L’HOMME FATAL

My difficulty with the feminine man

DECEMBER 7, 1944

I touched the bottom again and then liberated myself. I decided to eliminate the cause of friction, to not care about the press. I never go there unless Gonzalo calls me. I battled for my health by going to Jacobson. Then Jaeger reminded me we are never in a trap unless we want to be. I had to choose between breaking with Gonzalo and accepting him, and I accepted. I began to write, first out of the intolerance, out of despair—I saw art so clearly as a drug, the only drug left to me now that all illusion is removed.

Then Lanny Baldwin, the southern poet whose book we are printing, came to the press “to breathe.” I like his humor and softness. He took us to lunch. One afternoon he was looking over his pages and I saw his blond, sensitive hands and felt their nudity and sensuality. He was at first merely a handsome man, well groomed, who had been on the stage, not comfortable in business, who has a home in Mount Kisco and two children. Then he became the southern gentleman poet who was gallant and shy with me, became the man whose rich, soft voice stirred me over the telephone. The homme fatal for me, the soft, feminine, rather weak man. As I grew healthier, lighter, freer, I began to desire him, to dream of kissing him.

We went out together last night—a French restaurant, red wine, a long talk. He wanted me to read his last poems at the hotel. At first I said I’d wait in the taxi, but he urged me upstairs. I read the poems. It was late. When I stood to leave he kissed me, so delicately and so strongly, so sensually. I left. In the taxi I threw my head back, drugged.

Lanny. Lanny cannot hurt me. He can only give me pleasure. He is born in September, under my father’s sign, but he is my flirtatious, tender father. I can take only pleasure now.

DECEMBER 13, 1944

Writing important pages richly, intensely, with strength—I know—for women’s history, on anxiety, on a bicycle ride, on Lucia (Hejda), Thurema (Lillian), and Luise (Stella), but I feel I never surpass the diary. I cannot invent character. Hugo is paying me the subtle tribute of weeping, weeping over the difficulty of my destiny. He thinks I am being sacrificed to the writing of the future, that I will not live to receive my due.

I wrote Sunday out of the drunkenness caused by Lanny’s kiss. Then yesterday he came to my place. I expected pleasure, but I found a man afraid. He had been dreaming of me, obsessively, but he could not bear the deception, the secret, the partial relationship. He was afraid I would hurt him. We kissed. He held me so close on the couch that I felt his desire against my body. He fought his desire. It was all so sensual, so soft, so tormented. I felt his sincerity, his naïveté, his fears, his absolutism. He was saying good-bye, and he was kissing me and crying out: “Oh, God, to feel this way again. I never thought I could feel this way again.” (He is just barely recovering from a cruel break with an actress.) But he cannot lie. He dreads the estrangement from his wife and home that he felt after he left me. There is so much feeling between us that I do not believe he will be able to stay away. But fear can be stronger than desire in him. So I don’t know. I felt sad at his loss, empty to be deprived of the drunkenness. Two bad, empty days without joy or drunkenness. Why do I choose so unwisely? I feel he will return and we will have pleasure. I will hurt him and perhaps liberate him too.

DECEMBER 14, 1944

For two days I felt the pain all through my body, of my loss and his loss too. He is too good, too simple, to be free. I had desired Hugo’s goodness, Hugo’s inarticulateness, Hugo’s adolescence in Lanny, and something of Eduardo’s physical attributes. It is strange, this excursion into the ecstasy of loving qualities I already possess around me, loving them anew. I never understood, as a Doña Juana, the deeper causes of Don Juanism. The mystical impersonal expansion of love, loving only the dream and not reality, which means to love the beginning over and over again, the ecstasy of a new dream before the morning, the awakening, to love again a young Hugo, a young Eduardo, our young idealism, our young sentimentalism and fears. It is strange, the overflow of love, for I have never loved Hugo better or more completely. I have never loved Gonzalo better, with a purer maternal passion. But the mistress goes on forever, desiring, desiring, pouring out. Creation does not reduce my love output! The strength goes out to the new book. The softness goes to men, women, and life.

I wrote this book yielding absolutely to unconscious images and following associations, and then the symbolism became clear, the awakened thinking of trivial facts. I was haunted for days by the image of mirrors in a garden. I wrote it and found the thread of connection later, one of the essential symbols of the book, that of art and reality. At times I depict nature as nature, and at times I must use the mirror. I call on poetry, on symbols, even on a bicycle to tell a very simple truth. We will respect the taboos created by people’s fear of truth. The mirrors will remain in the garden, the mirrors of art and poetry. The sexual scenes must take place in the mirror of the naked garden in Paris. People cannot bear the truth; they have placed mirrors where they can see the bodies possessing each other, but where they cannot see when the bodies fail.

Lanny came back, doubting, protesting, but was carried away by the intoxication. He cannot bear lies, he cannot bear the uncertainty, but when he dreams of me or sees me, he is swept away. We were in the restaurant. His ex-mistress had come to his house, very drunk, and he no longer loves her. We leaned over the little table as if we were going to fall into each other. I was drunk too, and again my intuition did not lead me astray. At moments his fantasy answers mine…above all, our feelings go together. At the same moment we both withdrew from the noise of the restaurant and went somewhere…we imagined a room…we imagined… Oh, the drunkenness of love and desire. The day is illuminated—the press, the winter, the house, the music, the books, writing—Lanny. He couldn’t kill the desire I knew. I was physically in pain for a week when I tried to. Today, joy again. Joy. Joy. Joy.

DECEMBER 22, 1944

Alone with Lanny in my apartment, and again the doubts: do I love him or merely desire him? He is afraid. He wants an absolute love, in the open. He doubts everything, himself, and me. And he fears pain. When it was a question of unimportant women he could play and feel no conflict, but now he feels churned and pulled. The contrast is too violent between his life at Mount Kisco and me. He talks like a woman who is afraid to be possessed. Sitting back, tender, vulnerable, he arouses me painfully. And then suddenly the brakes give way, and he holds me with such a fervor that it is like a possession. He says: “Let me sleep. I’m broken. I want peace.” So we lie side by side, and as he falls asleep, his caresses grow wilder, all but the ultimate. His passion and emotionalism now arouse me more, and I suffer now. My feelings are captured by his conflict. I know. I know. Let him sleep in my tenderness. From this he cannot be saved. If I withdraw, it does not matter. Lanny cannot kill the passion that is in him, the poetry and the ecstasy. They are in him. They will torment him. I wish I could turn back, but it is too late. I didn’t want to feel so much.

The other day I thought suddenly: I can never be happy in love. If Lanny comes to me we will be happy together for a short time and…I suddenly imagined him in uniform. The next day he talked about the re-classification, saying he might be drafted (he was not drafted because he broke an ankle skiing). His exterior is so cool, so contained… he always enters so cool and polite, and then he breaks into flames. Now that I have felt this fire in him, I find myself caught in more than desire, and I suffer from his conflict—the passion, the passion in his free body, and then the fear paralyzing him. Lanny. It is so strange. There is his external self: the American, neat and dapper, clear and sleek. Everything separates us: his Americanism, his masculine wife, his children, his home, his business life, his bourgeois frame, his bad taste in painting and in music. Only his writing is different. And then suddenly all this breaks down, and body to body we burn together. What a mystery. What a marvelous, incredible, beautiful thing it is, this welding fire. Then again his thinking, his conscious self. We can’t meet. But this breaks down at the touch. In the touch there is all: cognition, similitude, rhythm, expressiveness. He is to me all tenderness and warmth, all hidden and sacrificed by his goodness and responsibilities. He is full of innocence and immaturity. He is idealistic. In him I like it, because at the same time he is an homme à femme. In this he is knowing and worldly. He has the lover’s polish. It’s comical too, how the lovers recognize each other and distrust each other. Those made for love know that lovers pursue love and are therefore unfaithful. (Chinchilito—how he distrusted me, feared to love me.)

I know Lanny is the lover, but I have more confidence than he has. I know I can hold the lover, satisfy him, enchant him. I do not fear him. I see Lanny elusive and playful, smiling with charm, soft and debonair too, handsome and distrustful. At the same time, I see now, I am the lover. Oh, god, I am the lover. This moment of frenzy when we lay together, he trying to sleep—the violent embrace is everything to me. Everything else pales. This is the fever and the madness, the flame. I want this over and over and over again. Lanny, Lanny, his softness. I, alas, am courting again, I am courting a woman…the sensitivity of the face, mouth, the warm softness of the features.

DECEMBER 24, 1944

I am so lovesick I can’t write. A whole day before me, and what I want is to make love to Lanny. It seems to me that I cannot create unless I possess his femininity, his softness. I have a craving to have him in me, and then I shall feel complete to do my creative work. I need strength, and I have put all my softness on him. I melt towards him, and this weakens me for writing. I have lost my strength. It has gone courting him on Christmas Eve, seeking the yielding of his body. Give me my lover, oh, god, give me my lover so that I may do this arid and strong work, for I have to make clear this chaos of sex, and it drowns me. Today I drowned in my unconscious!

A whole afternoon alone together at Jon Stroup’s apartment, Lanny and I. The same scene, the same passionate embracing and the same blocking. He is caught in his fear of life, of pain, of desire. And yet all we say and do together has a kind of harmony. He can do all but take me. He takes my mouth, he uncovers my arm, he slips his hand under my sweater, takes my back, takes the dimples at the beginning of the back, and takes the feelings and the turmoil. No two love affairs are ever the same. In ours there are ballet gestures. He takes me by the waist as if he were going to lift me up in the air, and there is a region of his body I feel under his shirt, his back and ribs, wavering and shivering under my fingers, all the peripheries and dances of a ballet that prevent fusion. We touch a point of fire. He brings me many things: an America I never knew, an aristocratic America, a gallant America, an ideal America. We can laugh together. He can dance loosely. As he dances a little I see the woman in him, the woman who peered out of my father lying down when he fainted after his concert, pale and disheveled, the woman in the golden transparency of Eduardo, with his green eyes, their ardent caress. But this is more than a love affair manqué. There are subtle transmissions, as when I received Albert without the orgasm. There is a penetration. Will the obstacle be removed? As we come out in the street, I miss the elation that follows lovemaking, yet I feel the intoxication of half-possession. We talked. I sat away from him. “Don’t touch me,” he said. “If you touch me, I lose my lucidity.” He confessed, and I helped him, perhaps. He was recently annihilated by a woman. (How woman can demolish a man. I wonder if I ever left a man as destroyed. I wonder if I left Dudley demolished—yes, I did, and Rank, and Harry, and others, those I did not want. The wounds of the war of love. The cripples.)

JANUARY 5, 1945

Between the afternoon I spent with Lanny and last night when he took me out, I decided to withdraw. Immediately he felt it. We sit in a dim bar, and I refuse to be drawn into his softness. He questions me, and I tell him, “It was a mirage.” “No,” he says, and then with great feeling and anxiety, he adds, “But now that you feel it was a mirage will you abandon me?” His face is so near to mine, and my being is again drawn to him. “No, Lanny, no.” “What I feel,” he says, “is that at any time, any moment, I will get violent…” (And take you?) But oh, his doubts of women, of himself, of this situation. He gives great weight to the fact that I left Henry as Lanny’s mistress left him, that I am someday leaving for Europe. His love for the other woman, who was married, was great until he told his wife that he wanted to surrender her and the home and marry the mistress. But the mistress would not leave her husband, would not go all the way, so this situation is the worst for him, and he cannot accept it. It paralyzes him. His instinct is right. This is only a love affair, and it will take him again to an impasse: the failure to have the woman all to himself. He knows. For his own sake I should free him. But we are caught together, for he has the power to melt me. Why? I came last night to resist being melted, but then it is his voice, his full and sensual mouth, his emotional green eyes, his rich dark hair, his slender blond hands, his emotionalism melting me, and I’m drunk again. After we talk, quietly it seems, we stand up to leave, but we are unsteady and swaying from desire.

Why can’t he play the role of love and not demand the absolute?

In all mature love, there is the love of and response to certain qualities which run from one human being to another like the theme of a symphony. There is my love for humorous fantasy and playfulness, which come from my father’s whimsy, storytelling, imitations, take-offs, etc., which reappear in Henry, in Gonzalo, in Chinchilito, in Lanny. Love does not end but continues like a tapestry, simply passing from one human being to another. One first perceives the continuity and eternality of love in its current. This flow does not die—what dies is the individual’s love for another. If, in the same restaurant, my blood was stirred by the voice of Henry ten years ago and now by the voice of Lanny, Lanny is struck with the tragedy of the passing of love and I with the wonder of its continuity.

JANUARY 12, 1945

Another afternoon with Lanny here in my apartment. We try to talk as friends. He becomes passionate; he cannot go all the way. This hurts me physically and emotionally, and is followed by a great depression. I feel he is bad for me. I should break with him, yet I can’t because he is suffering and needs me. He falls asleep, and then when he awakens he suddenly attacks communism. I refuse to quarrel or argue. He is a mixture of Mars and Venus. Because our Venus cannot form a conjunction, must our Mars flare up? So there we are. The next day he telephones and I am out. The day after he telephones again. Can we have lunch? I didn’t want to go—I was depressed and ill. But I went, and again it becomes mellow and soft…I feel caught and angry to be caught.

To break Lanny’s spell I telephone Chinchilito at his home, and meanwhile he is telephoning me from outside. We always do this simultaneously after months of not seeing each other. I invite him to choose between Monday and Tuesday (Hugo is going to Cincinnati). He chooses Monday. Tuesday it is Lanny. I love the idea of Chinchilito’s power to heal the insecurity with Lanny, yet the truth is that I have a more tender, warmer feeling for Lanny—Chinchilito has never aroused my tenderness. What fatality there is in my loves. It seems cruel and selfish to abandon Lanny, yet for me it would be best.

In one week: Hy said to me, “I must not stay near you, I want you too much. From the first I knew I would be attracted, too attracted…” Then Elsa de Brun, whom I have known for twenty years: “I knew nothing about the love between women when I was a girl, but oh, Anaïs, the dreams I had about you, always about your nakedness, your beauty. And with Jaeger we talked about you; I was always obsessed with you. I understand it now.” Then Jimmy reports to Martha about having dreamed of me naked, then Thurema’s own desires for me are made clear by Jaeger, then letters from Henry. And meanwhile, where am I? Because I see Lanny as Hugo was—imprisoned, human, lost—I am lying down by his side, a shell-shocked Lanny, suffering from paralysis.

Evening with Chinchilito. He arrives again in a state of erection and places his firm desire in my hand at the door. We lie naked on my own bed, and I abandon myself completely, voluptuously, to a marvelously strong, powerful interplay. He is confident, firm, relaxed and potent. My strength answers his in a long-lasting, deep, complete fusion.

He takes the whole body between his hands; I take his, and within the golden-haired pagan tabernacle, a mélange of fluids, wines and palpitations of a golden mass, a mass of pagan silky sounds, rhythms of joyous blood transfusions. There, there, in the billowing flesh, at the core, a soft and thirsty and vibrating wall of flesh, I took him in, enveloped him, and he lay there, waiting, moving, waiting for the sudden spurt of ecstasy, mutual, confounded, perfectly rhythmic. Oh, the sweetness, the repose, the languor, the laughter. No pain in the world of the body and of the sun. I fell asleep afterwards, with a feeling of richness. Love is not necessary. The body has its own sun life which stems from itself, from beauty, from a life that is apart from the darker mysteries of personalities. Chinchilito returns to other women, no doubt, living naturally, free of identity, free. And I too.

The key word is certitudes.

JANUARY 18, 1945

Lanny comes with a speck of dust in his eyes and a guilty nervousness because he has to leave his wife to have dinner alone in town in order to be with me. So I have to bathe his eyes and lull his guilt…then we sit on the couch, and he tells me: “I want to go and live in Mexico, take a house there by the sea. Leave my job, and write. Will you come? I will go only if you come with me, to stay with me.”

“I can’t. We haven’t the means to go.”

“But I will take care of you and Hugo. We’ll work at farming, all in cooperation. I have the means. Both Hugo and you are creating worthwhile things, you ought to be freed. You have genius. I want to watch your development. I feel I have to live this life with my family. I cannot live two separate lives. I’m not…sophisticated enough. But all of us together, in Mexico…”

So I pursue the elusive, potential Lanny against reality. Always against reality. At home, again he relaxes. He almost falls asleep and asks me to wear my oriental trousers. “You dreamed them. I don’t have them.” Yes, he is dreaming. Then again he feels desire and makes me lie alongside him, and he caresses me. And again he stops. I return always to the imprisoned ones. Is it merely my desire which catches me helping those bound ones, those of less ecstasy, less freedom? Do I feel the latent passion in Lanny as I did in Hugo, who was so quiet and attenuated and bound when I first knew him? There is more than desire here. I look at his full and sensitive mouth with such mixed feelings. He moves me beyond desire. His laughter moves me.

SATURDAY EVENING, JANUARY 20, 1945

The diary has been my canto to love. When I love I cannot write, I can only be with my love. Lanny is in the music I hear. He is in Mount Kisco, behind my green iron gate at Louveciennes, with his wife as I am with Hugo. Lanny tries to reconcile the irreconcilable, to deceive himself and hold back his passion. There is a feminine quality in men (Hugo has it) which arouses me. A timidity.

JANUARY 25, 1945

Yesterday was a day I felt I should break with Lanny because he is not free, and I cannot bear this ambivalence. A day when I rebelled against Gonzalo for not reading my new manuscript (in contrast to Lanny’s interest) so that I actually feel pain at his not being the companion of my work. A day when I felt nervous before the ordeal of posing for Town and Country again, as different women in different costumes (impersonating Hedja, Stella and Lillian). I didn’t sleep, imagining this scene with Lanny. Then in the icy, cold studio, I did pose, successfully in spite of the problem of clothes—shoes given to me by Frances not fitting me, a shirt from Valeska not fitting me, etc.

Lanny telephoned me during the posing, and then later he called for me. We went off together to sit in the Plaza room, which is like a huge baronial room, an awful place. Oh, Lanny. He likes the splendor and the vastness. And there we were in big leather chairs; I was so tired, so tired by the posing, and languid. We drank together, talked. His eyes blurred, dissolved. He drank, and I hardly, but the dissolution always takes place at the same moment. There is a blood rhythm. He touches me, always when I feel he must, when I crave it. He took my hand. I leaned over. When I leaned back, relaxing, he said, “I don’t know if it is because you are tired, but you’re lovelier than I have ever seen you.” Amazing how two people in the Plaza bar room can express such a multitude of moods and gestures.

When the talk got too deep I refused to go further. I said that I knew his demon, that it was like mine, but I would not say at four in the afternoon, at the Plaza, that it was a sensual demon. “No,” I said, “If they would put out the chandelier, and then the white mural bulbs, and then the red lamps, I might tell you.” So he called the waiter and tells him what I’d said!

How he plays, how light he has become, such gayety. He wanted to go dancing, but he had to catch a train—because of the cold his family may need heat. We walked to the studio. He took me to the elevator. He left me. He came back to kiss me fervently over the eyelids.

JANUARY 28, 1945

Days of feverish inspiration, such a flood of spontaneous and disordered writing that at one moment I took my head in my hands and believed I was going insane. An onrush of associations, of disconnected episodes, utter freedom. What happens is that I reach such a deep level where I touch the cosmic consciousness of woman, and I lose my character as a separate, identifiable personage. They all flow into one another, boundaries are lost, and in the end I am swallowed by the infinite ocean of my own unconscious. So I lose my grip on reality, my construction.

But today I emerge with thirty-eight pages on the snow woman, a beautifully told myth of the virgin woman.

FEBRUARY 3, 1945

Lanny again. We met at Gotham and then had lunch at the restaurant, at the table where we first met. I said: “I am proud of your poems. I want you to bloom. You reveal in them a rich unconscious.”

I wrote him a fan letter, unsigned. He will see Martha. Will she unite us, or dissolve our illusion because of the pain involved? I don’t know. I have more than desire. I feel a terrible, devastating tenderness, which is worse than passion, when he shows me a missing button on his shirt or a torn glove. His slenderness moves me, his quietness too, the sensibility of his mouth. I write to be nearer to him, to re-taste my happiness with him. My new humor seems somehow to have been born with him. I feel an irrepressible youth with him, my own youth, so free, as it never was.

The beauty of this moment is in my freedom. My abundance of love is able to live itself out, to keep Hugo in a state of romance (the secret of the duration of his romantic love), to keep Gonzalo in a state of romance, to make each hour, each evening, each moment, each love yield to this inexhaustible wealth I feel—to disperse and dispense tenderness, attentiveness, coquetry, desire, feeling.

FEBRUARY 7, 1945

Talk with Martha. She tells me there is no masochism in my relation to Lanny, first because he is different, not egocentric or narcissist as Henry and Gonzalo are, second because I have been able to keep my sexual freedom (Edward Graeffe), and third because of the way I handle it, with airiness, no obsession, no fixation, etc., no neurotic reaction. I am not hurt, only aware of his pain and difficulties. So this morning I let myself express my feelings for him in a note: “You are in the music I hear, you are all around and within me. You give me the fever that is life, and the quietness that is creation. I feel I worked with your quietness, for you have a surer rhythm, against my great disorder and recklessness. Yet I have the freedom, a full, full freedom. And you will have it too. What there is between us is so deep and too strong to be broken by an obstacle…”

After being separated since Friday because he was ill, he rushed down this morning at eleven o’clock and laid a poem on my knees, and I read it while he read my note. His poem was a poem of death.

He was deeply moved by the note. He said: “It makes me happy. It’s wonderful. But I give you this death in me while you give me life and the sun.” Then he read the new pages in my book describing Henry’s insouciance, and he was elated. “I love the freedom of this man.” He likes my waking writing better than my dream writing. He responds to my directness. His duality—he passes from warmth to coldness. He is at times remote. Today he did not caress me. I don’t know if my body can bear this, especially when I am constantly tempted.

The mystery of freedom. To face the same experience again with a different attitude. In Lanny, it is Hugo who comes again to court me and then to be afraid, to be impulsive and impotent, to be full of desire and full of fear. In Lanny, Eduardo has come again in all his states of death and paralysis. In Lanny comes John Erskine asking me to undress, throwing himself upon me and then not able to take me. In Lanny comes the month of ecstasy with Gonzalo when he could not take me either. In Lanny comes my difficulty with the feminine man who defends himself with all the feminine man’s virginity and fear. But I am not the same. With Hugo I wept and thought that he did not love me. With John I wept and became obsessed with the failure. With Eduardo I was frustrated, with Gonzalo too. With Lanny, I suffer physically to have to withdraw my desire, but I am not defeated or hurt or obsessed. I am free of tragedy. I am free. That means my desire can go elsewhere, anywhere. I am not enslaved. I am free. Lanny’s poem touched me: “Alone among idolatries, World without compassion, World without passion, I must move alone, in saintly seriousness.”

It is the death I felt after John Erskine. But I will not die with him. I will give him life without hurting myself.

To be free means to go on living, not to die under a tragic impasse or a blow. To be free means to go on living, making love, loving even when faced by an obstacle, or pain, or a collision, or a tragic loss. When I first faced pain I was shattered. When I first met failure, defeat, denial, loss, death, I died. Not today. I believe in my power, in my magic, and I do not die. I survive, I love, live, continue. Lanny is in me, but his death does not kill me. He cannot kill my body or my feelings by denial. They are stronger. To be free means to be stronger than your jail. It means to live in the present.

After ten years I see my father altogether differently. At first I saw his Don Juanism as his crime against me, and I the victim of it, and I hated it. But today it is clear that what I thought I hated I actually loved and wanted to be. Ten years later I see his dancing faithless figure in the quest of love not as the enemy, but as myself. I have become him. There is a youthful man in me who has desperately courted the feminine in men. My soul was an effeminate young man. My virility has donned my father’s suit (it fits me well, there is no doubt about it, like the suits of Eduardo’s young men which fit me perfectly in Paris), and now I am him. It is possible that instead of courting the feminine in men I might be happier courting the women who yield to me, the women in love with me. What has appeared in my last book is a woman who loves all women. I was convinced that Don Juan was desire, not love. And I am love.

Gonzalo’s only comment on my book was a criticism of its erotic element and obsession with sex. He gave me the title for it from one of the phrases in it, “This Hunger…this hunger became love.”

Such a shock last night. Going with Gonzalo to MacDougal Street and finding it rented to another person, being painted, empty and dirty, because I could not pay the rent for three months. Another rincon lost, after three years of love, desire and work. A shock. The fear of change.

Lanny, when I say I will go away, it means I have lost my courage. Today I lost my courage. You have aroused in me a dream of complete love, and I cannot bear to kill it. You do not suffer this because you are in mourning. You are in a state of death. This that I suffer you do not suffer. I suffer from being fully alive, aware and awake. You have lost your faith in love. I have more to kill, more to kill. You can renounce more easily at this moment. You have withdrawn. I am not withdrawn, and I cannot renounce because I don’t know how. I feel you have been able to kill your feelings for me, because the other love experience killed you. Oh, Lanny, I cannot bear it. There is too much to kill. Do you want me to do this, to die with you because you cannot live with me? I have been living with you. You are not living with me. You are where your poems told me you are. What an exchange that was, your poem on death and my note to you! That to me was like the final stab. Final. It is final, final, final. My courage was because I did not believe it final. Say the word that it is not final.

Lanny, you killed me with a poem, with your most beautiful poem, one I love so much I wanted to set it by hand, print it by hand. I wasn’t thinking of myself then, but of you, and then I didn’t want to feel what it meant for me. I will not see you tomorrow. I cannot see you, Lanny. I answered you cruelly at the restaurant when you spoke of Tristan and Iseult, because that was a love that ended in death.

FEBRUARY 17, 1945

I touched the bottom of suffering, and then I rebelled, violently, and definitely. I will not submit to this. So when Lanny came yesterday with his negative evasiveness, his hesitations, ambivalence, postponements, fear of conflict, I brought it all out in the open. I said, “I cannot see you anymore.” I let him read what I wrote in the diary because I was so hurt and so bewildered that I could not speak. In his attitude I read the final image of his ambivalence and guilt, and I responded with determination. He wants this game with his secret desires; he wants a friendship without sex, but I don’t. I felt the masochism of it. In place of sexuality he thrusts out jealousy, the jealousy of impotence, and destruction. He destroyed my spring mood; he destroyed so much in a feminine and indirect way. He criticizes Jean Varda because Henry’s article on him appeared next to my story of Jean Cateret in Circle Magazine. Something cold and destructive emanates from him, the reflection of his death. And I rebelled. I let my nature rebel. It came so swiftly, like nature’s storms. I made the break, tore him out of my being. The pain was deep and terrible. I sent him away. When he left, bewildered, inadequate, I was shaking and trembling. With an act, I had freed myself of pain by tearing out the injured flesh. But oh, the pain, the violent pain.

When I called Frances, I had such a moment of despair it was like dying. She came and tried to help me. When she left and I tried to sleep, I sobbed again. Such a full, open pain. Slept fitfully. Awakened dead. Heart dead. Weak. Rushed out. Could not bear my house. Wept in the street.

Talked with Edmund Wilson at lunch. I felt his distress and received his confession. My suffering has created an understanding which even a stranger like Wilson senses and turns to. He is lonely and lost. I accompanied him to buy his uniform (he is going to France as a war correspondent), his sleeping bag. We walked, talked about his suffering with his wife Mary McCarthy. Suffering opens all the doors to the depths. As I came home I was consoled by this that I have given. I am walking and weeping but able to give. I rebelled against pain. Will I suffer from this as much as from the loss of Albert? I want to be delivered from these men! What irony. The women are the ones whose temperaments I love and make me happy.

And women suffer from the passivity, the taking, the lack of power of men. Yet the women…we love each other, but we know it is not sexual.

Midnight. Gonzalo came, studied the preface I wrote Sunday, admired it. We were close, tender. He consoled me, unknowingly. He took me, kissed me passionately, fell asleep. I lay quiet, and I began to weep. I called out to Gonzalo. He took my wet face against his and murmured, “What is it?” I said, “I feel oppressed by my work, all I have to do. I cannot do it alone. A woman cannot do all this alone.” The feeling was mixed with the pain of losing Lanny, as if my need of him outside of love had to do with the writing. I lost a companion in writing. I need the writer at my side. I need love. I need love so abnormally that it all seems natural to me, being close to Hugo the night before he left, then to Chinchilito, then to Frances, then to Lanny, then to Gonzalo, all the one and same love.

FEBRUARY 18, 1945

There is virility in suffering. Today I went with Hugo down to the sea. I saw the sea sparkling, rolling, white-foamed in the winter, walked for an hour. Hugo talked about Mexico in July. The astrology magazine promises me romance then. I thought of Chinchilito, I thought of how free I am and that I can enjoy other men. I felt the pain, yes, but I felt strength against it too. There are terrible moments, but I haven’t wept today. Lanny clung to me Friday saying, “We won’t lose this understanding that is between us?” He stood so near. But I do not want his friendship. I want no pain. In his moments of freedom how he came to me, but his fear was greater, his guilt, his masochism. I saw a wild light of jealousy, a lightning of frenzied, denied jealousy when he saw my photographs taken in Provincetown, where I lay at the edge of the sea. “Like a Hollywood star, the half-nakedness, a gayety.” He asked, “You won’t go away? You won’t go back to a devastated Europe?” And then the protective, chivalrous, terrible goodness which moves me so deeply: a concern over my pain. “You won’t be alone tonight? You won’t stay alone? When is Hugo coming back?”

He haunts me. His sensitiveness and unconscious cruelty, his acting and his ambivalence, like a dance by a cripple, dancing awhile and then falling. But I feel erect in my suffering. I feel strength. I won’t die or break.

Yesterday I reached the depths. Lanny told Gonzalo he would come to the press, and I could not face this—at the smallest reference to him I begin to weep. I had to call him and ask him not to come. I had to hear his voice, and melt, and hear him say: “I must see you. We must have an understanding. I wrote you an answer to your letter, but I won’t send it. Let’s get together today.”

“No, no,” I said.

“But why?”

I could not say because I am too hurt. I cannot bear it. I hated his Anglo-Saxon control, his Anglo-Saxon self-deceptions, his Puritanism and sexual rigidity. Yet I had not used the word “final.”

I have never cut away or rebelled against pain so sharply or clearly. As I heard him react with impatience, “But we must talk this over. I want to know the reason,” I was glad. I thought: let him suffer. He has not felt the loss yet. He has so much protection. The whole structure of American life protects him from such absolute feelings of the pain I experienced, his false courage, his objectivity, his home, wife, children, the drinking, his friends, the skiing.

I feel my old demon came to tempt me in its most seductive form: will you suffer again, Anaïs, at the hands of a wife, at the hands of a mistress, at the hands of man’s passivity, fears, guilt, indecision? Will you suffer again because the man is in the hands of a stronger woman, a wife and her rights, an inhuman mistress, and will you be the savior at the cost of your life, every step of his freedom paid with your blood, will you be the battlefield, the confessional, the absolver, the priestess, the friend, the muse, the mother, the guide? No, not again. He is not the man for me. I know I am capable of these strong illusions. I create them, and my body incarnates them, and then it sweeps me into tragedy. No. No. If I can overcome this temptation I will be stronger. If I succumb I will be the eternal martyr. No. Anaïs is free. I will be free of pain, of regression. Yet today in the taxi, I saw him as vividly as I saw him the first time, in bondage, slender and neat in his business suit, with his briefcase, on a trip, lonely, his sensitiveness encased in this conventional uniform, and I felt the stoop in his shoulders and back. I felt it so violently in my own body that it was a physical pain, a shock, a terrible identification with him, a bond—how can I ever disentangle myself from him?

I have no defenses. He has been part of my work too. I cannot write. This illusion sustained me. I can’t bear the bleakness. The strength of my rebellion and the overpowering tenderness, the compassion I feel. All my emotions are rushing out to him, and all my strength is saying: he is not good for you; he is bad for you; he will kill you. The weaker ones kill the stronger ones. What makes me love so violently when others love so weakly and shallowly? Yesterday I wept desperately when I came home. Today less. May this be my last ordeal as I cannot bear any more.

FEBRUARY 21, 1945

This morning I awakened and tried to write. I wrote the barbaric, primitive raping of the snow woman. I am being possessed by a cannibal, of the Winter Paris edition, but strengthened and amplified. I put my strength into the writing. Then I got violently angry at the window I couldn’t open and started to bang on it with my fists to break it open, such violence I have never expressed, banging until Hugo stopped me, and I threw the flowers on the floor, those Pablo sent me for my birthday. Suddenly I felt: I have overcome the weakness in myself. I have overcome Lanny and my own weakness. I felt a new power, born of the violent rejection of pain. I feel my strength at last. I do not need Henry or any man to write my book. Yesterday I wanted Lanny to lead me by the hand towards realism. I have a strength made out of deep suffering. I feel my violence which I never lived except through Henry and Gonzalo, my own pure violence and indestructibility. Lanny was the last image of my bondage and submission. I feel I am the woman who is being unveiled, who is being liberated. I gave myself to Hugo with a sensual frenzy and no devouring regrets or yearning, for my own pleasure. My violence was my strength which I denied, oppressed, submerged. I was the woman in bondage to man’s weakness, submitting to pain. And life gives you what you submit to, accept. I am unashamed of my strength.

MARCH 2, 1945

Something persisted and survived the break with Lanny. Had I succeeded in overcoming what had to be overcome, but, as usual, without killing totally, saving the good? Yesterday I obeyed the impulse to write him a note, “I will be your friend.” Then I telephoned him: “You can come and talk, anytime. Tomorrow.”

“No, today,” he said, “I’ll come at three.”

His first day back, he left his work. I said: “I am not sure that this can be done. It is a lesser thing in place of a bigger one.”

“This is the bigger one,” said Lanny. “I am not free. I know it. It makes me sad.”

“I have never lived in a temperate, neutral zone. I dread the coldness after the warmth.”

“But it is just the opposite with me. It is with you I express warmth and with the sexual comes a conflict which leaves me cold. You spoke of weeping for both of us. Do you know—after the break with you, I wept, I wept for the first time, completely.”

“Then my weeping was good, if you wept too. It was worth it.”

Now that he no longer feared me, the warmth came back, the immense tenderness. I let myself feel this tenderness, confining it just before it overflowed into desire. If this time I can relinquish desire for the Son I am saved. Already I have less desire than before because he is too soft, too yielding. Already I feel the woman in him, but how he arouses my tenderness. He has a tremendous innocence. I realize that because of his innocence, I felt the innocence of my youth towards him too, and therefore I aroused his romanticism, his worship and his fear of his instincts. I couldn’t abandon him altogether.

The sun came into the studio. He dreams of a woman to have peace with. I dream of fever.

One learns not to die. One learns to suffer without dying. I suffered deeply, body and soul, but I did not die. Two weeks later I am dancing, singing, writing and loving. A full life is like a powerful current that can take the suffering but continues to flow. I was amazed to be able to see the sun on the sea, to feel the spring, to renew my love affair with the world.