Love

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.

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• From Henry and June (1986)

  the goddess Indra studded with a thousand eyes. Anaïs, I only thought I loved you before, it was nothing like this certainty that’s in me now. Was all this so wonderful because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other? Was I less I, or more I, and you less or more you? Is it madness to believe that this could go on? When and where would the drab moments begin? I study you so much to discover the possible flaws, the weak points, the danger zones. I don’t find them—not any. That means I am in love, blind, blind, blind. To be blind forever! “I picture you playing the records over and over—Hugo’s records. Parlez moi d’amour. The double life, double taste, double joy and misery. How you must be furrowed and ploughed by it. I know all that but I can’t do anything to prevent it. I wish indeed it were me who had to endure it. I know now your eyes are wide open. Certain things you will never believe any more, certain gestures you will never repeat, certain sorrows, misgivings, you will never again experience. A kind of white criminal fervor in your tenderness and cruelty. Neither remorse nor vengeance, neither sorrow nor guilt. A living it out, with nothing to save you from the abysm but a high hope, a faith, a joy that you tasted, that you can repeat when you will. “While it thunders and lightnings I lie on the bed and go through wild dreams. We’re in Seville, and then in Fez, and then in Capri, and then in Havana. We’re journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and Arabic and Turkish. We are admitted everywhere and they strew our path with flowers. I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realize. Life and literature combined; love, the dynamo; you, with your chameleon’s soul, giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you assert yourself the more you want me, need me. Your voice getting hoarser, deeper, your eyes blacker, your blood thicker, your body fuller. A voluptuous servility and tyrannical necessity. More cruel now than before—consciously, wilfully cruel. The insatiable delight of experience . . .”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I am in her arms in a taxi. She holds me tightly and says, “You are giving me life, you are giving me what Henry has taken away from me.” And I hear myself answering in fevered words. This scene in the taxi—knees touching, hands locked, cheek against cheek—is going on while we are aware of our fundamental enmity. We are at cross-purposes. Yet I can do nothing for Henry. He is too weak while she is there, as he is weak in my hands. While I tell her I love her I am thinking of how I can save Henry, the child, no longer the lover to me, because his feebleness has made him a child. My body remembers a man who has died. But what a superb game the three of us are playing. Who is the demon? Who the liar? Who the human being? Who the cleverest? Who the strongest? Who loves the most? Are we three immense egos fighting for domination or for love, or are these things mixed? I feel protective about both Henry and June. I feed them, work for them, sacrifice for them. I also must give life to them, because they destroy each other. Henry worries about my walking back from the station at midnight after seeing June off, and June says, “I am afraid of your perfection, of your acuity,” and nestles in my arms, to make herself small.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Hugo is reading. I bend over him and pour out love, a love which is acutely penitent. Hugo gasps, “I swear I could never find such joy in anyone but you. You’re everything to me.” I have a sleepless night, with nerve-wracking pain, thinking of Jung’s wise words: “Let things happen.” The next day I slowly pack, dreaming of Henry. He is food and drink to me. How could I, even for a few days, swing away from him? If Hugo would not laugh like that, like a child, if his warm, furry hands would not reach out constantly for me, if he would not lean over to give chocolate to a black Scotch terrier, if he would not turn that finely chiseled face to me, saying, “Pussywillow, do you love me?” Meanwhile it is Henry who leaps in my body. I feel the spurt of him, his thumping and pushing. Monday night is intolerably far off. The length of his letters, twenty and thirty pages, is symbolical of his bigness. His torrent lashes me. I desire to be only a woman. Not to write books, to face the world directly, but to live by literary blood transfusion. To stand behind Henry, feeding him. To rest from self-assertion and creation. Mountaineers. Smoke. Tea. Beer. The radio. My head floats away from my body, suspended midair in the smoke of Tyrolean pipes. I see frog eyes, straw hair, mouths like open pocketbooks, pig noses, heads like billiard balls, monkey hands with ham-colored palms. I begin to laugh, as if I were drunk, and say Henry words: “cripes,” “screw,” and Hugo gets angry. I am silent and cold. My head floats back. I cry. Hugo, who has been trying to tune himself to my gaiety, now observes the swift transition and is baffled. I increasingly experience this monstrous deformation of reality. I spent a day in Paris before leaving for Austria. I rented a room to rest in because I had not slept the night before, a small attic room with dormer windows. As I lay there I had the sensation of all connections breaking, I parted from each being I loved, carefully and completely. I remembered Hugo’s last glance from the train, Joaquin’s pale face and fraternal kiss, Henry’s last milky kiss, his last words—“Is everything all right?” which he says when he is embarrassed and wants to say something deeper. I parted from them all exactly as I parted from my

• From Henry and June (1986)

  We had an amusing talk about our beginnings. Henry had wanted to kiss me the day we were first alone, the day of our walk to the woods, talking about June. “But confess it was a game for you, at the beginning,” I said. “Not in the very beginning. In Dijon, yes, I had cruel, cold ideas, of using you. But the day I came back to Paris and saw your eyes—oh, Anaïs, the look in your eyes in the restaurant when I came back. That got me. But your life, your seriousness, your background scared me. I would have been very slow if you hadn’t . . .” I laugh now, as I think of it—what I read him from the red journal, the dream about his writing. It was I who broke the shell, because I desperately wanted him to know me. And what a surprise I was to him, he tells me. I followed an impulse, daringly, boldly. Was it because I could see more quickly and knew that Henry and I . . . Or was it naïveté? We confess the most humorous doubts about each other. I have imagined Henry saying to June, “No, I don’t love Anaïs. I acted as you do, for the sake of what she could do for me.” And he has imagined me talking contemptuously about him in a few months. We sit in the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds, which a caress will dissipate in a moment. I am in my pajamas. Henry’s hand slips around my shoulder, and we laugh, wondering what will prove to be the truth. The contrast between Hugo’s sensuality and Henry’s torments me. Could Hugo, be made more sensual? It lasts so short a time with him. He thinks himself a phenomenon because he took me six nights in succession, but with quick, stabbing movements. Even after a paroxysm Henry’s tenderness is more penetrating, more lingering. His soft little kisses, like rain, stay in my body almost as long as his violent caresses. “Are you ever dry?” he teases me. I confess that Hugo has to use Vaseline. Then I realize the full significance of this confession, and I am overwhelmed. Last night in my sleep I touched Hugo’s penis as I learned to touch Henry’s. I caressed it and pressed it in my hand. In my half-sleep I thought it was Henry. When Hugo became excited and began to take me, I awakened fully and was deeply disappointed. My desire died. I love Hugo passionlessly, but tenderness is a strong tie, too. I will never leave him while he wants me. I believe that this passion for Henry will be burned out.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  But not to a Henry. We lie awake in the night, talking, and although my arms clasp him firmly my wisdom already relinquishes him. He is begging me not to take risks during the summer; he is still kissing me, after the convulsions of our fucking, which was, as he said, as if the thermometer had broken. I have conquered a man least conquerable. But I also know the limits of my power, and I know it takes June and me together to answer the demands of men. I accept this with a sad elation. Henry has loved me; oh, I am his love. I have had all I could have of him, the most secret layers of his being, such words, such feelings, such looks, such caresses, each flaming for me uniquely. I have felt him lulled by my softness, exultant in my love, passionate, possessive, jealous. I have grown on him, not bodily, but like a vision. What does he remember most vividly of our moments together? The afternoon he lay on the couch in my bedroom while I finished dressing for a dinner, in my deep green Oriental dress, perfuming myself, and he, overtaken by a sense of living in a fairy tale, with a veil between himself and me, the princess! That is what he remembers while I lie warm in his arms. Illusions and dreams. The blood he pours into me with groans of joy, the biting into my flesh, my odor on his fingers, all vanish before the potency of the fairy tale. “You are a child,” he says, half-puzzled, while at the same time he says, “You certainly know how to fuck. Where did you learn, where?” And yet when he compares me to Paulette, the real child, he observes the seductiveness of my gestures, the maturity of my expression, the mind which he loves. “I am at one with you, Anaïs. I need you. I don’t want June to come back.” When one knows the brutality that existed between Henry and June, it is strange to see how attentive he is to the least sign from me of boredom or fatigue. He has developed new perceptions and a new softness. To tease him, when he talked about my lack of hard-boiledness, I said that I had expected to get that from him, I had hoped to clash with him, to face ridicule, brutality, to learn to fight and hit back and talk louder, but that he had completely failed to give me that experience. I had disarmed the Bubu who was going to make a hard-boiled woman out of me. I don’t even get criticized.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Today I feel that I want to face June and the problem she represents. I want to test my own strength. Anaïs, you have spoiled me, and now I cannot be satisfied with a marriage based on passion alone. What you have given me I never imagined I could find in a woman. The way we talk and work together, the way you adapt yourself, the way we fit together like hand and glove. With you, I have found myself. I used to live with Fred and listen to him, but nothing that he said really hit me until I lived with you those few days during Hugo’s trip. I realize how insidiously you have affected me. I had scarcely felt it, yet suddenly I realize the extent of your influence. You made everything click.” I said, “I will accept June as a devastating tornado while our love remains deeply rooted.” “Oh, if you could do that! Do you know my greatest anguish has been that you might begin to battle with June, that I would be caught between you, not knowing what to do for you, because June paralyzes me with her savagery. If you could understand and wait. It may be a tornado, but I will take my stand once and forever against what June represents. I need to fight this battle out. It is the great issue of my whole life.” “I will understand. I will not make it more terrible for you.” And here we are, Henry and I, talking in such a way that the end of the afternoon finds us rich, eager to write, to live. When we lie down together, I am in such a frenzy that I cannot wait for our unison. Later we sit in the dim light of the iridescent aquarium, bowed with turmoil. Henry gets up and walks about the room. “I cannot go away, Anaïs. I should be here. I am your husband.” I want to cling to him, to hold him, to imprison him. “If I stay another minute,” he continues, “I will do something mad.” “Go away quickly,” I say. “I can’t bear this.” As we go down the stairs he smells the dinner cooking. I bring his hands to my face. “Stay, Henry, stay.” “What you desire,” said Allendy, “is of lesser value than what you have found.” Because of him, tonight I even understand how John loved me in his own way. I believe in Henry’s love. I believe that even if June wins, Henry will love me forever. What tempts me strongly is to face June with Henry, to let her torture us both, to love her, to win her love and Henry’s. I plan to use the courage Allendy gives me in greater schemes of self-torture and self-destruction. No wonder Henry and I shake our heads over our similarities: we hate happiness.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He had to come, he said. He had not slept for several nights, keyed up by his book. I have forgotten my sorrows. Henry is tired He and his book must be nurtured. “What do you want, Henry? Lie on my couch. Have some wine. Yes, this is the room I have been working in. Don’t kiss me just now. We’ll have lunch in the garden. Yes, I have a lot to tell you, but it must all wait. I am deliberately postponing everything which might disturb the breathing of your book. It can all wait.” And then Henry, pale, intense, eyes very blue, said, “I came to tell you that while I worked on my book I realized everything between June and me had died three or four years ago. That what we lived out together the last time she was here was only an automatic continuation, like a habit, like the prolongation of an impetus which cannot come to a dead stop. Of course, it was a tremendous experience, the greatest upheaval. That is why I can write so frenziedly about it. But this is the swan song I am writing now. You must be able to differentiate between the writer’s evocation of the past and his present feelings. I tell you, I love you. I want you to come away with me to Spain, on any pretext, for a few months. I dream of our working together. I want you close to me. Until things work out in such a way that I can completely protect you. I have learned a bitter lesson with June. You and June are women of such personalities that you cannot thrive on drabness, hardships. It is not your element. You are both too important. I won’t ask that of you.” I sat dazed. “Certainly,” he added, “I had to live through all that, but precisely because I have lived it through, I am finished with it and I can experience a new kind of love. I feel stronger than June, yet if June comes back things might start again out of a kind of fatal necessity. What I feel is that I want you to save me from June. I do not want to be diminished, humiliated, destroyed by her again. I know enough to know I want to break with her. I dread her return, the destruction of my work. I was thinking how I have absorbed your time and attention, worried you, hurt you, even; how other people’s troubles are poured on you, too; how you are asked to solve problems, to help. And meanwhile there is your writing, deeper and better than anybody’s, which nobody gives a goddamn about and nobody helps you to do.”

• From Bluets (2009)

  Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal. 2. And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns. 3. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this . 4. I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine. ( This ought to arouse our suspicions .) 5. But first, let us consider a sort of case in reverse. In 1867, after a long bout of solitude, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis: “These last months have been terrifying. My Thought has thought itself through and reached a Pure Idea. What the rest of me has suffered during that long agony, is indescribable.” Mallarmé described this agony as a battle that took place on God’s “boney wing.” “I struggled with that creature of ancient and evil plumage—God—whom I fortunately defeated and threw to earth,” he told Cazalis with exhausted satisfaction. Eventually Mallarmé began replacing “le ciel” with “l’Azur” in his poems, in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations. “Fortunately,” he wrote Cazalis, “I am quite dead now.” 6. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain. 7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature—in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)—that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  In the theatre. How difficult to notice Henry while she sits resplendent with a masklike face. Intermission. She and I want to smoke, Henry and Hugo don’t. Walking out together, what a stir we create. I say to her, “You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.” She answers, “It is a good thing that I am going away. You would soon unmask me. I am powerless before a woman. I do not know how to deal with a woman.” Is she telling the truth? No. In the car she had been telling me about her friend Jean, the sculptress and poetess. “Jean had the most beautiful face,” and then she adds hastily, “I am not speaking of an ordinary woman. Jean’s face, her beauty was more like that of a man.” She stops. “Jean’s hands were so very lovely, so very supple because she had handled clay a lot. The fingers tapered.” What anger stirs in me at June’s praise of Jean’s hands? Jealousy? And her insistence that her life has been full of men, that she does not know how to act before a woman. Liar! She says, staring intently, “I thought your eyes were blue. They are strange and beautiful, gray and gold, with those long black lashes. You are the most graceful woman I have ever seen. You glide when you walk.” We talk about the colors we love. She always wears black and purple. We return to our seats. She turns constantly to me instead of to Hugo. Coming out of the theatre I take her arm. Then she slips her hand over mine; we lock them. She says, “The other night at Montparnasse I was hurt to hear your name mentioned. I don’t want to see cheap men crawl into your life. I feel rather . . . protective.” In the café I see ashes under the skin of her face. Disintegration. What terrible anxiety I feel. I want to put my arms around her. I feel her receding into death and I am willing to enter death to follow her, to embrace her. She is dying before my eyes. Her tantalizing, somber beauty is dying. Her strange, manlike strength. I do not make any sense out of her words. I am fascinated by her eyes and mouth, her discolored mouth, badly rouged. Does she know I feel immobile and fixed, lost in her? She shivers with cold under her light velvet cape. “Will you have lunch with me before you leave?” I ask. She is glad to be leaving. Henry loves her imperfectly and brutally. He has hurt her pride by desiring her opposite: ugly, common, passive women. He cannot endure her positivism, her strength. I hate Henry now, heartily. I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength. Probably Jean loved her strength, her destructive power. For June is destruction.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  No one can help weeping over the destruction of the “ideal marriage.” But I don’t weep any more. I have exhausted my scruples. Hugo has the most beautiful nature in the world, and I love him, but I also love other men. He lies a yard away from me while I write this, and I feel innocent. I live in his kingdom. Peace. Simplicity. Tonight we were talking about evil, and I realized that he lives in complete security about me. He cannot ever imagine that . . . whereas I can so easily imagine. Is he more innocent than I am? Or does one trust when one’s self is so integral? The more I read Dostoevsky the more I wonder about June and Henry and whether they are imitations. I recognize the same phrases, the same heightened language, almost the same actions. Are they literary ghosts? Do they have souls of their own? I remember a moment when I allowed myself to feel petty resentment for Henry. It was a few days after he had told me about being with the whores. He was to meet me at Fraenkel’s to talk over the possibility of helping him publish his book. I felt very hard and cynical. I resented being looked upon as the wife of a banker who could protect a writer. I resented my tremendous anxiety, my wakeful nights, turning over ways and means of helping Henry. He suddenly seemed to me a parasite, a tremendously voracious egoist. Before he arrived I talked with Fraenkel, told him it was impossible and why. Fraenkel felt so much pity for Henry; I, none. Then Henry himself appeared. He was so carefully dressed for me, showing me his new suit, new hat and shirt. He was carefully shaved. I don’t know why this infuriated me. I did not welcome him very warmly. I went on talking about Fraenkel’s work. Henry felt that something was wrong and asked, “Have I come too early?” Finally he mentioned our going to dinner. I said that I couldn’t go. Hugo had not left for London as I had expected he would. I had to take the seven-thirty train home. I looked at Henry’s face. It gave me pleasure to see he was fearfully disappointed. I left them. But I was very unhappy immediately afterwards. All my tenderness returned. I was afraid I had hurt him. I wrote him a note. The next day Hugo was gone, and I went to him immediately. That night we were so contented together that, falling asleep, Henry said, “This is heaven!” August

• From Henry and June (1986)

  June, take everything from me but not Henry. Leave me Henry. He is not necessary to you. You do not love him as I do today. You can love many men. I will love only a few. For me, Henry is rare. I am giving Henry the courage to dominate and dazzle June. He is filling himself with the strength my love gives him. Every day I say I cannot love him more, and every day I find more love in me for him. Heinrich, another beautiful day with you is finished, always too early. And I am not empty of love yet. I loved you as you sat yesterday with the light on your gray-blond hair, the warm blood showing through your Nordic skin. Your mouth open, so sensual. Your shirt open. In your stocky hands you held your father’s letter. I think of your childhood in the streets, your serious adolescence—but always sensual—many books. You know how tailors sit like Arabs over their work. You learned to cut out a pair of pants when you were five years old. You wrote your first book during a two weeks’ vacation. You played jazz on the piano for the grownups to dance to. You were sometimes sent to get your father, who was drinking in a bar. You could slip under the swinging doors, you were so small. You tugged at his coat. You drank beer. You abhor kissing a woman’s hand. You laugh at it. You look so fine in all your cast-off suits, shabby clothes. I know your body now. I know what deviltries you are capable of. You are something to me that I never read in your writings or heard about from June or your friends. Everybody thinks of the noise and the power of you. But I have heard and felt the softness. There are words in other tongues I must use when I talk about you. In my own, I think of: ardiente, salvaje, hombre. I want to be there wherever you are. Lying next to you even if you are asleep. Henry, kiss my eyelashes, put your fingers on my eyelids. Bite my ear. Push back my hair. I have learned to unbutton you so swiftly. All, in my mouth, sucking. Your fingers. The hotness. The frenzy. Our cries of satisfaction. One for each impact of your body against mine. Each blow a sting of joy. Driving in a spiral. The core touched. The womb sucks, back and forth, open, closed. Lips flicking, snake tongues flicking. Ah, the rupture—a blood cell burst with joy. Dissolution. The three of us are on the couch, looking at a map of Europe. Henry asks me, “Are you still gaining weight?” “Yes, continuously.” “Oh, Anaïs, don’t gain weight,” says Fred. “I like you as you are.” Henry smiles. “But Henry likes Renoiresque bodies,” I say. “It’s true,” says Henry. “But I love slenderness. I love virginal breasts.” “I should really love you, Fred. It was a mistake.”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  A startlingly white face retreating into the darkness of the garden. She poses for me as she leaves. I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, “You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage. “The only power which keeps you together is your love for Henry, and for that, you love him. He hurts you, but he keeps your body and soul together. He integrates you. He lashes and whips you into occasional wholeness. I have Hugo.” I wanted to see her again. I thought Hugo would love her. It seemed so natural to me that everybody should love her. I talked to Hugo about her. I felt no jealousy. When she came out of the dark again, she seemed even more beautiful to me than before. Also she seemed more sincere. I said to myself, “People are always more sincere with Hugo.” I also thought it was because she was more at ease. I could not tell what Hugo was thinking. She was going upstairs to our bedroom to leave her coat. She stood for a second halfway up the stairs where the light set her off against the turquoise green wall. Blond hair, pallid face, demoniac peaked eyebrows, a cruel smile with a disarming dimple. Perfidious, infinitely desirable, drawing me to her as towards death. Downstairs, Henry and June formed an alliance. They were telling us about their quarrels, breakdowns, wars against each other. Hugo, who is uneasy in the presence of emotions, tried to laugh off the jagged corners, to smooth out the discord, the ugly, the fearful, to lighten their confidences. Like a Frenchman, suave and reasonable, he dissolved all possibility of drama. There might have been a fierce, inhuman, horrible scene between June and Henry, but Hugo kept us from knowing. Afterwards I pointed out to him how he had prevented all of us from living, how he had caused a living moment to pass him by. I was ashamed of his optimism, his trying to smooth things out. He understood. He promised to remember. Without me he would be entirely shut out by his habit of conventionality. We had a cheerful dinner together. Henry and June were both famished. Then we went to the Grand Guignol. In the car June and I sat together and talked in accord. “When Henry described you to me,” she said, “he left out the most important parts. He did not get you at all.” She knew that immediately; she and I had understood each other, every detail and nuance of each other.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  On the contrary, I was rather proud of being a realist and I knew that Ginou too was not of a romantic nature. Hers were the very soundest middle-class virtues: a practical common sense, good judgment, an avoidance of any exaggeration. I, on the other hand, was always too impulsive and excited, so that I really needed a more balanced, realistically inclined, and sane woman. So I soon began to think of marriage, for all this, of course, could lead only to marriage. I respected Ginou too highly, and there were other things in life besides mere fun. I never forgot to think of my own future in constructive terms. But I still didn’t dare to propose to her quite openly. Instead, I described to her what kind of wife I hoped to marry, and the portrait that I drew was as realistic as a good photograph of Ginou. I would always insist that I hoped to do everything in my power to make my wife happy, and she modestly pretended not to understand what I was after as she discussed my views and argued with me in the name of all womankind. I could see that she got my meaning, and I used to dream of her every evening as I fell asleep, repeating her name to myself: Ginou, Ginou. The “ou” in her name seemed to me to express some particularly sweet harmony as it melted in my mouth... I even tried, for her, to achieve things that had never particularly interested me. Mina realized now what she had started and how difficult it all was; that was why she watched us so closely, as if stimulated by everything that seemed to defy fate in this situation. I allowed her to check my progress and swallowed my pride. I learned, for instance, with some displeasure that I shaved badly and not often enough and that people made remarks, behind my back, about how carelessly I dressed, about my noticeably North-African accent when I spoke French, and about the violence of my language. So Mina assumed the task of educating me. She was quite pitiless about it and pointed out to me each time there was a trace of tattletale gray about my collar, or a button missing from my jacket, or any stain that should be removed, or a tear that needed mending. At any other moment, I would have answered that my appearance didn’t matter to me, which wasn’t really true, and I would have demanded the right to be free in my violent criticism of the histrionics and the bowing and curtseying that characterized most of my friends. But Ginou was worth all this discipline to me. She was a middle-class girl, Mina would remind me, each time I feebly protested.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I seek to illumine June’s chaos not with man’s direct mind but with all the deftness and circumlocution known to woman. Henry said, “June had tears in her eyes when she spoke of your generosity.” And I could see he loved her for that. In his novel it is clear that June’s generosity did not go out to him—she constantly tortured him—but to Jean, because she was obsessed with Jean. And what does she do to Henry? She humiliates him, she starves him, she breaks his health, she torments him—and he thrives; he writes his book. To hurt and to be aware of hurting, and to know its ultimate necessity, that is intolerable to me. I do not have June’s courage. I struggle to spare Hugo every humiliation. I do not ride over his feelings. Only twice in my life has passion been stronger than pity. An aunt of mine taught our cook how to make a soufflé of carrots, and the cook taught our maid Emilia. Emilia serves it for every festive meal. She served it to Henry and June. They were already hypnotized by the oddness of Louveciennes, the coloring, the strangeness of my dressing, my foreignness, the smell of jasmine, the open fires in which I burned not logs but tree roots, which look like monsters. The soufflé looked like an exotic dish, and they ate it as one eats caviar. They also ate purée of potatoes which had been made airy with a beaten egg. Henry, who is thoroughly bourgeois, began to feel uncomfortable, as if he had not been properly fed. His steak was real and juicy, but cut neatly round, and I am sure he did not recognize it. June was in ecstasy. When Henry knew us better, he ventured to ask if we always ate like that, expressing concern for our health. Then we told him about the origin of the soufflé and laughed. June would have wrapped it in mystery forever. One morning when Henry was staying with us, after all his starvation, sloppy meals, café-counter slobbery, I tried to give him a beautiful breakfast. I came down and lit the fire in the fireplace. Emilia brought, on a green tray, hot coffee, steaming milk, soft-boiled eggs, good bread and biscuits, and the freshest butter. Henry sat by the fire at the lacquered table. All he could say was that he longed for the bistro around the corner, the zinc counter, the dull greenish coffee and milk full of skin. I was not offended. I thought that he lacked a certain capacity for enjoying the uncommon, that is all. I might be down in the dumps a hundred times, but each time I would clamber out again to good coffee on a lacquered tray beside an open fire. Each time I would clamber out to silk stockings and perfume. Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Henry is playing with the idea of saintliness. I am thinking of the organ tones of voice and the expressions and admissions I get from him. And I am thinking of his capacity to be awed, which means to sense divinity. When I have been most natural, most womanly, rising from bed to get him a cigarette, to serve him champagne, to comb my hair, to dress, he still says, “I do not feel natural with you yet.” He lives rather quietly, almost coldly at moments. He is absent from the present. Afterwards, when he is writing, he warms up, begins to dramatize and to burn. Our bouts: he in his language, I in mine. I never use his words. I think my registering is more unconscious, more instinctive. It does not appear on the surface, and yet, I don’t know, for he was aware of it, of the weight of my eyes. The slipperiness of my mind against his relentless dissection. My belief in wonder against his heavy, realistic notes. The joy, when he does seize upon wonder: “Your eyes seem to be expecting miracles.” Will he perform them? Does he make such notes as: “Anaïs: green comb with black hair on it. Indelible rouge. Barbaric necklace. Breakable. Fragile.” That second afternoon, he waited for me in the café and I waited for him in his room, through a misunderstanding. The garçon was cleaning his room. He asked me to wait in the other room across the hall, a very small drab one. I sat on a plain, homely chair. The garçon came with another chair covered in red plush velvet. “It will be better for you,” he said. I was touched. It seemed to me that Henry was offering me velvet-covered chairs. I was happy as I waited. Then I got a little tired and went to sit in Henry’s room. I opened a folder entitled “Notes from Dijon.” The first page was a copy of a letter to me which I had not yet received. Then he came in, and when I said, “I do not believe in our love,” he silenced me. I felt humble that day, before his strength. Flesh as strong or stronger than the mind. His victory. He held me with a kind of fear. “You seem so breakable. I am afraid I’ll kill you.” And I did feel small in his bed, naked, with my barbaric jewelry tinkling. But he felt the strength of the core of me, which burns at his touch. Think of that, Henry, when you hold my too-fragile body in your arms, a body you scarcely feel because you are so used to billowing flesh, but you feel the movements of its joy like the undulations of a symphony, not the static clay heaviness, but the dancing of it in your arms. You will not break me. You are molding me like a sculptor. The faun is to be made woman.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I am impervious to the flat visual attack of things. I see your khaki shirt hung up on a peg. It is your shirt and I could see you in it—you, wearing a color I detest. But I see you, not the khaki shirt. Something stirs in me as I look at it, and it is certainly the human you. It is a vision of the human you revealing an amazing delicacy to me. It is your khaki shirt and you are the man who is the axis of my world now. 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.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  While he was away, I met with Henry, carrying my pajamas and comb and toothbrush, but poised for flight. I let him talk. “This Paulette and Fred,” he says, “they are cute together. I don’t know how it will end. She is younger than she said. We were afraid at first her parents would make trouble for Fred. He asks me to take care of her in the evening. I have taken her to the movies, but the truth is, she bores me. She is so young. We have nothing to say to each other. She is jealous of you. She read what Fred wrote about you. ‘We’re all expecting the goddess today.’ ” I laugh and tell him what I have been thinking. I can see in his face how uninterested he is in Paulette, although he admits it is the first time he is indifferent. “Why, Paulette is nothing,” he says. “I wrote that letter enthusiastically because I enjoyed their enthusiasm, participated in it.” This became a subject of teasing. It was an ordeal for me to go to Clichy to meet Paulette. I was afraid of her and I had wanted to bring her a gift, because she was a foreign presence, a new person in our Clichy life, living there in the way I would like to be living. She was nothing but a child, thin and graceless, but temporarily attractive because she had just been made woman by Fred, and because she was in love. Henry and I enjoyed their childish cooing for a while and then got tired of them, and for the remaining days I spent in Clichy we fled from them. One night when I arrived, Henry had a stomach ache. I had to take care of him as I do of Hugo—hot towels, massage. He was lying on the bed, showing a beautiful white stomach. He slept a while and awoke cured. We read together. We had an amazing fusion. I slept in his arms. In the morning he awoke me with caresses, mumbling something about my expression. Henry’s other face, with which he may someday repudiate all this, is for the moment impossible for me to visualize. Just before this, I had one visit with Allendy, in which I clearly showed a retrogression. I returned to him a rubber préventif he advised me to wear. Interpretation: I wanted to show him I was in a mood of repentence for my “loose life.” This, because Joaquin was taken ill with appendicitis, giving me a feeling of guilt. Then I confessed that certain practices in sexual games do not really appeal to me, like penis sucking, which I do to please Henry. In connection with this, I remembered that a few days preceding my liaison with Henry I couldn’t swallow food. I had a feeling of nausea. Since food and

• From Henry and June (1986)

  How extraordinarily our thinking leaps along with opposition of themes, contrasts, and fundamental accord. He mistrusts my swiftness, slows down my rhythm, and I plunge into his creativeness as into unlimited wealth. Our work is interrelated, interdependent, married. My work is the wife of his work. Often Henry stands in the middle of my bedroom and says, “I feel as if I were the husband here. Hugo is just a charming young man whom we are very fond of.” More and more I realize that his life with June was a dangerous, shattering adventure. I understand it when he wants me to save him from June. When he begins to talk about renting a place like Louveciennes somewhere and I say, “When your book comes out, you’ll send for June and do all that,” he smiles sorrowfully and tells me that is not what he wants. I know it, or, rather, I know he wishes a life like mine and Hugo’s were possible with June. Last night because Henry was tired and looked for a moment less lusty, less truculent, such a tenderness for him welled in me that I almost walked over to him in front of Hugo and Mother to embrace him, to ask him to come downstairs to our big soft bed and rest. How I wanted to care for him. He was almost crying as he talked about women loving each other in the movie Jeunes filles en uniforme. Then he said, in front of Mother, “I must talk to you a few minutes. I have corrected your manuscript.” We went downstairs and sat on my bed. I was so moved by the work he had done. We began kissing. Tongues, hands, moisture. I bit my fingers so as not to scream. I went upstairs, still throbbing, and talked to Mother. Henry followed, looking like a saint, creamy voiced. And I felt his presence down to my toes. Hugo is playing and singing as he used to play and sing in Richmond Hill, fumbling, hesitating. His fingers are not skillful, and his voice wavers. The sadness I experience as I listen to him shows how deeply his songs and sweetness have receded for me, into a past linked to the present hour only by the continuity of memories. Memories alone hold Hugo and me together; and my journal preserves them. Oh, to be able to leap forward without this web around me. September I look into Allendy’s face with newborn power, I see his intensely blue, fanatic eyes melt, and I hear the eagerness in his voice when he asks me to return soon. We kiss more warmly than the last time. Henry is still between me and a full tasting of Allendy, but the deviltry in me is stronger. I repeat our kiss in space, holding my head up to it as I walk through the streets, my mouth open to new drink.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I lose my fear of showing myself naked. He loves me. We laugh at my gaining weight. He has made me change my hair because he did not like the severe Spanish style. I have thrown it back and high over my ears. I feel wind blown. I look younger. I do not try to be the femme fatale. It is useless. I feel loved for myself, for my inner self, foi every word I write, for my timidities, my sorrows, my struggles, my defects, my frailness. I love Henry in the same way. I cannot even hate his rushing towards other women. Despite his love for me, he is interested in meeting Natasha and Mona Paiva, the dancer. He has a diabolical curiosity about people. I have never known a man with so many sides, with such a range. To have a summer day like today and a night with Henry—I ask nothing more. Henry shows me the first pages of his next book. He has absorbed my novel and written a fantastic parody of it, incited partly by his jealousy and anger, because the other morning when I left him, Fred called me into his room and wanted to kiss me. I did not let him, but Henry heard the silence and imagined the scene and my faithlessness. The pages elated me—their perfection and finesse and sharpness, and the fantastic tone. There is poetry in them, too, and a secret tenderness. He has made a special nook in himself for me. He expected me to have written ten pages at least about that night we spent talking until dawn. But something has happened to the woman with a notebook. I have come home and sunk into my enjoyment of him as into a warm summer day. The journal is secondary. Everything is secondary to Henry. If he did not have June, I would give everything to live with him. Each different aspect of him holds me: Henry correcting my novel with amazing care, with interest, with sarcasm, with admiration, with complete understanding; Henry, without self-confidence, so extraordinarily modest; Henry, the demon pumping me, making diabolical notes; Henry concealing his feelings from Fred and displaying to me a tremendous tenderness. Last night in bed, half asleep, he was still murmuring, “You’re so wonderful, there is no man good enough for you.” He has made me more honest with myself. And then he says, “You give me so much, so much and I give you nothing.”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “To proceed from the dream outward . . .” When I first heard these words of Jung’s, they fired me. I used the idea in my pages on June. Today as I repeated the words to Henry they affected him strongly. He has been writing down his dreams for me, and then antecedents and associations. What an afternoon. It was so cold in Henry’s place that we got into bed to warm each other. Then talk, mountains of manuscripts, hills of books, and rivulets of wine. (Hugo comes over while I write this, bends down and kisses me. I had just time enough to turn the page.) I am in a great fever, frantically pulling at the bars of my prison. Henry smiled sadly when I had to leave, at eight-thirty. He realizes now that his not knowing he was a man of great value almost led to his self-destruction. Will I be given time to place him on his throne? “Are you really quite warm enough?” he asks, closing my coat around me. The other night he was stumbling against obstacles on the dark road, his weak eyes blinded by automobile lights. In danger. At the same time I lead Hugo to Allendy, who not only saves him humanly but awakens in him an enthusiasm for psychology, which makes him interesting. As I look at Henry talking I realize again that it is his sensuality I love. I want to go deeper into it, I want to wallow in it, to taste it as profoundly as he has, as June has. I feel this with a kind of desperation, a secret resentment, as if Hugo and Allendy and even Henry himself all wanted to stop me, whereas I know that it is I who stop myself. I am terribly in love with Henry, so why doesn’t restlessness, fever, curiosity become attenuated? I am steaming with energy, with desires for long voyages (I want to go to Bali), and last night during a concert I felt like Mary Rose in Barrie’s play, who hears music while visiting an island, walks away and disappears for twenty years. I felt that I could walk out of my house like a somnambulist, forgetting utterly, as in that hotel room, all my connections and go forth into a new life. Each day there are more demands from me that deprive me of the liberty I need, Hugo’s growing demands of my body, Allendy’s demands on the noblest in me, Henry’s love, which makes me a submissive and faithful wife—all this, against the adventure I must constantly renounce and sublimate. When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself. Hugo’s reading of Allendy’s books has convinced him that I do not love Allendy, nor he me. It is simply a mutual attraction born of the analysis, the intimacy, certain strong currents of sympathy.