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)

  Allendy says that if I were to give Hugo several shocks, like my desire for John, I would rouse him, but I cannot do this, and I prefer to put him in Allendy’s hands. To awaken him through pain—here is my limitation, my failure. And secretly, I have a fear of plumbing his limitations. I am afraid to find a fund of deep feeling and nothing else. How much mind, how much imagination, how much sensuality is there in him? Can he ever be resuscitated, or am I to continue this course from man to man? Now that I am moving, I am afraid. Where am I going? I see what I do not like in Allendy—a certain conventionality, a veneer of conservatism; he is a lightweight being, when what I love are tragic, heavy-souled men, just as Henry said he loved romantic women. Today Allendy tried not to acknowledge that I am well. He wants me to need him. His analysis was less perfect insofar as there is now a personal element in it. I could see the crumbling of his objectivity. I marvel that this man, who knows the worst about me, is so strongly attracted. I am his creation. Henry reads Hugo’s journal and finds it to be that of a cripple. He begins to suspect I was also a cripple when I married him. When Henry said this, I brought out my journal of that period, when I was nineteen, and read it to him. He was startled, jubilant, too. He wanted to read more, and to read the novel I wrote at twenty-one. Hugo was away on a business trip, and for five days Henry and I lived here together, never going to Paris, working, reading, walking. One afternoon I asked Eduardo to come. They discussed astrology, but secretly they fought each other. Henry told Eduardo he was dead, a fixed star, while he himself was a planet always revolving, always in movement. Eduardo remained composed, superior through his coolness, deftness, courtesy. Henry became confused and lost. Eduardo looked at once faunesque and clever. Henry was slow and Germanic, offering a smile to me, so infinitely moving.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  With me he quickly surrenders his impulsive judgments, like calling Paulette adorable. By patience and gentleness I gain equilibrium in a man who is all reactions, oscillations, contrariness. Sometimes when he marvels at the deftness of my fingers, whether I am carving fish or arranging his tie, I think of Lawrence, so irritable and so bitter and so nervous, and I think I am playing on somewhat the same instrument. I still feel his kisses on the palms of my hands, and I hate to bathe because I am impregnated with wonderful odors. Hugo is coming home in a few hours, and so life goes on like this in contradictory patterns. How long, I wonder, will I crave the sensualist? Before falling asleep, he said to me, “Listen, I am not drunk, and I am not sentimental, and I tell you you are the most wonderful woman in the world.” When I say I love him sensually, I do not altogether mean that; I love him in many other ways—when he is laughing at the movies, or talking very quietly in the kitchen; I love his humility, his sensitiveness, the core of bitterness and fury in him. He was going to write June a crushing letter, full of accusations. And at that moment I brought him a document which justifies all her actions. It was as if he had raised his hand to strike her and I had to stop him. I know now June is a drug addict. I have found descriptions in a book that verify what I have vaguely sensed. Henry was overwhelmed. He can be so easily duped. June talked constantly about drugs, like the criminal who returns to the scene of the crime. She needed to mention the subject while violently denying ever taking drugs (two or three times, perhaps). Henry began to piece the fragments together. When I saw his despair, I grew frightened. “You must not be too sure of what I say. I am sometimes too quick to synthesize.” But I felt I was right. Here, he passed the only ethical judgment I have ever heard him pass on self-destruction, that taking drugs denoted a deficiency in one’s nature. This is what made the relationship hopeless. I felt such pity for him when he began to question how much June loved him, comparing her love with mine. I defended her, saying she loves him in her own way, which is inhuman and fantastic. But it is true that I would not leave him as she does. It is true, as he says, that her greatest love is self-love. But it is her self-love that has made her a great character. Henry is sometimes amazed by my admiration of June. Last night he said, “At the beginning you very much wanted June to come back. Am I right in thinking you don’t want it now?” “Yes.” And I have also admitted other things, after never answering his questions about lovers.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  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?” This, because I received this morning the first pages of his new book, stupendous pages. He is doing his best writing now, fevered yet cohesive. Every word now hits the mark. The man is whole, strong, as he never was. I want to breathe his presence for a few hours, feed him, cool him, fill him with that heavy breath of earth and trees which whip his blood. God, this is like living every moment in an orgasm, with only pauses between plunges. I want Henry to know this: that I can subordinate the jealous grasping of woman to a passionate devotion to the writer. I feel a proud servitude. There is splendor in his writing, a splendor which transfigures everything he touches. Last night Henry and Hugo talked for each other, admired each other. Hugo’s generosity blossomed. When we were in our bedroom, I compensated him. At breakfast, in the garden, he read Henry’s latest pages. His enthusiasm flared. I took advantage of it to suggest we open our home to him, the great writer. Holding my hand, weighing my words of reassurance—“Henry interests me as a writer, that’s all”—he assented to all I wanted. I go to the gate to see him off. He is happy just to be loved, and I am astonished by my own lies, my acting. I did not come out unscathed from the inferno of Henry’s overnight visit. The development of those two days was intricate. Just as I was beginning to act like June, “capable of worship, devotion, but also of the greatest callousness to obtain what she wants,” as Henry had said, he fell into a sentimental mood. It was after Hugo had gone off to work. Henry said, “He is so sensitive, one ought not to hurt a man like that.” This roused a storm in me. I left the table and went to my room. He came to watch me weeping, and he was glad to see me weep, showing the absence of callousness. But I became tense, poisonous. When Hugo returned in the evening, Henry began again to listen to him attentively, to speak his language, to talk gravely, ponderously. The three of us were sitting in the garden.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Title : Christianity and the Social Crisis Author: Rauschenbusch, Walter ASIN : B078FL6DZJ CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS BY WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN ROCHESTER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY [image file=Image00000.jpg] New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., L td. 1920 All rights reserved C opyright , 1907, B y THE MACMILLAN COMPANY To THE WOMEN WHO HAVE LOVED ME MY MOTHER MY SISTERS FRIDA AND EMMA MY DEAR WIFE PAULINE AND MY LITTLE DAUGHTERS WINIFRED AND ELIZABETH THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED THY KINGDOM COME! THY WILL BE DONE ON EARTH! [image file=Image00001.jpg] Hope. Inspiration. Trust. We’re Social! Follow Us for New Titles and Deals: FaceBook.com/CrossReachPublications @CrossReachPub Available in Paperback and eBook Editions Please go online for more great titles Available through CrossReach publications. And if you enjoyed this book please consider leaving a review online . that helps us out a lot. thanks. © 2017 CrossReach Publications All Rights Reserved, Including The Right To Reproduce This Book Or Portions Thereof In Any Form Whatever. CONTENTS I. The Historical Roots of Christianity: The Hebrew Prophets II. The Social Aims of Jesus III. The Social Impetus Of Primitive Christianity IV. Why Has Christianity Never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction? V. The Present Crisis VI. The Stake of the Church in the Social Movement VII. What To Do About CrossReach Publications More From Walter Rauschenbusch ----------------------------------------------------------------- DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I T he Historical Roots of Christianity: T he Hebrew Prophets Historical importance of the prophets. Their religion ethical and therefore social. Their morality public and not private. Their sympathy with the oppressed. The effect of their social interest on their religious development. Later religious individualism a triumph of faith, but not pure gain. The prophetic hope of social perfection. The “pessimism” of the prophets. Summary CHAPTER II T he Social A ims of J esus The new social interpretation of the gospel. Jesus not a social reformer, but a religious initiator. Significance of his relations to John the Baptist. The kingdom of God his aim, its previous meaning, his changes in the ideal, the persistence of its social essence. The ethics of the new society. Christ’s indifference to ritual and his insistence on social morality. His teachings on wealth. His social affinities. His revolutionary consciousness CHAPTER III T he S ocial I mpetus of P rimitive C hristianity The probability of a gap between Jesus and his followers. The limitations of our information. The hope of the coming of the Lord. The revolutionary character of the millennial hope. The political consciousness of Christians. The society-making force of primitive Christianity. The so-called communism at Jerusalem. The primitive churches as fraternal communities. The leaven of Christian democracy. The outcome of the discussion CHAPTER IV W hy has C hristianity never U ndertaken the W ork of S ocial R econstruction ? The problem stated. Impossibility of any social propaganda in the first centuries. Postponement to the Lord’s coming. Hostility to the Empire and its civilization.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It does not stop where they stop, and occasionally it may cut right across their beaten tracks. When Mary of Bethany broke the alabaster jar of ointment, the disciples voiced the ordinary law of conduct: it was wasteful luxury; the money might have fed the poor. Jesus took her side. While the disciples were thinking of the positions they were to get when their master became king, her feminine intuition had seen the storm-cloud lowering over his head and had heard the mute cry for sympathy in his soul, and had given him the best she had in the abandonment of love. “This is a beautiful deed that she has done.” The instinct of love had been a truer guide of conduct than all machine-made rules of charity. Jesus was very sociable. He was always falling into conversation with people, sometimes in calm disregard of the laws of propriety. When his disciples returned to him at the well of Samaria, they were surprised to find him talking with a woman! Society had agreed to ostracize certain classes, for instance the tax-collectors. Jesus refused to recognize such a partial negation of human society. He accepted their invitations to dinner and invited himself to their houses, thereby incurring the sneer of the respectable as a friend of publicans and a glutton and wine-drinker. He wanted men to live as neighbors and brothers and he set the example. Social meals are often referred to in the gospels and furnished him the illustrations for much of teaching. His meals with his disciples had been so important a matter in their life that they continued them after his death. His manner in breaking the bread for them all had been so characteristic that they recognized him by it after his resurrection. One of the two great ritual acts in the Church grew out of his last social meal with his friends. If we have ever felt how it brings men together to put their feet under the same table, we shall realize that in these elements of Christ’s life a new communal sociability was working its way and creating a happy human society, and Jesus refused to surrender so great an attainment to the ordinary laws of fasting. Pride disrupts society. Love equalizes. Humility freely takes its place as a simple member of the community. When Jesus found the disciples disputing about their rank in the kingdom, he rebuked their divisive spirit of pride by setting a little child among them as their model; for an unspoiled child is the most social creature, swift to make friends, happy in play with others, lonely without human love. When Jesus overheard the disciples quarrelling about the chief places at the last meal, he gave them a striking object lesson in the subordination of self to the service of the community, by washing their dusty sandalled feet.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Jews were wrenched loose from the firm hold of their race and religion; Greeks from their culture and pleasures; and both joined on a footing of equality. Spiritual affinity triumphed over the strongest bonds that hold men together. The call of Jesus to give up home and property, reputation and life, for his sake, was treasured in the collection of his sayings because it corresponded to the actual experience of so many of his followers. The society-making force can be measured by the obstacles it had to overcome. It was the Christian policy to minimize the contact with the unhallowed life outside. It was this withdrawal which evoked so much hatred and resentment and brought on the Christians, as on the Jews, the charge of an odium generis humani , a general hatred for human kind. But within the charmed circle of the Christian name the love was all the more intense. Its strength was novel, inexplicable, and awakened sinister suspicions in outsiders. But it was not common crime, as the heathen suspected, but the common experience of the highest spiritual and ideal good which unfettered such new powers of human fellowship. Faith in a common Father made men brothers. When men had vowed allegiance to the same Master, had felt the inward compulsion of the same divine Spirit, and looked forward intently to the same great consummation in the return of Christ, all the old distinctions were puerile and outworn, and they locked hands as Christian brothers. The natural desire for social intelligence and intercourse, the inborn craving of man for man, was spiritualized, ennobled, and intensified by being put on such a basis. The fact that such a society was possible at all is splendid testimony to the good in man. The strength of its cohesion is prophetic of what human society may come to be when its higher dormant faculties are called into action. The churches of the first generation were not churches in our sense of the word. They were not communities for the performance of a common worship, so much as communities with a common life. They were social communities with a religious basis. A common religious experience and hope brought them together, but the community of life extended to far more than that. They prayed together, but they also ate together. They had no church buildings, but met in the homes of their members. That in itself was an influence against ecclesiasticism and for social intimacy. They had a rudimentary organization, as every human society is sure to have, but they had no official clergy distinct from the laity. They were democratic organizations of plain people. Because they were separated from all other society, they had to find nearly all their social relations, pleasures, and interests within the Christian community. How far did this sharing of all life extend? The church at Jerusalem will occur to every one as the classical illustration of a larger sharing of life.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  There was, then, in our city, according to that which the ancients relate, a very great and rich merchant, whose name was Lionardo Sighieri and who had by his wife a son called Girolamo, after whose birth, having duly set his affairs in order, he departed this life. The guardians of the boy, together with his mother, well and loyally ordered his affairs, and he, growing up with his neighbour's children, became familiar with a girl of his own age, the daughter of the tailor, more than with any other of the quarter. As he waxed in age, use turned to love so great and so ardent that he was never easy save what time he saw her, and certes she loved him no less than she was loved of him. The boy's mother, observing this, many a time chid and rebuked him therefor and after, Girolamo availing not to desist therefrom, complained thereof to his guardians, saying to them, as if she thought, thanks to her son's great wealth, to make an orange-tree of a bramble, 'This boy of ours, albeit he is yet scarce fourteen years old, is so enamoured of the daughter of a tailor our neighbour, by name Salvestra, that, except we remove her from his sight, he will peradventure one day take her to wife, without any one's knowledge, and I shall never after be glad; or else he will pine away from her, if he see her married to another; wherefore meseemeth, to avoid this, you were best send him somewhither far from here, about the business of the warehouse; for that, he being removed from seeing her, she will pass out of his mind and we may after avail to give him some well-born damsel to wife.'

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Midnight. June. June and madness. June and I standing at the station and kissing while the train rushes by us. I am seeing her off. My arm is around her waist. She is trembling. “Anaïs, I’m happy with you.” It is she who offers her mouth. During our evening together she talked about Henry, about his book, about herself. She was truthful, or I am the greatest dupe who ever existed. I can only believe in our ecstasy. I don’t want to know, I only want to love her. I have one great fear, that Henry will show her my letter to him and hurt her, kill her. She compared me to the teacher in Jeunes filles en uniforme , and herself to the worshipful girl Manuela. The teacher had beautiful eyes, full of pity, but she was strong. Why does June want to think me strong and herself a passionate child beloved by the teacher? She wants protectiveness, a refuge from pain, from a life which is too terrible for her. She looks in me for an intact image of herself. So she tells me the whole story of herself and Henry, the other face of the story. She loved and trusted Henry until he betrayed her. He not only betrayed her with women but he distorted her personality. He created a cruel person, which she was not, wounding her tenderest, weakest self. She felt an absence of confidence, a gigantic need of love, of fidelity. She took refuge in Jean, in Jean’s loyalty, faith, understanding. And now she has set up a barrage of self-protecting lies. She wants to protect herself against Henry, create a new self inaccessible to him, invulnerable. She draws strength from my faith, my love. “Henry is not imaginative enough,” she says. “He is false. He is not simple enough either. It is he who has made me complex, who has devitalized me, killed me. He has introduced a fictitious personage who could make him suffer torments, whom he could hate; he has to whip himself by hatred in order to create. I do not believe in him as a writer. He has human moments, of course, but he is a trickster. He is all that he accuses me of being. It is he who is a liar, insincere, buffoonish, an actor. It is he who seeks dramas and creates monstrosities. He does not want simplicity. He is an intellectual. He seeks simplicity and then begins to distort it, to invent monsters. It is all false, false.” I am stunned. I sense a new truth. I am not vacillating between Henry and June, between their contradictory versions of themselves, but between two truths I see with clarity. I believe in Henry’s humanness, although I am fully aware of the literary monster. I believe in June, although I am aware of her innocent destructive power and her comedies.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magic forces of the world. I want to both combat you and submit to you, because as a woman I adore your courage, I adore the pain it engenders, I adore the struggle you carry in yourself, which I alone fully realize, I adore your terrifying sincerity, I adore your strength. You are right. The world is to be caricatured, but I know, too, how much you can love what you caricature. How much passion there is in you! It is that I feel in you. I do not feel the savant, the revealer, the observer. When I am with you, it is the blood I sense. This time you are not going to awake from the ecstasies of our encounters to reveal only the ridiculous moments. No. You won’t do it this time, because while we live together, while you examine my indelible rouge effacing the design of my mouth, spreading like blood after an operation (you kissed my mouth and it was gone, the design of it was lost as in a watercolor, the colors ran); while you do that, I seize upon the wonder that is brushing by (the wonder, oh, the wonder of my lying under you), and I bring it to you, I breathe it around you. Take it. I feel prodigal with my feelings when you love me, feelings so unblunted, so new, Henry, not lost in resemblance to other moments, so much ours, yours, mine, you and I together, not any man or any woman together. What is more touchingly real than your room. The iron bed, the hard pillow, the single glass. And all sparkling like a Fourth of July illumination because of my joy, the soft billowing joy of the womb you inflamed. The room is full of the incandescence you poured into me. The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don’t hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “No,” he said. “The life of freed instincts is composed of layers. The first layer leads to the second, the second to the third and so on. It leads ultimately to abnormal pleasures.” How Hugo and I could preserve our love in this freeing of the instincts he did not know. Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions for pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones. All this, Hugo and I knew. Last night when we talked he swore that he desired no one but me. I am in love with him, too, and so we let the issue lie in the background. Yet the menace of those wayward instincts is there, inside of our very love. November We have never been as happy or as miserable. Our quarrels are portentous, tremendous, violent. We are both wrathful to the point of madness; we desire death. My face is ravaged by tears, the veins on my temple swell. Hugo’s mouth trembles. One cry from me brings him suddenly into my arms, sobbing. And then he desires me physically. We cry and kiss and come at the same moment. And the next moment we analyze and talk rationally. It is like the life of the Russians in The Idiot. It is hysteria. In cooler moments I wonder at the extravagance of our feelings. Dullness and peace are forever over. We asked ourselves yesterday, in the middle of a quarrel, “What is happening to us? We never said such terrible things to each other?” And then Hugo said: “This is our honeymoon, and we are keyed up.” “Are you sure?” I asked incredulously. “It may not seem like one,” he said, laughing, “but it is. We are just overflowing with feelings. We can’t keep our balance.” A seven-year-late, mature honeymoon, full of the fear of life. In between our quarrels we are acutely happy. Hell and heaven all at once. We are at once free and enslaved. At times it seems as if we know that the only tie which can bind us together now is one of white-heat living, the same kind of intensity one finds in lovers and mistresses. We have unconsciously created a highly effervescent relationship within the security and peace of marriage. We are widening the circle of our sorrows and pleasures within the circle of our home and our two selves. It is our defense against the intruder, the unknown. December I’ve met Henry Miller. He came to lunch with Richard Osborn, a lawyer I had to consult on the contract for my D. H. Lawrence book. When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He’s a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He didn’t want to add himself to “the list” of my lovers. He didn’t want to get serious. And now! He wants to be my husband, to have me all the time; he writes love letters to the child I was at eleven, who has touched him profoundly. He wants to protect me and give me things. “I never thought such a frail little thing could have so much power. Did I ever say you were not beautiful? How could I say it! You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful!” When he kisses me now I do not hold back. I can now bite him when we lie in bed. “We devour each other, like two savages,” he said. 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.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Nothing hurt me until you touched on the source of my terror: June and the influence of Jean. What terror I have when I remember her talk and sense through it how loaded she is with the riches of others, all the others who love her beauty. Even Count Bruga was Jean’s creation. When we were together June said, ‘You will invent what we will do together.’ I was ready to give her everything I have ever invented and created, from my house, my costumes, my jewelry to my writing, my imaginings, my life. I would have worked for her alone. “Understand me. I worship her. I accept everything she is, but she must be. I only revolt if there is no June (as I wrote the first night I met her). Don’t tell me that there is no June except the physical June. Don’t tell me, because you must know. You have lived with her. “I never feared, until today, what our two minds would discover together. But what a poison you distilled, perhaps the very poison which is in you. Is that your terror, too? Do you feel haunted and yet deluded, as by a creation of your own brain? Is it fear of an illusion you fight with crude words? Tell me she is not just a beautiful image. Sometimes when we talk I feel that we are trying to grasp her reality. She is unreal even to us, even to you who have possessed her, and to me, whom she has kissed.” Hugo reads one of my old journals, the John Erskine period, Boulevard Suchet, and almost sobs with pity for me, realizing that I was living in The House of the Dead. I did not succeed in resuscitating him until he almost lost me to John and to suicide. More letters from Henry, parts of his book as he writes it, quotations, notes while listening to Debussy and Ravel, on the back of menus of small restaurants in shabby quarters. A torrent of realism. Too much of it in proportion to imagination, which is growing smaller. He will not sacrifice a moment of life to his work. He is always rushing and writing about work and in the end never really tackling it, writing more letters than books, doing more investigating than actual creation. Yet the form of his last book, discursive, a chain of associations, reminiscences is very good. He has assimilated his Proust, minus the poetry and the music. I have dipped into obscenity, dirt, and his world of “shit, cunt, prick, bastard, crotch, bitch” and am on the way up again. The symphonic concert today confirmed my mood of detachment. Again and again I have traversed the regions of realism and found them arid. And again I return to poetry. I write to June. It is almost impossible. I can’t find words. I make such a violent effort of the imagination to reach out to her, to my image of her.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  And then Hugo drives me home in the car, and he says, “Last night I was awake, and I thought of how there is a love which is bigger and more wonderful than fucking.” Because he had been ill for a few days and we had not made love, but slept in each other’s arms. I felt as if I would burst from my fragile shell. I felt my breasts heavy and full. But I was not sad. I thought, Darling, I am so rich tonight, but it is for you, too. It is not all for myself. I’m lying to you every day now, but see, I give you the joys I am given. The more I take into myself, the greater my love for you. The more I deny myself, the poorer I would be for you, my darling. There is no tragedy, if you can follow me in that equation. There are equations which are more obvious. Such a one would be: I love you and therefore I renounce the world and life for you. You would have a prostrate nun before you, poisoned by demands you could not answer and which would kill you. But see me tonight. We are driving home together. I have known pleasure. But I do not shut you out. Come into my dilated body and taste it. I carry life. And you know it. You cannot see me naked without desiring me. My flesh seems to you innocent and entirely your possession. You could kiss me where Henry bit me and find pleasure. Our love is inalterable. Only knowledge would hurt you. Perhaps I am a demon, to be able to pass from Henry’s arms into yours, but literal faithfulness is for me empty of meaning. I cannot live by it. What is a tragedy is that we should live so close together without your being able to perceive this knowledge, that such secrets should be possible, that you should only know what I wish to tell you, that there should be no trace on my body of what I live through. But lying, too, is living, lying of the kind I do. Fred’s presence restrains me, as though my very own eyes were watching the extension of myself into spheres I should renounce. With Fred I could live out something delicate and intricate. But I do not want to live with myself. I am flying from myself. Still, I am not deforming my true nature but manifesting the sensuality which exists in me. Henry answers a strength in me that had not been answered before. His sexual vitality is in accord with mine. When I took up dancing it was a Henry I craved. It is a Henry I sought, erroneously, in John. My thoughts, like elastic, are stretched to their tensest meaning. With Henry one does not talk to the depths of

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Now I must keep secrets from Henry, and I can no longer confide everything to Allendy because we are man and woman with passion growing between us. I have lost a father! I cannot tell him I still love Henry. Shall I try to be altogether truthful with Henry? Hugo plays his guitar tonight while I write and draws me to him with a new violence, roused by analysis. He has been writing profusely in his journal and talking expansively, and, at last, interestingly. Eduardo does not believe my confidences about Allendy. He thinks we have planned to save him by arousing his jealousy—my beloved pathological child, Eduardo, whom I will love in a certain way eternally. The only time we are happy together is when we retrogress to a magical sphere of beauty. He has wiped our sexual hours from his memory, but not my offense. He dreams that I will one day go to him and crawl on my knees, so that he can make me suffer for flaunting Henry before him. He fights me blindly, furiously, reproaching me for the night we went out to dance, for my trying to force him to be alive. At the same time his jealousy is obvious, and he shows Allendy a note in which I tell him I love him and will always love him, in a strange, mystical fashion. I rush to Allendy for help, because my apparent desire for Eduardo was expressed merely to efface the offense he cannot bear. I wanted him to have the last word, to feel that he had refused me, because he needs to feel his strength. But when Allendy shows me the tenderest, most protective love, I rebel against it. He wants to postpone personal intimacy for the sake of the analysis he feels I still need. As I fight off analysis, I betray exactly what he suspects: that I require extravagant, passionate demonstrations of love, not tenderness or protection. He has sensed that I want his love as a trophy, not for his very own self. Yet as soon as I write these words, I know they are not entirely true. I leave him completely shattered. And today I receive my true love, Henry, with great joy, and ardent commingling. How we flash! And then I realize I can only love fully when I have confidence. I am sure of Henry’s love, and so I abandon myself. Then Henry tells me, because he has been jealous and worried, that he has read about those hysterical women who are capable of loving two or three men profoundly at the same time. Is this what I am? The only thing psychoanalysis achieves is to make one more conscious of one’s misfortunes.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I trust Allendy, and I am drawn to him. (Particularly today, when I saw the sensual modulation of his mouth, the possibility of savagery.) But underneath, I felt, like all women, a strong, protective love for Henry—the more imperfect, the more to be loved. I grow strong. I telephone Eduardo to help him, to sustain him. I give up my trip to London. I do not need it. I can face Henry and June. The suffocating knot of pain is gone. I do not need to lean on external changes, on new friends. All this is nothing but a fierce defense against the loss of the lover I will never forget. What is going to become of his work, his happiness.? What will June do to him?—my love, Henry, whom I filled with strength and self-knowledge; my child, my creation, soft and yielding in women’s hands. Allendy says he will never again have a love like mine, but I know that I will always be there for him, that the day June hurts him I will be there to love him again. Midnight. June. June and madness. June and I standing at the station and kissing while the train rushes by us. I am seeing her off. My arm is around her waist. She is trembling. “Anaïs, I’m happy with you.” It is she who offers her mouth. During our evening together she talked about Henry, about his book, about herself. She was truthful, or I am the greatest dupe who ever existed. I can only believe in our ecstasy. I don’t want to know, I only want to love her. I have one great fear, that Henry will show her my letter to him and hurt her, kill her. She compared me to the teacher in Jeunes filles en uniforme , and herself to the worshipful girl Manuela. The teacher had beautiful eyes, full of pity, but she was strong. Why does June want to think me strong and herself a passionate child beloved by the teacher? She wants protectiveness, a refuge from pain, from a life which is too terrible for her. She looks in me for an intact image of herself. So she tells me the whole story of herself and Henry, the other face of the story. She loved and trusted Henry until he betrayed her. He not only betrayed her with women but he distorted her personality. He created a cruel person, which she was not, wounding her tenderest, weakest self. She felt an absence of confidence, a gigantic need of love, of fidelity. She took refuge in Jean, in Jean’s loyalty, faith, understanding. And now she has set up a barrage of self-protecting lies. She wants to protect herself against Henry, create a new self inaccessible to him, invulnerable. She draws strength from my faith, my love. “Henry is not imaginative enough,” she says. “He is false.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I was relieved he did not come today. Henry interests me, but not physically. Is it possible I might at last be satisfied with Hugo? It hurt me when he left for Holland today. I felt old, detached. A startlingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry’s wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. Years ago, when I tried to imagine a true beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman. I had even imagined she would be Jewish. I knew long ago the color of her skin, her profile, her teeth. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me. Henry faded. She was color, brilliance, strangeness. Her role in life alone preoccupies her. I knew the reasons: her beauty brings dramas and events to her. Ideas mean little. I saw in her a caricature of the theatrical and dramatic personage. Costume, attitudes, talk. She is a superb actress. No more. I could not grasp her core. Everything Henry had said about her was true. By the end of the evening I was like a man, terribly in love with her face and body, which promised so much, and I hated the self created in her by others. Others feel because of her; and because of her, others write poetry; because of her, others hate; others, like Henry, love her in spite of themselves. June. At night I dreamed of her, as if she were very small, very frail, and I loved her. I loved a smallness which had appeared to me in her talk: the disproportionate pride, a hurt pride. She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others’ eyes. She does not dare to be herself. There is no June Mansfield. She knows it. The more she is loved, the more she knows it. She knows there is a very beautiful woman who took her cue last night from my inexperience and tried to lose her depth of knowledge. 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.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He walked round the table, trembling with indignation, and went straight up to her. ‘No, I forbid you - d’you hear me? — I forbid you to spoil my Nounoune!’ She retreated to the end of the room, babbling, ‘ What’s that? what’s that? ’ He followed her as though bent on chastising her. ‘You heard what I said. Is that the way for Nounoune to speak? What do you mean by such behaviour? Cheap little jibes like Madame Peloux’s, is that what you go in for? To think they could come from you, Nounoune, from you. ...’ Arrogantly he threw back his head. ‘I know how Nounoune should speak. I know how she ought to think. I’ve had time to learn. I’ve not forgotten the day when you said to me, just before I married, “At least don’t be cruel. Try not to make her suffer. I have the feeling that a doe is being thrown to a greyhound.” Those were your words. That’s really you. And the night before I married, when I ran away to come and see you, I remember you said to me .. He could not go on, but all his features were bright with the memory. ‘Darling, pull yourself together.’ He put his hands on Lea’s shoulders. ‘And even last night,’ he went on, ‘it wasn’t the first time you asked me whether I might not have hurt somebody over there\ My Nounoune, I knew you as a fine woman, and I loved you as a fine woman, when we first started. If we have to make an end of it, must you start behaving like all the other women? * She dimly felt the cunning behind the compliment and sat down, hiding her face in her hands. ‘How hard you are, how hard,’ she stammered. ‘Why did you come back? ... I was so calm on my own, getting so used to ...’ She heard herself lying and stopped. ‘Well, I wasn’t!* Ch6ri said quickly. ‘I came back because ... because ...’ He raised his arms, let them drop, and lifted them again. ‘ Because I couldn’t go on without you, there’s no point in looking for any other explanation.’ For a moment no word was spoken. Quite overcome, she looked at this impatient young man, who with light feet and open arms, as white as a seagull, seemed poised for flight. Cheri let his dark eyes rove all over her body. ‘Oh, you can be proud of yourself,’ he said suddenly. ‘You can be proud of yourself for having made me - and what’s more for three months — lead such a life, such a life! ’ ‘I did?’

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “How much I owe you!” he cries. And in my heart I answer, “How much you owe Henry.” I cannot help feeling today that some part of me stands aside watching me live and marveling. Thrown into life without experience, naive, I feel that something has saved me. I feel equal to life. It is like the scenes of an exceptional play. Henry guided me. No. He waited. He watched me. I moved, I acted. I did unexpected things, surprising to myself—that moment, Henry mentions, when I sat on the edge of the bed. I had been standing before the mirror combing my hair. He lay in the bed and said, “I do not feel at ease with you yet.” Impulsively, swiftly, I went to the bed, sat near him, put my face very near his. My coat slipped off, and the straps of my chemise, too, and in the whole gesture, in what I said, there was something so naturally giving, pliant, human that he couldn’t talk. I feel that when Henry talks or writes to me he seeks another language. I feel him evading the word which comes easiest to his lips, grasping another, a more subtle one. Sometimes I feel that I have taken him into an intricate world, a new country, and he does not walk like John, trampling, but with an awareness I sensed in him from the very first day. He walks inside of Proust’s symphonies, of Gide’s insinuations, of Cocteau’s opium enigmas, of Valery’s silences; he walks into suggestivity, into spaces; into the illuminations of Rimbaud. And I walk with him. Tonight I love him, for the beautiful way he has given me the earth. As I go along I cannot and must not tear down. I will not ask Hugo even for one free evening. Because of that I bring out new and profound feelings in Henry. “Are you glad,” asks Eduardo, “that he wants to write, work, that he is exalted rather than destroyed?” “Yes.” “The real test will come when you begin to want to use your power over men destructively and cruelly.” Will that time come? I tell Hugo about my imaginary journal of a possessed woman, which fortifies him in his attitude that everything is make-believe except our love. “But how do you know there is not really such a journal? How do you know I’m not lying to you?” “You may be,” he said. “You’ve got a really supple mind now.” “Give me realities to fight,” he has said to me. “My imagination makes it worse.” I let him read my letter to June, and he found relief in knowing. The best of lies are half-truths. I tell him half-truths. Sunday. Hugo goes to play golf. I dress ritually and compare the joy of dressing for Henry to my sorrow at dressing for idiotic bankers and telephone kings.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He did not protest. He laughed, half sadly. Then he sat on the couch, completely absorbed by the terror of knowing how easily everything could crumble. I waited, baffled by his brooding. Finally he awoke to say, “I am only what you imagine me to be.” I don’t know what else we said. I realized both the extent and the limits of Henry’s love, of his being possessed by June against his will, just as I am, and of his loving me deeply, as I do him. When he said to me, in torment, “I need to know what you want,” I told him, “Nothing more than this closeness. When all is right between us I can bear my life.” He said, “I realized that a holiday in Spain for a few months is no solution. And I know that if we took it, you would never return to Hugo. I would not let you return.” I answered, “And I cannot think any further than a holiday because of Hugo.” We looked at one another and knew how much each of us was paying for his weakness: he, for his slavery to passion, and I, for my slavery to pity. The days that followed were unique, resplendent. Talk and passion, work and passion. What I need to keep, to hold warmly against my breast, are the hours in that top-floor room. Henry could not leave me. He stayed two days, which culminated in such a burst of sexual frenzy that I was left burning for long afterwards. I have ceased worrying. I lie back and just love him, and I get such love from him as would justify my whole existence. I stutter when I mention his name. Each day he is a new man, with new depths and new sensibilities. I received a photograph of him today. It was a strange feeling to see so clearly the full mouth, the bestial nose, the pale, Faustian eyes—that mixture of delicacy and animalism, of toughness and sensibility. I feel that I have loved the most remarkable man of our age. Most of my life has been spent in enriching as well as I could the long, long waiting for the great events which fill me now so deeply that I am overwhelmed. Now I understand the terrific restlessness, the tragic sense of failure, the deep discontent. I was waiting. This is the hour of expansion, of true living. All the rest was a preparation. Thirty years of anguished watchfulness. And now these are the days I lived for. And to be aware of this, so fully aware, that is what is almost humanly unbearable. Human beings cannot bear the knowledge of the future. To me, the knowledge of the present is just as dazzling.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  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. With me he quickly surrenders his impulsive judgments, like calling Paulette adorable. By patience and gentleness I gain equilibrium in a man who is all reactions, oscillations, contrariness. Sometimes when he marvels at the deftness of my fingers, whether I am carving fish or arranging his tie, I think of Lawrence, so irritable and so bitter and so nervous, and I think I am playing on somewhat the same instrument. I still feel his kisses on the palms of my hands, and I hate to bathe because I am impregnated with wonderful odors. Hugo is coming home in a few hours, and so life goes on like this in contradictory patterns. How long, I wonder, will I crave the sensualist? Before falling asleep, he said to me, “Listen, I am not drunk, and I am not sentimental, and I tell you you are the most wonderful woman in the world.”