AWAKENING
Oh, the drug of my marvelous dreams
NEW YORK, MARCH 22, 1946
The greatest suffering does not come from living in mirages, but from awakening. There is no greater pain than awakening from a dream, the deep crying over the dying selves. Giving up the children seems like giving up my life, my own youthfulness. Pain, terrible pain. A desert before me. I have no husband, no lover, and no child. At last I must relinquish all.
Gore and I acted in Maya’s movie, and I felt my desire for him weakening. I am battling it with Staff, trying to relinquish what cannot satisfy me. With Staff, I go to the end of my dream and face the fact that even if Bill had yielded to me, I could not have been satisfied, because we were both trying to reach the unattainable.
Oh, the tremendous experience of the acknowledged weakness, the acknowledged helplessness.
There is sadness for the dying selves that must be killed for the sake of the new ones.
Accepting my mother role towards Gore, I left him at his house last night, felt no pain in the taxi, and I told him I had lost my wish that he should be my lover. Then, I dreamed of his lover’s kiss with his tongue breaking the shell between us, of great joy and ecstasy. The emotional tie is so strong. This morning I am broken again. This is worse than the mirages which crucified my sensual body and killed all my joy. This is barren, like death. This awakening is death.
Staff calls it resistance. “You find new caves to hide in. You say giving up the child is giving up your youth, but it isn’t so, because you played the mother. The children didn’t free the child in you. They demanded that you protect them.”
Then a new resistance emerges: if I give in to my sexual nature, I will live like a whore and want nothing but sensuality. I refuse to create, to write, because it seems like a poor substitute for passion. I suffer physically from want of passion.
I write letters to Bill which I tear up, in which I try to obtain the emotional warmth Gore gives me, while I try to obtain from Gore the physical responsiveness Bill gave me. Impasse. I must turn away, react, activate. I rush out into the spring softness and buy a nightgown, a bag, objects I need to be ready for love. I feel weak, lost, on the verge of hysteria. I called Staff. He can’t see me.
MARCH 23, 1946
Yesterday was the worst day of all, worse than the end of the mirages. It was the day when I was like a drug addict deprived of his drug. I opened my mouth to shout, to scream, to call for help. Anxiety choked me. I called Staff. I forced myself to be calm. I went into the street. My writing tastes of ashes. I have lost my dreams. My relation to Hugo is tender but passionless; to Gore and Bill, finished; to Gonzalo tender and dead. I keep pretenses, talking like a wife, cook, nurse, mistress, friend, but I am dead. I talk to Gonzalo, who makes a big scene of jealousy, trying vehemently to reassure him while knowing my love is dead. Gore has gone to visit his boy. I have no loves. Gonzalo took me but I couldn’t respond. Hugo takes me and I can’t respond. The dream has been killed by the body. Only the body gets cheated in the dream. One does not eat, make love, live with the body, in the dream. The awakening is to a desert.
Monday I reached the highest peak of suffering, when I envisaged the possibility of a relationship between Gore and Pablo, and then I awakened completely. Suffering comes from the dream that does not coincide with reality. In the children’s world, I cannot find a lover. I had not been able to surrender my dream of Gore as my lover, but yesterday I did. I said: “To hell with this children’s world! It is a dream that cannot be.” Tragedy comes from dreaming against reality, and the reality is that Gore is sensually a child, a child afraid. Pablo is a child afraid.
Oh, the drug of my marvelous dreams, the pain of awakening. The most terrible pain came when I dreamed of Gore possessing me, and then I awoke unpossessed. The unreality of it, the emptiness. The dream is a drug which kills the body, kills fulfillment. Don Quixote came to a sorry end, and I too. Awake, Anaïs, Gore is a little child, a very sweet and lovable child. C’est tout. Pas plus. And I am alone.
During all this, Hugo tries so earnestly to be all to me. He reads his old diary and is shocked by the image of himself. He does not like his own image. I had to console him, while I was collapsing from exhaustion and sadness.
We worked all day for Maya. Acting is like freedom. Pablo returned from Panama fiery and gay, as before, his body full of warmth. We danced a new Panamanian dance, we laughed, we embraced. All of the pretense of relationship for the film was a shadow dance, for there was no deep carnal relationship between anyone yesterday. All the men are homosexual, and all of the women are unsatisfied. Rita Christiani, the half-negro girl, is a lesbian. Maya is unsatisfied with Sasha, her partner. The women are drawn to each other. The men are drawn to each other. What is this, a world without vital passionate relationships? “There is a relationship going on!” shouts Maya, directing, “a contact made at the party, talk as if you were related!” They couldn’t. We couldn’t.
Out of fatigue, after being under the strong lights from twelve noon until twelve midnight, we became hysterical and gesticulated wildly to break down the walls between us. When I tried to relate to the others, it was not from the depths of passion, but from its periphery.
Tuesday: Gore came, and I tried to act detached and light-hearted. I pretended Bill had been here for twenty-four hours (a wish, and a counterbalance to Gore visiting Bill Miller at Dartmouth). Gore tells me: “I know now how everything is. My Bill is my little brother, and we have sex together. But you are mon âme. This is more important. Bigger.”
And he handed me a poem called “Return.”
I tell him I am happy to not spoil his sense of balance, his happiness at having what he needs, but he is too intuitive, too instinctive. He reads my eyes, face, and voice, and says, “You are not happy.” He is so soft, so melting, so gentle, so warm, so near, so much present in his feelings that the warm flow begins again. I told him I could be happy and complete if my Bill were here for the passion. He offered to get Bill out of the army. “Though it would hurt me and I will be jealous, I want you happy.” His love for me is real. “With my Bill,” he said, “I am not myself. I am awkward, and not myself. Why is that? We are not very compatible in bed. He likes women in bed, really likes them but doesn’t love them or feel related to them.” And there it is. In my presence he is completely himself, and I too because I cannot act before him. He knows all I feel. Sweetly we eat together, walk together. I tell him about my fears of Pablo. “Oh, I don’t want Pablo. There are a million Pablos. And he is in the group, and I don’t want my secret out.”
“What shall I tell him?”
“That we are lovers?”
“But it isn’t true.”
“This is a love affair. Otherwise we wouldn’t feel so alive. We are the two most alive people in the world today. Will you marry me?” he asked me again.
“Not yet.”
“Age doesn’t matter when one loves,” he said later, after he had told me that people of thirty-five or forty are “old.”
He knows how to make me feel his love. What he wanted to see on my face as soon as he returned was, “I am still yours.” And he can see it. I feel like a woman in love. My eyes tremble before his. He wants to act a love scene in the movies.
It is hard to believe in an analysis in which I choose to starve myself of my hungers and passions out of the fear of the consequences of abandoning myself to them. But why did I choose a man who denies me what I so violently desire?
Staff: “Your instinct tells you: ‘This one bears the obstacle that will act as a check upon my complete possession by another. I do not have to check myself; he will do it, first by being incapable of making love to a woman, and second by the difference of age.’”
“But the hunger! The desire! How can I believe that I sought to starve myself, to deny myself?”
“Well, when you were faced with the possibility of escape from these traps, you were filled with fear: either you would become uncontrollably erotic, a whore, or you would fall victim to a man who would impose his will over yours. When you contemplate a world of maturity, you also fear rejection. Your father rejected you. The children cannot reject you. They need you, idealize you. You are in power.”
Self-imposed suffering and starvation. Such deformations. I deformed my inner vision of Hugo. I painted him within myself as the father without youthfulness. It is true he is almost continuously depressed, but so was Bill, and I forgave him, and so was Gore before I met him. It is inner fate, destinée intérieure. The human being we relate to best is the one who reflects our present psychic state. In me, there was this hungry child in need of another child (while playing at being the mother), the fear of the violent lust of man (such as Wilson’s), and the fear of having to live in a state of violence (the same fear Gore had after being beaten by his mother).
Angoisse makes you dash to the end so as to be delivered of suspense (a short circuit): quick sexual acts, quick satisfaction, for I can’t bear the incertitude.
Staff discussed altruism as a cover for the hunger, for needs of which one is ashamed. I was terribly ashamed to take, so I gave, and as I gave, I wanted to cry, “This is what I would like you to do for me.”
Hugo went to see an analyst. Poor Hugo.
Wednesday. One day softened by Gore’s emotional nearness, then the next a letter from Bill, a passionate letter full of physical longing: “Last night I lay a long time in bed thinking of you. You become so real in my mind that I felt your body beside mine; I felt your fingers stroking me, and I felt your lips and tasted your tongue. I was with you with all my senses and desires. I wish it could have been reality; it’s been so long and it will be longer after I leave for Japan. I found you in the description of Lillian: the white young body, the vitality… The blue light seeping through the high window, flowing down into darkness, enfolding gently the flower body… Pale straight stem cool in its white repose… Studded with blossoms, black and red and pink… Crowned with a heavy flower, blooming, whitely among black silk petals… A pale stalk, from waiting sleep awakened. Motionless and in quiet symmetry singing of the burning consummation. The white blossom turns slowly towards the shadow pale stem diving… I am by the two stalks lured into enchantment… Black tendrils winding through my fingers… as the real blossom opens. Your fingers are enfolding my layered selves… Your breath has entered my soul. In the blue light we dance.”
And ecstasy! It is spring. The bells are chiming on Fifth Avenue, the shops are full of flowers, the crowds are gay, and suddenly I am in ecstasy.
Joy. Joy. Joy. I saw Gore for lunch and had to leave at two to pose for some publicity pictures with Maya. He left with me. In the dazzling sun, I was almost dancing. In the taxi I talked about Bill’s letter, but I was moved almost to tears by Gore. He took my hand and melted completely in my presence. I have starved myself, cheated myself of joy. It is incredible.
Unwisely I write Bill, “I can free you if you wish,” thinking that I can tell Staff: “I won’t give them so much importance. I won’t give them my whole self.”
Gore says: “Will you come to my property in the tropics? We will live there together eleven months out of the year and one month only with our Bills.”
I have a longing for a free kind of home, a houseboat, a gypsy cart.
APRIL 1, 1946
Staff says, “You help others obtain what they want.” I warm Gore, and he attains pleasure and health. His mother had said he could not act because he was self-conscious, but he got over his fear and acted. His mother said he couldn’t dance. I said he could, and so he begins. He carries my castanets in his pocket, goes bicycling in the park, calls me when he finishes his chapter. He says for the first time he can give. He is happier, writes more spontaneously. He writes to music as I do.
Then I lie on my bed, convulsed with hunger. I am the one who wants freedom, money, success, power, to act, to dance, to find passion, strength, confidence, but it was Gore I helped because I could not take for myself. But I, what have I? I want love, passion, confidence. Instead I have this hunger.
“It’s a breakthrough,” said Staff, “a breakthrough with the want, the need.”
I came home less depressed, full of tenderness for Gore because of the way he behaves. If my voice isn’t alive in the morning when he calls (even if I tease, “I’m practicing how to be an Anglo-Saxon for the next time I see you”) he knows I’m sad, and he calls me again in the evening.
“I want the williwaw (storms). I don’t want coldness.”
The tragic element lies in the absurd dream I invented, to see Gore as my husband and lover, putting everything in his hands, as I put everything in Bill’s hands. This is the end of the Transparent Child…or the beginning of my own lost, killed, buried child…
L’ENFANT TRANSPARENT C’EST MOI!
One night I was very comical for Hugo, dancing, impersonating, singing, mocking, inventing a song about Hugo’s “glooming in the gloaming.” I laughed until I wept, but suddenly I felt the despair of knowing, of never really forgetting, of seeing myself, to be so split.
Staff, “The first person you gave yourself to betrayed you.” So I split. Ultimate giving terrifies me. I split, split, split, and seek split beings.
Dream: A painter comes with a woman. He has painted the woman in a very obscene fashion on the canvas, with a hole through it. He talks loudly. I have a feeling he has been using the painting sexually. He scoffs at the woman and says to me: “Yes, she looks sensual, but she’s got a padlock inside her sex. Can’t get her to make love. Can’t get any woman to make love.” As he goes off, he says, “I suppose you’re not willing either, that you haven’t even got a towel with you.” Such a crude invitation I can’t answer, although I wanted to sleep with him.
Tuesday: I told Staff I was free of the dream of Gore, that now he could analyze Gore without fear of me. I felt wide awake. Then I met Gore, but he is still dreaming his dream. He says: “You don’t need the diary anymore. This is the last relationship—there will not be any more.” And: “I don’t need analysis. I have your faith.” And: “Do you know why my father is enthusiastic about you? Because he sees you are destroying my mother’s image, and he always said my mother had been bad for me.”
Then I tell him, “Someday you’ll know I did the hardest thing of all when I sent you to the analyst.”
“Why?”
“Oh, you may marry Cornelia and have nine children.”
I know, as Staff told me, he will lose his “illusion” that we are lovers and see the truth. And I hate to lose his illusion even though it harms me. I hear the words of a “lover.” I won’t hear them anymore. And it seems like a second surrender, a terrible thing to be asked to give up. Illusion. I never saw it so clearly. “Something would break in him if he knew your age,” said Staff. “The illusion will disappear. You will be good friends.”
Gore calls me three times a day. My photograph is on his desk. His words are those of love. I must surrender, surrender illusion for the sake of truth.
Gore says: “We are not pretending. We are lovers.”
I said: “We have talked about your complexes. Now let’s talk about mine, so that I can convince you I don’t want you for a lover. You are Don Juan. You live now for the conquest. You like to add them up on a little blackboard.”
And this is what this boy of twenty answers me: “This is only true because I haven’t slept with anyone I loved. If I had a relationship with you it would no longer be so. So there, I can knock down your complex right there.”
His illusion—and his faith in it—touches me. I observe that as I sit there, the painful hunger, the tension of desire, the excitement, all of it is gone. I am free, as long as I don’t look too long at his mouth. Free but sad. I am awake, but he is still dreaming. I have such faith in him, but he is the one who has faith in our life together. He writes me a dedication on the cover of his new novel, “You placed the king on his throne.”
Is this illusion necessary to his life and creation, or will the truth give him greater strength?
This was the hardest of all surrenders: to give up being his analyst, the needed one, for the sake of the strength he will get. I want him strong. I want him to suffer less than I have. This is his reward for his own courage, his own capacity to love, his responsiveness, his constant truthfulness. He is so truthful, so direct, so worthy of being given all. I want to give him all the strength, all the power that comes from self-knowledge. This analysis will be invaluable to his writing. The love is real, sincere, and it will endure. When the mother gives up her son, that is the greatest love of all.
APRIL 4, 1946
Yesterday I met Gore at the museum for lunch. He plays at greeting me like an Anglo-Saxon (to get ahead of my doing it), so twice now we don’t kiss upon meeting, and it hurts me. The waves of love choke me. I walk the streets with this love that is too big for Gore. I hold it in, and then I go dead, dead. When Gore telephoned this morning and I did not have that electric feeling, I thought I was free. I am dead.
Truth and Illusion. Truth and Illusion. Illusion has been creative. What will the truth be? That is why I always lie. I can’t have a truthful relationship. Gore’s idealization of me sets my pattern. I begin truthfully, but then I withhold what hurts him, what would destroy his illusion. I hide my psychoanalysis, my real age, my sexual needs, my past lovers and experience, my negro lover, and I give him his dream, his ideal woman. But where am I in the end? He is a boy who loves the truth.
Weeping, I bring Staff my fear of what truth conceals compared to the beauty created by illusion. Staff proves to me that it is not an illusion about me which animates and fecundates Gore, but rather the real Anaïs, whom Gore knows unconsciously, who is rich and inspiring, who created a world he can live in, whose warmth makes him feel alive, and who awakened the depth of his feelings. So what do I fear? At the movies a young woman danced a most gliding dance on the screen, and he said, “C’est toi.” When I talked of difference of age, he said, “At forty I will be a cripple, and you will still be vital and shining.”
Staff: “But that is not the best part of the relationship. The best part is the real part: his need of you, his real contact with you, your understanding of each other, your helping each other. The ‘illusion’ that you are lovers is spurious. You aren’t. And it will be years before Gore is ready for a woman.” He admits part of my illusion was based on reality and that he is only dealing with the false parts, as when I began to lie to Gore when I saw he wanted the mystical, romantic me.
When I mentioned Staff, Gore looked pained and said: “Oh, you aren’t going to him now when you have me, are you? I’m not harmful to you. You should not need him.”
So, to sustain his great desire to possess all of me, to be the only one I need, I said I had been seeing Staff before knowing him. That was the first lie. Then there was another, then another, until finally my role is shaped by his needs, and I am overwhelmed, lost, unhappy. I am always anxious because I am aware of the falsity, and in this way I lose true contact with him. But illusion was the drug (I confused the illusions I created with my real intuition about people’s potentialities), and when I lose its stimulating, enhancing effect, I die.
Reality seems like death. If Gore and I can’t believe we are lovers, or may be lovers, what is there? A love which was not intended to be sensual, because sensually he is thirteen years old and I am his mother.
After talking with Staff I felt strong, clear and quiet, felt like writing.
Dream: There is a gathering to listen to poetry. I walk through naked. I feel embarrassed and yet defiant too. I don’t sit down, however, I stand. There is to be a party afterwards. I am looking for someone to cover me. Martha is there. Three of us are lying on a bed. Martha wants to make love and slips her hand under my dress. I am ashamed people will think we are lesbians. She begins the caresses and I think how childish this is, how incomplete. People are passing by, and then a train cuts right through the gathering under a tunnel. I look to see if the tunnel is already made, or if the train has to lift the earth and pierce its way through each time. I gave Martha pleasure with the hands, but I felt none.
Association: Sexual relations with Gonzalo last night. I wondered how I could ever have been satisfied with him, with his weakness, his inability to finish the act, his interruptions, the rings, my having to give him pleasure with the hands, and not always reaching the orgasm myself because I feel the vacillations. How could I have desired this lack of power? It would be the same with Gore. I am cured of the desire for Gore. There is only tenderness left. With Staff, I moved away from him. I see him sexually as a child, and I want power. I feel the power in myself, and I want an answer to it.
May this diary bring me freedom from desire for my sons, and a lover and husband.
Letter from Bill: “You must know you put me in a difficult position. For how am I to answer your offering of a way out when you show by every comma and syllable what you wish I would do? The problem is not simple. In Japan I will learn whether or not I am fertile or barren. If I am the first I shall be happy and shall return in the manner of Ulysses who has had his search inside himself; if not I shall return and struggle along with external support. For these reasons I have decided to go to Japan. Until we meet on my furlough (soon) I embrace you in thought, tendrement, ton Guillaume.”
With analysis, I may perhaps attain freedom from the diary itself, by watching myself live, by having to create stories to make it more marvelous. I may attain freedom from my idealized self, the idealization of others. I got frightened because I have gained four pounds, so I look less spiritual and look more like what I am: a sensual woman who lives a great part of her life through her senses. As I broke off with the bourgeois world, I also broke with the intellectual world.
APRIL 5, 1946
Gore. I tell him all, how I talked with Staff, how it will be a long time before he is ready for a woman, how I have conquered my desire of him, why I want him to have analysis. I tell him this is my most sincere relationship. “We have much to give each other.” I am quiet, strong, and yet full of feeling, full of the desire to be what he needs, to be the woman nearest to him. The pain is gone. I will have little stabs of regret, yes, but now the truth is strong and deep. I want to accept reality and to make it rich and deep. The pain lies in the impossible wish. “Our only enemy is time, now,” said Gore.
APRIL 7, 1946
After our talk, Gore came to a party that I had decided to enjoy in a carefree way, by giving up sexual obsession and the obsession to conquer something for myself. When Gore arrived, he kissed me on the mouth so warmly. Hugo was not there, so Gore played the husband. He hooked up my new dress. When Pablo came (and I knew they were attracted to each other), it did not change the steady current between us. I told Pablo Gore and I were happy together. He was jealous and yet happy too, as if I had said, “Your brother and I are lovers.” They will sleep together, I know, but it doesn’t matter. Pablo made me dance wildly, and Gore came timidly to try. I made him close his eyes and listen to the music and obey through delicate vibrations the movements of the dance, and in this way he found rhythm. The first time he danced, it was true, he had none, but now he held me close and followed the rhythms. Sometimes he fell back into a lifeless, monotonous motion, and sometimes he obeyed the music. To see each part of his body, once stiff, becoming alive was a joy. He watched Pablo, he imitated him, we laughed, we played. “With you, I can dance.” With you, you, you. There is no frustration because there is a life current.
Pablo brought five ugly, vulgar homosexuals, who danced among themselves, kissing and talking obscenely. Gore had the same aesthetic reaction I had. “You see, that’s the world I don’t want to fall into.” “You won’t, I won’t let you,” I said. I have no pain. I am free. We danced.
When Pablo left at two for another party with his revolting retinue, Gore didn’t go with them. He stayed, waited until everyone had left to take me in his arms and kiss me amorously several times, lingering like an adolescent lover not yet fully awake, a little nebulous, which is what he is. The sweetness pierced me. Our tongues don’t touch, just the mouths melting (the sexual thrust is lacking, it is like a communion). It is enough to establish physical contact, so that it is not abstract such as it was with Eduardo. I was very happy. Pleasure is always there, always possible, when one is not obsessed with a quest to conquer the unattainable, to force one’s will upon the unwilling, to change the unchangeable, to conquer what is not conquerable, to want what cannot be taken.
I was simply happy to have what I could have, which is all that Gore can give.
Awakened peaceful, eager to write…tired, but relaxed and wise.
APRIL 10, 1946, EVENING
Gore’s interview with Staff was a failure. “It didn’t sound as if he were talking about us. I didn’t recognize you or myself in his statements. He said I should be your playmate and your friend. He tried to say it was good for you to have a relationship without sexuality, that you tended to over-sexualize. He was tactless and crude. I have no respect for him. He tried to separate us, I could see that,” said Gore.
He aroused my anger against Staff for the first time, anger that he should speak of me thus to Gore, and that he didn’t know how to overcome Gore’s resistance, or pride, and win his confidence. He intimated that Gore was not ready for analysis, not desperate enough.
All that I obtain with tact and gentleness, Staff could not obtain by his direct tactics, which caused Gore to rear back. I have to help him alone, with love. My love alone touches and moves him. His Bill slipped away, then came to New York to visit his older friend without seeing Gore, and he saw them at a bar.
“Little boys can’t love,” I said.
“Is that it?”
“You are deeper,” I said. “You can’t put deeper feeling into small receptacles.” (I should know. I have learned my lesson.)
APRIL 13, 1946
I now believe Gore went to destroy Staff so I would not continue to lean on him. He went with jealousy and hostility. Staff said, “He is nothing. Your idealization again. You would die married to him.”
I worked well this morning, wrote pages on the adolescence of Stella, the relationship of Michael and Donald, and then the story of the opening of the tulips, inspired by my incident with Bill.
Monday: I am inspired and flowing, writing pages on Sabina, the fire bug, the café life.
What a man and woman can achieve together is rhythm. When Gore feels fragile, I feel strong. When he feels strong, I enjoy being led and being fragile.
By kissing, we keep the physical current alive.
Bill is coming soon, my passion, but I want more now, and I see this is not enough.
APRIL 16, 1946
I have such a sense of relief because of the freedom from Gore and the thwarted wishes, a sense of great inner richness pouring out in the writing, as well as a flow of emotion, a sense of youth and strength.
All of this I owe to Staff.
The bond with Gore is broken because it is merely a child and mother disguised as a woman submitting to a man who is secure and powerful on the surface, while he depends, leans, and gives his delicate, tender self. There is great tenderness, yes, but now I turn away from his childishness, his little boys, his miniature sexuality, and I am at peace. I wait patiently, tranquil, smooth-faced, feminine, quiet, plant-like, gaining weight.
Strange, the great honesty about my sensuality brings from Gonzalo a new wave of lustiness. He tells me that after nine years I am a marvelous mistress. “How wonderfully you make love!” He is more openly sensual. I enjoy it. I enjoy whatever I have. I dream of Bill. I write about Louveciennes. Dr. Effron, who analyzed Staff, reads This Hunger and says simply, “She has genius.”
I telephoned Bill. He said: “I’m as well as can be expected. Send me the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Are you telephoning from the old homestead?”
“I miss you.”
“I miss you too. I won’t be coming before two or three weeks.”
Hugo is on his way to Cuba, so I have ten days of freedom and no lover.
When Henry couldn’t have something he wanted, he didn’t care—he took something else. So I have Gore, a party, cocktails, an evening at home, people I want to see, adventures I can try.
Gore wrote a perfect love scene for his novel in which he possessed me.
Damn everything that hurts. I am free of all that hurts. The only true freedom is not to want anything, not to care so desperately, to not depend on love as though it were a matter of life or death. All dependence is wrong. I am sad, free, free of Gore and of his boy, just an ordinary little boy, “not too bright, of a lower class, and who dreams of another life,” which is what he finds in me.
APRIL 21, 1946, EASTER SUNDAY
A year ago Bill and I were lovers for the first time. Last night, Gore came early to the party, depressed—he realized last night that the boy bored him, and he longed for me. “I want a boy like you, in every way like you.” I smiled. We embraced, kissed, and he lay half over me, with his face buried in my neck. The telephone broke the spell. People arrived. Irina said, “He is adorable.” Gore always hovers, plays the husband. His pride and arrogance all gone, he even talks cordially to Bill Attaway, the negro writer, breaking through his prejudice. After the party he gathered the glasses for me. We kissed passionately, and he left. Le petit fait de progrès, I thought, when alone, remembering his kiss, its vehemence. Then, suddenly, I lost my gayety and irony and felt pain all through my body not to have him at my side after this emotional flow we had. The passion is aroused again. There was desire on his face.
I feel thoroughly, completely alive.
APRIL 22, 1946
Gonzalo and I.
Gonzalo: “It’s unbelievable, we’ve been together nine years, and I still feel an illusion. I never had this with any woman.”
Anaïs: “Nine years!”
Gonzalo: “I’d like to know how often you have been unfaithful.”
Anaïs: “I don’t want to know how many times you have been.”
Gonzalo: “Oh, with me, only a few. When you left Paris that time, and I got drunk. At Provincetown, too, that girl who was so friendly with you at the beach.”
Anaïs: “I didn’t ask you. I don’t want to know.”
Gonzalo: “But I do. I know you went off with that singer. Why did you? A singer. I wouldn’t make love to a woman singer for anything. Mine were unimportant. You know you’re the only one I love.”
Anaïs: “But if I had gone off with him, you’d think it was important.”
Gonzalo (disturbed): “It’s different for a woman. When did you? And why?”
Silence.
Gonzalo: “You won’t say anything.”
Anaïs: “I don’t believe we should talk about this. I don’t want to know about you. (Crying) I never wanted to think about it, and now you are making me.”
Gonzalo: “You’re crying? But it was nothing. I forget about them immediately. And in nine years only a few times, whereas with you, oh, I’m sure it was at least fifty.”
Anaïs: “I didn’t ask you. Why did you have to tell me?”
Gonzalo: “I’m just more sincere, and you aren’t.”
Anaïs: “It isn’t sincerity, it’s revenge. You told me to hurt me.”
Gonzalo: “I told you because I thought it would make you tell, drive you to tell me.”
Silence.
Gonzalo: “Now you’re shut like a clam.”
Anaïs: (I no longer love Gonzalo, but he doesn’t know it, and I can’t tell him, because I know that if I did, I could plunge him into hell. And Gonzalo thinks I am crying over his infidelities.)
Gonzalo: “I would like to know how you learned all you know about love. Where did you learn to move as you do, so rhythmically, tantalizingly? Who taught you that inner spasmodic clutching which is so exciting? Very few women know this.”
Anaïs: “Miller’s wife told me about it.” (I won’t say Miller taught me. I can’t say one man taught me this, another that, Henry taught me to clutch, this one taught me other things. I can’t say either that a great deal more was a natural gift, I learned very quickly and much instinctively. No one taught me responsiveness and quick sensitivity, or the easily flowing honey, or the lascivious turning I later discovered in Albert, native island tropical languorousness, the voluptuous inheritance of tropical islands.)
Gonzalo: “It enrages me to see how much you know. I often wonder where you have learned.”
Anaïs: “In every relationship it’s different. We have our own ways. We have invented our own lovemaking together out of our own temperament.”
Gonzalo: “Yes, I remember, I liked taking you from behind, that excited me. But now I have changed. What a good mistress you are! Other women don’t move rightly. You’re so soft down here (touching me). It used to make me feel it’s so soft I can’t bear to hurt you, I used to fear hurting you, I still feel as if I were stabbing you in there, how can it be pleasurable. I see this big dark penis inside of this soft, small, white and rosy part…”
Anaïs: “It is pleasurable.”
Gonzalo: “Sometimes I made you weep with joy, didn’t I? I reached deep into you, didn’t I?”
Anaïs: “Yes, but how is it you talk about this now? You used to be so secretive.”
Gonzalo: “Yes, that’s true. Now I’m aware of all this. I wasn’t before. It was always difficult for me, I found adaptation difficult. Couldn’t be satisfied easily. There weren’t many women, even when I was young. And you feel nothing here, outside, do you? When I kiss you there you never respond.”
Anaïs: “No, I was hurt there once, horseback riding, in that particular place. I was about sixteen and I went horseback riding in Central Park, and it was the first time. I was wearing garter panties, and the garters got between me and the tight riding trousers, and I would not complain. I went on riding for an hour.”
Gonzalo: “You’re the one who feels more inside, anyway.”
Anaïs: “Yes, except when you caress me, that I feel too. But much more inside.”
Gonzalo: “Why did you go off with that singer? Why did you do that to me?”
Anaïs: “There was no singer. I just liked to dance with him.”
(When I cried, Gonzalo tried to take me. He was aroused, but I wouldn’t let him. I was still resentful of his unfaithfulness. When finally he took me I wouldn’t respond. It made him angry, but I was still terribly subdued by all the betrayals, the inevitable ones, crying over love itself, its fluctuations, and its ends.)
He couldn’t extract a confession. I defeated him in this, knowing how he would torture himself with one fact, let alone all the truth.
Hugo is gone, and I have no engagements. I am free to go adventuring, but I feel anxiety. Suppose I find no one I know, or that I have to eat alone. Suppose I am approached by an utter stranger slipping into the Village underworld, unknown. Oh, so Miss Nin, what an adventurer! You set controls over and around yourself. You say because of Hugo you can’t do this, because of Gore, because of Bill, and it is because of you!
Your cage is open, and what? You’re shy. You’re ready to call someone you know. And what do you do with your freedom? You obey another’s need. You call on Nancy Banks, married to a negro guitarist, because she is lost and confused. You meet her and her husband at a Calypso restaurant. You sit at George’s and listen to jazz.
Then Nancy tells you her life history. You think about it, and then at ten o’clock you are home for Gonzalo.
The first night of freedom.
The second night you are in bed, tired from the quarrel with Gonzalo, the sentimental yearning for Gore combined with the anger at him for the half-passion by which he holds you, you are not well after the dentist, the cocaine, and a late night.
And tomorrow I try again. But I call Josephine and Pablo. I am led by the hand because I am afraid of the underworld of violence and illness and darkness. Afraid. That is why I went into it only to pull Henry and Gonzalo out.
The cage is open, but I don’t know how to fly.
At one moment when Gonzalo was trying to take me while I wept, he managed to slide his foot between my legs, a little game we often played, his big dark foot between my white legs, and I would say very politely, “Oh, your foot has come to pay me a visit,” and suddenly I remembered the time I had such a frenzied desire for John Dudley, the wildest of all, and that after we had satisfied it and were lying back talking, he was trying to woo me again, and playfully he placed his foot between my legs and said, “My foot likes you.” Because this reminded me of my little game with Gonzalo, Gonzalo’s image came before me and all my real love for him, and I brusquely felt violated by John’s foot, the falseness and strangeness of our lying there naked, so I got up and dressed. What if I told this to Gonzalo? He could never rid himself of the image of me yielding to another man. It would poison his life. Already the slightest gossip poisons him for days.
APRIL 25, 1946
I gave up the frenzied desire for a new lover after falling into the familiar trap of pain, when Gore’s kiss the night of the party bound me to him erotically again. To escape, I threw myself into sensuality with Gonzalo. When Gore told me about a night with the boy, I retaliated and implied I had an affair too. I felt resentful. I broke a luncheon engagement, and his reaction was real illness. He suffers from jealousy. When we had dinner together, he was loving, hurt and jealous. He took my hand, touched my neck, and said, “One more bottle of wine and I could take you.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Cut out sex,” he said, violently.
We went out drunk, soldered together as one by our similarity of feeling. With a passionate kiss we separated, he to his boy, and I to Gonzalo. It is hell on earth, and then we break, soften, and the tenderness heals us both. I had imagined him and Pablo together, and the image was so unbearable I felt that I must leave for France right now. I must break this.
Staff was scathing when I said sorry, sorry, sorry, doctor, but I still feel as one with Gore, not with Hugo, not with Gonzalo. I feel all he feels.
Taking the subway and recalling his pale face and his hand on his heart, I felt cut in two by tenderness, absolutely weak right through the center of the body. Hunger, a yearning hunger, at times not sexual, so deep it is within the womb. I analyze it myself now: one feels one possesses the child, but not the man. There is a bond which gives security. It is real and physical. I can also identify with the child’s needs, his hunger. We are two children ashamed, rejected and deserted, he by his mother and I by my father. Both of us are hungry and insecure, he to find his mother, and I to possess something inside of me, something near.
Yes, I know, the child needs. Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge. D. H. Lawrence wrote enough against merging. There he is, he is tall, he is slender, his skin is golden and new, vulnerable, with the tenderness of newness, youth. He is an old child. Like me, he covered the weakness by acting paternally, as I acted maternally. He dominates, he takes responsibilities, he patronizes his little boys. He doesn’t feel overwhelmed or threatened by me, so he loves me, and I yield. When I want to affect him, I do so gently and subtly. I don’t run headlong against his prejudices, I don’t argue about negroes or Jews. I present him an interesting negro writer and Gore sees. I show him Maya at work and Gore learns. I don’t attack his writing as it was. I help him expand. I say, “Write as you are, out of yourself, that is where your richness lies.” I worry about his writing. It is conventional, but I at twenty was sentimental, romantic. My first novel was unprintable. Not his.
He made love to me on paper. The day after being apart (I was having my “affair” and not lunching with him) he hands me as a gift his handwritten version of the love scene, not seeing the irony, believing he is “spoiling” me with this chapter seven, our love affair on paper.
Will I ever be free of him, of his neck, his soft, brilliant fawn eyes, his vulnerable, emotional, full mouth? He has the same aspects of Miller—aggression, taking from the world, using people—because he needs to shine, to achieve, to attain fame. As Miller did, he says: “Ask Leo Lerman to review my book. Invite the Book of the Month Club man.” He pushes forward, primitive, hard, self-interested, but towards me he turns a soft, truthful, humble, lost self.
As I know what drives him, I cannot judge him. My love will make this less necessary. I don’t know.
APRIL 26, 1946
I spent last night alone, fell asleep early, suffering from loneliness, the unreality of my soft, deep yearning for Gore. Hugo is far away. Gonzalo is far away. I feel a mellow tenderness for them, but that’s all. I have so many relationships, but none are near enough to the core of my being. Gore says, “You are my deep life,” but I wonder how deeply he would go with me.
My art is not artifice. There is no separation between my life and art. The form of my art is the form of my life, not the artificial pattern of narrative, and my life is an unfinished story.
While neurosis rules, all life becomes a symbolical play. It is this story I am trying to tell, the ghastliness of our life today.
Who has not followed for years the spell of a particular tone of voice, from voice to voice, as the fetishist follows beautiful feet, scarcely seeing the woman herself? A voice, a mouth, an eye, all stemming from the original fountain of our first desire, directing it, enslaving us until we choose to unravel the fatalism and free ourselves. The story of freedom does not appear in the new book—you are still in the labyrinth and must be willing to get lost before you are saved. The unreality we suffer from is what I am making clear. The hero of this book is the mysterious malady which makes our lives a drama of compulsion.
Saturday. I was writing yesterday when the bell rang. I expected the drug store, and Bill stood at the door! I nearly fainted. A Bill who has lost his dewiness, opalescence, transparency, from life in the army, with rougher hands, now a lieutenant. A Bill who is tender and less shy. We talked at first, because he wanted to wait until Monday night when he could stay all night, but the hunger was too great, and we kissed, kissed. The ecstasy of his determined kisses, the softness of his hands, the sliding, tender way he enters all my being. Oh, Bill, of velvet and silk, oh Bill of the rich voice, moth-like ears, tender skin and sharp, strong teeth. “I want to undress you. I can’t wait till Monday.” He kissed my breasts, grown heavier. He undressed. The soft waves, the rolling of our bodies without violence. I melted, melted by the lightest hand of all, dissolved in ecstasy. “I have dreamed of this so often, you look now as I saw you in my poem. The windows are blue and you, so white. I have dreamed of you so often.” Bill talks, utters words, lifts my legs to better penetrate me. Bill is mute through the orgasm, but his heart beats faster with ecstasy. One hour of joy. When he leaves, I take a warm bath to music, to preserve this ecstasy. Ecstasy, vaporous, light, mystical, sensual. What a contrast to what follows.
At nine o’clock it was Chinchilito. I was still full of desire, having been barely aroused by Bill. I kept thinking of Gonzalo’s stories about the lambs in Peru, the beautiful lambs. At mating season, so as not to wear out the male, they gather all the females and they first send out all the young lambs to tease and caress the females, arouse them, prepare them, and then, when they are warm, alive and melted, comes the male, who is not one for voluptuous expansion, but who takes them quickly and directly.
The young, soft lamb Bill, and Chinchilito, the giant pagan, six feet tall, enormous, heavy now, so violent. I hurt my body against his strength, and in a frenzy of excitement and desire, we meet each other’s violence. He is like a beast, aroused, grunting, and violent. I tantalize him, rubbing my breast against his penis, give him violent gestures, and the violent strengths are matched, firm, hard body against body, not yielding, not taken but taking with him, answering with contortions and convulsions, the wide, big, stormy, elemental explosion of what began as a soft, honeyed, secret flower pistil caresses with Bill.
Power.
Violence.
I fell asleep appeased, but today again I’m in a frenzy of desire. This is delirium. This is what I feared after I sought to thwart myself with Hugo.
Evening: Gore has been ill in bed for two days. He comes out to have dinner with me. He is pale. I beg him not to ask questions, not to make me talk about my other life. He wants the truth. How long will Bill be here? Where does he live?
He sees what I feel. I feel our nearness, our bond, our pain.
“Should we surrender each other?”
We can’t. He shows me the poetry he wrote at sixteen, emotional and deep. “In school they made fun of emotions.” Thus the shell that surrounds him.
I am full of love. Can I heal him?
“My little boy bores me. He is not enough.”
“My little boy and I are strangers,” I say, for that is true.
Coming out of Lafayette, I lean towards Gore, put my head on his shoulder. “Gore, if you only knew what I feel.”
“I know,” he says, “neither one of us is happy.”
I ride on the bus with him to his home way uptown on 92nd Street to have more time together.
Then I have to console a jealous Gonzalo, who is suffering with suspicion. Three exhausting scenes of jealousy—he had seen me on the street with Gore.
I am tired, and sad.
Duits talks about Bill: “Bill is a deeper person; be patient with him. He is just perverse, very perverse, and frightened. He is more than Gore.”
APRIL 29, 1946
While I had dinner with Gore, Bill came and waited on my doorstep for an hour. He was only free from eight to ten, and then had to return home.
At ten Gonzalo came, took me, commenting again on our nine years together and the incredibility of this, and analyzing why I didn’t have a hairy and thick-lipped vulva like most women, but that of a young girl, and that, he said, was why he loved me. He took me, then passed to jealousy and fury, working himself up into a rage like a volcano, naming all the men I slept with (wrongly) and took a painting by one of the children down from the wall and smashed his foot through it.
Such violence. I was equally furious, denying everything, saying, “You’re stupid and blind.”
Standing there, naked, while he destroyed the painting of “one of your lovers,” he shouted, “I should break your face!”
Angry, as if I were innocent, so intent was I on protecting him from the truth (a truth far worse than he imagines), like a black demon.
Five minutes later, he called me up: “I’m crazy, I guess I’m crazy. Forgive me.” I, feeling deep pity for his suffering and yet knowing it was he who destroyed my love by his own destructiveness, I called him back. He was humble and wounded, and I healed him. We had lunch together, feeling very tired. “As tired as if you had beaten me,” I said. He laughed, but I’d rather be killed than confess, because I believe the truth destroys more than it creates. The truth about one’s betrayals is not good. I keep begging Gore to let me at least be silent and for him not to tell me about his sexual life. But he insists on the truth.
Ten-thirty at night. I am waiting for Bill and am disturbed by Gore’s jealousy. I do not tell him about tonight, but he knows. Yet, he let me look for an apartment for him where he can receive his boys. It is an impossible situation. I would like to go to France, but I can’t desert him, at least not until he has someone, a relationship. I find myself surrounded by men who cling to me and cannot surrender me: Hugo, Gonzalo (Henry, too, was not ready to stand alone).
In analysis, the contest is now between the violent and unsubtle men, and the gentle, tender homosexuals.
Chinchilito was too brutal the other night. So was Gonzalo. Bill and Gore are too gentle, too passive, too feminine. Chinchilito so Germanic, Gonzalo so Spanish, with Moorish, Indian violence. I have associated sexuality with violence (my father and mother at war), as the homosexuals do. Going into mature sexuality seems like going into dark violence, nightclubs, villages where men attack and harm you.
Gore: I wait for a lover, yet I am thinking of you. I am filled with you. When we stood waiting for the bus and I felt your leaving me, for you do leave me at such times, I wanted to say to you: I love you more than ever. It is hard to believe. But the reason Bill is my favorite lover is merely because I have more of a feeling of having been with someone like you, and therefore feel nearer to you, and I can’t bear men who are altogether different from you. I died once, before you did, for three days when you were with your Bill. I went through a kind of hell. Believe me, I do not exaggerate. It’s just that I know better than others the marvelous things which get killed by pain. What I fear, my love, is that you and I will harden, close ourselves up, in order to numb the hurt. Tonight already you were changed towards me. I’m only now aware of this, and I don’t know how we can find a way to keep this love alive. The first time I was deeply hurt when you were with your Bill, and that, you remember, ended our dream of a life together. Why I sometimes seem to take things sadly is simply because I am more aware of what happens to feelings. Gore, it is true that the lover doesn’t take me away, that I continue to flow towards you in all my feelings. If I read, I read with you, if I hear music, I think of you, when I write, I write with you, for you, and it doesn’t, as I had hoped, kill my desire for you. But it is also true that when we hurt each other and feel jealousy, the one who is hurt leaves and wants to break. I found it very hard today to look for an apartment, having so vividly in mind that it is for you and your boys. You have faith. You think we will grow used to it, but you forget at what cost: the cost of hardening towards each other, closing the doors which had been opened. And instead of being happy tonight, I think of this and fear for this strange love of ours. Jealousy is the worst of all pains, and it is worse when love has no completion, no security, no moment of saying we possess each other. I don’t lack faith or love, but you know, my love, you have a little of that masculine sense of injustice. You say, “We are even,” in such a reproachful way. You forget that you struck the first blow (involuntarily, I know). You feel my unfaithfulness more, as if mine were a greater betrayal, yet all the time I have belonged to you in a way you haven’t to me, for I went all the way towards you, remember?
MY NIGHT WITH BILL
My diary, keep for me this most precious of nights, keep, keep in your pages this night with Bill.
There are those who enter your being and truly take you. Every one of Bill’s caresses has entered my being. Every one has left its mark. My hair remembers his fingers. My neck remembers his mouth, his teeth. My hips still feel taken in his hands. My skin still raises its down at the remembrance of his light touch…his hands. Why is lovemaking so different, so different, how can a body be touched so differently? He sat on the bed, his legs hanging down, so as to make love to me with his mouth, his head, his shoulders. I buried my face in his thin shoulders, felt the delicate bones, kissed his tender, silky, lean body, his belly, his hips, took his penis in my mouth, his penis hard and leaping, breast against breast, tongue against tongue, mouth within mouth, and flights away from the burning sweetness into the cooler regions of the neck, ears, hair, to rest from the fire of his penis and the warm, flowing honey in which he dipped his fingers. In their light agility he weaves, interlaces, kneads, binds—it isn’t just a touch, a weight of flesh, it is a making of lace, a tying of threads, an encirclement, an envelopment. Sliding, smooth, subtle. How some can find the entrances to the being, and others cannot. His hands enter into me, open every pore and tendril, melt me, when the penis comes the body is already so open, so given, so dissolved, the orgasm comes out of the depths, effortless as with no one else, like a flower orgasm, all the regions without violence (only his teeth are violent). He enters, he takes. Never, never have I known this sweetness. My body feels like a flower, turned to velvet and petals. His voluptuous movements, all made out of softness, never a discord, or dissonance, or jerking, everything is of flesh enfolding, unfurling, the movements of merging, of flowing. No impact or hardness, but a complete, total melting, flowering, flowing like a dream with a strong flavor, a lasting, enduring flesh taste as of having been in the ocean. Bill and I swam together in a sea of flesh, so it was, caresses I will never forget, our bodies have the same veins, flow, rhythm, it is languid, voluptuous, rhythmic, but not like a drum, but like a rolling of flames, curling, in satin whirls.
He lies over me as he was when he took me. I let my legs slide down parallel to his. He lies over my whole body, his face buried in my neck, in a trance of oneness. Keep this, keep this here, my diary. It is rare. It will be lost. Keep this, my diary, the flavor of his flesh, the taste of his sex, our legs twined as he sleeps over me, in a dream of abandon, crushing me, so fitted together our bodies, knitted together, his mouth so hungry. Only when he is inside he has not yet learned to control the movements. They are not rhythmic. He moves too softly, though firm and erect within me, and his orgasm comes quickly, like a soft, gentle fruit of his skin, his delicacies. The violence is missing, he flows into me, he doesn’t stab, but it is all so harmonious with his age, his newness, his shyness, so natural to his beginnings as a lover.
In the early morning Bill awakened, smiled at me, drew close, slept in my arms, laid his penis against my leg. I could feel it throbbing and pulsating. Then he took me and we fell asleep again, but before I fell asleep I watched his beautiful face, his long eyelashes, his pure skin, the blue shadows under the eyes. I watched too, the little part of his face which is like Gore—the corner of his mouth, the upper lip, the nose—and felt as if Gore were lying there, and the two loves mingled without shock. And I fell asleep trusting, given…
A day of ecstasy, ecstasy and contentment.
MAY 3, 1946
A night with Bill was illumined by his passionate face drinking mine with drunkenness, his long eyelashes lost into mine, his eyes closed the better to drink my mouth, the endless draughts he took, his whole face in the kiss. The touch of his skin, this silk, this purity of silk, the firm softness of his mouth, all over my body, kissing my stomach, my hips, his hands everywhere like so many leaves, his mouth, how he sat and pulled me up so our breasts would feel the impact, how he pulled me against him, how we found each time the gesture of the most utter nestling, fitting, no gestures lost or wasted, each one aimed at the being, each one clear: I take this, I take this, I take this. Every gesture answered, if my head falls between his legs, he pulls my hair up and devours my neck, he devours my breasts until they hurt, he kisses me until it hurts, a trance, a trance of flesh, a trance of throbbing, pale voluptuousness with a core of fire. For such a long time he kisses, caresses, such a long time until my body is utterly dissolved and only then, as if he knows, he enters, only then, with a divination allowed only to the greatest lovers, the divination, every moment he has this, he has this, how can bodies emerge separate after this, I feel we will emerge as one body, deeply, deeply, he takes me, and I know he will remember this forever.
When I reach such fulfillment it stays in the body as if he had made a child within me. It stays in my body and over my skin. Then, as I have caught his rhythm now, and I know he wants this to end like a big wave to roll gently out of the depths into lightness, we emerge together into playfulness. I take him to visit everyone and every place I knew and at every place he enters the game. I say: The house was like this, the person like that, he says this, and says that of you, and even though you don’t say very much, I know this person will ask me about you months later. We visit thus, he sketches me. We drink rye together, smoke, talk. Content. And he takes me again before leaving.
And I dressed, washed, and went to a Calypso dance, to not feel, to not break, to not die. Lost and blind at the dance, lost with Nancy Banks. “What am I doing here?” Anaïs, who has lost her identity, is dancing, but at least she does not feel Bill’s departure. I feel too much, but my feelings have passed into other lives. I said: “I won’t feel. I won’t feel.” But this feeling passed into Nancy’s life, and I saw it. The next morning I got up and wrote the story of Nancy (“The Child Born Out of the Fog”), feeling for Nancy and her negro husband and child. I don’t feel for myself. I have had fulfillment. There are others who have never had it. I have. I am rich. I am fortunate. I have no right to die. I wrote the story of Nancy, I went out, I laughed.
But this morning anguish got me by the throat. I wouldn’t cry. I opened the window. Angoisse. Death passing. Swooping. Anger at Gore. Such anger. I went out, walked, ate, my eyes filled with tears, strangers looking at me. My life I have lost. My life is the peaks, the climax. Life is magic nights with Bill, light and fire. And now? Gore and his foolish boys.
No. I must leave.
SUNDAY, MAY 5, 1946
Gore came, having gone through hell, angry, jealous, frustrated, wanting to go far away, to take a woman, to overcome his fear, to come back and take me. This week he knew he did not have me, and that the boys were nothing. At first we were uneasy and tense. I pretended to be well, I assumed a role, I took a drink. The expression of his face touched me. He was sad, sincere, and he could see I was pretending. Then we broke down, embraced fraternally, tenderly, admitted all, admitted the pain, my desire to go away, his desire for flight, his rage last night, his terrible storming. He went into a debauch, an orgy. He called me (after saying he could not see me, he got free, and when he called I had gone out), went to the Astor bar, went off with a group invited to an orgy in which he could not participate. We sat on the couch, caught together again in a sincere, soft bond. After a little while we got lighter. He is more capable of detachment than I am. So I not only have the problem of my desire for him, which was not cured by Bill because he has the same kind of appeal, mouth and voice, and a strong emotional harmony, but there is also the problem of jealousy.
At peace again until the next storm. In the bus he says, “Your hands are like my mother’s.”
“What else?”
“The color of your hair.”
“What else?”
“Your moods.”
“But I’m not tyrannical.”
“Oh, you are, but very subtly.”
He doesn’t want me detached. When I propose to leave until I can feel about him as I do about Eduardo, Pablo, etc., he won’t have it. He is fully aware of what we lose by detachment. When I pretended to be happy, he was not happy.
MAY 6, 1946
The pain, the physical pain of losing contact with Bill was terrible. It caught me unaware, like death. I opened the window, I went out, walked. After seeing Gore, I fought for life. I kept busy, saw Staff. Gore and I ate at the Caviar Restaurant. He was at peace. I had let him read the part about himself in the diary.
I talked with Staff about my feeling of merging with the child, which makes my sensuality with Bill so acute, so ecstatic. How can I progress from this when it gave me fulfillment? Staff only says: “It was fulfillment because you only took the best from it, but let it be tested by marriage, by permanency. You would run away from both. It’s the romantic peaks you took. You try and live on them alone.” I know.
It is a beautiful day. Under the effect of gas at the dentist, my heart beat fast and I beat my chest with my hand to communicate to the dentist that I thought it would break. I thought: this is like death.
I must keep active, active.
Gore was sad that “Bill got into your diary.” Yes, hurt. Oh, end this diary, end the children’s world, if only, if only I could detach myself, be detached. Please, please, I beg no god in particular, help me be detached.
Gore, there is one thing you do which you must stop if we are to have peace together. As soon as I say to you, “Bill freed me of my desire for you,” instead of accepting this and letting me be, you set about talking as you did the other night, talking about going away, making love to some unknown woman, to come back to me, etc., all of it sounding more like medicine than pleasure. Now will you please understand, I don’t want this kind of willed desire. If it hasn’t come out of love, I don’t want it. I don’t want planned lovemaking! I only wish you would let me alone with my physical fulfillment with Bill. You only make me feel humiliated, for you and for myself. The wish doesn’t come out of real desire for me, but merely to take me away from Bill. I need, at the very least, my dream of Bill, and you try to pull me away. Then as soon as I am at peace, you say something to make it clear that we are to stand apart, but only after you think you have won me back with illusions about the future. Then you say, like yesterday, “Oh, we could make an arrangement,” or like today, “Oh, no, I’ve tried that already,” which sounds as if you thought my peace came out of this illusion you extend to me, whereas when I listen to you, the way you talk about coming back to take me, I compare this with real desire, and I am at the moment more convinced than ever that you are not the one for me physically. It would be better for both of us if we surrendered this. It isn’t worthy of us. It wasn’t this prospect of your forcing yourself to take me which gave me peace at last. It was feeling that my physical fulfillment with Bill didn’t break our relationship. So please let me be, Gore, don’t stir false wishes and let me see you tear them down the next day as if you feared my having believed you, or else we’ll never be happy. I was only sad the other day because when Bill is not here I have no protection against the physical loneliness. I have ceased making wishes for us. What does not happen out of love cannot be good. Also I don’t like it when you talk about making Bill a homosexual. Why do you want to take him away from me? Why can’t you help me not to desire you, to be free? Do you think this way of talking coldly about taking me tempts me? I am utterly convinced and free of this wish, but it makes me angry that you keep it alive in me.
In Gore’s handwriting, “You begin to write the way I do.”
Gore, with the last pages you read I tried to break the mirage which makes me suffer. Forgive me if I misunderstood you, but I thought that if I could just face the truth and accept it, I would no longer feel this in you which exalts me, pulls me towards you and then suddenly dissolves, and we could be at peace. This is your diary, Gore, because you are at the center of my life. Be a little patient with me because it is a little harder for me to surrender this, and when I get angry I’m really angry at myself for not being able to achieve what you achieve, and because I am suffering in a way that you are not.
This diary comes to an end as you wished it would: no more relationships. I belong to you. I would not marry anyone but you. But I can’t marry you because I could not bear the pain. But we can be happy, Gore, we can work together, and I will always be there in between the boys, whenever you want me.
May I be free of desire for Gore when this diary ends. Free of my passion for him. Free of all wishes for the impossible, free of pain and of frustration. I am so tired of pain, so tired of it. I want fulfillment and richness and peace, to write, to love wholly. What makes life tragic for me is thinking of each break as an end, as death. Each quarrel, each separation, each voyage for me is death, the end. I cannot be separated from Gore until I separate from the child in me, who is married to him.
Angoisse, worse than ever. I have feelings of choking, as when one is drowning. I feel I am either drowning or being born to a trauma. I was born asphyxiated. It took a long time to bring me back to normal. My life is definitely tragic. This diary ends as Gore’s novel ends: “‘Of course, you must go,’ she said, gently dying.”
We make love to each other only with words, with telephone calls, and on paper. Our love is a dialogue of warm words, taking each other only by understanding, imagination. Nature is shut out. The forest, the sea, the marvels of sun and flesh are silenced. Pleasure is shut out, trances, reveries, softness, touch. How arid this is, a love without fusion, without ecstasies, full of half gestures. He can live without even touching me, without intimacy. Not even tenderness is necessary to him. He can be content with walking crowded streets, sitting at restaurants. His love doesn’t need a room, doesn’t need a touch. Ah, Anaïs, why don’t you have the courage to break this? For the first time I question my dreams, my faith. How I give myself to my dreams. Is this another dream that cannot be? I feel lost. Gore has not forgiven me the truth in place of illusion. He is hurt.
A child’s world, a day at Yonkers for Maya’s moving picture, a Greek park open to the public, with statues, pools, grass, Greek temples, Helba, Maya, Sasha, Nancy, Sheri, Rita and I.
They won’t let me carry anything, saying, “You’re too fragile.”
Sheri says: “You are a legendary character. I keep thinking in the future I will look back and say, here I was with the legendary character Anaïs.”
Nancy: “I’m glad you said you wanted me to sit by you in the train. I wasn’t sure you liked me. You’re so much more experienced. I must seem adolescent.”
Helba was shocked to see me carry a can and eat a frankfurter.
My legend and my gifts created this distance. I fell into a deep despondency, felt locked out, locked out of everything. To surrender Bill and Gore, to surrender my own childhood, to seek equality in passion, I decided to close the diary, for it is an end, and I can’t bear ends.
MAY 19, 1946
For three days I struggled to rise to the surface, threw myself into activity, had angry sessions with Staff: “The anger is there now, for giving much and receiving little, not receiving what you need. Good. With anger comes revolt and strength, and you will find other worlds. There are other worlds.”
I met Gore at Charles and talked about our work, about getting him a display at the Gotham Book Mart. He dislikes my detachment, and it is he who drags me to the bottom again. “I want you to be yourself.”
I don’t want to disturb his serenity (he always says: I feel well, I am serene), and when he asks me how I am, I say: “Don’t ask me. I want to forget about myself.” I gave him a taste for the depths, where reality lies, so it is he who plunges into it: “I want a boy like you, with all you have, and I know I won’t find that. I am not serene. I’m full of rage. My boy wants to break with me because he feels I have not given myself. I hold him back merely because I am tired of changing. And yet I’m bored, bored, I’m losing interest in them, even physically.” (The battle is on, my poor Gore, the battle between your split selves.)
“I’m looking, and you are waiting for Bill. There will always have to be another person between us. I know Bill will grow up.”
“But he won’t grow into a person like you.”
“I know. You won’t find another boy with my understanding of you, nor I a boy like you. We have spoiled each other for relationships.”
“If I went away now, you would be content with your homosexual world.”
“Never, now that I know you and what a big relationship can be. But I know you want to go away, that you are poised for flight. I know also that you will think of me if you ever leave me, as I will think of you, and that there is no running away. I’m full of anger. I feel now that even if I turned to a woman it might be with the hard side of myself, my angry, revengeful side, eager to destroy them because I hate my mother. So it would never be you, because I won’t hurt you.”
“But you’re revenging yourself on me just the same by withholding a part of you, out of mistrust.”
He fears I would be sadistic. He was troubled, pale, angry. I was about to break down, to weep, but I controlled myself. We walked out in the rain holding hands.
“Why won’t you allow me to come to the surface?” I said.
“Because I like you as you are, really.”
“This time you made the scene. I’m glad. I thought you were getting impatient with my scenes.”
As soon as he sees me stirred, unhappy, he feels the bond is strong, that he has taken me, that I am real with him, that he possesses me. Then he is happy. We sat at a little bar, his hand over mine. After the emotional disturbance (as after lovemaking) he said, “One can be happy in the depths.”
What made him happy? In the turmoil he extracts his nourishment. I admit we have a special understanding of each other. His love for me is human and personal. He knows my moods, cares about how I feel, and I admit I do not have this with Bill. I admit that I thought of him lying at Bill’s side. I admit regret that we are not living together. I admit sorrow and longing. In the taxi we kiss fervently, on the rim of passion. And that is our love scene, a love scene of the impotent, of the castrates, the inadequate, the immature.
Gore, what I cannot accept is that with the surrender of the physical tie, we surrender all that surrounds it, the intimacies, the living together, the sharing of life, talks in the dark, all the multiple exchanges, the mutual creations. It is not just the act of taking each other, but all that it means. We live as visitors now. We do not share a life, the constellations, the changes, all that constitutes being together. When Hugo left the conflict, your fear of my becoming passionate destroyed the intimacy. So each day I rebel anew. I feel the loss. I have so much imagination that I felt I had already married you. I have too much imagination, so in my body I felt your relation to others. Your nights with the boys don’t happen far away. I see them and feel them in my body. They happen to me. Such nearness is intolerable. That is what I want to run away from. Not from you, but the intolerable living so close with you in the imagination and so abstractly in reality. And hoping…
Dream: I go into a whorehouse. The men who are going to make love to me are babies, one of whom is crippled. I ask him to keep his clothes on so I will not see his deformity (he is tight, drawn, pulled together). There are visitors. I want to make love immediately, and people remind me of the visitors. I say, “But if it is a whorehouse, why pretend to be here for some other social reason when everyone is obviously here for sex?” And I want to go into the room with the little boys.
I started with the idea that to be loved you had to become wonderful. So I eliminated selfishness, demands for love, aggression, exploitation. Then I associated with people who practiced this openly—they did it for me.
I project many of my sensibilities onto others—I imagine great vulnerability in others. So I summon that part of themselves, gentleness, softness, weakness, and as Hugo says, “You make me feel things I don’t feel,” meaning they are in the unconscious and that they could be left there. Something else could be summoned out. I remember I used to feel that Henry summoned my strength, challenged it. Hugo makes me feel soft and weak. And so this side of me turns to him. Do I invent feelings as well?
Hardening and strengthening was a terrible process. Strength appears to me like hardness. I have reactions after I hold out. There is a possibility of happiness, then, in the non-caring. I have had a magnified caring, an over-developed sensibility. Sure, it gave me insight into others’ feelings, but it also tormented me.
There is a way of living which makes for greater airiness, space, ease. It is like the airplane’s rise above the storms. It is a way of looking at the obstacle as something to overcome: if we look at what defeats us as a monster created within ourselves by our fears, it is dissolvable and transformable.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 14, 1946
Letter from Hugo:
Six-thirty in the morning.
Have found the early morning is the time when I feel most deeply about everything. The unconscious is most active in me in this quiet time, and now I yield to it instead of feeling as if I were a sea being tossed against rocks.
The part in Ladders to Fire about the powdery gold, the atomizer, the green dress, the green that was never seen before, the mist of perfume, the trembling light behind you, the sounds that become music—“the air of that summer day, when the wind itself had suspended its breathing, hung between the window and the garden, the air itself could displace a leaf, could displace a word. The essence, the human essence always evaporating where the dream installed itself and presided”—all that gave me a pang and a feeling of overwhelming tenderness for this picture of you. The preciousness of your evanescence and the knowledge of the pain it gives you to be evanescent made me hope that I have protected this one with tenderness and quenched the other with my manhood.
I know I have not always done both at the same time. The parts I have acted, as in your book, have been acted as if by separate people, or by the same person at different times. There were times when, as in the book, the husband merely visited you sensually, as a man, and when the whole lover did not possess you. And that was when you turned to others for what I did not give you. Only once did I lose you both ways. Now I am bringing together both lover and husband, poet and protector—you need both and I know I can give you both, because when I read your book I respond equally to the sensual and the tender evanescence in you, and I think you are going to have a hard job finding those two responses to your satisfaction in anyone else because those two needs of yours are two sides of myself which are now fusing.
As ever, your Hugo
SEPTEMBER 8, 1946
Letter from Bill:
Cherie,
I have been thinking about you continually since I left.
Letters are a poor substitute for what we had when we were together, but I guess they are better than nothing.
As you can see, I am now in Korea, in a little town on the southern seacoast, a place called Pusan.
My address is on the envelope.
I wrote a poem while in Tokyo, or rather a very short verse. I’m working on a longer one, but haven’t got the privacy to complete it.
In secret chambers of the city she,
In oriental panoply,
Sits; she weaves a web
With fingers fair
That draws my quickening
Memories there.
All my love, Guillaume