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THE COLLECTOR

I suggested we feed him the diary

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 30, 1940

Again I opened up to Henry—he had to woo me again. We lay in bed in his hotel room, and talked about my idea which is bearing fruit—that while Henry could no longer write erotica for the old millionaire, I could give him copies of the diary in exchange for money for Henry’s trip. Virginia copied diary 32, I revised it, changed the names, but while doing it I relived intensely my new love for Henry. Is it the power of the diary? My love seemed intact. I felt awe, as for a magical event.

And here I am with Henry, who is still fragile, lean and ageless, merely a little too tired for big nights, a little harassed by invitations and people’s dependence on him. The first volume of his life with June is on his desk. I cannot read it; I have not the courage. It is Pandora’s box. I close my eyes and yield to Henry’s desire. He makes me lie over him. We again find the sensual frenzy, the same violence, followed by peace and tenderness.

Faced with Henry’s dependence again, I suggested we show the diary to Barnette Ruder, the collector of rare books. This is a strange story—he is a Jew who looks like Rank. I have never seen him, only a snapshot of him. When Henry came to New York, Ruder liked him and often invited him to dinner, gave him presents and a little money now and then. At the same time, he talked about himself. His life was a failure, he was alone and could never win a woman for himself. He was always reading and hankering for life, and wanted Henry’s guidance. Henry took him out, but Ruder didn’t want to pay for his women. One day he told Henry that he had a client who was an elderly man, very rich, who had no sensual life at all, who was interested in Henry’s writing, especially the sexual element, and thought it might have a miraculous effect on his own paralyzed life. He was willing to pay Henry one hundred dollars a month to write one hundred pages or so especially for him, mostly on sex. And then, almost like in Dante’s Inferno, Henry was condemned to write about sex. At first it seemed easy, but it became unnatural and forced, and finally it was hard labor. He did this for a few months. Ruder said that he did not even read the pages, that he immediately sent them to the old millionaire down south. When Henry got the contract from Doubleday for the book on America (The Air-Conditioned Nightmare), he dropped the writing for Ruder. I suggested we feed him the diary as I have no money for Henry’s traveling expenses. Ruder assented but will make no decision until he reads it. Monday I turn over volume 32, beginning with my love for Henry and June. Not without mischievous intentions, I pasted one of my most becoming Louveciennes photographs on the inside of the cover. Now I wait.

At the moment my love for Henry is strong, but I do not seek to hold him near because my love for Gonzalo is more violent, more emotional, and I live in constant, anguished fear of discovery.

John is going home. I do not feel him, hear him, or see him.

DECEMBER 1, 1940

Henry for the first time is experiencing being used, being asked to help Patchen, being begged to solve others’ problems. He is amazed by the spreading of needs—when you help one, five more appear. For the first time I found Henry depressed because he has awakened suddenly to the needs of others and is overwhelmed. I said, “I have lived with this knowledge since I was a child.” “I couldn’t bear it,” Henry said.

On the very day Hugh gets paid, all he gives me for food, the house, and myself, is given away (half to Henry, half to Gonzalo—the half I give to Gonzalo Hugh knows about, but not the two hundred a month I give to Henry). The second day my pocket is empty, and then begin the antics which wear me out emotionally. I have to cheat, lie, intrigue, borrow, steal the rest of the time. Finally, a few days before the next allowance, I have to confess to Hugh: “I’m broke.” Hugh scolds me. Sometimes he notices I pay with checks for things I said I would pay with cash given to me. I never can tell him when I get paid for my writing. Dorothy Norman’s check for the Elena story went to Henry. It is as wearing as Henry’s old way of living when he had nothing (getting himself invited to dinner, borrowing and stealing). It keeps me on edge. I never buy anything for myself. I have to expect Hugh’s revolts and take his scolding as if I were extravagant. When he relents and forgives me, I feel even worse. I feel I am harassing him. That is why I was able to rebel against John.

DECEMBER 13, 1940

Revising diaries from 32 to 38, overwhelmed by the reading. Such consuming pages, such ecstasies, such fever, expansion, dilation, joy, drunkenness. The love for Henry looms immense and deep. At moments I feel that it is the first time that a woman has opened herself up. I had forgotten. Will it warm others as it warms me, consume them as it consumes me? Where am I now? In human life, not so drunk, and not so open. I have locked my door.

Henry’s “Essay on Balzac” appears in Twice a Year with my story of Elena.

I am sad. The world is heavy without the dream.

DECEMBER 14, 1940

Telegram from Ruder: “Very much impressed (diary 32), have forwarded my client making clear that he is under obligation to pay for this installment. I think he will be interested in others provided the material is similar. What do I do now?”

Got one hundred dollars from Ruder when I was borrowing from Millicent, the maid, with four days until Hugo’s payday. I got one hundred dollars when Gonzalo needs money for his teeth, Helba needs a mirror to work with, Hugo needs material for his engraving. There are no promises of more—Ruder does not know what his client will say. The client is interested only in the erotic passages. I was highly excited, happy, dancing around.

The joy I have in giving money away, oh, the joy, the joy. Why can I never have enough of my own money so that I should not feel guilty about giving, why?

DECEMBER 15, 1940

I have amorous dreams about Henry after rereading the old diaries. No sense of pain. Joy only.

Sometimes Gonzalo and I watch our neighbors undress across the way in another house. Gonzalo has seen them make love. I never have, but they like to walk around naked. She combs her hair, brushes her teeth. They pick up the black cat, turn out the light as they enter the bedroom. He puts his hand around her breasts. We talk about a rape we read of in the newspapers. A woman declared that a negro raped her three times, once when she was coming out of the shower, once on her bed, again in her automobile. It was untrue. She may have wanted him to.

JANUARY 4, 1941

Robert Duncan. He stands near and clear in me. At first I did not entirely hear him. He spoke through the poems. He is beautiful. He is at times in a trance, and he talks flowingly then, like a medium. I first loved Robert when we sat and talked alone, after I read his diary. We must never touch physically, but I am under his spell. After he leaves I want to run after him and say: “I love you,” but this assertion is annihilated because the possession takes place mystically and more swiftly than words.

Robert as a woman—his great charm, the seduction of his eyelids, nose, ears, hands—I let Eduardo court him for me, make love to him. Others make the motions of love, but we do not. The passage between us is free, open, profound; we are two slender Egyptian bodies in a posture of dance, immobilized by the fulfillment of meeting the double, the TWIN. It is haunting. He talks about consuming hunger, his own “children,” his renunciations, his quest for the father, his need of love; when he acts, I am at times frightened.

I think I am talking all this that I have written here, forgetting Hugo and his world, feeling uncensored, free. I am talking. I hear my words.

I feel pain again. I dreamed Hugo died. I have never before had such a clear, absolute feeling of death in dreams. I had killed him with anguish. I had to get into Hugo’s bed to be reassured. It was all the guilt I have for sacrificing him to the care of my children. Then I went to see Henry. I was lying over his bed with my coat on. He lay over me like a child, with his head on my breast. I asked him if he would have preferred a human life with me at his side but with all the imprisonments, submissions to poverty and dependence on the world, or the freedom I gave him. He said he preferred the freedom. But how was I? he asked, was I all right? I didn’t say. Henry took my waist between his hands, almost spanning it (I have lost weight again).

The old man accepted volume 33. I was again given one hundred dollars, which paid for the doctor for Helba and part of Henry’s trip. The old man asked me for expansion of the sexual scenes. I let myself go and wrote descriptions of sexual scenes for volume 34. It was during the moonstorm, and I was powerfully excited by my own writing. I had an orgasm while I wrote, then I went to Henry and was passionate, then to Gonzalo, who was passionate, and I responded to both!

Henry left yesterday. I always feel his leaving; it hurts me. He seems frail, has lost the joy he found in Greece, is not happy. He is forcing himself to travel, to write.

JANUARY 7, 1941

Needing the money urgently for Henry, I set about satisfying the old man by writing four sexual scenes for volume 34. Now I’m inserting some in 40 and 41, the father volume.

Robert is being analyzed, liberated. He too puts all his faith in others. He gives faith, but has none in himself. For this, we depend on our love. He too feels great strength from me. We can talk about all things because we travel equally into the myth or the human. In the legend, women slept with their fathers or brothers. In the legend, one can make love in a mirage, one can be haunted and possessed. It is so strange. Robert in my world has taken away the loneliness.

Tragic love. Why must I suffer so deeply in my earthly loves and find joy only in the mystical ones? The joys with Jean Cateret, the ecstasies! The ecstasies with Robert! Ecstasies of penetration.

JANUARY 8, 1941

Robert fecundated me. I was able to turn to The Winter of Artifice, to see its falsities, to separate the fragments and make them individually perfect. I was able to take up the houseboat story, see where I had deviated from the dream and make it more complete. I extracted the Mouse incident and gave it its own legs to stand on. I worked and worked. I wrote sexual passages for the father volume (as his adventures). I cannot give the real volume so I gave The Winter of Artifice with expansions.

JANUARY 15, 1941

Gave Ruder volume 35, working on 36.

Eduardo came. I saw Robert change, become the woman, seductive, tantalizing. I saw them caressing, enjoying each other. There was such a current of love that I was taken in and saw, through Eduardo’s presence, Robert’s feminine body dilating, becoming passionate. I saw Robert in the atmosphere of love and desire. It was like being admitted into the secret chambers of sensual love and then seeing in Robert what would be otherwise concealed from me. It was a strange transition.

Eduardo said, “You two are exactly alike.”

“But Robert is more truthful,” I said.

“He loves less,” said Eduardo. “He is a narcissist.”

There was warmth in the air. The taboo between Robert and me which makes us act somnambulistically towards each other was annihilated for a moment. The love flowed through and between the three of us, shared, transmitted, contagious, the threads binding us. I could look with Eduardo’s eyes at Robert’s finely designed body—the narrow waist, the square shoulders, the stylized body he has, the corrupt, dilated expression. His face expresses dissolution; it reveals the flow, openness, and changefulness. It is so mobile that it seems like an act of exhibitionism. Everything is revealed to the naked eye.

JANUARY 19, 1941

Working on volume 36.

Robert did not give his true self to Eduardo. I saw Robert give one night of pretenses, then withdraw into creation, then detachment, then the “male fury,” the rebellion, and finally cruelty. He could not conceal his feelings. I pitied Eduardo, but I knew that it was he who failed. We had scenes, talks, tears, shared torments, confusion, and I had to help and console Eduardo. Eduardo had said: “You love him more, you defend him.” So I had to do for Eduardo what Robert could not do: prove to him my love was greater for him, that I judged Robert’s acts as those of cruelty. (In the next room where Eduardo could hear, Robert caressed and took Marjorie [Duncan’s friend with whom he was staying] without reaching the orgasm himself, and afterwards he excluded Eduardo from all our talks, as if he didn’t exist.) I knew this changed nothing in my love for Robert, for Eduardo I love as one loves a sick person, an impotent person (Eduardo is not the artist), but Robert to me is potent and does not need my lies. I knew that I was acting for Robert, to do what he did not have the patience or compassion to do. So I was full of love for a broken and weeping Eduardo and helped him out of the confusion. I knew everything Robert felt—I could not truly judge the cruelty because it was an act of honesty. I knew he was acting more nakedly and naturally within his own drama of confusion between myth and human life. Deep down I love him for this too, because it is the sign of the creator. Secretly, while knowing it is inhuman, I admire it. He has more courage. He acts as I would want to, with a clean wound.

The incapacity for cruelty has been my weakness, and in this Robert is a male twin. He often says: “Am I going to live your life?” I am glad he is not going to live my life, but rather what I failed to live in my life. He stopped reading the diaries, not wanting to be engulfed. He teased me about living to make his diary more interesting for me, as interesting as mine. When he was making love to Marjorie, she said to him, “You have done this before.” “No,” he answered, “I am just very well read.”

There is a sexual drama too. Eduardo takes him as a woman, and his knowledge of the danger of this is far more terrible than the woman’s abandon—in this abandon woman finds her fulfillment, but the man who yields in this way is condemned to a passivity which destroys the active part of himself. It maims him and produces the caricature of the woman which the passive homosexual represents, because in him it is not a fulfillment of the deepest nature, but a destruction of one side of the hermaphroditic body for the sake of the other, a crippling. So what is left in this feeble half-woman—the defeated woman with only woman’s weakness, still flaunting her seductions superficially as the whore does when she is no longer beautiful or potent— is doubt and uncertainty. This is what Robert could not become. He had begun to assert his male aspect with me, in my presence. I feel that what I transmit to him is the masculinity in me, the strength. I feel this current passing from me into him. Robert, I give you the masculine in my own soul, for I am fulfilled as a woman, complete. When Robert is in my presence, erect, firm, stylized, pure, there is a coalescence that takes place, and then he is the perfect hermaphrodite, balanced, effective.

When Eduardo came, Robert’s body softened, his hips swayed, his face became that of the cabotine, receiving flowers with a coquettish batting of the edges of the eyelids, oblique glances, like an upturned corner of a coverlet, the edge of a petticoat, the stage bird’s turn of the head, the little dance of alertness, the petulance of the mouth pursed for small kisses that do not shatter the being, the flutter of the birds, all adornment and change, a mockery of the evanescent and mysterious little darts of invitations and coy exposures, a burlesque of the small gestures of alarm and promises… He becomes the woman without the womb in which child and creation coil and erupt, the woman without the womb in which terrible mysteries take place—but the travesty of the whore’s invitation is that it never leads to the magnificent marriage of blood.

While all this happened, I stood in the room staring at Robert, and perhaps through my eyes he saw his disguise, the eyes of my strength calling to him to stand erect and cease these gestures. I am filled with the tears of Eduardo: “I know I risked losing Robert when I took him as a woman…” The tearless, smileless life of Robert flows into his diary because we all talk to each other through diaries. Robert lays the diary open on my knees. He says: “At first with you and me it was the myth. But now I feel it is human.”

I felt guilty when I remembered Robert had read in my diaries about my experience with Eduardo in Paris when we tried to make our love actual. I asked myself: did Robert act out this pattern of outgoing and then withdrawing, like the magic dictation I received from June, the June in me pushing me to abandon Henry and then return to him? Patterns, repetitions. “Your only weakness,” said Henry to me many years ago, “is your incapacity to destroy.”

It only came to me this year—I revolted against being a saint, a martyr. Today Patchen telephoned me: would I send him ten dollars. This request came three days after I had already given him ten dollars. Hugo and I eat for a week on ten dollars. And just a few minutes before I had telegraphed Henry all I had! The injustice riled me. I wrote Patchen a long, stormy letter. I told him we all knew the world has never taken care of the artist, and no one counted on it. He is like an angry beast demanding to be fed, and one knows as soon as one stops feeding him he will be full of hatred again. I do not forgive hatred.

Three people have aroused my hatred: Helba, John, and Patchen. Perhaps it was necessary that I should learn hatred too. I feared it so. I always strove so desperately for harmony. I could not bear hatred, but it is a force. In Patchen I rebel against what Helba and Gonzalo made me suffer, and I refuse to pass through this state again. I have no pity for Patchen, because his hatred is stronger than his love, and his self-love greater than all, and above all, his stupidity, his denseness… I now have the courage for anger, of being hated. Before I had to win all the loves, even the ones I did not feel, but I no longer can pretend.

JANUARY 25, 1941

My letter to Patchen was mad. My madness now is: why do people want to use me, my strength, my courage, my devotion? Why? Is it my weakness they immediately exploit?

The moonstorm makes me insane, but my insanity is nothing but revolt, the revolt I never expressed or lived out. I no longer want to be the victim of the criminals. I want to be the criminal, and this has come simultaneously with the birth of the artist. I want to be the artist now. I have begun to create. I am sad, humanly I am sad. The saint in me was killed by excess. I had to know hatred.

JANUARY 27, 1941

I can write about everything. Erotic scenes for the old man, the Conrad Moricand story, Jean’s story, the barge, the diary. I am stirred, rich, fertile. I faced Ruder, who is selling the diaries, enchanted him. His rejection of the mystical in the diary pushes me into the human. It is good for me. I possess both powers, but I must strengthen the human. I was stopped when they clashed. When I get confused, when they invade each other like my loves, they must be kept separate. As soon as I try to make ONE love, ONE creation, I am broken by the impossible. LET NO ONE EVER DARE TO SAY I DID NOT TRY TO GIVE MYSELF TO ONE LOVE OR TO ONE CREATION—LET NO ONE DARE TO SAY I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR THE PAINFUL DIVISION.

But all of them must live, be heard and written. There lies the strength. I felt it in Paris when I wrote the journal on Fire.

JANUARY 30, 1941

Deliver me from obsessive love. Let me dance. People think I only crave lovers or worship. Nobody knows I am crying out tragically for my very existence. I only exist in the body of my lover, as a body within the body of my lover. My creation exists in its communication and openness. My mystical world, my force, my power, exist only in the twinship voyage. How can I go anywhere alone? I do not exist outside of love. I have never been to a museum alone, to a movie alone, for a walk alone. I have written not to be alone.

FEBRUARY 7, 1941

The Myth story begins to exist because Robert likes it. The Artaud story he sees before it is written so that now I can write it. Robert as a creator has great strength, as a revealer, a prophet. Robert is sitting there writing. For days we locked ourselves in, got drunk on writing.

As the male soul, he says, “Declare your treacheries.” My female soul says, “Protect those you love.” When I destroyed Patchen, he said, “You cannot judge anyone truly because you are expecting someone.” Patchen is not the one, but Robert is. I am content. I seek nothing else.

Mr. Ruder telephones: “More realism! More realism!”

FEBRUARY 9, 1941

In the afternoon, when we met in our corner, Gonzalo said: “There is a change in your voice.” He made us get under the covers, took off my panties, took me with fire and delight—a long orgasm which he ends with grateful, tender kisses. I left him all warmed.

This morning I met Henry. His father died yesterday. He arrived two hours too late. Henry was, as I expected him to be, Chinese, mystical, full of tender acceptance. He met me with passion, hunger. I gave myself so wholly, feeling his fragility, his preciousness, the unbroken bond, the well of tenderness, of devotion. We lay in bed talking about New Orleans, his trips, what he saw. We did not talk about his father. There is such tenderness in his leanness. He seems so small, so delicate; I look at his wrists. He has to go back to his family, to watch over the body of his father.

Journals 32, 33, 34: they recreate a state like opium smoking in which one little incident, one caress, one scene, produces enormous diffusion. The writing is all about the feelings produced, removed from reality, the enormous expansion in sensation. Life comes in small pieces, little scenes. I was an opium dreamer—I could not focus on reality.

35 to 45: later the diaries become focused on human drama, movement. The writing grows tighter, concerned with essentials, terse, sparing, strong. 45 to 50: the focusing gains in intensity and accuracy. Greater sincerity, greater clarity. In the last volumes, 50 to 60, there is a fulfilled climax, a fusion of the dream, the mirage, and human life. They flow together.

FEBRUARY 13, 1941

The day before yesterday, a day of orgy.

I met Henry for lunch, and we got into bed afterwards, so eagerly, so completely, grasping the asses with our hands, clutching at them to bring them more violently together. Henry fell asleep. I slipped out of bed.

Dinner with Gonzalo. Our corner. A prolonged enjoyment, prolonged to exasperation, a wallowing into flesh, a hunger of the hands.

Orgiastic day, no writing possible. Hugo called me to scold me: the telephone bill has grown huge, immense, and unpaid when he had given me the money for it. The net of economic difficulties closes in on me. Everybody is irresponsible, unaware that we are going to be shipwrecked.

Yesterday, a Day of Work, thirty pages of writing. Today another Day of Work. I could ask myself, as Patchen does, why does no one pay me for all the work I have done? Ironically, it is not the real diary I am paid for, but the false one.

Story of Ruder, continued. Who is the client? Is it Ruder himself? I said: “Soon I am coming to a volume that brings up the political question. What side is your client on?”

“Bourgeois, of course.”

I hesitated eloquently, baffled. “Well, that will be difficult; I myself have swung to the left.”

“Oh,” said Ruder excitedly, “that will be terribly interesting. I’m very much left. I think you must put all that in. It is all related. Have you tried to reconcile Freud and Marx?”

He was speaking for himself. And his client was bourgeois!

The mystery remains. He repeated his invitation to dinner and the theatre. It is the return of Rank’s body without the power and greatness, the same dolorous begging eyes, the intellectual attitude, the incapacity to enter life, all the energies spent on analysis. He is a pepper, this Mr. Ruder, hoping sometime to be able to make an entrance. But because I see his inadequacies and ugliness, I laugh to myself and think: entrée payante, Monsieur Ruder.

Laughing with a hundred dollars in my pocket, I went to Henry, who was waiting for me in bed. I said to him, “Mr. Ruder is beginning to contradict himself. He says he likes simple, nonintellectual women but he invites me out to dinner!” We talked until late.

Today I said to him: “When you return, if you still want to marry me, we will get a place and live together. I will leave Hugo.”

At this moment I had forgotten Gonzalo. I imagined a whole life of creation and love with the One. Henry said, “I thought you could never separate from Hugo.” Separate or break. When the moonstorm comes, I separate, and then it is madness. I write heavily, with the stone of realism weighing on me.

MARCH 4, 1941

One infernal week. Robert brings me all his children to feed. I write for Ruder, who is never satisfied. My period is late, and I am worrying already about the expense of an abortion, about where I can get a cheap one. Coming every morning are angry bill collectors and threats. Feelings of defeat, exhaustion. Henry becomes aware, tender, asking questions he has never asked. I had to beg Ruder for the hundred dollars for Henry’s departure. He at first refused, then offered me an advance of forty dollars, but today he rejected the hundred pages as definitely not erotic enough. I took it quietly, but I am beaten.

I went to see Slocum, who advises Henry to stop traveling for a while and write, to catch up. Henry cannot break his contract with Doubleday, so he must go on with his trip. I have spoiled them. It’s too late. When I asked Gonzalo only to be careful with the money, he had a crisis of guilt and desperation. The guilt turned into fear, then jealousy. He made a scene again as violent as those in St. Tropez. This one was directed at Robert. He shouted: “I want purity! Purity! You’re still going around with the degenerates.” He got wild, monstrous. He said, “You are still forming groups around and for Miller. That is what it is, Miller’s world. You won’t give it up!”

Saturday Henry left. Last night Gonzalo took all his clothes off, I mine. He was caressing, voluptuous, with his whole body. It was like the nights of rue Cassini, sex through the whole body, a whole love. I became baffled. Why, why? I asked myself. How did this wave of passion return, like the waves of its highest peaks, in spite of the day before, in spite of the poison, in spite of Gonzalo’s bad health, in spite of my doubts of him and his love? When one stops demanding it, it comes; the passion came, flooded me. I said, “Estoy contenta.” “Yo también,” said Gonzalo. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been this happy,” as if he knew Henry was gone. It was one of those dazzling nights. I felt strong.

MARCH 8, 1941

I am down to my last pair of stockings, and they are torn. I sell my books. Every morning I get angry, threatening letters from somebody or other. My only fear of war is: what will happen to my children? If Hugo loses his job, how will I protect them all? What saintliness Hugo has, accepting to sacrifice for others with me. When he scolds me it is always just. He does not ask for himself. He is concerned for me.

If Hugo is the husband of me at twenty, at least he has not deteriorated—he has grown. He has become the artist. He is more today than he ever was.

All my strength goes into the erotica. The diary was abandoned. I look at it tonight to just to assure myself it is still there. I have nothing to say.

Wrote forty pages of erotica with the possibility of selling it.

MARCH 27, 1941

Robert is gone, ordered to report for induction. I could not eat; I walked the streets. Hugo began to work for his return, his liberation. They do not want homosexuals in the army. When Robert left, for the first time he did not give me a child’s kiss, but a lover’s kiss.

What I want to tell Gonzalo, but cannot, is that his love for Helba is destroying mine for him. When one brings, as he does, the past into the present, one surrenders the present to the past. His blind, foolish devotion to a person who is willfully and voluntarily enlarging every little pain, magnifying every discomfort and malaise in order to command pity and attention, finally tires out my love for him.

I know this is not true—it is my own sickness that makes me feel this. Perhaps Gonzalo feels the same about Hugo or Henry. Even of Eduardo he is jealous. He was insanely jealous of Robert. Now I am the one insane with this trauma.

How can I surmount the feeling? My life is full, but is there always to be one point of disease in it? Before it was fear of losing Hugo, then Henry, and now Gonzalo? Do I fear losing him? Fear alone causes jealousy, and my fear is invading me—it invades the love and eats into it. The hatred for Helba is growing stronger than my love for Gonzalo. It is a monstrous thing.

I write ten or fifteen pages a day. I see Eduardo, Thurema, Slocum, Ruder. I write to Henry. I paint the benches. When I am with Gonzalo, we paint together when we are not making love. But as soon as I am alone, I fall into this obsession.

I read this tale as if I had never known all this.

I wanted to join Henry, but I do not have the money. Robert is in army prison. I shy away from people. I have isolated myself.

In my own love there is duality, which is why cannot I accept another’s duality when it has forced me into mine (or when my duality forces others into theirs). Who is waiting for a whole love, to give whole love? Henry gave me a whole love when he separated from June, but I did not consider this separation absolute, because after June the human being came June the legend, the theme of his work. So I threw myself into a new love only to meet with the same situation, only worse.

APRIL 15, 1941

Still restless, restless, not to be able to meet Henry in Santa Fe, to escape. Then came a day of defeat, the diary finally ending its tour of the publishers, rejected, then the exhaustion of my erotic themes, the debts.

Caresse came. Her lover Canada Lee is a star on Broadway, in Native Son. She asked me to accompany her to Harlem, where I met him. I had given her the courage to live out her love. We both worried about our lives growing shabby because love has brought us both poverty and restrictions. I have what all women want, love, but it has enslaved me, not freed me. It is devouring me. I am tired of writing. I am losing everything, the little beauty I have, my gifts for expansion. I am imprisoned by devotion. Look where I am! I am watching Native Son, sitting by Mr. Ruder, who is ugly, vulgar and familiar. This is the prostitution I have entered into for Henry and Gonzalo. Look at Anaïs Nin in her dark wine-colored velvet suit (seven dollars at the Lerner shop), in her frilled grey blouse from New Orleans, given to her by Caresse, in the six-year-old wine-colored velvet hat with a feather, the one I wore on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, with a cape cut out of the dilapidated princess fur coat, with mended stockings, walking with a twaddling, deformed monster who invades the privacy of others! Who wants to enter my life and meet my friends?

However, people still say I look dashing and elegant. I discard my costume d’époque to better match Gonzalo’s workman’s clothes, his corduroy trousers and leather jacket, and down Broadway again we walk to see a jungle film, the only film I would see twice, in which the savagery of the animals trains me for the savagery of man and war.

Henry’s adventure trip around America is catastrophic, a wasted sacrifice, for he is creating nothing out of his trip; he is only spitting in America’s eye, like a preacher in an endless sermon casting it to hell.

MAY 4, 1941

The madness reached a climax, where I banged my closed fists against my brow, awakened in the morning dreaming I was murdering Helba…and then I fought it, dissolved it. How? There is a way of bringing the monster out of the cave, and in the clarity of the day it shrinks.

What a strange night, when Eduardo asked me: “Come with me to the Tavern” (the night before he had been there and had picked up a homosexual boy). This tavern was next door to my place with Gonzalo, 132 MacDougal Street, a basement room full of monsters, ugly, mediocre types. It was the rhythm of the two negroes playing the piano and cello which Gonzalo and I could hear from our little studio, the music Gonzalo and I lay down to and caressed each other into druggedness and desire. And to this same music, Eduardo and I sat before a little table, watching the door for the marvelous being that might enter, but no one came. Rats and mice and rabbits scurried, snickered, dawdled, munched, hunched, but there was no marvelous being to love. Eduardo watched with anxiety. Another night without love. For Eduardo sensual hunger is also a hunger for love. And if I were sitting there without love?

Tam, tam, tam…the piano and cello while Gonzalo and I lie on the bed, and his black fingers drum on my skin and play the cello between my legs. We are laughing at the music because it is always the same. But what goes on inside of us is never the same. The millions of days, nights, and moods varying in color, smells, form, climate, depths are never repeated. All the millions of nuances of one love, one love turning its million faces towards each other, the millions of gestures altered by the mood of each day, colored by fear, misunderstandings, revelations, creations, books, films, the past, voyages, other loves, dreams. Tam, tam, tam…Gonzalo’s body each time is sufficient to awaken erotic feelings—his hair, his neck, his chest, his smooth back, his iron legs, his odor, his color, his laughter, his voice. Gonzalo is unfastening my new panties with the garters attached, and saying: “It looks like a pulpo (octopus)—how many pulpos do I have to unfasten? Gonzalo, throwing his cigarette butts still lighted in the middle of the room…

Eduardo’s eyes are riveted to the door…tam, tam, tam…of emptiness. His blood will flow back to its source unspent and hurtful; his love flows back like poison. I look at the door too. Gonzalo will come in, as he came in the first time into the small room of Roger Klein’s apartment in Paris, looking very tall and demonic, his black hair wild, his body bigger than everybody’s, but big like a child’s, retaining the softness of contours and the awkwardness… Eduardo said sadly, at midnight, “Let’s go.”

JUNE 1, 1941

Gave Ruder fifty pages.

Dorothy Norman will print fragments of volume 1, the childhood diary. Paul Rosenfeld, the literary critic, kept the diary a month without reading it. Henry is in Hollywood and refused to do script writing at two hundred dollars a week. Ruder said: “Doesn’t it make you angry?” “No,” I said, “I expect this. He does not want to sacrifice himself.” What a relief from tension when he receives one hundred and twenty-five dollars from Town and Country (for his article “The Colossus of Maroussi”) for the next two weeks.

Gonzalo makes me happy. He has the secret to the kind of love I want, which only the child-man can give, the child-man who has all the time and freedom to love, who gives himself to love like a woman does. What a continuous multitude of kisses and tender gestures. When he meets me, he hides to surprise me. He is always touching me, on the street, in the movies, in the restaurant.

Everyone rages against the child-man: he is irresponsible, he lets his women take care of him, he permits the mother’s sacrifices and care, he takes it for granted. It is not selfishness. He accepts his weakness and need of protection. He trusts, believes, and it is all natural. Henry never tells himself that writing scripts for Hollywood would unburden Anaïs. No child ever thinks of unburdening the mother. Henry has not tried to find other protectors…he wants protection with love and understanding from someone who lets him be free. I have never asked him to accept the Hollywood offer, which is merely for money, and Henry has never done anything for money.

What no one understands that this child-man also has a precious gift. His very irresponsibility makes him relaxed, soft, gay. Very often after grim hours of responsibility with Hugo, who worries about the future, who has stomach troubles because he worries too much about the future, as I do with him because of the children, I go to Gonzalo and enter his insouciant child-world of such absence of reality and sense of burden that I relax, I forget, I am free. As with Henry, there is purity, almost an innocence regarding the commercial basis of life.

Care often debases one. I have written a hundred pages, which I do not believe in, to take care of my children. I have accepted many humiliating things.

If only people would accept that each one has a role and fulfill it without guilt. Eduardo is not a delightful companion because he is a guilty child. He is not a man, but he is not a child either. He cannot play unknowingly, nor can he be mature and responsible. He never chose between being a bourgeois and an artist—he is always in between.

JUNE 4, 1941

For three days I thought Henry was lost to me because of his enthusiasm for Luise Rainer, born the same day as his mother and June. I was sad, but not desperate as I would be if it were Gonzalo. I was sad like a mother losing a child. I thought of Henry with tenderness, a deep tenderness.

I took a humorous, teasing letter of Henry seriously. He teased me because of his own jealousy aroused by reading 180 pages of erotica, which he is trying to sell for me in Hollywood. “I’m not in love with anyone,” writes Henry.

JUNE 10, 1941

I said to Gonzalo how strange it is that the spermatozoa sometimes lingers in the womb before fecundating the egg. He said, “Yes, it’s slumming!”

I said, “Janet saw a hermaphrodite, half of her body a man’s, half a woman’s.”

“And the sex,” said Gonzalo, “was it a banana split?”

He talked to me for a whole evening about the activity of microbes. Coming home, we saw lovers sitting in Washington Square. Gonzalo said, “I wonder what makes people fall in love.” I said, “Don’t tell me it’s microbes!”

Gave Ruder another fifty pages. Hugo says, “I need money,” so I wrote fifty more, then fifty again about Elena, and about a seductive man who is Gonzalo with a will.

Robert is awaiting his release after weeks at the hospital, after he declared himself as a homosexual to the army.

The old man is begging me to write, to write now. He wants my erotica like a drug.

Jealousy is a small undercurrent, and all I can do is to recognize it, to be honest about it. It is ugly, and I want to conquer it. Henry says: “You have no confidence in yourself.” So gently he answers me, my alarms, my panic. I knew he would laugh at my angry telegram. He writes: “Do you really mean that if you had the money you would join me? You’re not stringing me along?”

Hugo, poor Hugo, has regrets now for all he has not done. He has regrets when he reads Picasso et ses amis, whereas Gonzalo says, “I thought I was reading my life.”

Those who do not enter life—I live in the Village yet I stand outside of it. I walk the streets and I am estranged from all promiscuity. I live only within my deep loves. My last adventure was a fiasco.

Je vis en marge. I have regrets. I have saved one hundred dollars for Henry, which he does not need. I can keep it for joining him—but do I want to?

Stuffed with French books, I write for Ruder.

I only feel I am living when I am meeting my lover, or walking with my lover, or lying down with my lover; I feel that everything else is death, that I should have had many lovers. An evening of soft climate, animated streets, open bars throwing out music and confused voices, gives me no peace, only restlessness. Outside of the orbit of love I do not exist.

Why do I find everything but peace? Great, deep human love should give peace. Every day I abandon a mystical belief, a psychic interpretation. Every day I find new physical roots to the dream.

Jacobson has taken the place of the analyst, and of course I am less happy because only the illusions and delusions create ecstasy. The discovery of the physical and of the earth saddens me. That is why earth people are sad and mystics alone know joy.

When Gonzalo and I sat on the porch this morning and I looked out into space above the houses, he said, “You look as if you were preparing for flight, right out into space.” I had asked the airline for the cost of a trip to Hollywood.

I carry armfuls of books back and forth from the library and write…it is like a beehive…pollen and semen indeed.

JUNE 18, 1941

When I think I have conquered the monster, it attacks me again. I awaken in the morning charged with poisons. I see failure of my writing, failure to live for one absolute love, failure to free myself from economic tyranny.

Then Henry’s letter this morning quieted me: “If you can’t join me I’ll be starting back slowly.” Is that all I needed? I felt that if I don’t join him I will lose him altogether to the Roman life of Hollywood, or to Luise Rainer, who resembles June and me, or to the waitress who talks like Seraphita in an empty restaurant, or to luxury and someone else’s protection.

Je cherche mon rêve. Most of the time I am not in New York at all, but in some corner of Paris, reliving the marvelous peaks of my life there.

What I cannot understand is that although I hate Hugo physically, I suffered one night when he was enchanted by a mulatress at the negro ball. I can bear Henry’s absence and only feel maternal solicitude, yet when he wrote me that my erotica had affected him powerfully like an aphrodisiac and that he was at that moment going to visit Luise Rainer, I had a black day. In both cases I felt I should abdicate, that it was only right to let Hugo enjoy what I had enjoyed, to let Henry find a new love when mine for him is no longer a passion, but I could not bear it in the end. I believe Hugo’s sexual venture might deprive me of his love, which I need. Henry’s love is inhuman, lasting, a strange bond.

I did not finish writing, in the red diary book (begun in 1932), the story of the passage through the eighth house of astrology, the book of poisons, the book of rebellion, the book of disillusion. All through it I still clung to the myth, and there was an undercurrent I did not touch—the story of our aging, all of us, aging. I never was aware of age except for one day in Louveciennes, when I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: I am growing old. But that was before I loved Henry, and when I loved I forgot about my age again, completely. I lived in the illusion I gave to people of my youthfulness. In Mallorca the children called me la niña casada (the married girl). People were always surprised at my real age…I did not feel it. I did not identify with the subject of Balzac’s La Femme de Trente Ans, but I do now. I did not notice others’ ages then.

I first noticed Henry’s aging when he worried about a sexual défaillance, his growing interest in mysticism and diminishing interest in women, his first periods of physical fragility, his desire for tranquility. Hugo has a stomach, grey hairs on his temple. Psychically, we left our youth in Europe. Facing America, we showed the lack of suppleness and adaptability of people at forty. I was the youngest…I struggled not to age, not to accept physical handicaps. I took young lovers (a bad sign). Henry submitted quietly to a change of rhythm…he is always submissive. He cannot bear late nights, and his health has weakened. Earthy Gonzalo resents the failing of his body; it depresses him. He has little to spiritually nourish him. Hugo had no such crisis. He is peaceful; he accepts.

And I? In Europe I was about to enjoy the ripeness of maturity, but here, in the country of youth, I became painfully aware of something others do not see. The young men seek me out, they make no distinction. I join them in dancing and equal them. In Harlem I am the maddest dancer of all. For John Dudley I had no age. Physically there are no signs: my body is that of a girl—I weigh 113 pounds and my waist is still pronouncedly indented. My breasts are dainty, the tips are roseate. My skin is translucent. My hands alone have aged, but they always looked old. There are fine wrinkles around my eyes, and I have a few grey hairs. On tired days my chin is less firm, but the experienced girl at Elizabeth Arden said: “Apart from the lines around your eyes, all is well. The muscles are firm.” I can deceive anyone, even a doctor. I pass for thirty easily. My walk is easy and free, my steps are light—but the feeling, the agedness given to me by the American life, its immaturity! Everywhere there are unformed beings, awkward ages. That has aged me in my awareness. Fatigue. The passage into human life, detachment from the dream. Once, Luise Rainer and I ran away together when visiting Dorothy Norman, to talk. We slipped out of the house, and she drove us to see the ocean which faces Europe. We stood on the edge of the beach, yearning for Europe together. Laughingly, sadly, I said to myself: for this romantic escapade in an open car, hair flying in the damp night, I will pay dearly. The next days were filled with pains and overwhelming fatigue. I left the weekend defeated, shattered. While walking today, I thought I would write a book on aging, le déjà vécu. The tragic motif comes from my not being physically and spiritually in harmony. I await the moment of retreat, and each one seems to be a victory over pain. What pain? The pain that lies in everything. I…once so prodigal… The book of age is the book of caution. I seek tranquility and the absence of pain. The Monster lies all around me, gigantic in the world today. The outer image is too horrible for human awareness. Contemplate the news—the war of Germany and Russia—and you go mad.

I have created the isolation in which I find myself. Life shrinks in proportion to one’s courage.

Letter to Henry:

Do you want a divorce, Henry, so you can live out west, quietly? Are you ready to live alone in your Shangri-La? I have felt at times that you were approaching that Tibetan cycle. Should I free you of me? Are you ready for the ascension? Should I be Seraphita now and vanish, is this the moment?

Robert escaped from the army, came back, seeking a place to nestle in. He slept two nights curled up in a parked car, and then went back to Marjorie, who has room for him in her apartment. He is thoroughly dehumanized now.