Читать книгу Mirages - Anais Nin - Страница 15

INTERMEZZO

Please lead me into the world of pleasure

PROVINCETOWN, AUGUST 8, 1941

I fight against the madness day by day, find relief in writing. What silences me is Gonzalo’s illness, and so not to hurt him I keep my hatred of Helba a secret. I start out to the beach with Hugo, who is, as ever, gentle, contented. We prepare our lunch, we get on our bicycles, we swim, we lie in the sun. I never know at what moment my obsessive hatred will be aroused, when it will be there to eat into me, devour me, poison me. I begin to hate Gonzalo for submitting me to the woman who represents all that I hate. Then I conquer myself, get a few hours of peace, forgetfulness and contentment. I say, like someone who has been very ill and is now well, what a relief. I am free and well again. I fear the return of the obsession at night. If it comes, I cannot sleep, I suffocate, I suffer. Why can’t I be free of Helba? Hugo sees it, says she is a devil. The emptiness of this place, of America, the failure of my writing, has turned my thought only towards what hurts me. When I return to New York I must take up something that will fill my life. What?

AUGUST 10, 1941

Hugo, with his divine goodness, is the only human being who has never hurt me. Yesterday I was saddened by his leaving, and the liberty I was gaining did not seem so wonderful. Gonzalo did not seem so wonderful and could not console me. I did not respond to his passionate lovemaking last night. He took his clothes off and there he was, but I was not moved. I felt Hugo’s goodness all around me, like a cloak of tenderness, and for once I looked down upon the passion. I crumbled last night, my body was cold, and passion could not reach me. I have locked myself away from all the pain that accompanies passion, the jealousies, the fears, the cruelties. I awakened this morning to weakness and smallness in me, a hyper-sensitiveness, to a loneliness which neither Gonzalo nor Henry ever filled, a sickness they cannot heal. Hugo alone gives me life, but when he is here I yearn for the violence of passion. I awakened weak, but then took hold of myself. I wrote Hugo a beautiful letter in which I tell him I love my children (as I have told him they are to me, and he believes it) less and him more. Then I answered letters, set order in my life, took the decisive step of buying the press from Robert to do volume 1, the childhood diary, and planned to give Gonzalo and myself an occupation. I dressed myself in my most becoming costume, the pareo of St. Tropez, red and white, with shells in my hair and around my throat, and walked down the street to see how many men would turn their heads, and all of them did. Now I sit in the café writing, and again my diary gives me the sense of wholeness, which having so many loves takes away from me. Love in me is a wound. Again and again I repeat this, and the only one who loves me in such a way as to heal this wound is Hugo. I am in truth a very, very sick person, and I need a love like Hugo’s to keep me from insanity and death.

AUGUST 13, 1941

It is because I see no expansion in my life—it has fallen into a static sameness— that I have to anguish. No hope of a new passion. Last year, when I returned to Gonzalo from the John adventure, I was hoping not to find a new love that would separate me from him. Now I do hope for it. All dreams of the absolute are gone. Passion gives the illusion of an absolute, but then the eyes open, and there is no absolute union. My eyes are painfully open, and I want to escape. But Provincetown—this is no place in which to find new passion!

AUGUST 14, 1941

Terrific happiness tonight, all anguish dispelled. I talked to Gonzalo, gently, almost in the words I use here, quietly, movingly. I found that he not only understood everything about Helba, but that he had the lucidity I begged of him. He said he had no guilt towards Helba, that his only crushing guilt was not being able to work, to earn a living, to take care of her, because of the paralysis of his will, his laziness. When I said, “She will separate us,” he answered me so seriously and wisely about his independence, his differences from Helba, I felt all my fears dispelled.

A strange night, for when he wanted to leave, I didn’t want to stay alone, so I walked out with him. At eleven o’clock the town is quite dead. Gonzalo urged me to play Beano, although I had been losing for weeks. To please him, I played. I played indifferently, sadly. Then came the lottery, and my name was called. I won ninety-five dollars! Gayety! I gave Gonzalo half because he had forced me to play and brought me luck. I planned to send Hugo the rest so that he could come for the Labor Day holiday. We went to the Flagship for the first time at night and drank three whiskeys each. I carried it well, but they closed at one o’clock in the morning, and I had to go to bed. I fell asleep immediately in a euphoric state, but awakened early to send Hugo the telegram and the money. A turn of luck, faith.

AUGUST 16, 1941

The night Gonzalo and I went to get drunk at the Flagship, there stood at the bar a magnificent man. So magnificent, so arrogantly handsome, a blond Nordic Viking, that I made fun of him to Gonzalo. I said: “There is the gallo, the cock. Such wonderful Don Juan plumage.” But I did feel: here is a MAN. The MALE.

The next morning he arrived at the beach, walked in front of us. He expanded his chest, held himself as if in a state of euphoria. I was still mocking his magnificence. But as he passed, with a free, large, lyrical walk, he smiled at his male companion, so brilliant a smile, so wild, so sensual, that I felt a pang. He was the Sun Man smiling. He stretched himself near us. Beautiful skin, not pale but golden. Curled golden hair. Something so noble, royal, that it shattered all the rest of the people around us. From the first I felt him aware of me as I was aware of him. I wondered at his solitude. I felt: he is foreign to America. He does not mingle with them.

The next morning I awakened so gay, so irrepressibly expansive. I met him on the street. I smiled at him. I broke away from dinner with Virginia and Bob DeNiro and their friends and ate alone at the Flagship in hopes of meeting him there. I ate alone and was exalted by the music and candlelight and thought: if only the people were interesting. There is nobody but him. How well he answers what in me wants music and dance. There is music in him. Yesterday: same place at the beach. When Gonzalo moves away we smile at each other. Walking home: as I reached my place, he reached his a few doors away, moved forward extending his hand, introduced himself. We talked a little while. “I knew you were European,” he said. His teeth were dazzling. His smile exactly like my father’s, with the milk tooth protruding mischievously. I said, when he asked me what I was doing, I was having dinner alone at the Flagship. He said: “We’ll have it together.”

Beautifully dressed in my Morocco-blue jacket, in the candlelight, we created a sensation together. All the women were pursuing him. “But American girls,” he said, “I can’t be with them.” A delightful gay dinner. He is Viennese, and a singer of opera. Subtle and full of nuances and beautiful manners. He flirted so delicately. Said I had a beautiful figure. And I discovered he had been observing me all along, everything I did, that Gonzalo read the newspaper at the beach and deduced that we were married. At nine-thirty, having to meet Gonzalo, I left. He was disappointed. “I thought we could go to the White Whale nightclub together.” I said I would try to join him at eleven when Gonzalo leaves me. At eleven Gonzalo left, but two things deterred me from going: the fear of discovery (the nightclub is right next to Gonzalo’s house, and he prowls about when he can’t sleep) and the feeling I should not appear, leaving the taste of brilliance at dinner and then making Edward Graeffe feel my presence. He missed me.

The next morning he was watching for me on his porch. I said I might be free to go to the beach with him (it was Helba’s turn to be taken to the beach by Gonzalo). But Gonzalo came. I insisted that he had come with me for four days, that it was Helba’s turn, and sent him away. My heart was beating. Edward had waited longer than he had said he would wait. I knew everything as it would be. It was a fantasy I had often indulged in. A beautiful man, the sand dunes, the sun, sensuality and no sorrows. This fantasy I would have liked to fulfill with Gonzalo. But we never did. Since St. Tropez I wanted it.

Edward flung his long legs, singing. His gorgeous torso naked, his golden curls shining, his steely blue eyes gay. Euphoria. A long tramp through the sand dunes. I had grown a little shy. His big hand now and then falling on my shoulder or neck. It was romantic, to an amusing degree. I in my St. Tropez pareo, Hawaiian seashells on my hair and neck. In the heart of the sand dunes, he threw himself on the sand. I fell at his side. Lying back, he began with the most delicate caresses of my fingertips and wrist. Such delicacy. And now and then he smiled at me. Slowly I got undressed as his hands searched for buttons and bows. Afterwards, his nakedness as he stood in the wind, laughing. Truly godlike in his physical magnificence. The waist and hips slender, not thick, the torso marvelously ample, shoulders wide. A golden blondness. If only I didn’t have the usual stage-struck feeling, it would have been magnificent.

Last night, a secret meeting at the Flagship. He will make his debut in Siegfried at the Metropolitan. Taking a bath, preparing for him, I laughed to myself: Siegfried was lacking in my collection. I must have all the mythological figures: the son of the Inca Sun Gods, the Lord of Essex, the Demon of Literature. A sensual, romantic fantasy fulfilled. His free, swinging walk, a conqueror. Man of aristocracy. And power. He was once the leader of the Olympic skiers and nearly married the daughter of an English Peer.

Next morning he waited for me. I was not free. Gonzalo took me to the beach. On returning from the beach, I found Luise Rainer and Dorothy Norman looking for me. With other friends we drove around and stopped at the Flagship for coffee. I went to get Graeffe because he knew Luise. We had a most animated party, with everybody watching Luise and asking for a photograph. Luise and I had one intimate talk while I changed into my dress. She said beautiful things about my writing. Someone in the street said: “They are sisters.” Then they drove away.

It is strange to choose someone blindly, intuitively, and then to begin to discover the world he lives in, the details one likes. In this brilliant moment he fitted in so well. “He looks like a god,” said a French singer who had come with Luise. Physical royalty. The blue eyes charged with lightning, the teeth incandescent, the golden curls so smoothly brushed. His hands are long and aristocratic, smooth, well-groomed. He dresses beautifully. He carries a Spanish leather hunting bag, with its niche for bullets and a beautiful net pocket which he fills with oranges. A thick wide leather belt for his money and keys.

“My father was a general.”

How like a fantasy to have him for a dancing partner, talking by candlelight, listening to music. Now and then he sings a fragment. A rich, colored, free voice. Another Caruso, people have said. He is thirty-two but he looks manly, a man really, with poise, savoir-faire, polish, finesse, humor. He is playful. He remembered a few Spanish words (his mother was from Malaga); when we parted he thundered after me, amplifying his voice: “El Barón de la Mantequilla saluda la Condesa de la Santa Burro,” rolling the words as if he were saying: “La Duchesse de Guermantes…” We laugh a great deal. He is exuberant, gay, poised, joyous. Luminous, brilliant atmosphere. The nightclubs are transfigured by charm and desire. As we dance I feel against his leg, in his pocket, the hard little French leather case of his watch. He laughs and says: “It is only my watch. I regret to disillusion you.” But soon, when he has taken out his watch at my request, he ceases to disillusion me and we have to stop dancing. The misty lights of nightclubs. Mystery. When we move from one to the other, he has to go ahead to see if Gonzalo is not about. People are stunned by us. The homosexuals had all tried to interest him (because when he first came he was with a male friend). He is taller than Hugo or Gonzalo, taller than anyone here, holds himself erect and proud. Talking. Drinking. At one o’clock all the places close (New England). He walked home with me. Before my door in the black night he began to caress me. We entered. I didn’t turn on the light. Naked in bed. His caresses, from the lightest to the most violent… I cannot yield entirely yet, but what pleasure I feel, what voluptuous currents of sensations. I say laughingly that I, being Ondine, instead of catching him by my singing, was caught by his singing.

Siegfried is not always romantic. He is often Rabelaisian in his speech, but grandly. All the Americans who tried to interest me look at this couple where all the European charms center, his and mine together. The three of us, Gonzalo (“the motorized Inca,” Graeffe calls him, seeing him on his bicycle), Graeffe and I are like personages out of a myth. People think I am an actress or a dancer. Luise’s coming heightened everything, and all the stagnant obsessions which haunted me a week ago have vanished. I have escaped, changed climates. The most terrifying, tempting aspect of infidelity is how attractive it makes you to your deepest loves. The afternoon I came back from lying in the sand dunes with Edward, Gonzalo came and took me with the greatest desire he has felt for a week. That has always happened. Love and passion form a current which must be nourished and sustained and renewed and retransmitted. Fixed upon one object it stifles and strangles itself. Desire. Twice I have known desire free of love.

I awakened singing. It was raining, cold, but I was singing. So strange, the passage from sorrowful, shrunken days to luck with money, with desire, with Luise’s visit, expansion and flight.

Gonzalo, Gonzalo, I cannot live in the caverns of my obsessions and doubts.

It was strange and terrible, the night Gonzalo talked to me so wisely about Helba. He reassured me of the love, but not of the passion. It was the first time one of our reconciliations did not take a sensual expression. I felt the love and the tiredness, the deep tiredness of the man who is burning out, as Henry was burned out, the loss of vitality, and my passionate youthfulness celebrating a remarriage without a night of passion. This very night, under my joy at spiritual nearness, there ran the sense of loss and separation. And like a floating uncertain, rootless being, I caught at Siegfried, all shining, and was drawn magnetically to the source of desire again.

Brilliance again. Music.

Pouring again. No beach with Siegfried. Alone. Dreaming. Lying in bed, glad of the rest, for my body always takes on more than it has strength for. It always cracks when I begin to soar. So marvelous to reach for your dream when you are outside of the nightclub and you hear the music and you are locked out, not dancing, you are alone in a room watching the candlelight of the Flagship, but knowing tomorrow you will be inside, dancing, with a new lover.

AUGUST 21, 1941

In spite of Edward’s playfulness and the carefulness with which he preserved himself from this relationship, as I did—the impersonality—a new element entered into it yesterday. The day we planned to go to the beach, it rained, so we did not meet, and I have asked him not to call at my studio. Once I passed by his house and he was out. At a quarter to twelve I passed by the Flagship and he was not there (he came at twelve and did not find me). Meanwhile friends dragged him out all afternoon and evening, took him to the beach at one o’clock, made him drink, etc.

He came home at six in the morning. At twelve we talked. Gonzalo was taking me to the beach. So Edward came, but sat with a friend a few yards away. At three Gonzalo left to teach Helba how to swim. I pretended to leave on my bicycle but I returned, talked to Edward, and we went together to the other end of the beach. And then, because he was tired from the night before, a little less invulnerable, perhaps because I had the intuition of what he needed, I ceased to treat him as a lover. I talked fantastically about Peru, and later at the Flagship I drew him out to talk about his life, and he told me about his first deep love for the daughter of a Peer, whom he could not marry because he was without money.

At this moment the romantic Edward appeared, the one I had sensed through the delicacy of some of his caresses. From this he passed to talking of Tristan and Iseult, the sensuality and eroticism of the music. As it happens, the motif of our dancing music at the Flagship is stolen from Tristan and Iseult. I felt his disgust of the night before, his desire to dwell again in music and poetry. I made the evening beautiful. How true my instinct. He confessed to me how women pursue and demand the lover in him. And at my door he gave me the most delicate of kisses, mere brushings… We had lifted the experience out of the realm of une affaire de rêncontre, a pick-up, a banal incident, into another sphere. The other women saw only a desirable body. It is quite a feat to construct a dream out of an ordinary seaside flirtation and after playing the accessible woman. But I did it. I detected a certain regret when he said: “All this will soon be over. I am leaving the 28th for Nantucket. Will we see each other in New York?”

Je voyage. Je voyage. What I trusted was his smile. There is a Nordic fierceness to his eyes, a power to his neck, but his smile opens like a feminine Iris. In the grandeur there is softness. I could fall in love with his smile. The very image of him makes me breathe more deeply. My pride is reawakened, the desire for beauty and elegance. I feel a curious physical euphoria. Why does the joy of complete yielding elude me? Twice he has taken me, and I do so want to feel him entirely.

AUGUST 22, 1941

We went to the beach together by bus. Went to the farthest end of it, opposite to where Gonzalo was with Helba. We lay on the sand, near people at first. Edward caressed me furtively, when no one was passing, the breasts, between the legs. As I had told him the story of the little animal in Peru who inserts his beak into women’s wombs, he was immensely amused and started to call his ever-rising sex “chinchilito,” and I “chinchilita.” We went into the sea. Under the water he caressed me. How beautiful this was. I could see his marvelous body under the water and I caressed his chinchilito and we laughed so together. So much that when Edward came out of the water he looked for a secret place behind the beach, hidden by the grasses, and there we lay naked for a while, until his desire grew again and we caressed and he took me, too quickly and vigorously for my pleasure, but the sensuous pleasure, the feast for my eyes which he is, the erotic images of his body a feast for the imagination and senses, gave me such joy. I had dreamed once of lovemaking in harmony with the sea and the sand, and here was a laughing god of the sun, teasing, imitating the growling, rather swollen ways of Gonzalo, my alertness and Gonzalo’s old, tired lion manners. I was in such a high mood, exalted with pleasure, shedding radiance and full of charm. I know I enveloped him in essences new to him. How much he perceives, feels of me, I cannot tell. I know he is enchanted.

We were invited to a cocktail at Peter Hunt’s together. He always says, “I would rather be with the chinchilita.”

After the cocktail, we gravitated again together for dinner. He grew talkative, more and more expansive, telling me fantastic stories. The sensualist is there, in a phrase now and then. Always women. More and more the project to see me in New York appears in his talk. I never mentioned this. I accepted his being born of the sea and vanishing with the end of the summer. I have doubts. About love I would know, but about pure pleasure and sensual caprice I am ignorant. Every day I think it is ended. The story of his frustrated love is the alibi all men and women give who cannot love ever again. He is impenetrable to me, because this climate without love is new to me. Yet now and then, unexpectedly, he will press his forehead against mine. He is mysterious to me. A new kind, proud (he was short of money today and would not accept the smallest loan), arrogant, independent. Yet I say to myself: why is he so aware of the motorized Inca? Why does he tease me so persistently? Is it a kind of jealousy? In a climate without emotion to guide me, I am rudderless. It is all new. True, I had no feelings for John, but he was sentimental; he was in love.

A whole day without thoughts of Gonzalo. I went so far away from him in a few days, it was difficult to return, to become aware again that he is spiritless, half-ill, lifeless. We met at nine. My ebullience was contagious, and of course he desired me. What encouragement to unfaithfulness. He took me. I was still talking like a drunkard, amusing, high-spirited, impossible to suffocate again, irrepressible. My thoughts were all centered on the charms of Edward, his infinitely alluring smile and his hands, his coups des belier, his clowning imitations, his cries of Chinchilita! The humor in him.

Alone. The enchantment of Proust, the web of profundities. Alone. Reweaving each glance of his eyes, each modeling of his lips. Seeing him over and over again on the crest of the dune, wind-blown, or emerging from the water. Neptune. He repeats for me the ice-cold inscrutable eyes of Henry, and the sensual softness of the mouth, in terms of beauty. His deepest love, of which we talked, was dreamlike. The book of age became the book of renewal. For once, I was not prophetic. The beautiful adventure. To find in the physical body, in the physical world of pleasure and sensuality, always the shadow of the dream being fulfilled, always the fantasy, always a body capable of a dream. Never mediocrity. “Je suis contente,” I said to him, “d’avoir si bien choisi.” We are not in love. We are playing. It is a fantasy.

AUGUST 23, 1941

Suddenly my wings no longer carried me. I fell. Leaving Siegfried at the beach, I suddenly fell into an abyss. It was too impersonal, too lonely, not tender enough, this brilliant affair. Though we lay four hours on the sand and talked about his family, and he caressed my hands so delicately, still it was not love. I cannot carry it off. I glided on the wings of his humor, and then I fell. I wanted love, love, love. When my exaltation fell, I saw Gonzalo ill and sad. I said: “Come and eat with me at the Flagship.” He said, “Restaurant food does me harm.” But we went. I took a whiskey. Suddenly I understood people’s feverish seeking of pleasure. I drank a whiskey, and Gonzalo can’t drink one— he drank two. Then we went out for a while, to buy bicarbonate of soda for Gonzalo. At eleven he took me home and returned to his room to listen to the news. People were going to the costume ball. Edward had not asked me to go to the Flagship. He was engaged with friends. This caused a terrible feeling of desertion and loneliness. I wept. Gonzalo could not understand. I cannot escape into surface living, and I wanted to! I thought I was saved, that I could leave the caverns of desolation and regrets and little deaths, but I cannot do it by desire alone. It must be love.

Siegfried said yesterday, referring to the evening before, when after our dinner together I left him to meet Gonzalo at nine: “Change of guards at Buckingham Palace.”

When one says I cannot reach the world of pleasure, one should add: you can only reach it if it is in you. Siegfried, please lead me into the world of pleasure.

AUGUST 24, 1941

Ce chagrin étrange de hier soir. This morning I met him at the coffee place. He said playfully: “Is the Inca’s wife not well today so you have to go with him?”

“I don’t know yet, but whichever it is, I am free all the same.”

“You must not be so revolutionary,” he said. “It will hurt him. He may need you.”

This angered me, though it was delicate. I said so. I left then, to see Gonzalo. He had planned to go with me. I yielded. I returned to the coffee shop to fill my thermos and to say: “I cannot come. Chinchilita est fâché” (annoyed).

He was so soft then, gentle. “Don’t be fâché. Will I see you later?”

“If you can défâché me!”

I left. He told me later, “Last night, at the dance, it was dull. An American girl appropriated me. I cannot be with them more than an hour.”

But why didn’t he stay with me then? Or take me to the dance? He always says: “I prefer to be with Chinchilita.”

I do not understand him.

AUGUST 25, 1941

He went to our place on the beach, alone, and waited. But I…I imagined him arriving with friends. My eyes are not good for distance. I was a little sad. When Gonzalo left me to teach Helba to swim, I stood there and again imagined it was Chinchilito in the water with another woman, probably caressing her as he had caressed me. Jealous. I turned away and rode home. But at six o’clock I could not stay away, and I called on him at his rooming house with some pretext. Then I heard he had waited for me. Even in playing, I spoil it with my lack of confidence. Of course, I am not altogether unjustifiably jealous. The night before he had made love to the American girl. And at the restaurant he pointed her out to me, but saying, “I always return to Chinchilita, and I would give up all the others for Chinchilita.” We had dinner together. He talked expansively, about the wealthy people he knows (he is the singing coach for one of the wealthiest American families), talking like a revolutionary, an independent being who is detached from the world, as he is detached from bohemianism, and most all, from American life. At nine o’clock, change of guards. At eleven, the Flagship (for Gonzalo I appeared to be falling asleep so that I could slip out early for Edward).

At the Flagship he was in a tender mood, saying: “Tonight what I would like is for you to come to my room, undress me, and cover me, and put me to sleep!” So his invulnerability breaks down. But in the crowded, noisy, chaotic nightclub, he places my hand where I can see he is not asleep yet. He walks home with me, and as before he has eluded kisses on the mouth except at the moment of possession (which is the proof that we are not in love—men never kiss the whore, and I didn’t like to kiss John because I didn’t love him), now he kissed me lingeringly on the mouth and pressed me against him so that I could feel his desire. But he did not come into my studio out of delicacy for Gonzalo. So that while I play and follow with Edward the capricious outline of pure desire, at the same time I am looking for the wild frenzy and abandon of passion and forget how this is lacking from the world of desire and pleasure.

In the world of desire and pleasure I am in danger, in danger from my imagination which embellishes, from my tenderness which releases in the man the cruel tensions imposed by other women when faced with the sensual relationship (the old Don Juan talking to Colette: “They did not forgive me for one raté, one défaillance, they kept such strict accounts and compared notes with other women to see if I was always at the same level”). This tension of the men chosen by women for the role of lover, unrelenting women, as in an Olympic championship game of sexes, a night without lovemaking is his only refuge from women’s pursuit. Poor Don Juan. Edward is fated to this role. Women have marked him for the stallion. They disregard the human being, his moods, his needs, his fatigues, his moments of detachment, everything but the erect phallus.

He talks at times delicately: “My father was born in Samoa. He did not leave until he was sixteen years old. When he took the boat home it snowed. He had never seen snow or cold. He thought the snowflakes were butterflies. He tried to catch them and was amazed to see them melt.” Then again, he talks like my father, suddenly a voyou (guttersnipe) with a Rabelaisian language, cynical, gross, with obscene gestures, but playful. He uses obscene words and then, just as suddenly, becomes tender again, delicate, or once more clownish, like Henry in his writing.

He eluded all the women, came to the beach alone, waited, got impatient, came to where I was with Gonzalo (Gonzalo had just left to see if Helba had arrived), sat near us, waited. When Gonzalo finally left, we went together to the other end of the beach. I told him tenderly what I had already told my diary, and my intuition was right. He was amazed at my understanding of his Don Juan problems, and he talked openly about women. I heard astounding things about women. He dropped his role completely, all the impersonality. He talked about all that he is passionate about, the development of his voice, his studies, his feeling that he is ready as few singers are ready, not only by an arduous, extraordinary discipline, but all of his life, being, experience, feeling, all dedicated to the one end, his singing. He, who said that he always listened, now talked flowingly and confessed how right I was, how he was sick of women who hated him if he didn’t always make love. And as I leaned over with a curious wisdom and said, “When you need a friend you do not have to make love to, you can come to Chinchilita,” the look in his eyes was almost a look of love, whereas for the other women he shows brutality and cynicism and contempt. I wonder if it is because he realizes that it is their self-love and vanity they reveal in their relentless need to be made love to which is more about their power and charms than a true desire which would consider Edward as a human being. Anyway, he gave me his sincerity. All the other women cannot hold him for more than a moment. I am the only one he spends hours and hours with. He told me how angry they were. One woman whom he refused to accompany to the ball said about me: “But she is not very young…”

Our afternoon was so sincere and mellow that the poor, persecuted Don Juan said at the end in a lugubrious tone: “This evening I have to go to a birthday party.” He yields. He will always yield. The woman who will love him deeply will enter an inferno. Like my father, he also accepts his role and needs it. This loveless gift of himself preserves his integrity, his independence, his equilibrium. He has the strength of the isolated, the invulnerable. He will not be in bondage. He will not love. Like all the stories of the whores, the frigid ones, the narcissistic ones, the story of the first frustrated love is said to have locked the doors for good, but it is not so, it only served as an alibi for the nature whose course was not to love. My first frustrated love did not keep me from falling in love anew each time.

Tonight he may yield again. It is always the women who attack him. Not for them the delicate caresses, but the ferocious irony, more ferocious after the yielding, the invincible smile, the abandon. He walks proudly, head high, untouchable. Women can touch his body, but not the core—I touched both. After he has gone, I still see him vividly. It is a kind of enchantment, like love. To discover his qualities, compassion, human evaluations, his absence of vanity, I found more delight in these qualities, and the essence contained by his beauty turns out to be in harmony with it. So that the adventure which, for other women, has turned out elusive, unrepeatable, unseizable, for me has left such a dreamlike taste that I feel content, rich, perfumed. I breathe more deeply when I remember it.

Gonzalo came when I returned from the beach, took me, and I responded fully.

Content. My only wish is that I may feel Edward once, physically, completely. Why do I resist the final abandon? Morning. The flavor remains. I awaken singing the imitated melody of Tristan. In this little book, I passed from death to life, beyond age and change, into the eternal in relationship, lived out a dream with an echo instead of a trite adventure sans lendemain. How he slipped in and out of other hands, but remained in mine to distill his personality.

So overflowing with gayety that I could not have dinner alone. I thought: let me bring some of this gayety to Virginia and Bob, give it, spill it, spread it, share it. Imitating the booming voice of Edward, I said: “Let’s go and have a glamour dinner.” They were enchanted. I took them to the Flagship, drank with them. But poor Virginia and Bob, they are caught in a drama of disease: Bob got gonorrhea from Robert.

Where I sit, eating lunch at Taylor’s, it is like Coney Island. I live in hope of seeing Edward pass, like a king. Nine o’clock. After missing him all day, a rainy day, I passed by his house and he called me. He was expecting his friends. We sat talking in the little parlor. He was tender, caressing, delicate, mischievous, obscene, with strange gestures, from kissing my fingertips and the hair on my temple to suddenly taking out his chinchilito. He said over and over again: “C’est beau, très beau.” Then he asked for my address in New York. His friends are driving him away. His expression was beautiful, radiant. The radiance of his smile unnerved me. My god, is this an adventure? When I left his place I heard the wind through the leaves, like the very breath of life of which he speaks, the breath, the feeling I had the first day walking through the dunes, of breathing largely, deeply, freely because of the way he breathes. Why this joy? This joy? I met one of the girls, the one at the party. I had met her in the bus. I see his face: “C’était beau, c’était beau.”

It is raining. I am out of the house of death and age. Saved by another dream. I recognize the dream. It carries me. My feet are light. I feel imponderable. All the little contingencies cannot touch me. This morning he was looking for me, pursued me, while I looked for him. But I vanished. He did not dare go to my studio. He is always aware of Gonzalo. He said: “On this rainy afternoon I imagined you would both get into bed and make love all afternoon.” Anaïs, beware. Il faut savoir jouer. Il ne faut pas rêver.

Midnight. His friends came so we could not meet. I waited at the Flagship. Then I realized that the scene in the afternoon was a good-bye. And what I felt was too deep. I was frightened. In a few days he filled my imagination constantly. I felt him in everything. Et lui? Tonight I realize it was all too powerful and dangerous. It will be difficult to forget him. What will he remember? C’était beau, très beau… It was very beautiful!

AUGUST 26, 1941

La petite Anaïs ne sait pas jouer.

I was having breakfast when he came in with the friend—the rich woman with the beautiful voice whom he coaches. I did not see them, my back was turned. I walked out to mail a letter. As I passed the restaurant from which one can look into the street he waved at me exuberantly. I smiled. I caught a glimpse of her face. I said to myself: if she is beautiful, I am lost. If she is rich and beautiful, she is his mistress. But the glimpse told me nothing. Merely a distinguished woman, that was all. As I passed them buying fruit on my way to the beach (always at the sight of him I experience a shock, I miss a heartbeat), he stopped me. He came forward and introduced me to the woman (he had already said that he wanted us to meet). She immediately said: “Why, I know your father’s music very well. I have often heard his songs, which Ninon Vallin used to sing. And I have heard your brother’s concert at Town Hall.” She asked news of other people. She was very cordial. I felt very proud for him because he seemed proud of me. It was all very charming. We bowed and smiled. They went off to the beach in her car. I was happy because she was not beautiful! Such nonsense. I was happy. At the beach, the sea, the sand, the sun. Something to dream and remember which has the indolence, the golden colors, the capriciousness, the nature moods of the place. His body the color of sand, with the sun on it, his eyes the color of the sea, and how he lay on the beach, the bigness tapering towards the slender ankles of the aristocrat. My desire detached itself for the first time from the body of Gonzalo and clung to Edward’s image. It finished en beauté like a very elegant dance, with a strange symbolic scene in which he bowed his head over my fingertips and kept his mouth over them like an homage.

Returning from the beach, preceded by a flurry of autumn leaves, the sound of the sea in my ears, I felt the flow again, the mellowness, a sense of connection with the currents of life. I am in the dream again. Intact, as I was at the beginning of dreaming. It is the dreaming which creates the innocence.

Evening: haunted by mirages. I see him whole, entire (sometimes one does not see people full length, but some part of them, an oblique aspect of them), the very image of physical plenitude. By a sensation: the firmness of his skin against mine, the fineness of it, and his powerful sexual thrusts. By an emotion: the discovery of his tenderness, the penetration of his voice. I keep the brilliance like a precious essence, fearing its vanishing.

I say to myself: I only want one more night. But am I deceiving myself? I wish I were not so vulnerable or impressionable. If he loved me, were moved equally, he would have been with me all the time. But there was the barrier of Gonzalo ever-present in his speech and teasing, like a danger sign, and perhaps I felt his own fear of ever being enslaved, his own desire to safeguard himself against it.

So I will not know until I reach New York whether this is to have a continuation. Yesterday I felt on that dark, rainy day that it was the end. But then I always fear the end. With Henry, every day was the end. With Gonzalo too. Yes, I am in love; it is a feeling that opens one like a flower, fills one with essences that make one mobile and singing like the wind or the sea. Even in passing, I react with a deeper romance.

AUGUST 27, 1941

Yesterday another meeting, the lady, Edward and I in the streets. He asked me to join them to go to the ocean, but I had already told Gonzalo I was going to meet him, and it was the day before Hugo’s arrival, so I couldn’t, but I asked them to meet me at the Flagship for a cocktail. The lady and I found much to talk about because she knows music and musicians, but I suffered from a paralyzing uneasiness again from an attack of discouragement, timidity, doubts. The magnification of small incidents with which I torture myself. As I had invited them I had arranged with the waitress beforehand not to present a check. Characteristically Edward discovered this, and he said playfully: “If I had known this I would not have asked for a sandwich.” I replied playfully: “No, you would have asked for a lobster!” A maladroit remark, made out of nervousness, maladroit because of his pride. And I fancied he was hurt. When we parted, finally, it was like the end of an ordeal. I was full of anguish. Tout est perdu. Everything went wrong. I was nervous. I wanted so much that she should like me so that he would be proud of me. I walked past his house several times in hopes of a meeting which would reassure me. During the tea he had continually touched my knees with his, and before she had arrived he had run in to excuse a few minutes’ delay and had said tenderly: “Chinchilita, I will see you in New York.” But last night I thought I had spoiled it all, the dream—I, who never hurt people’s feelings!

Gonzalo was having dinner with me. I lured him into the Flagship. I took two whiskeys. Then Edward and the lady came in. We smiled at each other. Gonzalo was jealous. It was a pleasure for me to be able to see him now and then. Strange, she has come alone to see him, she has a room next to his, he drives her car, they are together, yet I feel no jealousy at all, as if she were the mother. She is a woman of my age, ugly, but intelligent and charming, distinguished.

Because of the whiskey I could not sleep all night, not until five in the morning. Then at nine I yielded to an impulse and slipped a note under his door (the door of the house is always open) to come for a minute. I would like to efface last night’s error. I cannot tell what he feels at all. His behavior is contradictory. His obsession with Gonzalo is very pronounced. His need of being the center of love is equally clear. I lie waiting for him. Hugo arrives at twelve. I should forget him.

Twelve. He came. He was very caressing, tender. Opened my blouse and kissed my breasts. Teased, played, admired the fishing net overhead, spoke again of New York, no shadow of anything wrong. All I needed to calm my anguish. But what I should not have had to do was to nourish my dreams. Always he repeats: “How beautiful it was in the dunes!” As if it were for him the highest moment too.

They leave today.

Everything so beautifully timed as Gonzalo was beginning to grow alarmed, observing the difference between Edward’s formal early bows and the irrepressible cordiality of his last ones. Last night I did not desire Gonzalo, but Edward. I have the clear feeling today that I will see him again, that there is a suspended feeling in him too, a question.

I feel a mysterious, soft happiness.

I see again in him the elegance of my father, the pride and the nobility. Once, when I went into the house where he stays, the doors were all open, there was no one around, and I did not know which one was his room. Three rooms all open on the parlor. I peered in and saw on the dressing table the silver hair brush, comb, clothes brush, and mirror, like my father’s, and I knew they were Edward’s. His signet ring too, in gold, like my father’s, and his beautiful long-fingered hands.

I would like to have beautiful clothes again. All that I surrendered for Gonzalo— the automobile, the servants, the good meals, the house in order, the comforts. I can give, with what I have, the illusion of beautiful dressing.

With Hugo returned the budgets, the accounts, the bills, the calculations, the sense of restrictions, the meals at home, tenderness, absence of fantasy, ennui, gloominess (he always errors in his calculations which makes our situation seem worse), talk of insurance, taxes, indulgence towards my stories, towards the smiles I gather from so many people, the forced lovemaking, the refuge from the sickness.

Becalmed. The sails no longer swollen by great winds.

Then last night I touched the roots of Gonzalo’s sadness: no longer supported by alcohol, he is faced with an impasse—the realization of his life, awareness. At the age of forty-four he is faced with a complete paralysis of his will and activity. He cannot even write a letter now, a letter of vital importance. He is completely paralyzed, guilty about his laziness, fully aware of its destructiveness, of all he could have done, of the love and support he got from me.

Eight in the evening. It is all in Proust: “mon mal,” “l’amour maladif,” the anguish of love, of doubt. I have never understood Proust so deeply or loved him so much. It hurts me to read him, the craving for the love of the mother, the suffering over a lost kiss, over a phrase carelessly uttered. Every day I live these angoisses and want to be free of them. When Edward filled my being I was happy. Now I am prey again, waiting for Gonzalo and thinking he might not come; all the beautiful Portuguese girls here seek him out. Calling for him and hearing him converse with Helba. Being with Hugo on the beach and seeing Gonzalo alone, waiting for Helba, and wanting to run to him and having to hold back. If he does not telephone. Finally my anguish, like Proust’s, was only calmed when he began to telephone me every day and I could see him every day. As I know that the disease kills the love, I keep it secret. I get deeply disturbed when I reveal it, when it betrays me, as if I were ugly and monstrous.

Both Hugo and Gonzalo have successfully destroyed my ecstasy. It lies imbedded, deep down. When I am at the beach, I abandon myself to it. But it fades, like the emotions aroused by John Dudley. I think of it in terms of pleasure, an escape, a joy, but not in terms of love. I wish it were.

Gonzalo no longer gives me life. He is like a dead planet.

Since Edward is not my love to come, what then? Or can I have a new, a joyous, a carefree concept of love, devoid of pain perhaps, as I thought Gonzalo’s was at the beginning? Proust: “For what we mistake for our love, our jealousy, is not the same uninterrupted and indivisible passion. They are made up of infinite successive loves, of discrete jealousies, all short-lived, but which, through their uninterrupted multitude, give the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.”

I am becalmed for the moment.

Ready to return to New York with the full conviction of my unhappiness and the desire to escape into pleasure or merely to escape.

AUGUST 30, 1941

The day after Edward’s friend arrived, my perfume bottle disappeared, was either broken or stolen. What did it signify? A bad or a good omen? I have been trying to discover the name of the record we dance to, the motif of Provincetown. I was told it was called “Intermezzo,” and it made me sad. I heard it while taking coffee with Gonzalo. I tried to find out its name again and failed.

So it is that the Montparnasse of most people’s knowledge never existed for me, but the dream and essence of it was mine in Henry and Gonzalo, who were both beyond it while they lived its life. So it is that Provincetown, which is vulgar, mediocre, and stupid, was not Provincetown for me, but Siegfried and the dunes, the dunes of Alemany’s photographs. So it is that the Village is not for me the home of poseurs and fakes and mildewed poets, but the Village which does not exist for anyone else, the Village of my painted windows and benches, my autumnal life with Gonzalo, the autumn of my face and not of my body, the autumn which has marked only my eyes and a few strands of my hair, but not my soul yet because my soul was always aged. The afternoon I called on Edward in the prim little New England parlor, which looked too small for his magnificent body, when his head touched the ceiling, and the little New England rocking chair protested at his weight, when he bowed his tender-skinned temples against mine, his mouth on my fingers and kissed me inside my ear and teased me, and it was raining and grey, when I walked away with my breasts heaving as if filled with a potent wind, my sails swollen by the long draughts of life-breath he filled my lungs with, I heard the autumn wind rushing through the leaves, the old trees, like the sea sounds at the beach, like the sea sounds of Proust’s phrases, rolling infinitely and ebbing, throwing tides and echoes all through the marvelous edifice of lucidity, through the tragedy of this too great and too deep lucidity.

Autumn. Only the tender leaves of the laughing wrinkles have withered in me, only the hope of happiness and peace in love, only the hope of living free of anguish and the deep malady of exaggerated sensibility.

The smile of Edward is gone. Simultaneously, the sky clouded, the beach grew cold, the sea icy, the leaves fell on the old library steps, Gonzalo and Hugo became like dark caverns in which my luminosity died.

The poet knows too well, too acutely what vanishes in others’ eyes. When I read Proust I rush to see Gonzalo as if I were not sure of ever seeing him again.

I am so hungry for pleasures, for dinners with music. Last night I lured Hugo to the Flagship. I was fêted by the hostess and waitress there, two girls who are painters. One stole dessert for us and gave me crème de cacoa, and refused a tip. I asked the violinist to play “Intermezzo,” and it was Edward I dined with.

Return to New York. Telegram from Henry asking for money to return. Telephone to John Slocum to borrow money for a few days. Visit to Miss Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart. Patchen’s book is selling well, and Henry’s World of Sex. My books are in great demand, but they are all out of print now. Visited Henry Volkening, the publisher dissatisfied with Henry’s book on America. Saw Eduardo, who has rented a room near me.

Organizing my clothes. Alas, trickeries, rearrangements, rafistolages. Organizing my home. Dreaming of Chinchilito. Telephone conversation with Luise. She has serious anemia.

Henry’s agent says: “Henry’s book on America is unacceptable.” Henry owes Doubleday five hundred dollars. His new article for Town and Country was rejected. I had to beg for him, and I can’t write for Ruder. The music “Intermezzo” haunts me like a dream that I would like to repeat. I would like to fall asleep and dream the same dream. As in a dream, I did not possess him, feel him enough. It has no substance. I prepare my clothes as if for a dream.

SEPTEMBER 16, 1941

Curl my hair, I said to the hairdresser, I am going to a dance. What dance? In spite of war and broken beings and disease and death, I am going to dance and to dream, as I dreamed with Edward. I am not in love with him, yet he remains the symbol of the luminous. I dress for him. When I walk into the Savoy Plaza to see Tia Anaïs, I expect to meet him. I see him in luxury and music. He has not telephoned, but he is in the city and I may meet him, only because he lies for me in air and light, and when I remember him I raise my head, my feet are lighter, and I feel light.

Henry is slowly traveling back, but I wish he were not coming. I feel separated from him.

Last night a night of pleasure and lovemaking with Gonzalo. Like the past, his sensual enjoyment was tremendous, as was mine. A younger and slenderer Gonzalo, made beautiful by the sea. But the desire for fever and pleasure remains insufficiently answered.

Every day a little weight is added to my shoulders until I will be bound again: the lack of money, so acute that I hesitate to write Robert “Come back” because of the impossibility of taking care of him (Marjorie has refused to do what I did last winter—feed him and his friends and give him pocket money—so he left for Chicago). Eduardo has a room nearby and lives on a small allowance. Why has the dream of luxury returned after years of drabness and sharing the renunciations and denials of others? With Edward I reach into a dream of luxury, abandoned for so many years. Poverty is monstrous. I see it in the life of Virginia and Bob. Gonzalo is weary of it. I returned to the few years when I knew comfort (Boulevard Suchet and Louveciennes) before I met Henry. I have a need of ascension, not to the same possessions but to a purified luxury, the poetic quality of it. I realize the value of what I surrendered. I asked myself: What is this exaltation? A premonition? An illusion? A mirage again? A preparation for a new love?

NEXT MORNING HE TELEPHONED!

I jumped with joy. I can’t sit still or eat. I’m joyous, joyous, joyous. “I missed you in the café,” he said. “I arrived last night. When are you free?”

“Chinchilita!” he cried gaily as he arrived in his small car. I led him to the studio. He glowed, beamed, purred with contentment. “It’s beautiful here. The painted windows! The benches. You are a real artist. What am I doing here, me with my two vocal cords only?” I gave him the House of Incest, saying: “I give you here dreams you already know.” I showed him my photos and he took two for his pocketbook, he said. We sat in the porch on the swinging hammock. He caressed me, my breasts, my legs. I saw a new Edward, softer, more tender, feminine. At the beach his physical arrogance, which is purely of the body, predominated. In the city it is attenuated by the clothes. And the softness appears. We spent an enchanted hour. And it occurred to me that we were living in a dream. All I could feel was a slight physical pleasure, a great airiness, brilliancy, an entirely new feeling. I wonder what I give him. He called me as soon as he arrived. He took me driving in his toy car, his hand over my legs, sometimes stealing between them. He talks about next year in Provincetown. I was terribly nervous, yet at one moment I divined his own unsureness. The strange thing is that he is so much like a dream that sensuality is dissolved. I would like an orgy in which to feel him more violently. I was exhausted from nervousness. I wanted to enchant him. And I was not sure. Afraid he would vanish. He said: “Provincetown was marvelous…when I met you.”

When I came home, Hugo was not yet there. I stretched myself out as with an opium pipe to remember EDWARD…

In a few days I’m broken by so many marvelous moments: the night with Edward, the arrival of Robert, the night when Luise invited us to see her act in Barrie’s Cinderella. The life I wanted. And Robert, as always, understands this idea of the myth dimensions, my desire to live only with myth people, and he is ready to discard all that does not answer to this. The bond between Robert and me unshakable and pure. The new emotions roused by Luise’s acting, my love for her. I sent her a letter together with one of my glass slippers. A telephone call from Edward. In a few hours I am consumed and burn through all my strength of body.

SEPTEMBER 21, 1941

Robert makes such a true distinction between disguise and transformation. He also said as I say: one person cannot suffice to my great hunger. So again I lie writing in the diary. Hugo is engraving at his table before the window, and Robert is painting the coffre to match the benches.

Last night I was exalted, so vulnerable…every sensation intensified. Music threw me into exalted joy—an intoxicated state, like love. I had dinner with Gonzalo, swept him off his feet. Did he feel my mood for an orgy? He said: “Let’s go to Harlem.” I was delighted. But in the end he led me to our rincon and got me under the covers, naked, and we threw ourselves into pleasure, long, drawn out, a long-lasting orgasm, a bath of caresses, of strong odors, mouth filled with sperm, fingers imbued with honey. A night of joy and plenitude, so like the past that I could not believe in all the little songs of waning love I had been observing.

Conflict in myself: I first took to our rincon the Madagascar bed cover, which I had in rue Cassini and which was stained by Gonzalo, but now I keep it in the apartment because it looks beautiful and I see it more often, and others admire it. But I feel this is a betrayal, a lessening of the passion, a throwing of the objects surrounding our love back into the current of my individual life. I do not feel the same betrayal when I take something from my home for my life with Gonzalo—as if all I had should naturally go into the passion, the passion being at the center.

SEPTEMBER 24, 1941

Last night I went downstairs at nine o’clock and there was Chinchilito already there, moving towards me, crossing the street, with his phosphorescent smile and singing voice. We came back to the studio. We read his horoscope together, which is beautiful and confirmed my heightened image of him, the expansion, the largeness, the idealized figure. When we read of sorrow in love he said: “That’s Chinchilita.” As he recognized my handwriting (Eduardo left me stranded with only a few facts, and I had to complete the horoscope with a book), he was grateful and amazed too. He said, “But what is this, Chinchilita?” Playing upon my horoscope design he said: “There she is, a painter, here a goddess, here an angel, here an astrologer, and down here, a little devil…” and he kissed me on the mouth. Kisses, kisses, kisses, and caresses, but no invitation to make love. We sat at a bar and talked. And then he almost destroyed my mirage by telling me stories as bad as Henry’s or Rabelais, but all concerned with excrement and urine, etc., about himself, which I particularly detest, and which left a bad impression on me. I returned home, baffled.

Robert said: “What makes Winter of Artifice a failure are the falsities, the interchange of personalities and the disguises.”

Eduardo said: “In Winter of Artifice, we get the second transformation of a reality already once transformed in the diary. This twice transformed reality being wonderful but not accessible to all.” Obviously, my idea that my work consists now in retelling it all with greater completeness is implicated in all the criticism of the diary’s incompleteness, but for the moment I prefer to continue and be more complete in the present.

OCTOBER 6, 1941

I am not ready to retire from life and do the masculine creation of the other face of the diary, to labor on what the woman could not complete—the circle from feminine personal to masculine impersonal. My human life means more to me.

Luise does not believe in pretenses, playing roles, because she thinks it leads to disaster. I said I had done this often and without catastrophes. My deceptions! But it is true it requires alertness and tension. To answer in front of Hugo when thoughtless people ask me over the telephone: “How is Henry?” To prevent Hugo from receiving the telephone bill on which are noted telegrams to Chicago (when I haven’t the money I am forced to telephone the telegrams to Henry). For my mail: care. When I was in Provincetown I had to send a check for the “corner” on MacDougal. When I signed as Mrs. Moré, I said with infinite care: “Mrs. Moré, care of Mrs. Guiler, 437 Commercial Street,” so the receipt could be returned to me. But the postman, knowing everybody in Provincetown, took it upon himself to deliver it to Helba. Fortunately Helba does not read English. When I wrote fifty pages for Ruder in the summer, and Henry needed the money, Ruder asked me not to mail the pages, but to send them with somebody. Hugo was leaving for New York, but if I gave them to him he would know there was fifty dollars coming to him, and Ruder had already telegraphed the money to Henry. I told Hugo they were pages written by Virginia, and I sealed the envelope (when someone else writes for Ruder he does not pay cash but makes them wait three weeks for the answer).

OCTOBER 9, 1941

Feeling very exalted and inspired, I tried to work on the Jean story, but all the time it is Luise I feel and see. My friendship with women are like love affairs, and such a fervor takes me, such vividness, that it inspires me like love and haunts me like love.

Chinchilito telephones me from a life charged with singing, rehearsals, mysterious trips (the Lady? a floating personage, growing vaguer in me). Yet the thought that he is coming Monday afternoon gives me the suspense of a high perilous trapeze leap. The long intervals between our meetings, the absence of sensual connection, makes it like some brilliant trapeze incident, spangled, accompanied by music, in which I can admire his deftness and my accuracy. I sense he too is keeping himself outside the circle of pain, and the little poison of jealousy to which he is so vulnerable has germinated, and my image becomes inseparable from the black shadow of Othello. (Even over the telephone he asks: “What is the motorized Inca doing?”) And the tone of his voice, the kind of fatigue and discouragement of the person faced again with his fatal pattern of recurrence (the rival) when he said: “He lives so near to you!” As if he had said: “Too near!” And I, I do not again want the man with a wife (Gonzalo), who belongs to the public (Henry), or the fêted singer-idol (my father, who received applause and the flowers of all women’s tribute, the flowers of their sex with the fern garnishing of multi-colored pubic hairs, pistils of desire, the corolla of the orgasm that is given to the interpreter of music, to all the figures on the stage where the illusion we need for love is already prepared). Those who fall in love with performers are like those who fall in love with magicians—they are the ones who cannot create the illusion with love alone. The mise en scène, the producer, the music, the role, will surround the personage with that which love needs: the myth. In this love Edward will receive, in the bouquets of women that will rain upon his voice, I would find again the pain my father gave me, and I do not want it. But because we touched the ring around the planet of love, we touched the aura of it, the long beautiful leaps we take together in space, leaps of grace and beauty, across visitless weeks, are marvelous, like demonstrations of the agility our souls are practicing to escape from the prisons of tragedy, the incarcerations of jealousy, the caverns of deep love’s tortures…

I lie here awaiting Henry’s telephone call and my being is against his return. I no longer feel him. It seems to me that I am struggling to free myself from the burdens, too heavy now, which threaten my existence.

Evening: What defenses against Henry! Luise telling me I should break with him, be free, live for myself, seeing Gonzalo while I awaited Henry’s telephone call, all to prepare myself to say: I feel separated from you, it is time to separate. I added in my mind the proofs of his detachment so that I could reveal them to him. He stayed months in Hollywood when it was not necessary for the book, he showed reluctance at returning to New York because he would have to see his mother and face the problem of the rejection of his book on America, and feel again the association of New York to his past (it was then I decided to go to Provincetown and no longer wait for him). And it took him a month to return.

When I arrived Henry himself was timid and nervous. He sought my mouth and I turned it away. I was tense, quiet. I looked at him, feeling: “I am free of him.” I looked at what I never liked, the coldness of his little eyes. He was shaky, from the long trip, the tension. I thought: perhaps he is free too. We talked. It was he who softened first, came to my chair and kissed me with passion. I did not desire him, but I did not feel any distaste either, like something sweet and familiar. He made me undress, but once in bed he was impotent. Then I was tender and at the same time I began to talk and to say what I felt, but he was merely humoring me as one might a sick person, humoring my doubts, laughing even, absolutely confident that nothing was broken, unbelieving. All this in a quiet tone. I said: “Since freeing you was my obsession perhaps the time has come to also free you of me. You were happier out west, liberated of restrictions brought about by my marriage.”

Henry was soft, tender, and listened to me as a man listens to a woman who is complaining of some little defect, and he loves her, and sees her doubts and knows it is not serious. We lay there. He repeated how nervous he felt. I said: “Let us get very quiet.” We put out the light, we talked. After a while he took me. Then he laughed: “You won’t believe me, but I have only gone with one woman once in all the six months, and she was a prostitute. I was almost atrophied!” And we went back to our old “scenes,” of his merely reassuring me of his love while never for one moment doubting mine or fearing its loss! By this time I was completely disarmed and I could not see the separation, as if the mystical law by which we live created the kind of bond that survives the death of the body, and created a continuity such as we know will happen only to our highest thoughts and feelings. On certain days I know clearly what in me will survive, that highest moment of illumination that comes from effort and courage—so that the highest peaks of my relationship partake of the same immortality.

So it was the same hotel room of six months ago, the same dinner at El Pezzo… In one moment Henry made the most confused statements. I realized anew his weakness and softness. In one moment he asserted that he had no needs and would live on nothing, that he would never live as Eduardo did, on one dollar a day, that he felt so good he could even take a job, that his integrity prevented him from doing scenario writing in Hollywood.

At last I said: “And what of my integrity, doing the writing for Ruder all last winter?”

Henry laughed, admitted the paradox, the contradictions, the injustice, laughed again and dismissed it.

In this entire scene what affected me most was his trembling, his weakness, his childlike confidence. What is lifted, distilled from ordinary life, by the one who has the creator’s eyes. My pattern is the dream. I seek to approximate it—when I do not get drowned in the depths of my too-human loves.

OCTOBER 13, 1941

Chinchilito came, lay back on the couch looking at the colored windows, caressing me, and said: “This is the place where I am happiest…” He stands apart, observing the inflated idiocy of singers and severely watching himself, ready to ridicule himself if “I talk like a dramatic tenor.” He said my book on my father was tremendous, that he could not believe little Chinchilita had done it. He quoted lines from it.

He murmured: “How beautiful it is here. I would like to come and stay here for a whole day. We have not enough time together. We should have a whole day together.” Delicately, closing his eyes as if he were smelling a bouquet, he kissed my fingertips, laid his brow against my temples, against my cheek. There is dissonance in him, from crude phrases to tender ones, constant contradictions, or is it between the Chinchilito I see and the one I hear? It is lovely, this dance we have together in space…

OCTOBER 17, 1941

Henry took me with hunger and I did not want it. But something remains of the old sensuality so that, in contrast to my complete closing against Hugo, after a moment with Henry I can yield even if I began without desire. His desire has outlived mine. Everything externally is the same as before the trip. I take the same 8th Avenue subway to East 53rd Street. I go to a house near the one he used to live in. We eat in the same chop suey restaurant and go to the same movie houses. But I am changed. And Henry does not know it.

Gonzalo gets passionate and wild over world events and reproaches me for not feeling them as violently. So again we quarreled. My blood flows somewhere else. My passion goes to human beings, near, and in need. I hold a whole little world together—I hold Hugo, Gonzalo, Henry, Luise, Eduardo, and Robert together.

In writing for Ruder with indifference and detachment, I attained a smoothness and technical perfection I can never attain in my rarefied writing.

OCTOBER 25, 1941

Henry is reading the abridged diary from which all the love affairs are deleted— nothing left but the outer relationship with Allendy, Rank, Artaud, etc. He is discovering how neurotic I was, which in all the years we were together he had not realized. He discovered my little treacheries, my accusations, and his failings. He praises the diary as a big, absorbing world.

My old anguish returned, and I asked him: “I haven’t really hurt you, not seriously.”

“No, no,” said Henry, laughing, shaking his head, as if to say: there you are at it again, the old obsession with hurting, wounding. It is all so old, the past.

Henry said: “Now I have no need of returning to the past, to the story of June. It is all dead. I may write a book completely detached from the ego, the personal, the autobiographical.”

Time. I once lived in the tragic fear of having to read the story of Henry’s life with June. Now time has effaced this story, and all he has written are the myth pages already in the Tropic of Capricorn, the summation, the poem, not the full exposure and development. Henry said that my fear of hurting others produced more pain in the end.

NOVEMBER 1, 1941

Last night with Henry, a Henry full of desire and tenderness, a Henry growing older, unable to bear great activity or too many visitors, dreaming of a peaceful place, so tired that I left him at eleven.

At midnight I was in bed. Hugo was still working at the New School preparing for his exhibit. Gonzalo telephoned! He had been at the School to get the prints in order to frame them, and he telephones! I knew what a pleasure it must have been for him to find me at home and in bed. I fell asleep enjoying his pleasure, his sense of security. This morning he referred to it. Said he was disconcerted to find me so “sage.” I laughed. Gonzalo laughed too, saying: “You laugh because you think how lucky it was that I telephoned last night and not some other night!”

Henry said: “No, I was not wounded by what I read in the diary, but then I ask myself what could be in the missing pages. You’re so clever you may have fixed this version just for me!” (That is just what I did do, Henry. And why does this act of protection always make me feel gay, as if I had defeated all the evil forces and the pain in the world by my trickeries!)

Coming up the stairs, home, tired, I felt gay and strong because I had defeated the cruelty of life, the tragedies of time, of love’s great expansions and treacheries, by disguises only, only by disguises! Henry discovered after our many years of life together what I always knew: the power one can have over the world by gentleness. He no longer fights his editors; he seduces them and wins them over to his ideas instead of alienating them further. He treats them humanly and wins concessions and privileges instead of breaks and wars. He has lost his vanity and pride which made him unable to recognize his superfluous explosions, his failed bombs (like the moralizing in the American book, which is ineffectual). He said again he had nothing to worry or irritate him—only the money problem. He dreams of cheap, peaceful, isolated islands. Soon he will ask me to escape with him into peace and paradise.

NOVEMBER 4, 1941

This diary opens on a cool morning of a delayed winter, upon Gonzalo making frames for Hugo’s engravings; upon Hugo producing his twentieth print for the exhibit; upon a copy of Twice a Year with seven pages out of volume 1 translated by me; upon Robert and me dancing last night in Harlem celebrating my meeting with Kay Boyle; upon Eduardo drinking and reading poetry with Harvey Breit and George Barker; upon an aging Henry finishing his American book; upon Luise reading a play on Rachel; upon Veronica Jennings of the Saturday Review of Literature saying my diary has no universal quality, that it is too intensely personal; upon Henry saying it is beyond the personal; upon Stieglitz dying and the long ago dead Dorothy Norman receiving Henry and not giving him a copy of Twice a Year; upon Edgar Varèse starting a choir and Paul Rosenfeld writing that we must listen to him; upon Moscow’s heroic defense and people still unable to recognize Russia’s greatness.

Eduardo says perhaps I am, after all, a witch. I gather the poets around me, and persuade them to write erotica, communicating eroticism and spreading this writing that is usually suppressed, giving them both the poison of disintegration and perhaps a way of purification, for all of us have violent explosions of poetry, and we eject the purely sexual as fervently as if we had taken vows of chastity. A purge, and not debauchery, results from the infiltration of erotic confessions. Breit, Barker, Robert. A house of prostitution. I, the Madame, supplying the Old Man with moments of perverse felicity, his drug…so that he has come to beg for it, and I gathering the poets to sell their erotic writings. The homosexuals write as if they were women, satisfy their desire to be a woman. The timid ones write about orgies. The frigid ones about frenzied fulfillment. The poetic indulge in pure bestiality, and the pure ones in perversion. Henry appeared as the mythological Animal. Barker has an English flavor, Robert is metaphysical. None are truly erotic, because eroticism is born of impotence, of extreme decadence. So we enter openly into the secret world of sex, rebelling at the bondage of sex, and exploding into poetry which we have to cut out afterwards. Haunted by the dream which stupid Mr. Ruder forces us to deny…forced to walk when we would rather dance.

Gonzalo’s jealousy is alarmed again by my new dressing, my renewed elegance. He has no cause for it. All my desire has withdrawn from Henry. I am more wholly Gonzalo’s than ever.

And it is at this moment that Henry is nourished by reading of my passion for him in my old diary, nourished by this past so beautifully captured. He telephones me: “I read the last one hundred pages. It’s wonderful. All that about Rank and New York.”

His voice was exalted. The last pages of this abridged version are all about the love of Henry as my absolute—the most beautiful pages on our love (after the birth illumination, the return to France, etc.). So I said: “You liked especially the last page?” He laughed. “That sounds like the diary. You would remember what was on the last page! Well, go back to lie and dream on your couch, and write more in your diary!”

Chinchilito telephoned: “I have been in Chicago three weeks—can I come today?” He never vanishes altogether.

NOVEMBER 7, 1941

In bed with Gonzalo. Laughing.

“Gonzalo, your confidence in me has not grown at all.”

“We’ll have to water it and put it in a hot house.”

“You can’t say it hasn’t been in a hot house!”

Gonzalo laughed, had to recognize the high temperature of our love.

NOVEMBER 9, 1941

Telephone from Michael Fraenkel: “I have to see you alone.” (How could have Henry have had a relationship with so repulsive a man? What a commentary on our life in Villa Seurat.)

Telephone from Ruder: “Old Man says none of the manuscripts you sent of Breit and the others came up to the standard you set.”

Telephone from Caresse: “Saturday night I want to take you to Peter Powell’s.”

Telephone from the telephone company: “Your bill is overdue. You will be cut off.”

NOVEMBER 12, 1941

Luise is too ill to be a good friend. Every word and emotion in her is now negative. When she is alone with me, she recognizes the greatness of my writing. When she introduces me to an agent, she diminishes me, as parents diminish their children by patronizing me or discussing the imperfections and immaturities of my Henry-June novel, and she thinks it’s quite natural when the agent says: “Put away all your European work. It doesn’t go here. Read Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, see how they do it and go ahead.” She brings moral and idealistic judgments upon me, for the “Crime against love I committed against June.” She is so confused, she switches, oscillates, sways between identifying herself with a violent, destructive June and being defeated by me. She orders me to write how she is both June and me. But already I see that she is harmful, destructive, and that her softness and love are not basic, fundamental, but like atonements.

NOVEMBER 14, 1941

Talk with Henry, who is disturbed by the news that his first wife Beatrice believes he has made money under a pseudonym and is inquiring as to his whereabouts to see him for unpaid alimony (amounting now to $20,000) and by the news that his daughter suffers from epilepsy.

When the past haunts him he wants to run away. When he wants to run away he wants me to do it with him. Then he is faced with a recurrent doubt he has of my ultimately breaking with my past to follow him. Now and then he says: “And when we do get a big sum of money, you won’t come. What will be your excuse then?”

Then tenderly, half playfully, I deflect the question as I always have, by pointing out how catastrophic it would be if I had not remained exactly where I am to be his guardian angel. I said: “You know, you always talk about faith, about everything coming out well, about your having no anxiety, but you know all the time that why you have faith is because I never let you fall or go hungry. If I dropped dead today you would be completely helpless again.” (Last year he made $1000 and of this owes $500 to the publisher.) “I do not reproach you. But I know you are a dreamer, a child, and I know too you have had bad luck with your two publishers.” (Jack Kahane was a dishonest and avaricious exploiter and now so is James Laughlin.) “I must continue to be what I am, where I am. I have given you a taste of freedom, traveling. I expect you to want it again, to get restless. I know you hate New York. When you can’t bear it anymore you can go away for a few months, but for me it is impossible.”

Henry said: “If I ever become aware that each move I make is a sacrifice for you and that my trip was the cause of your slaving for Ruder, I’ll go crazy.”

It is always the same answer. When they become aware (Gonzalo too, periodically) they become desperate, tear their hair, feel guilty, but that is all. They cannot remedy it. They can only protect themselves from the awareness, seek to be blind to it. In all these lives they have made the mad breaks, run away, traveled without money, but each move, instead of freeing them, has closed upon them like a net. The abandoned wife seeks retribution. The unpaid landlord keeps the trunks and most precious possessions. The starvation creates an endless trend of maladies. The papers not in order lands them in jail. The editor treated anarchically avenges himself. Nature avenges herself. Those from whom they begged, borrowed, stole, exploited, avenge themselves.

Henry took me with fervor after the talk, then said: “I did pretty well for a depressed man!” The illness of his daughter he looks at as a punishment too. Poor Henry.

When I say they are innocent it is because they are unaware. I can see in Henry the inability to grasp the reality of money. It’s as if the basic concrete fact they cannot see, as the poets cannot see biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics. And that is why I justify or excuse them. As they become aware they always become sad. It is so much like the process of the child becoming aware of the evil in the world, of duties. I see in their eyes first of all clarity and gayety that goes with irresponsibility, then slowly a sadness which I hate to cause. Only when I was cornered and unable to do more have I dared to say to Henry: “In seeking to fulfill your dream of traveling, I have made you less able to accept the limitations which today are universal. Today we have to be in America. Even if you had a fortune you could not tour the world.”

NOVEMBER 19, 1941

A week of disillusion. When my back is turned Robert uses my telephone to call up Massachusetts—one dollar for me to pay. Miss Steloff and Rae Beamish put in their pockets checks received for The Winter of Artifice which Beamish did not print, breaking his contract with me. Henry continues to moralize in the American book. Dorothy Norman believes her dreams are works of genius and receives me, marveling at her own work. She returns volumes 51 to 54 unread after asking for them and keeping them for six months. Gonzalo now wants to work, but when I asked Dorothy if she could advance me $200 for a press and that Gonzalo, in exchange for this, would do a piece of print for her worth twice as much, she immediately demurred and shrank. Suddenly I feel an immense fatigue. When I lose faith, when my eyes are opened, then for me it is like death.

Monday morning Virginia came with typed diary pages. I wrote eighty pages for Ruder. To help those who needed money, I spread the writing of erotica recklessly and reached a point of danger to myself. I bear the responsibility of their writing, supplying paper, arranging meetings, interceding for advances, advising, correcting, and the brunt of the rejections and Ruder’s complaints. The only moment of pleasure is when I carry in my pocket the money so eagerly, so desperately awaited by the hungry poets.

Seon Givens telephones (she was working at the Gotham Book Shop, met a rich young man, may marry him and become a publisher). “I love The Winter of Artifice. I want to do something of yours.” She has the fervor and the love that it takes to do things.

NOVEMBER 23, 1941

Dr. Jacobson: “You’ve lost five pounds in three weeks. There’s nothing I can do for you. You’re spending yourself so fast no amount of injections can help you recuperate. Your heart is strained. You have to rest, eat at home, get calm.”

Trembling, taut, vibrating, exhausted. Stayed home two days, revised Winter of Artifice for Seon Givens and Wayne Harris, the delightful and intelligent young couple, my future publishers. Seon was born on the Island of Aaron, masculine, exuberant, Harris is feminine and like Durrell in appearance. Their understanding of my work is exceptional.

NOVEMBER 26, 1941

Successful tea at the New School for Hugo’s exhibit. Paul Rosenfeld bought a print. The warm bloom of many friends—the Imbs, Caresse, Kay Boyle, Eduardo, Frances Steloff, Lucia and Francesco Cristofanetti. Hugo expansive, glowing, Jupiterean, with a healthy color, warmth, efflorescence. Grateful to me, telling me: “You created it all.”

I can only see my future work as a completion, for each day I see more…even looking back into the past, the figures do not grow less distinct, but infinitely more meaningful… Often I look back, from the Eduardo of today to the youthful one. Today he is thirty-seven but he looks youthful, he looks innocent, and, but for hardly perceptible signs, like a man of twenty-seven. He is graceful, charming, golden. Only now and then I catch the suddenly loose, lax expression of the child, the decadent immaturity. Then it is as if he were deteriorating as a perverse child might and not a man, as if I caught the contortions of the baby’s face when it is about to cry, the feeling of lack of control of the muscles, the too easily opened mouth, the disintegrated laughter. Then again he can easily hide this, and I see the suave man who still can deceive women as to his tastes, as he never has effeminate gestures, but merely the actor’s smoothness. So women are still drawn to him. Luise said: “He is like the first man I loved. He is quite beautiful.” Caresse preferred him to George Barker. Robert was warmed by his glow until he discovered the child where he was looking for a firm, severe father, and an analyst where he desired a poet. To cover up his timidity and paralysis in writing, he puts forward frightening edifices of quotations. He is practically drowned in research work. He thinks the source of his statements will be questioned. He seeks reinforcement and stilts.