Love reduces the complexity of living.
“I feel that you have taken away from me the little confidence I had. I feel humiliated because I have confessed to you, and I so rarely confess.” It is quite mystifying to hear such a confession from someone who writes with sincere candor and poignant rawness. But “Henry & June” is no ordinary diary, it being authored by one hell of an uninhibited woman, Anais Nin.
Anais was not exactly an innocent barrio lass when she first met June and Henry, from whom she learned the bohemian ways during her stay in Paris, but her awakenings with them were of the colossal kind. They were stirrings of amatory splendor.
The love between women is a refuge and an escape into harmony. In the love between man and woman there is resistance and conflict. Two women do not judge each other, brutalize each other, or find anything to ridicule. They surrender to sentimentality, mutual understanding, romanticism. Such love is death, I’ll admit.
She starts in awe of them: “Henry gives me the world. June gave me madness. God, how grateful I am to find two beings I can love, who are generous to me in a way I cannot explain to Natasha.”
Quickly though she realizes that the weakest way of enjoying life is to let it whip her. “By conquering misery we are creating a future independence of being such as they will never know.” Soon enough she discovers her beauty, her sensuality, her power—and naturally exerts all these beyond Henry and June:
I feel a powerful sense of life unimaginable to either Hugo or Eduardo. My breasts are swollen. I hold my legs wide apart in love-making instead of, as before, closed. I have enjoyed sucking to the point of almost coming to a climax while doing it. I have finally eliminated my childish self.
In no time Henry is now her little puppy. Writes Henry: “I love you. I go to bed now—it is too painful to stay awake. I am insatiable. I will ask you to do the impossible. What it is, I don’t know. You will tell me probably. You are faster than I am. I love your cunt, Anais—it drives me crazy.”
From adoration to bewilderment, Anais sees Henry and June in a stunningly completely different light. Of her: “I thought bitterly of June’s magnificent willfulness, initiative, tyranny. I thought, it isn’t strong women who make men weak, but weak men who make women overstrong.” And of him: “While I tell her [June] I love her I am thinking of how I can save Henry, the child, no longer the lover to me, because his feebleness 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?
Whatever or whoever, I love what becomes of Anais the next time she is reunited with both Henry and June: “I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.”
Dear Elizabeth 