But Hampton Manor, the enchanted, has vanished. John’s money is finished and he has to go home. He growls at everything. The press plan was abandoned because Caresse didn’t have the money for it. John would have to have done all the work, but this I didn’t want, because I don’t want to leave Gonzalo in New York, and at Hampton Manor I couldn’t be with John.
But again, when John and I were in the same room, garden, or road, we felt each other’s presence like wild magnets. We only had one walk together, the last day, and he told me how he suffered from my absence and the fear that I should die, how he only came to life when I arrived, how he wanted me. What power draws us together and makes me forget Gonzalo. Desire. Desire. Again our eyes fixed on each other each time Henry and Flo are not looking, and again we hypnotize each other completely, falling into the well of the other’s being, compelled, blind, drunk. His blue eyes are firm, fixed like a virile possession, and he takes me. At other times he is dissolved with desire, his voice grows husky and warm, and I feel bathed in warmth and passion.
We planned to meet again in New York, to spend nights together.
In the evening, when Flo was in her room and Henry was in the bathroom, I ran downstairs lightly because I heard John locking the doors. He heard me coming. We stood for an instant in the darkness of the porch, crackling and burning like wild torches—he all gold and blue, I all red and black—hearts snapping with the tension, whispering words of love. He then became the lover, feverish with desire, with the voice and laughter of the lover, the man one wants to be locked in a room with.
I am grateful to have a lover I want to be locked with in a room—a lover on fire.
I sit in the train and I still feel him, where one should feel a lover. He says I am his only joy. I say he is my only joy. He says I am the only one who has his rhythm. I say, “You have mine.”
On his birthday, we found a pack of cards fallen around the car. I picked up the ones with their faces turned upward. I do not know their meaning, but the negress said it was all lucky.
Sad days, the last of Hampton Manor. We see the long, long roads before us. From afar they look wet, but they are absolutely dry—a mirage. Many tree branches lie wrapped in cocoons of spider webs, dead leaves and dead insects lying tangled in the gown of white fog ribbons, the maternal fluid weaving its cocoon pockets in the forest, silvery envelopes, snowy white wigs of crystallized saliva. The earth is sienna colored. The negro is singing on his horse. There is a pool crowded with headless trees. Dalí is painting a guitar that is loose and slack like a body without nerves and a woman’s body taut like a guitar while the hand plays on her sex. Dalí is painting a horse whose insides contain a woman whose child is kissing his horse teeth while the child’s enormous horse-like sex hangs limp. Henry is writing about Greece. John is writing about corruption and rebelling: “Why do we take up your death theme? We haven’t died.” Why indeed, the gold sun youth of America wallowing in our European death chant.
“Well, can you visualize tomorrow?” I asked. “You are tomorrow.”
“I can’t—it’s true.”
So they chant death with us.
SEPTEMBER 7, 1940
Tonight I suddenly realized the demon in me, the one shattering my life and endangering my love for Gonzalo, the demon of intensity which pushes me to feverishly seek it wherever it lies. As soon as I left John, I fell again into a more natural world and was sad, as when you want to play the drum because you are taut and full of rhythm, but the drum skins tear.
I am in an absolutely mad state, abnormally sensitive, magnifying everything, emotional, full of anguish and nervousness. If I am eating in a restaurant and the music begins, I become dissolved and lacerated. If I see an accident in the street, I am obsessed all day, jerking with pain for the others. I feel like June—unbalanced, lost.
At the same time I have a ferocious lucidity which makes me act on Hugh’s blindness and ghostliness, and I give him a superb talk, such as Rank used to give me on unreality—the blind man’s dog I am! At the same time, I am aware that my gift is my curse—for as I see into others’ lives abnormally with such a keen insight, it sometimes gives me an inhuman role to play—the wise man’s role, so hateful, so difficult. At times some depend on my guidance, but at other times they hate it and rebel against it, as Henry did. And yet at other times, they ignore it, and then, because my feelings are involved, I suffer more from their blindness than they do. Hugh said the worst is that in anger I utter truths which hurt. He said nobody could hurt more than I, because I am accurate. I hate my own lucidity—I suffer as a god must suffer when he looks down and witnesses a murder committed in a moment of blindness. Sometimes I feel so desperate I cry out that I will kill myself and put an end to this seeing. Oh, the torture of eyes forever open! Close my eyes, oh god, that I may rest from suffering. I can no longer bear my awareness. How clearly I see! I see Hugh walking off like a ghost when I leave him, and this image of gauntness and isolation saddens my trip to Hampton Manor. I dwell on this and discover the significance of his absent-mindedness, his absence.
When I returned, as we were driving home, I told him all I know and how I have struggled to reach the point of living fully in the present, with all my faculties in the present moment. I poured out all that I have attained myself with such difficulties—the presence, in contrast to the absence of unreality.
Hugh was vitalized, touched. His gloom and greyness passed into me after I talked, because all my strength is used in these transmissions of life. I am weary of burdens— burdens.
I am afraid to ask myself what John will be for me—he will be my joy for how long? John is absolutely poor, but unwilling to submit to the discipline of a job because he wants the life of the artist. He is imprisoned by his wife’s complete dependence and clutching love. She has no life of her own, no creativity, no action. She lives vicariously through him, a shadow—his shadow, his echo.
I am cornered. John is not the man. When will he come? Will he have the savour of Gonzalo, but with strength…or will I have to provide all the strength again, until I die? I await him. It was in this exact mood that I awaited Gonzalo a few months before he came along. I knew then he would be a big man, not from France—I almost felt him. I saw his eyes in Fez. And Jean de la Lune (Cateret) had said, “Watch out for 1940.” But it cannot be John.
I think I am a little mad with feeling, with awareness, with obstacles. Create, Anaïs. Every word you wrote was always the golden key which opened the doors of your prison. The Lawrence book brought you Henry. The House of Incest Gonzalo. The Winter of Artifice John. It is your female chant for man, for the lover. Write. It is your ornament, your grace, your seduction, your chant for courting.
Create, Anaïs. He will come.
NANANKEPICHU II
We saved the dream
SEPTEMBER 12, 1940, HOLLY CHAMBERS HOTEL, N.Y.C.
I spent all afternoon walking the streets of the Village looking for a place for Gonzalo and me, for a dream, a room that would not be just a room, a studio that would not be just a studio, a house that would not be just a house. I was standing at the corner of my hotel, worn out and discouraged, about to go back in, to surrender. At that moment I felt so vividly the kind of place I dreamed of that I continued to walk, as if I were walking towards it. I walked to an agent, and he took me to three places. The third place was the Place—an old red brick house in front of the Provincetown Playhouse. Top floor—a studio which is an echo of Nanankepichu—part of it low-ceilinged, uneven, with small square windows, the other half skylight, high and wonderful for drawing and writing. Old but clean, floor painted black, a fireplace—an air of not being in New York. A big bed and a big desk. Beautiful. My heart was pounding. I took it immediately. The next morning, while waiting for Gonzalo, I took over the bed cover from Paris, the same pair of sheets we had in rue