewarming, but asked if would he come with us. He said no. I felt his disappointment. Then Hugh decided to play tennis, which meant I could have seen John. I felt that he would call again and come to the de San Faustino cocktail with us just to see me. And he did. Then I said, “You can come at five and I can pose for an hour.” I knew he was going to come alone. And he did. We were tense. He tried to draw. The night before I had noticed he was wearing a ring too tight for his finger, and I said it constricted him and that I could not bear it. He took it off and, as a symbol of his expansion, never wore it again. We talked, but what we really wanted was to kiss each other. He did not have the courage until we stood by the elevator. By the time we got to de San Faustino’s house, after wandering around dazed, we were absolutely exalted. I forgot about age. I heard everyone saying: “We are mourning the past in Paris as the White Russians mourned the old Russia. We are mourning the death of France, of Europe.”

John does not feel this death. He is outside of it, as an artist, as a youth. As I write this, it is a half hour before I go to his room. I pray for a new passion, which comes with the sound of his slender fingers drumming on the table at Harlem, full of sensuality and savagery. He said I was a legend in Des Moines, known for my glamour. He was afraid of me.

Yesterday, after the kiss, I met Gonzalo, who talks only of what he reads in the newspapers, who complains of the heat, of fatigue, of pain…a Gonzalo without fire, dull and heavy, like a sad animal.

JUNE 17, 1940

John was looking for me from his window. He was tense, highly strung, overwhelmed. We talked a little, and then he came over and kissed me. He took all my clothes off. He was amazed by my body, the body of a girl, yet more than a girl…ageless. I felt his fear, but to tell the truth, I was afraid too, as if this were my first love affair. I was intimidated because I knew what his imagination had made of me—a mythical figure. I knew he was overwhelmed and that I could not live up to my reputation of an experienced European woman of the world. It felt unreal, and I told him so. I was quiet, timid, passive, feminine—my own humanness put him at ease. He became impulsive, dynamic, violent, and our caresses were entangled in strangeness.

He is truly Henry’s son, a young savage, with the same blue eyes, same white skin, a laughing face, but with great strength. He is only twenty-six. I pushed aside the literary aura, the past, so that we could breathe. I said this was something happening in space. I wanted life…and there is life in John, an abundance of it. At first I dreaded my age—thirty-seven—but when we talked I realized I have no age in his eyes. John said he could tell everybody’s age, but not mine. He knows, for instance, what his wife will look like ten, twenty years from now, but he cannot tell about me. He feels I will live forever and that I have had many lives, far into the past. He said many poetic things—he is full of faith and ardor. Henry and I have expanded the world for him. I know this is to be a creation, and for that I am sad. I wanted something else, but I am so grateful for John, for his worship and his youth—he is a young giant, a force to come, full of potentialities. He is explosive, alert, violent, active, a strong personality. I enjoy his electric youth. It is better than living in the past, clinging to Gonzalo’s heaviness and inertia, to the tragedy of France’s death. A few days ago I was dying with France, dying with Gonzalo. Today I went to John’s room and forgot all about death. I felt my own youth; there was music again. At least my body is not dead. I told Eduardo I was going to pose for John, and Eduardo said: “It’s dangerous. He has his Moon over your Sun.”

John says poetic things about my voice, is awake to my hair, my clothes, my skin. Is the current of life set in motion again, by John? He is tender, worshipful, too excited to sleep. Because he is romantic and idealistic, there is the danger of him mistaking this for love.

JUNE 23, 1940

I went to him every afternoon this week. At first it was like a game, an electric game, but we have transcended the phase of unreality. The second time he delighted me with his fervor, his newfound strength, and I responded to him sensually. His awakening, his gratitude, his chivalry, his romanticism, his excitement, are contagious. I came dancing, always with a pounding heart, left after a bath of love. That second afternoon, after I left him, I felt my gayety stronger than death. The dawns in his eyes, the wonder.

I met Gonzalo, who, of course, was amorous again because I was turning away from him. He began to pursue me again, was desirous, asking for a whole night with me, because I had broken away from him after suffering the torture of his lack of passion. One afternoon, after being with John, I went to Henry. We went out together for dinner. I had said many things to John about living on the peaks, how he only needs intensity, that his going away will not matter, that this is a violent dream in space. Then, as I was having dinner with Henry in the Chinese restaurant, they came in, the boys. I felt a pang of pleasure, and then a stab of pain at the thought of losing him. They had no money; no one would sponsor the magazine, and they were in danger of having to return to Des Moines. I cannot help them. Finally, someone gave them a little money, and they will stay a few more days, until Monday.

Strange boy. He is a descendent of the Earl of Dudley, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth, of Thomas Dudley, Duke of Yorkshire. His family owned Kenilworth, of the Walter Scott novels that once enchanted me. And that is how he looks, like a figure out of a novel, a darling of women, a fighter, a tyrant, reckless, courageous, romantic. Fine, tall, white body, hair around his head like a faun’s, curled and golden. Half artist, but a good one who makes marvelous drawings with character. Aware, awake, alert, luminous. When near him, after telling myself I do not love him, I feel sensual warmth. Once I came to him in the middle of a violent storm; I came to him on Sunday, a day when I am usually a prisoner. He is extraordinarily aware of me. His drawings of me are accurate and interesting. He has protective impulses and asks if I had been hurt living with Henry, asks what he can do for me. I said: “You rescued me from death. One rescue in a week, is it not enough?” When he feels unequal to me, I say, “Can you say you are less than me only because I’ve been to exotic places and you have not?” He says: “You accept me. You challenge my strength and make me whole. I feel stronger with you. At the same time I feel weaker than before other women. I was an egoist. I did not consider woman…as an equal.” He has a small, childish, dreamy wife, married only for a year. She is even too small sexually for him…too small, not a giant. He will be someone. He will be loved by women, by everybody. He is already. People listen to him. With him, miracles may happen. He is a conqueror, in a way. He is determined; his only hesitancies are those of youth. He has strong hatreds and strong loves. I see him as light and joy.

His worship revives me so much that I return to Gonzalo full of charm, fancies, rid of the tightness and bitterness of absolute dependence, the poisonous, acrid fears. I return nonchalant, imaginative, and he falls in love with me all over again, takes my clothes off and makes love to me all over the body as I like it. I’m like a drunkard, drunk on love, spending most of my life in bed, in an orgy of caresses. Mad, absolutely mad, lying with all of them, creating, laughing, inventing, writing. Liberated, liberated of the fears which made me clutch at Gonzalo. What pain these last months, watching the passion die, but then replenishment at the source of love itself, a tender, young, passionate love, drinking there and gaining strength, sexually, spiritually, emotionally, all in one week. A miracle. And everything around it is nourished by the miracle, a life transfusion of love given to all. I asked John, “Have you the courage to live something inhuman, the poem?” But as I began to leave him and saw the pain on his face, I yielded to a human impulse and said, “You know there is no more passion between Henry and me.”

Henry took us all last night to 662 Briggs Avenue in Brooklyn, where he lived nine years of his childhood. We walked through it all, listening to him recollecting. John at my side, silent. Jealous? The night was beautiful. The past, so rich and full to the point of bursting, and the present—John—walking together.

What John and I joined together were two quick, pulsing rhythms, quickening blood, adventure.

I have infinite patience with his youthful stuttering, his youthful errors. I tell him when he retracts or apologizes, “Never retract with me.” When he stumbles or hesitates, “Go on.” He asks: “Is that clear? Do you understand?” I say: “Don’t write. You are a painter.” He only wearies me when he tries to make it a great love instead of hunger, electric sparks, everything but love, when he tries to carry me to see if he can carry me away from all the others.

Because he has no past and I had no future, we have traded, but I feel airy and strange. Eduardo said: “You have no center of gravity. You live outside of yourself, in your relationships. You are really mad, in a way. Hugh is your only foundation, which may be wonderful for poetry, but you seek only the peaks.”

I am so grateful to John that I can feel, laugh, and pulse again. He said to me: “Henry has something of death in him, a greyness, Hugh too. But you are of a different color altogether—you are barbaric red.” As an artist, he sees me as beautiful. I see the shadowless translucence of his skin. I like creating him sensually, unleashing him, inflaming him, opening him. I feel his body as if I were making it with my own hands, touching off new cells of responses, new sparks. There are flames again—they leap in my hands.

He is full of delicacies. I have never been served and adored like a princess. He says when I go down the street he wants to push everyone away so I can walk alone, guarded by him alone. When he says romantic things (almost like the ones I said to Henry) I laugh gently, mockingly, a soft laughter. He said after our first afternoon, “This room is now immortalized.” Sensually he is learning; he was fumbling at first, but he is gifted for nuances, he is gifted for love. Can I bear his going away? Will I miss his caresses, his exaltation? He does not sleep; instead, he spends his nights making drawings of me.

I did betray Gonzalo—oh, not by sleeping with John, I do not consider such acts betrayals. No, betrayal is when I brought John a piece of Japanese wood Gonzalo stole for me once, to light and produce the most unique incense perfume, a wood Gonzalo and I only burned for ourselves, to make strange hotel rooms smell like us. That is betrayal: stealing what belongs to the other, to the very soul of the relationship, and desecrating it. My sensual gift is only a great expansion of the self, drawing on new worlds, new senses, new experiences, another self totally unrelated to Gonzalo. I dedicated House of Incest to both John and his wife (of whom I am not at all jealous), which touched him. He places her under my protection. When I was sixteen, I used to read Kenilworth with passion. It had a magic meaning. I shall call John Kenilworth. John I do not like, because of the other John (Erskine), and because it is too simple.

I often can cut through the manifestations of anger and recognize the suffering behind it. Many people react to suffering with anger.

Death and disintegration require passivity like Henry’s and Gonzalo’s, which I do not have, even in small things. Gonzalo does not know when he is hot or cold and goes out for a week in the same costume; if it is too light and the weather changes he gets a grippe. He suffers. He waits. One day I said: “Gonzalo, you’re so hot in that suit. You’re suffering. I saw fine-looking slacks in the store with light shirts.” We go and look at them. I urge him to get them. It is I who had to help Helba and Gonzalo find an apartment. I urge them into more expensive places because I do not want them thrust into dark rooms again, into a drab past.

ORIENTA APARTMENTS. MAMARONECK , JULY 4, 1940

A strange, terrifying thing has happened to me twice now. As soon as I feel the downward curve of love I throw myself into a new one. This time I threw myself into desire for John, a meeting of two fires. After our fourth afternoon together he asked me, “You have never said you loved me.” We were separated for two days. During those two days he was like a wild horse suddenly corralled. He rebelled against my power over him. No woman had ever touched off such deep responses, sensually or imaginatively. Until now he had been the loved one, and here I had taken hold of his body and soul without even saying, “I love you!” On one of those nights of rebellion, he saw the film La Femme du Boulanger, saw the handsome shepherd whom the woman eats like a beautiful fruit. John asked himself if that was all he was to me. I was away with Hugh during those two days, and John was to wait until Monday to see me again before leaving. He cried out, “It hurts, it hurts.” It was a storm of revolt against the wounding pain of passion. He was going to leave before I returned, but Monday morning Henry told him, “Anaïs is coming later.” My name struck John like a bombshell. He waited. Then I came, and he told me all he had suffered, but still I would not say I loved him. We plunged into caresses, and his were violent, hungry. I liked the fire in him—I bathed in it.

All the time I knew it was not love. Then came the last day, when we possessed each other like savages. The last evening we all went out together, Hugh, Eduardo, Lafayette, John and I, to Chinatown. As we walked the streets I was drunk with desire. We wanted desperately to touch each other again. The intoxication was too strong; it was torture. I felt myself on the threshold of doing something mad—I could not let him go away. I promised to see him again. And suddenly, it was all unreal; the exaltation disappeared. I did not feel his departure. I felt nothing. I fell into an abyss. Back to the familiar loves, to human life, grey days, sickness, bad moods, fatigue, back to aging and dying, to sorrowing over a lost world. John left me nothing of his goldenness, not a tremor of desire. I cannot remember his words. Nothing he said left an echo. No caress left its imprint on the blood. It was all a mirage.

I do not want to see him again.

Hugh and I came to Mamaroneck for Hugh, so that he can enjoy his boating and fishing. I hate it. I want to run away from it.

Tonight I lie in bed hating my bourgeois life, feeling desperate and destructive while Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, throwing whistling bombs that remind me of those which terrorized us in Europe.

I should learn to accept twilight, deserts, impasses. I am liberated of my obsessive love, but not of the love itself.

JULY 13, 1940

After four days in Mamaroneck with Hugh, I spent a night with Gonzalo and took a plane to Richmond, Virginia, telling Gonzalo I was meeting Hugh in Washington. Gonzalo came to see me off after an intimate and emotional night.

At Richmond Henry was expecting me, with John Payne, Caresse’s young lover. We arrived at Hampton Manor, another enchanted house, like the Grand Meaulnes or Louveciennes, with its white columns, its deep frame of old trees, its large harmonious rooms, its extraordinary stillness, the enchanted sleep to the tune of whip o’ wills.

Caresse, whose life at the Mill (the Moulin du Soleil) was spangled with all the personalities of her time, felt that life might repeat itself with Henry and me at Hampton Manor. When she saw us there, writing, talking, she felt perhaps it was the Mill again, with Harry Crosby like a meteor, with Breton, Éluard, Frank Crane, Ernst, the painters, the aristocrats, the wealthy, the capricious. Now she had invited Henry, Salvador Dalí, and other artists. There are so many currents in Caresse’s receptive being that she brings forth more friendships, links and currents created by her life force. She sits stuttering, rubbing her eyes, rubbing smooth the wrinkles on her face, flicking her tongue, her small, sensual pink tongue.

We slept through long, hot afternoons. Henry wrote in the morning, adding many pages to Sexus.

We received telegrams from the Earl of Dudley that he might arrive Thursday or Friday with his wife, but I was not stirred. Yet when Thursday evening came and Caresse took us off to the movies I said, “Dudley will arrive tonight.” Henry said, “No, at three o’clock in the morning” Caresse said: “Tomorrow.” So we went to the movies, but I knew. As we were driving back to the house in the darkness, I said: “They are there. I know it.”

And they were.

As soon as I heard John’s voice, the sensual turmoil reawakened. His wife is small, dead, insignificant, lifeless. John stole a kiss from me in the dark stairway, and then we all went to bed, Henry and I in one room, John and his wife in another, Caresse alone because Payne is now in the army. I lay awake desiring John, whom I do not love, wishing he had the audacity to rise in the middle of the night, imagining how it would feel to meet in the dark, secretly, feeling each other’s bodies, as I read long ago in a novel which stirred me erotically at the age of nine. Darkness and nakedness.

In the morning the current of desire between us was so strong it was unendurable. I was leaving for ten days in the afternoon, and John’s wife followed him every minute with a fear of me. But Caresse took destiny in her own hands. She took John’s wife in her car to shop an hour away. Henry was trying to get in touch with his friend Emil Schnellock at Fredericksburg, so I suggested lightly that he too go to town and telephone him, and he did.

John had just finished taking a shower. I entered his room, and he began to kiss me hungrily in front of the window while we watched them driving away. The tension was so acute, a storm broke out during our caresses, a violent electrical storm. I stood by the window, John behind me. I pressed against him and felt his desire so hard and strong. He opened my blouse, took my breasts in his two hands and pushed them upward as if to drink from them. The storm over our heads, all the peace gone, fire and lightning bolts coursing through the body. We threw ourselves on the bed, and he took me with violence.

How grateful I was to Caresse for this moment, Caresse with her knowledge of passion. How joyous I was to have discovered this joy divorced from the pangs of love, this purely sensual vibration which alters in no way my deep love for Gonzalo, a vibration which takes place only when John is there, a drunkenness which lasts only while he is there, and of which I am free as soon as I leave him, free of love. Yes, he is the shepherd, and all I want is to bite into him when he is there, his flesh so alive, the summer perspiration fresh as dew, the sensual underlip. He is alive. Electric joys.

Nothing else about him interests me; his atmosphere of Middle West America homeliness, the cult of the ugly, the drinking, his dreams and talk, which I cannot even remember. Absolutely ordinary, youthful, too simple. He is imitating Henry. So when I leave him, the spell is broken, and I am free.

Caresse and I were in the airplane, talking, confiding. Caresse thought Hugh was going to meet me in New York, but I told her Hugh did not know I was arriving, that Gonzalo was going to meet me. Poor Gonzalo was desperately anxious—we were an hour late due to fog. He was waiting for me on the curb, anxiously staring at all the taxis. We spent the night in our little room. The next day we went together to Mamaroneck, to look for a place for him and Helba near Hugh and me. But they are so slow they will move in by the time I am ready to leave.

Here, in Mamaroneck, I have no excitement or fever, so I fall into an abysm. The smallest frustration makes me despondent. If I am thwarted I can easily think of suicide.

This place: a bourgeois apartment house near the bay, everything genteel and well regulated. The husbands all go to the city in the morning. The beaches are dull, the people stodgy and uninterested in each other. It is all plain and homely and tidy and colorless.

Now I think coldly like a demon: John will help me get through the summer, I will get strong, and in the fall I will throw myself into the fullest, most hectic life possible. I must find another love; I must get free of Gonzalo. It is all painful and negative now. He weighs on me heavily. I am only made for passion; it is the temperature of love that I cannot endure. I am afraid, and I think it is death—everything but passion seems like death to me. Only in fever do I feel life.

JULY 28, 1940

On the train from Fredericksburg to New York

Back in Hampton Manor again, Flo followed John like a shadow every minute. We could not even talk to each other alone. We could not touch each other. Tuesday, Wednesday. He does not know ruse yet. At night when we walked—we swayed in the dark to touch each other’s hands. Powerful currents traversed us. At any moment we could have made a wild gesture. The excitement mounted and became pain, the body aching with desire. One afternoon we went to the Potomac River to swim, and when I walked towards John in my bathing suit I saw the desire on his face. We knew we had to act.

Thursday morning Flo was not well, and she let John drive the poor negro, who has a tumor on his finger, to the doctor. We sat in a café and stole kisses, the tension growing so keen that I wanted to scream. We took the negro to the doctor, and then we drove to a pine forest I had observed on the way. We entered into the heart of it, walking on pine needles. We kissed voraciously. He slipped his hands into my shirt. What strength in John’s hands, what firmness. I felt his desire hard. We lay on the pine needles, and we almost shouted with the wildness of it, the ecstasy. When we returned to the house, we were gentle and appeased. When Henry and Flo took a siesta, John and I went down to the cellar, to the Mexican room, where he wanted me to see his drawings. I was naked under my cotton dress. He bit my thighs. Again delirium.

The last day we had only one hour together. Unable to unleash our desire for each other, I was forced to notice John’s character, and I saw the points at which we touch, the sensuality, the electric tensions, the positive onrushing natures, a likeness of swift, proud, domineering and active temperament, the capacity to burn. But he has a timid, plaintive, shrunken wife, who wants him small, who is afraid of the violence in him, afraid of a mistress who can give him a tremendous sense of expansion, set him on fire, challenge all his forces. The first time John and I returned from the ride in the village, she was weeping—and she said, without knowing anything, but out of pure intuition: “I was thinking how it would be if someday you loved somebody else.” The day of their wedding she had already lost him; he was already beyond his marriage. He calls her the waif.

Strange thing: wanting to reassure Henry, I took a siesta with him, knowing he would take me, and I responded fully. And it was after this I went down to the Mexican room and could still vibrate under John’s earthy caresses.

Mars of the earth again.

John can do something none of my other loves could do—he can make me feel joyous, sensual, free of pain.

I enjoy my power. I can say John’s name in such a way that he says it feels like a knife. I can make him tremble with desire, quaking with it, keep him awake and tortured. He has given me what woman should value highly—a young man’s first passion, so total, so romantic and fervent. I feel beautiful, desirable, potent in his hands. The light in his face at times is dazzling. After a walk in the dark when merely brushing each other, we could create ecstasy. Even in the dark his face is resplendent.

John, it is marvelous to arouse desire. Do not be too hurt. So much in the world we should caress and love only with the blood and the flesh because it is beautiful, brilliant, alive—as we love fire. No small role—giving me pure joy—giving me life in this body, a miraculous current without pain. For the first time the Sun. I was never given the Sun.

Poor little Flo—she taps John’s knees lightly with a small, helpless hand. I dig my nails into them and he trembles like a racehorse.

MAMARONECK, AUGUST 12, 1940

I believe I have defended myself against loving John, against suffering. I believe that just as in the beginning when I still loved Henry and couldn’t yield to Gonzalo absolutely, so have I defended myself against yielding to John. Whenever I arrive at Hampton Manor, I am prepared not to feel. And so it was the last time. Because there was Flo, because John is poor and not free, because of his youth, there were obstacles. Anyway, I arrived cold. And for a few hours all was well, but soon the warmth returned. John may have been talking. I saw his eyes on me. I looked at his mouth.

The next day the torment began. I found him depressed. Flo attacked him each time they went to their room. Her instinct is not blind: she told him: “I am not the woman for you. Anaïs is the woman for you.” And then, more obscurely, she fights to diminish him, crush him. She tells him he must not be crude (when he is merely impulsive), that he talks too much, or she attacks his work. Poor John.

All the time we were watching for a moment together, and all through the first day it was impossible. The next day Caresse arrived early in the morning. She sent us on errands, which included two huge valises so that no one else could get into the car. John and I went—and we went to the woods. The moment was too short for me to respond fully in spite of my excitement, but I still feel the starved kisses, the violence. That evening, a walk in the dark with sparks burning through us.

Caresse announced her publishing partner was failing her. Somehow or other we all simultaneously began to talk about doing it ourselves. Caresse was very concrete and determined. We sat at lunch, planning to run a press in Hampton Manor to publish the books she had intended to do: Nadja by Breton, translated by Jolas, a novel of Kay Boyle’s, memoirs by Marianne Gold, Cendrars, Radiquet, etc.

We walked over to the barn, but found it was too open for a press, and we would not be able to get it heated later. Then we walked to the house built for the servants, a lovely little white house all of natural wood inside, with many rooms. We decided to install the press there. As this was shaping into a solution to John’s life (penniless, nowhere to go, a good craftsman, he could live on running the press), it became all intermingled with our love. John saw it as our work. I could see him working, incited by love, and the excitement took the form of an intense personal joy which we wanted desperately to share together, to share together like a bottle of wine.

While everybody was looking through the rooms, talking, I caught John alone, walking behind me. I turned fully on him and whispered: “I love you!” which completely set him on fire.

That evening we were so full of emotions, we could not talk. John is so different from Gonzalo—so creative and not twisted. Things take form in his hands. He loves to build, to work, invent, discover. The night before—while Henry argued against us—we had talked about the necessity of recreating the universe from the beginning with our own hands. John has that. He likes to dominate matter. This likeness, this capability we both have attracts us to each other. That night the accord between our temperaments was so visible that Flo left the table and went to her room.

Next morning. It is the day of my departure. We find ourselves alone in the library, sitting far away from each other because we are in turmoil and John says he wants to pounce on me. Every time we look at each other we feel we are sent reeling. The whole world is reeling around us. It is unbearable. John comes over to me, takes my face in both his hands and quickly covers it with kisses.

He is despondent. He feels defeated, imprisoned by Flo, frustrated. I am depressed too, from so much supervision and repression.

A little later when I am all packed, I find Henry has fallen asleep. I leave the room. I go to Caresse and ask her if she will call John for me (Flo is ill in bed) so that I may see him a little while. She suggests I go to the little white house and wait there. She’ll come with John later. And this she does so deftly that Flo thinks John has been called to help Caresse carry things to the little house where the press is to be.

She leaves us there. My heart is beating. We kiss. John is ecstatic. “Everything you do I love, everything. You are perfect, marvelous! I like your audacity. I like all your impulses. Now I am happy.”

In the train I travel with Henry, who has to go to New York. I don’t know if it is Henry who has changed or my image of him, but he seems faded, grey somehow. In the train I am anxious because I fear I am going to fall in love with John, but there are reservations in my desire for him which do not exist in my other loves.

The night before I left for Virginia, lying with Gonzalo, after his possession of me, he moved his head in such a way that his long black hair brushed my breasts, and this I felt so deeply, as if every strand of hair were tangled with a strand of my own hair and tied around a cell of my blood. John’s gestures do not have this sort of effect on me. The intoxication is there each time, the need to embrace, kiss, to lie with him, but only while he is there, and it never grows roots into my being. Even this time, though I remember the intoxication, I do not feel those blood roots stirring in me, the kind that makes a woman know the man is inside her womb as a child would be, stirring at the center of her being.

AUGUST 22, 1940

Saturday I discovered I was pregnant—three months! Days of anguish over the money and the complications I feared would arise. Jacobson put me in the hands of a good German Jew who works for rich women. He said it would have to be done in two operations, one to insert a bag which dilates the womb (this is done without ether) and then a final one that is done with ether.

I set the date for Wednesday, the 21st. I arrived at nine-thirty and was strapped like an insane person, wrists tied, arms, waist, legs—a strange sensation of utter helplessness. Then the doctor came in. As he began to work, he found the womb dilating so easily that he continued the operation in spite of the terrific pain. And so in six minutes of torture, I had done what is usually done with ether! But it was over. I couldn’t believe it. Hugh was so full of anguish, and Gonzalo.

The only wonderful moment in all this was when I was lying on a little cot in the doctor’s office and another woman came in. The nurse pulled the curtain so that I could not see her. She was made to undress and lie down, to relax. The nurse left us.

Soon I heard a whisper to me: “How was it?” I reassured her—told her how I had been able to bear it without ether, so it would be nothing with ether.

She said: “How long were you pregnant?”

“Three months.”

“I only two—but I’m scared. My husband is away. He doesn’t know. He must never know.”

I couldn’t explain to her that my husband knew, but that my lover had to be deceived and made to believe I had no relations with Hugh. Lying there whispering about the pain, I had never felt such a strong kinship with woman—woman—this one I could not see, or identify, the one who was also lying on a cot, filled with primitive fear and an obscure sense of murder, or guilt, and of an unfair struggle against nature— an unequal struggle with all the man-made laws against us, endangering our lives, exposing us to inexperienced maneuvers, to being economically cheated and morally condemned—woman is truly the victim now, beyond the help of her courage and aliveness. How much there is to be said against the ban on abortion. What a tragedy this incident becomes for the woman. At this moment she is hunted down, really. The doctor is ashamed, deep down, but falsely so. Society condemns him. Everything goes on in an atmosphere of crime and trickery. And the poor woman who was whispering to me, afterwards, I heard her say to the doctor: “Oh, doctor, I’m so grateful to you, so grateful!” That woman moved me so much. I wanted to know her. I wanted to pull the curtain and see her. But I realized she was all women—the humility, the thoughtfulness, the fear and the childlike moment of utter defenselessness. A pregnant woman is already a being in anguish. Each pregnancy is an obscure conflict. The break is not simple. You are tearing away a fragment of flesh and blood. Added to this deeper conflict is the anguish, the quest for the doctor, the fight against exploitation, the atmosphere of underworld bootlegging, a racket. The abortion is made a humiliation and a crime. Why should it be? Motherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman.

And today I am home, lying down most of the time.

Gonzalo came to make lunch.

AUGUST 26, 1940

Days of convalescence. Gonzalo’s behavior has restored my faith and calmed my doubts. Finally today, as we were resting side by side, I felt his desire stirring, and he placed my hand over it and let me caress him. I was warmed by his desire. I am in love with Gonzalo still. I know it now.

In utter despair at American emptiness and homeliness, we began to dream Paris all over again. Gonzalo told me one story after another, and I urged him to write them down. He recreated the atmosphere for me. Listening to him and remembering, I began to write, starting with the pages on the rue Dolent, a fantastic story about Hans Reichel. With Gonzalo, I could abstract myself from the American scene. It was a collaboration. After working, I often telephone him and say: “Look what you have done! It is your book.” His stories are terrifying. I started to write flowingly last week, two days after the abortion. Yesterday I wrote the pages on the café. I am working to weld it all together… the barge story, the rag pickers.

A corrupt man is like a woman. Corruption is a kind of passivity, a pregnable, open, yielding element which attracts one. One feels like plunging into this corrupt, lax, open being, through which all currents flow, raping it, mastering it. During Gonzalo’s storytelling I suffer sometimes to see the expression of yieldingness, of abandon, which took him everywhere…the abandon… That must be the way a man feels about woman, the desire to insert the hard erect knife of his will and desire into this soft, open flesh.

Poor John. I think of him now as the brightest son I ever had, but I love the dark one best of all, the one who has shown ugliness, envy, fear, weakness, criminal negligence, corruption. Corruption is revealed by a choice of ambiance, and Gonzalo’s choice was of the darkest, most diseased and corrupt of all, monstrous.

AUGUST 27, 1940

Strange days of loneliness, barrenness and inner burning. I live absolutely in my past and partly in Gonzalo’s. We meet like conspirators, while Hugh is fishing, and we talk, talk, talk. Then I work. Physically I am at a very low ebb, but spiritually I carry a demon of restlessness, hunger, imaginings. I want a rich, multiple, dazzling life. I want abundance, recklessness, sumptuousness and the heights of passion, up to the hilt. I want to be burned, to be burned. And now I want to live out everything within the very layers at which I am creating. I have set the climate and I must find it—but where?

SEPTEMBER 1, 1940

I must beware of my imagination. At the moment when love becomes pale, I begin to suffer from doubts. Gonzalo, on the contrary, has nestled in this love and does not expect catastrophe now. He expected it during the passion. I expect it now. Last night I told Hugh I was leaving for Virginia at midnight, and I arranged to have dinner with Gonzalo in New York. I told him I could leave, or not leave, whatever he wanted. He didn’t say anything, so I finally began to tell him how, because of his passivity, I had suffered and was detaching myself from him. He was immensely surprised, and he laughed good-naturedly, absolutely innocently. He said all I seemed to be missing was his tyranny, and that he had changed deeply, felt more balanced, less crazy than before, that he now believed in me. I said I loved our rhythm before, when he took the active role, that now I was lost. Gonzalo explained that all men were stupid when it was a question of ruse, and that he had grown to depend on my ruses for our meetings. He showed great tenderness, but I did see the change and felt that this Gonzalo I don’t like, that I preferred the crazy one who made scenes. This Gonzalo is old, fat and peaceful. But I have become aware of the demon in me that is the cause of my suffering, the demon of doubt. It may cause me to destroy the very love I want, as I destroyed my life with Henry, because fundamentally, Henry having made his love of June the theme of his work, I never really believed in his love. And Gonzalo, being enslaved by Helba’s helplessness, her deafness, I feel equally that in the end, when the passion is over, I may lose him. I have a feeling I should make Gonzalo jealous as I made Henry jealous by running away to New York. But that only reassures me for a little while, and then Henry’s egotism destroys my faith again. They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love.

It is my fault. I love with so much devotion that I make everybody selfish… I know there is something very wrong with me. I need proof of love constantly, and that is wrong and cruel for the others.

All day Sunday I tortured myself needlessly with doubt. Monday morning I didn’t telephone Gonzalo. Then he telephoned me to say that because of the weather he thought I should not leave for Virginia. He was afraid for me. Such a small thing can make me happy for a day, but then an equally small act of thoughtlessness can plunge me into despair.

To rise beyond this emotional weakness, I worked well last week. Then Henry came and read what I had done, and his criticism was negative. He had nothing to say about the fragments themselves; all he could see was that they were not woven together. He said it was bad, monotonous and static. This stopped my writing completely. I showed it to Gonzalo, and he responded. But why should I depend on such responses? Why must I depend on others for everything, never on myself? I am back to where I was years ago, before analysis, to a devouring doubt, continuous hyper-sensitivity and fears. What can I do now? Before I was helped by Allendy and then by Rank. Now I have to heal myself alone. At least I realize it is all in my imagination. But the suffering is there, continuous, haunting, like an infection. No relief. A few hours of peace, and then the gnawing begins again.

Anaïs, stop devouring and fearing. You are a tortured being, you have been all your life. Come out of this darkness and live passionately again, forget yourself. Create. You isolate yourself with your love, and you suspect every nuance and every word and every gesture. It is bad. You must be courageous and ruthless and reckless. If you always need a new love because you only believe in the new, you will lose Gonzalo, whom you still love.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1940

Hampton Manor has changed because of the petty antagonisms that have grown between Mrs. Salvador Dalí and Henry and John. She used Henry (she doesn’t know English), and she has appropriated the library where we used to talk for a salon for Dalí’s work. Meals were full of hostility and mockery. The wife wants the entire place run like Dalí’s kingdom, and we are to be his subjects. John and Flo feel humiliated by the conversations entirely in French, and John is critical of Dalí’s persistent work and gayety (he whistles and sings all day). I would not have felt all this. I am less rebellious at being asked to help, or to being used. John hates to serve. Henry hates Mrs. Dalí’s coddling of Dalí. They hated everything and made crazy statements like: “Dalí only eats lamb,” as if this were in itself a crime. Henry resorted to his maniacal contradictions. I liked to hear Dalí talk, but it was impossible. John was jealous when I spoke Spanish, and Mrs. Dalí was on guard against me. Dalí liked me, lost his shyness and retiringness when I came, showed me his work.

But Hampton Manor, the enchanted, has vanished. John’s money is finished and he has to go home. He growls at everything. The press plan was abandoned because Caresse didn’t have the money for it. John would have to have done all the work, but this I didn’t want, because I don’t want to leave Gonzalo in New York, and at Hampton Manor I couldn’t be with John.

But again, when John and I were in the same room, garden, or road, we felt each other’s presence like wild magnets. We only had one walk together, the last day, and he told me how he suffered from my absence and the fear that I should die, how he only came to life when I arrived, how he wanted me. What power draws us together and makes me forget Gonzalo. Desire. Desire. Again our eyes fixed on each other each time Henry and Flo are not looking, and again we hypnotize each other completely, falling into the well of the other’s being, compelled, blind, drunk. His blue eyes are firm, fixed like a virile possession, and he takes me. At other times he is dissolved with desire, his voice grows husky and warm, and I feel bathed in warmth and passion.

We planned to meet again in New York, to spend nights together.

In the evening, when Flo was in her room and Henry was in the bathroom, I ran downstairs lightly because I heard John locking the doors. He heard me coming. We stood for an instant in the darkness of the porch, crackling and burning like wild torches—he all gold and blue, I all red and black—hearts snapping with the tension, whispering words of love. He then became the lover, feverish with desire, with the voice and laughter of the lover, the man one wants to be locked in a room with.

I am grateful to have a lover I want to be locked with in a room—a lover on fire.

I sit in the train and I still feel him, where one should feel a lover. He says I am his only joy. I say he is my only joy. He says I am the only one who has his rhythm. I say, “You have mine.”

On his birthday, we found a pack of cards fallen around the car. I picked up the ones with their faces turned upward. I do not know their meaning, but the negress said it was all lucky.

Sad days, the last of Hampton Manor. We see the long, long roads before us. From afar they look wet, but they are absolutely dry—a mirage. Many tree branches lie wrapped in cocoons of spider webs, dead leaves and dead insects lying tangled in the gown of white fog ribbons, the maternal fluid weaving its cocoon pockets in the forest, silvery envelopes, snowy white wigs of crystallized saliva. The earth is sienna colored. The negro is singing on his horse. There is a pool crowded with headless trees. Dalí is painting a guitar that is loose and slack like a body without nerves and a woman’s body taut like a guitar while the hand plays on her sex. Dalí is painting a horse whose insides contain a woman whose child is kissing his horse teeth while the child’s enormous horse-like sex hangs limp. Henry is writing about Greece. John is writing about corruption and rebelling: “Why do we take up your death theme? We haven’t died.” Why indeed, the gold sun youth of America wallowing in our European death chant.

“Well, can you visualize tomorrow?” I asked. “You are tomorrow.”

“I can’t—it’s true.”

So they chant death with us.

SEPTEMBER 7, 1940

Tonight I suddenly realized the demon in me, the one shattering my life and endangering my love for Gonzalo, the demon of intensity which pushes me to feverishly seek it wherever it lies. As soon as I left John, I fell again into a more natural world and was sad, as when you want to play the drum because you are taut and full of rhythm, but the drum skins tear.

I am in an absolutely mad state, abnormally sensitive, magnifying everything, emotional, full of anguish and nervousness. If I am eating in a restaurant and the music begins, I become dissolved and lacerated. If I see an accident in the street, I am obsessed all day, jerking with pain for the others. I feel like June—unbalanced, lost.

At the same time I have a ferocious lucidity which makes me act on Hugh’s blindness and ghostliness, and I give him a superb talk, such as Rank used to give me on unreality—the blind man’s dog I am! At the same time, I am aware that my gift is my curse—for as I see into others’ lives abnormally with such a keen insight, it sometimes gives me an inhuman role to play—the wise man’s role, so hateful, so difficult. At times some depend on my guidance, but at other times they hate it and rebel against it, as Henry did. And yet at other times, they ignore it, and then, because my feelings are involved, I suffer more from their blindness than they do. Hugh said the worst is that in anger I utter truths which hurt. He said nobody could hurt more than I, because I am accurate. I hate my own lucidity—I suffer as a god must suffer when he looks down and witnesses a murder committed in a moment of blindness. Sometimes I feel so desperate I cry out that I will kill myself and put an end to this seeing. Oh, the torture of eyes forever open! Close my eyes, oh god, that I may rest from suffering. I can no longer bear my awareness. How clearly I see! I see Hugh walking off like a ghost when I leave him, and this image of gauntness and isolation saddens my trip to Hampton Manor. I dwell on this and discover the significance of his absent-mindedness, his absence.

When I returned, as we were driving home, I told him all I know and how I have struggled to reach the point of living fully in the present, with all my faculties in the present moment. I poured out all that I have attained myself with such difficulties—the presence, in contrast to the absence of unreality.

Hugh was vitalized, touched. His gloom and greyness passed into me after I talked, because all my strength is used in these transmissions of life. I am weary of burdens— burdens.

I am afraid to ask myself what John will be for me—he will be my joy for how long? John is absolutely poor, but unwilling to submit to the discipline of a job because he wants the life of the artist. He is imprisoned by his wife’s complete dependence and clutching love. She has no life of her own, no creativity, no action. She lives vicariously through him, a shadow—his shadow, his echo.

I am cornered. John is not the man. When will he come? Will he have the savour of Gonzalo, but with strength…or will I have to provide all the strength again, until I die? I await him. It was in this exact mood that I awaited Gonzalo a few months before he came along. I knew then he would be a big man, not from France—I almost felt him. I saw his eyes in Fez. And Jean de la Lune (Cateret) had said, “Watch out for 1940.” But it cannot be John.

I think I am a little mad with feeling, with awareness, with obstacles. Create, Anaïs. Every word you wrote was always the golden key which opened the doors of your prison. The Lawrence book brought you Henry. The House of Incest Gonzalo. The Winter of Artifice John. It is your female chant for man, for the lover. Write. It is your ornament, your grace, your seduction, your chant for courting.

Create, Anaïs. He will come.