GORE

If I could have loved a woman, it would be you

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 19, 1945

Kimon Friar asked me to go to his lecture on love at the Y.M.H.A. I was in a sad mood, so I dressed as Mary Stuart, who had her head cut off by a jealous Queen Elizabeth, in a tight black dress with long sleeves half covering the hand, a heart-shaped black hat edged with pearls, and a white veil. Kimon lectured at the head of a long table. At the foot of the table one chair was empty, and I took it (Hugo had to sit behind me). Next to me sat a handsome lieutenant, who, after I had leaned across him to speak to Maya Deren, spoke to me. “Are you French? I am a descendent of troubadour Vidal.” His voice is like Bill’s. He is luminous and manly. He is nearer to the earth, not nebulous, but clear and bright. He talks, is active, is alert and poised. But he has the same tall and slender body, the same clear skin, and the same full, sensual mouth. He is twenty years old. He is one of the editors at Dutton, and his own novel is appearing in the spring. He knows Under a Glass Bell and had guessed who I was. He asked when he might visit me. I said I would be home that evening or on Tuesday evening. He said he would come on Tuesday as he was not free that evening. But after a moment, he said “I’d like to come this evening if you don’t mind.”

So four hours after meeting him, he walked into my studio. It was his likeness to Bill which attracted me. His voice is rich and warm; he is intuitive. There is too much to tell.

I eluded an evening with Wilson.

I tear up Bill’s letter because it is uninteresting, noting, however, that on January 5 he will come for eighteen days. I write him lovely letters.

I feel more insincere than ever. I must break with Wilson.

To separate truth from creation now, what a task. I write about Miller without love in the new book and marry him to Thurema in order to make a new story that is true without telling the truth. If only I could tell the truth, how easy it would be.

My attraction to Gore Vidal is based on his resemblance to Bill, but I like his aristocracy, his French ancestry, his intelligence, his manliness, his poise, his greater worldliness. He is wealthy and free. But at the moment I feel love like a river, not in individuals. I can spend a marvelous hour with Gonzalo in Bill’s room at Frances’s, and then be with Marshall, and feel both equally. For now I am dulled and numbed to pain, and can only respond to pleasure. Therefore, I love no one.

When Gore Vidal says he will be the President of the United States, I believe him. He walks in easily, not dream-fogged, not unreal, not bemused as Bill did. His eyes are not blue, not shadowed in blue, but clear, open, hazel. They are French eyes. His face is square, not long and narrow. I begin to see him, now, and I like him for himself. He came Sunday afternoon. Then this evening we sat at the Number One bar and talked. His father is a millionaire. His grandfather was Senator Gore. His mother left them when he was ten to marry someone else. “She is Latin-looking, vivacious, handsome, her hair and eyes like yours,” he said, “beloved of many.”

The boy-man is lonely. He rejects homosexual advances. He says, “In the army, I live like a monk.” He is writing his novel. He is clear-minded, but emotionally confused and vulnerable. He is less afraid than Bill. (Oh, Anaïs, Anaïs, I know that my love for the disconnected, aloof, lonely child is my own lack of real contact with others. Their imprisonment is mine.)

Will his French troubadour lineage stir in his memory some recognition of Anaïs, whose name comes from a little Greek town in the south of France? I feel yes, unconsciously. He has the courage to say, “May I come?” He telephones, he can command a taxi. Will he dare? I feel the bond, less than with Bill, but one that suits my present self better, for I am returning to my aristocracy and my pleasures, and leaving my bohemianism behind.

Gore talks about his childhood: “When my mother left me I became objective…I live detached from my present life…at home our relationships are casual…my father married a young model…I like casual relationships…when you are involved you get hurt…I do not want to be involved ever…”

Mutely, as with Bill, Gore’s sudden softness envelops me.

I am advancing into the adult world of power, leaving behind me the crippled and the weak self. The voice of the analyst is the voice of sincerity. I said to Staff: “I have become terribly aware of my insincerity. I dread the world of power—the world of my father, the salon—because there is a greater insincerity there than among the bohemian artists.”

Staff: “We live in an insincere world, full of falsities. All you can do is to find your own integrity, act by your own values.”

I am getting nearer to the lost Anaïs.

Roles: the proof they exist is in the loneliness in between. My character: where am I? I am here, in the diary, confessing my roles.

My first act of sincerity: I broke with Wilson. He was sad, shocked, tender, sincere. I said I could not go on, that it was not worthy of us, not big enough, not deep enough, not satisfying. I had been afraid of his anger.

“Afraid,” said Staff, “because deep down you recognize your false pretenses. You knew you had never wanted Wilson. It was a compulsion to seduce the father-critic you feared, enslave him and diminish his power. Notice that all your relationships are partial, which is a way of eluding control and contact. You have never given yourself, only a part of yourself. A part to one, a part to another. You have never loved. What excites you sexually in these boys is that you do not fear them. They do not demand as man demands. They are little men, not dangerous. Their anxiety in the world of men, which they can only calm by seducing the men, is like your anxiety in the world of men, which you can only calm by seducing them too. You choose those who you know cannot give themselves, because that gives you the courage to let go. You know they will let you down and that you will inevitably suffer from being thwarted. But you prefer this pain to the other, the pain of giving and being betrayed, as you were as a child. You choose unconsciously those who will not assert themselves or claim you. Or if you find one who does assert himself, does claim all of you (Rank, Wilson), then you do not love them, you reject them.”

Staff: Departmentalization. Close one, open another. Multiple relationships, not out of richness, but to maintain the split necessary to my life. The split is safety from contact.

“But if I put all my intensity upon one person, it would shatter him!”

“Not if it is well answered,” said Staff. “It’s only shattering when the other is split too, and feels threatened.” (How frightened Bill was when I centered all my passion upon him!)

DECEMBER 5, 1945

Gore is a lieutenant at Mitchell Field. He comes in on weekends, and Sunday he came to see me. We had a fine talk, lightly serious, gracefully sad. He read me from Richard II. “Why was he killed?” I asked. “Because he was weak. I am not weak,” said Gore.

No, he is not weak, but he might need Joan of Arc to place him on his throne. I told him his arthritic hand was due to a psychic cramp for writing about an ordinary hero when he himself is no ordinary young man. I teased him, touched upon his depression. His handwriting is chaotic and unstable. He took me to dinner.

Today he called me up, “This is troubadour Vidal.” His voice is lovely, musical. He is not homosexual, he says, but he doth protest too much.

Bill is coming December 22.

Two days in bed with bronchitis.

I have to escape from this children’s world where the woman Anaïs has outgrown her childhood fantasies. Can I? Am I still in love with Caspar Hauser? In both Bill and Gore the idea of death is strong.

When Bill won me, Pablo declared his love. He showed me his suffering and jealousy, his flight from me, his homosexual ambivalence, his desire to be psychoanalyzed. At the door, he kissed me for the first time as a lover, ardently. I became evasive and elusive, but I feel more for them all than I do for man.

Chinchilito calls up to tell me that he has spent three days making me a Christmas present.

God, god, god, I need love, I need it, I need it. That is what Bill feels, poor Bill. His need is endless. He cannot even answer, only drink, drink, drink of it. The love-starved children. Staff called them the love-starved monsters.

DECEMBER 10, 1945

Gore came, and we slid easily into a sincere, warm talk. He dropped his armor, his defenses, his roles. He confessed that he has had homosexual experiences—casual ones—without love. He has taken women but recoils from them. He may feel attracted to the men, but he cannot love them. He is caught in a zone of non-love, non-desire. He dreams of love but does not know it. “You are the only one I have told this to. I am amazed. I don’t like women. Either they are silly, like the girls of my set I’m expected to marry, or they are harsh, strident, masculine intellectuals. You are so different…”

He takes me to dinner at the Lafayette. All the society mothers look for him, for their cocktails and dances. The debutantes write him letters, “Why are you so detached?” As we walk, I take his arm. This gesture has infinite repercussions upon the long distance range of his being. When I relinquish it, a moment later he extends it back and says, “Mon bras?”

The part of me that was living out my relationship with Bill is still tied to Gore’s voice and full mouth by the thread of resemblance, but Gore’s own definiteness and maturity have now taken their rightful place: he is more adequate, answers all I say, and holds his ground. When we return home (he came at four and left at midnight), he makes me laugh with the most amazingly well-acted pastiches of Roosevelt, Churchill, a southern senator, a petitioner at the House of Commons, etc. He is so proud that his well-constructed roles and personae masked his homosexuality from me, that there is no confusion possible between him and Pablo and Marshall. His façade is entirely manly and upright. But now, I abandon my writing, my need of the doctor, to write about him because I enjoy his presence. I enjoy being allowed into his secret self.

His very far apart, clear hazel eyes open into mine, “I give you the true Vidal, a supreme gift.” Leaving, he says: “I’ll come on Wednesday. Don’t let anyone else come. Send Hugo away.”

DECEMBER 13, 1945

Wednesday I met him at the restaurant, wearing my fur hood and cape. He had news for me. Dutton had a conference, offered $1,000 and a contract for all the new books! We celebrated.

When he tells me I must finish my new book in two months, I say: “I don’t know how I will do it! I’ll have to stop seeing people, with a few exceptions, or I’ll have to go away.”

“Wait till I’m out of the army” (I had told him Hugo was going to South America in February, and he dreams of going south or to Mexico with me).

When he gets up to pay, I watch his body with desire. In the taxi he says, “I am jealous of your young men.” I know this is bad for me. He will not be able to take me, or if he does, he will have anxiety. Strange—just before going out, I had received a beautiful letter from Bill, a symbolic love letter, but the fear of suffering is still there. I hold Gore as a talisman against pain. I have Gore. Secretly there is a hope, a hope that Gore may become strong because Bill is leaving for Japan, and I cannot lose all of what Bill is to me yet. Gore’s warm voice is that of a male, so different from the homosexual voices. It was Gore who called my attention to the homosexual voices.

Anyway, the charm is there.

And the conflict.

Staff took the diary, and while I was uneasy, I didn’t expect the remark he made. I expected a condemnation, a judgment, but not what he said: “You live in fantasy. You see things that are not there. You are inventing a world, not because of a conflict between fantasy and reality, but because of the fear of being rejected in the real world (of the father), of being inadequate.”

No. Here I resisted. If what I write here is fantasy then my life itself is in danger. I am alarmed. I stayed away from analysis under the pretense of making love with Chinchilito and to receive his beautiful, imaginative Christmas present, but deep down, it was out of conflict. My fantasy world: Gore, the warmth I feel…unreal? The desire? The elation? Is it all unreal? (Yet today I cannot understand having felt the way I did for Lanny Baldwin.) I believe now that the non-feeling I experienced after Bill came from the trauma. I said to Staff: “I feel I’m getting elusive again. I feel the floating, the absence of an anchor, the absence of solidity, integration. I feel diffuse. Lost. Perhaps Gore is an escape.”

DECEMBER 16, 1945

Gore’s visits on Sundays are now a habit, but I knew he would telephone me yesterday, not wait until Sunday. He had dreams to tell me about. He had his early novel to show me (written at seventeen), his poems. How easily we talk—it flows and shines. He is so responsive, quick, personal, confessional, natural. He is warmer, nearer, stronger than Bill. Sharp. Sometimes I feel a kind of twinship in his quick responses. He does not elude, but meets and answers. Why, why, why, why can’t I enjoy this without desire? Why am I so affected? What makes me so vulnerable to his mouth and voice, so moved by his rootless childhood, his old man ways, his intelligent awareness? Latin and Celt, mystic and realist, he says about himself. I can talk to him. He does not frustrate me, or cut me off, or arrest me, or elude, or waver as Bill does. He speaks of the luminosity of my writing, is so gallant, attentive, observant.

Saturday I made the house beautiful. I bought new couch covers, sewed pillow slips, banished the sea shells, the Japanese umbrellas, the jewels, the romantic trappings.

Monday Gore came. He dreamt that he and I stood at the top of a mountain and had a titanic battle. He believes it was a battle about his ambivalence, his duality in sex. He is not interested in the group around me, only in being with me.

“Oh, god,” I said to Staff, “this cannot go on. I can’t put my passion into it, yet it is Gore who arouses this passion.”

Staff: “Because you do not fear them. Bill, Pablo, Gore. They do not threaten you. You feel adequate. But you know they are not. The castrates can’t dominate or engulf you, claim you, possess you.”

“Small fry,” he says contemptuously of the boys, to whom go all my desires and feelings.

Eduardo does Gore’s horoscope and says, “There are similarities to Bill.” And now Bill is coming.

Gore is jealous of Bill. I told him that Bill was leaving for Japan and that I must forget him. Why? I thought it would encourage him to know that Bill could take me. I have a deeper love for Bill, but there is desire for Gore because I feel that Bill is a part of him.

Staff, “These are all escapes from the man who could answer your passion, and really take you.”

I came back to Staff ready for any truth that will deliver me from these fascinations without fulfillment. I really believe I suffered so much from the disproportion between my feelings and Bill’s that it split my love and it began to flow to Gore.

While I ponder this strange fascination which brings me so close to Gore that I feel we resemble each other physically, he notices that our eyes are the same color. We get ill at the same time, we get well at the same time. How to free myself, how, how, how?

“At best,” says Staff, “there is nothing there for you. What if you do make him a man, have his desire, do everything for him, so he can marry a woman his age and have a child…and you?”

Why, why, why the feeling?

I sent Hugo away…subtly…on a skiing vacation for ten days, ten of the fifteen days of Bill’s vacation. And now I’m in love with Gore.

Gore has won his place. His voice, so warm and rich, issuing from a sensuous, lush mouth, delights me. When he telephones it sings, “Anaïs!” He does not know he feels inadequate, that he is overshadowed by the parents, whom he glorifies and belittles himself in the process. He doesn’t see that his homosexuality is a part of his childhood. He thinks he is mature because he carries himself with poise in the world, because he is intelligent, wise and mature in his knowledge, because he likes sherry and waltzes, because he is going to be a “severe” husband. But he doubts his strength. He is afraid of failure.

Gore has a feeling of a power to accomplish whatever he wishes, has brilliance of mind, clarity, decisiveness. On the conscious level, he is manly, capable of leadership, active, dynamic, magnanimous, proud, direct, generous, with an expansive attitude. On the emotional level there is another Gore: hypersensitive, insecure, subtle, but passionate. His imagination and intuition are highly developed but not entirely trusted. He is afraid of this and disguises it with convention. He allows the mystical, sensitive, musical poet little freedom, because he associates this aspect of himself with his nature’s soft and feminine side. A true Venus and Mars. He will never be passive, therefore he will not be a complete homosexual.

DECEMBER 22, 1945

In a quiet, harmonious studio alone, I wear a new fuchsia dress just as the couches are wearing new covers, with stronger lamps, with order, cleanliness, renewal, clarity and simplicity, and I wait for Bill.

But last night the one I at first mistook for Bill’s substitute is winning as himself, winning his own place in me, by our harmonious, vital connection, our understanding of each other. Gore said, “You are the first for whom I ever wrote a poem” and gave me his poem entitled “The Mountain.”

All day I had been painting, dressing, curling, beautifying myself for him as well as for Bill.

When Gore comes, I want to kiss him, but I don’t because I know it will precipitate a conflict. He has said he is slow to make decisions, to act, and I want it to be his act, his decision, or else it will not be good.

Can he not feel this pull, this longing of the mouth to touch, this full voluptuousness of his? He took his sensuality elsewhere to a homosexual and felt depressed, hostile, repulsed afterwards. No fulfillment. And I felt the pain of this, the jealousy, even though I knew his deeper being was not touched. Three evenings, three aspects of his life. One with the homosexual author of Dark of the Moon, drinking, blind sensuality, and depression. One as the dancing partner of a lovely debutante at the high society Victory Ball, where he felt stifled and bored, where the loveliness of the girl did not touch him, where he was critical of her falsities and her prattle (even though she writes poetry), where he left her early to be escorted home by another young man. The third evening was with me, when he gave me the poet and his poem, two pages of his childhood recollections, the fourth chapter of his novel, his sickness from the war, arthritis and stomach cramps, talk, all that lies in him, his mother, his father, his childhood, his homosexuality. He complains of a feeling of dédoublement, of unreality. He talks of death, reveals the mystic. He is obsessed, as Bill was, by the circle of young men around me. This open nearness I have with Gore I could not achieve with Bill, because our nearness was only sexual, while the subterranean and the inarticulate were unknown to him. Bill now seems like the younger brother of Gore.

I should be writing, yet all I do is to dream about Bill and Gore in a strange, interwoven way. It is a symphonic obsession, Gore’s absence of cruelty an exorcism of the pain Bill deals me. But would Gore become cruel and anxious if he tried to take me? Would all our pleasure together become pain if we attempted to possess each other physically? Gore might then hurt me too, out of his conflict. He was the friend of a girl for six years before he took her and then recoiled—but he did not love her.

Midnight Sunday. Gore is sitting at the foot of the couch writing his play on the werewolf (a legend attributed to his ancestors). He said, “We met at just the right moment.”

“It is so good to be one’s self without poses,” he said. He loses his overly serious society boy’s tenue. He becomes soft and warm. Only when he talks about homosexuality does a frown come to his face.

Cornelia Vanderbilt is in love with him, and she is very beautiful, but not “too earthy.” But he is happier here. “You inspire me,” Gore says. I suffer only when I look at his mouth and want it.

Our love takes place in space, in his poem, and in the werewolf play, for I told him the story of the woman who let the werewolf suck her blood to save him from being caught, and this touched his fancy. I meant it as: let the animal free in you no matter if it bites, hurts, kills, so at least he lives out a love of woman in his play. And I lie here in my red robe. (All day I had expected Bill but I have less suffering with Gore. He is tender, attentive, not cruel to me.) Like Bill, he opens my letters saying: it is probably someone telling you how much they love you, etc. It is strange. If I could only learn to love these young men mystically and find a man for myself.

CHRISTMAS DAY, 1945

Yesterday a flowing evening with Gore writing his play. When he got up to leave he was stiff with arthritis. His face was pale, his eyes glowing warm, and an impulse so strong willed me to embrace him, to warm him, and I could not resist it. I embraced him, body to body, my head on his shoulder, cheek against his cheek, not a lover’s embrace, but a passionate fraternity (not daring the other, not daring to look at his mouth), and he responded. He did not stiffen, or grow distant or afraid. He returned the pressure equally, firmly, but sought no more. He answered me as he answers my talk, he meets me. He did not elude or fear me, at least. It was whole, bright and warm. I couldn’t bear the evening to end without touching him.

But afterwards I felt anxiety. Have I spoiled it? Will he grow afraid of me? I felt he had not. I felt he took the embrace as it was intended, not as a sexual aggression but as a need of simple nearness. But still I could not conquer the anxiety, the regret of my impulsiveness, even though I felt his love.

I refrained from telephoning him. Gore, did I spoil it, this élan of warmth?

I went to Staff instead. “Why, if I’m clearer about this,” I said, “am I in it deeper than before?”

“It’s like the exacerbation of an illness running its course.”

But the sweet delights attending it, the fever, the loveliness of the sun and the snow illumined.

“I fear the loss of magic.”

“No loss of magic,” said Staff. “Nothing need be lost, only strengthened.”

I’m obsessed with the desire to live like this, alone, to have no need of Hugo, to feel light and free, to lie in bed in the evening dreaming.

The first to call me today was Gore: “Merry Christmas, Anaïs. I finished the play. I’ll come Friday evening, may I?”

And I was happy.

Is it possible I am reliving my adolescence with Eduardo, but with an understanding of it, with deeper knowledge? The karma of my sixteenth year with the young man a girl of sixteen would love, only then it was blind, and now it is deep.

“Why,” I asked Staff, “why do I have a real desire for them?”

“Because you are sexually normal, not homosexual.”

Writing all day with the ecstasy and warmth of Gore’s early morning telephone call is all I need. And he uttered the right words about my work, “You have expanded in depth, now it should be in width.” Others may have said this, but he says it enwrapped with his love and understanding of what I have done—or is it that he has the magic power of saying what I need to hear?

I feel I own this love.

Yesterday Bill called in his little boy’s voice, a prisoner of his family because it was Christmas Eve, and today perhaps he could run away. But with the pain he causes, he has broken the spell. There have been too many futile watches, disappointments, absences, elusiveness. He is not warm and near.

I am writing with a more active, dramatic power. Static analysis was my danger in writing.

Seven o’clock. Oh, my diary. Bill came, brought me presents, two little Japanese birds to wear, a bottle of champagne. We sat on the couch and talked. Then I saw on his face that expression of love, and simultaneously we moved towards each other with such a deep impulse. I couldn’t believe in my happiness, couldn’t believe in it. His passionate kisses. His words: “I have thought of ways to be free. I’ll come Thursday night and stay all night. We will begin all over again. I want to stay all night. I always want to sleep here.” “We hypnotize each other,” I say.

Such kisses, such devouring, as if he would eat me alive. And then such phrases as, “It will be fun to go to Japan,” a complete contradiction except that as a little child he feels going to Japan is inevitable…but he has yielded to it. Yet he loves me. I know this when we lie together. He has only a moment, no time to make love, just kissing. Such torment. He came in a pouring rain. I’m left melted, drunk and pained that he had to leave, but so happy at his behavior. He always comes a little older, a little more determined, a little more impulsive. I see again that blue shadow over and under his eyes, the paleness, the mystic language. And I am pierced again, possessed again, and I see the pretense of all my attempts to escape the pain of losing him. He is too young to know what he is losing when he loses me, thinking perhaps he will not lose me.

This does not change in any way my feeling for Gore. Mystically I feel Gore to be an older Bill, come to woo me without fears, to be with me without retractions and flights. He has come to relieve me of the unbearable intensity of my passion for Bill, to divide and soften it, so that my love can match their needs and youth. Le vrai partage mystique.

DECEMBER 29, 1945

Thursday evening. Bill came. We went into a long, endless tunnel of caresses, fell asleep together, awakened to more caresses, talked only a little. Our only contact is physical now, because he cannot sustain a relationship. Then he disappeared again into his family prison.

Last night Gore came. As he arrived he handed me his play like a bouquet of flowers. “Here is what you inspired.”

I read it. It was intense, dramatic, emotional, strong. He read me the last act. I was stirred. He made me feel I was the cause of it. “I’ve never written this way, impulsively, directly, without plan. Never with such intensity. I collapsed afterwards.”

I let him read my pages on Eduardo. I have never known the way we talk with anyone else. His answers are so close to my thoughts that we have the impression of hearing ourselves talk in the other.

He wanted to know when I would make his portrait. “I made it in the diary when you gave me permission.”

“I gave you permission because I knew you would do it anyway! Read me the portrait.”

I hesitated. “You can skip anything you want to skip.”

I brought out the diary. I was still hesitant.

“I know all that is in the diary.”

I looked at his face and saw that he knew. I felt uncovered, happy, but hurt. Happy that he does know me, and terribly hurt that the one who comes so near to my thoughts and feelings should be one I am not allowed to touch.

Our faces were a confession of love. He said, “You are Maria” (the woman who gave the werewolf her blood and is willing to die).

“I am not used to being discovered, known by others,” I said. I tried to laugh away the pain, the desire to clasp Gore. I said, “Now we’re two magicians using magicians’ tricks on each other.”

“I didn’t mind being uncovered by you,” said Gore.

I could not say: “It’s different. My secret was my love. Yours was your non-love.”

To not show my desire—I was hurt because earlier in the evening he had said, “The situation is the same.”

“You’ve had more homosexual experiences?”

“No, because I’ve been ill. And I felt all the trouble of getting the hotel room, etc., not worthwhile” (whenever he talks about this, it is as a man talks of whoring, deprecatingly, cynically). And with me, he is melted and warm.

“I must retreat from you,” I said, my exposure causing me pain because it was the exposure of love. “I won’t read you the diary until I feel I can read you every word I wrote, Gore.”

Later he said, “It is something we can’t face yet.”

Such tension and excitement. Doesn’t he feel it? His body, can it be so dead when his eyes are full of love, his face, his words, when he knows it is a play of love he has written, when he is saying in so many ways that I am his love? When I said, “You will hurt me,” he was so moved. When I lean over at times, talking, to plead, to tell him something with vehemence, I feel him being moved, answering.

Oh Gore, our thoughts and feelings touch, how can it be that our bodies won’t? It can’t be!

And for the first time I felt sadness, and the desire to run away from him, because he moves me so deeply.

Will Staff deliver me from this fatal love? I know all the reasons, and yet I am caught again, longing, yearning, dreaming, hardly able to work, to write clearly, my whole body aching.

DECEMBER 30, 1945, EVENING

I explained to Gore, “I didn’t withdraw because of your coming near to what I think or feel, but because I became aware at that moment that you are the one I am forbidden to love.”

“I feel the same thing, yes, all the sadness of it.”

In every gesture and glance there is love. When he first comes in, he wears a formal mask, has a certain coldness. But at a certain moment, when we enter our personal realm, he becomes deeply sincere.

“If I were normal I would take you away from Hugo.” And again, “I am jealous of Bill.”

He wants to destroy the bird Bill made.

His feeling about writing has changed. He now wants color and magic. He realizes, without my ever having had to say it, the conventional mask of his first novel.

He does not believe he is handsome. He has fears and doubts. His only security is external, material, his family position, of which he is proud.

“My play is the first time I have written about love.” As he sits near me I am consumed with desire and sadness. When I leave I cannot control myself, and again I hold him to me. Again he holds me. No more. And again I must surrender the mirage of love. Oh, Anaïs.

He always refers to his mother’s warmth, her consuming passion for him. So there it is. I can never describe the excitement, the perverse exaltation that takes place. May I find the man who will answer and accept that for which I am ready.

JANUARY 2, 1946

A consuming life. The desperate intensity with Gore was relieved by New Year’s Eve with Marshall. At two o’clock we were dancing together at my place. Poor Luke, who is in love with Marshall, saw the exaltation in the air, in the dancing, and left us. I said: “Let’s forget this. It wasn’t meant to be. Let’s just go to sleep together.”

In the dark, naked, Marshall began to speak of my unreality, the mask of my smile. Then he spoke of how he did not feel my desire, how his other woman lover was so open about hers. I realized he was telling me what Staff tells me: my fear of rejection makes me elusive and makes my physical warmth invisible so that the man too is lost in this non-presence. I almost wept when Marshall said this, but he didn’t know it was fear which caused it—he thought it was merely a lack of substantiality.

At this I began to caress him, arousing his desire with caresses of the mouth until he took me with cries of ecstasy. (I didn’t have time to respond. Oh, Anaïs.) With his hands on my body, as I still lay over him, he said: “You are the earth too, but the finest part of it. Not all earth is just black dirt, but there are the veins of precious metals. You are one of the finest veins of the earth.”

He got up. He put on music, and we took milk and crackers and cheese. It was five o’clock in the morning when we fell asleep. In the morning he was exultant. “I feel strong and clean. I’ve always wanted to wash afterwards, but not this time.” He began to build up the relationship, too high, dreamed of taking me to his parents in West Palm Beach so they would know he had conquered homosexuality. He said, “With you I can create.” He was tender and whimsical, wanted to stay and write his story. But he had to leave because I expected Bill.

Bill came at five. We always begin to talk, becoming mute and overwhelmed with desire. Then everything is total fusion, our bodies understand each other, we sink into voluptuousness. I feel the ecstasy! Such ecstasy! He no longer gets sad afterwards. He whistles while he dresses.

And he left. One hour together in five days. He is completely mastered by his parents again, has become a child again.

When he left, I dressed to meet Gore at the Charles Restaurant, a sad Gore, pale and sardonic. We sat at the St. Regis bar. He mocks his world and yet draws strength from being on the social register. As we walked we met three of his homosexual friends.

I’m saddened by Gore’s vanities, his display of position. I saw a discordant Gore, half detached and half dependent on worldly attributes, terribly in need of glorification. I saw his personae in the world: arrogance, coldness, masking his sensitive self.

He said he wanted to take me to the Stork Club. Sitting at the St. Regis in my astrakhan cape and hat and fuchsia dress, I felt sad and estranged from Gore. If I could only detach myself from his mouth.

JANUARY 1946

Marshall came, completely exhausted from the tensions, ecstasy, emotion, surrounding the “miracle,” as he calls it. He came pale, eager, gusty, worn. He said he must not take me because he was consumed and needed strength for his work, but actually he is playing with the fire of his new life. I was in the same state and glad, for I was thinking of ways to avoid intensity. I lay down to answer the telephone. While I talked he lay beside me, caressing my legs and stomach. We kissed: “Oh, Anaïs, I can’t believe it. I have lost all my fears. I was lying here and I just got roused by your legs, your stomach. It is a miracle.”

Desire overwhelmed him. We moved apart. He had come to see if it could be true, if it would last. All evening we played with our desire, and the perverse denial of it, like moths. Embracing, separating, talking, a game I have learned to enjoy. He said, “I have lost weight.”

I said, “That was the little piece of ear I bit off.”

He laughed and said, “It’s like a door opening! I saw a scene in the movies: when the man and the woman kissed, they showed a door opening, and then another, and then another, and the last one opened into space, the sky! That is how I feel. I have never known this, Anaïs!”

If this could be my gift to Gore. If this could happen with Gore. Gore.

I made him leave early.

I slept ten hours from exhaustion. Then Bill came at one, Bill, who quoted Eliot, “A shadow falls between my feelings and fulfillment,” to describe himself. We went together to visit Isamu Noguchi, to see his work. Met a Hindu girl there. Went to the Museum of Modern Art. We were happy together, light, arm in arm, hand in hand. A light afternoon of freedom and an exploration of art for my beloved prisoner, and with my new understanding of this moth dance around the fire of desire.

I think of my own understanding of the great fire within me, the desire to unite body and spirit. Knowing fully now my own fears of the great fire, I allow only my young moth men to touch me with air and light between the interstices of their fears. At last I have found my rhythm with them, the play of fire and light, of magic, of distance, of loss, of shadows. I understand them. It is like a perfect dance now, on the rim of my own dreams. I am ready, perhaps, for my own mature woman’s fire, at the center, and they will be able to play on the rim of my soul and body with their light fingers and newborn strength. Oh, my love for them, my love for them, can I ever love a man as well! Every shade of fear, of vacillations, of delicacy, of sensitiveness in them touches off something in me so deep, so protective. Oh god, this warmth is flooding me. How can I give it, where? It cannot be given to them; the burden is too large for my loves, my tender, whimsical dream lovers. Three of them could make up the man I will love. Bill is the most childlike of all.

I can’t write or work. I am drugged, weak, exalted.

While Bill was here, Gore telephoned. “I’m on my way down to take you to lunch.”

“But I’m not free.”

“Who is taking you out?” he said in the same tone as Bill had used, severe, jealous and fearful.

Oh, Gore.

The doors have opened for me too, the doors away from frustration. This wild eroticism is centered on the unattainable, for the knowledge that it is unattainable dissolves the fear, but now that it has become attainable, I feel free of frustration. I feel this miracle, that the shadow is being removed. Gore is my only closed door, my last wish. And then I shall be free of fear.

Gore is tall and slender, but more like a Latin, not elongated with a long face or long-legged, but more stocky. He has blond hair which he combs down too severely, parted on the side to make him look older, and eyes that are brilliant and aware with very heavy eyebrows. His skin is pale and smooth, his nose long and fine. His mouth is full, rich, emotional. His smile is his greatest charm, showing two small, white milk teeth protruding slightly (wolf teeth), which reveals the tender and gentle child in him, beneath the austere mask, the frown, the anxiety, the criticalness. His hands are delicate, but strong. When we tried our hardest handshakes (I have a very strong handshake for a woman), he can crush my hand hurtfully.

I write because then I can see him physically. How I desire him, desire him.

I wish I could stop this diary and create. I love my life better than my work. This period, with Hugo away, has been so rich and marvelous. I want to live alone. I want freedom. Such an obsession with love.

The secret of the diary is my illness.

If I could find a man like Bill—Gore, please, please, please—a man who is sensitive and not afraid, sensitive and subtle, who will actively take me, possess me.

I am lost, but happy…happy and sad. Bouleversé. A little crazy with love.

Friday. I felt this that I wrote on the next page and let Gore read it, teasing him because he always knows what I think, “You probably already know what you are going to read.”

He read: “Gore, forgive me. I wanted to give you strength, but the warmth I couldn’t hold back added to your sadness and created a conflict. Women will love you and make you feel their demands. I demand nothing. You can rest in me, and I will be your friend. We will invent a new love. Only take the tenderness, for that I can’t hold back, take it without fear.

“If you only knew how well I understand. For me this that torments you is only a part of your true age. You aged so quickly in so many ways, you are so mature, but only in this you are simply the adolescent, and I believe completely in your ultimate strength. This homosexuality is only a part of adolescence. It is not right to force maturity. Let it be. It will come with your strength, your naturally born strength, and not the forced one, hastened and forced by the too early loss of your mother. We will give each other strength, but only admitting truth, your true age, your true softness and sensitiveness, with the maturity. You will not lose me, the bond is too deep. So do not be sad. Let there be tenderness in which this, the loveliest part of your being, will bloom. Let there be trust and no sadness. I have nothing to hide from you now.”

He read—with sadness.

I said, “I don’t want you to be sad.”

“This only makes me sadder,” he answered. “You see, if I could have loved a woman, it would be you. Now I know my homosexuality is incurable.”

He is worn, pale, sick. Such compassion I felt when he said this. I would make any sacrifice to help him, to give him peace. I would be the mother then, anything he needed. So sincere and true he was at this moment, so well we understand each other. I feel every tension in him, every strain, every “crispation.”

So he is to be my son. I embraced him tenderly when he left, “Bonsoir, chéri.”

Hugo is coming back. I have lived out two complete loves, and one mirage. I fell in love with my life alone. I wish I could live alone, with this stream of lovers, washed in love.

I can’t understand Gore’s knowledge of me, a boy of twenty for whom my thoughts and feelings are transparent. He is the same to me, I can see every true feeling, every false role, every pain, heaviness. I know his thoughts. In my presence he is true, and all his vanities fall away. With me, he is so far from his royal life, from Cornelia. He says, “I could walk out of it and not miss it.”

“But you draw strength from it.”

“No, I draw strength here; that is why I wrote the play here, with you.”

His arrogance with others, his sweetness with me. He gives Cornelia my books to read, shows her my photograph. He has a real love for my work. It is the only time he has taken an interest in another writer, pushed one. He admits his egoism in this. He wants first to make a place for himself, but he wants my work known. He wants to bring his friends to my house. If I can draw away from my desire we could have a fine relationship. But what will happen if I fall in love with a man; what will happen to Gore? The mother abandons you for a husband and lover. I’m in love with his aristocracy, his erect bearing, his intelligence, his sensitivity, his tenue, his sadness, his loneliness, his fears, with the dimple in his cheek when he smiles, his hands, his body, his voice. I see in him racial images again, his French ancestry, his Spanish ancestry, his link with the Austrian Baroness like mine with Denmark, a tone of North within the South. He suffers from Anglo-Saxon rigidity and frigidity. For the role of Maria in his play he chooses a Latin actress. Accents of love, the true accents of love I have heard in his voice, and I can’t say as I should: it is hopeless.

Not a million analyses seem to free me from romantic and tragic loves.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 6, 1946

Bill and I had our most beautiful talk of all on Caspar Hauser. He loves the legend now, sees all I see in it of its application to him. He wants to write the play. I told him the story fully, movingly. Then, passion. In passion he says all, is firm, willful, voluptuous and strong, and then afterwards he becomes again the child, casual, ironic, hating, cutting, stifling warmth.

But the physical ecstasy! The current between us. And the break of this afterwards, as if he is fighting the engulfing passion and trying to keep it in check.

When he was about to leave, Hugo arrived unexpectedly. Bill had to hide in the outside stairs while Hugo came in.

All this made me so anxious, for Bill’s reaction to Hugo’s arrival, for Hugo’s reaction to my reception—how I hated to see him after Bill—for my exploded dream of love with Gore.

Exhaustion. The desire to run away, the need for peace.

Consumed.

Mad Anaïs—Gore, a boy of twenty, who is so old, so old! I’m younger than he is. What irony. He loves the Latin world, he loves feeling, articulateness, expression, color. With him I expand, whereas Bill hurts me with his Anglo-Saxon dryness, his coolness and his detachment. Not Gore. We glow, expand, warm each other. I don’t play a role with him. He has power where I don’t in the world. Authority. Ease.

Hugo threw away Gore’s horoscope because of the terrific relation between Gore’s and mine, every kind of sympathy, every kind of attraction, every kind of bond, conscious and unconscious, physical, spiritual, understanding. Our Mars is in the same place. His Sun is over my Ascendant. His Jupiter is over my Moon. Emotional ties, mystical ties.

“Good God,” said Hugo, “this is too much!”

Mad hopes. And lucidity.

Strange thing, this planet Neptune, a planet of magic first pulling Bill and me together and then Gore and me.

I feel if Gore saw Bill, he would love him. They are so much alike, with the same voice, and similar mouths, but Bill is more feminine-looking than Gore. There is the same arrogance and pride combined with sudden softness, the same cautious writing, the same detachment, only Gore is mature and Latin, and Bill is childish and Anglo-Saxon.

Bill told me about Fowlie courting him, about how often he had been courted, how he could not understand homosexuality. “It’s aesthetically impossible. I can’t understand it.”

Such irony. If only Gore had Bill’s eroticism. But then it would be a catastrophe, for he would be the One, and we cannot marry.

Gore, believing I am thirty, asked me to look up in my diary what I felt and did the day he was born.

He doesn’t want me to write in the diary. I said, “If I can talk to you, I won’t.” Over the telephone he asked, “Have you had any more thoughts for the diary?”

“You know what they are. I won’t tell you.”

“But I like to hear you say them.”

JANUARY 8, 1946

Staff seeks to sober me. He says no matter how powerful Gore seems, he is a frightened child. He could not contain the passion in me. It is the children’s world. I am putting all my passion in it, and if it could be fulfilled, said Staff, I would be dissatisfied very soon with my role in it. For in the love of the child there is no solidity; it is all uncertain, ephemeral. I would have no feeling of strength, no place to lay my head. This, with Gore, was the greatest mirage of all because of the spiritual and emotional nearness. I seek to put a woman’s full, deep passion into the children’s world. There is disproportion and therefore pain.

Staff spoke of the child’s faithlessness (such as Henry’s), the unfixed attractions. He seemed to be describing Bill, the Bill not knowing, being unsure of what I mean, not prizing it, overwhelmed rather than roused to a man’s definite selection and possessiveness.

So, Caspar Hauser, you have come again to haunt me.

Staff smiles. He sees me being too sad and too deeply involved with a small world.

“But I don’t find men like Bill and Gore.”

“Bill and Gore will grow up, won’t they? A Gore of forty might be someone for you.”

As I went to Staff, I walked along the park. At two o’clock it became dark, a storming dark. I feel again that it is the end of the world. I heard bells on a horse’s back. I lost my sense of time and place, didn’t know if I were in France, Spain, a child or a woman.

JANUARY 9, 1946

Yesterday—the dark day—Gore telephoned me. I sensed he is lost to me. Symbolically, he telephoned me from outside and we were cut off. I called him, but he didn’t call me back until this afternoon. I asked him to come. He did. He took me by the waist and kissed me fraternally, warmly.

I said, “I feel we lost each other.”

“I did too.”

“Why? Was it what I said last time?”

“No, it was Hugo coming back.”

“Was my intuition right? I felt you had gone to an orgy.”

“No. I worked. And I went out a great deal.”

“Help me get an airplane seat to go south with Caresse,” I said.

“That I won’t do.”

“Why?”

“It isn’t safe. I think of airplanes as death voyages. So many of my friends were killed in airplanes.” (His father owns Eastern Airlines, and Gore was its youngest air passenger.)

He called up Cornelia from my place. Why? He tries to make Cornelia jealous, and perhaps me. Said he would bring her down Thursday. I said no, she wouldn’t understand. He said, “She would envy you.”

“My freedom?”

“Yes.”

Because there can’t be deception between us, I told him the truth about Hugo’s position, how we spend our money, everything. I explained my prison break, how I made it, and why. That story surprised him. “It gives me courage to do the same thing,” he said. “A break is forthcoming. I can’t be an artist and a senator, or a president. I must choose.”

“What a story,” he repeated.

“This time I surprised you!”

“Yes.”

“Where are you happiest, Gore?”

“Here with you. And you?”

“Here with you.”

I teased him, “Are you going to help me find a man like you?”

“With all my traits but one.”

“Yes, but how did you know I liked your traits? Do you like all of mine?”

“Yes.”

He says he is cynical, suspicious, and does not like people. A shadow fell between us when we discussed whether or not we should go to the Ruban Bleu. I said I was free, that I had given Hugo a good excuse and could stay on a little. “I’m good at that,” I said playfully. But Gore stiffened: “I don’t like this. It makes me think you have done it before.” And he became severe. We would not go to the Ruban Bleu. He would take me home. “Are you angry?” I asked. In an effort at reconciliation I took his hand, but he did not respond. We talked of other things. When I explained my remarks that I like freedom, but not destruction, he said, “Oh, no, I like to break things.”

“What are you going to break, Gore?”

“The diary and the group around you.”

A deep depression. An impossible situation. Jealousy and no fulfillment. He had said, “When are you going to leave Hugo?”

“Not until I find the One.”

Later I reminded him that he had promised to be analyzed a year after our meeting. “Then I would become normal and take you away from Hugo.”

He is always sad and sincere about this, but I must free myself from it.

He always asks whom I see. I gave him the impression that he dispersed the group, which is partly true.

To divert him I reminded him that I made a wish which he must guess, and I invented a ritual which he must guess too. He is sure he knows the wish (that we might be lovers), but the ritual comes from his werewolf play—I want him to bite me with his milk tooth.

Bonsoir.

JANUARY 11, 1946

When Gore said he wanted to bring his theatre friends down, I went into a state of fear. I imagined them sleek, hard, cynical, scornful, successful. I imagined myself failing somehow. I found it too difficult to accede to Gore’s desire to show me off. I lost my confidence.

A talk with Staff restored it. The old nightmare: a half of Gore represents my father’s standards—he admires the best dressed, the most beautiful, the highest achievements. This half frightens me. But Staff brought out the truth: actually Gore looks up to me, is proud of me, thinks of me as a beautiful woman of achievement. He brings his friends to admire me. They asked to meet me. The overwhelming mountain disappeared. Staff said: “Be yourself. You are the one these people are seeking out, even Cornelia. They are attracted by your richness.”

I wept violently at the realization of my crippling illness. Incredible. The descriptive harshness I have towards myself, measuring myself by wrong standards.

I became free and casual again.

I dressed in my peach Greek Recamier Empire dress, with a long black taffeta skirt which I slip over it, making the bust and shoulders very lovely, graceful. The crossed ribbons laced around the waist just below the breast. Hugo brought vodka, cheese and crackers. The people came, and they were not as I had seen them. The diseuse was not a ravishing beauty; the producer and designer were no faultless Greek god homosexuals. The producer was an intuitive man who gave me a ring and read my handwriting: “By great lovingness, you transform everything. At the moment there is a deep depression, which may affect your writing. You seek to tell the truth but are enveloped in magic.” He would not say more because everyone was listening.

They were expected to go somewhere else at ten-thirty, but they left at midnight and Gore stayed on with us.

Oh, the bond with Gore, the feeling that even from across the room we make no movement that is not felt by the other, have no thought unknown to the other. Our glances meet at the same moment. Only my body moves around his like an ocean, receding, returning, espousing. My body receives his movements. I feel suddenly melted in his mouth, or I feel the neatness of his hips, his legs against or within my own. If only he felt this. Last night he felt it more. I felt his eyes clinging to my face. How can I escape this physical spell? If only this could become mystical. But as a weapon against passion, I have this understanding of Gore: his gift to me is his knowledge of me and his capacity to love.

He stayed last night. Surely he must feel all these strings pulling mouth towards mouth, paleness towards paleness, slenderness towards slenderness.

I said, “Are these the friends you told me about who are going to take a house on 85th Street together and rent apartments to other friends?”

“Yes, they are.” Already he had read my thoughts. “Why, would you like to live there? I had thought of living there too.”

We play with the desire, the fear to be somewhere together.

The bond is undeniable, inescapable.

I have faced the extent, the terrifying extent of my neurosis. I conceal it from the world, even from Hugo. I have only now realized how anxiety has devoured my life, thinned my blood, destroyed my pleasures. Everything was contaminated. The rarity was the moments of peace, of enjoyment.

I only confessed to Hugo and to myself recently how after an evening, for instance, I relived every moment in terms of destructive self-criticism. Last night, after overcoming the fear of people, the fear of disappointing Gore, after seeing that all went beautifully, that Gore was relaxed and sweet and himself, that we laughed, I savagely condemned myself for not being comical and humorous.

Because Gore postpones his visit tonight, I feel he loves me less. I could never postpone seeing him.

Staff attacks the anxiety, feeling it is caused by false motivations (the need of approval is really the need to triumph over people I seduce as symbols and not for themselves, which creates guilt).

Oh, god, there is such a labyrinth of suffering from which I’m making superhuman efforts to escape. There is such sadness and fatigue at the struggle to gain freedom, reality and space, but what wonderful art is created out of it. I want to depict the neurosis of our time. But I’m so sick of it. Staff thinks the anxiety caused anemia.

To cure myself of Gore I think of his defects. His lack of security makes him vain, in need of approval, susceptible to flattery. He is perverse, as all homosexuals are. He is intensely jealous and possessive. He is conventional and superficial at times. He is tyrannical, but all of this is external…his defects are neurotic. I love what he truly is; I understand him. He is marvelously gifted, intuitive, tender, interesting, colorful, unusual, sensitive, poetic. I love him.

JANUARY 14, 1946

Gore. There should be no shadow between us now because Thursday night killed the physical spell. Today you came and you were for the first time humorous and objective, and I was at the most painful moment of awareness of what we had lost. It could have been a tremendous love, Gore, changing our lives, helping you to bloom. It could have been a big relationship. The pain of giving it up is unbearable.

Too soon, another blighted, unlived love. All day I’ve been in the blackest state. This time I won’t have the courage to go on. I want to die this time.

Oh, Gore, what I didn’t say today, what you didn’t let me say. I can kill the desire, but I can’t kill the tenderness, the need to touch you when your eyes are dark, when you are pale.

Well, it’s done. Yesterday everything died in me, every hope. If after Thursday night he didn’t feel as I did, then I can no longer desire or hope.

It is done.

If this be my illness, my feeling too deeply, then I am gravely ill indeed, ill enough to die.

This was the first time we had a false meeting, when I didn’t say what I felt because I felt he didn’t want the sadness, when his irony and teasing almost stifled me.

So Hugo plays his role again, comes home and finds me ill with bronchitis (ill with forcing the rich love back into the breast, back into the womb, ill with an aborted love). He is tender, anxious, paternal, maternal, takes care of me. I hide in him, relax, want to weep, then try to react for his sake.

I awakened stronger. The fight for health is superhuman. This morning, to fight the bronchitis, I went to three doctors. The third was Staff.

On the one hand, I went to Elizabeth Arden and bought a valise there for my new life. For my new life and new self I want the best. So I have a valise with toilet preparations, black and smart. Today I bought the best vanity case of red leather at Jansen’s. I have the best dressmaker (a negro Frenchwoman) making me a smart black dress copied from an expensive one given to Frances. I have the good fuchsia dress I bought for Christmas and one pair of new shoes from Miller. I have thrown away all my old clothes, clothes that have been fixed. I have never been a real bohemian about my own person, never became unkempt, careless. I never ceased to have beautiful nails, clean hair, never ceased loving finery. So that, at least, is sincere. I begin a new life.

I begin A, B, C, with the clothes. I like good clothes, and they suit me. About my home—I don’t know yet what I want.

JANUARY 15, 1946

An evening with Marshall. He has made a painting, wants to write a play. When lovemaking, we began fiercely and then he couldn’t carry through.

“I’m afraid again, Anaïs.”

I was relaxed, humorous. “Oh, don’t be sad.”

“Too many years of homosexuality. I can’t let this happen to me.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. Maybe I’m not the woman for you.”

“Don’t say that. I love you, Anaïs.”

“I’m not slutty enough.”

“You’re slutty enough,” he said gaily, and we laughed.

“Love me but don’t take me too seriously. Take me like a whim. I can stand your whims, now yes, now no.”

“But I want you.”

“Well, you’ll have me. Tonight was just caresses. They were good, weren’t they? It wasn’t so tragic.”

“Be patient with me, Anaïs.”

I left lightly, because I don’t love him, and I was even glad, for I wanted to slip out of this relationship, which for me was a whim, and which my deeper feelings for Gore and Bill made difficult to maintain.

So I must think that even if Gore had been my lover and all had gone well, the relationship could not be good for me. I would still be the mother, helping him, and never sure of his love, never secure, never free of anxiety.

But I made an important discovery. My hostility was not directed against others, but against myself. It was savage self-criticism, savage self-destruction.

I have never described, even in the diary, the act of self-murder which takes place after my being with people. A sense of shame for the most trivial defect, lack, slip, error, for every statement made, or for my silence, for being too gay or too serious, for not being earthy enough, or for being too passionate, for not being free, or being too impulsive, for not being myself or being too much so.

JANUARY 16, 1946

That was the darkest hole I fell into. I wept. I wept before Staff at the surrender of the dream of Gore. I wept with anger at my choice of weak men. Staff cleared up everything. He revealed my masochism as guilt for stolen pleasures. My hostility has turned inward for fear of it destroying others. A great weight was lifted. Then he praised the deep insight and wisdom in my work, how with imagination I deepened the relationship between Lillian and Djuna, when in others’ hands it would have been merely ordinary. I feel light and free and strong.

Then Gore called me up just to know if I were well.

Then Wilson came.

He said, “You’re neurotic about not seeing me. You’re always sick when I want you to come to my house.”

“I’m not neurotic, but you always try to force me. What you want I can’t give you.”

When he came, he forced a kiss on me, which I recoiled from violently. The rest of the scene is blurred, by his anger, incoherence, irrationality. He realized I was determined never to be his mistress again. He sat down, angry and seeking a way to avenge himself.

He lit upon my writing. “In Winter of Artifice, I sympathize with the father.”

“That’s just what estranges us. You already said that in the restaurant. Then you wonder why I won’t see you.”

“I will give you lessons in writing for nothing.”

“No one can teach me to write. I have my own way.”

“I’ve given up hope of absorbing you—you’re too strong a personality. But I could tell you what’s wrong.”

I stopped him. “What you say now about my writing is not objective. You’re angry because I won’t sleep with you. I made up my mind long ago, quietly, that you didn’t understand me. People who don’t understand each other can’t help each other, only destroy each other. You can’t destroy my confidence in what I am doing.”

What I didn’t say was: “You’re an inferior writer to me. You’re not creative. You’re dull.” No. I’ve only learned to defend myself, not to attack yet. I wouldn’t let him spill his rancor and give him the pleasure of a battle as a substitute for sex. I was cold, silent, superior, and that unsettled him.

“You’re unjust and angry. Don’t make it seem literary when it isn’t,” I said.

I had stuck home, because he believes in his objectivity. He doesn’t believe his role of critic masks his impotent rage at being a mediocre writer and an ugly man.

He was so ugly.

I hated him, hated his way of saying my name, his brutality, violence, ugliness, and cheapness. I was glad not to have trusted him with the diary.

In the face of Bill’s and Gore’s beauty and delicacies, what a caricature Wilson was.

“I’d better go,” he said.

“You’d better.”

He tried a humble reconciliation, “Well, good luck, and do include the Henry part in the Winter of Artifice.” (He identified with the father and the analyst and felt rejected.)

Tant pis. He is full of meanness.

Gore, my love, I see you so clearly now. I see you insecure and leaning for support on external values, because you don’t yet know your inner personal values. I love you deeply for this true inner self revealed to me in your sincerity. This that you do not yet see or know clearly is the most valuable part of you. You need external proof of love, of your value, but they will count as nothing if you do not acquire faith in the core. There alone lies strength. Your faith in the hidden core, the best, where feeling and creation and deep values issue, that is what we must seek together. You found simply that you could love no further, but I had to destroy an already rich, full passion, to kill something already born, already living. It was a little easier for you to remain where you were, at a distance, free of desire for woman, but I had to destroy the dream of a complete love while knowing the tremendous rarity and power of it.

The “values” of your parents, such as Clark Gable handsomeness, top notch celebrities, etc., are superficial, and at the same time they overwhelm you, for you are made of a finer, more sensitive, more intelligent, more gifted, more subtle quality. And if you pit yourself against this you are pitting yourself against a glorified emptiness which will destroy you, for your value lies elsewhere. All the values of your parents are external, for appearances, not deep. Yours are much more than this. You have to separate yourself from this because it causes you uneasiness, dissatisfaction. You could triumph in any realm, but if it wasn’t the one which has value for you, you would never be content. The deeper Gore would feel ashamed to be a best seller, or to be a Clark Gable. If I didn’t think you were better, that you were more than all this, I wouldn’t say this. Tu es plus que tout çela, mieux que tout çela. Our life here is more real. My love for you is more real than anyone else’s, because it is for the inner you, your imagination, your feelings, your dreams, your doubts, your fears, your soft and your strong self, for your days of weakness as well as power, for your creativity as well as for your lost self, for your gifts and brilliance as well as for your insecurities, for the you that you are becoming. What I love is the courage, the efforts, and the truthfulness. Strength is a rhythm, not an absolute.

JANUARY 18, 1946

A day of happiness. Gore took me to dinner. In the middle of the dinner he said, “I wonder if there could be a marriage without sex.”

“Yes,” I said, “like Gide and his cousin Madeleine. Why? Is that what you proposed to Cornelia?”

“No, that is what I propose to you.”

I was taken aback. I don’t remember what I said. I saw his distress.

He asked, “Or do you feel you need Hugo?”

“No, it isn’t that. We’ll talk later.”

At home I explained. “Wait a little while.”

He said, “A year.” He explained that our relationship was so wonderful, that I was the only one he would marry, that I would accept his homosexuality.

“And would you accept my having a lover?”

“I would be jealous, of course, but as long as you were truthful, and as long as it were only physical, I would accept it.”

I had begun the evening in great gaiety and lightness, free of my desire, of tragedy. I came out shining. He said, “You look so dramatic! So electrical!”

And this wish of his gave me so much security in his love that I was in ecstasy. He talked about his constancy. His fear was rather that people should ask what could I see in him, or that he should disillusion me.

If only Bill had made such a wish. Only this from Gore gave me such a feeling of security, of trust, so that now I can give out freely the love I feel. Freely. I don’t feel that I gave more than I was given. He had his dream.

For the first time we talked to each other at close range, sitting on the couch near each other, relaxed. Never so near, so relaxed, so tender.

I let him read the last pages I wrote. He was amazed. Understood the difficult, painful transposition I had to make. “How could you?”

“Well, Gore, it was either lose you, run away from you, or kill the desire. It was hard, like death, really, like Maria being willing to die for the love of Stephan in your play. It was a death. But what I feared actually was that the love should be harmed, whereas it is still alive.

And now I fear for Gore, not for myself, for I shall find a complete love and he may not. And at this point he needs me more than I need him. But I feel happy.

At the door I said, “Guess the ritual.”

He couldn’t.

“I want you to bite me with your milk tooth.”

He tried, not very hard. He said, “My milk tooth doesn’t touch the lower one so I can’t bite with it.”

We laughed. I had said I wanted a ritual like no one else’s because of the fraternal kiss I give to several, Pablo, Eduardo, etc.

We embraced fraternally.

But what I enjoyed was the disappearance of his fear, his melting, his trust. If I can be light with him, as with Marshall, we will be happy.

We’re overcoming his fear. We were playful. I told him how I wanted to smooth out his frown.

He said, “That’s what my mother always wanted to do.”

I then sat far away and said, “I won’t mother you.”

“That will fix you,” he said, laughing.

I give him his small manly victories. I always answer his direct questions. They are like a masculine thrust, spontaneous and impudent. I evade very few of them.

JANUARY 19, 1946

Analysis gives power. The way I felt last night when I went out to dinner with Gore was like a real Spanish woman: integrated, vivid, electrical, strong, gay. Not grieving, pale, wan, nebulous, but vivid. Today sickness again, weakness, but happiness.

Sunday: Gore came. He lay back, became so gentle and sweet, so lyrical and tender, so pure and simple. He is anxious about Bill. He thinks that since he and I are not lovers, I will want Bill again and he will lose me.

I have told him with Bill it was passion and not this emotional nearness. He said, “A passion could take you away from me. Whereas nothing will take me away from you. I could never love a man. I know that.”

“Nothing will take me away from you, Gore.”

He was depressed. “Whenever I get depressed, I will ask you about Bill.”

The truth is a difficult thing to tell, even when one wants to. What is the truth?

It is true I can imagine myself living with Gore and not with Bill, because Bill is aloof, detached, except in sensuality. Yet with Gore I would suffer from the absence of the physical tie. With Gore I have harmony.

I wanted to, and did, love Bill wholly, but this wholeness was shattered by his passivity, his attitude towards me. Bill…he left without a word of love. Gore is filled with love.

Gore is in Washington for a week. I miss him. I can’t separate from him. If I dance an improvised dance, I’m dancing for him. If I hear music, I hear it with him. I like to talk about him, to say his name.

A fantasy: Gore and I are in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, and leading a life like a dance from one brilliant point to another in a current of writing. We call on Rebecca West, who would say, “What a witty young man,” on the French, who would like his Latin air and quick mind; on the Greek poet in Athens, who would fall in love with him; on Durrell, who would like his writing; everyone would be charmed and eager to invite us; and Gore and I would seek our solitude by the Mediterranean in the sun, weaving our stories out of our own Thousand and One Nights. We would never run out of stories, for we have the body and face to create new ones, to awaken confidences, to receive secrets. People would be open to both of us, love us, and we would illumine each other, say the astrologers. And if I can be cool enough and can divorce myself from his mouth and take my desire elsewhere, if we have this understanding together, we could be happy and free together and find the marvelous everywhere. We could travel, see the Riviera, the Italian lakes, Bali, and also be quiet together and work together in our subterranean life. So at last I would have found Caspar Hauser and live out my love. For the first time I feel this love as a new beginning, as if I were his age.

I never fantasized a life with Bill.

Friday: I wrote in one breath the first ten pages of the party in my new book, in a new way, being able to execute concept of neurotic world vision as we experience life. It is an interior party, a fusing of symbols and externals.

Saturday I wrote five more pages. Yesterday five more, on Djuna’s absence from the party.

Thanks to Staff I pay no attention to criticism. I listen only to myself.

JANUARY 29, 1946

Monday towards five o’clock Gore telephoned, five minutes after returning to New York. I had an engagement but I broke it. He said, tyrannically, “Meet me at Charles.” It was to celebrate his coming out of the army. We arrived at the same time. He called me from his taxi, leaped towards me, kissed me. He was in his civilian clothes, looking more slender, more youthful, more vulnerable. Gore. He noticed my lace blouse. He has sensual reactions, then retractions, then pleasure. He says: “I feel as if I were coming home. In Washington, I felt lost. You have ensorcelled me. What I used to accept now I don’t like. I found my grandfather, the senator, boring…”

We went to Ruban Bleu (where Albert gave me his first kiss). We drank together. We sat close, arm against arm, sometimes holding hands. There was great warmth. He told me about his mother beating him until the blood came. She said to him, “No one will ever love you as I do.”

He wanted his mother to die, and he imagined how her jewels would look on me. “This is the most fabulous love in the world today.”

I’m so moved that the boy who lived in the most external of all worlds should be most capable of a dream, and of giving himself to a dream, the dream of our marriage. Why do I live in it knowing the obstacles in reality, our difference of age, yet dreaming it, wishing it (long before he said it, I had imagined that he would). We have a world together. It is now real. He wants to live in the Village. I dream of a house in the Mews, a little house where he would live on one floor, and I on another. Why? Why? Are we truly so close, so similar? Is this another spell? It’s strange that I like his earthiness. When he is a little drunk, he is very sexual, a realist in his talk. He oscillates between two worlds. His hands are square, not long and fragile. We were both obviously happy. People could swear we were in love. I say, as I only said to Bill, “Bonsoir, chéri!” And he asks me, “How is Guillaume?” without knowing that Bill signs himself Guillaume.

I was able to drink five whiskies without bad results. Was cheerful and humorous all of the next day, clowning for Hugo in the morning with a heat pad over my head, pretending to have a heavy hangover. “The logical conclusion to a life of spirituality. Now I’m a night club frequenter and a drunkard.”

Lightness and pleasure. I write well. I wrote pages on Djuna’s flight from the party. Real wonder lies in the depths; as soon as you look deeply you find the extraordinary. The truth, which only the child and the artist tell, is the real wonder. Magic and power lie in the truth, the truth.

Cornelia is attacking me, has begun waging a big battle against me (she says my work is decadent). She admits she is jealous and feels Gore’s devotion to me.

He comes to me depressed, ill, and slowly begins to glow, to come alive.

“Until this moment I felt terrible.” His mood lifts. He lives in a world of terrors. He goes through battles with threatening forces. Poor Gore, and his fear of criticism, his resentments. Someone has insulted him. I can help him. I feel serenity. I feel confidence. I feel confidence in his love. I do not fear Cornelia. He says “cherie” as he leaves me. (I bring the fraternal kiss a little closer to the mouth.) Oh, Gore. The high sense of romance is there.

He said: “I often feel, when I look into the mirror, I am looking for a skipped, missed fragment of my life, my childhood. I’m constantly aware how they run into each other, how the feelings I have are the same ones I had as a child.”

A child shall lead me into the external worlds, a child shall cover me with his mother’s jewels, a child shall take me into the world I rejected, and I shall take him into mine.

He is so easily wounded, hurt, destroyed. Cornelia told him she liked his first novel better than his second. Why? She had no reasons that made sense, but her statement disturbs his faith, as all negative statements find an echo in that part of ourselves which doubts, and which is dependent on confirmation. Why does it count so much?

“I must know what everybody thinks,” he said.

Most of all you must find out why they say and think as they do. When it doesn’t make sense it’s because there is another reason. When Wilson can’t have me for a mistress, he attacks my writing. Perhaps Cornelia is quarreling for other reasons. “Be sure you can see why a criticism is made so it will not harm you.” So now she will take the side of his doubts and I the side of his dreams.

Gonzalo and I are still walking the streets together (in his new suit bought with Dutton’s money). We still sit at cafés together, we still lament having no shelter to make love, and have to content ourselves with furtive caresses stolen with the anxiety that Hugo might come, but we are not walking the streets of the present, but of the past, an echo of an early passion, its human echo, a once-shared passion, a flame with enduring reverberations. We are not sitting at today’s cafés, but at an extension of the Paris cafés. It is the old passion, the old love which guides our steps, which orders the drinks, guides our talk; it is the old passion which makes pale gestures with familiar warmth. The spark is not there, only a human, lingering echo of the past. The streets of a nine-year-old love are still richly peopled. He is still telling me wonderful, lusty stories, even if I do not hear them as vividly. He is still full of Indian humor, malice, roguishness, rich with experience. He dreams of making a big fortune with a business deal, buying a bigger press, and he is now playing at mature constructions of a life, cheerfully and playfully. But it is all tributaries from a lost central flame, running with mellowness, out of the past, echoes and reverberations.

I always go where life and the flame are, to share what is immediate, my present self with the match to my present self, Gore. Under the warmth of my strength, he is allowed to be what he is, the child cheated of his childhood.

“I told Cornelia about writing my play in your presence. She fights you now.”

His first novel is dedicated to his mother Nina, his play to me. His second novel?

“Be careful,” said Staff, “to not enter this new world with any need to seduce, charm, conquer what you don’t really want for the sake of approval. The frozen moment before the people who belong to Gore’s mother’s world was due to your fear that they might not approve of you, your desire that they should.”

I feel my center now. I feel my integrity and confidence. I want to take from this external world what I want and what is a part of me, not to be corrupted (as my father was corrupted). To add to myself the beauty it gives me. To reach mature playing and enjoyment with my oldest son.

Gore, my love, I lie here listening to music and so filled with you that I marvel that an incomplete love should seem so complete. I ask myself whether you feel this, the intensity of a full love, the sense of completeness, of fulfillment.

(Gore read this and wrote in his own hand, “Yes.”)

Hostility

For the first time hostility appeared clearly in my relations to Hugo, yesterday, when the time came for Hugo to take me…I never desire him. I feel I must obey his will because he is good to me, because he has a right to me, because I want to give him what he needs as he gives me what I need. Also, I would like to find satisfaction at home. The asexual relation to Gore, which keeps me so erotically aroused, and the fact I do not desire anyone else, is hard to bear. I am filled with sensuality. So I will yield to Hugo. But my body bristles against him. I can’t bear his eroticism, his preliminary caresses. I hasten his taking me because his caresses have the opposite effect they are intended to have. They make me bristle, and I want to cry out, “I don’t want you!” That would break his life. I can’t do it. So I will submit, close my eyes. Once he is inside of me it is easier to close my eyes and imagine it is Bill or Gore lying over me. I’m angry that Hugo breathes heavily as Bill does not, so that it interferes with my fantasy. I’m angry at all the expressions of pleasure he shows because they break into my fantasy. I close my eyes and I feel not Bill’s sex, or Gore’s sex, but their mouth. Their mouth! (I won’t let Hugo kiss me on the mouth.) And with this I can reach the orgasm. But when Hugo has reached his pleasure, immediately I hate him again, violently. I can’t be tender. I would like to destroy him. I find a pretext to get up, to go to the bathroom. I hate lying beside him afterwards.

How can I hate Hugo when in reality there is nothing to hate? The abysm between reality and my feelings is tremendous.

“You do not hate Hugo,” said Staff. “Your hostility is towards the one who is the aggressor, the taker, who is doing what a part of you wants him to do but which a part of you has denied in yourself (you rejected self-assertion, violence, taking, as you saw them in your father and mother). These are the elements of which you were the victim, and they are therefore to be hated. But these are also positive elements of life which you need: activity, self-assertion, anger, power. So you place them on others, and when others act them out you hate it in them. Hugo fulfills his natural husband-lover needs and assertions. And you feel hostility towards this which you have repressed in yourself, which you only allow to come through in a perverse form towards those who, with the same perversity towards their own aggression, hate it and fear it: Bill, Gore, and the other children. When your love wants to come through then you have the problem of hatred, which comes through simultaneously with love because of your relation to your parents. To suppress the hatred, you controlled the love and dealt it out in compartments. The hatred still came out, only indirectly: your hostility towards Hugo in faithlessness, in sharing the young lovers’ son-like hostility towards Hugo, your hostility towards Miller. Wilson is right to say you are destructive, but it was in so subtle and indirect a form that it was practically undetectable, and greatly suppressed too, almost imperceptible. You let others do it…Miller, for example, who was so aggressive in his writing. And you played at being thoroughly gentle, a victim of the aggressions, which made you guiltless. Bill feels the same way. You express his wants of which he is ashamed, so he will punish his sensuality in you. We project this unbearable self onto others so that we can hate it in them and destroy it. Now, these condemned elements are necessary to life; when you kill them, you kill life.”

Last night Gore came—a long, lovely, playful evening, so full of unconscious richness, talk, listening to Wagner, reading his synthesis of his play. He read my party pages. “The best you have done. All I can say is, I wish I had done it.”

“That comes out of us,” I said. “You inspired me. I will dedicate this book to you.” That pleased him.

I enjoy the perversities. I’m not masochistically subjugated or a victim to them. I enjoy his perversities: his love of his father, his hostility towards Hugo, his love-hatred of his mother, his jealousy when I speak of other loves, the lover I would take later (I described Graeffe). “I only ask you never to let me see him,” he said severely.

He had said, “I don’t want you to live like a nun.”

I said, “So you won’t be concerned…I’ll take a lover later.”

I enjoyed his suffering, as he makes me suffer when he describes his affairs. “You know, I need them less. I used to have frenzies of promiscuity, one every night. Now I need less. And it doesn’t satisfy me.”

What is this? A step towards me? No. I am the mother. When he dreams of his new place (where I will have an apartment in the same house) he dreams that I will feed him late at night when he returns.

But when he left, I asked him to kiss me “for the two weeks you will be away.” He was shy and gentle, and a little lost. He had already kissed me warmly on my cheek and neck. This time I put up my mouth fully and we kissed. Again, as with the first embrace, he answers, but does not seek more. We pressed our mouths together and separated. But I felt the sweetness and the fulfillment of a wish, a dream I have had so often.

I haven’t conquered my desire.

FEBRUARY 6, 1946

Strange that whomever I love takes on a quality of light. The illumination has withdrawn from Bill because it was not lived out; the life that was being thwarted by his absence has been transferred to Gore.

He is now illuminated for me. I am less unhappy with him (emotionally I feel answered, only physically am I thwarted). But I question this light.

FEBRUARY 10, 1946

My world is so large I get lost in it. My vision is hard to sustain. Last night I had a real fear: am I insane or a genius? I am alone in what I am writing. It’s a big burden for a woman.

From Florida, Gore writes me the word YES, all alone, in a letter.

Yes to what I feel, write, think. Yes to all. Such a subtle, aware, accurate way to reach me, to bring us close. For these things I love him.

“There is more equality here,” admitted Staff.

When I opened his letter, a flush of pleasure warmed me. Actually, my blood so stirred, it rushed to my face. The word was so penetrating, so warm, so intimate, so direct. Yes, Gore, you have a gift for relationship.

FEBRUARY 17, 1946

Gore rushed back before his two weeks were up, three days early, and telephoned me as soon as he awakened today to meet him at Charles.

“I thought I shouldn’t leave you too long. I must watch over you, not leave you long out of my sight. What about the Viennese?”

“I was faithful,” I answered.

And it all begins again. I said my feelings were calmer, but when he telephoned my heart began to skip beats and lose its rhythm of peace. Elation. I had been concerned with his saying he found homosexuality boring. (When I mentioned Gore saying he felt unfulfilled, Staff had said, “There is hope for him.”) But when he added he would like to meet Christopher Isherwood because their writing was similar and he would like to have written Prater Violet, I said, “And if you find him, he may be more than an ordinary sexual experience since he is your intellectual equal.”

“Not the same as this, this is the best,” he said, so simply, so clearly, so sincerely.

Oh, god, the temptation is great, to live with him, to marry him, to make a new life. In the bus I take his arm, “I’m so glad you’re back.”

“Why, it’s always a beautiful day when I come back to you…look.” We looked at the grey, soggy day made beautiful. Gore. What a man he will be someday, when he is made whole. He is not a homosexual, but a split being, split by his mother’s violence, and who saw his father harmed by her too.

Such sincerity with me, and, he said rightly, “our insincerity with other people.” His wisdom is what characterizes him. He can express violence, too. His violence is not crippled. And his body is not dead like Eduardo’s. He reacts to my clothes, charms, notices and responds. He feels.

FEBRUARY 18, 1946

Today I finished writing Part II of Ladders to Fire and was so disciplined that I reduced 200 pages to 80. The party is a wonderful section, like one of Martha Graham’s ballets, full of rhythm, rich, full of color, and strangeness. It’s like a mobile, a modern painting. It satisfies me. I’m exhausted, nervous. My love for Gore and his for me is the drug I need to create. In the sun yesterday his eyes were green and gold, the color of his tanned skin is golden. There is intensity in him, moments of open sweetness, moments of serious manliness and courage. He faces pain, doesn’t shrink from it. If only he were but ten years older. He is ripe for passion, capable of passion.

Tuesday. Oh, Anaïs, you’re dreaming again. My feelings go out to Gore with wholeness, and the next day, when I wanted to bring him this wave of wholeness and faithfulness, he had already broken the dream, our élan, the closeness, by a night out with a sailor. His need of telling me was an unnecessary pain he inflicted. He needs to put this between us as a way of saying: we cannot be closer; I am not wholly yours.

And so, hurt, I took my desire elsewhere, mocking my own seeking of an unbroken, whole dream. At a party at Maya’s, Paul André danced with me and became violently passionate, so passionate we had to stop dancing or he would have lost control. Then a young, slim Austrian said, in a fever, “This is not a dance, it’s a spell.” And we danced like one person, drugged. Today Chinchilito telephoned me, and I said yes, I would come tomorrow at ten. That ends the dream of wholeness.

FEBRUARY 20, 1946

Today I could relate to Chinchilito better than before. Things are said, revealed, acted, expressed, withheld out of fear, and these make up the tapestry. Chinchilito. We began to invent a room together, a kaleidoscopic, mobile room.

I write to Bill every day because he is in hell, his hair shaved, his skin spoiled by the hardest training among the coarsest men, living in barracks. Bill among those men, my god, is like a young girl among them, a child. So for this I write him every day, not because he finds any words to answer me.

Midnight. I thought my visit to Chinchilito would kill my desire for Gore. As he had insisted on knowing the truth, I said: “Gore, I don’t want to lie to you, but I must tell you, I have taken a lover. I must ask you not to make me talk more about it.” I wanted to test him (he can’t bear deceit). He was deeply disturbed. From then on I don’t know what happened. It was if a barrier had broken down. I kept telling him: “If it hurts you, I can’t do it. It’s my obsession, not to hurt you…oh, Gore.”

“How is it, how is it for a woman? It’s different. I’m not possessed. It is I who take.” (He was struggling with this feeling: Anaïs is possessed.)

I hid my head on his shoulders and confessed, “I thought of you all the time, every moment.” Oh, god, it was true, it was Gore I kissed with my eyes closed, not Graeffe. Then, when I came home, I wept. It is the same as for the man, when it is done without love—it leaves no memory, it doesn’t stay in the body. That’s why I don’t like it. “But tell me, Gore, if it estranges us, I don’t want it.”

He could feel, of course, that there was no change. I suddenly embraced him and said, “I belong to you, you know that.”

“I know that,” he said with the same vehemence. His emotionalism, his responsiveness—we never came so close. We sat close, as we never have before. In my desire to reassure him, I expressed all my love. He received it. He answered. He kissed me back, near, near the mouth, not on the mouth. He told me after he took the boys he always thought of me, sad that it wasn’t me. We were close, so truthful. He said the homosexual act was like a meal, no more. It was not a break in his love for me. He was afraid mine would be. I said, “When you came here, you sensed no change, did you?”

I had received him with the same élan. My sadness when I left Chinchilito was that this will remove me from Gore, make me cold. I found out that Gore doesn’t mind my desire, that he didn’t want to be unfair and demand a chastity which he would not practice, that he only feels it cannot be as casual for a woman. Some barrier was broken, a physical barrier. There was so much feeling in his embrace. So many things he said. He didn’t want to take and not give. He didn’t want to hurt me, ever. It was the nearest we shall ever come to a real love scene. I could not hold back my quick, spontaneous kissing. I was terribly moved. Although, just before he came, I had listened to L’Ile Joyeuese, and I was in ecstasy. If only Gore knew such big waves of love which carry one over the highest obstacles. He only knows the small waves.

Four o’clock in the morning. Awakened by a storm. Inexplicably happy, as if I had had a sensual night with Gore, so much did the emotions make us flow together. It is a magical power to touch a finger one loves. I touched each one of his fingers as we talked, his ears, his cheek, kissed him obliquely, touched his arm. His slenderness is strangely lusty, as his character at twenty is strangely firm. He faces me. His body never shrinks. He has will and courage, and all the possibilities of manhood.

He is proud of my work.

FEBRUARY 21, 1946

Went with Gore to Noguchi’s studio. At the moment that I wanted to leave, I looked at him and saw he wanted to leave too. So we went together to eat at the Jumble Shop. He is tormented that there is somewhere a man who has possessed me, who feels he has possessed me.

“I won’t see him again,” I said.

“I know how you feel.”

Well, there is something gained, but actually he cannot accept this without pain, as I can’t accept the homosexuality without pain, so there it is: the pain, and the conflict.

FEBRUARY 22, 1946

An hour before meeting Gore at the restaurant, I decided he must have security. He has given me all that he can give, including his feelings. I want to protect him. He needs to grow, and to grow he needs trust. I can do without it because I’m older. For his great tenderness and sincerity of feeling, I will accept my role. I will protect him with a lie. I said, “Gore, I’ve made a decision. For a year I will belong to you exclusively. This is worth it.”

“I can’t make the same promise.”

“I don’t expect it.”

I treat him not like my child, but like a passionately loved brother. So after dinner he took me out to share in his perversions. We went to a homosexual nightclub, saw an astounding man-woman who was fascinating, corrupt, stirring in me all my masculinity. I wanted to rape him, attack him. I wanted to be a man. Gore unrestrainedly showed his attraction for a boyish young man, but the young man was violently making love to a woman. I saw in Gore such an expression of avidity, childish lust. The fact that he desired a boyish, humorously innocent boy, not the corrupt fairies, touched me and convinced me of the childish narcissism of his homosexuality (quest for the lost childhood). I felt tender, dissolved. He bought me a flower. He held my hand. He confessed his fears: he either worries about his writing or his health. “There’s something wrong with my insides. I have vomiting spells. And I have to be operated on for a fistula which may cause cancer.” Anxiety, fear of death. In the street and in the taxi, it is he who now takes my hand. And upon leaving me, he kissed me on the mouth. Very well, I shall love my sons with passion and find myself a husband, but let Gore have his dream, which he needs now to strengthen him. At twenty he is so full of courage, and he has trusted me. I will not hurt him. He has given me the emotional tenderness, warmth, understanding that Bill never gave me.

Yet how it hurt me today that Frances threw away the little bed where Bill slept, where we made love several times.

What Gore most fears is Bill’s return, and he is right to fear it, for I have the same kind of love for Bill, and he can give me physical fulfillment. There is a possibility of his giving me greater emotional fulfillment as he grows older, though I believe he will always remain the child of a “father and mother who didn’t believe in showing feeling.”

In the middle of an evening, at the most unexpected moments, Gore remembers the bird in the middle of the studio. Gore, mon enfant malade, has at times the cramped, stiff appearance of anxiety. He then seems to move with difficulty (the mere act of living becomes difficult). His face loses its softness and is set in a forced, false mask, jerky and brusque, which is painful for me to see, for then I know he is bound and pretending, moved by neurotic compulsions. I love him in his natural moments. I know too, he touches the depths of depression, but never fully. Pleasure and elation are rare in him. I’ve tried for the first time not to treat him as a child, but to relate simultaneously to him both as a child and an old man, for there is in him a side that is not only mature, but even promiscuous and cynical, a side of him that sees people coldly, in the light of their defects. I feel more relaxed to discover his standards are not as severe as my father’s—he doesn’t care about clothes and luxury. I thought he demanded “perfection.” No, he wants freedom, richness, experience.

FEBRUARY 25, 1946

Last night Gore came. After writing under the stimulus of benzedrine, he was depressed. I talked about analysis, had to confess I had been to Staff because “I wanted to die.” Although Staff said if Gore were analyzed I would lose him, I want him free and strong. We aren’t lovers anyway, and what he wants is impossible to me, to live with me, to be close to me, possessively, emotionally, but to sleep with boys. When he takes me out he does not conceal his interest in boys. He wants me to share this. I get hurt, though I try to act cynically. He discusses them with me, undresses them, tells me how it will be: “This one will be too white, and he will want all sorts of things I don’t want. He will be complicated and make a scene. They do terrible things which I don’t do. My approach is entirely non-phallic.”

I tried then to know more. What does he mean? “I do the least of all, and I am glad when it is over.”

In the taxi he takes my hand and talks about our life together. Upon leaving me, he kisses my mouth. He moves me emotionally and erotically. Yet it can’t be, this life, but on the other hand, because he has power over my feelings, I can’t envisage not living near him at all. Curious. Mentally, he is full of aggression, thrust, directness, essentially active, not passive.

When I hear Gore’s voice over the telephone, I am so moved, and I want so much to be with him. I get lifted by yearning, as if I were going to melt into him again, then I awaken to reality and seek to quiet my feelings. I was afraid of this: frustrated in my élan towards Gore, my desire and feelings for Bill have reawakened.

Terrible depression.

Party.

The studio decorated with Hugo’s two new immense copper plates. The mattresses are taken off the beds, making four low oriental divans. I installed more lights, hired a flamenco guitarist. Guests brought their musical instruments and sang with great animation. Steve Heidrick is a handsome, suave, elegant young man who dances beautifully, who loves to dance with me. He dances clingingly, caressingly, with his brow against mine, cheeks touching. Gore saw us dancing often together, and although he doesn’t like to dance and does not dance well, he “Cut in” and said, “I wanted to take you away—no more dancing with him.”

“Release me from my promise.”

“I will not. You are mine. You said you’d be mine for a year.”

Immediately his reaction is to seduce his rival. Steve is homosexual and wears the sign ring on his little finger. I love his active self, acting on impulse. Here, not out in the world, he becomes soft and gentle.

Though I have suffered tension while preparing for the party, once it was on I abandoned myself to the magic of it, and it became beautiful.

After I made Gore jealous, I melted with pity. He is young. I do not enjoy causing him anxiety.

The enormous labor, only four hours’ sleep, and cleaning the house this morning exhausted me. I spent the day in bed. Gore calls me. He has written a poem, which I help him sell to Harper’s Bazaar. He talks about my work to everyone. My responsive man. I say to him, “We teased each other last night, and I always get uneasy.”

“You shouldn’t.” (He has confidence in my love, the rascal.)

“But you can always read something in the diary to reassure you.”

“And you always get a poem, and that is even better.”

He asked me what I put on my nail polish to give all the colors a warm gleam.

“Gold.”

“Like your writing,” he said.

MARCH 11, 1946

I did a lecture and reading at Amherst, and it was a success. I was fêted, worshipped, and I signed twenty books. There was both tension and elation. I read like a dramatic actress, made friends with James Merrill, a twenty-year-old poet, answered the mathematicians who questioned me on the “fluctuating point of view” before sixty persons. I was surrounded by soldiers. I went to sleep in Jimmy’s room, yearning for Gore, loving Gore, filled with desire, feeling him to be the one nearest to my heart and body.

I telephoned him constantly from Grand Central while he was telephoning me from the outside, until we talked together. I saw him the next day, a highly emotional meeting. He said: “I felt terrible at your leaving, even though it was only for two days. I felt it deeply.”

But at the same time he told me that he had met the boy nearest to his physical ideal, like the first man he had had sexual relations with when he was thirteen, like his half-brother to whom he has been attracted for years without daring to act. “Now I’ll tell you something that will make you happy. This is the best physical relation I have had yet, and with the most beautiful boy, and no ordinary boy either…he is an inventor, a student of mathematics. And still this relationship with you is bigger and means more to me, and I want it more than anything, and if I had to choose, I would choose you.”

Still, the attraction for the boy was there, and he could not help talking about it, even telling me when they were going to be together.

We went out. He said conflicting things, “The wall between me and woman is so thin, so thin.” He was tender, touching me, was near, but he also talked about the boys. To make him jealous, I said I would take a lover. The need of the lover was so real, my fantasy of a young lover from Amherst grew. I told Gore I would see him the next evening, while he was with his boy. As we walked home, Gore talked about our place, how we would live together, entertain, how it would be a Mecca for all the artists.

We separated regretfully. I went to sleep in pain. The next day he telephoned. He was not jealous. “As long as you don’t love him.”

The next day I was completely unnerved. I could not see Staff, and I felt lost. I felt all the pain at once.

That night Hugo took me. I was completely cold. I went to the bathroom and wept. I fell asleep weeping. The next day I couldn’t stop sobbing. When I heard Gore’s voice, it broke me. I began to whisper, to tell him I must go away. He was so tender over the telephone, wanted to see me, but I couldn’t let him. I went to Staff, who again pointed to the identification with the child, why the intensity of the feeling was so strong. But I already knew: I must not sexualize. I would be caught in a painful relationship anyway. He is young, and he must live out his life. Even if we were lovers, he must live out his youth, his whims. At best, I knew it is not for me. Staff said, “That is progress.” But I couldn’t stop weeping.

Gore came that evening, ill with sadness. He felt my sorrow. He was like an older man. I said: “In killing my desire for you I feel I’m killing a dream of love. I can’t bear it. And I can’t do what you want me to do. I can’t bear sex without love.” We kissed more tenderly.

He said, “I will give him up.”

I said, “I wouldn’t ask you that.”

Then he told me the boy wanted to travel with him. He is a student at Dartmouth, but he has an apartment in New York. I suddenly bowed my head, fought against the tears and whispered, “That is the end of our life together, that is just what I feared.” At this Gore was pained. “Oh, don’t say that, don’t say that.” The irony is that it is my love warming him that has strengthened his relations to others and made them less casual. He knows this.

Upon leaving he said, “The windows you painted look like you, not Hugo.”

“Maybe because I have to stay here a little longer,” I said sorrowfully.

The next day he was ill, very ill, and so was I.

His attitude and sincerity, however, had moved me. He does not elude my pain, but shares it. He has great tenderness. I went into death and out again. I faced the truth: he is my child, loves me romantically and passionately as a child.

When he got ill, I said, “What can I say to make you well?”

“Take back what you said about our life together being at an end.”

“I do take it back.”

When he got well, we went out together, to an exhibit, to a party. He said, “I have faith in our star.”

Such nearness. Our romance begins again, the exaltation of love, but I have faced the truth. He is not the one. But he is the nearest now, and he deserves my love. He has given me all he could.

Gore said: “I understand what is happening. I know how you must feel. Mine is a feeling of being split in half, of being divided. I know this, because it has happened to me. I should like to help you fight this thing, to help you feel that it is not necessary to choose, but I think you know that. It is a very important thing to me that you be happy and that I can give you as much as you have given me, so let me say that these attractions I understand and, because of our incompleteness on a certain plane, must exist. What you must find is what I have found, that it is possible to have both without being in any way unfaithful to the other—and so you will fight this thing and conquer it and be happy which is of great importance to me. Don’t be sad.

“The feeling of death and sorrow came from the fear that the split might make the love less strong, less big, but you made me feel it is not so. I feel the power and strength of it.”

MARCH 13, 1946

Last night Gore made me go to the Pen Club dinner, and, in an effort to “face the world,” I instead found mediocrity, cheapness, degradation. I tried to sustain my dream with Gore, and I have finally awakened. His writing and a part of himself belongs to the ordinary world, the world I reject: Hollywood, society, office life, army life—those are his themes. There is a split between the ordinary world and my world.

After the dinner, which he didn’t like, we left, ran away. He confessed he had asked me to come because he wanted to see me at eight-thirty and would have had to wait until ten-thirty. So this way, he again wins my heart, again he touches me with his humor. When we sat at the Blue Angel he began to look all around, interested in a young movie actor, then remembered I had said, “When I’m out with you I’m not interested in other people,” and playfully, he turned his back on the actor and stared at me intently.

I said, “Why are you staring at me?”

“When I’m out with you, I’m only interested in you!”

I laughed, and then he added in the tone of someone repeating a French lesson, “Je suis toujours content quand je suis avec toi.” This was so childlike that I laughed. The truth is that if I am his deepest love, his interest is also scattered, diffused and expanded like Miller’s, the child’s interest in conquest, in vanity, in “meeting everybody.” This is good, for a child. Now I am awake, and my body alone aches, because I am without a lover. I don’t want Hugo or Gonzalo. All this richness, and spring, and no lover! The mirage is over. I am free. I have wild longings to clasp him, but they will disappear when I have a lover.

The soft spring forced me out into the street. I bought an aquamarine dress, a gold chain bracelet chained to the ring. I saw Staff. “The child cannot answer your needs.”

The ache, the ache, the hunger, the terrible hunger is not acknowledged. Can I really break this pattern? All my love affairs have been that of mother and child, even with Hugo. You could not bear your own helplessness, you had to achieve mastery, and you feel your own drive to helplessness, fighting the desire for mastery. Je suis bien fatiguée. Very often I feel the struggle to live is too great and death would be easier.

This diary will end when I find the lover.

MARCH 14, 1946

Gore came and kissed me ardently, as passionately as one can without sexuality. He was responsive to my new turquoise dress, looked so melted, admiring, so near…it is so near to complete love that it is pitiful. I pitied him, his hunger. He was so moved, he was almost trembling, was so vulnerable. For the first time I saw the child’s fear in him. I saw, as I embraced him, how drawn, moved and frightened he was. His hand over me had the gentle awkwardness of a child, as he had about our first kiss. I was light and happy, seeking to make him happy, made him feel I would never again get sad or emotional about his sexuality. He was not well, with a headache and neuralgia. At such times it is hard to separate. My feelings want to envelop him, protect him. He is divided, and he suffers. Knowing now what a relationship can be, he can no longer have casual sexuality, so he dreams of W. H. Auden and Isherwood, of writing with Isherwood. He yearns for the complete relationship, and I can see what will happen: no marriage, and no protectiveness. Isherwood is probably egocentric and will not give Gore the tenderness he needs. Poor Gore, he is caught, and Staff won’t help him because he is fighting for my life and is afraid of what will happen if we ever became lovers. This way, I at least have a chance to escape my fatality. Gore himself helps me. There are moments when I do feel that I would be lost if we became lovers. Enfant adoré, enfant mille fois chéri, enfant who gives himself, gives me more than Bill.

MARCH 18, 1946

The reality of Gore’s world, which is based on prejudices and bourgeois standards, is ugly. He is hostile towards Jews and negroes. When it came time to work on Maya’s film I told him simply: “This is the way it is. The star is Maya and a negro girl.” He answered, “If I can act a part with you, that is all I want,” and he joined us. I tried to make him break through his “pose” by acting not as an actor, but as we are together. I incited him, “Let’s drop the acting and talk as we do when we are together.” In spite of the fact that I suffered with fear of showing my age in the violent lights, I believe we acted well. Gore never left me for one moment, and that is what makes me feel so close to him. He always makes the intimate contact, “Tu es contente? Tu es fatiguée?” His personality towards others is what I don’t like: he is cold and ruthless, almost the opposite of what he is with me, almost like Miller, full of cruelty and caricature, and without feeling. It is from his narcissism that his passion for me, his mother, and all that belongs to him comes. I like that he telephones several times a day. I like his closeness. But I am now free of the tragic desire to be possessed by him, because I see the outcome: pain. When he gets analyzed he will discover I am the mother, and our romance will be over. Meanwhile, he is mine.

Sometimes I feel the anxiety and suffering are too great, the ordeal of analysis, to be made whole, to break life-long patterns and habits. I got ill. There is pain everywhere, and I feel cornered. I must go on.

Staff, “You are afraid to give up being a mother or a child and to be a woman, for then you will have to face man, genitally, and give yourself up.”

Yet I can see that in the relation to Gore there can be only pain. I am condemned to be the mother again. No, no, no. There is a pause. I wait for a man to come. Staff shames me by saying that it is something that must happen within me. Confusion. I am lost, utterly lost.

I am in the new apartment, all white, with the beautiful modern stained glass windows, everything clear and fresh. The light of reality is clear and bare.