THE TRANSPARENT CHILD

He is my son, my lover

NEW YORK, MARCH 8, 1945

William Pinckard, who wrote me from Yale after reading Under a Glass Bell, is seventeen. He was born in Manila to American parents, spent four years there, four years in China, then came to America and its loneliness. He is incredibly slender, with white hands more feminine than mine. There is extraordinary beauty and magnetism in his eyes, in their length. There are curiously pure blue shadows over them when he looks down, a celestial blue. He destroyed his diary, and his adolescence with it, when he came home from college. He brought me a story he wrote, his watercolors, and left them with me (to be blessed?), as Pablo leaves his work, as Lanny left his poems. I am rich indeed with young men’s dreams and worship. If they were not Anglo-Saxon, but French, they would be my lovers and I could be initiating them to life as well as to art, but they are the jeunes filles en fleurs of America’s future, the sexless future artists. Poor America. I am the celestial Madame, and this world will castrate me unless I find a MAN for myself soon. But the marvelous mood I’m in, the pleasure, confidence, faith. I am dancing, practicing the castanets.

MARCH 10, 1945

Last night: Pablo, Eduardo, Bill, Hugo. Bill knows hypnotism, and Pablo wanted to be hypnotized. For half an hour, Bill talked Pablo into a sleep. Pablo obeyed all Bill’s orders; he could not hear our voices, only Bill’s. He could not see latecomers because Bill told him he would only see those who were in the room when he fell asleep. He was told that he was two years old, and he said in Spanish, “Agua.” At three years old he said, “Nanny.” At four he sang a little song in an unknown language. At five he broke a vase and stood in the corner for punishment. Bill gave him a cigarette, which he smoked awkwardly, and at the taste of it he made a wry face and coughed and choked. Later, asked about his home, Panama, he said, “I want to lie on the sand.”

“Do you want to paint or write?”

“No. I want to lie in the sand.”

“Now you are in New York,” said Bill. “What do you want to do?”

“Write and paint.”

We were all half-anxious, half-afraid, half-laughing. Bill, smiling and dominant, flaunted his power. The beauty of his face was deeply moving, the dark blue, intense, shadowed eyes, the paleness of the face, the fine, lean line of the cheekbone, elongated, then indented at the chin, the full-balanced, sensual mouth, the boy’s tousled hair. I said to Eduardo: “He is my mystical son. More than Pablo or Lanny.” And Eduardo told me, “He is ruled by Neptune.”

Oh god, confessor, analyst, help me not to desire my sons, not to want to be the mistress of my sons. Help me to keep my desire away from the sons of my soul. But how whole I am. Where my soul goes, my body goes. Bill has helped me to free myself of Lanny, because he is mystically and romantically freer, nearer. The spell is broken.

MARCH 17, 1945

Bill and I sat in Washington Square, talking over his wanting to break with his family, sweetly, warmly. We went to the press, where Bill wants to help me.

Blessed am I at this moment with loves that never turn into pain. This mood, this peace, relaxation, freedom and joy, I have never known but intermittently. There is joy at giving life to Bill, at opening up my home, at the youth which surrounds me. I look younger than I did at thirty. I dance. I sing. I enjoy Pablo, his activities and motions. Bill. I love Bill. He looked tired after the hypnosis, as if he had made love.

“Can you make someone fall in love with you?” I asked him.

“That would be a poor kind of love,” he answered.

If only I do not fall into desire. He moves me so.

Pablo is my Spanish child, natural, physical, and alive. Bill is my mythical one. Everything is marvelous, a summer day, the beat of a factory nearby, the sun on the meager courtyard and the anemic trees, the sparrows, the Debussy records. Last night as Bill left, I held his hand in my two. He responded.

MARCH 19, 1945

Bill said, “If I had a place to go to, I would leave home.” I said, “Do nothing if you don’t feel emotionally ready.” (He only has two months before he goes into the navy, and he wants to live freely.) But what formed and crystallized his maturity was not only reading my books, seeing me, but sharing our life, the spontaneity and aliveness of Pablo, the vitality of Josephine, the atmosphere of my house, my friends.

Saturday evening I had a party, a warm, lively, joyous evening with Josephine singing and drumming, making us all sing and drum and dance. At the end Bill hypnotized Pablo and Marshall (another beautiful boy), and it turned into great humor and high fantasy, mixed with a little terror (Bill ordered Pablo not to see Hugo after he awakened, so he could not see Hugo for the rest of the evening, but he could see his shadow on the door as he left). During the hypnosis I left the studio and went into the kitchen. I have to be alone at times for one moment when I am in a crowd. My sense of solitude overtakes me at moments, in the warmest, fullest moments. Bill sent for me: I had to be there. Doing hypnosis gives him a sense of power. Such purity and innocence he has.

How difficult it is to be in the presence of Bill’s great beauty, his intense blue eyes, his fair skin, his full and languid mouth. When he leaves, I always take his delicate, soft-skinned, feminine hands in mine, and he yields them up with a vibration, as if he placed his being in the shelter of my warmth.

Yesterday, Sunday, was the critical day for him. His father was going to make him work in his business downtown Monday morning. Bill said he was first going to Yale to collect his belongings and to leave home, not intending to return. I told him, “Your life is beginning.”

He appeared at my place with the valise, and our dream began. Bill eats with us, shares our evenings, books and music. Frances and Tom gave him a little room. I gave a party with Josephine Premice and her rhythms, Luise and her fantasies, an atmosphere of gayety and invention and freedom. I think of my nearness to Bill, the mystical and mysterious understanding, his great beauty, his fear of death, his understanding of my work, his drawings of me, in which he really sees me.

When the studio is full of people, Bill and I look at each other across the room with understanding. In his face I see the mysteries of the orient, the glow of the moon, the power of insight. At seventeen he has intuition about people. Nothing of his “class,” his sheltered life, clings to him. He is the adventurer in spirit in spite of his sensitiveness. He has spiritual courage. He reads everything, he absorbs, he evaluates, he shares. His shyness is physical—his body alone is slightly bound.

MARCH 26, 1945

Another party. When I am near Bill I am happy and feel the tremendous glow of the dream. I also feel a great fear of pain and collision. I love his youthful, delicate, flawless skin and his magician’s eyes—what are these shadows on his luminous face, those blue-violet shadows? I love his hair falling over his forehead like a boy’s. I love his bird profile and his noble, full face, long, narrow and oval, with a full, generous mouth, the perfect and strong teeth. There is strength in him, in the deepest layers of his being. He is deep right through his youth, beyond his experience.

What does he feel? When I sat near him at the party, I felt as if we were gravitating towards each other, melting into each other. After the party, I felt great sadness—I wish he were older. “By magic, make yourself twenty-seven years old for a while,” I said. (That I may know you as a lover.) I fell asleep to the tragedy of time, of my ever-haunting dream of uniting with what my soul loves. Last night we went to dinner, arm in arm. Friday we went to a cocktail at Elsa de Brun’s, where Lanny went too. I introduced Pablo and Bill to Lanny, who was constantly uttering disillusioned phrases, making me happy that I was free of him. Bill smiles. How easily he took me away altogether from Lanny—but who will take me away from Bill, away from the love for which my body would be sacrificed, for there is no place for it? When he finds the woman who is his age, I will have to leave him. Bill has great strength, but not enough to be my lover.

I dreamed that Josephine, with her sexual aggressiveness, took both Pablo and Bill away from me. About Pablo I didn’t mind, but Bill… Monday night when I left at nine o’clock to meet Gonzalo, Bill was uneasy. “Where are you going?” I returned at eleven. Because of Bill, I began to suffer from Josephine’s caressing of all of them, but he did not respond to her endearments. Yesterday Josephine telephoned to take them out when I had to go to the press. It was such an effort to yield up Bill. I wept because I must surrender him…he cannot be mine. Surrender. I went to the press, returned at five-thirty, and Bill was there. He had not gone with Josephine and Pablo. He had called the press. He was looking at my photographs, and he said, “I wanted you here.” Such an élan towards each other. I made tea, and we sat on the couch. We lay back on the cushions, so near to each other, talking. He asked me, his face close to mine, “What did you say last night about me…who was nearest to you?”

“You were.”

We touched hands. I touched his hair and he caressed mine. It was like a trance in which we kissed violently, violently, and his kiss was a man’s. Bill. Hugo was on his way home, and I had to break away. I did not dare be happy because I have such a fear of pain. I was afraid of Bill’s reaction, which was one of sadness, not ecstasy. Was it guilt? I could not tell. This morning he was sad, not knowing why. Is it all lost? Too great a burden for his youth? I wait, all day. What does he feel? I cannot tell.

That afternoon, when I returned home from the press, I found Pablo asleep on one couch and Bill awake on the other. I sat on Bill’s side and said, “I will put you to sleep,” and stroked his hair. He lay so quiet I thought he was asleep, but then he opened his eyes.

“You didn’t fall asleep, Bill.”

“I can’t with you so near,” he said. I kissed his hair, then his temples, and it was he who took my mouth in his beautiful, wide, generous lips, so full and red. We kissed deeply. He kissed me as in possession, fully, strongly. When Pablo awakened, we separated. It was the day before this that Pablo was taking a sun bath on the roof, and Bill again kissed me. We stood for a moment together, kissing wildly, and I pressed my whole body against his, swayed against him. I felt his sex rigid against me and felt such joy at his desire and maleness. But how afraid I was of his fears, of his retractions. How I held my intensity in check, amazed that from such frailness and youth desire could emerge, his body slenderer than mine, with his woman’s skin, his hands more delicate than mine.

Then yesterday, Easter Sunday, Pablo and Hugo were away. I wore my white kimono. Bill came. Would he be afraid?—no, he lay on the couch. We played at my putting him to sleep, and when I kissed him tenderly, he answered sensually. His whole face was luminous and mystical, but his mouth is so sensual. I lay at his side. He kissed me profoundly. And again I felt his innocence, the passive pause before the unknown.

I whispered, “Am I your first love, Bill?”

“Oui,” he answered softly. “Take your clothes off.”

I opened my kimono and took off my panties. He lay over me, his desire erect. He penetrated me. Then he lay still. I moved slightly, rhythmically. He lay inside of me, and after a while his strength withered. But he continued to lie over me, and I knew it was only the beginning, that he would be strong. When we lay quiet and I had closed my kimono, I said, “I will go and dress.” He said: “No, don’t dress. Stay this way.” And he unbuttoned my kimono, and with his soft, beautiful, golden hands, he caressed my breasts, my hips, my belly, and then my sex. His desire rose and he entered me again. How sweet and tender, how warm it was. Making man, creating man, giving birth to man. The child becoming man in the mother’s womb. His childlike abandon, his newborn strength.

After our first kiss, he dreamt that his father and mother came to take him back and that he rebelled and refused to return with them, insulted his mother.

I wanted so much to be his first love. I act like a very young mother, not overwhelming. I hold my ecstasy, my desire, within the boundaries of his youth. Such a mysterious act has taken place, a love between Bill’s unconscious, not yet born—the future Bill—and me. The present Bill is still a child, still blind (“How frightened I was the first time I came to see you”), but the deeper Bill obeys his mystical maturity. It is the unconscious Bill who shows us his extraordinarily beautiful face, the mystical knowingness. I saw the sensual Bill in his drawings and in his mouth. Danger. I took the risk of losing him. I wanted to be the initiator. He is my son, my lover, and his life will begin with wonder instead of poverty. It is as it should be, the initiation into creation and life together. May the love be sweet and painless. I am the giver of life. How I loved his delicate body, the gold down of his hair, his long, dark eyelashes, his hand over my breast.

Last night I had to go to see the Gendels. Hugo said he preferred to go to the movies. Bill and Pablo said they would go with me, but at the last moment Bill said he would stay and write. Hugo and Pablo left. Bill made me lie alongside of him. He put the radio on. We fell into caresses and an orgy of kisses, for a long, long time. Shyly, his hands caressed me, shyly but knowingly. He loves to caress my sex. I cannot abandon myself to the pleasure because I feel he is not ready for the storm of the climax. Silently, entranced, we kissed and caressed. The sweetness is overwhelming. The child and the man. A child who enters your being by softness, and a newborn man who asserts himself when he says, “I want you!” We took our clothes off at the end, and lay body to body, his sex erect, and he spilled his seed too soon, against me, not inside of me, so that I felt the warm rain over me. But the sweetness, the sweetness. What strange joys, joys of birth, joys of erotic motherhood, his angoisse when I go out. When I went to the Gendels at eleven so that Hugo would know I had been there, Bill went to Frances’s and tried to telephone me so that I would leave. I had mentioned the Gendels having invited a man who wanted to meet me. Bill asked me over the telephone when I got home, “What did the man do?” His insecurity, his mind, and Hugo’s suffering because, “Bill will grow up, return in a uniform, a man, and you will love him.”

I have no time for Lanny, who is courting me again, who wants to reawaken my love. I have put my love in Bill’s hands with trust in his hidden, unborn unconscious self whom he does not yet know. His love for me is unconscious, blind. In consciousness, he is a child, confused, inarticulate, reserved, separated. I go to Gonzalo and fulfill the unfinished sensual act, carrying in my body the warm caresses of Bill. I have the child inside me: Anaïs, the undying adolescent who persists in living out this relationship with another child. Bill looks at times like a young Rimbaud.

Hugo is suffering, and together we have discovered that all through the past his “deadness” was a secret, mute jealousy. I found the words to console him, but I cannot stem the flow of love. I drift, float, cannot work or write. I live like a flower now. I cannot hold back, direct, guide, or stop this flow of life. Hugo loves me for it and suffers from it. I love his concentration on me, but it is a burden. I carry this love with Bill like a precious seed of youth and creation. It is a sweet, sweet lover lying upon my breast.

Yesterday I had to meet Lanny for a cocktail at six and the others at seven for dinner and a play. I felt Bill’s uneasiness. When we all met for dinner, he was depressed. We came back to my place because the Lorca play was so badly acted we could not stay. Lanny danced with me. Pablo danced with me. Bill had taken a cardboard sign that reads “Reserved” from the theater and placed it on my couch-bed (he always waits in my corner) and was silent. Lanny left early. Pablo began to talk to me about his passionate love affair at fifteen with a woman of thirty. Suddenly Bill got up and, barely saying good-bye, left. I rushed to him. At the door he was trembling. I begged him to tell me why he was leaving. He kissed my hand and left.

A while later, I went to Frances’s and knocked on Bill’s door. We sat on his bed. He did not know the cause of his sadness, or at least if he did, he would not admit it. I feared guilt and withdrawal, but I realized it was jealousy after he became happy when I showed my love and lay at his side, lulling him. He kissed me deliriously. He embraced my whole body. He was desirous and passionate, but it was midnight and Hugo was waiting for me. He knew I had left to talk to Bill, and I could not stay. But Bill held me, kissed me, clung to me, would not let me leave. For the first time I allowed myself to feel the joy and passion his love gives me, and for the first time I felt sure of his love, and I felt the ecstasy. We clung and kissed. When I finally got up to powder and comb my hair, he stood behind me. I turned. We stood kissing with complete abandon, desire against desire, his sex against mine, until we were dizzy.

Frances walked back with me. She told me how Bill spent hours looking at my photograph, how restless he is when away from me, how lost he is in his dreams, how clearly in love he is. How beautiful this love is. I am living my life over again, the life that was battered at every turn. This is my second life. I begin again, but not as before, in tragedy and fear. I am Bill’s age, before Hugo came to hurt and shock me with his fear and his flight from me. I am seventeen again as I was when I could not touch Eduardo. And now I have a lover who has the face of a mystic and a fiery body. I am blessed in this second life with the joys I did not have, the power I did not have, the deeper freedom I did not have. By my suffering, I have earned this second life. In this life, at this moment, there is no Eduardo and no Hugo—only Bill.

At Bill’s first withdrawal I felt deep anguish, fearing his guilt. One Sunday morning I went to his room to awaken him. We lay naked together and he spilled his seed over my body, too soon, before entering me. His silence, his heart beating, and his hands cold, his childish, delicate, knowing hands. The next day he was moody. He teased me, contradicted me, was perverse and difficult. When Josephine brought me closed tulips and I opened them gently to make them seem like esoteric flowers, he reacted strongly against me. I felt all is lost. He feels he is the flower that was opened too soon, too swiftly. We talked, and I was truthful. He said, “I am full of resentments,” but he did not know why. And I, fearing his guilt, misinterpreted it all—Frances had said the opening of the flowers was his opening me, his guilt for opening me, that the young believe the sexual act is an act of cruelty. In the maze of his childish unknowing and confusion I tread so delicately.

“Is it that you cannot bear the burden of becoming a man?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to give me up?”

“No, I want you.”

“I’ll wait now, until you come to me.”

He let me leave, kissed me chastely. I went out and wept in the street because I fear my destiny and its fatalities. I thought him lost. I felt the loss of his sensual mouth, the mouth I have loved most of all, the loss of his paleness, his delicate hands, his voice, his brilliant smile, his beauty, his boy’s body. I came home to be consoled by Pablo’s warmth. I went to Frances, who talked about my “loving the man to be,” never living in the present, and suffering from what the present is until the dream is fulfilled.

With pleasure, I hurt Lanny, retaliated against his weakness and discarded him. “I love Bill and I cannot love you.” Then Bill sat by my side and we talked. I began to sense a deep, deep jealousy which was the basis for the moods, the flight, the resentments. For him it was “only a cloud.” He retained his mystery. He is the closed flower, giving but a petal at a time, his mouth above all. We kissed, kissed, kissed, and the delirium returned. We kissed, body against body, his sex erect against mine, his mouth voracious, and the joy returned, life returned.

Josephine came. We danced. Bill, who can dance, now danced with me. Pablo got tired of Josephine’s silliness. So our little feasts of magic continue. Bill cut a silver bird out of foil and hung it on a thread from the ceiling. It turns at every breath of air, and he painted it with phosphorescent paint, as well as the tapestry, the lighthouse, the benches, so when we turn out the lights the place glows. Magic. Duits comes. He and Bill invent a duel of fluid forms with a tiny tape measure, which looks as if they were dueling with lightning. The atmosphere is elusive, gay and free, impossible to describe except as magical. When people come, Bill pastes a little piece of mirror between my eyes. He pastes silver paper over my toenails. He paints my legs with gold. He bites my fingers. He cuts copper and tin foil to make earrings. Pablo makes a clay figure, writes twenty pages of his experiences. The music pours out. We dance. My love for Gonzalo is dying.

There is no love on earth for me without anguish, no love without fears and doubts. Bill is naturally passive like a child, and I need an active love. I suffer because my ecstasy is restrained by the measure of what he can answer and bear. It is not the love for me. I know it. But it gives me mystical and selfless joys—to create him, to free him, to see him bursting from his shell, to see him laugh and be natural. I cannot understand how my new life could lead me to this, to a greater, more selfless love, to the child. Yet I feel a lightness too, a youthfulness, a beginning, without knowing the meaning. Frances says I love the future Bill, the older Bill with that mystical, sensual light in his face. He will travel. He will be a great lover. He will pursue mirages, as I did. This vision illumines my love, and this love takes place in the future. That is why no one understands it, not even Bill himself. It is a lonely love, one he will know later.

APRIL 15, 1945

The new life is different: what I fear does not come to pass. The birth of man in my arms gives me such joy. Bill has become a passionate lover. We begin to talk, but he wants caresses, kisses, bites. We lie naked in his little bed. He takes me. I whisper: “Love is like a dance. Move inside of me.” Like a shy new dance, the beginning of love, the rhythms of love, move, move, the dance of lovemaking, the marvelous young dance of love. When I think he is exhausted and asleep, he continues to kiss me, to lie over me, and we fall into a trance, half asleep, and again he becomes warm and full of desire, and he takes me again, rhythmically, and his warm blood flows into me.

His awakening power fills me with ecstasy, such ecstasy. And afterwards, no sadness, but lightness and strength. He recites French poetry. He runs up the five flights to my apartment, and makes me run. Joy. I am more romantic than my lover. He has a certain sardonic humor, like Henry’s, a sense of caricature, a criticalness in general, which is alien to me. But sensually and mystically we are alike. He brings me back to the depths with his seriousness. He loves Bach and Modigliani’s painting. My happiness this afternoon was that of giving birth to the man, and to my own second adolescence, my own early faith before the great pains shattered me. I am whole again.

APRIL 17, 1945

I can hardly believe in my happiness with Bill, whose passion mounts day by day, who expresses it, who is impulsive, who, when we are about to go out, begins to kiss me and does so for an hour until we have to lock the doors and windows and get under the covers naked, who becomes more active, firm and potent, not only once but a second time, bathing in desire, in endless kissing and caresses, and soon he will be strong enough for me to have pleasure. And his gayety afterwards, his teasing, or standing on his head, his gayety as we go down the stairs arm in arm, or when I run up the five flights I could barely climb before.

To see Bill’s strength being born! Such a joy! Love is my heaven and my hell, my all, my climate, my life.

APRIL 20, 1945

Just after our hour of passion the other day, Edward Graeffe telephoned. Bill was lying by my side. He encircled me with his arms, and his hand teasingly pushed against my stomach to stop my voice from answering. He placed his small, delicate ear against mine near the phone: he listened. And after a while he said, “Who was that?” The memory of his hand on me has not left me since. I feel the imprint of it. It was the sign of his possession of me, the sign of his appropriation, of the magic stamp, for I felt his hand on me like that of a child, abandoned, trusting, helpless, and yet also like that of the lover, holding and encircling. At that moment I became his prisoner, and I had no desire to see Edward, as I have no desire to see Lanny. Bill, who, with his wild blond hair, his drugged face, his white silk scarf, his aristocratic carriage, his constant oscillations between childhood and manhood, learning engraving in one lesson from Hugo, quick and dexterous with his hands, wanting the experience of drunkenness after the exultancy of his virility, getting drunk at Frances’s, then coming to me the next morning sick, to be taken care of. Oh, the yearning over his growth, his feebleness, his anxieties, and the nurturing of his strength. I feel full and complete as he lies in me as only the child can lie. What I wanted of the lover was this child lying in me, becoming man while he lies in the womb. Such sweetness, such twinship, in the shape of his hands, in his slenderness, in his druggedness and trances, his losing himself in sensation. My animus, my poetic male soul. He begged to see what I had written in the diary. I read him the first few pages, enough to satisfy his need to know how I saw him, but he himself stopped me, understanding what I said, that the diary would be destroyed if I opened it to others, for its mystery must be maintained so that I may go on telling the truth. Opening it kills it. He feels this, but he also feels embarrassment at seeing himself. Yet he says if he hypnotizes me he will make me open the safe and he will read them all. There is in his face the mysterious light of Neptune.

I see now the role of personal responsibility in destiny, but I also see the part of destiny which is beyond my power. I had the power to enchant Bill away from his home, his parents, his security, to win his love, to give him life and creation, but not to keep him from war. And so on May 8 he has to leave, and I will lose him.

A terrible revolt shook me today, a revolt against pain and my tragic destiny. All the time I had Pablo and Bill, I could not enjoy them because of Hugo’s “Crisis” of jealousy, this after he had said to me: “I cannot expand. I can only contract. You have to do the expanding for me. I accept this. It is good for us to have Pablo and Bill.” The moment of carefree pleasure is in the past, and now we come upon another obstacle: the money debacle, the payment for all the dreaming. Once again reality destroys all life, all dreaming. An end to parties, hospitality, expansiveness.

Bill’s mother sought an interview with him. He went, and I spent the evening suffering with anxiety.

Bill, my love, I write this for you tonight while I wait for you to return from your parents, for you to read when you feel alone. I feel the deepest sadness at your leaving, and I want you to know it. The day you came to my house, you walked deeply into my being, and a dream began which we must protect against the world. We must fight against separation. Remember that in your moments of conflict you tend to destroy, to condemn, to move away from what you dream, want and possess in your own self. Remember that in you, love is not continuous or harmonious, but full of breaks. Half of you is at war with the other half. Remember that I represent the deepest layer, the one that will have the greatest difficulty in asserting itself. In your withdrawal from your unconscious—your moon—you will also withdraw from me, because I am your moon. I understand this. Your greatest need is for integrity and unity. Trust in me, and my love will help you in this, for it is without breaks or oscillations. My love is the great separator and isolator. Feeling is the only unity we have…it makes for wholeness…

Bill saw his mother, passed the test and holds on to his freedom. Then today his father called him “to discuss his future.” They want to do the best for him, to save him from being drafted into the army, to forestall it, but in so doing relieve their anxiety over the decadent group he has fallen into. I gave Bill a dream, and the world says I have corrupted him. I gave him strength and love, and now I must surrender him.

APRIL 22, 1945

Last night I seriously contemplated suicide, because what I most want in the world, the only thing that counts, my deepest need, my obsession, is the dream of love, and that I cannot possess but intermittently. I want it all, a continual, frenzied, full orgy, even if I must pay for it with my death. I feel I should leave Hugo, who represents protection against death, but also restriction and oppression. I feel I should surrender everything to my dream and be willing to die for it (because I cannot stand on my own feet without protection). Without Hugo, I would have lived like the romantic poets and been consumed. He has rescued me and restrained me, has been my counterbalance, but he is also the dead weight, the oppressor. If I could only have given myself completely to each dream, or lived alone in order to have been totally Bill’s while he was here, if I could have only given way to the intensity and the Neptunian urge that is my life…and my death. If I cannot fulfill this because of my weakness (“your anemia,” Hugo always reminds me), I instinctively feel dangerously unsettled and trapped. I cannot bear the restrictions, Hugo’s temperamental opposition to the marvelous atmosphere of the house this month. He is hopelessly heavy. His attempts to dance are heavily grotesque. He is grotesque. His weight is always present. The magic is destroyed even though he protects it. He has admitted his cruelties towards me, which I have felt but never admitted, not even to myself. He gives me liberty by word of mouth, but in a subtle, oriental way, he retracts what he gives. He loaded me with guilt with his brooding severity and gloomy inertia. He never did accept me totally, yet he did not surrender me. He wanted me to be what I was, yet he constantly restricted what I needed to be. “I can’t breathe,” I cried out when he threatened to eliminate Pablo and Bill and the beautiful activity of the house. “I would rather die than live as you do.” Yet without him, without Saturn, what am I? I fulfill men’s dream of love today as no woman can. I want to give myself to this. I want more of it. I want to live altogether for it. Oh, god, give me freedom. Give me freedom. Freedom!

Hugo sits before me. The father. Again I recoil from his desire. I am like a dancer who has to constantly force herself to merely walk. Reality. I came close to it last year, and I hated it. I recoiled from it. My dreams are greater, deeper. And if to fulfill them I must die, I would rather die, but not slowly with only intermittent loves and passions— no, by a vast fire! To die for the dream which reality destroys is right for me. Reality and the dream are hopelessly opposed, irreconcilable. I choose the dream. Bill saw me in his dream as a little nymph running naked in the forest. I see already in the past the luminous afternoon when Pablo and Bill painted the tapestry, when Pablo wrote the colorful history of his life, decorated a bottle, made collages and drawings, when Bill wrote and engraved, cut a firebird out of metal that hangs from a thread from the middle of the studio and turns in the air. I had come back, running, from the press at four to make tea and honeybutter. In the past already is the time when Pablo became de trop because Bill and I wanted to kiss each other, and then the restlessness, the stolen kisses in the kitchen, in the bathroom.

APRIL 25, 1945

As the love grew in beauty and strength, the obstacles threatening it grew too. Bill began to sense the tragedy of our separation. He became more intense, more demonstrative. He gave himself wholly. He uttered words of love (he, the silent one). One evening at seven we were alone and were going to the ballet together. I was dressed. We were smoking our last cigarette when suddenly Bill put his hand on my breast and said: “I don’t want to go to the ballet. I would rather stay here with you.” We became passionate, but Hugo came home for dinner and we had to go out. We saw the ballet. It was beautiful, sad, symbolic, Pillar of Fire.

But on our way out we, with our hands interlaced, arm under arm, ran into Gonzalo walking with two Spanish friends. I knew this would provoke a crisis of jealousy. Worse still, the next afternoon Bill came eager and impatient to caress me, possess me, and I had to telephone Gonzalo to give him an excuse for not going to the press. At six Gonzalo telephoned me and said that he wanted to break our relationship. I went downstairs and found him beside himself with jealousy. “The way you walked with that young man was like two people in ecstasy. I know.” I denied everything, quietly, quietly, quietly weeping for the sadness of it all, over the sadnesses, the deaths of love, the pain it causes. Today he was gentle again, and had accepted all my explanations. But oh, the turmoil yesterday in the magic studio, with the silver bird turning in mute circle flights, the phosphorescent planets glowing, in opposition to the subterranean jealousy of Hugo, to Gonzalo storming downstairs in the rain, to Bill’s father invading Frances’s home to see where his son was staying and threatening to harm the woman who had incited his son away from home. “If you get into trouble,” said Bill’s father to Bill, “I will get all these people into trouble.” Power against spirit. His power is frustrated with his deepest wish, for he has lost his son. There is the danger of scandal for all of us, the danger of Hugo losing his job, of my being sent out of the United States. Already Bill’s father has harmed his teacher at Yale, Wallace Fowlie, by accusing him of corrupting the morals of the young, including Bill, by giving them books by Miller and myself to read. I wanted to face the tyrant and risk destruction. I didn’t want to bow down, or Bill to bow down. I felt the time has come to pay with my life for my beliefs and what I represent. I am ready. I am ready to be burnt at the stake. I said to Frances, “One instant of romantic life is worth all of life itself. I am willing to pay.” Frances tried to dissuade me, and Tom went to see the father and talked calmly and gained his confidence. His hatred of me is there, but the lightning was averted in time. Frances said that in reality I have never come so close to catastrophe. The cost of living out a dream is so great, so great.

This morning I felt overwhelmed, but after we heard the father had recanted the harm done to Fowlie, Bill and I were ecstatic and again plunging into passion. Yesterday, before the threats, I had felt my first orgasm in his arms, quietly, deeply, passively, in rhythm with his. We had consumed ourselves in caresses for an hour in the afternoon, and then, in fantasy, we walked through the studio under an umbrella “to Mexico,” playing games, teasing, with little scenes of jealousy, with sadness when Fowlie’s letter came. But the sweetness, the delicacies, the songs, the caresses, the games (he buttons and unbuttons my kimono with chop sticks). His clothes lie about the room, his drawings, his writings. The obsession and madness of love, its ecstasies, its laughter. He crushed me so hard with caresses, I said, “I’m going to come out thin as a wafer.” He answered, “The better to commune with, my dear.” Bill treats me playfully like some young animal, tries jiu-jitsu on me, hurts my arm, picks me up and carries me, is altogether disrespectful and calls me, laughing, “The weird Miss Pin” (as my name was misspelled on a card). Every time I get a letter, he opens the envelope and reads it. Every time I get a flattering letter he starts calling me Miss Pin, and thus he and Pablo place me in their youthful world and are amused, treating me like a child. Bill gets rough and tumble, and when we end up on the floor, he cries, “Look at the lady of the legend, look at her, so pleased with my fall into naturalness.” I embrace him and say, “This is better than a legend.” A human and natural atmosphere of play, full of ecstasy and angoisse, because it is so precarious.

Jealousies. When Bill’s father visited Frances and we expected him to descend on us, I quickly took down the colored bird. When Pablo takes a photograph of me, Bill demands it back. He won’t allow Pablo to possess a photo. Hugo made me copper earrings to outshine the ones made by Bill. A million jealousies keep me tense, for I am aware of all their feelings. All my men are so difficult to obtain, and so difficult to lose. I cannot lose Gonzalo. He clutches at me. So does Lanny Baldwin, who, because he is jealous of Bill, indebts me to him by helping me to do my book. The world of love, the drug, the spell. Frances and Tom watch over us, for Bill and I are entranced and out of reality, except in our caresses. With all his teasing, each time the moment for caresses arrives, Bill’s heart beats wildly in his slender body, and I am so deeply moved. I lie so quiet, waiting, waiting for his delicate and dexterous hands to open my kimono, for his mouth on my throat. His is the most beautiful of all mouths I have known, his slender face so rich and sensual. The trance of the mouth, mingled with his incredibly tender skin, silkier than mine. The pauses afterwards, when he does not leave my body and lies over me, still kissing my shoulder. Our hypnotism, he calls it. Who hypnotized whom?

He was such a solitary boy, a rich man’s son always at school, without warmth and affection. How he imbibes my sensual, maternal warmth, bathes in it, needs it. How will he live without it? He opened like a flower. How will I live without his caresses and the presence of his complex, mysterious moods so like my own, without the joy of his flowering? His hands, so sensitive and so strong. His frailty, like mine, concealing a strength and power. I love the child in him. The new, vehement young man devours me with kisses. How are we going to live without each other?

APRIL 29, 1945

Testament. What I most value, most want, I cannot have, which is a love without tragedy. I am haunted by sorrow and depression. I cannot bear any more sorrows. I have given enough, creatively, and in love I have given more than I have been given. I love more than I am loved. It is not enough. Nothing is enough, except death.

During Joaquín’s quintet at the Museum of Modern Art, the sadness became unbearable. I cannot continue. I cannot rise out of this as I rose out of the Lanny failure, because I have to cut off something that is flowering. The loneliness. I cannot bear the loneliness. I am lonely with Bill, since because of his youth he cannot feel in proportion to what I feel. I am lonely because the mental life in him is stronger than the emotional. It is his mind he uses, his instinct, but not his feelings. I always love the one whose feelings are not as strong as mine. It is my own emotional nature which will kill me, for it rules me, blinds me, sways me, torments me. I feel weak and powerless. It all becomes unreal, and it all dies. Bill looks like the moon, pale and dead, because he is staying with his family for two days.

APRIL 30, 1945

Will I break this time? Hugo takes me back, tenderly. Lanny stands by, gently paternal, admitting his imprisonment, speaking of the emotions that “choke” him, push the tears into his eyes, strangle him.

“It comes like a wave of ecstasy.”

“The difference between you and me,” I said, “is that I ride on this wave when it comes.”

Lanny helps me, reminds me of my work, of my obligations. I have loaded Hugo with debts. I must repay him. I must bring the book out.

“We will help each other.”

All my loves stand around me, for I am a suffering symbol of love in a world that is destroying itself with hatred.

Saturday Bill went home for the last days of his stay after his mother begged him, but he is plotting our Tuesday and Wednesday nights together (Hugo is going on a trip) like a mature man. Monday his father asked him to stay at home but allowed him to go out with a college friend to the galleries. I came home at five to talk with Frances, and Bill had arranged to get away. When Frances left, we fell into passion. Bill was expected home at six-thirty. At six, after arriving sad, dead, eclipsed, he began to kiss me and become alive…soft light kisses, brushings, at first, and then hunger. He opened his mouth and bit mine, made me lie down and opened my red robe. In this embrace we expressed all the love and passion and hunger. How can people set themselves against this completion of the dream, this transfusion of sweetness, this marriage act of skin and hair and blood and honey?

Martha is against it, and Frances.

Bill emerged gay and alive—a reprieve from death. I died while he was away, and he died in his home. He could not sleep. He sat dejected and dead. We danced down the stairs, his skin now roseate, his mouth red, his hair wild, his hands warm (they were cold before touching me). And I felt ecstasy, and yet an acceptance of the sorrow.

Frances is proud of herself for not having desired Bill.

I am proud to have given him all and to have received all.

Frances has protected our love, but she does not believe in passion. She believes in its denial, as Martha does, and their rationalization is that it causes pain.

Greater pain is caused by negation and denial of passion.

MAY 1, 1945

A day of happiness. I await my young, ardent lover. He came a while ago, gay and demonstrative, laid his head on my breasts and said: “Do you know what I don’t like about Frances? She is too matter of fact, too heavy-handed. She lets nothing rest. Why isn’t she as you are…more flighty…more moody.” I laughed at the word “flighty,” but knew what he meant.

He brought me a photograph of himself.

It is raining. He will come soon for the whole night. We will sleep all night together. A day of happiness. A night of happiness. Remember, Anaïs, when you want to die, this is enough and is worth the death in between.

MAY 2, 1945

I lie in bed with my drug (my love), and my diary (the reflections of my love, my life, to remember, to hold, to relive each hour of fulfillment).

Last night: stretched at Bill’s bed, reading, and Bill’s little game of flirting with the big moments of passion, his jeune fille evasions and retractions, holding me off, reading, making me read, and listening to music. Not abandoning himself instantly to the moment, to the fire, but I, having learned to play this game, lie still, wait until the lights are out and we find our slender nakedness in the dark.

He asks me afterwards: “Were you happy? I never know whether I’m a good lover…”

“I told you that you were naturally gifted,” I said.

But then I knew the time had come to teach him more, so I said, “You must learn to prolong the pleasure, to hold back so it will last longer.” And when he awakened this morning, he drew me to him, took me again, lingering, waiting, and I had with him a perfect rhythm of fusion and pleasure. Such joy and peace afterwards. I believe in passion. It makes one pure and chaste afterwards. It is a fire which purifies. I am at peace tonight, full of love and without anxiety. I await him.

I can even think of my work and its meaning. I feel I approach the same truths discovered by scientists with art and writing—for instance, Reich and his Function of the Orgasm. My function is to present these truths I hit upon long ago in the form of art—for example, the idea of describing and discovering character by observing gestures, behavior, occupation and its sexual meaning (as I described Lillian by her anxieties and achieved a picture of unfulfillment). My task is to give an art form to the new scientific discoveries in psychology. Reich’s entirely new theory concerns the relationship of masochism and the pleasure principle, and I discovered for myself that pleasure comes from the realization and the pain of tension. I have been for the greater part of my life in a state of tension and, therefore, pain. Only recently have I achieved a more continuous state of relaxation and, therefore, pleasure (and the orgasm). This relaxation I first encountered in Henry, and for this reason he was able to give me the best of my pagan life…he relaxed me. Anxiety destroys this.

For a moment I thought that the pain of losing Bill would kill me. Now I have accepted it, perhaps because I believe in it and believe it will continue. (Or is it that love will continue? Or that I must surrender Bill soon anyway so he can find a girl his age?) Last night, falling asleep, he talked about his novel about a youth who finds a world he rejects (the world of Yale, of his family, of his former friends).

“Would I like Miss Nin?” asked his mother. “You are poles apart,” answered Bill.

MAY 5, 1945

A few days ago, Frances’s mood changed from softness and sympathy to sharpness and irony. Bill felt the change. I intuitively felt this: When Frances said, like Martha, I should not sexualize everything, and that she had a beautiful relationship with Bill, intellectual and pure, which could last forever, I felt that this was untrue, that she was jealous of the passion. I answered: “Well, we each got what we wanted. I wanted passion.” The afternoon I said this, Bill had come to my place. Tom and Frances were there. I wore my red Chinese robe, long, flowing, with gold buttons and full sleeves. Bill had come from his home, depressed. Tom and Frances left at six. At six-thirty he was due home, but he stayed and made love to me, and when we separated, we were elated. Yesterday I saw Frances in her home. She wore a pale blue flowered robe. I said, “How nice you look in your blue robe.” She answered ironically: “In frigid blue, in my frigid blue robe. I should wear a red robe.” The red robe of passion?

On Bill’s pale face, there is the sign of passion. What binds us is an oriental, voluptuous quality, trance-like lovemaking, charged with dreaming and silence and rich transmissions. He, the remote one, so rarely near human beings, is caught in a trance of warmth and nearness. How can anyone dare to reject the experience of physical union, which is the completion of everything? They all suffer from the denial of this. I know now it is right. I regret no physical gesture ever made. My only regrets are for those I did not make fully, completely, because my anxieties destroyed my enjoyment and the full taste of sensuality. I regret no gesture made to connect with human beings through the great beauty of the body.

The idea that lovemaking is like a dance animates Bill’s young, passive, timid body—he moves with the dance, takes, holds, feels, touches, plunges, discovers. Yesterday afternoon at Frances’s, while she was out, Bill took me to his little room and possessed me twice, fully, drawing from me a flower-like orgasm of the purest pleasure. The softness of our skin will soften the words between us. The coldness of his hands, of his rhythmic withdrawals, will find warmth in my body. I no longer suffer from his rhythm of abandon and withdrawal. I understand it. I also understand the limits of his physical power and how he instinctively refuses to face its limit, holding himself from a consummation he cannot withstand. And I have tuned myself to his energy, to his youth, to his power, to his rhythm. “How alike we are,” he says. His emotional nature is clouded at times, but it shines through in possession. In this he dissolves and burns. Then he emerges cool and detached. His mind assumes control again, and it is all clear and no longer hurtful to me. I feel peace. I feel confidence. I feel rich.

And I fall asleep dreaming of his orientation, dreaming of how I am living with the future Bill no one yet knows, with his royal aristocratic traits, his aristocratic ways, the young man who, discussing with Hugo the men who ruled the small kingdoms of India, or Hugo’s friend who ruled Tunisia “temporarily,” to which Bill said arrogantly, “But I will rule permanently.” He dreams of the Orient, he dreams of a power that is both mystical and of the world. All this I see and live with in actuality, whereas for others it is in the future. As a woman I like to give him a feeling of leadership. I like to yield to him because it helps the man to be born, and he likes to be tyrannical and possessive. I let him bite my fingers, hurt me, because it pains him and then he kisses these same fingers with tenderness. He has tested his power, and he can now show his love. The true woman knows when to let the man feel his power so that he will grow strong. Bill will be one of my most wonderful creations. My Neptunian child, visionary and instinctive. Suddenly he performs mature, assertive acts, surprising ones of pure instinct. It is while lying naked over me he telephones his father, holding me in his power, as if confronting his father with the victory of his manhood. His father’s voice asks severely, “Where are you?” And Bill is satisfied with this as I was satisfied, like an oriental, by my unexploded, silent, secretive revenge and rebellion against those who hurt me. Now he refuses to be with Hugo. His jealousy of Hugo is open. While meeting Chinchilito for lunch today, I wore Bill’s white scarf as a shield against temptation.

MAY 6, 1945

Last night suffering at Bill’s leaving. He went to his parents’ with his valise and I don’t know if we can meet again before he leaves.

Put away the toys, the scattered records, the box with the phosphorescent paints, the copper, the scissors, the watercolors, the half-finished earrings, the colored glass. Put away the copper plates, the prints, the poems, the scrap papers, notes, sketches. Bill’s poem: “This day / this hour / a dancer / circles in the room. / This flesh / this sound / our life / this round / a secret still simoun / our sigh / our sighs / draw close / and bind us / ask why / I know / it’s here / the answer.”

MAY 7, 1945

This afternoon Bill telephoned me from Frances’s to say he would not be over to see me until four o’clock. I felt such pain at not having him all afternoon, so I called him back and said that his last afternoon belonged to me, and that rather than seeing him so late, I’d rather not see him at all. His answer is always to call me “Stella” (from the novel in which I describe Luise Rainer’s doubts). But he came. The misunderstanding was cleared. He has the same reactions, the same doubts as I.

I said to him, “So you must understand mine.”

His answer was, “Mine are childish—and so are yours.”

Then, because he had a cold and is weakened physically for a day or two after our last passionate afternoon, we sat quietly and had our first clear, deep talk on writing, on the writing of the future. I inspired Bill with the possibilities. Then I spoke of Neptune, the subtle, intangible rapport between us, for which we have used so few words. I realize my love for Bill is greater than his for me, so I would not dare to follow Bill anywhere, for fear of not being loved enough. (Perhaps it is because I cannot believe in anyone’s love but Hugo’s, whose way of loving is like mine.) I have made no progress in confidence. My feelings, love and faith in others are strong, but not my faith in their love. I have suffered at Bill’s first sadness after our first kiss, at his moods of detachment and remoteness, at his brusque manners and cautious statements, his measured words, his rhythmic expansion followed by contraction, his passion followed by coldness. He is not continually human or warm. I realized suddenly that during possession he can be passionate and physically warm, but not in between. What a strange, painful destiny mine would be. I now see that the only person who matched my sensual self was Henry, in extravagance, in love of the orgy, and in potency. The only one who matched my emotional nature in intensity and violence was Gonzalo, in his outbursts and explosions. The only one who matched my protective form of love is Hugo. The only one who matched me mystically was Jean.

With Bill it is both the mystical and physical, but there is no emotional tie. He subdues me emotionally with his reserve and inexpressiveness.

Tonight I feel a sadness deeper than death. I return slowly to Hugo, whom I hated for a month, to ask his forgiveness. I return to Gonzalo. They are both aging, as I am not aging. But I am so weary of pain.

MAY 9, 1945

Bill came this afternoon. Twice now, we have had an exchange of ideas. I gave him my essay on Rank to read and my “Women in Creation” from the American Quarterly.

When it is time to separate, we fall into passion. How I love the feminine abandon of his face, its softness, its meltingness. He closes his eyes. He yields. We fall into a trance of mouth hunger, then it is the cool tenderness of his skin, his pale, drugged face, and his hands, so deft, delicate, like a musician’s, timid, faltering, but gifted for caresses, opening the skirt, and then nakedness, his new knowledge of timing, postponement, lingering, profusely enriched with kisses. We are under the knitted blanket, heads and all. The little holes of the knitting are like mosque grills. Under this we lie, his body over mine, slender, delicate, long, fitting so close together, our two identical waists, our lean hips, our long legs, our silky skins. No violence. Voluptuousness. He sinks into caresses. He falls asleep. Then he takes me again. I am prepared now for his detachment and cloudiness when he arises, for the break that takes place, his contractions after abandon.

Frances is right that the anxiety I feel is caused by guilt, because he is a child and I am a woman, the active one, and that is destructive. He is feminine and passive, and wants me to assume all responsibility to free himself of guilt, and I feel the anxiety. I want a love without anxiety, without uncertainty.

To each illusion I give a kind of absolute love, intense, too intense, when my feelings are involved. Why can’t I be lighter, enjoy Graeffe, not become attached, remain free? I have not been free. I gave my all to Bill. I abandoned Hugo and Gonzalo, my work, Graeffe, Lanny, all my friends. Bill. His pale, pale face, his hair falling over his eyes, his voice grown rich (the first time I heard his voice it was dead).

Dream: A ballet is taking place, and everybody is wearing highly colored costumes. There is a choice to be made between red and yellow chiffon. Yards and yards of both colors lie draped for me to choose from. I choose red unfalteringly.

MAY 12, 1945

Hugo is almost always in a continuous depressed state, grey, dim. He has a silent, subconscious way of making me feel guilty for my expansions. His weapon is guilt over the money spent. Now, when it is jealousy and fear of losing me, I understand and sympathize with him, but this does not apply only to Bill (or whomever he is jealous of), but to all my friends. He does not evince interest in anyone, in nothing, not even his fellow engravers. In fact, he has no friends but me. He wants to come home, eat quietly, read his paper and go to sleep, sometimes right after dinner. After a week of this, I get ill, desperate and restless. I love people. How can I reconcile this radical difference in our temperaments? Eliminating Bill is not the solution. It doesn’t solve my wanting to talk to Frances, to laugh with Thurema and Jimmy, to see Russian movies with Gonzalo, to dance with Pablo, to write with other writers, to walk down a sunny Fifth Avenue with Lanny. What compels me to expand is stronger than any oppression, but I have been choking for three days and nights from the lack of air with Hugo, his tightness. When it is jealousy, I feel compassion and I am ready to surrender. But when he says I should not publish my D. H. Lawrence book because he will be disgraced at the bank, or that he is driven to live a bourgeois life, then I lose my compassion and begin to suffocate. When he has a “fling,” he gets an apartment at Mamaroneck such as his family would get, or he buys a car or a motorboat. I have been dependent on his kindness but emotionally submissive and in bondage to his tyranny. Each step of my liberation was a painful one. Expansion and contraction is a normal rhythm, like depression and elation, but Hugo is all contraction, all depression. I’m willing to have flings and then contract, work, pay debts, etc., but the expansion I will not surrender. I have given Hugo the largest portion of my life, the most basic one. He gave me all, but he demanded a sort of annihilation.

This morning we wept, quarreled, got hysterical. Hugo feels guilty for having constantly put the brakes on me, and, simultaneously, for wanting what I get by expansion. I feel guilty for having spent his money on my life (because he separated himself from all I did—Jean was the only one we shared). My only freedom came when he traveled. Since we live in New York, he not only does not travel, but he never leaves the house in the evening. I can’t always meet my friends on the outside. If I go out, I must be home by twelve, apparently not to disturb the sleep which he needs, but actually, when he has fallen asleep and I have accidentally arrived late at one, he awakens to look at his watch and say, “You are late.” Because I left him in the evening to go out with Gonzalo twice a week, he plays a game intended to make me feel that I abandon him. His fear of losing me was never open and clear. We lived for twenty years on the assumption that I was the fearful, unstable one, and Hugo was the confident one, not the neurotic.

Lately I have rebelled, in many ways. I have ceased to feel guilty even for the money I spend or give, for I could be spending it on clothes, playing cards, or as Hugo’s mother and sisters spend theirs, on chichi, comforts, luxuries, etc. Twenty years ago Gonzalo chose his way of life, and nothing could stop it, no love, no human being. Henry made his choice, ruthlessly. I have tried to be human. I have admitted interdependence and interrelation. Hugo and I needed each other. Neither Hugo, nor Martha, nor anyone can imprison me. No one. When Bill hurts me now I feel detached. I move away. What lingers in me is Hugo’s pain.

Bill and I get into all kinds of dissonance. When he is uneasy, does not feel well, or does not feel equal to the situation, he suggests we call Frances. I get hurt because he has just arrived, perhaps, and I want to see him alone. So I say: “You go to Frances. I have something else to do.” Then he feels I don’t want him, and he becomes sullen. If he reads, on the other hand, he won’t talk. He is full of small cruelties. He burns my hair with his cigarette. His power is expressed with cruelty, autocracy, arrogance and demands. He has hardly any compassion, very little sympathy for others, a great deal of detachment. I need detachment, and I have gained in this. I became free and far from him in between times. I achieved this by not exacting and not idealizing, but slowly my power to exalt will be killed, and I shall hate those who helped kill it.

MAY 14, 1945

The tension grew so high between Hugo and me that he went to a hotel to get away from it. I spent the day with Bill and maintained my rebellion against Hugo’s oppression. The next day I hardly saw Bill because he had to see his parents, and in the evening we all went to a dance recital. Hugo left for his hotel, and Bill would not come upstairs with me! The pain of this was unbearable. When I am not free, he wants me. When I am free, he perversely shrinks back. He kissed me goodnight, multiple kisses, like those of a child, and left me. He associates me with his passionate expansions and also with his withdrawals, instead of sharing peace and tenderness. I was completely shaken. And for this I was making Hugo unhappy. I thought I could live alone, without Hugo, and at a childish act I crumbled. I could not bear to face the empty night. I called the hotel before leaving the apartment at one-thirty. The sordid setting Hugo chose overwhelmed me. It was practically a hobo hotel, for men only. What masochism. I was not even allowed inside, but my inquiry over the telephone had brought Hugo down. I spied him, turned the revolving door fast and shouted into the lobby, “Hugo, come home!” He smiled with happiness. With Hugo back, I could sleep. Battered and defeated, I asked his forgiveness. He asked mine for oppressing me so.

This morning I went to awaken Bill. He was unaware of what he had done, was puzzled. But I had a desire to hurt him. I made him jealous, so easily, when I showed him a thirteen page letter I had received from a young writer in Richmond, who was on his way to New York just to see me. Bill became anxious. Then I went out with Gonzalo, and Bill thought I had gone out with the young man from Richmond. He asked me: “How was he? When is Hugo coming home?” I’ve lost interest. He is perverse and difficult, possessing a world of cruelties and perversities, of loneliness and terror. So today I feel cold and tired. I am ill (the same illness I had when Albert left). Any illusion of happiness with Bill is gone. La passion est dure comme l’enfer. In passion one must be hard, not deep. I will learn. Today I felt strong, but it was only because Hugo was there. I have no illusions about my strength. None.

MAY 17, 1945

Bill stayed long enough to break the illusion of nearness and understanding. His behavior, his whims, his changefulness, his fears, his selfishness, his insincerity, give me anguish. There was a mutual and inhuman fascination there, another mirage. When he paints a picture he tacks it over one of Frances’s paintings, or one of Hugo’s.

I can see what I dreaded: that the future of America is schizophrenic; the youth has been born dead at the roots of feeling. They can think, they can desire, take, absorb, but they cannot feel or give. They are automatons, born of Puritanism, of loneliness, of hardness and callousness of American life. Their souls are atrophied.

Miller was the first symbol of this I had encountered. Should I say America? My father was a schizophrenic. But it is America. Then what am I? An exaggerated, feeling nature, captured always by the non-human, by my compassion, for the isolated, the lonely, the cripples, the lost, and paying heavily for it. I can never answer this—it is the mystery of my life. Does my constant dissatisfaction with the love given to me proceed from my lack of confidence, or is it in reality less than what I give? Why do I feel Hugo is the only one who loves as I do and that even he loves me as he perceives me and not as I am? Why did I feel Henry’s and all the others’ love less than mine, and yet anyone who looks into my life will say I was greatly loved? I can see in my early diaries the disparity between the facts I note down faithfully and my reaction to them. I can see that. Then what is it I don’t see today?

Is it neurotic of me to suffer because Bill has not been passionate for many days, or because he did not stay the other night when Hugo was away? Will I continue to suffer from anguish and uncertainty, because last night he said it was crazy for Thurema and Jimmy to marry due to the difference in age, that she would become old and withered? His egoism is like Henry’s. He takes, he feeds, he absorbs, and he gives nothing. Yes, he is enchanted, as Henry was, but for his own pleasure and delectation, for his vanity, his pride, his future, and his creation. How can I ever enjoy my loves with this anguish corroding them all? I don’t want to believe that this anxiety comes from the deep knowledge of illusion and mirages, for it seems to me that my mirages have often created miracles. What I pursue, which others do not believe in, has often materialized. If I surrender my power of illusion, I surrender my power of vision into what others do not see.

Now I come to the critical break with America. If I am convinced that the youth is schizophrenic and therefore dead at the roots and incurable, then I should not sacrifice myself to America. I want to leave it.

MAY 18, 1945

As inexplicable as nature’s moods, Bill’s suddenly melted into a flowing, illuminated sensuality. Yesterday afternoon while I wrote to detach myself, he was delayed when he had a quarrel with his mother, who reproaches him for his coldness, indifference, and his bored air at home. As he didn’t call, I went to Frances. I also arranged to meet Gonzalo at Henrietta’s place. (Now that we have no place to go, our meetings have been rare, and I wanted to reassure him, but I also need his great volcanic warmth again.) At Frances’s, at four-thirty, Bill telephoned imperiously that he was waiting for me at my apartment. I returned. He was painting a watercolor. We talked. Because he had gone through the storm with his mother, I was gentle, tender and relaxed, concealing my hands which were trembling with the anguish of doubt of the love. I was thinking again of his need, not mine. He was tender, playful. He left regretfully at six. At seven he telephoned me: “My parents are going out for dinner. May I come down?” He came, embraced me, followed me into the kitchen. From his remoteness and silence, he becomes the golden boy, melting in gold light and softness, his hands so delicate on my skin, on my hair. I served him dinner. We lay down together. He read the papers and I the Manifeste des Surréalistes, which asserts all I assert: the right of the imagination.

It was eight-thirty, and Gonzalo was calling for me at nine. Bill left his paper, stretched, yawned and relaxed, slid down on the couch, laid his head against my stomach. He looked up at me. I know this look, this pose. It is a woman with a man’s sex lying down, inviting caresses with the eyes, the eyelashes, the open flower face, the opened flower mouth. He lies there, inviting, timidly caressing my hair, his body nearer, melting, opening until I melted, burned, and fell into voluptuous kissing. I tried to extricate myself, reminding him the bell would ring, but his passion was aroused. And from passivity he suddenly emerged virile, lying over me, his sex hard against me, becoming willful. Why at the wrong moment, when I am not free? Remembering this capriciousness, I did not yield. When the time came, I left.

Gonzalo surprised me with a wild attack, with voraciousness and power like that of our first year together. He, who rarely shows sensuality of the mouth, now took my mouth for a long time. I answered, and the passage from one passion to another was made almost imperceptible, without shock or conflict, as if it were the same ocean. The distinctions efface themselves. Passion burns in all directions, in the past and the present. The silky, gold hair of Bill and Gonzalo’s heavy, black, coarse hair; the silk feminine skin of Bill and Gonzalo’s violent sandalwood skin; Bill’s lightness, Gonzalo’s heaviness.

I came home and fell asleep, dreaming that I met Henry’s wife and liked her, free of all jealousy. Why can’t I conquer my doubt of love, the source of all my anguish? Bill’s behavior would not hurt me if I did not see it in terms of my doubts of love. He himself says, “You imagine things.” Why? Why? Is that the brand, the scar of guilt? Is it guilt? Passion is my only certitude, and passion is nothing but the intensification of the love, the love forced by the obstacles, circumstances, outer pressure, to concentrate its force into one moment, therefore exploding and causing violent physical embraces.

In a few moments I have loved Bill as much as I have loved Hugo, or Gonzalo, or Henry. That is passion.

Friday afternoon we were together, and Saturday he left. He called me on the telephone and said, “I’m at the recruiting station and taking the train for Fort Dix at six.” I wept. Then an hour later he appeared. He was free for a few hours. Half of the time we spent at Frances’s, half here. I had to make him some supper. He was tender, playful, but afraid of our feelings. He lay over me and, like a true Anglo-Saxon, he said: “Now I want you to smile. I don’t want you to get upset.” And I obeyed. So we kissed, but not on the mouth, knowing the danger of this. And he left.

Seeing his laundry today, his small shirts, his small underwear, I experienced the abysmal yearning of the mother, tenderness and concern over his fragility in the army, over his being cold, over his food. A terrible, painful concern for his boy’s body, so tall and underweight, his little boy’s neck and ears. And yesterday, an hour after he left, I sobbed uncontrollably. I awakened to the memory of his mouth, and then I yearned for his caresses, his touch. Oh, the pain. I wanted to sleep, to become unconscious. Such a human, simple, deep pain. I hated the sunlight, a day I could not enjoy with him. He became small, frail, distant, and I empty and lost.

I went to the press and worked to tire myself. I slept. I could not climb the stairs. Oh, Bill, mon enfant précieux, my beautiful, voluptuous child.

If you are not neurotic, you are not fixed, caught, trapped in suffering. It does not become geological, pressing and oppressing the flesh into frozen layers, crystals of defenses, petrifying, arresting life. If you are not neurotic, the pain washes through you, absolute and terrible, from head to toes, dissolves you, and flows out again. You either die instantly, wholly, or you return to life. I have learned to suffer without dying. The being becomes accustomed, yields to the grief, cries, sinks, and then lives. What helped me was Bill’s letter, like Henry’s letter, without expression of feeling or loss. His child’s letter quieted me and revealed the disproportion—oh, not in age, for at seventeen I was capable of pain, grief, loss, abandon to feeling. So I wrote him with a tender lightness, not fully charged with my love, but with gentle emanations, allegories, symbols. And then I returned to the surface, to the sun, to the summer. I opened the coffre with summer clothes and gave away old dresses associated with old pains, such as the green dress in which Albert possessed me for the last time. I began to live in the future, to surrender the depths where all suffering lies, the depths of attachments, the intensity. I have learned to suffer and to flow and live.

MAY 22, 1945

Il y a des souffrances vraies. True sufferings purify, like the excesses of passion, like the orgies of creation. I have my moods. When I receive his child’s letters, their coolness subdues me, detaches me. When I went out onto East 13th Street, I was suddenly stabbed by the vivid image of his luminosity. The day he walked with me to get cigarettes on 3rd Avenue, he wore his white silk scarf negligently. It was a grey, cool day. He walked with me to the press. I saw him cross to the other side and walk away, the very symbol of poetry. He was marked as if by a drug, by an orientalism, a voluptuous mysticism, a blue light from not sleeping, those who dream at night and do not sleep deeply. He was marked for trances of unreality and for trances of the flesh. He was illumined by mysticism and a small, burning arc of desire. Was it symbolic that we spent our last minutes together comparing the twinship of our hands, their length almost the same, the slenderness of the fingers the same, the width of the wrist, the color golden, but mine more creamy, his of Anglo-Saxon milk whiteness, mine of ivory and ermine? Yet I must see not always into the future, not always into the deepest layers of people’s beings…I must see the little child…

My jeune fille en fleur, my precious Bill, fainted when they gave him a needle thrust to test his blood. He is now trembling at the idea of more injections. And this is the child America sends to war. My love, mon enfant précieux, I am listening to music and thinking about how, in order to become a writer, you must learn to express your feelings, that this is linked with creation. Miller wrote because he was not repressed in any expression…he expressed all. I the same. The flow in the diary was the flow of response. Let your letters become the diary of your other self that is just being born, instead of a carapace, a disguise, an oblique evasion of your feelings and thoughts. You may say what you felt when you were mon enfant précieux. But you must seek to know, for it is in this tapping of the source that lies abundance. The secret of writing lies in your moods, your feelings, not in the exterior self. To stay near this inner self, either write your diary again, or write to me, since you know I love the Bill who slept in the little cot, the Bill who had a thousand moods in one second. Trust and confide, for that is writing. You intend to be a novelist, so open, expand, speak, name, describe, paint, caricature, say everything. Speak for your moods, make your muteness and silences eloquent.

Frances is studying my Rorschach test. The mind is fine and clear but has no power over emotional impulses. The emotional nature, the neurotic drives, sweep me away. I have floating anxieties, not schizophrenia, but hysteria. I must either act or use writing to prevent the explosions. Sexuality causes my anxiety and tension, but also relieves it. There are sadomasochistic tendencies, idealization of pains inflicted on me, and I give mystical explanations of my roles and destiny, mystical reasons for my sacrifices. I hold a romantic image of myself as from another world. It is this self I fear to open to the world, because when I do give it, open it to all, it gets shattered. I have no defenses against pain, no hostilities. It is in this alone I am passive. Wanting life and contact, I found no other way than that of pain—my ecstasies are rooted in pain. So I get shattered, and then my intellect comes to the rescue, or my capacity to yield to the direction of others (as I yielded to my analyst, recently to Frances when Bill’s father threatened me, because I felt lost in a dream, a myth), or my creativity in which I manifest great active strength. But there is a strong, modern woman in me—if only she could act directly in the world, instead of obliquely. I did not face the world squarely, but created obscure, legendary writing. My protection is mystery and feminine elusiveness. There was a moment after analysis when I almost became the woman captain, integrated and strong, when I began to put my strength in writing, but then I met Lanny and Bill, and again my strength was dissipated in anxiety and in this painful love of the feminine man.

Will Bill be my last romantic love? When Bill left, I fought my pain with activity, but I also accepted the pain, wholly, emotionally, when it came. But now I face reality, problems, debts, the press, etc. The longest hours were his hours: at four, when I expected him for tea; at ten-thirty, when he would come from his parents’ home. I miss him deeply, deeply. I hated Hugo violently last night when he took me. Somehow or other, there has been a break with Hugo. I feel far from him. I began to feel peace, to enjoy the peace, the freedom from anguish. I thought vividly of Bill’s mouth, its richness, its loveliness of texture, the tender palpitations of his skin when he awaited the kiss, but I remembered the anguish of his failure to contain my full passion, my full strength. I remembered all the delicacies, the controls, the subduing, the way I had to hold back.

As in the Rorschach test, I get submerged by my emotions.

MAY 25, 1945

The day Bill left, Pablo and Duits telephoned. Pablo telephones every day. They all circle around me again now that Bill’s jealousy does not close the door on them. I miss Bill deeply, abysmally. I wrote him a long, humorous letter yesterday. I think of him on awakening, during the day, and before going to sleep. I passed by his parents’ home and was chilled at the gloomy, severe uniformity of Park Avenue, as if my luminous child escaped a prison but is now in another.

Shock yesterday with Martha. In her usual elephantine heaviness, she cornered me and said, “I had expected to have an intense, emotional relationship with you!” I said I had given all my love to Bill and that my women friends were resigned to my “disappearances” during times like that. But I did not save her feelings by disguising the truth to as I might have done before, because I felt she was committing a violation. She knows from analysis I have fervent friendships with women. I admitted to my acceptance of great differences of temperament. “But you don’t know what a capacity for intensity I have!” This from an analyst. Supreme masochism, offering love where it is not wanted, not seeing, not feeling it is not wanted, forcing me to turn my eyes away with pudeur before her mental, psychological blunder. “This I no longer feel for women,” I lied, “but only for men. Your life is different. I have begun a new way of life, not in reality or ordinary living. I’m more obsessed than ever with the marvelous. It may be my last attempt to live it out, but I must do it.”

My dear Martha, I had to reject you for your lack of taste, discrimination, evaluations, your artistic and creative values. You are tone deaf, you belong to the prosaic, and I have been overburdened with this.

Oh, Martha, so inadequate in life and relationships, reaching for me so clumsily, forcing me to say: I do not love you. Outside of analysis, again, as with Rank, is an incomplete and pathetically ridiculous being, large and formless, reaching out so heavily, her big body edging up towards me, her embrace. How can one analyze a friendship into what it is not?

MAY 28, 1945

Depression. Loss of courage. Scenes repeat themselves, but without the illuminations of desire. I feel dead. My friendship with Frances has deepened, strengthened by our sharing of Bill, the child. His letters, like Henry’s, are frozen and impersonal, after I wrote him such a beautiful letter, tender, light, glowing, humorous, nourishing.

MAY 29, 1945

Self-discipline. Bill’s letters helped to kill the terrible meltingness and softness I feel for him. With Pablo, it is a climate of my nature, seeking expansion, movement, life, motion, dance, music, color, impetuous living, drama, love, relationships. It is pleasurable because we are not in love. It is free and easy and natural. When he smiles, I feel I smile as I can’t smile with Bill or with Hugo. I feel like an open flower.

This flower feeling has come with the acceptance of my nature. I find it difficult to make great efforts. I prefer ease and relaxation. For a while I enjoyed the peace of a world without a lover, but now I feel restless again. Anaïs, work, work at the press from one to five, and have patience.

The lover has come, has always appeared, and will come again.

JUNE 7, 1945

Bill writes me: “In the little time that I lie awake after I go to bed, Anaïta, I think of you and wish I could be lying beside you again. Love to my wafer.”

I was delirious with joy on a cold, gloomy day. I went forth and bought a much-coveted Mary Stewart hat of black, edged with pearls, something to wear for Bill. With one little word he binds me to him fast and passionately. He has the power to make me dream, to illumine my darkest day.

What a bottomless infinity there is in one personality. Certain elements get buried, dispersed, lost, forgotten. They lie there. Suddenly a mood brings them to the surface. I awakened desiring change and adventure, awakened with a violent attack of wanderlust, and said to Hugo, “I’m going to hitchhike to Mexico.” Hugo said, “What about your health; what about money?”

“I’ll be healthy if I do what I want. I’ll wash dishes for my meals.”

JUNE 10, 1945

My week of strength did not last. I feel that everybody threatens the poet in me, the very symbol of the soul, and seeks to destroy me. They do not accept me totally, or understand me totally. They should encourage me into purer and purer fantasy, but they do not. Even Frances wants me to destroy the legend I have created, mocks my idealizations and embellishments, how it seems unreal that I should sit in her place and eat, that I am never seen blowing my nose, never visibly and messily sick, etc. Hugo explains: “You are a living reproach to everyone. Everyone feels that they should immediately give up all their earthly occupations and fly with you. And it frightens them.”

JUNE 16, 1945

I find reality to be the enemy of experience, the enemy of intuition. Frances knows the end of it all and cheats herself of experience, dropping the stones of wisdom with emphasis upon the obstacle, the obstacles between Bill and me, for example, rather than on what is being created in the present. They destroy the dream with their realism. Of course Bill will ultimately go to a young girl, and I to my mature man, but it is the present that counts, the boy who needs me as I am today. I needed, in the center of my being, the flower of his skin and his new, uncertain soul, the delicate suggestions of a newly born portrait not yet crystallized. “Your fantasy life,” they say, as if it were not the reality of my soul’s life. In mystical worlds, Bill’s age and mine have no importance—we touched and saw each other in space, and that is enough. I have an intuition about him (true, he shows very little of my intuition about him to others, so they love him as an intelligent, charming and handsome boy). I rebelled against Frances’s extreme use of analysis to destroy my illusions, which are fecund. I recoiled from her, Hugo, Martha, and they all capitulated.

But I feel alone, alone, alone. The great beauty of my life was that I lived out what others only talk about, or dream about, or analyze. I want to go on, living out the uncensored dream, the free unconscious. I have made my concessions to reality—I work at the press eight hours. Then I come home and write to Bill, as if he were my diary, but more lightly, more fancifully. Will he become what I have seen in him, and then will he see me totally? This destructive lucidity, analyzing everything under a microscope, is death to experience. “Bill is too young. It is all unwise. It is not good for you. He is too young to give himself, too young to love.” Do such words dispel the taste of his mouth, the richness of his kisses, the silkiness of his body resting over mine, the delicacy of his hands, the quality of his voice, this childlike grace, shyness, the voluptuous trances we fell in together? Eduardo says: “Perhaps you will be the one to reveal the positive meaning of Neptune, not as illusion, but as intuition.”

When Hugo takes me, Bill’s luminous face haunts me, paralyzes me, closes me. It is so near, so vivid, the son against the father.

Hugo always says, “Poor little pussy,” and loves me weak, helpless, small. When I grow strong he admits he does not like it. When I say, “I am no longer the poor little pussy,” he dislikes it. I was strong for a week and they all battered me. Hugo doesn’t want me harder, he wants me soft. The best of human beings are cruel to each other. Hugo wants me soft and tender, yet he does not want me to do soft and tender things for others. When I want to get harder to meet responsibilities, he protests. I have sworn to pay back our debts and to support Gonzalo, and myself, so as to be free of reproaches and to unburden Hugo. I feel lost and bewildered. I have no one to turn to who feels exactly as I do, who lives as I do, who accepts me as I am, and understands me completely. All of them, even Martha, have been possessive and selfish in their love. Frances feels that until I accept her reality, her atmosphere, background, friends, daily behavior, I do not accept her totally. I have always eluded this (poker games, writers from the New Yorker, cigar-smoking lawyers), as I elude Martha’s heavy atmosphere, because it stifles me. I feel pursued and loved, but not understood.

JUNE 26, 1945

Work. Work. Work. Seeing people with portfolios, writing the preface forty times. We turned out a beautiful work which sold quickly, so we paid for the linotype and will be able to buy paper. Work, the press, Hugo and Gonzalo, Gonzalo and Hugo, a light dinner, oppressive heat, milk. Every afternoon when I came from the press hot and dirty, I took a bath and wrote Bill beautiful, flowing letters. For a week I communed with him with my best, freest, most tender self.

And he stopped writing. No letter for two weeks, but he still wrote Frances and Tom. All my pleasure, courage and élan fell. I do not want this dependence on love, this anguish. My greatest enemy, depression, clutched me again. All work, no pleasure, no love, no peaks, no sparks, no illumination. The source of my illumination is the lover, whoever he is, and without it I die.

I made my peace with Hugo and ceased living with a caricature of him. After living twenty years with an idealized Hugo, I suddenly saw him at his worst, and then I accepted him again. But he remains the father, old and grey. I’m full of rebellion. To reassert the dream, I bought a cotton dress for seventeen dollars, shaped à la Recamier and of that peach salmon rose which suits me, and came out in my new costume looking, as Tom said, all of fourteen years of age. And now shall I wither? I am writing prodigiously in my head, feeling discouraged with the new book, discouraged by people’s lack of understanding.

Martha, in daily life, destroys what she created in analysis: she is full of envy, jealousy, ambivalence towards me. In analysis she accepted me, and in life she doesn’t understand. She says she would have had my kind of life and experience if she had had my ego and my narcissism.

Pablo and I, starved for love, not lucky, suffering from depreciation in a world full of paltry natures, not abundant like ours, not being in love, we do a dance together, an improvised dance to On the Town music. Beautiful. He rules me, sways me, turns me… it is a dance in place of lovemaking. I feel the intensity of his body, the fullness of it, but I do not succumb. He is not deep enough, only his physical nature is fully alive, but afterwards, when he talks, it is all dispersion and froth, exterior, and too light. I was untrue to my diary, giving Bill all that came to me and flowed. I closed the diary and wrote to Bill. And there you are. But Bill was too small, too small to take it. I hope I can detach myself from him, soon, soon, be free of him, free of the physical memories.

JUNE 28, 1945

Six-thirty. I finished writing, and then I telephoned to find out how expensive a call would be to Michigan, where Bill is. I had a crazy impulse to call, but I controlled it. I lay on the couch dreaming of talking to him. And he phones. He had misaddressed several letters, and when they were returned with the mark “not at this address,” he got frightened. He called because he was afraid I had left. Telepathy? Connection? My mood changed. I always expect the worst, always think it is the end.

I took the chop sticks, the white scarf, the “Reserved” card, the tin foil bird, the poems, the drawings, and wove a story for Bill. Each letter is a part of the tapestry. One day I wore the white scarf of faithfulness, the one he wore that dark day I watched him walk down the grey street like radium. I wore the “Reserved” card on my breast when I went to a party. New people come, but none are adept at unbuttoning my robe with chop sticks. I take the red robe and the revolving bird, and I reweave the past into the present. Gaily too, I call him William the Conqueror of the Wafer, and I sign myself the “frayed streamer” from a review of my writing we all laughed at. I court him delicately, surround and envelop him with sweet securities. Je me glisse a côté de toi et je t’embrasse.

When he is lost to me, I die, but as soon as he called today I was revived. Yet all the time I know the truth about my Anglo-Saxons: they are frigid; they are not passionate as I am, as the Latins, as Gonzalo. They are all afraid and ashamed of touch. They are colder, more calculating, more awake, not roused to the depths and not in the present as I am. They cannot give themselves. Hugo did in time, but how afraid he was. Frances and Eduardo have doubts of love, so they subtly instill their doubts in others, in everything. They cannot give faith. Frances did not say, “Have faith in Bill’s love,” but instead, “His is sadistic, perverse.” And perhaps it is true, but I may still win, as I won with Henry. Something has been created, and truly the purpose of love is to create, if not the child, then something else, like Henry’s writing.

JULY 8, 1945

Today there was a moment of absolute serenity and detachment. I awakened free of Bill. All the intensity and depth are gone, dissipated by his letters, which are prosaic, ordinary, lacking in feeling, pretentious, parsimonious, self-conscious.

JULY 15, 1945

I am yet far from sadism. Out of compassion for Lanny, I spent an evening with him, listening to his poems and was patient with his confessions, confusions, fears, contradictions and chaos. I showed tenderness.

Then at Pablo’s birthday I wore my new low-cut peach cotton dress. I felt beautiful and young. The place was filled with five women and fifteen young men. I felt light. I was courted, flattered, surrounded. I danced with Lanny but found him dislocated, grotesque in his exaggerated caricature of “freedom.” Already my tenderness has frightened him. He was drunk, jealous, glittering with malice and destructiveness.

“There are too many men around you.” Later he took me outside to kill my gayety. He said, “Bill is coming back next week.”

“I know.”

“You forget too quickly,” he said, severely.

“I’m not forgetting Bill,” I said, looking at Lanny’s petulant mouth and remembering Bill’s so much more beautiful and strong. “And if I could, it would be better for him,” I added angrily. I hated his moralizing, his disguised, hypocritical desire and jealousy. I had Bill’s letter inside of my dress, against my breast.

The atmosphere was easy, lax and natural. Pablo had brought his blue rat in a cage, his beautiful fiancée, Tieko, and Claudia, with her statuesque gravity. All night long I heard: “You are a legend. I wanted to meet you for months. You are a legend. I had a dream about you before I saw you. You are a legend. I can’t believe I am talking to Anaïs Nin at last.”

Then they went to a bar and discussed me. I have reached the peak of my magic, but not of love!

JULY 17, 1945

In the courtyard this morning I heard a Spanish woman singing desultorily as they do at work. Her voice sang joyously. I felt the weight of my mood like that of a cloud. Why does she feel like singing and I do not?

“Allo ooo oooooooo,” sings Chinchilito over the telephone. “What are you doing today? I am free all day, Chinchilita.”

“I am free, too.”

We went to Pablo’s place, which is a small room with two windows open upon a rich elm tree, making it seem like a tree house, like the African huts built up on the trees in the jungle. The tree filled the room with its greenness, with its silk frou-frous, its whisperings. Chinchilito and I lie on the small bed. He is like the sea, the sand, the sun, the forest, lying at my side. When I lie under him I am like the earth being ploughed and churned. A rhythm begins which is like a dance increasing in tempo. The shivering of the leaves is like the silk shivers of the skin and the hair. The green light of the tree and the blue light of his eyes and the glow of his teeth…the swaying of the branches and the swaying of the bodies, the rhythmic undulations of legs and arms. I can encircle him, wind around him, press against him. His strength is there. I can pierce him with my breasts, I can contain his piercing, draw pleasure at will, receive his vigorous thrusts. It is all firm and rooted to the core of his strength, of his power. He is the trunk and I the leaves. He is the hard core of desire. He takes his pleasure at his own time. He is straight and free, and tender when the passion is over, tender and smiling, and pleasure comes from fullness and ripeness.

Later he rose and filled the room with his singing, with euphoria. Later, when alone, I broke into singing, every cell singing out of fullness and ecstasy. When I came home the Spanish voice was singing in the courtyard. I knew why.

It is strange that before I experienced this absolute ecstasy with Chinchilito, I described him in This Hunger as Philip, the magician of joy, and with him I have achieved it. Fullness, ripeness, expansion, power, the great splendor of maturity and strength. It was a physical encounter of great splendor, of relaxed, sure, deep pleasure. Such pleasure. This morning I was still in ecstasy, walking in the rain, singing, singing, until I met Lanny, and then Gonzalo, and all their twistedness and poisons of weakness, their pain and impurities. I felt them and lost my joy. But I was content to have attained it.

I am the one who has traveled between subjectivity and objectivity, between romanticism and modernism, christianity and paganism, tragedy and joy. To arrive by deep routes to nature and joy, what a feat! To arrive at the ecstasy of joy and nature when having known only ecstasies of the spirit.