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Mirages. Anais Nin
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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