I REMEMBERED THIS
My first erotic feeling
NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 26, 1941
Notes on future work: While writing the erotica I remembered this: In Brussels we lived in a two-storied house. I was seven or eight years old then. My father always took us to the attic to be whipped. He did not want my mother to hear us. She would interfere and get angry at him, and the struggle usually ended in a great battle between my father and mother. So the punishments always took place in this low-ceilinged room, cluttered with trunks, rags, broken dolls, old curtains, moth balls, old books and music. As far as I can remember, we all hated this and begged to be forgiven. The walk up the stairs was usually spent trying to persuade our father that we were innocent and did not deserve punishment. I remember I wept violently at the humiliation and hated my father. Now I ask myself if the hand which administered the powerful spankings must have awakened, at the same time as the pain, a region of pleasure. I do not remember feeling the pleasure then, but much later when I remembered the beatings it was as if the warmth of the hand had awakened not only the pain at the blow, but the dormant regions of sensibilities around the backside. It was as if the beating had come too near to the place where pleasure is felt and then entangled and related in the body, both the pain and the pleasure suddenly revealed as close to each other and related. I never became aware of the link between them until I was walking down the boulevards one night and I entered one of those places where they show erotic lantern slides for one penny. I had already seen four or five scenes of embraces, men and women rolling over on the grass, women caught in their bath, whores undressing, and then I saw the following scene: It was in a schoolroom. Many little girls sat on a bench, wearing very short skirts such as I wore as a child. The teacher was growing angry at them. Finally she ordered one of them to walk up to her desk and she scolded her. The little girl answered impudently. The teacher took the little girl, laid her across her knees, lifted her skirt, unbuttoned her pants, and began spanking her sharply. As I watched this scene I felt the most amazing pleasure. I was stirred, I grew wet between the legs, and began to palpitate, almost reaching the orgasm. This was a revelation. I could not remember experiencing this pleasure as a child. It must have come as an aftermath of the pain. The pain created the warmth, and ultimately a feeling of pleasure.
When I discovered this it became a fantasy which I used when I could not feel the orgasm with Gonzalo. I would imagine this scene in the attic from the very beginning. I would close my eyes and imagine the attic, and my father spanking me. In doing this his hand would slip and touch my sex. The warmth of the spanking spread to the sex between my legs. I would say to myself: now my mother is slowly coming up the stairs to stop this, slowly coming up to see what my father is doing. She will catch him spanking me and she will try to stop him. I must enjoy it before she comes up (and how clearly I felt this warm hand on my backside, or was it Gonzalo’s warm hand, and Gonzalo’s Spanish words). He is spanking me, but it is like a violent caress, and it arouses me sexually. I must open and enjoy it more and more before we are stopped by the mother (before Gonzalo satisfies himself and stops moving inside me). My father is spanking me, my backside is warm, feverish, and all around it, it is spreading, the warmth and fever… And seeing this image I would have the orgasm.
My wedding night: Hugo very exalted and romantic. He read me a poem. He kneeled before me and uttered wonderful words of worship. Then we turned the light off and slipped into bed. I wore a white satin nightgown. He was inexperienced. He had never made love to a woman before. He rubbed his body against mine. I did not know what to do either. All I knew was that it would hurt and that there would be blood. I did not even lift my nightgown. Hugo never got his sex into me at all. He rubbed his body against mine, the penis against my belly until he came all over my nightgown. I was so amazed to feel this enormous penis where before I had felt something soft and small. I was so amazed by the wetness of my nightgown. My nightgown was stiff with sperm when I awakened. I felt sad, vague. Hugo was sad too. I thought that he did not love me. He thought that he was impotent. When I went to the hairdresser at the hotel to get my hair fixed he was jealous and went with me. That night we were to take the train home. I thought then it would happen, that he would take me really. But this time he had no erection. He began to weep, to excuse himself. I had a vague feeling that something was wrong. But all I felt was: he does not love me, he does not desire me. We were both terribly sad. When we got into our first apartment, then what Hugo liked was to get me to lie on the bed with my clothes on, and to raise my legs so that he could look. That was all he wanted, to look up between my legs, without pushing it and rubbed until he came. I would come too rubbing against him. That was all. We wore ourselves out this way, with excitement and frustration. Then one night I determined he would possess me altogether. He was afraid to hurt me. Every time he had tried he had found me too small and tight, and timidity and fear would make me even tighter. He was very big, I discovered later, unusually so, and I was rather small. But it was I who incited him one night to push in, it was I who made him. I did not complain about the pain. I incited him until he finally broke through the virginity, and the blood came, and it was done. But we were never made for each other. He was too big for me. And then he would always come too quickly, almost immediately, and I was slow. In fact, for months I did not know the deeper orgasm. I only felt the superficial orgasm of the clitoris, which he excited with his hands, but nothing deep down. The amazing thing was that it was only a year later in Paris that I felt the deep orgasm. We were living in a two-room apartment separated only by a curtain. My mother came to visit us. She slept in the salon, on the couch. She was tired from a long journey and fell heavily asleep. Hugo and I tried to get into bed without awakening her. Hugo wanted to take me. In the dark I was pleading with him. I was afraid my mother would hear us. My resistance inflamed him. In the darkness, in the secrecy, with the anguish I felt at the possibility of discovery, I suddenly felt this marvelous expanding, ecstatic rush of pleasure all through the body, like a strong liqueur bursting through the veins. I was spellbound. It was nothing like the pleasure of the clitoris orgasm. It was deep down inside of the womb, and such violent enjoyment. It was a revelation. Then I was aroused to the entire world of sex. I began to search through the quays for books on sex. I bought French dime novels which were illuminating. I found in the closet of the old bachelor whose apartment we were subletting, a memoir of a prostitute. When she was a little girl she was touched and tampered with by the tramps who slept under the bridges. But that was just the clitoris orgasm. Then at sixteen she was really possessed and she described what she felt at the full orgasm. This man placed her in a whorehouse. She could receive eight or ten men a day and feel nothing. But when her lover came he could arouse her to a frenzy.
Later my Spanish dancing teacher fell in love with me. He was about fifty but vigorous and agile, a man of the people. Below the dancing studio there were little dressing rooms, stuffy and small and badly lit. After the lesson the teacher would follow me into one of the little dressing rooms, and then, as I stood against the dresses and shawls, he lifted my skirt and kissed my sex until I grew dizzy. But I could never bring myself to go to his hotel room as he begged me to.
It also amazed me, much later, to discover that a man could rarely know when a woman had felt the orgasm. The penis is not sensitive enough to register the palpitation of the orgasm. If the penis is lying quiet inside of the woman it can feel the voluntary muscular contractions which imitate the contractions of the orgasm, but those of the orgasm are more feeble. A man could make certain by the accelerated heartbeat, but even this can come about from the sheer physical exertion.
When you are in love, you love every part of the body; when you are not in love there is always a part of the body you want to push away. When you are in love, after the desire is satisfied, you still love the body of the beloved. When you are not in love you want to push it away.
My first erotic feeling I experienced at the age of eight. I was playing with four or five children of my own age. We had exhausted all the games we knew and it was getting to the end of the afternoon. I remember the growing darkness, and how we passed from the room where we were playing into a glass hothouse. It was very hot and perfumed in there. The only lights came from the street. I don’t remember whose idea it was, but someone suggested we take our pants off and show ourselves to the little boys. We did, but out of timidity perhaps, when we took our pants off, instead of facing the boys we turned our backs to them and leaned over as if to receive a spanking. I think we believed this was the interesting part to show. One of the little boys was not content to look. He approached me and placed his hand on my backside caressingly. Just at this moment we heard a noise. We all got dressed quickly. We were nearly caught by the parents.
DECEMBER 2, 1941
Since yesterday, there has been elation and power at the realization that I am completing a work, not about to begin one, but bringing my life task to full effulgence, efflorescence, fruition. Joy. The joy at discovering the diary is not just a sketch book, but a tapestry, a frieze being completed. When Gonzalo referred to its being hidden in a box, I answered, eluding all personal secrecy: “The condition of the work required it being done in darkness, inside of a box. Its condition of life is secrecy. It was born out of timidity. I lacked the audacity of the artist working in daylight (I write my stories in the morning, my diary at night). Secrecy produced this truth, and each day I grow farther away from feminine reflection and nearer to art, to objectivity. I have written the drama of the process, from the blurred reflection of the emotional waters to the terrifying lucidity of the mystic poet. I feel calm and lucid now, patient (before I was turgid, impatient, chaotic, hysterical, occasionally clairvoyant, often blind, careless, living so fast, writing in rhythm with it, negligent, excessive). Now I write more slowly. I even condescend to caress words and phrases. Before, I had contempt for technique, of words in themselves, of my tools, of labor. I have care and patience now. Timidity has marred my creative work outside of the diary (daylight). In the presence of others I assume poses, mannerisms, or the ultimate defense of perfectionism, the perfect diamond phrase no one can attack or wound, the perfection of House of Incest and my stories. A shield, shiny and polished. But inside of the box, my soul speaks, truly and simply. Secret.
Memories of my trips to Switzerland alone, which I considered my “healing place.”
Every trip aroused in me the same curiosity and hope one feels before the curtain is raised at the theatre, the same stirring anxiety and expectation. With me it became almost painful, because I expected more than a spectacle; I expected my very life itself to begin, at any moment, there on the quays, and as I watched the people it was almost too painful, this expectation of the person who would make my life marvelous, who would transport me out of the impasse in which I had placed myself (the hopeless love for John Erskine, the paralyzing timidity). It was a hunger which did not come from any clear, precise region of my body, but it was gnawing and persistent like hunger. I was unaware of its nature. I was expecting someone. Every time a door opened, every time I went to a party, to any gathering of people, every time I entered a café, a theatre, I was expecting someone. My keen awareness made me quite clearly picture the worlds I imagined to exist, the personages in them. But my timidity locked me out from them. The flights of my childhood repeated themselves over and over again. Because of my father’s brilliance, our house was always full of people who wanted to live in the effulgence he spread around him, people who delighted in his articulateness, in his gifts as an actor which made him enact every story he told like a play. I wanted to participate in this, yet my fears were even greater than my desires, and I ended by hiding myself in some corner of the house, in a place where no one could find me. Once there I meditated on the neglect of the world, on people’s indifference—I reversed the process which had taken place and felt as if they had abandoned me, those who were laughing and talking (I always feel abandoned by those who are laughing and talking as if they had left me out, whereas it is I who get cut off by my own nature and separateness). I did not know that I had made the move out of the enchanted circle, fallen out of grace through my own timidity. And every day it was the same. I stood alone at the station, yearning to be a part of every intense, every joyous, every tragic moment, longing to be the woman who was weeping, the woman who was being amorously kissed before everyone, the woman who was handed flowers to wear, the woman who was laughing, the woman who was being helped into the train.
My marriage was a part of the hiding away, the refuge. It was a soft, dark, secure hiding place where I was sure of not being hurt, taunted, exposed. My husband was a shadow of myself then, projected all around me, who never separated from me, who echoed my moods, my joys and sorrows, who applauded my efforts, my courage and my weakness equally, who loved every aspect of me… As I boarded the train I was clearly aware of how difficult it was for me to move away, without my shell, without Hugo, without his reassuring presence.
Then I read Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and I made two discoveries: first that I had never experienced the sensations described by Lawrence, secondly that this was the nature of my quest. But I was equally aware that something had created in me a state of perpetual defense against these very experiences, the same urge for flight which took me away from scenes of pleasure and excitement. I had stood many times on the very edge of it and then ran away. I myself was to blame for what I had lost.
My being was now urged to move forward and into the current of life. The book acted on me like the revelation of a submerged self, the one who wanted to feel love, desire.
The Hugo of that early part of our marriage—he spread his big body over mine and clawed at me, quickly, lightly, like a quick, heavy bird, and was soon satisfied and exhausted. A few short stabs into me and then his pleasure, and it was all over. Very rarely I felt the orgasm, and never again the deep one I had felt the time of my mother’s visit. He made no caresses before, did not linger, or seek to create the mood. He walked towards me firmly, briskly, as if his will in this were sufficient to arouse the same desire in me. He never watched my face, my mood, waited for a certain light to appear in my eyes. He did not notice that I had no time to grow moist. He accepted the fact that he had to leave the bed and go and spread Vaseline between my legs to make it possible for him to penetrate me. In everything else he was sensitive, in this completely blind. He thought it was natural this way: the woman’s immediate response to a willful act of desire. He was not disturbed when at times I could not pretend to have pleasure. He would say very quietly: “You are not in the mood for it? Then just be my little slave, just let me make love to you.” These were the times when I did not have the courage to pretend, when he had already taken me the night before, and I felt unable to pretend. Then I would lie back absolutely inert and passive. I would even turn away my mouth so that he would not kiss me, and his kisses fell on my ears and neck. At such moments I hated him. I could not understand this great abysm between the man I liked to live with because he was so attuned to me, so sensitive, so enveloping, so protective, and this man who appeared at the moment of sex and who was an autocrat. This will which he did not show in our life together, which he yielded up completely during the day (for I was allowed to choose everything, the place where we lived, the movie, the book, the friends, the kind of life…he left everything for me to create as I pleased). But all this was somewhat like an abdication in exchange for the reversal which took place at night. During the day he refused to reign. He gave me a kind of worship, together with an acknowledgment that I was the leader and creator of our life together. But at night it was the will of the man, straight and firm, simple and direct, and to be obeyed. The will of the husband. No attempt at charming, seducing the woman, playing on her moods, awakening her desire. Merely the immediate consent to the sexual urge which came up in him with such firmness, like an order.
He never desisted or turned away, was not discouraged by my passivity. The little game that had grown between us, the habit of saying “be my little slave,” then, became the usual story of our sexual life. I would lie down and take off as few clothes as possible if I were dressed. He would watch me undress. I would take off my panties, my garters, and stockings, and then nothing else. He would have to beg me to take off my dress when he wanted to touch my breasts. I exaggerated the difficulties. I would say: “This jacket takes too long to unlace. It’s awkward. Let’s not wait.” I had a feeling against undressing completely. I did not like to feel his body. At times I felt obscurely that I had chosen him as one chooses a brother, a father to live with, some personage of one’s family one likes to live with, but that I had not chosen him to lie naked with. I did not like his body. I liked the fervor of his love which was like some perpetually warm climate around me, but actually at the moment of possession I disliked to undress, and I disliked his mouth on mine. His penis was big; it entered into me with difficulty. Once inside of me it did not move nimbly; it was so big that it remained rigid, moving only in and out, quickly. And quickly it was over. Hugo always lamented this: “How quick,” he would say, “Too quick!” And I lay like one that had been murdered, feeling the whole scene to be like an act of death rather than an act of life. Very often I felt angry at his forcing the sexual act on me against my unresponsiveness. I compared myself to the wax mannequins he liked so much. It was his only act of unfaithfulness, his love for the window mannequins. I felt sometimes their inanimateness must have reminded him of mine or that he must like this unreal wax inhuman coldness, or he would not walk out of his way to visit a particularly erotic one, and come to me speaking of their charms. He knew just where they lived, how they were dressed. He had his favorites: the one who wore a transparent black nightgown (like mine), the one in London who was naked under furs. He disliked violent, passionate, primitive women. The bestial nature of women frightened him.
All this was not apparent during the first years of my marriage. Our games sufficed then, and I enjoyed them, especially the caresses of his hands. I desired Hugo then, and could feel passion. It was only when my desire turned to John Erskine, and finally to Henry, that I discovered the deeper sensual joys which finally separated me from poor Hugo’s inexperience. Was it inexperience which failed to awaken the deeper response, or merely sexual inharmony which became clear to me and not to Hugo? Hugo improved as a lover as I learned from Henry—but it was too late. My love for him had fixed itself on a fraternal pattern—my passion had turned towards Henry. Even today when I have no desire for Henry, I still can give myself without the revolt I feel towards Hugo. Towards Hugo I feel a tremendous obstruction, as if we had never been lovers, as if it were a case of incest, and this is no delusion because the proximity of our birthdays marks us as brother and sister. How is it that Hugo’s nature adapts itself so well to incest and not to my nature? Because I have known authentic passion, perhaps.
Every book I wrote has brought me new friends, new realms, opened new houses, new experiences. The imagination brings forth personages which lie in the obscure regions of our being. They come to the surface, take form, appear in the book. And then the answering personage appears. I am sure when Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley that Lady Chatterley appeared. When I wrote about Lawrence, Henry appeared, who was to represent the Sun for me, expansion and fertility. That is my own interest in writing, not to make a name, not to be exposed in libraries, or celebrated after death, but to create life, immediate life around me. I cannot go into new lives without my books. They are my boat and sail, my passport and map, my compass and telescope.
I write too, because creation is my way of reaching the “cosmic consciousness” of the mystics, because this highest point of my being is the point which survives and continues, and I know my highest self is the one who will not die.
If I were a man and I read the passages in my books of expectation, waiting, suspense, I would feel this: “This is my cue. I can enter now. This woman is ready to receive me. The atmosphere is propitious.”
When, through lack of audacity, I turn back during my adventures and go home and write the book, the book I then use like dynamite to blast my way out!
DECEMBER 3, 1941
American style in writing—current and general—is commonplace, prosaic, pedestrian, homely, as French never is. Even in Harper’s and Vogue, so-called aristocratic publications, there is a total absence of elegance, subtlety, nuances. Even there the plainness and ugliness is apparent. No wonder I have failed here. I am their antithesis. The poet is the antithesis of America. Just as they don’t know “race,” clothes, distinction, of any kind, their writing reflects vulgarity and looks shabby, seamy, like faded slippers for tired feet. Mongrels. But real mongrels acquire a personality from their wanderings. The American mongrel is bourgeois and colorless besides.
A speech I invented in the erotica which I wished someone had made to me: “You are the little girl who hid in fire escapes when people came to the house, in corners of balconies, under a shawl. Of course you realize that is a very subtle way of calling attention to yourself. It is another way, a most insidious way, of cutting a separated figure. Think what impression a woman makes if you find her sitting on top of a tree. The most haunting woman is the one we cannot find in the full café when we are looking for her, the one we must go on a quest for and seek through the disguise of her stories.”
For Hugo I was perpetually traversing mysterious states he did not even seek to penetrate. He was there merely to console me on every return. He was always there to receive me from every kind of journey, secretly aware of my ordeals, never aware of what caused them. Blindly he showed his own joy at my return, from a night out or a trip to America, from France, or a return from Virginia. Blindly he consoled me for the grief caused me by John Erskine, and then by Henry, and then by Gonzalo. He asked no questions. For him it was a sufficient miracle that I should come home—his entire concern was that I should come home. My transformations he did not try to understand. I returned from the ordeal of John Erskine dead. He did not see the death. He was only aware that what exuded from me vivified him. Since the luminosity still attended me, he did not detect the death. When I returned at dawn with a Spanish cape and candle wax on my shoulder, he did not seek the cause. Now the déroulement of his own life supplies beautiful explanations. In Paris he stayed out with Jean in cafés, talking all night, or walking through the city. So Hugo thought: that is how Anaïs spent her nights. Now he gets sad and restless at ordinary cocktails or an evening with bank people or rich clients, and he thinks: that is how Anaïs got restless and sad, and what I saved her from when I gave her liberty.
When I first met Eduardo we were two children, two cousins lost in a huge family of many cousins, aunts and uncles. Eduardo rang the bell of 158 West 75th, when I was about fourteen. He came from college with his two brothers. They stood at the door and asked for my mother. I wore a pale lavender dress and my face was very pale. I was intimidated and flustered so I answered: “My mother is not in—she’s out.” “Of course she is out if she is not in,” laughed the tallest cousin. Eduardo was taken into our games in the rooms that were not rented. I was presenting a play. We had made the costumes, and the scenario was my own invention, but it was not written because I held the theory that once I had told them the story (Thorvald, Joaquín, friends Eleanor and Gertrude) they should supply the words so that it would be spontaneous each time. It was torture for my unimaginative playmates! They stuttered. I was the souffleur. When Eduardo came we were having difficulty with the curtain. The programs were already painted, printed in handsome hand flourishes. But the curtain did not work. Eduardo helped. The costumes were made of all kinds of materials, mosquito netting for the princesses, Christmas tree tinsel, old dresses, discarded curtains. I was the Machiavellian, intriguing Black Queen.
Eduardo and I met again at big family dinners, holidays. We read each other’s diaries. In Richmond Hill he began to write me letters and send me flowers he picked in the forest lying on moss in a shoe box.
But we were like two transparent myth people who never touched each other. We never even held hands. We got exalted, poetized, soared together at Lake Placid. I was the first one to experience a human emotion. All our life until then took place in the air, in words, on paper, in poems. Then, when I was sixteen, we went to a dance at Forest Hills Inn. There I saw that there was a great difference between the attraction other young men felt for me and my relation to Eduardo. The others wanted to hold me, found dancing an excuse to. They complimented me. And then I noticed that my body felt Eduardo’s presence, and I wanted him to flirt with me, to admire me. But his body was dead to mine. It took me years to discover he was already a homosexual, and that of all the women in the world, I was the most tabooed one. I bore the name of his mother and his sister. Three Anaïses drawing around him the circle of incest.
When Hugo courted me Eduardo was passively, mysteriously jealous. But he accepted Hugo. Hugo was, in contrast to Eduardo, extremely present, vital, warm, powerful, assertive. The fantasy with Eduardo paled. Yet during my honeymoon, I wrote to Eduardo!
Gonzalo was sitting on the edge of the bed, had slipped his pants on and was fastening the buckle of his belt. I was not dressed yet. He showed me his belt. It had once been a strong leather belt with a silver buckle, but now it was so completely worn and frayed that it looked about to tear. The tip of it was completely frayed. The place where the buckle fastened on it was almost as thin as a piece of cloth. He held it in his hand and looked pensively down at it. “It is wearing out and it makes me sad because I’ve had it ten years.” As I looked at him I became sharply aware of that moment so often repeated before he unfastened his belt to let his pants down. Each time it came with a little suspense; it was the prelude to a joy. He never unfastened it until some caress, some embrace had aroused his desire so that the confined penis hurt him. I never once unfastened his belt. There was always that moment of suspense before he unfastened it. Then he either takes out his dark sex for me to touch or places my hand within the pants for me to take it out. Sometimes he merely unfastens it and lets me fumble to unbutton the trousers and take his sex out. If I cannot unbutton the underwear quickly enough (I have a shyness about this, a fear to scratch or hurt him) then he does it himself. The little sound made by the buckle always affects me. It is an erotic moment for me. This time what I felt when he spoke of the ten years was a strange, sharp pain. I thought of the five years before he knew me, of the many times he must have unfastened it. I saw him unfastening it in other places, other rooms, at other hours, for other women. I saw him so vividly with his dark hand taking his sex out and some strange woman bending over it, another mouth. How often he had made this gesture for other women! I felt acutely jealous. I wanted to say: “Throw the belt away. Do not carry the same belt that you wore for them. I will give you another.” It was as if his feeling of affection for the belt were an affection for the past that he could not rid himself of entirely. I remembered his early spontaneous confessions like mine. Early in our meetings he let fall: “I could always get whatever woman I wanted. I don’t know why. It’s a kind of magnetism.” Later he amended (as I amended): “I had less women than you imagine. Many times I desired a woman and then because I didn’t love her I couldn’t do anything sexually.”
Dr. Franz Horch, my literary agent, praises my work highly. But a new disappointment in my publication history—Wayne Harris and Seon Givens are dreamers. What money they had they already sank into poems by Patchen. I have to wait for this to appear and then sell, and then this money will pay for Winter of Artifice. This plan cannot come to any good. Patchen cannot feed my books. All this hurts my pride and adds to the lost time. One year lost when Caresse took the book and failed to print it. Another year lost when Beamish took it and failed to publish it. There is no protection for the writer.
How rich in meaning is The Voice in Winter of Artifice. What a rouleau compresseur I use, and how carefully it must be read. It’s a perfume. Every word is weighty, full of implications. I can reread it, and extract nourishment from it like “compressed tea,” a synthetic meal made for the modern age, even for parachute jumpers!
DECEMBER 7, 1941
JAPAN DECLARES WAR ON UNITED STATES.
We are all asleep. America was caught asleep and schizophrenic. We, Henry, Eduardo, Gonzalo, Hugo and I are caught dreaming, loving, creating.
DECEMBER 12, 1941
Since Robert returned from the army, what crystallized was his external behavior, his attitudes, and he took the form I had persistently refused to see because of the inner Robert I knew from his diary. First what became clearer was his schizophrenic coldness. He always came in without a greeting, entered like a stone figure. Then, like some primitive, but without a sense of ritual, he sought food, directly, ruthlessly. He asked me for two dollars (I wept because since Robert read my diary I could not understand how he could have the insensitivity to ask me, knowing all my struggles). He looks dissolved, vacant. He cannot flow. He has eluded all external discipline (earning a living, etc.), and he has no spiritual discipline to hold him together. Suddenly I saw, and he acknowledged it, that he was eating my writing for his own pleasure, a young cannibal, not out of love. I turned away.
DECEMBER 13, 1941
Preparing for air raids, buying flashlights, tape for the windows so they will not shatter, dark curtains.
Eduardo wants to go to war to have the current, fraternal experience like the others…
“To escape your conflict,” I say.
“I can’t return home to bourgeois life and capitalism.”
“Then give your life to communism, that’s heroic. Going to war, for you, is suicide. Don’t expect me to be objective,” I said. “I am your mother. I can’t send you to war.”
Henry says, “Let him go.” Gonzalo says, “He won’t go. He is merely talking.”
I copy twenty pages a day of diary 60 to catch up with the others. The diary is a gigantic rumination.
DECEMBER 25, 1941
Robert reading my diary and feeling nothing. Letting me serve him. Asking for money. Finally I see the insanity of this, the shut-out feelings, the disconnection. He took Bob sexually, a whim, causing Virginia pain, not feeling her pain, hating Bob. He found it necessary not only to inform Virginia of all this, but to read her full descriptions of the scenes from his diary.
With Henry I had a tremendous talk. He takes the side of the crazy Hitler, the ego, the criminal genius. I of Stalin, the sane, the powerful, the impersonal, the benefice. Henry likes the man who he thinks obliterates limitations (I said it isn’t true, he merely refuses to see them, as madmen do, and overcomes them only by brutality and sadism). Henry takes the side of the inflated ego who justifies his acts by speaking of a divine guidance. These are the symbols of our drama: Stalin, true power by a contact with reality, conquering by real strength, not fanaticism. Hitler the Satan, the dark, the criminal born of humiliations. I said to Henry: “The criminal is the man who revenges himself for the harm done to him by society a MILLION TIMES—that is the criminal, the man who, because you denied him bread once, kills a hundred persons. That’s Hitler. Germany was humiliated always for its aggressiveness, its brutality. It has become a monster.” Hitler will fall, of course, because he has a false power, the power of the madman who cannot see the human limitation to power (the generals who failed in Russia he punished, not realizing it was natural they should fail, faced with a stronger enemy, not seeing the real profound reason for their failure). War is only the drama we made on a higher scale, out of our weakness, hatred, negativism, neurosis, fear, schizophrenia.
There is a side to Henry that is criminal, identifies itself to the criminal. In Cancer there was a total absence of feeling. Today his absence of feeling for France is appalling, inhuman, after ten years of life there. Why? I have sometimes a feeling for even a particular tree in Paris, a sudden tender remembrance of a certain street. Henry nothing.
JANUARY 5, 1942
I had an amorous and beautiful dream of Chinchilito, and the next morning I received a card from him that he was going to telephone. He didn’t telephone at the appointed day, but Saturday night I had another dream, and the next morning he telephoned. He came at four—the afternoon before New Year’s. As we talked he caressed me, raising my skirt. His long-fingered artist hand, smooth and soft and nervous. More and more caresses. He hid his head on my breast, tenderly. More and more caresses of the hands. Then he took me—lingeringly, with strength, with power, with tenderness, uttering caressing words in German, his youthful vigor and maturity, his wonderful knowingness, strength and fervor, our mouths together, his beautiful face bowed over mine, amorous, luminous. Point lumineux de ma vie. Point lumineux de rêve, outside of human life. At the end, small moth kisses on the face, romantic kisses. Silence, and hushed words in caressing tones… Chinchilito, I whispered. And I, of course, timid, unable to enjoy it fully, yet enjoying all but the orgasm. I rose with a desire to dance. Feeling light and joyous, the only joyous moments of the holiday. His wavy gold hair, his luminous teeth, his fantastic tallness. Siegfried—the Nordic God. So beautiful the moment. When I hear music it is this moment I love again. When I dance alone, it is this moment that makes me dance. Chinchilito!