And today I am home, lying down most of the time.
Gonzalo came to make lunch.
AUGUST 26, 1940
Days of convalescence. Gonzalo’s behavior has restored my faith and calmed my doubts. Finally today, as we were resting side by side, I felt his desire stirring, and he placed my hand over it and let me caress him. I was warmed by his desire. I am in love with Gonzalo still. I know it now.
In utter despair at American emptiness and homeliness, we began to dream Paris all over again. Gonzalo told me one story after another, and I urged him to write them down. He recreated the atmosphere for me. Listening to him and remembering, I began to write, starting with the pages on the rue Dolent, a fantastic story about Hans Reichel. With Gonzalo, I could abstract myself from the American scene. It was a collaboration. After working, I often telephone him and say: “Look what you have done! It is your book.” His stories are terrifying. I started to write flowingly last week, two days after the abortion. Yesterday I wrote the pages on the café. I am working to weld it all together… the barge story, the rag pickers.
A corrupt man is like a woman. Corruption is a kind of passivity, a pregnable, open, yielding element which attracts one. One feels like plunging into this corrupt, lax, open being, through which all currents flow, raping it, mastering it. During Gonzalo’s storytelling I suffer sometimes to see the expression of yieldingness, of abandon, which took him everywhere…the abandon… That must be the way a man feels about woman, the desire to insert the hard erect knife of his will and desire into this soft, open flesh.
Poor John. I think of him now as the brightest son I ever had, but I love the dark one best of all, the one who has shown ugliness, envy, fear, weakness, criminal negligence, corruption. Corruption is revealed by a choice of ambiance, and Gonzalo’s choice was of the darkest, most diseased and corrupt of all, monstrous.
AUGUST 27, 1940
Strange days of loneliness, barrenness and inner burning. I live absolutely in my past and partly in Gonzalo’s. We meet like conspirators, while Hugh is fishing, and we talk, talk, talk. Then I work. Physically I am at a very low ebb, but spiritually I carry a demon of restlessness, hunger, imaginings. I want a rich, multiple, dazzling life. I want abundance, recklessness, sumptuousness and the heights of passion, up to the hilt. I want to be burned, to be burned. And now I want to live out everything within the very layers at which I am creating. I have set the climate and I must find it—but where?
SEPTEMBER 1, 1940
I must beware of my imagination. At the moment when love becomes pale, I begin to suffer from doubts. Gonzalo, on the contrary, has nestled in this love and does not expect catastrophe now. He expected it during the passion. I expect it now. Last night I told Hugh I was leaving for Virginia at midnight, and I arranged to have dinner with Gonzalo in New York. I told him I could leave, or not leave, whatever he wanted. He didn’t say anything, so I finally began to tell him how, because of his passivity, I had suffered and was detaching myself from him. He was immensely surprised, and he laughed good-naturedly, absolutely innocently. He said all I seemed to be missing was his tyranny, and that he had changed deeply, felt more balanced, less crazy than before, that he now believed in me. I said I loved our rhythm before, when he took the active role, that now I was lost. Gonzalo explained that all men were stupid when it was a question of ruse, and that he had grown to depend on my ruses for our meetings. He showed great tenderness, but I did see the change and felt that this Gonzalo I don’t like, that I preferred the crazy one who made scenes. This Gonzalo is old, fat and peaceful. But I have become aware of the demon in me that is the cause of my suffering, the demon of doubt. It may cause me to destroy the very love I want, as I destroyed my life with Henry, because fundamentally, Henry having made his love of June the theme of his work, I never really believed in his love. And Gonzalo, being enslaved by Helba’s helplessness, her deafness, I feel equally that in the end, when the passion is over, I may lose him. I have a feeling I should make Gonzalo jealous as I made Henry jealous by running away to New York. But that only reassures me for a little while, and then Henry’s egotism destroys my faith again. They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love.
It is my fault. I love with so much devotion that I make everybody selfish… I know there is something very wrong with me. I need proof of love constantly, and that is wrong and cruel for the others.
All day Sunday I tortured myself needlessly with doubt. Monday morning I didn’t telephone Gonzalo. Then he telephoned me to say that because of the weather he thought I should not leave for Virginia. He was afraid for me. Such a small thing can make me happy for a day, but then an equally small act of thoughtlessness can plunge me into despair.
To rise beyond this emotional weakness, I worked well last week. Then Henry came and read what I had done, and his criticism was negative. He had nothing to say about the fragments themselves; all he could see was that they were not woven together. He said it was bad, monotonous and static. This stopped my writing completely. I showed it to Gonzalo, and he responded. But why should I depend on such responses? Why must I depend on others for everything, never on myself? I am back to where I was years ago, before analysis, to a devouring doubt, continuous hyper-sensitivity and fears. What can I do now? Before I was helped by Allendy and then by Rank. Now I have to heal myself alone. At least I realize it is all in my imagination. But the suffering is there, continuous, haunting, like an infection. No relief. A few hours of peace, and then the gnawing begins again.
Anaïs, stop devouring and fearing. You are a tortured being, you have been all your life. Come out of this darkness and live passionately again, forget yourself. Create. You isolate yourself with your love, and you suspect every nuance and every word and every gesture. It is bad. You must be courageous and ruthless and reckless. If you always need a new love because you only believe in the new, you will lose Gonzalo, whom you still love.
SEPTEMBER 5, 1940
Hampton Manor has changed because of the petty antagonisms that have grown between Mrs. Salvador Dalí and Henry and John. She used Henry (she doesn’t know English), and she has appropriated the library where we used to talk for a salon for Dalí’s work. Meals were full of hostility and mockery. The wife wants the entire place run like Dalí’s kingdom, and we are to be his subjects. John and Flo feel humiliated by the conversations entirely in French, and John is critical of Dalí’s persistent work and gayety (he whistles and sings all day). I would not have felt all this. I am less rebellious at being asked to help, or to being used. John hates to serve. Henry hates Mrs. Dalí’s coddling of Dalí. They hated everything and made crazy statements like: “Dalí only eats lamb,” as if this were in itself a crime. Henry resorted to his maniacal contradictions. I liked to hear Dalí talk, but it was impossible. John was jealous when