I felt guilty when I remembered Robert had read in my diaries about my experience with Eduardo in Paris when we tried to make our love actual. I asked myself: did Robert act out this pattern of outgoing and then withdrawing, like the magic dictation I received from June, the June in me pushing me to abandon Henry and then return to him? Patterns, repetitions. “Your only weakness,” said Henry to me many years ago, “is your incapacity to destroy.”
It only came to me this year—I revolted against being a saint, a martyr. Today Patchen telephoned me: would I send him ten dollars. This request came three days after I had already given him ten dollars. Hugo and I eat for a week on ten dollars. And just a few minutes before I had telegraphed Henry all I had! The injustice riled me. I wrote Patchen a long, stormy letter. I told him we all knew the world has never taken care of the artist, and no one counted on it. He is like an angry beast demanding to be fed, and one knows as soon as one stops feeding him he will be full of hatred again. I do not forgive hatred.
Three people have aroused my hatred: Helba, John, and Patchen. Perhaps it was necessary that I should learn hatred too. I feared it so. I always strove so desperately for harmony. I could not bear hatred, but it is a force. In Patchen I rebel against what Helba and Gonzalo made me suffer, and I refuse to pass through this state again. I have no pity for Patchen, because his hatred is stronger than his love, and his self-love greater than all, and above all, his stupidity, his denseness… I now have the courage for anger, of being hated. Before I had to win all the loves, even the ones I did not feel, but I no longer can pretend.
JANUARY 25, 1941
My letter to Patchen was mad. My madness now is: why do people want to use me, my strength, my courage, my devotion? Why? Is it my weakness they immediately exploit?
The moonstorm makes me insane, but my insanity is nothing but revolt, the revolt I never expressed or lived out. I no longer want to be the victim of the criminals. I want to be the criminal, and this has come simultaneously with the birth of the artist. I want to be the artist now. I have begun to create. I am sad, humanly I am sad. The saint in me was killed by excess. I had to know hatred.
JANUARY 27, 1941
I can write about everything. Erotic scenes for the old man, the Conrad Moricand story, Jean’s story, the barge, the diary. I am stirred, rich, fertile. I faced Ruder, who is selling the diaries, enchanted him. His rejection of the mystical in the diary pushes me into the human. It is good for me. I possess both powers, but I must strengthen the human. I was stopped when they clashed. When I get confused, when they invade each other like my loves, they must be kept separate. As soon as I try to make ONE love, ONE creation, I am broken by the impossible. LET NO ONE EVER DARE TO SAY I DID NOT TRY TO GIVE MYSELF TO ONE LOVE OR TO ONE CREATION—LET NO ONE DARE TO SAY I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR THE PAINFUL DIVISION.
But all of them must live, be heard and written. There lies the strength. I felt it in Paris when I wrote the journal on Fire.
JANUARY 30, 1941
Deliver me from obsessive love. Let me dance. People think I only crave lovers or worship. Nobody knows I am crying out tragically for my very existence. I only exist in the body of my lover, as a body within the body of my lover. My creation exists in its communication and openness. My mystical world, my force, my power, exist only in the twinship voyage. How can I go anywhere alone? I do not exist outside of love. I have never been to a museum alone, to a movie alone, for a walk alone. I have written not to be alone.
FEBRUARY 7, 1941
The Myth story begins to exist because Robert likes it. The Artaud story he sees before it is written so that now I can write it. Robert as a creator has great strength, as a revealer, a prophet. Robert is sitting there writing. For days we locked ourselves in, got drunk on writing.
As the male soul, he says, “Declare your treacheries.” My female soul says, “Protect those you love.” When I destroyed Patchen, he said, “You cannot judge anyone truly because you are expecting someone.” Patchen is not the one, but Robert is. I am content. I seek nothing else.
Mr. Ruder telephones: “More realism! More realism!”
FEBRUARY 9, 1941
In the afternoon, when we met in our corner, Gonzalo said: “There is a change in your voice.” He made us get under the covers, took off my panties, took me with fire and delight—a long orgasm which he ends with grateful, tender kisses. I left him all warmed.
This morning I met Henry. His father died yesterday. He arrived two hours too late. Henry was, as I expected him to be, Chinese, mystical, full of tender acceptance. He met me with passion, hunger. I gave myself so wholly, feeling his fragility, his preciousness, the unbroken bond, the well of tenderness, of devotion. We lay in bed talking about New Orleans, his trips, what he saw. We did not talk about his father. There is such tenderness in his leanness. He seems so small, so delicate; I look at his wrists. He has to go back to his family, to watch over the body of his father.
Journals 32, 33, 34: they recreate a state like opium smoking in which one little incident, one caress, one scene, produces enormous diffusion. The writing is all about the feelings produced, removed from reality, the enormous expansion in sensation. Life comes in small pieces, little scenes. I was an opium dreamer—I could not focus on reality.
35 to 45: later the diaries become focused on human drama, movement. The writing grows tighter, concerned with essentials, terse, sparing, strong. 45 to 50: the focusing gains in intensity and accuracy. Greater sincerity, greater clarity. In the last volumes, 50 to 60, there is a fulfilled climax, a fusion of the dream, the mirage, and human life. They flow together.
FEBRUARY 13, 1941
The day before yesterday, a day of orgy.
I met Henry for lunch, and we got into bed afterwards, so eagerly, so completely, grasping the asses with our hands, clutching at them to bring them more violently together. Henry fell asleep. I slipped out of bed.
Dinner with Gonzalo. Our corner. A prolonged enjoyment, prolonged to exasperation, a wallowing into flesh, a hunger of the hands.
Orgiastic day, no writing possible. Hugo called me to scold me: the telephone bill has grown huge, immense, and unpaid when he had given me the money for it. The net of economic difficulties closes in on me. Everybody is irresponsible, unaware that we are going to be shipwrecked.
Yesterday, a Day of Work, thirty pages of writing. Today another Day of Work. I could ask myself, as Patchen does, why does no one pay me for all the work I have done? Ironically, it is not the real diary I am paid for, but the false one.
Story of Ruder, continued. Who is the client? Is it Ruder himself? I said: “Soon I am coming to a volume that brings up the political question. What side is your client on?”
“Bourgeois, of course.”
I hesitated eloquently, baffled. “Well, that will be difficult; I myself have swung to the left.”
“Oh,” said Ruder excitedly, “that will be terribly interesting. I’m very much left. I think you must put all that in. It is all related. Have you tried to reconcile Freud and Marx?”
He was speaking for himself. And his client was bourgeois!
The mystery remains. He repeated his invitation to dinner and the theatre. It is the return of Rank’s body without the power and greatness, the same dolorous begging eyes, the intellectual attitude, the incapacity to enter life, all the energies spent on analysis. He is a pepper, this Mr. Ruder, hoping sometime to be able to make an entrance. But because I see his inadequacies and ugliness, I laugh to myself and think: entrée payante, Monsieur Ruder.
Laughing with a hundred dollars in my pocket, I went to Henry, who was waiting for me in bed. I