Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 158 of 344 · 20 per page

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Eduardo warming, melting, desirous. So I say, “Let’s go to the movies. I know one we should see.” He is obstinate. But there is no more pity or weakness in me. I am just as obstinate. Eduardo with the Hotel Anjou in mind. I with Henry’s blood in my veins. All during the lunch I thought how much I would like to bring Henry to the place. Give him food out of those enormous, fairy-tale banquet dishes. Eduardo is very angry, in a chill way. He says, “I’ll take you to the Gare St. Lazare. You can make the two-twenty-five.” But I have a rendezvous with Henry at six. We walk a bit together and then we separate, both angry, with barely any words. I see him walking aimlessly and desolately. I cross the street and walk into the Printemps. I go to the counter with necklaces and bracelets and earrings, which dazzle me always. I stand like a fascinated savage. Glitter. Amethyst. Turquoise. Shell pink. Irish green. I would like to be naked and cover myself with cold crystal jewelry. Jewelry and perfume. I see two very broad flat steel bracelets. Handcuffs. I am the slave of bracelets. They are soon clasped on my wrists. I pay. I buy rouge, powder, nail lacquer. I do not think of Eduardo. I go to the coiffeur, where I can sit still and frozen. I write with a wrist encircled in steel. Later, Henry asks questions. I refuse to answer. I resort to women’s tricks. I keep the secret of my faithfulness. We press each other’s arms as we walk through the streets of Paris. A dangerous hour. I have already experienced today the strange pleasure of hurting Eduardo. Now I want to stay with Henry and hurt Hugo. I can’t bear to be going home alone, while Henry goes to Clichy. I am tormented by the desire we couldn’t satisfy. It is he who is now afraid of my madness. Today Allendy drives his questions relentlessly. I cannot escape. When I try to change the subject, he answers me but returns to the subject I am eluding. He is confused by what I tell him about Eduardo, about wanting to be cruel to Hugo the same day, and about the bracelets. Henry is obviously the favored one just now. But since Allendy proceeds from the assumption that I love Eduardo, he is certain to get lost, although he does see quite clearly the struggle between my wanting to conquer and my wanting to be conquered. I sought domination in Henry, and he does dominate me sexually, but I was deceived by his writing and his enormous experience. Allendy did not understand the bracelets. I bought two of them, he says, in contradiction to my feeling of satisfaction at hurting Eduardo and Hugo.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Ultimately her own unique voice prevails, and her writing reflects her emotional and physical frenzy during this momentous year. She is never to be quite this wild again, although her sexual odyssey will continue for many years to come. Rupert Pole Executor, The Anaïs Nin Trust Los Angeles, California February, 1986 Paris. October 1931 My cousin Eduardo came to Louveciennes yesterday. We talked for six hours. He reached the conclusion I had come to also: that I need an older mind, a father, a man stronger than me, a lover who will lead me in love, because all the rest is too much a self-created thing. The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself. As we were talking, Eduardo suddenly began to tremble, and he took my hand. He said that I belonged to him from the very beginning; that an obstacle stood between us: his fear of impotence because at first I had aroused ideal love in him. He has suffered from the realization that we are both seeking an experience which we might have given to each other. It has seemed strange to me, too. The men I have wanted, I couldn’t have. But I am determined to have an experience when it comes my way. “Sensuality is a secret power in my body,” I said to Eduardo. “Someday it will show, healthy and ample. Wait a while.” Or is this not the secret of the obstacle between us?—that his type is the large, buxom woman, heavy on the earth, while I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman. For a whole week Hugo has come home very late, and I kept cheerful and unconcerned, as I had promised myself. Then on Friday he got worried and said, “Do you realize it is twenty minutes to eight, that I’m very late? Say something about it.” And we both burst out laughing. He did not like my indifference. On the other hand, our quarrels, when they come, seem harder and more emotional. Are all our emotions stronger now that we give vent to them? There is a desperation in our reconciliations, a new violence both in anger and in love. The problem of jealousy alone remains. It is the one obstacle to our complete freedom. I cannot even talk of my wish to go to a cabaret where we could dance with professional dancers. I now call Hugo my “little magnate.” He has a new private office the size of a studio. The entire bank building is magnificent and inspiring. I often wait for him in the conference room, where there are murals of New York as seen from an aeroplane, and I feel the power of New York reaching way over here. I do not criticize his work any more because such conflict kills him.

• From Bluets (2009)

  176. This idea has its charms, but I think it possible that I have watched too many blue movies for it to have a lasting hold on me. If you grow accustomed to wall-to-wall, even the slightest shred of mystery or plot can become an agitation. Who cares why these people have found themselves in this banal, suburban tract home in Burbank? He is not a delivery man; she is not a bored housewife. They are not the stars—their orifices are. Let them open. 177. Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you. 178. Neither Cornell nor Warhol made the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. For Warhol, fucking was less about desire than it was about killing time: it is take-it-or-leave-it work, accomplished similarly by geniuses and retards, just like everything else at the Factory. For Cornell, desire was a sharpness, a tear in the static of everyday life—in his diaries he calls it “the spark,” “the lift,” or “the zest.” It delivers not an ache, but a sudden state of grace. It might be worth noting here that both Warhol and Cornell could arguably be described, at least for periods of their lives, as celibate. 179. When I imagine a celibate man—especially one who doesn’t even jerk off—I wonder how he relates to his dick: what else he does with it, how he handles it, how he regards it. At first glance, this same question for a woman might appear more “tucked away” (pussy-as-absence, pussy-as-lack: out of sight, out of mind). But I am inclined to think that anyone who thinks or talks this way has simply never felt the pulsing of a pussy in serious need of fucking—a pulsing that communicates nothing less than the suckings and ejaculations of the heart. 180. I have not yet spoken of the princess of blue, which is somewhat intentional: it is unwise to give away too much information about a good dealer, and she has been, for almost two decades now, an excellent and primary supplier of blue. But I will say this: the other night I dreamed of visiting her in her forest. In the dream she was sitting cross-legged, as was I, but she levitated. She wasn’t a deity—it was just that I had sought her and was now her guest. The forest was translucent. We talked. She told me that pollution, too, could be worshiped, simply because it exists. But Eden, she said, there’s no Eden. And this forest where we’re sitting, it doesn’t really exist.

• From Bluets (2009)

  55. One image of the intellectual: a man who loses his eyesight not out of shame (Oedipus) but in order to think more clearly (Milton). I try to avoid generalities when it comes to the business of gender, but in all honesty I must admit that I simply cannot conceive of a version of female intelligence that would advocate such a thing. An “abortion of the mind, this purity” (W. C. Williams). 56. There are, however, many stories of women—particularly saints—blinding themselves in order to maintain their chastity, to prove that they “only have eyes” for God or Christ. Consider, for example, the legend of Saint Lucy, patron saint of the blind, whose name means “clear, radiant, understandable.” What seems clear enough: in 304 AD Lucy was tortured and put to death by the Roman emperor Diocletian, and thus martyred for her Christianity. What is unclear: why, exactly, she runs around Gothic and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her blue eyes staring weirdly out from it. Some say her eyes were tortured out of her head in her martyrdom; some say she gouged them out herself after being sentenced by the pagan emperor to be defiled in a brothel. Even more unclear are the twinned legends of Saint Medana (of Ireland) and Saint Triduana (of Scotland), two Christian princesses who were pursued by undesirable pagan lovers—lovers who professed to be unable to live without their beloveds’ beautiful blue eyes. To rid herself of the unwanted attention, Medana supposedly plucked her eyes out and threw them at her suitor’s feet; Triduana was slightly more inventive, and tore hers out with a thorn, then sent them to her suitor on a skewer. 57. In religious accounts, these women are announcing, via their amputations, their fidelity to God. But other accounts wonder whether they were in fact punishing themselves, as they knew that they had looked upon men with lust, and felt the need to employ extreme measures to avert any further temptation. 58. “Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing” (Leonardo da Vinci). 59. There are those, however, who like to look. And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head. “I love to gaze at a promising-looking cock,” writes Catherine Millet in her beautiful sex memoir, before going on to describe how she also loves to look at the “brownish crater” of her asshole and the “crimson valley” of her pussy, each opened wide—its color laid bare—for the fucking. 60. I like to look, too. “Saint Lucy, you did not hide your light under a basket,” begins one Catholic prayer.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He has a big, overwhelming body, like John’s. He holds me so tightly I almost suffocate. His mouth is not as voluptuous as Henry’s, and we don’t understand each other. But I stay in his arms. He says, “I will teach you to play, not to take love so tragically, not to pay such a heavy price for it. You have made it too dramatic and intense a thing. This will be pleasant. I have such a strong desire for you.” Detestable wisdom. Oh, I hate him. While he talks I bow my head and smile. He shakes me, wanting to know what I am thinking. I really want to weep. I had aspired to this sort of relationship, and now I have it. Allendy is poised, powerful, but I have upset him. I have got him to love me first, to betray his love. If this is joy, I don’t want it. He is aware of my reaction. “This seems tame to you?” There is only his body to fascinate me. He is the unknown. Eduardo, to whom I pour out this story, is glad I am moving towards Allendy. Both of them hate Henry. Still, I want Henry tonight, my love, my husband, whom I am going to betray soon with as much sorrow as I felt when I betrayed Hugo. I crave to love wholly, to be faithful. I love the groove in which my love for Henry has been running. Yet I am driven by diabolical forces outside of all grooves. Hugo is being greatly helped and strengthened by Allendy. He is beginning to love him, because there is in him a certain element of homosexuality. Allendy is now a devil god directing all our lives. Last night as Hugo talked I could observe Allendy’s deft and beautiful influence. I laughed riotously when Hugo said Allendy had told him I needed to be dominated. Hugo answered, “Yes, but that is easy. Anaïs is Latin and so pliable.” Allendy must have smiled. Then Hugo comes home and throws himself on me with a new savagery, and I enjoy myself, oh, I enjoy myself. It seems to me that at this moment I am blessed with three wonderful men and quite able to love all three. I suppose only a scruple keeps me from enjoying them. I wish Allendy were more forceful. He submits to women. He liked my aggressivity in our sexual games. His first sexual experience was a passive one when he was sixteen and an older woman made love to him. I went back to see him with great impatience, trembling now with cold, now with fever. We have discarded analysis. We talked about Eduardo, Hugo, astrology. I asked him to come and see me, but he feels he cannot yet because of his analysis of Hugo. We laughed together about the domination

• From Henry and June (1986)

  It amuses him, my seriousness. He says, “Perhaps you are the kind of woman who doesn’t hurt a man.” He has been humiliated. When he thinks I have said, “You annoy me,” he jumps away as if I had bitten him. I don’t say that sort of thing. He is very impetuous, very strong, but he doesn’t annoy me. I answer his fourth or fifth kiss. I begin to feel drunk. So I get up and say incoherently, “I’m going now—for me it can’t be without love.” He teases me. He bites my ears and kisses me, and I like his fierceness. He throws me on the couch for a moment, but somehow I escape. I am aware of his desire. I like his mouth and the knowing force of his arms, but his desire frightens me, repulses me. I think, it’s because I don’t love him. He’s stirred me but I don’t love him, I don’t want him. As soon as I know this (his desire, pointing at me, is like a sword between us), I free myself, and I leave, without hurting him in any way. I think, well, I just wanted the pleasure without feeling. But something holds me back. There is in me something untouched, unstirred, which commands me. That will have to be moved if I am to move wholly. I think of this in the Métro, and I get lost. A few days later I met Henry. I was waiting to meet him, as if that would solve something, and it did. When I saw him, I thought, here is a man I could love. And I was not afraid. Then I read Drake’s novel, and I discover an unsuspected Drake—foreign, uprooted, fantastic, erratic. A realist, exasperated by reality. Immediately his desire ceases to repulse me. A little link has been formed between two strangenesses. I respond to his imagination with mine. His novel conceals a few of his own feelings. How do I know? They are not consistent with the story, not quite. They are there because they are natural to him. The name Lawrence Drake is put on, too. There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work. I wondered at this last night as I closed Drake’s book. I knew it would take me years to forget John [Erskine], because it was he who first stirred the secret source of my life. There is nothing of Drake himself in the book, I am convinced. He hates the parts I like. It was all written objectively, consciously, and even the fantasy was carefully planned. We settle this at the beginning of my next visit. Very good. I am beginning to see things more clearly. I know now why I did not trust him the first day. His actions are devoid of either feeling or imagination. They are motivated

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Lucidity: There is in Henry a lack of feeling (not a lack of passion or emotion) that is betrayed by his emphasis on fucking and talking. When he speaks about other women, what he remembers of them are the defects, the sensual characteristics, or the disputes. The rest is either absent or implied. I don’t know yet. But feelings are fetters. Henry is not to be worshiped as a human being, but as a genius-monster. He may be soft-hearted but only indiscriminately so. He gave Paulette, out of generosity, the pair of stockings I had left in his drawer, my best pair, while I was wearing mended stockings so I could save to buy gifts for him. The money I sent him from Austria, for a woman, he spent on records for me. Yet he stole 500 francs from Osborn’s legacy to his girl friend when Osborn left for America. He gives my dog half his steak, yet he keeps the surplus change given to him by a taxi driver. These sudden acts of callousness, which also appear in June, bewilder me and I expect to suffer from them, though Henry swears he could never act thus with me. And so far I cannot see anything in his treatment of me but the utmost delicacy. He has not hesitated to fling out cruel truths—he is fully aware of my defects—but at the same time he succumbs to the spell, the softness. Why do I trust him so, believe in him, have no fear of him? Perhaps it’s as much of a mistake as it is for Hugo to trust me. I crave Henry, only Henry. I want to live with him, be free with him, suffer with him. Phrases from his letters haunt me. Yet I have doubts about our love. I fear my impetuosity. Everything is in danger. All that I have created. I follow Henry the writer with my writer’s soul, I enter into his feelings as he wanders through the streets, I partake of his curiosities, his desires, his whores, I think his thoughts. Everything in us is married. Henry, you are not lying to me; you are all I feel you are. Don’t deceive me. My love is too new, too absolute, too deep. As Hugo and I walked tonight from the top of the hill I saw Paris lying in a heat haze. Paris. Henry. I did not think of him as a man, but as life. Perfidiously, I said to Hugo, “It is so fearfully hot. Couldn’t we ask Fred and Henry and Paulette for a visit overnight?”

• From Bluets (2009)

  61. In his book On Being Blue, William Gass argues that what we readers really want is “the penetration of privacy”: “We want to see under the skirt.” But his penetration is eventually tiresome, even to himself: “What good is my peek at her pubic hair if I must also see the red lines made by her panties, the pimples on her rump, broken veins like the print of a lavender thumb, the stepped-on look of a day’s-end muff? I’ve that at home.” After asserting that the blue we want from life is in fact found only in fiction, he counsels the writer to “give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them.” 62. This is puritanism, not eros. For my part I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or an airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses and light. I will not choose between the blue things of the world and the words that say them: you might as well be heating up the poker and readying your eyes for the altar. Your loss. 63. Generally speaking I do not hunt blue things down, nor do I pay for them. The blue things I treasure are gifts, or surprises in the landscape. The rocks I dug up this summer in the north country, for example, each one mysteriously painted round its belly with a bright blue band. The little square junk of navy blue dye you brought me long ago, when we barely knew each other, folded neatly into a paper wrapper. 64. It was around this time that I was planning to travel to many famously blue places: ancient indigo and woad production sites, the Chartres Cathedral, the Isle of Skye, the lapis mines of Afghanistan, the Scrovegni Chapel, Morocco, Crete. I made a map, I used colored pins, etc. But I had no money. So I applied for grant after grant, describing how exciting, how original, how necessary my exploration of blue would be. In one application, written and sent late at night to a conservative Ivy League university, I described myself and my project as heathen, hedonistic, and horny. I never got any funding. My blues stayed local. 65. The instructions printed on the blue junk’s wrapper: Wrap Blue in cloth. Stir while squeezing the Blue in the last rinsing water. Dip articles separately for a short time; keep them moving . I liked these instructions. I like blues that keep moving. 66. Yesterday I picked up a speck of blue I’d been eyeing for weeks on the ground outside my house, and found it to be a poison strip for termites. Noli me tangere, it said, as some blues do. I left it on the ground.

• From Bluets (2009)

  Each female mates only once. She incubates the eggs alone. 69. When I see photos of these blue bowers, I feel so much desire that I wonder if I might have been born into the wrong species. 70. Am I trying, with these “propositions,” to build some kind of bower?—But surely this would be a mistake. For starters, words do not look like the things they designate (Maurice Merleau-Ponty). 71. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. 72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink— Here you are again, it says, and so am I . 73. In his Opticks, Newton periodically refers to an invaluable “assistant” who helps him refract the shaft of sunlight streaming in through the aperture Newton had drilled into the wall of his “dark chamber”—an assistant to Newton’s discovery, or revelation, of the spectrum. Over time, however, many have questioned whether this assistant ever really existed. Many now believe him to be, essentially, a “rhetorical fiction.” 74. Who, nowadays, watches the light stream through the walls of her “dark chamber” with the company of a phantasmagoric assistant, or smashes at her eyes to reproduce lost color sensations, or stays up all night watching colored shadows drift across the walls? At times I have done all of these things, but not in service of science, nor of philosophy, not even of poetry. 75. Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that. 76. At one point in history, to approximate the color of ultramarine, which comes from lapis, which for quite some time was available in only one mine, in what we now call Afghanistan— Sar-e-Sang, the Place of the Stone— and had to be journeyed out via hundreds of miles of treacherous trade roads, Westerners would churn up cheaper pigments with blood and copper. Generally speaking we don’t do this anymore. We don’t store our oils in the bladders of pigs. We go to the store. If we want to know what a phosphene is, we don’t mash our fists into our eyes. We Google the word. If you’re depressed, you take a pill. Some of these pills are bright blue. If you’re lonely, there’s a guy on Craigslist two blocks away who says he has an hour to kill and a dick longer than a donkey’s. He has posted a photograph to prove it. 77. “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” (Thoreau). 78.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  God, I have known such a day, such hours of female submission, such a gift of myself there can be nothing left to give. But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough, not savage enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted. Before we met that day, he had written to me: “All I can say is that I am mad about you. I tried to write a letter and couldn’t. I am waiting impatiently to see you. Tuesday is so far off. And not just Tuesday—I am wondering when you will come to stay overnight, when I can have you for a long spell. It torments me to see you just a few hours and then surrender you. When I see you, all that I wanted to say vanishes. The time is so precious and words are extraneous. But you make me so happy, because I can talk to you. I love your brightness, your preparations for flight, your legs like a vise, the warmth between your legs. Yes, Anaïs, I want to demask you. I am too gallant with you. I want to look at you long and ardently, pick up your dress, fondle you, examine you. Do you know I have scarcely looked at you? There is still too much sacredness clinging to you. I don’t know how to tell you what I feel. I live in a perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late. You numb me. I try to picture your life at Louveciennes but I can’t. Your book? That too seems unreal. Only when you come and I look at you does the picture become clearer. But you go away so quickly, I don’t know what to think. Yes, I see the Pouch-kine legend clearly. I see you in my mind as sitting on that throne, jewels around your neck, sandals, big rings, painted fingernails, strange Spanish voice, living some kind of a lie which is not a lie exactly but a fairy tale. This is a little drunken, Anaïs. I am saying to myself: ‘Here is the first woman with whom I can be absolutely sincere.’ I remember your saying: ‘You could fool me, I wouldn’t know it.’ When I walk along the boulevards and think of that, I can’t fool you—and yet I would like to. I mean that I can never be absolutely loyal—it’s not in me. I love women, or life, too much—which it is, I don’t know.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Hugo says angrily that she is an empty box and that I am the full box. But who wants the ideas, the fantasies, the contents, if the box is beautiful and inspiring? I am inspired by June the empty box. To think of her in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living. The world has never been as empty for me since I have known her. June supplies the beautiful incandescent flesh, the fulgurant voice, the abysmal eyes, the drugged gestures, the presence, the body, the incarnate image of our imaginings. What are we? Only the creators. She is. I get letters from Henry every other day. I answer him immediately. I gave him my typewriter, and I write by hand. I think of him day and night. I dream of an extraordinary extra life I am going to lead someday, which may even fill another and special diary. Last night, after reading Henry’s novel, I couldn’t sleep. It was midnight. Hugo was sleeping. I wanted to get up and go to my writing room and write Henry about his first novel. But I would have awakened Hugo. There are two doors to open, and they creak. Hugo was so exhausted when he went to bed. I lay very still and forced myself to sleep, with phrases rushing through my head like a cyclone. I thought that I would remember them in the morning. But I couldn’t remember, not even half. If Hugo did not have to go to work, I could have awakened him, and he could have slept on the next morning. Our whole life is spoiled by his work in the bank. I must get him out of it. And that makes me work on my novel, rewriting, which I hate, for a new book is boiling in my head—June’s book. The conflict between my being “possessed” and my devotion to Hugo is becoming unbearable. I will love him with all my strength but in my own way. Is it impossible for me to grow in only one direction? Tonight I am full of joy because Henry is here again. The impression is always the same: one is filled with the weight and lashing of his writing, and then he comes upon you so softly—soft voice, trailing off, soft gestures, soft, fine white hands—and one surrenders to his indefatigable curiosity and his romanticism towards women. Henry’s description of the Henry Street joint (where June brought Jean to live with them): Bed unmade all day; climbing into it with shoes on frequently; sheets a mess. Using soiled shirts for towels. Laundry seldom gotten out. Sinks stopped up from too much garbage. Washing dishes in bathtub, which was greasy and black-rimmed. Bathroom always cold as an icebox. Breaking up furniture to throw into fire.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I revolve around your richness of being. “Come close to me, come closer. I promise you it will be beautiful.” You keep your promise. Listen, I do not believe that I alone feel we are living something new because it is new to me. I do not see in your writing any of the feelings you have shown me or any of the phrases you have used. When I read your writing, I wondered, What episode are we going to repeat? You carry your vision, and I mine, and they have mingled. If at moments I see the world as you see it (because they are Henry’s whores I love them), you will sometimes see it as I do. To Henry the investigator I offer enigmatic replies. When I was dressing, I was laughingly commenting on my underwear, which June had liked, June who is always naked under her dress. “It is Spanish,” I said. Henry said, “What comes to my mind when you say this is how did June know that you wore such underclothing?” I said, “Don’t you think I am trying to make it all more innocent than it was, but at the same time, don’t go so directly at ideas like that or you’ll never quite get the truth.” He overlooks the voluptuousness of half-knowledge, half-possession, of leaning over the edge dangerously, for no specific climax. Both Henry and June have destroyed the logic and unity of my life. It is good, for a pattern is not living. Now I am living. I am not making patterns. What eludes me forever is the reality of being a man. When the imagination and emotions of a woman overstep normal boundaries, occasionally she is possessed by feelings she cannot express. I want to possess June. I identify myself with the men who can penetrate her. But I am powerless. I can give her the pleasure of my love, but not the supreme coition. What a torment! And Henry’s letters: “. . . terribly, terribly alive, pained, and feeling absolutely that I need you . . . But I must see you: I see you bright and wonderful and at the same time I have been writing to June and all torn apart, but you will understand: you must understand. Anaïs, stand by me. You’re all around me like a bright flame. Anaïs, by Christ, if you knew what I am feeling now. “I want to get more familiar with you. I love you. I loved you when you came and sat on the bed—all that second afternoon was like warm mist—and I hear again the way you say my name—with that queer accent of yours. You arouse in me such a mixture of feelings, I don’t know how to approach you. Only come to me—get closer and closer to me. It will be beautiful, I promise you. I like so much your frankness—a humility almost. I could never hurt that.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “I don’t know what I expect of you, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to demand everything of you—even the impossible, because you encourage it. You are really strong. I like even your deceit, your treachery. It seems aristocratic to me. (Does aristocratic sound wrong in my mouth?) “Yes, Anaïs, I was thinking how I could betray you, but I can’t. I want you. I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit—ah, I don’t know what I am saying. I am a little drunk because you are not here. I would like to be able to clap my hands and voilà, Anaïs! I want to own you, use you, I want to fuck you, I want to teach you things. No, I don’t appreciate you—God forbid! Perhaps I even want to humiliate you a little—why, why? Why don’t I get down on my knees and just worship you? I can’t, I love you laughingly. Do you like that? And dear Anaïs, I am so many things. You see only the good things now—or at least you lead me to believe so. I want you for a whole day at least. I want to go places with you—possess you. You don’t know how insatiable I am. Or how dastardly. And how selfish! “I have been on my good behavior with you. But I warn you, I am no angel. I think principally that I am a little drunk. I love you. I go to bed now—it is too painful to stay awake. I am insatiable. I will ask you to do the impossible. What it is, I don’t know. You will tell me probably. You are faster than I am. I love your cunt, Anaïs—it drives me crazy. And the way you say my name! God, it’s unreal. Listen, I am very drunk. I am hurt to be here alone. I need you. Can I say everything to you? I can, can’t I? Come quickly then and screw me. Shoot with me. Wrap your legs around me. Warm me.” I felt as if I were reading his most unconscious feelings. I felt all life embracing me, in those words. I felt the supreme challenge to my worship of life, and I wanted to yield, to give myself to all life, which is Henry. What new sensations he arouses in me, what new torments, new fear and new courage! No letter from him after our day. He felt a tremendous relief, satisfaction, fatigue, just as I did. And then? Yesterday he came to Louveciennes. A new Henry, or, rather, the Henry sensed behind the one generally known, the Henry beyond what he has written down, beyond all literal knowledge, my Henry, the man I love tremendously now, too much, dangerously.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I feel a tremendous curiosity. I have looked into this man, I have imagined him naked. He has looked into me, too, with narrow animal eyes. The emotion of duplicity releases an insidious poison. All the way home the poison spreads. I understand now how to play for a moment with those feelings I have held too sacred. Next week instead of going out with my quiet “husband,” Henry, I’ll go and see the Spaniard. And women—I want women. But the masculine lesbians in Le Fetiche cabaret did not please me at all. I now also understand the carnation in Carmen’s mouth. I was smelling mock orange. The white blossoms touched my lips. They were like the skin of a woman. My lips pressed them, opened and closed gently around them. Soft petaled kisses. I bit into the white blossoms. Morsel of perfumed flesh, silkiness of skin. Carmen’s full mouth biting her carnation; and I, Carmen. It is too bad Henry has been good to me, too bad he is a good man. He is becoming aware of a subtle change in me. Yes, he says, I may look immature at first sight, but when I am undressed and in bed, how womanly I am. The other day Joaquin came downstairs unexpectedly, into the salon, to ask me a trivial question, and Henry and I had been kissing. It showed on Henry’s face, and he was embarrassed. I did not feel troubled or ashamed. I was resentful of the intrusion, and I said to Henry, “Well, it serves him right for coming here when he shouldn’t.” If Henry realizes that I am becoming shameless, strong, sure of my actions, refusing to be impressed by others, if he realizes the true course of my life now, will he change towards me? No. He has his needs, and he needs the woman in me who was soft, timid, good, incapable of hurting, of running wild. Instead of that, every day I grow nearer to June. I begin to want her, to know her better, to love her more. Now I realize that every interesting move in their life together was made by June. Without her he is a quiet watcher, not a participant. Henry and I combine beautifully for companionship but not for living. I expected those first days (or nights) in Clichy to be sensational. I was surprised when we fell into deep, quiet talks and did so little. I expected Dostoevskian scenes and found a gentle German who could not bear to let the dishes go unwashed. I found a husband, not a difficult and temperamental lover. Henry was, at first, even uneasy as to how to entertain me. June would have known. Yet I was happy and deeply satisfied then because I loved him.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  And I send him money. I think about him most of the day. But I would never let Henry touch me. I struggle to find the exact reason, and I can only find it in his own language. “I don’t want just to be pissed on.” Do you do such things, June, do you? Or does Henry caricature your desires? Are you half sunk in such sophisticated, such obscure, such tremendous feelings that Henry’s bordellos seem almost laughable? He counts on me to understand, because, like him, I am a writer. I must know. It must be clear to me. To his surprise I tell him just what you say: “It is not the same thing.” There is one world forever closed to him—the world which contains our abstract talks, our kiss, our ecstasies. He senses uneasily that there is a certain side of you he has not grasped, everything that is left out of his novel. You slip between his fingers! The richness of Hugo. His power to love, to forgive, to give, to understand. God, but I am a blessed woman. I will be home tomorrow night. I am finished with hotel life and solitude at night. July But when Hugo left for London Monday, I rushed off to Henry. Two nights of ecstasy. I still bear the traces of his bites, and last night he was so frenzied he hurt me. Our love-making was broken by profound talks. He is jealous. He took me to Montparnasse, and a handsome Hungarian sat next to me and made advances to me, boldly. Henry talked afterwards of wanting to keep me under lock and key, that I was made for intimacy. When he saw me in Montparnasse, he felt that I was too soft and delicate for the crowd; he wanted to protect me, to hide me. He has been debating with himself whether or not to give up June. With me he feels whole, and he knows I have loved him better. We lie awake in the night talking about this, but I know he cannot and must not think of giving up June, his passion. I, in his place, would not give her up. June and I do not efface each other; we complement one another. Henry needs both of us. June is the stimulant and I the refuge. With June he knows despair and with me harmony. All this I say while I hold him very firmly in my arms. And then I have Hugo. I would not give him up for Henry. What I cannot say to Henry is that he is primarily a physical man and that this is why June is essential to him. Such a man inspires sensual love. I, too, love him sensually. And in the end, this tie cannot last. He is destined to lose me. What I give him would be tremendous to a man less sensual.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  seems fantastic to me now. It is some divine prank, some cruel jest you are playing on me . . . I want you." I said to Allendy, “Don’t analyze me today. Let’s talk about you. I am enthusiastic over your books. Let’s talk about death.” Allendy assents. Then we discuss Joaquin’s concert. He said my father looked like a young man. Henry made him think of a famous German painter—too soft, perhaps double sided? an unconscious homosexual? Now I am surprised. My article was good, says Allendy, but why do I not want to be analyzed? As soon as I begin to depend on him I want to win his confidence, analyze him , find a weakness in him, conquer him a little because I have been conquered. He is right. “Yet,” I protest, “it seems to me it is a sign of sympathy.” He says yes, because that is the way I treat all those I love. Although I want to be conquered, I do all I can to conquer, and when I have conquered, my tenderness is aroused and my passion dies. And Henry? It is too soon to tell. Allendy says that although I appeared to be seeking domination and cruelty and brutality in Henry (I found them in his writing), my real instinct told me there was a softness in the man. And that although I appear to be surprised that Henry should be so gentle, so scrupulous with me, I am now really glad. I have conquered again. I have been cruel to Hugo. Yesterday I didn’t want him to come home. I felt a terrible hostility. And it showed. Henry and his friend Fraenkel were there in the evening. I stopped Hugo when he was reading out loud, something too long, monotonously, and I changed the subject once so brusquely that Fraenkel noticed it. But Fraenkel liked Hugo, thought highly of him. Once Hugo moved his chair, after having put some books and manuscripts on the floor. Later he sat on it, and Henry’s manuscript was right under a leg of the chair. That made me restless. I finally got up and tenderly picked it up. There was a humorous moment when Fraenkel was talking about Henry’s sound way of sleeping and how long he slept. I looked mischievously at Henry and said, “Is that so? Really?” My Henry listened like a big bear to little, sinuous Fraenkel explaining complex abstract ideas. Fraenkel has a passion for ideas. Fraenkel, as Henry says, is an idea. A year ago those ideas would have filled me with joy. But Henry has done something to me, Henry the man. I can only compare what I feel to Lady Chatterley’s feelings about Mellors. I cannot even think about Henry’s work or Henry himself without a stirring in my womb. Today we had time only for kisses, and they alone melted me.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  But he looks down and shows me his lanced desire again. He himself is surprised: “I love you; I wasn’t even thinking of fucking. But your touch alone . . .” I sit on his knees. And then we sink into that drunkenness of sucking. For a long, long time, just tongues, eyes closed. Then the penis and the yielding walls of flesh, clutching, opening, beating. We roll on the floor until I cannot bear any more, and I lie still, saying no. But when he helps me off with my dress and embraces me from behind, I leap up to him, all aflame again. What sleep afterwards, lost, dreamless. “When it comes to sensuality,” Henry says, “you are almost more sensual than June. Because she may be a splendid animal when you hold her in your arms, but afterwards, nothing. She is cold, hard, even. Your sex permeates your mind, runs into your head afterwards. Everything you think is warm. You are constantly warm. The only thing is that you have the body of a girl. But what power you have to keep the illusion. You know how men feel after they have had a woman. They want to kick her off the bed. With you it remains as heightened afterwards as before. I can never get enough of you. I want to marry you and return to New York with you.” We talk about June. I laugh at his efforts to break with her, in his own mind. We are two against her, two in harmony, in love, in profound fusion, yet she is stronger. I know better than he knows. He has admitted so much against her and in favor of me. But I smile with a wisdom rooted in doubt. I want no more than what I have been given these past days, hours so fecund that a lifetime of remembrance could not exhaust them, wear them thin. “This is no ordinary garden,” Henry says at Louveciennes. “It is mysterious, significant. There is mentioned in a Chinese book a celestial garden, a kingdom, suspended between heaven and earth: this is it.” Over all this hangs the joyous probability that his book Tropic of Cancer will be published. When I am alone, I hear him talk. Like Lawrence’s snake, his thinking comes from the bowels of the earth. Someone has compared him to an artist who was known as the “cunt painter.” He is so much clearer to me. Towards certain women, he shows toughness and hard-boiledness; towards others, a naive romanticism.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  True, she helped people to fall into each other’s arms, but she never brought couples together at random. Anyhow, I was too much interested and flattered by what she hinted at, and that alone excited me, though I tried to force myself to act as if I didn’t care much. So I threw the ball back toward her, carelessly at that, so that it fell without much of a splash on the crest of a lazy wave, borne almost to the shore, and then immediately lost again in the light foam. The sea was like us, content to play languidly with the tips of its fingers. But Mina insisted: “Still, Ginou’s a wonderful kid. You know, she’s my best friend, and she really dreamed about you.” Ginou, also called Jeannette, was playing ball over the breakwater just beyond ours; she was the only girl there, in a crowd of five boys. She was petite, plump, as perfectly proportioned as if an artist had created her, bursting with health, her cheeks rosy, her lips red, eyes blue, almost like a celluloid doll. Whenever she won a point in the game, she shouted out her joy; but when her opponent scored she threw the ball right at his head, splashed around in the water, clapped her hands, put on a real three-ring circus with all her excitement and byplay, a show indeed for the boys who were with her. “She’s a bit of a minx,” added Mina. “Watch her now! You had better be careful, boy. Anyhow, good luck!” I pretended to be surprised and annoyed: “What on earth do you think you’re talking about? You’re even crazier than usual.” But I felt grateful to Ginou who was always so charming and flirtatious, because she had chosen to dream about me, of all people. I was ready to believe Mina’s story, and there probably existed, between Ginou and myself, points of contact that had never occurred to me but that she had discovered. Moreover, I was ready to develop a crush on any one of these girls, leaving it to circumstances to decide why it should be one rather than another. Of course, I would never have dared to approach Ginou on my own, but she had now opened the way and I was already upset and grateful. All the desperate tenderness that I had repressed in my heart was concentrated on her. Within a couple of days, without my having said another word to her, she already began to assume, in my eyes, all the qualities of a great love . Still, I had to undertake some kind of courtship, though it might be much easier than I feared.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  It is for the men who are not primarily physical that I am the essential woman, men like Hugo, Eduardo, even Allendy. Henry can do without me. Yet it is extraordinary to see how I have changed him, how he has become whole, how he rarely attacks windmills and rails illogically now. It is I who cannot live altogether without Henry. I have changed, too. I feel restless, spirited, adventurous. To be absolutely truthful, I hope secretly to meet someone else, to go on living as I am living, sensually. I have erotic imaginings. I do not want solitude, introspection, work. I want pleasure. These days I occupy myself with frivolities. I serve the goddess of beauty, hoping she may grant me gifts. I work for a dazzling skin, vibrant hair, good health. True, I have no new clothes, because of Henry, but that doesn’t matter. I have dyed and altered and rearranged things. On Monday I’m going to risk an operation which will forever efface the humorous tilt of my nose. After a night together, Henry and I couldn’t separate. I had promised to go home Sunday and spend the evening with Eduardo. But Henry said he would come to Louveciennes with me, whatever happened. I shall never forget that day and night. The maids were out; we had the house to ourselves. Henry explored it and enjoyed it to the utmost. When he threw himself on our big soft bed, the voluptuousness of it affected him. I joined him, and he penetrated me swiftly, hungrily. We talked, read together, danced, listened to guitar recordings. He read bits of the purple journal. If he felt the fairy-taleness of the place, I began to feel a kind of ensor-cellement, too, in which Henry was an extraordinary being, a saint, a stupendous master of words, with a dazzling mind. I am astonished by his sensitiveness. He wept as he watched me listening to the records; and he refused to read on in the journal, upset by its too intimate revelations—Henry, who holds nothing sacred. Eduardo came at four o’clock and we let him ring the bell. Henry was enjoying it, but not I. “You’re too human,” he said, adding, “Now I know how you will feel about me when you put me in the same situation.” Henry and I lying in bed, and Eduardo ringing the bell, walking away, and trying again a half hour later. At half past one Monday Henry left me, thinking I was leaving that night for a vacation. At two o’clock I was at the clinic. I was amazed at my going there, all alone, to take a great risk with my face. I lay on the operating table aware of every gesture of the surgeon. I was at once calm and frightened. I had told nobody about this. My sense of solitude was immense, and with it I felt a sureness which comes to me at all big moments. It carried me through. If

• From Vox (1992)

  “But you’ve called these numbers before, haven’t you?” she asked. “A few times, but with no real success. And I don’t think I’ve ever called this very number before—2VOX.” “What do you mean by ‘success’?” “No women with any kind of spark. Or, actually, honestly, few women at all, period, except the ones who are paid by the phone service to make mechanical sexual small talk and moan occasionally. It’s mostly just men saying ‘Hey, any ladies out there?’ But then once in a while a real woman will call. And at least with this, as opposed to pictures, at least there’s the remote possibility of something clicking. Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to say that we, you and I, click, but there is that possibility.” “Yes.” “In a way it’s like the radio. Do you know that I’ve never actually gone to a store and bought a record? That’s probably why I never learned to appreciate the fade-out, as you describe it, since on the radio, one song melts into the next. But it seems to me that you really need the feeling of radio luck in listening to pop music, since after all it’s about somebody meeting, out of all the zillions of people in the world, this one other nice person, or at least several adequate people. And so, if you buy the record, or the tape, then you control when you can hear it, when what you want is for it to be like luck, and like fate, and to zoom up and down the dial, looking for the song you want, hoping some station will play it—and the joy when it finally rotates around is so intense. You’re not hearing it, you’re overhearing it.” “On the other hand,” she said, “if you own the tape, you show you’ve got some self-knowledge: you know what you like, you know how to make yourself happy, you’re not just wandering in this welter of chance occurrences, passively hoping the disk jockey will come through. Maybe when you’re a little kid you find yourself out on a balcony in the sun and you think, My oh my, this feels unexpectedly nice. But later on you think, I know that I will feel a particular kind of pleasure if I walk out onto this balcony and sit in that chair, and I wish to experience that pleasure now.” “Well, right, and so the reason I called this line was that the pleasures I’d sought out weren’t doing it for me and there was this hope of luck, that I, that there would be a conversation …” “You never said what it was about the Disney Tinker Bell exactly, at the video store.”