Incest: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1932-1934)

by Anaïs Nin

June wants Henry to be a Dostoevsky, but June prevents him from being one—unwillingly, instinctively. She wants him to sing her praises, not to write a great book. She is blameless in her destruction. It is her breathing, her life assertion, each movement of her ego which confuse, diminish, break others. She is sincere, blameless, innocent. I have aggrandized Henry. I can make a Dostoevsky of him. I breathe strength into him. I am aware of my power, but my power is feminine; it demands a match, not a victory. My power is also that of the artist, so that I don’t need Henry’s work personally as an aggrandizement of myself. I do not need him to praise me, and as I am an artist first, I can keep my ego, my woman’s ego, in the background. It does not block his work. I sustain the artist in him. June wants not only an artist but a lover and a slave.

I can relinquish the demands of my ego, capitulate to art, to creation—above all to creation. That is what I am doing now: creating June and Henry. Alimenting them both, giving my faith.

June sees in me the woman who has gone through hell but who remains intact—who wants to remain intact. She will not lose her self, her ideal self And Henry wants the Dostoevskian ideal. The artist. He finds the image of this artist self in me. Whole, powerful, untrammeled. I do not need his art to glorify me. I ...

And June, who loves me blindly, seeks to destroy me, too. My pages on her, which are a work of art, do not satisfy her. She overlooks their strength and beauty, and voices the complaint that all I have said is not true. But not for a moment am I crushed. I knew the exact value of those pages, independently of June. My work first, then. My power as an artist shaken, and then what other power have I? My natural stimulation, my vitality, my true imagination, my health, my creative aliveness. And what will June do to them? Drugs. June offers me death and destruction. June ensorcells me—talks with her face, her caresses, lures me, uses my love of her for destruction. Double death. My freshness of body is to be destroyed so that my body may become like hers. She said, “Your body is so fresh, mine so spoiled.” And so, blindly, blamelessly, innocently, she will kill my freshness, the intactness she loves. She will kill all she loves.

June herself has no true imagination, or she would not need drugs; June is hungry for imagination. Henry, too, was hungry. And they have enriched me with their experiences. They have both given me so much. Life. They have give me life.

Sometimes it hurts me that there should be less feeling and more intelligence. I seemed more sincere before. But if to be sincere means to throw one’s self overboard, it was a sincerity of defeat. To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice. I no longer need to do so much to cover the ineffectually of my inner transmutations, to substitute for understanding. I need to do little, but with a great deal of strength.

How many closenesses are there in the world for a woman like me? Am I a unity? A monster? Am I one woman?

June is my adventure and my passion, but Henry is my love.

June’s perpetual cry that one cannot trust Henry with the truth. I see such a deformed picture of each in the other’s eyes. I must make terrific efforts to keep my Henry and my June. And they want to involve me in conflict, to pit me against one or the other. June wants this performance, because it is another manifestation of the attention we give her; she wants us to fight for her, Henry and me. That would give her the moment of hatred, or passion, in which she alone believes. She cannot live in halftones, in suggestion, in truth. My God, am I strong enough to help her?

June thinks Henry is stirred up when he becomes enraged, stuttering, illogical; she thinks he is alive now, whereas he was alive before she came, only deep down. Throughout her love of me there rings this note of jealousy: She wants to impede the now-certain publication of his book because it comes from me. She attacks Henry because he does not take any more advice from her. For all this I have to watch in the very moment of the greatest exaltation. When she cannot blind me she offers her body.

June is a character, material, adventure, but this copulation of man and woman within the very furnace of creativity is a new monstrosity of a new miracle. It will upset the course of the planets, and alter the rhythm of the world, and “leave a scar upon the world.”

Henry made a monster of June because he has a monster-creating mind. He is a madman. He suffered in June the very tortures he himself created, too, because June’s love for Henry was not at all monstrous, but probably as simple as mine for her. I did adopt Henry’s belief in the monstrosity of June. Now I see the human being June suffering; and I see how these two have failed to understand each other—but that June is the weakest because the contents of Henry’s mind have made her insane. The contents of Henry’s mind do not confuse me; they interest me objectively. They fascinate my intelligence, my imagination.

I saw the process of deformation when Henry explained my pages on June and invested me with great mystery and monstrosity. His imagination is relentless and fertile; it grasps a human being and deforms him, enhances him, magnifies, kills. It is a demon loose in the world, labyrinthian, leading to insanity. Henry could make people mad.

I love to play with Henry this dangerous game of imaginative deformation. We are adequate adversaries, now that Allendy has integrated me and revealed my fundamental pattern. Divest me of exteriorizations, theatricality, masochism, and you find a kernel, a core, an artist, a woman. But divest June of trappings and you find an ordinary beautiful woman with a feeling for illusion, sacrifice, ideals, fairy tales—but no contents. She must remain a character, a curiosity, a freak, the illusory form of personality.

After all, my imagination, too, has played fantastically with both Henry and June, with this difference: I have a great need of truth, and I succumb to pity. Truth makes it impossible for me to distort, because I understand. As soon as I understand Henry, I cease to make a “character” of him (the underworld brute of my second conception of him, inflated by his books). My first conception is invariably true: my first description of Henry in the journal fits him today, and my first description of June is truer than my literary composition. I begin to love as a human being, and the game ceases.

Fantasy for me is a form of disguise. The world forced me into fantasy, and I myself did not want to see the early-morning face of my acts.

I came home after having slept only a few hours, and I went to bed, and I wrote. I ate my lunch, slept like a soldier, masturbated, and took up my writing again.

Henry was enraged to think of the useless suffering he had experienced, to see that truth (though remaining mysterious) was a profound relief from his years of blind-bat suffering. It became horribly clear that all the experience June had hurled at him she had not really given to him, in the truest sense, because by her lies she had cheated him of knowledge. Henry was floundering, desperate, bafoué, cocu, in a maze of deformities, lost as a man and as an artist; and yesterday a woman gave herself for the first time to him by truth. That was marriage. Man giving woman his strength and vision, and woman giving man her strength and vision. Henry at that moment moved me so deeply, reached such a secret recess of my being, that all former surrenders seemed but half gifts; and that night, in his arms, I almost wept because of that absolute breaking up of myself this absolute dissolution of myself into him.

Last night, because of L. V., the schema of my lyrical book burst into crystallization. Death. Disintegration. Perversion. Spengler’s prophecies unraveled: lesbianism, June (minor themes in connection with June of lies, abortion, primitivism, psychism), incest—the de Vilmorins—Eduardo and homosexuality and paralysis, my death, holocausts. A thoroughly neurotic book including all the symptoms, phenomena, descriptions of moods, dreams, insanities, phobias, manias, hallucinations—tableau of disintegration, franker than Lawrence’s treatment of homosexuality, than Radclyffe Hall’s treatment of lesbianism, because of this conception of mine which is a reflection of Jung’s attitude against Freud’s—if we could understand the significance of the sexual symbol we would have the key to vast pregnancies and abortions, fecundations and impotences—-from the sexual root, the imaginary world—as, for instance, incest does not mean only possession of the mother or sister—womb of woman—but also of the church, the earth, nature. The sexual fact is the lead weight only: The drama is in space. The gesture is only a symbol with enormous significance (you can even find the taste of death in copulation). All the neuroses—amplify Eduardo’s fears, mine (making love in the middle of the night when half-asleep my greatest enjoyment), Henry’s, June’s! Accentuate each one’s follies (June’s fear in subway, Louise’s deafness, my blindness).

I see the legendary aspect persisting, and I see in men the ultimate, eternal worship of illusion. How hurt Henry would be if I squatted over the bidet, if I held my “pussy” in my hands like a bouquet! Wisdom means giving each human being his due and playing one’s role beautifully, without regrets, for one can only fulfill one’s own karma, and I would probably make a poor whore!

Henry and I both have this terrifying faculty of immersing ourselves in an atmosphere to the extent of forgetting ourselves and our love.

We laugh. We lie together, fucking softly, gently, swimming in it, and for the first time the orgasm comes to me unsought, peacefully almost, like a slow dawn, a slow flowering out of relaxation and yieldingness and nonbeing. No reaching out for it. Falling like rain, flowering, drowning the mind.

Henry believes he is passing through a great transition from the romantic interest in life to interest in ideas. He has become sage, philosopher, metaphysician. His mind functions continuously.

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as an ordinary woman. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I’m a neurotic—in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

Quite definitely, today I felt classified, categorized as a species of seductress not often encountered. I play not only with sex but with souls, imaginations. A whore is an honest whore. I seduce men’s bodies and souls, and I play with serious, sacred things. As Henry said once, I love sacrilege. I am a new kind of enchantress. The men of serious, deep lives who are not captured by the whore, the men who are least subjected to the will of woman—these are the men I possess. I am a poison which does not work into the flesh alone, but into deeper sources.

Henry sleeps in me like my own blood and flesh, sleeps and stirs. Artaud haunts my imagination and arouses fever, arouses the supernatural efflorescence straining in space, aspiring upward.

Je suis un abîme complet.”

Henry cannot bear his solitude, and he goes off on his bicycle to come nearer to me. I think of Henry on the road, eating in a cheap restaurant with gusto, making friends with waiters and workmen.

Evening. In his room. He tells me about his life with Mother. It is a revelation, and I know it is all true because I recognize the traits in Mother which made such a life possible. I am profoundly shocked. First because it is strange to discover the sexual life of one’s parents—one’s mother. Secondly because Mother had seemed a Puritan to me . . . always. So reserved, so unsympathetic, so secretive about sex. Religion. Morality. Bourgeoisie. And now I discovered a war, a sexual war, like the one between Lawrence and Frieda, June and Henry. Father trying to ascend as an artist; Mother the spider, voracious, bestial, not voluptuous, naturalistic, unromantic. Destroyer of illusion. Unkempt, dirty, without coquetry or taste. She could take off her wig before Father, lie about in kimonos. Terrible list of crude details. Smell of perspiration, strong smell of unwashed sex. These things tortured my Father, the aristocrat, cursed besides with an excessive sense of smell—a passion for perfumes and refinements.

“Toi, Anaïs! Je n’ai plus de Dieu!”

As soon as one becomes strong one has to accept the consequences. Brave, strong ones are never pitied.