The Winter of Artifice
Anaïs Nin








Winter of Artifice is a collection of novelettes: ‘Stella,’ ‘Winter of Artifice,’ and ‘The Voice.’






“A handful of perfectly fold fables, and prose which is so daringly elaborate, so accurately timed… using words as magnificently colorful, evocative and imagist as any plastic combination on canvas but as mysteriously idiosyncratic as any abstract.”

    

—Times Literary Supplement












Anaïs Nin

THE WINTER OF ARTIFICE

Three Novelettes


To Nancy and Larry with love.






INTRODUCTION


From the publication of her first book in 1932 until the mid 1960s, Anaïs Nin was an obscure author who published books with, often, small presses, and short fiction in little magazines. With the appearance of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1934 (1966), however, she became well known, and then increasingly popular as more volumes of her diary were published. The number of her books published since her death in 1977 confirms that her appeal continues. At least twenty books of new or mostly new material have been published as of late 2006. These include nine volumes of her diary, four of them identified as unexpurgated (these four contain some previously published material); three volumes of correspondence (with Henry Miller, David Pepperell, and Felix Pollak); two volumes of erotica, plus five books of selections from them, one illustrated with photographs and another with artwork; and a collection of stories. Another volume of erotica has been attributed to her and her friends on the basis of unconvincing evidence. Additionally, some short pieces and selections from works published during Nin’s lifetime have been collected and published as books, and one novella has been published under its own title. Such a substantial number of posthumous publications begs the question of whether worthwhile Nin writing remains unavailable. Indeed so. Nin’s third book and second volume of fiction, The Winter of Artifice, has not been republished since its initial appearance in 1939. At least one serious reader considers this collection of three novellas Nin’s major fictional accomplishment. Writing to Nin in 1960, Felix Pollak states, “I stillink it is your best book, that unexpurgated version — magic, entrancing piece of writing” (Nin and Pollak 1998, 152).[1 - The titles listed in this note — all published after Nin’s death — are arranged chronologically within categories. I cite only first editions. The volumes of Nin’s diary are Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914-1920, translated by Jean L. Sherman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978); The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1966-1974, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980); The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Two, 1920-1923 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982); The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Three, 1923-1927 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983); The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Four, 1927-1931 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985); Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986); Incest: From a Journal of Love, the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992); Fire: From a Journal of Love, the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995); and Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love, the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1937-1939 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996). The volumes of letters are A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987); Letters to a Friend in Australia (Melbourne: Nosukumo, 1992); and Arrows of Longing: The Correspondence between Anaïs Nin and Felix Pollak, 1952-1976, edited by Gregory H. Mason (Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1998). The volumes of erotica are Delta of Venus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977) and Little Birds (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979). The volumes with contents drawn from one or both of these books are The Illustrated Delta of Venus (London: W. H. Allen, 1980), with photographs by Bob Carlos Clarke; A Model and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1995); Stories of Love (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia: Penguin, 1996); Fragments from the Delta of Venus (New York: powerHouse Books, 2004), with illustrations by Judy Chicago; and Artists and Models (London: Penguin, 2005). The collection of stories is Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories (Weston, CT: Magic Circle Press, 1977). The volume of erotica attributed to Nin and others is White Stains (London: Delectus Books, 1995).The collections of Nin’s entirely or mostly previously published works are Portrait in Three Dimensions (N.p.: Concentric Circle Press, 1979); The White Blackbird and Other Writings (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1985); Conversations with Anaïs Nin, edited by Wendy M. DuBow (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994); and The Mystic of Sex and Other Writings, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1995). The novella published separately is Stella (London: Phoenix, 1996).The vast majority — almost all — of titles that were in print at the time of Nin’s death remains in print in late 2006: diaries, fiction, and criticism.Pollak thought that Nin should republish The Winter of Artifice. In a 1960 letter to her, he writes, “I wonder whether you should not consider republishing now the original version of Winter — if someone like Grove Press would bring it out. It may make the stir it ought to make and bring financial rewards besides. Have you ever thought of it?” (Nin and Pollak 1998, 152). Nin responds only by saying, “Grove Press would never publish me” (154).] His assessment is debatable, though reasons for the significance of the book are not arguable: the novellas present several key characters dealing with emotional issues (a central focus in Nin’s fiction generally), they serve to illustrate Henry Miller’s influence on Nin’s prose, they indicate how Nin used diary material in her fiction, and theyprovide a basis for examining Nin as evaluator and reviser of her work.

“Djuna,” “Lilith,” and “The Voice” were all published for the first time in The Winter of Artifice. “Djuna” has never been republished in its entirety; the other novellas appear in every edition of Winter of Artifice, as Nin later named the collection, though she revised them after their 1939 publication and changed the title of one of them.[2 - Excerpts from “Djuna” appear as “Hans and Johanna” in Nin 1989. They are from The Winter of Artifice, 9-13, 14-16, 16-18, 18-20, 24-26, 26-27, 34-35, 35-36, 39, 40, 49, 66, 67, 69-70, 74-76, 76-79, 82-83, 83-85, 85-89. In titling the excerpts “Hans and Johanna,” Gunther Stuhlmann, the editor of Anaïs: An International Journal, shifts focus from the narrator, as Nin has it with the title “Djuna,” to the objects of Djuna’s desire. The novella seems more about Djuna than Hans and Johanna.The other editions of Winter of Artifice (with no definite article in the title and with contents different from those of The Winter of Artifice) are N.p.: n.p., 1942 (the first publication of Nin’s own press, which became the Gemor Press); in Under a Glass Bell (London: Editions Poetry London, 1947); in Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories (New York: Dutton, 1948); Denver: Alan Swallow, 1961; London: Peter Owen, 1974 (with House of Incest) and 1991 (without House of Incest); and Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1992. Since 1961 in the United States, Winter of Artifice has been continuously in print, first with Alan Swallow in Denver, next with Swallow Press in Chicago, and then with Swallow Press/Ohio University Press in Athens. The novella published as “Lilith” in 1939 appears without title in the edition of 1942, as “Winter of Artifice” in that of 1947, as “Djuna” (entirely different from the “Djuna” in the 1939 edition) in that of 1948, and as “Winter of Artifice” in every later edition.]

Set in Paris, “Djuna” concerns Djuna’s involvement with Hans and Johanna, a couple married unhappily. Djuna, the narrator, is a writer attracted to impoverished Hans because she considers him highly intelligent and admires the manuscript he struggles to complete. His novel depicts a character inspired by Johanna, who objects to his harsh portrayal of her. Although Djuna and Hans are lovers, she views herself primarily as the nurturer of his talent, an aspect of Hans that Johanna does not value. When Johanna returns to Paris after having been away for the first two-thirds of the narrative, she and Djuna develop a closeness that becomes physical to the degree that they kiss and fondle. The night they spend together in bed concludes the novella.

Despite the drama surrounding Djuna, Hans, and Johanna, including the tension between the spouses, the novella mainly deals with the narrator’s quest for contentment. Although Djuna does not identify her problems, she acknowledges some of her deficiencies: lying to Hans so he will not think her ordinary, assuming any role in order to accommodate him, and wanting to be loved while remaining ultimately unknown.

Johanna appeals to Djuna because Hans’s wife possesses traits that Djuna lacks, needs, and desires. These include forthrightness and the ability to act decisively. Even though the two women are attracted to each other and, taken together, constitute a complete person, Johanna does not satisfy Djuna. Why? Because in loving Johanna, Djuna embraces “the desired, unrealized, unformulated half of” herself. In order to gain emotional equilibrium, Djuna must unite with her true opposite, a man, as she implies after characterizing her love for Johanna as self-love, as narcissism: “What I loved to-day [herself in Johanna], far, far above this self, was Hans. Hans, the other” (Nin 1939, 85).

The novella concludes without resolution. Johanna plans to leave Hans for another man. If she does, Djuna will presumably have unrestricted access to Hans. A life with him might help solve her problems. Yet if Johanna does not leave Hans, Djuna must decide whether to continue her involvement with him on a less-than-ideal basis — by sharing him with Johanna — or leave him, hoping to find someone to satisfy her needs.

The second novella, “Lilith,” focuses on the narrator, Lilith, and her problems that result from her father’s abandonment of the family two decades earlier, when she was ten years old. The reunion of the daughter (a writer) and her unnamed father (a musician) in France is the occasion of Lilith’s narrative, although the text does not indicate what inspired their meeting.

Any child could be expected to interpret the permanent absence of a parent as rejection, especially after the parent treated the child insensitively when the family was intact, as happened with Lilith. Her father terrified her; he thought her ugly. His absence affected her to the degree that her life has been lonely, that she has been incapable of appreciating joyous moments, and that she has acted against her own best interest. As a way of retaliating against her demanding, perfectionist father, the adult Lilith violated their shared tastes and preferences in order to offend him. She did this by, among other things, loving only poor men, seeking ugliness, and courting danger. The effects of such actions on her are unknown.

Despite her father’s unfeeling treatment of her, the mature Lilith knows that her father acted as he did because of his own problems. She realizes that he was an inadequate parent partly because he lost faith in love after being betrayed by his betrothed, who is not identified. She also comprehends that what she perceived as his abandonment was an attempt to save himself from an untenable marriage by fleeing it. As a result of these awarenesses, Lilith forgives his fatherly shortcomings.

Understanding her father’s actions does not mean that Lilith should grant his every wish, however. Because of the effects of his father’s favoring of a daughter over him during his own childhood, Lilith’s father has been jealous of Lilith’s life independent of him. Within this context, he thinks that, in a sense, his daughter has abandoned him. Partly to protect himself against the pain that this perception causes, he implies that she should devote herself to him. His desire is unreasonable. If she commits to him, disaster would result not only because she would lack significant interaction with other people, but also because father and daughter are too similar. As Djuna learns in the first novella, Lilith knows that one must unite with one’s opposite, or at least with someone significantly different from oneself. Wisely, she does not dedicate herself to her father.

Although Lilith understands and forgives her father, she discovers that she no longer loves him. She likens the demise of her love to the death of her fetus, at a time unspecified. As it was dead, “the little girl in me was dead too. The woman had been saved. And with the little girl died the need of a father” (Nin 1939, 197). Lilith has liberated herself from the oppressive influence of her father and gained a healthy sense of her own individuality and independence. As a result, she will presumably lead a more fulfilling life than previously.

“The Voice,” the last novella, concerns an analyst who treats his patients conscientiously and sometimes effectively. These include Lillian, a violinist who thinks herself a lesbian; Mischa, a cellist with a stiff hand and a bad leg; and Georgia, an orchestra conductor who feels uncomfortable with her womanhood because of her father’s amorous adventures when she was young. Most importantly, the Voice treats Djuna and Lilith, the narrators of the first two novellas. All these characters, including the Voice, have significant emotional problems.

“The Voice” does not answer the question implied at the conclusion of “Djuna”: will Johanna leave Hans? Whatever Johanna’s decision, in “The Voice” Djuna and Hans remain together in some manner, though this is a minor issue. Her frustrated desire to deal with people on the deepest level, her fear of the past, and her avoidance of reality by living in a dream inspire Djuna to seek help from the Voice. By the end of the novella, he has helped her understand some of her problems, though she continues living too much in a dream.

Lilith has sexual relations with at least one woman and many men, not including her husband; proudly strong and independent, she is really weak and dependent. She believes she loves the Voice; like Djuna, she fears reality. Lilith reinforces the conclusion of the second novella by telling the Voice that her “need of a father is over” (Nin 1939, 238). Yet for her the Voice functions as a father figure, indicating her continuing need for the guidance and emotional fulfillment that a father can offer. “The Voice” ends with Lilith and her analyst vacationing together. Although their outing is unsuccessful and she spurns him because he repulses her, perhaps her rejection of him is positive: she possibly no longer needs a man such as the Voice or her father. If through professional or personal interaction the Voice helps Lilith overcome the need for a father, including himself, he serves her well.

As Lilith is something other than what she seems at the beginning of the novella, so is the Voice different from how he appears. Professionally confident and authoritative, he needs as much help as his patients. He understands and assists them, but not himself. His treatment of Djuna, Lilith, and others — he is deeply involved with but ultimately detached from them — parallels and reinforces his problem generally: lack of a serious human relationship, or love. The genuine love of anybody would save him from isolation. Yet because the love some patients profess for him is really attachment to his position and expertise, not to the man himself, he remains separated from life.

Need for love affects the Voice professionally. During a session with him, Lilith bares her breasts, which she thinks too small, ostensibly so he will assure her that they are normal. He responds by blushing and by cupping his hand, as if to hold one of her breasts. As he demonstrates feeling, he loses professional control. Lilith, who assumes the analyst’s chair while the Voice reclines on the patient’s couch, notes that he is unhappy and encourages him to explain why. Temporarily relinquishing his professional role and attempting to express his true feelings suggest that soon he might begin addressing his problems seriously.

Lilith grants the Voice’s request to accompany her to a beach because she thinks she loves her analyst, though Djuna correctly terms Lilith’s feelings for him a mirage. Unfortunately for him, his quest for a human connection is frustrated because Lilith realizes that she does not love him: “He remained nothing but the Voice with a death-like breath” (Nin 1939, 289). Although the novella ends before Lilith tells him her true feelings, surely she will reveal them. If so, how will her announcement affect him, this emotionally stunted, middle-aged man who thinks that Lilith is bringing him to life? In all likelihood, the pain of Lilith’s rejection will be great, possibly causing him never again to open himself to someone. He will likely remain an anonymous voice, valued and admired by his patients, though unloved. Only treatment by an analyst would seem to offer him hope for what might becalled normalcy.

After moving to New York in late 1939, following the publication of The Winter of Artifice, Nin established a press to publish her books (and books by others) because she could not interest American publishers in her work.[3 - For a history of Nin’s press, see Jason 1984. Nin writes about the press in Nin 1973.] The initial project of her press was, in 1942, a revised edition of her most recently published book, the collection of novellas.

Nin might first have published Winter of Artifice because the 1939 edition was, apparently, almost stillborn. Surely few people read it, either in France or the United States. For one reason, only a small number of copies of The Winter of Artifice were available, partly because the print run was doubtless modest; for another, Nin had little reputation, so her name would have attracted few buyers; for yet another, the book received, according to Nin, “no distribution[,] no reviews” (Nin 1969, 259), possibly because the series of which it was a part had as its goal, according to Henry Miller’s biographer Jay Martin, “the publication of books for which no commercial audience existed” (Martin 1978, 330). Additionally, Jack Kahane, owner of the Obelisk Press, which published Nin’s book, died in early September 1939, making the fate of the copies of The Winter of Artifice problematic. Further, as Gunther Stuhlmann notes in the introduction to The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939-1944, the book “disappear[ed] in the turmoil of war” (Nin 1969, ix). Nin was unable to take books with her to New York. Even had she taken copies of her new book, they might have been denied entry into the United States because they were, according to her, censored there (13); had she mailed them, they might have been seized because they were, according to Nin, “banned by the U.S.A. mails” (Nin and Pollak 1998, 7). She states that a limited number of copies were available in the United States (they “escaped censorship”) and that they sold well, but she does not identify the vendors (Nin 1969, 13). In 1954, though, her correspondent Felix Pollak engaged “book finding services” to locate a copy; they failed (Nin and Pollak 1998, 16). Summarizing realities that influenced the reception of her book, Nin writes, in a diary entry dated 17 October 1939, “My beautiful Winter of Artifice, dressed in an ardent blue, somber, like the priests of Saturn in ancient Egypt, with the design of the obelisk on an Atlantean sky, stifled by the war, and Kahane’s death” (Nin 1996, 370).[4 - I cannot determine the number of copies printed of The Winter of Artifice. Almost certainly, there were not more than 1,000. In the 1930s, the Obelisk Press published several books by Henry Miller. Lawrence J. Shifreen and Roger Jackson, Miller’s bibliographers, note that it published 1,000 copies of Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), Max and the White Phagocytes (1938), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939); 200 copies of Scenario (1937); and 150 copies of Aller Retour New York (1935) (Shifreen and Jackson 1993, 5, 55, 78, 81, 72, 51.)In a guide to writings about Nin, Rose Marie Cutting lists two reviews of The Winter of Artifice, one by Emily Hahn published in Shanghai and another by Alfred Perles published in London (Cutting n.d., 2-3).Maurice Girodias, son and successor of Jack Kahane, owner of the Obelisk Press, relates the understanding between publisher and authors about the payment of printing costs for the three books that Obelisk published in the Villa Seurat series, a series named after Miller’s Paris residence, 18 Villa Seurat. According to Girodias, his father would pay the costs for the first volume, Miller’s Max and the White Phagocytes ; Nin, for Durrell’s The Black Book ; Durrell, for Nin’s The Winter of Artifice. Girodias also records that, at Durrell’s suggestion, Nin and Durrell would pay for the printing of each other’s book rather than their own in order to avoid the sense of defeat that vanity publication might have created (Girodias 1980, 239). However, Gunther Stuhl-mann and Jay Martin claim that Nancy Durrell, wife of Lawrence, paid the printing costs for all three books. Martin also notes that the Villa Seurat series ceased publication (with The Winter of Artifice) when she could no longer support it (Nin 1996, 379; Martin 1978, 330). Commenting about underwriting Nin’s “Chaotica” (a working title for The Winter of Artifice) in a letter to Lawrence Durrell (5 November 1938), Henry Miller writes, “Let us know, will you, if the money is still available for this book? Hope you are not bankrupt yet” (Durrell and Miller 1988, 107). Lawrence Durrell’s biographer observes that “the PS150 it cost to print the three titles came from Nancy’s capital” (MacNiven 1998, 183). In a diary entry dated 1 November 1937, Nin states that “Larry is putting up the money [to Kahane] for three books” (Nin 1996, 162). In an entry dated 13 December 1938, she notes that “Durrell is bringing [The Winter of Artifice] out in February [1939],” implying that Durrell published this book (Nin 1996, 280). In an entry dated January 1943, Nin records that “Lawrence Durrell backed the publication of Winter of Artifice ” (Nin 1969, 259). Nin dedicates The Winter of Artifice to the Durrells: “To/NANCY and LARRY/with love.” James Armstrong addresses the date of Kahane’s death in Armstrong and Miers 2003, 31, 41 n91. A statement in The Winter of Artifice indicates that it was published in June 1939; Nin reports receiving her copies in mid July (Nin 1996, 345).The context of Nin’s comment about censorship indicates that she means United States censorship. Conceivably, she means French censorship. I cannot confirm that The Winter of Artifice was censored or banned in either country. James Armstrong does not include Nin’s book among the Obelisk Press publications “banned in Britain and the United States” (Armstrong and Miers 2003, 24). Jay Martin details Henry Miller’s successful effort to smuggle into the United States copies of his banned books, “one at a time.” Drawing on a letter from Miller to Emil Schnellock, Martin notes that Nin “held the unofficial book-smuggling record by managing to bring in fifty copies on one trip” (Martin 1978, 330). If she smuggled in so many copies of Miller’s books, she probably would have attempted to smuggle in copies of a banned book of her own ( The Winter of Artifice) if she had access to them.On 4 October 2006, abebooks.com listed for sale three copies of The Winter of Artifice. The prices, in United States dollars: $600, $962, and $1,000.]

If the scarcity of The Winter of Artifice was a reason why Nin made Winter of Artifice the first publication of her press, it was neither the only reason nor the major one. Unhappy with the contents of the Paris edition, she wished to publish a revised text that reflected her current thinking about it. The 1939 version of the novellas contains plot and narrative irregularities. In “Djuna,” for example, the narrator fails to specify whether she, Djuna, lives with Hans during Johanna’s absence — and if not, why not? — and does not explain why Johanna, upon returning to Paris, spends her first night in a hotel rather than with Hans, her husband.[5 - Before Johanna’s arrival, scenes shift between the residences of Hans and Djuna; yet, Djuna says that “I had been living with” him (Nin 1939, 81). Johanna’s hotel is mentioned on 71.] In “Lilith,” how does the daughter harm her father, as noted on page 128? Why does Lilith retaliate against her father by acting against her own best interest when, because of their long separation, he apparently does not know what she is doing? Further, why does narration in “The Voice” shift from third person to first on pages 278-79? Was Nin writing what became known as postmodern fiction, in the sense of intentionally omitting elements of plot and presenting an inconsistent point of view? If not, such shortcomings grate. She resolved some of the problems when revising the contents for publication in 1942.

Despite these issues, Nin seemed most dissatisfied with the 1939 text because it does not fully represent her own writing. She explains this concern to Felix Pollak: “When I wrote this book I was too much under the influence of Henry Miller’s writing and his revisions of my work (I was just beginning to write)” (Nin and Pollak 1998, 7).[6 - In a diary entry dated 8 February 1939, Nin mentions reading proofs of The Winter of Artifice with Henry Miller (Nin 1996, 309). I cannot determine when Nin became aware that Miller’s influence on her composition of this book was too great, although in a diary entry dated November 1941 she notes that she is “revising Winter of Artifice ” (Nin 1969, 162). What Nin means by “just beginning to write” is unclear. The Winter of Artifice was her third book; in 1937 and 1938 — the two years before the publication of this collection of novellas — ten of her short pieces appeared in little magazines.]

Anyone wishing to understand how extensively Miller edited Nin’s writing of The Winter of Artifice could do so by examining his comments on two facsimile typescript pages of “Djuna” published in Anaïs: An International Journal (Harms 1986, 114-15).[7 - Manuscripts and typescripts of Nin’s fiction — including those for much of The Winter of Artifice — are Northwestern University, which bought them at the suggestion of Felix Pollak. See Pollak 1952. For an inventory, see Van der Elst 1978 and Zee 1972.] The revised version of these pages appears on pages 54-55 in the 1939 edition. Miller takes seriously his task of improving Nin’s prose, which Nin acknowledges was then weak because French, not English, was her original language (Nin 1987, 93). In concentrating on style, idiom, and diction, he forces her to address aspects of writing that did not particularly trouble her when writing in her diary, the written source of the characters and events in “Djuna.” He addresses the issue directly: “Take out all the inflation and leave the hard, bare rock of concrete reality — then you get accurate poignancy. I am laying it on thick, because now you should see how certain aspects of ‘diary’ writing lead to falseaccents. Because it is a writing behind walls — without hope of criticism or of suffering the strong light of day. Get me?” (Harms 1986, 115)

Comparing a typescript paragraph with its published version indicates the care Miller took with and the degree to which he influenced Nin’s writing. The draft version reads as follows:






There was tacked on Rab’s door a paper with his name and address carfeully printed. She asked him: Are you afarid to forget your name and who you are,and where you live? Have you not played with the idea of amnesia, which only meens a somanabulistic condition of the ideal self. The conscince goes to sleep and then the critical self too, and you can walk the streets and act as you please without calms. Its only our name, our address, and our relations which bother us, like so many memorandums of what we ought to be to correspond to their image of us. But the important thing is only to resemble our own image of ourselves. (Harms 1986, 114)





Miller corrects spacing problems and misspellings. He also comments on some of his substantive alterations and suggestions. For example, about Nin’s construction “which only means,” he states, “Bad expression ‘which is simply another way of saying, etc.’ But it needs a better transition.” Writing about Nin’s use of “calms” for “qualms,” he barks, “Look it up!!!” Regarding “memorandums,” he notes that the “plural of Latin words ending in ‘um’ is ‘a’.” Responding to the conclusion of Nin’s penultimate sentence, he comments, “Bad sentence structure.” At the end of the paragraph, he advises, “Watch all your ands, buts etc. Weakly used!”

Here is the published version of this paragraph.






There was tacked on Hans’ door a paper with his name and address carefully printed. I asked him:

“Are you afraid to forget your name and who you are and where you live? Have you ever feared amnesia, or wanted it? I have desired it because it is like an atrophy of the ideal self. The conscience goes to sleep, and therefore the critical self. You can then walk the streets and act as you please without qualms. It is only our name, our address and our relations which bind us, like so many memoranda, to the role which is expected of us. The important thing is not to perpetually resemble that fixed image of ourselves, but to create and believe in transformations.” (Nin 1939, 54)





The draft and published versions differ significantly. Most obviously, the narrator has changed from third person to first, and Rab has become Hans.[8 - In the draft, the character speaking with Rab is Mandra, who is Djuna in the published version.] In addition to rethinking issues relating to narrative and character before deciding on the final text, Nin adopted some of Miller’s recommendations. Among them: “which only means” has disappeared, “memorandums” has become “memoranda,” and the penultimate sentence has been revised beneficially. She did not reduce the number of ands and buts.

Valerie Harms suggests that Miller’s “criticism [of Nin’s writing] was as merciless and exaggerated as was his own writing, and for Nin to survive it, without being destroyed, strengthened her” (Harms 1986, 113). I would not characterize as merciless Miller’s comments about this one paragraph in the “Djuna” typescript, though they are direct; nor would I call them exaggerated. Miller offers solid advice forthrightly. That Nin accepted most of his recommendations indicates her agreement with them at the time. Because the published version is superior to the draft paragraph, one can conclude that at least in this instance he influenced her writing positively.[9 - For an example of Miller’s sensitive, positive analysis of Nin’s writing, see Miller 1988. Responding in the 1960s to the question “Did you [and Miller] influence each other as writers?,” Nin states, “No, except in the sense that we encouraged each other…. But above all it was an understanding of what the other was doing” (Vaid 1987, 52-53).]

Nin later acknowledged the validity of Miller’s comment that the noncritical nature of diary writing makes unaltered diary entries inappropriate in fiction. Writing to Felix Pollak in 1955 about The Winter of Artifice, she comments, “It was my first attempt to transpose the Diary material, it was naively exaggerated” (Nin and Pollak 1998, 25). Indeed, because diary material serves as the basis for the three novellas (and because “Lilith” and “The Voice” have been published frequently since 1939, thugh in revised form), significant parts of the plots are now familiar. “Djuna” is Nin’s earliest published rendering of the now-famous interaction among Nin (Djuna), Henry Miller (Hans), and June Miller (Johanna), which Nin details more fully in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1934 and Henry and June.[10 - Characters based on the Millers appear in fiction Nin published subsequent to The Winter of Artifice. In most of her novels, she uses the characters Jay and Sabina, who were inspired, respectively, by Henry Miller and June Miller. A character (first named Alraune, then Sabina) based on June Miller appears in The House of Incest (editions after the first omit the definite article).] Events in “Lilith” are based on the reunion of Nin and her father, Joaquin Nin, as presented in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1934 and Incest ; those in “The Voice,” on the relationship between Nin and analyst Otto Rank as depicted in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1934; Incest; and Fire.

One paragraph in “Djuna” illustrates the astuteness of Miller’s and Nin’s comments about Nin’s use of diary material in fiction. As Nin’s passion and love for June develop in the diary published as Henry and June — now probably the published text most contemporaneous with the event — the author learns that June likes wearing sandals but cannot afford them.[11 - Deirdre Bair explains why Nin’s original diaries do not exist. Five years after engaging Virginia Admiral and Robert Duncan to rewrite her diary, in the mid 1940s Nin engaged Lila Rosenblum to help, mostly to correct her grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Anaïs wrote new versions of old events on lined pads, which Lila corrected. Then Anaïs recopied the corrected pages into booklets, some of which she had Lila type. This generally led to further rewriting and correcting, and when she was finally satisfied with the typed copies, she destroyed the originals. It was a process that went on and on, sometimes “hundreds of times.” She inserted all these carefully typed pages into loose-leaf folders, and when she gave them to someone to read, always insisted they were reading her original diaries. Anaïs Nin carried on this process of self-expurgation all her life. (Bair 1995, 324-25)In The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1934 (apparently superseded by the presumably unexpurgated Henry and June), the paragraph about the sandal shop, dated 30 December 1931, reads as follows:We walked to the sandal shop. In the shop the ugly woman who waited on us hated us and our obvious happiness. I held June’s hand firmly. I commanded: “Bring this. Bring that.” I was firm, willful with the woman. When she mentioned the width of June’s feet I scolded her. June could not understand the French-woman, but she sensed that she was disagreeable. (Nin 1966, 32)] In an entry dated January 1932, Nin decides to buy her a pair:






We went to the sandal shop. In the shop the ugly woman who waited on us hated us and our visible happiness. I held June’s hand firmly. I commandeered the shop. I was the man. I was firm, hard, willful with the shopkeepers. When they mentioned the broadness of June’s feet, I scolded them. June could not understand their French, but she could see they were nasty. I said to her, “When people are nasty to you I feel like getting down on my knees before you.” (Nin 1986, 24-25)





In “Djuna,” the paragraph reads as follows:






We went to the shoe shop. There the ugly woman who waited on us hated us and our visible joy. I held Johanna’s hand firmly and commanded. I was firm, wilful with the shopkeeper. Give me this, the best — don’t you see, it’s for Johanna? The best then, the very best you have. When the woman said she did not have broad enough sandals for Johanna’s foot, I scolded her. And then to Johanna: “When people are nasty to you I feel like getting down on my knees before you. I love you, Johanna.” (Nin 1939, 72)





Nin crafted this fictional scene out of diary material that presumably reflects an actual event. She retained the development and much of the wording of the “original” material, but refined it for publication in 1939. The fictional version seems generally superior to the nonfictional one.

For “Djuna,” Nin wisely deleted the fifth and eighth sentences from the text of Henry and June. The first of them is unnecessary. In describing herself as “firm, wilful,” Djna adequately identifies masculine qualities, making “I was the man” redundant. There is also no good reason for retaining the eighth sentence. By this point in the novella, Djuna has characterized Johanna as unsophisticated, poor, and primal. Saying that this American who has spent little time in France is ignorant of French would seem unnecessarily critical. Further, having Johanna observe the shopkeeper’s nastiness would be inappropriate because Djuna implies the clerk’s rudeness in her direct statement to Johanna.

As Nin deleted sentences from the diary version of this scene when writing “Djuna,” shealso added sentences to it. In two new sentences beginning “Give me this, the best,” Djuna emphasizes the depth of her affection for Johanna, although the first sentence would have conveyed this emotion adequately. Another new sentence at the end of the paragraph makes Djuna’s point obvious: “I love you, Johanna.” The additions strike me as redundant.

A beneficial change in this paragraph concerns the woman who waits on the customers. In the earlier version, she is one of at least two shopkeepers; in the later, she is the only shopkeeper. Making her the sole person involved with Djuna and Johanna eliminates an extraneous person or people, thereby sharpening focus.

Comparing this one paragraph in Henry and June and its revision in “Djuna” supports Nin’s claim that in writing The Winter of Artifice Nin “transpose[d]” material from her diary.[12 - As early as 1932 Nin considered her diary a source for fiction: “Everything goes into it that I may use for novels” (Nin 1966, 58).] Whether her use of the diary in the service of fiction was “naively exaggerated,” though, depends on what she means by this phrase. If her comment to Pollak means that she failed adequately to transform occasional episodes from the diary for use in The Winter of Artifice,she might be correct, although she did modify them, sometimes effectively. She errs, though, in telling Pollak that she first used the diary for fictional purposes in The Winter of Artifice. It serves as a basis for characters and events in The House of Incest (1936) and in some of her short fiction published before 1939.

Whatever the reasons for Nin’s dissatisfaction with the collection of novellas published in Paris, she revised it substantively for publication as Winter of Artifice in 1942. The later edition includes only two novellas: one without title that had been “Lilith,” and “The Voice.”[13 - Nin writes in early 1939 that she intends to have “a special version made of Winter of Artifice omitting the Henry-June novel [“Djuna“], all in part one, for Hugo and Gonzalo” (Nin 1996, 305). This she did in 1942 with Winter of Artifice. She might have omitted “Djuna” because, as Noel Riley Fitch asserts, “it reveals more than she wishes to reveal about the June-Hery-Anaïs triangle” (Fitch 1993, 252). Engravings by Nin’s husband Hugh Guiler (as Ian Hugo) appear in the 1942 edition, a volume that Nin’s lover Gonzalo More helped print.] Other than omitting “Djuna,” an altered point of view is the most important revision. In The Winter of Artifice, the first two novellas are told in the first person; the last, in the third. The two novellas in the revised edition are told in the third person, thereby creating narrative unity between these texts that concern Lilith prominently, though she is unnamed in the first one. The adjusted point of view also helps increase certainty. In the 1939 edition, narrator Lilith occasionally thinks she knows what another character means; in the 1942 text, the third-person narrator is certain. In the Paris edition, for example, Lilith interprets her father’s initial comments to her: “It seemed to me that his first words were words of apology” (Nin 1939, 123). Revised, the father’s meaning is unambiguous: “His first words were words of apology” (Nin 1942, 18). The difference matters, though Nin could have made Lilith’s statement definite had she changed it within Lilith’s own narrative.

Nin made other modifications to “Lilith.” Sometimes, individual words, sentences, and even paragraphs of the 1939 edition are omitted from the 1942 text. Here is a paragraph that appears only in the earlier edition, wherein Lilith refers to her experiences during the decades she was separated from her father:






It was this absorption in the need of the other which was at the root of all the mysteries of my life — at the root of my silences, my evasions, my lies. A sensitiveness to what my father did not want to hear prevented me even from picturing the scenes I had enjoyed. I was perpetually recomposing the scene in such a way that it would bring a balm to his egoism, a lull to his jealousy. (Nin 1939, 138)





Nothing of which I am aware indicates why Nin excluded this paragraph from the revised text. She possibly did so because it relates too much, especially in the first sentence, where Lilith conveys her understanding of the reason for her problems. Perhaps Nin realized that letting a character’s actions reveal emotional realities is generally preferable to explaining them.

Nin altered significantly the 1939 version of “The Voice” before publishing the novella in 1942. She removed every mention of Hans, which necessitated deleting passages as long as two pages. Other deletions indicate that she was aware of American censors or of the presumably delicate sensibilities of American readers, or both. Among the material present in the Paris edition but absent from the later one: the scene in which Lilith bares her breasts to the Voice (Nin 1939, 238-39), a passage dealing with an erection (244-45), Lilith’s menage a trois with Harold and Arline and later the two women’s sexual encounter (248-51), Lilith’s calling Djuna a bitch (254), and Djuna’s reference to her and Lilith’s menstrual periods (255). Nin also deleted material relating to Georgia and Mischa, as well as the entire scene of Lilith and the Voice vacationing. Further, Nin omitted less dramatic material, occasionally at the end of paragraphs, possibly because it is redundant. She tightened prose, as when describing Lilith’s response to the Voice’s statement that “a real woman” cannot successfully live life alone: “I must have become a real woman right here, for I feel the dependence now, and I don’t mind it. I like it” (276) becomes “I don’t mind my dependence on your interpretations” (Nin 1942, 139).

In sum, Nin made many changes to The Winter of Artifice before publishing two of the novellas in Winter of Artifice. The nature of the alterations indicates that Nin matured as a writer between the first two editions of her collection of novellas.

I have explained reasons for Nin’s dissatisfaction with The Winter of Artifice. As Nin acknowledges, it shows the influence of Henry Miller. Even with his assistance, however, she did not create polished fiction. Perhaps the flaws of the 1939 edition are understandable. Nin — an author admittedly not then fully rom the rtable with English — was writing in a form that was new to her: relatively long, relatively realistic fiction. Each novella is much longer and more realistic than her first volume of fiction, The House of Incest, a prose-poem of slight plot and externally ill-defined characters. Yet Nin’s accomplishment in The Winter of Artifice is important. Within imperfect plots substantial enough to hold readers’ attention, Nin effectively examines the emotional difficulties of Djuna, Lilith, and the Voice, precisely as she addresses similar problems with the major characters in the five novels beginning with Ladders to Fire (1946). The Winter of Artifice also illustrates the manner in which Nin adapted diary material for fictional purposes. Further, her revisions of “Lilith” and “The Voice” serve as a basis for documenting her maturation as a writer between the 1939 publication of the book and the appearance of the revised edition only three years later.

The Winter of Artifice is Nin’s most neglected book because from almost immediately after its publication until now it has been unavailable and therefore unknown. After its only reviews (one in 1939, another in 1940), it received no critical comment of which I am aware. Even Nin’s two major biographers, Deirdre Bair and Noel Riley Fitch, mention it only in passing. Some Nin scholars, such as Rose Marie Cutting, assume that all its editions are identical. For literary and scholarly reasons, then, this republication of The Winter of Artifice, two-thirds of a century after its first appearance, satisfies the greatest need relating to Nin’s fiction.






    

Benjamin Franklin V



    

University of South Carolina









Works Cited


Armstrong, James, and Gary Miers. 2003. Of Obelisks and Daffodils: The Story of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press. Portland, ME: Handsack Press.

Bair, Deirdre. 1995. Anaïs Nin: A Biography. New York: Putnam’s.

Cutting, Rose Marie. N.d. Anaïs Nin: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall.

Durrell, Lawrence, and Henry Miller. 1988. The Durrell-Miller Letters, 1935-80. Edited by Ian S. MacNiven. London: Faber and Faber.

Fitch, Noel Riley. 1993. Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin. Boston: Little, Brown.

Girodias, Maurice. 1980. The Frog Prince: An Autobiography. New York: Crown.

Harms, Valerie. 1986. “Interaction and Cross-Fertilization: Notes on the Influence of Henry Miller on Anaïs Nin’s Early Fiction.” In Anaïs: An International Journal 4: 109-15.

Jason, Philip K. 1984. “The Gemor Press.” In Anaïs: An International Jornal 2: 24-39.

MacNiven. Ian S. 1998. Lawrence Durrell: A Biography. London: Faber and Faber.

Martin, Jay. 1978. Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller, an Unauthorized Biography. Santa Barbara: Capra Press.

Miller, Henry. 1988. “About the ‘Mona’ Pages.” In Anaïs: An International Journal 6: 93-103.

Nin, Anaïs. 1939. The Winter of Artifice. Paris: Obelisk Press.

—. 1942. Winter of Artifice. N.p: n.p.

—. 1966. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1934. Edited by Gunther Stuhlmann. New York: Swallow Press/Harcourt, Brace & World.

—. 1969. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939-1944. Edited by Gunther Stuhlmann. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

—. 1973. “The Story of My Printing Press.” In The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Tradition & How-To, 39-42. Edited by Bill Henderson. Yonkers: Pushcart Book Press.

—. 1986. Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

—. 1987. “Into the Heraldic Universe: Letters to Lawrence Durrell, 1937-1939.” In Anaïs: An International Journal 5: 73-98.

—. 1989. “Hans and Johanna.” In Anaïs: An International Journal 7: 3-22.

—. 1996. Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love, the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1937-1939. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

—, and Felix Pollak. 1998. Arrows of Longing: The Correspondence between Anaïs Nin and Felix Pollak, 1952-1976. Edited by Gregory H. Mason. Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press.

P[ollak], F[elix]. 1952. “Anaïs Nin Manuscripts.” In Northwestern Library News 6 (42): 1-2.

Shifreen, Lawrence J., and Roger Jackson. 1993. Henry Miller: A Bibliography of Primary Sources. Ann Arbor, MI, and Glen Arm, MD: Roger Jackson and Lawrence J. Shifreen.

Vaid, Krishna Baldev. 1987. “Writing and Wandering: A Talk with Anaïs Nin.” In Anaïs: An International Journal 5: 49-55.

Van der Elst, Marie-Claire. 1978. “The Manuscripts of Anaïs Nin at Northwestern.” In Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas 11 (2): 59-63.

Zee, Nancy Scholar. 1972. “A Checklist of Nin Materials at Northwestern University Library.” In Under the Sign of Pisces: Anaïs Nin and Her Circle 3 (2): 3-11.




DJUNA


The café table was stained with wine. His blue eyes were inscrutable, like those of a Chinese sage. He ended all his phrases in a kind of hum, as if he put his foot on the pedal of his voice and created an echo. In this way none of his phrases ended abruptly.

Sitting at the café he immediately created a climate, a tropical day. In spite of the tension in me, I felt it. Sitting in a café with his voice rolling over, he dissolved and liquified the hard click of silver on plates, the icy dissonances of glasses, the brittle sound of money thrown on the zinc counter.

He looked like Prokofieff. Like a Chinese sage. Like a German scholar.

“How did you come to meet Johanna?” I asked, thinking that if she were his wife I could not understand her not being there, why she was not there listening to his voice, looking over the book he brought always in his pocket, forgetting to drink because he had been talking about his book which was getting so enormous that it had to be clipped every day.

“I met her in a dance hall. She was working as a taxi girl in a dance hall on Broadway.”

“She must have seemed so different from the other women there.”

“Not at first, and yet when she began to talk… Her talk and her voice. She sat down and she confessed her whole life to me. And what she confessed was all untrue.”

“Will she come back?”

“I don’t know. She’s often made promises like that. She may never come back. For the moment I don’t want her back. I don’t like what happens to me when she’s around. She humiliates me, paralyzes me, it’s torture.”

He opened his soft animal mouth a little, as if in expectancy of a drink.

“Whereas now, Djuna, I’m happy, I’m too happy.” Then he began to laugh, to laugh, with his head shaking like a bear, shaking from right to left as if it were too heavy a head. “I can’t help it. I can’t help laughing. I’m too happy. Last night I spent the whole night right here. It was Christmas and there were too many bed bugs in the hotel room.”

He’s a man whom life makes drunk. He is like me. I was surprised how gently he had walked into my life, how quietly he seemed to be living, when all the time his writing was whipping and lashing around, coursing like lava with burning bitterness and caricature. His softness of speech could not temper the watchful curiosity of his analytical blue eyes. Beneath the furry human warmth I sensed a non-human purpose. Behind this Hans with his southern roguishness wearing his hat tipped to one side and perpetually calling for drinks, I divined a more austere personage bent upon creation.

“Johanna… Johanna wanted to kill me for all that I wrote about her.”

“It is a very cruel book.”

“But she’s a terribly cruel woman.”

“I admire her courage to hurt… After all, she fed your work. She gave you a tremendous experience.”

“You’re only thinking of me as a writer,” he said, and then I knew that this was not so because while he talked I had been noticing that he was very thin, that although his voice was warm and ample, his body was thin, and that at forty his hair was almost white, and I knew that if Johanna had been good for his novels, I wanted to be good to him, to Hans the man who was hungry, thirsty, abandoned.

“When I read your novel about Johanna and Hildred, do you know what struck me as strange, Hans? That you the husband, lover, writer, should have been such an indistinct personage. You made the portrait of the two women full length, with bold, emphatic strokes. But when it came to yourself, you made yourself out an abstraction, just a writer, observing, noting, suffering, yes, but all of it furtive, modest, self-effacing. Why? It is as if Johanna crowded you out, as if you considered yourself unimportant except as a recorder, unimportant as a man, I mean. I couldn’t find you. I could only find a man who was telling a story.”

“Always thought of myself as unimportant… I’ve lived so blindly. No time to think much. Tons and tons of experience. Johanna always creating trouble, misery, changes, flights, dramas… No time to digest anything. And then she says I die when she leaves me, that pain and war are good for me. All the time I’m with her I’m choking with anger. After scenes with her I get terrible pains in the pit of the stomach.”

This man who cannot be distinguished in a crowd, who can pass through it like an ordinary man, so quiet, so absorbed, with his hat on one side, his step dragging a little, like a lazy devil enjoying everything softly, why did I trust this man, confide in him… He carries such a fertile world in his head, and yet he can sit like a workman before his beer, and talk like a cart driver to the whores, so that all of them are at ease with him. His presence takes all the straining and willing out of things. He is like the south wind blowing when he comes, melting and softening, bearing joy and abundance.

“Nobody was ever your friend and hers, too,” I said musingly. “The war is too strong between you. One must always make a choice between you.”

He said: “I could not bear to lose you. You are so close to me, yet you mystify and frighten me too, when you are sitting in your black armchair, like a queen… I can’t explain what I mean. I wrote you a letter, a crazy letter which I tore up. I wrote you a crazy letter, a love letter, Djuna.”

I wanted to shout, to run, to dance, to sing. But I was silent. Hans said: “Now you’re veiled again. You’re unreal.”

“Johanna…”

“I can very well imagine Johanna saying to me: ‘I can understand your loving Djuna’.”

We looked at each other. I let the moment dissolve into silence, lose itself in the cold light of the café. All the warmth and the reality were dispersed, dissolved, lost.

* * *


But when I saw him walking towards me, the sleeping drug of unreality was dissolved. He would not stop before the café table, I felt. He would never stop walking towards me and into my very being; he would walk right into my being with his soft, lazy walk and purring voice, and his mouth half open.

A strange long silence as if before the end of the world, the end of my immense loneliness. I was dizzy with the end of this lonely world of mine breaking up and crumbling at his coming. He was coming so gently to fill it, to fill it. He tore down the thick veils of dreams and distance between us with an all-engulfing kiss.

“And I thought we were in love with each other’s writing!” I laughed.

We were walking towards his room.

And while we walked together he said: “Your eyes are full of wonder, as if you expected a miracle every day.”

* * *


Lying on his iron bed, he said: “I am the last man on earth. Why did you single me out?”

But I was not to be deceived by his humility. All things were born anew in the shabby room when my dress fell on the floor.

I could not hear his words. His voice rumbled over the surface of my skin, like another caress. I had no power against his voice. It came straight from him into me. I could stuff my ears and still it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.

“I’m afraid of breaking you,” he said. “I feel a little embarrassed with you. You seem so fragile.” He covered me with his coat. “Only come to me again, come close to me, come close. I promise you it will be beautiful. I will never hurt you. I could never hurt you.”

“But I don’t care if you do,” I said laughing. “I want you to be always yourself, and I know there is cruelty in you too. I want to grant you all the privileges; you can be undivided, artist and saint, hungry animal and clown.”

“You urge me, you invite me to be myself, so blithely, so boldly, with a laugh even. You invite me to venture anything. I adore you for that.”




I lit his cigarette. He gave me an awkward smile and said: “I feel humble, Djuna. But it is all so good, so good.” He gave to the word good a mellowness which made the whole room glow, which gave a warm color to the bare window, to the woolen shirt hung on a peg, to the single glass out of which we drank together.

Behind the yellow curtains the sun seeped in; everything was the color of a tropical afternoon.

“How I have wanted this!” he whispered, “I feel you, I feel your hotness right down to my toes.”

The small room, like a deep set alcove. Warm mist, warm blood. The high drunkenness which made Hans flushed and heavy-blooded. His sensual features expanded, his heavy nose palpitated, his throat quivered.

“As soon as you come, I’m jubilant.” And he did a somersault on the bed, two or three of them. He pinched me merrily, looking up at me with a puckish face, his eyes brimming with malice and cunning.

Then suddenly he sat back on the bed, and the drunkenness went out of him. He became pale and sober, his eyes serious and exalted. He looked frail, and his face seemed impenetrable and Oriental.

He opened a book and began to read to me about China. “I stole it for you,” he said, “you must read it.” And his voice was tender. He offered me a slow, almost naive smile, and shook his head over his reading like a very gentle bear.

I went out for wine and food, out into the soft evening. And to everybody I wanted to say: “Give me the best you have. To-day is a day like none other.”

“This is a fine wine, Djuna. Let’s drink to my failure. There’s no doubt about it, no doubt whatever that I am a failure.”

“But I won’t let you be a failure! I won’t let you! I don’t want you to be a failure. I want you to be published, recognized, listened to.”

“You say ‘I want’ as if that made things happen.”

“It does.”

“I talked a lot of nonsense,” he said, “about your frailness. You have strength too, but of a different order. More elusive. No, you won’t break. You have a delicious sense of humor. I want always to see you laughing. You give me something rare. I don’t know if I am capable of making a woman like you happy. I’ve never fucked a woman with a mind, you know. A woman who has written books. They always scared me away. But you… well, you don’t look like a writer at all! You have the loveliest, the loveliest ass. Give me another glass. I don’t know what I expect of you. I expect miracles.”

I was drunk with his glowingness.

“I can’t let you go. I want to go places with you, obscure little places, just to be able to say: ‘here I came with Djuna.’ I’m insatiable. I’ll ask you forthe impossible. What it is, I don’t know. You’ll tell me, probably. You’re quicker than I am. And you’re the first woman with whom I feel I can be absolutely sincere. I’m wondering when you will come to stay overnight, when I can have you for a long spell. It torments me to see you for a few hours and then surrender you. You make me happy because I can talk with you. I feel at ease with you. This is a little drunken, but you know what I mean. You always seem to know what I mean. You know what I have not yet said and you know what I have not yet written. And you’re always so sure that it will be good, Miss Know-it-all, the well-known critic. Are you sure, as sure as all that? Or are you merely in love? Or are you playing a trick on me? Sometimes I don’t believe a word you say. When you’re gone I don’t know what to believe.”

“I don’t know what to believe either. You change from an old, wise man to a young savage: you’re both soft and obscene, tender, timid and cruel too. You’re all things at once. Your writing is explosive, destructive, full of caricature. You’re a bomb-thrower!”

“I believe in violence more than ever. I believe it’s the only holy, pure thing in life.” He paused a moment, reflectively. He looked up at me slyly, then mockingly, then gravely again. He seemed to grow savage inside, deep within, as if his very words were converting his blood into ideas, and the ideas into blood again.

“You’re so full of hatred when you write.”

“It isn’t just hatred. It’s beyond that. I don’t hate and I don’t love. I have no illusions. I feel as if I were the last man on earth. I’ve told you that before. I feel as if I were a scourge, an avenger. A Tamerlane. You want to know why I’m not published? Yon think it’s just because I use obscene language, dirty little four-letter words which the Post Office objects to? Nonsense! It isn’t the obscene words, as they say. It’s the obscene feeling. It’s the violence; it’s what’s raging inside me, that bomb in there that goes off whenever I sit down to write—that’s what they fear. But people are going to listen to me in spite of themselves, because I’m a force. I’m not going to shock them, I’m going to destroy them. I’m going to deal death and dynamite, not drugs and sleeping potions. Violence is pure, violence is holy. I’m savage, moral, earnest, deadly. I want to consume the whole world, devour it, chew it to pieces, and spit it out again—fresh, terrible, beautiful, alive in all its parts, alive and singing. ”

His voice reached an ample, assertive tone. The small room seemed too small to contain him. There was cruelty and mischief in his eyes, yet his mouth was still tender.

“You’re going? That hurts. That’s not right. I have lots more to say to you. Come back here. Button your coat properly. It’s raining. I don’t want you to get wet. I’ve got to stay here until the concierge goes to sleep, or she’ll ask me for the rent again.”

* * *


The only thing I do not tell Hans is that I too am a Johanna. I have infinite possibilities for delicate perversions. I have the capacity to burn like a torch, the love of suffering, the love of terror and death and of descending. Evil is life; I want to live out the evil in me. I want to surrender to Johanna. I want the life she led, desecration, humiliation, poisons, savagery. The demon in me is like the demon in Johanna. It is a demon of frenzy.

I feel such exaltation at the thought of burning and dying quickly. I want to live out my caprices, my fantasies, my erotic desires.

In Johanna I love the darkness, and the abyss.

* * *


“If Johanna returns she will poison us against each other. I fear that.”

“There is something between us, a tie which it is not possible for Johanna to understand or to break…”

“For that she will hate us, yes, and she will fight that with all her strength, and all her weapons.”

“And her weapons are… lies…”

He sat down with shoulders bowed, and his head bowed. I saw the grey-blond hair glistening.

How divided his love was at that moment I would never know. My love was so immense at that moment that I felt I could make Hans the ultimate gift… I could give Hans whatever he wanted, give him Johanna.

I smiled, a mask smile. “Her lies, her unnecessary complications make novels. Novels are made out of complications…”

“She never trusted me as you do.”

“I trust you because I understand you.”

I felt mowed down, anchorless with feeling, with terror and pain. But I smiled. “If I had the means to help Johanna come back—would you want me to do it?”

Hans winced and suddenly lurched towards me.

“Don’t ask me such a question. Don’t ask me!” He was suffering. I was asking myself if the full body of Johanna would triumph over all else, over understanding, over the ecstasies of our working together, over the double climaxes always of body and mind burning in unison, over this double flame of creation and love.

I hated my own gaiety which was not only a challenge to life, to pain, but to a tormented self. I challenged and mocked myself for that tightening of the flesh and the ebbing of secret tears. I loved him with a knowledge of him which Johanna never had. It would have been a relief for once to have been unjust and to hate. I could not. I could only hate myself and my own understanding which made me say: “The destroyers do not always destroy. Johanna has not destroyed you, ultimately. The core of you is a writer. And the writer is alive.”

“You give me smething rare. When I am with you I don’t understand how I can love two women…”

“You’re a big man, Hans, a very big man. There’s so much room in you, so much love. There are no limits to you, no boundaries. For that I love you. For being a big man.” And I laughed. “Maybe I’m just the biggest of the idiots.”

“No, you see more, you just see more, and what you see is there all right. You get at the core of everything…”

* * *


I imagined myself writing to Johanna: “Johanna, have pity on me. Do not take him away from me too soon. It is easier for you to find a match. I can find the man who will make the woman submit many times, yes, many times, but I cannot find a man who can make my head bow, this full, ripe world inside ofmy head. It is so rare, Johanna, when I can bow altogether, from head to foot, and woman wants secretly to be able to bow and love altogether. I can never be taken whole into a man’s arms, Johanna, take pity on my great hunger. You ask only to be worshipped. I ask that my lover should create beyond me… Take pity on my torment. You don’t carry in yourself the power to stand silently behind a chair, watching with breathless stillness the pages added to his work. You can only love his books for what they contain of you. You can’t love the miracle of the seed sprouting. You only love his work as an offering to you; you don’t love the labor of the creator. You don’t love the source of creation. You only want some one to make your portrait.”

And then I felt guilty before Johanna: I felt myself flushed and burnt with guilt and shame. Johanna was the weaker one, the one who was not there to defend her life. I felt the strength ofmy love to be a crime against Johanna. My whole being shrivelled with a feeling of guilt. I imagined myself restituting to Johanna the love I was sharing with her. I would be Johanna’s genius. I would tie him to her more absolutely than before. When Hans and I would lean over each other’s work, to fill out her portrait, I would engrave the wonder of her everywhere, reveal it, so that he could never free himself of her. I would melt into Johanna so that he could not detect any more flaws in her; I would explain her lies and ennoble and embellish them. I would create a Johanna with Johanna’s beauty and my own imagination and colors. I would be everywhere at once, defending each fragment of her, blinding him, infusing his work with the legend of Johanna. While he caressed me I would poison him with the inextricable mixture of Johanna and myself. The deepest treachery to man ever played. I was a creator of images, of characters and masks. I would recreate Johanna in Hans’ mind. It was I who would tell Hans what dreams, what desires, what impulses Johanna had. And I would give Johanna these gifts which Hans made me of his passionate rages, his curses, his secrets, his mind’s fertility.

I would not become absolutely mad until the end, until I had written the last phrase of the portrait of Johanna which was to change Hans’ image. I would be the witch of words. a silent swift shadow darkened by uncanny knowledge, forgetting myself, my human needs, in the unfolding of the tale, renouncing human joys, with only the pale beauty of a watcher—a watcher who never let life flow into herecause this life belonged to another.

* * *


He was wearing bedroom slippers and he was writing, with a bottle of red wine as a paper weight on his pages. Circles of red wine on the pages. Stains. The stains of living. The edge of the table was burnt by cigarette stubs.

He didn’t care. He said that what he had written was not as good as yesterday but he didn’t care, he was enjoying it just the same, he wasn’t worrying about art, everything was good, because if he was an artist as I had said he was, then whatever he said was right, and to hang with perfection, that was for old maids, and he was out of cigarettes and if I would give him one he might finish that page. I had come at the wrong moment, I was interrupting him, but that was good too, that was life, life always getting in the way of writing, but that was good, he believed in that, let the interruptions come, let people walk in, he was glad to be stopped, because everything was good, to write was good, andnot to write was good, and eating was good, and sleeping and fucking, and now he had finished the page and he was hungry, and he wished we might go to the movies, good or bad, it was restful, good or bad he enjoyed it, everything was good…

He seemed constantly in communication with the world, as if he were forever sitting at the head of a gigantic banquet. With two agitated hands he commanded the cymbals. “I want to show you the whore with the wooden stump who waits for clients near the Gaumont cinema. I want to show you the café where the nigger jazz players go after work. I want to show you a restaurant where prize fighters and chorus girls have dinner.”

I felt my wrist watch pulsing against my pulse, fast, fast, fast. The hours pulsing against my life, pulsing too quickly.

“I don’t want to leave you.”

The room was black. Hans was asleep in my arms, heavily asleep now. I heard the accordeon. It was Sunday night in Billancourt. The music made my veins swell, as if it were hot liquid passing through me. He lay asleep in my arms. And all this would vanish at Johanna’s coming. No duration. Like a Sunday holiday. It was like a holiday, with the accordeon playing, and the Sunday crowd laughing and shouting. I must not be sad because it was only a holiday. To-day I was welded to him, and to-morrow Johanna would be back.

What baffled me was that it should be possible for Hans to lie so close, knowing only what I wished to tell him. That there should be no traces on my body of the lapses in my courage.

My thoughts, like elastics, were stretched to their thinnest meaning. I was waiting for him to awake. He would push everything into movement again. He was all movement. He lived by gusts.

It was the gusts I enjoyed. I might sit for a whole day afterwards and sail my lingering mind like a slow river boat down the feelings he had dispersed with prodigality. In my mind, like a sanctuary, I gathered his passions, his drunkenness, his speeches, his honesty, his jubilance, his pranks, his contrariness, his naturalness…

Johanna and I were not so honest… never so honest…

“Hans, wake up,” I said softly, “wake up! I have something to say for your book. Johanna and I are hypocrites, hypocrites. We always want to embellish ourselves, to make our motives appear sublime.”

“Why did she lie so much?”

“For many reasons. Because she loved you and could not bear to hurt you. Or because she loved herself and could not bear to spoil her own image of herself. Or because she feared not to be loved as she was. Or because she wanted to improve on life, because she had read too many books and they went to her head. (I too was once top heavy. When I was asked where I came from I could only answer: books!) Or because you wrote certain things about her and she wanted to live up to them. (The other day when you called me a chameleon, I immediately thought of ways to become more so, because the idea interested me). She did deprive you of so much, by her lies. Everything she gave you was false. I want to give you back Johanna washed of all pretenses. I can do it. Ask me questions. Ask me…”

“Why don’t you lie to me?”

“Because we have other things to do together. We don’t have much time to play games—to invent. I sometimes regret the fact that we don’t have time to play, that you will never see me mysterious, provoking, elusive. In a way, I have been cheated of something, by coming just when you needed peace in which to work. Johanna could lie, could be noisy, dramatic, could run away, could come back, could torture you, make you laugh, deceive or make you drunk, I am only allowed to sit still, but I don’t mind. Look at to-day, we have your new pages to read, and the next ones to dream over. I have to give you a different kind of mystery. There’s nothing to throw at each other, for the moment, but questions and answers. What was the meaning of this or that event? Do you think I have done justice to it?”

“I always suspected that when Johanna gave me so many lies it was because she had nothing else to give but mystery, but fiction. Behind the mystery there was nothing.”

“That we must find out together. Let’s begin now.”

“There’s plenty of time, plenty of time for everything,” said Hans. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go out and have a juicy steak, with plenty of onions on it, and red wine. And let’s send Johanna a cable and tell her I don’t want her any more. I know now I don’t want her to come back, that I need you terribly. If when she comes back I act exactly as she wants me to act you must not feel that I disappoint you or fail you. Her rages terrify me. What I feel with you which I don’t feel with Johanna is that beyond love we are friends. Johanna and I are not friends. You are the only woman I can be faithful to in my way. Let’s not go out. There’s some stuff in the kitchen. I feel like getting to work right now. I want to show you some notes I made.”

“Sit down then. Let me cook the dinner. Let me play at being the wife of a genius.”

He smiled. “It’s funny to see you going to the kitchen in your stately rose dress.”

As I sat there looking intently at the cups and saucers which did not match, at the liqueur glass made out of an egg holder, at the chipped plates, at the stains on the tablecloth and the mend in the corner of it, I felt that I loved this meal more than all those I ate elsewhere because it showed the traces of living. Hans made no effort to disguise the imprints of living; each object was a proof of life’s using, wearing, breaking and staining of things. Everywhere else there had been an effort made to erase the damage made by life, as there had been an effort made to escape its stains, its destruction, and I saw in him and at this table, the bare, naked life, the debris of it, the ravages small or large, like the greyness of his hair, his fatigue, his heavy note books, all as rich in the acceptance of nature as the rich soup steaming hotly in the pan it was cooked in; everything without the disguise which diluted its colors.

* * *


The ancient garden slumbered like an old man in the sun. The trees swayed and the breezes sang. The books lay about on the grass.

“According to the Chinese,” said Hans, “there was a realm between heaven and earth… this is it.”

I cooked for him. Suddenly I loved cooking because it was for Hans. I cooked richly and the odors of pungent flavors seeped through the house. I loved to see him eat, and to eat with him. I could see the food turning to rich blood in him. Red meat, buttered and peppered food, and red wine. The alchemy of his joy giving a high flavor to every moment. The miracle of his fieriness converting food and sleep and rest into joy.

Desire coursing. Dreams of semen. Earth. Semen. Incandescence. A furnace of caresses and of talk. I felt heavy and burnt. Not bodies but flames, and added to the fuel the flame of our talk, our moods. I was crying and laughing with joy. Solitude. Summer heat. Tornadoes and exquisite calms.

The night. Books. “Djuna. I want to keep you under lock and key. To hide you. You are too rare. When I lie here with you I am no longer restless. You have a gift for illusion. It’s always a fairy tale with you. Even when you are cooking, even when you sewed my curtains, even when you cure my stomach aches, you are the Princess. With you I feel whole and ecstatic.”

And he lay still, lulled by my softness, resting on my love, the core of bitterness and fury in him lulled.

Suddenly, he leaped up with a whip-like alacrity and a smashing, overwhelming vigor and exuberance, like a man who had suddenly been electrified. He began to talk about his childhood, about Johanna, about his life in the streets, about the women he had loved and ditched, and the women who had ditched and “bitched” him, as he put it. He seemed to remember everything at once, as though it were a ball inside him which unravelled of itself, and as it unravelled made new balls which he would unravel again another day. Truth, lies, humor, fantasy, dreams, a hodge-podge which however fantastic, however wild or inaccurate, rang out with a fierce sincerity, with a gong-like reality that shattered the feeble realities of fact or dream even. Had he actually done all these things he was relating to me with such kaleidoscopic fury and passion? Had he really killed a boy with a snow ball? Had he really struck his first wife down brutally, with his bare fist, when she was with child? Had he really butted his head against a wall in sudden anger and knocked himself unconscious, as he said—because the woman he loved had rejected him? Had he really taken abortions and thrown them off the ferry-boat in order “to pick up a little extra change”? Whether he had or not really didn’t matter. I knew that he was capable of doing the thousand and one mad, rash, crazy, contradictory things he talked about.

All the layers of his vinous past he laid and unravelled before me, all his masks, his assumed attitudes, his mimicries, his buffooneries. I saw him pretending, driven by obscure revenges, by fears, by weaknesses. I saw him in the world another man from the one I knew. Before me he shed all his poses, all his defences. He was not on his guard to fight for his independence; he was not impelled to lie in order to startle or amuse; he was not urged to cover his timidities with a carapace of callousness.

The legend of hardness, violence and callousness. Like a tale to me, distant and unreal, in contrast to the softness I knew. And I knew which was the rind and which the core of the man.

Just as he loved the falsities and the legends he created around himself, he loved also to rest from these pranks and trickeries and attitudes. He loved to stand there so whole and so certain of what he was deep down, crystallizing in the white heat of my faith.

“You always know,” he said, “what is to be disregarded in me, what must be laughed away, what is unimportant, like the changes of leaves on a tree. You are never deceived about the core.”

Then all the laughter, the shouts, the clownishness and nonsense and reminiscence subsided into a pool of serenity and reflectiveness. His voice became a soft murmur, trailing off in dreamy introspection.

“Why, that sounds as if it might be the beginning of my book, of my Self-Portrait!” he exclaimed.

And when all the gestures and vociferousness and restlessness seemed lulled, suddenly then he sprang up again with a new mood—a fanatic philosopher who walked up and down the room punctuating the torrent of his ideas with fist blows. A nervous, lithe walk, body light and airy, head heavy, the brow ponderous, the glance compact, riveting the phrases. And the voice incandescent. Ideas like leaves on a pyre which never turned to ash—on an everlasting fire. Suddenly the words, the ideas, the memories were all drawn together like the cords of a hundred kites, and he said:

“I’d like to work now.”

In a few moments I heard the crackling of his typewriter.

There remained in the air the echoes of his resonant voice, the hot breath of his words, the vibrations of his pounding gestures, the disturbance created by the gusts of his enthusiasm.

“What would Johanna think,” said Hans, “if she were to blow in now and find us talking about her like two sober craftsmen?”

I had sunk myself into my enjoyment as into a hammock.

“Maybe you’re the woman who will write the truth some day,” he said, “maybe you’ll be the one honest female of our time. Keep that head of yours clear when Johanna comes. Don’t let her delude you.”

“I could say the same to you.”

“You’ll see,” he responded quickly, “I’m another man. I know now what I am. I won’t let her override me. I don’t like what she does to me: she humiliates me. I won’t stand for it any more. I won’t!”

“Maybe you’ll forget all that—with the warmth of her.”

“Huh! Johanna’s warm only when she’s in your arms. Afterwards she’s cold, cold as steel. It’s you that’s truly warm, constantly warm. All you say is warm, all you think is warm, all you write is warm.”

He fell asleep. He rolled over and fell asleep. No noise, no care, no work undone, no imperfection unmastered, no word unsaid ever kept him awake. He could roll over and forget. He could roll over with such a grand indifference and let everything wait. When he rolled over the day ended. Nothing would be carried over into the next day. The next day would be absolutely new and clean. He just rolled over and extinguished everything—work, books, talk, love, laughter, people, himself, the whole world. Just rolling over.

* * *


He sat before his third glass of pernod. I looked at the hole in his coat and the stains on his hat.

“In my book,” I said, “all the men will wear glasses and have monumental brows! The women are not thrown on beds but on piles of manuscripts and open books. The dawn is reached and grasped with talk, hunger is stimulated by long discourses. Money is used to supply more paper, more carbons, to rent stronger typewriters.”

“Too realistic,” muttered Hans.

“It’s like the stains on your hat. I’m a woman and you must let me write about human things, trivial things maybe. I leave the problem of form and language to you, together with being and becoming, and physiognomies, and destiny versus incident, and the collapse of reality, and the coming fungoid era, and the middle brain and the tertiary moon… I want to put in all that you leave out. The shape of your hat, for instance. I can tell it from a thousand hats when I see it hanging on a peg. Your hat is like a Rembrandt. It belongs with your Self-Portrait. It’s human and battered, and it’s really not a trivial thing at all—it’s deeply significant. It’s your hat. It’s unique.”

Then I saw the glint in his eyes—the pernod glint, which was really npewritehe pernod but some gem-like layer ofhis being that the drink had peeled away, a glint that was hard, cruel, mischievous. His phrases seemed to break and scatter, to run wild like a machine without springs. They gushed forth from this contradictory core of him.

He was gloating over the childlike pranks he had played on his friends. “There was a guy I used to write pathetic letters to—in New York. Never failed to touch him. And then, as soon as I had gotten the dough, I’d send him a long cable thanking him. I liked to spend his money recklessly. I despised him for being so soft.” He bowed his head in a humble, yet sly way, and laughed softly to himself. “If I had money I would be as hard as nails. I’d never lend a penny to a starving artist. Never! You might as well throw your money down a sewer… You should have seen the two bums I picked up last night—two trollops, I mean. Whew! Were they hideous! I like them that way—the uglier the better. I like beautiful women and I like monstrous women. I don’t know which I like more. Andre was with me. He was peeved. He thought I was being unfaithful to you.”Here he laughed to himself again. “Listen,” he went on, “do you know what’s so awfully good about whores? It’s this: you don’t have to write them long letters. You don’t have to make love to them. There’s nothing gained and there’s nothing lost. It’s the algebra of love. The more grasping they are, the more whorish they are, the better I like them.” And he laughed again, without looking at me. It was a monologue. He was being “sincere” again, “truthful”! This painful sincerity was to prove to everybody that he had learned to embrace the ugly as well as the beautiful.

I looked at the sulphurous-colored pernod and drank it.

* * *


Summer evening. We were eating in a small restaurant opposite the Gare Saint Lazare, a restaurant wide open on the street. We were eating in the street and it was as if the street were full of people who were eating and talking and drinking. With each mouthful I swallowed I devoured the noises of the street, the voices and the echoes they dropped, the swift glances which fell on me like a piece of lighted wick from a guttering candle. I was only the finger of a whole bigger body, a body hungry and thirsty and avid. The wine running down my throat passing through the throat of the world. The warmth of the day like a man’s hand on my breasts, the smell of the street like a man’s breath on my neck. Wide open on the street like a field washed by a river.

Shouts and laughter exploded near us from the students going to the Quat’z Arts Bal. Egyptians and Africans in feathers and jewelry, with the sweat shining on the brown painted bodies. They ran to catch the buses and it was like a heaving sea of glistening flesh, soft flesh shining between colored feathers and jewelry, with the muscles swelling when they laughed.

Hans leaned over. “I want to lay you on the table—right here. I’m crazy about you. Lean over more. Lean over, I want to see your breasts.”

A band of students entered the restaurant, shouting and laughing. They circled round the table, like savages dancing around a stake.

Hans was laughing softly: “The other day when I left you, I was a little spiffed, you know. And hungry as hell. I ordered a good meal—a good meal. And I’m enjoying it. And then I notice a little whore opposite me, eyeing me up and down, and sort of looking at me wistfully, hungrily. I invited her to eat—naturally. She’s hardly sat down beside me when I run my hand up her skirt—I must have been cockeyed. Anyway, I finally took her to a hotel down the street—and all the while thinking of you, our afternoon, and wondering how the hell I could be doing this, but doing it just the same. And sort of hating myself for it, and yet enjoying myself—do you understand? But when we got to the hotel and it came time to lay her—I don’t know—something happened. I just didn’t have my heart in it, I guess. I couldn’t do a thing. And you know what a whore is! She worked over me like a steam engine. And the more she worked the less interested I got. It seemed to me as if it were all happening to some one else. I remember watching her curiously, as if I were examining a bug under a microscope. Very strange. I seemed to go dead under her. And wasn’t she contemptuous, though! As though I had insulted her. I guess she thought I was a pervert, or an impotent bastard. But she had her money. That seemed to soothe her a little bit. I felt sort of glad, sort of relieved, that I hadn’t given her too much. It was your money, after all… I don’t know, that’s how it was. Sort of queer and sudden. Can you understand it?”

I kept my eyes steady, saying quietly that I understood. But my body was bewildered, hurt beyond all words, beyond all understanding.

“One more thing,” he continued. “I must tell you this—and then I am through. I’ve got to get it off my chest… One night—it was Andre’s night off—we went to a cabaret. And sure as fate, we soon had a couple of Janes around our neck. They stuck to us like glue. To make it short, we took them home with us. We sat down in the kitchen and had a little snack together, the four of us. They weren’t bad, but they were greedy. Finally we began to talk turkey. They were holding out for some absurd sum—200 francs a piece, I think it was, or something like that. They might just as well have asked for the Woolworth Building. Anyhow, I was for letting them go. I told them so. I even showed them my torn socks. But Andre, the dope, he insisted that they stay. I don’t know what he gave them—but suddenly they became cheerful again. They began to sing and dance—they acted as if they had lost a screw or two. One of them was an acrobatic dancer. She wanted to show us a few tricks. And so she stripped down and began to do somersaults and handsprings—and every time she came down her high-heeled shoes made the chandelier clatter. They made a hell of a rumpus—the concierge threatened to have us put out next day. Next morning Andre was furious. ‘You try to tell me you’re in love with Djuna,’ he said. Well, I am—you know that. I think you might even have found a perverse pleasure in watching me, had you been there.”

I bowed my head. “I understand… I understand,” I kept repeating. He was still swimming on the airy, elastic waves of his drunkenness. The students were singing and laughing so hard they had to wipe their eyes. I looked at Hans and felt the whole world rocking.

The sign over the Hotel Anjou was in red lights. The red lights shone into the room. A red well. Blood madness. Blood rhythm. A charging, a hoofing, a clangor, a rushing through the world. Thumping. The torrent pressure of a machine panting, sliding back and forth, back and forth. A machine t/font>yielding honey. Swing. Swing. The bed- like stillness and downiness of summer foliage, heavy summer foliage rocking the warm, wine-filled senses. Rolling. Rolling. Clutching and folding. All curves filled. Steam. Steam. The machine on giant oiled gongs yielding honey, rivers of honey on the bed of summer foliage. The boat slicing open the lake waters, ripples extending to the tips of the hair and the roots of the toes. Honeysuckle juice and pistilled tongues, the jet of fountains on odored sheets, the room filled with fever and blood-red lights.

He sank into sleep. I lay at the bottom of the red well, laughing, while my joy mounted in endless spirals.

Through the open window came the riotous shouts of the students and the groaning of the heavy buses. I ran to the window naked and watched them. I looked at the patches of brown flesh and I wished I were there at the ball. Hans has made me suffer, but I am going to destroy pain with drunkenness. I want to go to the ball. I want to let life flow around me and drown me.

Hans awoke. He laughed seeing me standing at the window naked. “You’re curious and wild like a savage,” he said. “Come here!”

“I want to go to the ball!”

“Come here,” he said angrily. But I stood there in the halo of the red light and shouted: “I want to go to the ball!”

“I won’t have you leaning out of the window naked!”

I wrapped the brocaded curtain around myself and went on watching. Finally with arms extended I turned back to the bed where he lay, and as I approached the bed I made the gesture of closing my fists tight. Then slowly, as I neared him, I opened my fists again. “See, I wanted to hold on to you, but look, I am opening my hands. Have your little whores, if that will make you happy. Anyway, I am a gay whore myself.” And dancing around the bed I exclaimed gaily: “See what a gay whore I am! Twenty francs, please, Mister!”

When I rushed out of the hotel a gust of summer heat enveloped me. I used to wait for the seasons sitting behind a window, watching and waiting, and now they catch me living so fast, they come upon me with my dress only half buttoned, my hair wild, running for a taxi because I am late.

* * *


I had arrived too early and Hans was out. Andre opened the door to me. I stood in the middle of the room without moving at first, breathing this air in which he lived, the only climate in which I myself could live.

I looked at the photograph of Johanna tacked on his wall. The fevered profile, taut even in the photograph, so alive that I shivered a little, expecting the face to turn towards me with that slight twitching of the lips and the occasional tic of the eyelids. I half expected her to open her mouth and pour forth that eddying voice with the spinning phrases which gave one vertigo. There was in her portrait the imperious fever of her rhythm, like her wide, crunching walk. Looking at the taut, fevered mask of Johanna, I dreaded the malice behind her pretense; I remembered the hatred which Hans had ascribed to Johanna, the fierce possessiveness of the woman.

My eyes turned instinctively to his desk which was littered with notes. I read them over slowly… Johanna… Johanna’s life in the cellar on Sullivan Street… Johanna selling cigarettes and candy… Johanna’s cock and bull stories… Johanna’s drunken orgies with Hildred… Johanna’s extravagances… Johanna’s fear of humiliation… Johanna the female Stavrogin… Johanna’s bracelets… Johanna’s cat’s eyerings… Johanna this, Johanna that…

Johanna had made the world rock for him and that had been her great gift to him. The moment when the world rocks and mouths join, and the earth spins like a mad top, when the dreams rise like pyramids… And now Hans was erecting pyramids of notes. Johanna had shed her hair on his pages, her perfume, her torn dresses, her shadow as she dressed, her tears, her nail lacquer, her painted eyelashes, her broken bracelets. The notes were stained and brimming with her presence.

A volume of Proust was open on the desk. It was marked with Johanna’s name, with references to Johanna’s lies, Johanna’s friends. The last page on the typewriter was a description of Johanna’s jealousies, the scenes she created, the brusque reconciliations. Johanna. Johanna.

I picked a book out of his bookcase. Johanna’s name in the margin. I looked at the maps on the walls, the large maps Hans made of his future novels. “Life with Johanna on Sullivan Street.” A list of incidents, of the friends who surrounded them, of the quarrels and the despairs and the separations.

My joy crumbled. He loves no one but her.

But Hans came in then, and without looking at his desk, or at the photograph, or at the open book, he turned wholly to me, with all his ideas, his plans, his love.

“Roll up your sleeves,” he said, “there’s work to do. This description of Johanna is giving me trouble. Read it. Tell me how it strikes you.”

If only Johanna would die. If she would die. She does not love him as I do.

“The worst of lies,” I said to Hans, “is that they create solitude. I know Johanna must have been lonely at times. When you treat life and men like a play, and you can never speak or be what you really are, you get lonely.”

“You speak feelingly about it. I have no doubt you’re experienced in that pretending too. Now tell me, why do you think Johanna so often repeated that I would never know the greatest secret of her life, even when I was absolutely sure of her love for the other woman?”

“There was another secret…”

“You believe all that about the drugs?”

If she would only die! But then she would only live more vividly as a legend…

“I enjoy Johanna best when she is not here,” said Hans, “for then I can peacefully write and think about her. When she is here I feel choked and crushed. With you I shall call it the Golden Age between Wars. It is in time of peace that art is born.”

Slipping his hands through my hair, gently, he began to talk about Johanna. I knew that he was noting things in his mind, noting and thinking of his work. I knew too that it had fallen to my destiny to nourish the creator and love him in order to give him the strength to write about her, and that it might befall another woman to nourish Hans while he would be writing about me. In a flash I saw it all in a strange cycle of life and creation, life sustaining the creation, which was always concerned with the more distant experience, with the past.

“How is one to recognize a lie?” said Hans.

“By its dissonant tone. It is like a false note.”

“You have too musical an ear.”

“I have studied my own lies, I have trained my ear. For example, I am sure that both Johanna and I invent personages… I have often thought to myself: ‘I must keep silent.’ I must let this man look at my face and allow his dream of me to take form. I must give his imagination time to invent. While he is looking at me, if I say nothing, he is forced to interpret me by the color of my skin, the wave of my hair, the color of my dress, the shape of my neck, the few rare gestures I make. I feel him building an image. I see the image take form in his eyes. It lies in his eyes like a reflection in a river. I don’t want to open my mouth and speak. If I say what I want to say he may think I am just an ordinary woman. The image of me which he has been weaving like a spider web and which is trembling on the edge of his eyes like reflections of houses in a river may suddenly sink. I may see his eyes waver for a second and then turn into the glassy brilliance of reality and disillusion. Or even if I should smile—my smile may not conform to that intensely desired image he has been carrying about. I would like to answer people’s impossible wishes. I have tired myself desiring impossible things. I have so often sat and watched a beautiful face, beautiful while impassive, because its stone-like stillness allowed my fancy to create its meaning. And I have seen so often the disintegration of my fancy at the mere appearance of a smile. I have so often sat behind a face dreaming and desiring ardently that this face should answer my craving. I have experienced so often the demolition of a whole universe by a few words. I have been so fearful of those words, of hearing the voice, of seeing the face move, so fearful that my image, my dream, should be swept away. If the man spoke first and said: ‘You seem to me like a Hindu woman, so childlike and secretive,’ I can be that also. I can be all things. Whatever you want can become a game for me. I can play the role of the child-like secretive Hindu woman. If the man says: ‘You seem perverse to me,’ then I gather together all my knowledge of perversion, all I have read or seen on the stage and I play it all with such earnestness that finally I come to believe it myself.”

“You and Johanna…”

“I am sure that we have both played like this. It makes life difficult. People feel a certain falseness and then they seek to discover the reality, our reality. This reality we evade with al our cunning. And all this contributed to Johanna’s tenseness and her fear of being discovered. We want to be loved without being known. We are like porcupines with silver spikes. We imagine that our true selves cannot bear the light of common every-day simplicity. I am sure that as soon as she felt that the other’s image of her was in danger through something she said or did, she rushed to destroy the effect, to deny it, saying it was a jest or a game, mystifying and eluding any final judgment.”

“False mysteries.”

“Look at the pounds of notes her false mysteries have inspired. Let me read your last pages.”

When I had read them I said: “You’re the only man I would scrub floors for!”

“We could be very happy together. You would fall behind in your writing!”

“Good! I fall behind in my writing. I become the wife of a genius.”

“To-day, if there were a choice to be made between you and Johanna, I would surrender Johanna.”

“No, no,” I laughed. “No.”

“Johanna can be replaced, but I could have a thousand women after you and they could not efface you or replace you…”

“You’re drunk, Hans. I’m sure you’re drunk.”

I feared that he might say: “We will continue to find a rich interest in each other even if Johanna returns and I resume my life with her.” At the thought of this I felt the need of touching his suit, his arm, to exorcise my fear. Then I observed the mischievous twist of his mouth and I installed myself in the present, in my enjoyment of the hour.

* * *


We were sitting in the garden.

“Something happened to me yesterday,” said Hans musingly. “I happened to read over Johanna’s few letters and they moved me. I was about to send her a cable. Instead I wrote about her. And when I awoke this morning it was all over.” He handed me the last pages. “What do you think of them?”

They were among his best, I felt, after reading them carefully. Fevered and yet cohesive, strongly knitted. Spear blows. I thought how the beauty of these pages made it possible for me to subordinate my natural jealousy and possessiveness to my passionate devotion to the writer, the creator who required full latitude. I felt a separate, an immense, proud servitude to the splendor of his writing. I wanted my love to be an aliment. I wanted to augment his well-being, to feed him, to watch over him. He sat with a new compactness, a new strength in him, a new wholeness.

I imagined many books being born out of our intimacy. And I melted <…>




There were other people there, there had often been other people around us, with us, but I had only noticed and heard Hans. I was only attuned to Hans. I was conscious only of Hans. To-night I made an effort to become aware of the others, of Andre with fanatic blue eyes talking about astrology, of Louise with a voice like a wood-pecker, of Boris, who said the streets were worn by Hans’ wanderings.

Boris was saying that Nichols, the caricaturist, had gone insane, and had been sent to the hospital, that Hans ought to go and see him. Hans rubbed his hands with sly glee, shook his head, and danced about, exclaiming: “Superb! Superb! Let’s have a drink to Nichols’ insanity. I want to go and hear what he has to say. I hope he really is insane. That doesn’t happen every day.”

“Your humor is not humor, it’s demolition. You’re always breaking windows. That’s why the air around you is full of oxygen.”

I swallowed his laughter like bread and wine, while he jubilated like a gnome.

Encouraged by the darkness of the garden I began to talk flowingly.

“To-night,” I said, “is a fine dark night in which an artist might well be born. He must be born at night, you know, so that no one will notice that his parets only gave him seven months of human substance. The rest he must always add himself—and he does. He creates himself. He is born with a mania to complete himself, to create himself beyond the womb. His reality is sometimes questionable. One does not know if he survived the frailty of his birth conditions, whether or not he really sits at café tables and stains his fingers with nicotine. He is so multiple and detached, fluid and amorphous, that his central self is constantly falling apart into fragments and is only recomposed by a book, by his work. With his imagination he can flow into all the moulds, multiply and divide himself, and yet whatever he does, he will always be two. He will always be the Indian who worshipped his mistress but who made a flute out of her bone when she died. He will always be the man who weeps when his mistress dies, but who says: ‘A flute made out of human bones has a more haunting, a more penetrating sound’.”

I turned to Andre’s fanatic Celtic eyes for confirmation.

“Take me, for example. I am aware that when men look for the woman in me, the woman suddenly turns into fog, into night, into wind and sky. I am artist. Men run about in the fog looking for a woman. But I am not a being one can lay hold of and keep. I cannot be held and kept like a gold nugget. I am artist. I am fog, rain, tempest, sun, words. I am composed of words and fire and war. Is that clear?”

“You’re never clear,” said Hans brusquely.” I trust neither your ideas nor your way of putting them. You put things so clearly and beautifully, so crystal-clear—it all looks so simple and true. You’re so terribly nimble and clever. I distrust your cleverness. You always make wonderful patterns, I admit. Everything is in its place. Looks convincingly clear—too clear. And in the meanwhile where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas any longer, but submerged, sunk in some dark, obscure realm—like a submarine. One only thinks one has been given all your thoughts. One only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity—but there are layers and layers—you’re bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You’re the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubts, most disturbances.”

He said all this with great irritation and vehemence. Andre added:

“One feels that she gives you a neat pattern and then slips out of it herself and laughs at you.”

“Furthermore,” said Hans, “you have a half serious way of saying certain things—a funny fantastic twist to your phrases, like the way you talked about yourself just now, which puts one off the track. I know there is something else behind what you are saying—I can’t put my finger on it.”

I laughed. Three distinct feelings invaded me: one was an intellectual realization that in sum Hans’ criticism was flattering; another was a mischievous joy in having irritated, eluded and puzzled him; and finally there was a feeling of bitterness that he should suddenly fight me, attack me.

I sat in the quiet garden rehearsing swiftly, like an ever lost paradise, our days together—confidence, openness, peace. And here was the first sign of war. War. War was to be expected. Inevitable. Hans was war.

I endeavoured vainly to find my gaiety again. I saw that Hans no longer noticed me.

I thought: “Now the two slow-minded ones, the ponderous Hans and Andre have found solidarity against my nimbleness. They think I am not profound because I am swift. Well. I shall be more and more nimble, more and more treacherous.”

Hans said:

“Andre agrees with me that you are far too quick—always too quick, that you take swift decisions, and make swift judgments, and live too quickly, and write too quickly. That your quickness is not to be trusted.”

“That’s my natural rhythm,” I retorted.

“Well, you ought to slow up, that’s all I say.

Slow up. Read more slowly, listen, linger, dwell on things. Ponder them.”

“Well, you need me to focus you. You’re always going astray, with your roundabout ways.”

“Besides, what irritates me is your aristocratic nonchalance, that’s what it is. If I were married to you, I’d make you eat with the servants every day, I’d make you fraternize with everybody. I’d like to see you really friendly with them. Even when you’re kind you appear aloof, even when you’re full of compassion you really remain apart. If there were a revolution to-day, I would side with the people, and you, you’d have your neck cut off immediately. It’s a neck like Marie Antoinette’s, just made to be cut off. It’s too slender…”

I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t. The night, so sweet before, now seemed poisoned. “It’s good that you turn against me, it’s very good, for now I will be true only to myself. It is good because it hardens me, makes me lone and courageous. For I am soft and too easily devoured by my love. Turn against me, and I am alone with myself. I will never bat an eyelash, never weep. I cast you out, and by this new hardness in me, I will live. I have been swallowed by love. Devoured by it.”

In the morning I awoke so heavy, weighed down by my hatred. Hard face and brittle voice. I found Hans waiting for me in the garden. He said:

“I am upset about last night, about my insincerity. I said a lot of things I didn’t mean.”

“Didn’t mean?” I repeated, and waited, all wrapped in my silence and watchfulness.

“Your silences are more terrible than other women’s shoutings and sobbing. Yes. I was carried away by my desire to conceal my love. The truth is I was swept away by your tirade. I wanted to kiss you. And then I saw you looking at Andre with such admiration. Your looking at him bothered me.”

“Perhaps you’re acting again,” I said.

“No,” said Hans quietly. “I can’t lie to you.”

“It’s simply that you enjoy difficulties. You like creating troubles. Our few days of harmony aroused your usual craving for discord, for war.”

“No, you’re wrong. I don’t want war. But for a moment I lost confidence in you. You were so enthusiastic about the astrologer, your voice was so warm when you questioned him and talked with him. Tell me something… Oh, well, what a man wants is to believe that a woman can love him so much that no other man can possibly interest her, even if he be a magician!”

What a man wants! (Then we could have again that openness if I were truthful?)

“What a man wants,” I said, “is what I have given you up to now with a wholeness you can never imagine.”

He looked tender and dazed.

“I feel so battered,” I said. “Our first duel has come to an end.”

“It was all very interesting,” said Hans. “I like launching into a role, into a part which baffles those who believe they know me. When you are angry your eyes turn violet. I would like to write that up in the style you used for the story of the opium fiend.”

His unaccountableness will eventually make me lose faith in him. Whenever he or Alraune steps in, the water boils, the lids explode, poison runs through one’s veins.

“You stole a phrase from me only the other day, do you know? You take what you need like a beast feeding. I feel like a human pudding,” I said.

Perhaps, I thought, my desire to preserve the bliss and the peace is a futile effort to resist the flow of life. War is inevitable. It is like snow or rain. Let the avalanche come then: snow, rain, volcanoes, torrents, floods. And with them a gigantic humor. Like an everlasting moon, I want to fix ecstasy in its niche. Hans knows better. It’s good. He forces me back again into isolation. I have no more devotions. I am hungry and I am going to eat; I am going to steal, to sell myself, to wander. I am going to love my own books better than I love Hans’. No more sacrifices for him. If he acts ridiculously, insanely or sentimentally enough for me to hate him I will be able to attend to my own growth and become a magnificent woman. Until now I have been a woman in whose womb men could rest in utter security.

Defeat this tragedy concealed within each hour, which chokes one unexpectedly and treacherously, springing from a melody, an old letter, a line in a book, the color of a dress, the walk of a stranger. How? Make literature! Seek new words in the dictionary, chisel new phrases, pour the tears into a mould. Style, form, discipline. Whip yourself and others into a frenzy. Lie. Exhaust yourself and your capacity for emotion. Cut out the newspaper clippings carefully. Have your photograph taken. Tell everyone what you owe them. Tell your lover he has made you a woman, tell your editor he has discovered a genius, and then turn around again into your solitude. Like a dog biting his tail, or like a scorpion caught in a circle of fire devouring himself, so that when you gaze at your own image you say to yourself: “If the Chinese had not discovered that wisdom is the absenf ideals, I would have discovered it myself to-night.”

* * *


He made me lie down on the black rug. But I did not believe in his feelings. I felt I was being possessed by a cannibal.

Hans’ appetite. The gifts I had made him of my feelings. His appetite for my ideas, for my moods, for the books I gave him. How he devoured the vibrancy of my flesh, my thoughts of him, my awareness of him! How he devoured new people, new impressions. His gigantic, devouring spirit, in quest of substance, in quest of inspiration, in quest of exoticism. My fullness, which I knew to be inexhaustible, was soon absorbed by him. My continuous dissolutions and recreations and rebirths, all the changes in me, the opening up of new realms, all this could be thrown into the current of his life and work and be absorbed by it like twigs by a river. He could read the fattest books, tackle the most cumbersome tasks, make the most immense plans, attack the most solemn systems and ideas, produce the greatest quantity of writing. He had the appetite of the age of giants. He excluded nothing. Everything was food: the trivial and the puerile, the ephemeral and the gross, the details, the scratchings on a wall, the phrase of a passerby, the defects of a book, the pale sonata, the snoring of a beggar on a bench, the flowers on the wallpaper of a hotel room, the odor of cabbage on the stairway, the color of an electric bulb in a toilet, the fragment of a voice trailing in the night, the walk of a whore, the haunches of a bare-back rider in the circus. His analytical blue eyes devoured details, his mouth seemed open and ready to taste, his tongue flicked and the saliva came to his lips, his hands seemed ready to leap and to grasp, hands like the feathers of a bird all set to beat out into the air, a body all ready to leap, always alert, the whole substance of his body a sensitized sponge. Drinking, eating, absorbing, with a million cells of spongy substance. Every pore of his body sensitized, pregnable, saturated.

Lost, as it seemed, into the universes he explored, yet deep down, always ready to retire within himself with his prey, to nourish upon the substance alone, afterwards, in the great solitary feast of the creator, the greatest and the most solitary of banquets to which those who supplied the nourishment were never invited.

While he lay over me with his unabatable attentiveness I knew he was watching the alterations of my face, listening to the cries I uttered, and the final deeper, savage tones. I closed my eyes before this watchfulness of his and sank into a blind, moist drunkenness. I felt myself caught in the immense jaws of his desire, felt myself dissolving, ripping open to his descent. I felt myself yielding up to his dark hunger. An immense jaw closing upon my feelings, my feelings smouldering, rising from me like smoke from a black mass. Take me, take me, take my gifts and my moods and my body, take all you want.

I am being fucked by a cannibal.

It is all that is human in me that he devours. He eats me as if my love for him were something he wanted to possess inside his body, at the very core of his body, like fuel. He eats me as if my faith in him were a food he needed for daily sustenance.

He is not concerned to know whether I can live or breathe within the dark cavern of his whale-like being, within the whale-belly of his ego.

I was surprised that when this cannibal had ended his feast there was left in its place a still greater richesse. It was his devouring appetite that produced this miracle: it restored to all things their taste, their savour. It aroused an equal hunger, a feverish quest for new adventures, new foods. It set the blood and the pulse of life throbbing. His hunger was contagious; it gave birth to hunger, and with the hunger the savour of all things was restored. His appetite made things alive. It seemed to stir the activity of the earth, to call out vigorous sprouting and growth, the bursting of seeds and the flowering of the earth’s driest crust. It was like water over a desert, the moisture of his sensual mouth, the moisture of his sensual desires.

* * *


Each day Hans’ pages arrived in the mail, unfolding a full and human portrait of his life with Johanna. And the more Hans elaborated on the real details of his life the more I took refuge in fantasy and fairy tale, struggling to stuff my ears against his voice, struggling to blind myself to the vividness of the image.

I was jealous of everything, even of Hans’ insults and furies against Johanna, even of his hatred, or his cruel caricatures of Johanna’s lies. I was jealous of the suffering Johanna had inflicted on Hans, of their terrors, their hysterias, their reconciliations. I suffered to see with what well-nourished splendor Hans was writing—he was writing out of the joys I had given him. It was my love which sustained him like a fuel, incited him to new efforts. Our talks had awakened in him a new preoccupation with Johanna, because I had revealed to him what Johanna had never revealed: the secret inner functioning of a woman’s mind and feelings. It was this knowledge which I had nurtured in him that was now serving him to rediscover the meaning of all he had experienced with Johanna. Hans transposed his knowledge of me and used it like a new instrument in the rediscovery of Johanna.

Certainly no woman had ever been asked for so much courage. He was testing me to the limit, like a torturer. Yet I did not want to disrupt his work with the story of my pain. Work! Work! I incited myself. Work! Sift the petty substance of woman, crush it, write, be large, be altogether the artist. So soon! Too soon! Only a few days of bliss. I am a human being, not a goddess. I am a human being! This was an Olympian role Hans was thrusting upon me.

Like a crab sinking into the sand, I sank into my writing. But the poison of feeling could not be dissolved. However deep I sank, and with my ears and my eyes full of the sand of my inventions and fantasies, this loud core of feminine feeling burned bitterly, burned through all my armour.

In the morning it seemed to me that my arteries had hardened, that my blood had coagulated, that my tears had frozen, that I was made of stone; even so the pain weighed in me more heavily than stone, and I knew I would never be able to rid myself of it.

And then Hans came. A serious, tired Hans. I looked at him as from behind an ambush, waiting to divine his mood. He said he had absolutely needed to come, that he had not slept for several nights, that he was worn-out. I was silent. I forgot my sorrows. Hans was tired. The book and he must be nurtured. What do you want, Hans? Lie down. Have some wine. Yes, I have been working. Don’t kiss me yet. We’ll have lunch in the garden. Yes, I have a lot to tell you—but it can all wait. I am deliberately postponing everything which might disturb the breathing of your book. Everything can wait.

Hans’ pale, intense, eyes were blue, so very blue.

“Djuna, I came to tell you that as I was working on the book I realized everything between Johanna and myself had died three or four years ago. That what we lived out together the last time she was here was only an automatic prolongation, like a habit. No impetus ever comes to a dead stop. It was a tremendous experience, an upheaval. That is why I can write so frenziedly about it—but it is the swan song I am writing now. You must be able to differentiate between my dramatizations, my evocations, and my true, present feelings. I tell you I love you. I want you to come away with me. I dream of our working together. I want you close to me.”

I sat dazed, silent, opening my eyes wide, wide. He added:

“Certainly I had to live all that through, but precisely because I have lived it through I am finished with it, and capable of experiencing a new kind of love. I feel stronger than Johanna, I won’t be humiliated, destroyed by Johanna again. I know now that I want to break with her. I dread her return, the possible destruction of my work. All these days I have been thinking of you, how I have worried you, hurt you. And meanwhile there is your writing and no one gives a damn about it, and no one tries to help you.”

At this I laughed:

“But you give a damn! Besides I can wait. It is you who are behind time, you who must be given a chance to catch up.”

I watched the full mouth, and the pale blue eyes, that odd mixture of delicacy and bestiality, of toughness and sensibility. He became again weird and bright. His talk about his work seemed to throw off sparks, so high it bounced, so elastic, and so full, full to the bursting point always.

I felt that just as a woman carries an embryo in her womb, so I was carrying inside me the image of a fulfilled genius and that every day he became this image more and more exactly, every day he added to his stature, to the stature of this image, as if he used it for a model. And every day my love seemed more justified. Every day my vision of him melted into reality.

Everything became sparkling and vibrant. The warmth with which I surrounded him glowed like a magic ambiance in which he moved and expanded to greater dimensions.

The great joy, the greatest joy, is not to discover one’s greatness but to find on earth a match.

The table was too full and so the manuscripts and books lay on the floor. He made me lie on the black rug. My head touched the carbon paper. He pushed it away, saying: “We don’t want any carbon copies stat!”

* * *


He showed me some more of his notes, made in cafés, in the train, in the subway.

“For your collection,” he said. “I often imagine myself in another man’s boots a hundred years from now. I can see him enjoying my notes as I have enjoyed Balzac’s in the museum. It’s a hellish thing to say, perhaps.”

“Not so hellish as that. Looking at the photographs of Lawrence’s home, I often have the feeling that I should like to go and see that dismal house where you were born. I have the feeling that you are a personage, that I love the most remarkable man of our age!”

“That’s inverted megalomania,” said Hans.

He pulled out from under the pile of folders a thick manuscript.

“Here are my dreams for the month, all kinds of dreams. I’m going to do something with them some day—make something of them. Did you ever notice how feeble dreams usually are, in books? Writers are just as crippled when it comes to giving their dreams as they are inhibited in revealing their experiences. I’m going to record every detail—and especially the unfinished things, the shreds, the fragments.”

I told him my dream of God’s hand appearing behind a mountain, fingers pointing accusingly and how I said to whoever was standing beside me: “Can’t you see it’s made of cardboard, that it’s manipulated by strings? You can tell it’s a fake, like the marionnettes at the Javanese theatre, by the way it trembles and shakes… And after that I had another dream. It was about the birth of Johanna. Wait—I’ll read you the notes I made… I dreamed that like the Alraune of the legend, she was conceived in the poisonous womb of a whore from the seed of a man who was hanged. That she was a mandrake with fleshy roots, bearing a solitary purple flower in a purple bell-shaped corolla. Narcotic flesh. A stemless plant with thick roots and pale purple flowers that shrieked when it was touched. And those who heard it shriek went mad. I dreamed that she was born with gold-red jungle eyes, eyes always burning, glowing as from a cavern, from holes in the earth, from behind trees… snake, lizard basking with solitary, motionless eyes, all fire and cold, snake cold and slippery, coiling on its alert tongue of fire. The last film of fire was like the transparent curtain of death, the glaze of the idol that worships itself. Her smile, her lapidary smile, the liquid, blood-red light of sard behind which the flesh crumbled away, revealing the sepultures of love. Earth-laden, her heavy flesh was projected out into the night. Earth-laden and studded with a thousand eyes. The dead cold of a meteor which had been warmed to all degrees of incandescence. The heavy molten drag of flesh torn from its chromosphere.”

Hans said:

“Let’s cultivate our insanities like precious flowers. Water and nurture them, as the Jews nurtured hysteria to obtain prophecies from the possessed… Do you know what I dreamed? I leaned out of a window and shouted in a voice I had never herd before: ‘Help! Help!’ The hare-lipped market woman’s voice when the vegetables are stolen, the chicken being guillotined, the dog under a taxi… to the sound of these things in my voice the people ran. They stood gasping at my door. I was trembling. I pointed to the bluish green mirror where I had seen that I was murdered. The blood was coagulating. The skin was green like that of a drowned map. There was a gash, a gash across the face. ‘Help! Help!’ Why are you so inert? I have been killed! I was asleep here on this bed which smells of bestiality. I was dreaming of Venetian alchemist bottles. I was discovering a mixture. I had succeeded in fusing the sparse elements of myself into a long-necked bottle of jade-green transparency. At last I had been able to look at myself bottled. And then I was murdered. Envy, I tell you, envy of the one who has dreams. The people stood there breathless. A woman’s toe stuck out of a hole in her bedroom slipper. When I first began to talk it seemed like a mouse that wanted to run away from the light. It was turning in upon itself. Then it ceased moving as if I had stepped on it. It lay flat. Inert. I danced furiously before them. I poked them with the coal shovel. I saw in the mirror a murdered man agonizing. A woman came forward. She opened her handbag. ‘Look,’ she said. I saw in her pocket mirror an unblemished face—my own. I was alive. Whole.”

There was tacked on Hans’ door a paper with his name and address carefully printed. I asked him:

“Are you afraid to forget your name and who you are and where you live? Have you ever feared amnesia, or wanted it? I have desired it because it is like an atrophy of the ideal self. The conscience goes to sleep, and therefore the critical self. You can then walk the streets and act as you please without qualms. It is only our name, our address and our relations which bind us, like so many memoranda, to the role which is expected of us. The important thing is not to perpetually resemble that fixed image of ourselves, but to create and believe in transformations.”

“In my case,” said Hans, “what’s difficult is to keep any image of myself clear. I have never thought about myself much. The first time I saw myself full length, as it were, was in you. I have grown used to considering your image of me as the correct one. Probably because it makes me feel good. I was like a gigantic wheel, very heavy, surcharged with ideas and plans and inventions, but without a hub.”

“And I’m the hub now, eh?” I said laughing.

“Yes, you’re the hub, and no matter how far I wander off, no matter how enormous the circles I make, you’re always at the centre.”

“No, the hub is really yourself. A knowledge of yourself which you obtained from my love. My love was the catalyzer! It reintegrated you… Unwind that last page in your machine so that I can read it. I like to read it as it comes out of the oven, so hot and fresh.”

“Your tenacity amuses me,” said Hans.

“And your letting things happen amuses me. I love your not holding on to anything. You have declined all the responsibilities of life except that of creating books. You’re one of the authentic artists. You never let anything fall into a mould. I like the way your mind spills out so recklessly, spilling confusion, chaos and wealth. How you flow, spread, expand, enlarge. While I weave, gather and remember. ”

“And laugh secretly at my pompous speeches.”

“Our styles too have married, you know. My writing is the wife of yours.”

* * *


This is my Seventh Day. After so much straining and waiting, after so many empty years, after so much isolation and so much striving, I have arrived at my Seventh Day, and I am enjoying it. I rest now, I rest from my straining for perfection. I rest in this rich ambiance created by Hans, this warm climate I have always sought. He has created a world for me. I rest in the present with an Oriental enjoyment. I rest in the perfection of the moment. I have arrived at the end of my hard work to a long lasting holiday, a holiday with Hans. I say this even to-day when it happens that I am lying in bed and that I cannot move because of the pain.

For hours I amused myself with my own thoughts and memories. I played with the hours and with scenes. I labored like a chiseller, with minute care, wondering if I had given some lasting form to the hours most precious to me. I remembered the afternoon when Hans was lying on the couch in my bedroom while I was dressing foran evening party, standing before my long mirror perfuming myself. The window was open on the garden, and he had said: “This is like a setting for Pelleas and Melisande. It is all a dream.” The perfume made a silky sound as I squirted it with the atomizer, touching my ear lobes, my breasts, my neck. “Your dress is green like a Princess’,” he had said. “I could swear it is a green I have never seen before and will never see again. I could swear the garden is made of cardboard, that the trembling of the light comes from the footlights, that the sounds are music, even that noise of wood being sawed. You are almost transparent there, like that mist of perfume you are throwing on yourself. Throw more perfume on yourself, like a ‘fixatif‘ on a water color. Let me have the atomizer. Let me put perfume all over you so that you won’t disappear and fade like a water color.”

I moved towards him and sat on the edge of the couch. “You don’t quite believe in me as a woman,” I said with an immense distress quite out of proportion to his fancy, “yet it happened that while I was perfuming myself I was thinking how I might get you a new suit. Your suit is frayed at the sleeves. The skin of your wrists is so white and fine, as if it could easily be burnt or scratched.”

“This is a setting forPelleas and Melisande, ” he said, “and I know that when you leave me for that dinner I will never see you again. Those incidents last at the most three hours, and the echoes of the music maybe a day. No more.”

It was as if he too had taken the essence of the hour like a blood-colored ink and were tattooing it on my memory. The color of the day, the color of Byzantine paintings, that gold which did not have the firm surface of lacquer, that gold made of a fine powder easily decomposed by time, a soft powdery gold which seemed on the verge of decomposing, as if each grain of dust held together only bytoms were ever ready to fall apart like a mist of perfume; that gold so thin in substance that it allowed one to divine the canvas behind it, the space in the painting, the presence of reality behind its thinness, the fibrous space lying behind the illusion, the absence of color and depth, the condition of emptiness and blackness underneath the gold powder. This gold powder which had fallen now on the garden, on each leaf of the trees, which was flowering inside the room, on my black hair, on the skin of his wrists, on the frayed suit sleeve, on the black carpet, on the green dress, on the bottle of perfume, on the sienna-colored nails, on his voice, on my anxiety—the very breath of living, the very breath he and I took in to live and breathed out to live—that very breath could blow it all down, mow it all down.

The essence, the human essence always evaporating.

The air of that day, when the wind itself had suspended its breathing, hung between window and garden; the air itself could displace a leaf, could displace a word, and a displaced leaf or word might change the whole aspect of the day.

The essence, the human essence always evaporating.

The temperature of the day, the temperature in which the blood flowered and the skin unfurled its minuscule pores like the petals of the most secretly folded flower. The temperature of that day which could be repeated in time, perhaps a hundred times in my life: the temperature would be reproduced but never the hour with Hans lying on the couch watching me dressing, never his words or my response to his words, which were a dark wish to enclose the whole day in a strangling hand, to snuff out its color and temperature, so that no fragment of it would ever repeat itself, a fragment which might recall the whole, a fragment which might come upon me ten years later perhaps while I would be sitting in Asturias. The gold, the breathlessness of the air, the temperature, without his presence, his words and my response. The tantalizing incompleteness and uniqueness of an event, repeating only the setting perhaps, under a variance of moods, of feelings and of personages. And for that future day when I might again stand before my mirror perfuming myself, doing only a fraction of what I did on that other day, for the pain that unfinished, unreproduceable hour aroused in me, I would kill it, or I would sit for many hours juggling with words in order to imprison it.

Have I got it now? I asked myself. Have I got it, or will I return to these words one day and find them faded, find that it has all faded like a painting after a hundred years, that the colors are altered and unrecognizable?

I am only recomposing the whole of that hour because I am ill and thus so much closer to the fear of death. To-morrow when I get well I will rejoice that a different hour will replace this one I worship; I will rejoice that no moment of life ever repeats itself whole.

I wanted to send for Hans, but I hesitated. He was only for the joyous days, the courageous days. I wanted only the good things for him. While I was lying there he sent me a letter and this letter which was written to the sick Djuna overflowed with his own jubilant mood, with rutilant good health. In the last few days, he related, he had discovered a hundred new things which interested him.

He could not imagine my m gonor divert me from it. He could never divine others’ moods. His own were immense and loud and they filled his world and deafened him to all others. Like to-day: “I feel such well-being,” he shouted.

Until to-day I had believed in his phrases. It was enough that he said now and then: “I want to give you things.” It did not matter if he did not give them. It did not matter that he added: “But I wouldn’t give you perfume. I don’t understand your wanting foolish things like perfume.”

He came to see me, all buoyant with his own mood. He sat before me and said:

“What’s the matter with you? You look so frail. What’s all this moodiness about?”

His blue eyes looked cold. He talked about his work, about his jaunt through the country, about his lunch on the road and the marvelous wines he had tasted.

“Here is the book you wanted,” I said.

But I was tired of giving. I could not keep myself from saying:

“The other day you said you would come and help me finish my article, revise it. You came, and you chose to paint a water color instead.”

“That’s true,” said Hans, unflurried.

“The other day when there was a rumor of war, and we were discussing what we would do, I was concerned for your security… I made plans… I was full of anxiety. And you, what did you think of? Of your manuscripts—what would become of your papers, your notes, your letters. You never thought of me.”

“It’s true,” said Hans.

“You gave Andre’s little slut the only pair of fine stockings I own—I never have a decent pair of stockings myself; I’m always buying you books instead of getting stockings. Your feeling of pity for her was greater than any desire to protect me. I know I’m talking about little things, but they’re so full of significance! You don’t know what love is!”

“About the selfishness, I don’t know what to say. About not loving you, well…”

He began to laugh. “You’ve just got to believe in that.”

He said it so simply.

“You were quick, you know. Ordinarily you wouldn’t be hurt by my selfish enjoyment of life. You would relish it. When I wrote you that exultant letter about my being filled with the Holy Ghost, I thought to myself afterwards how queer it is that I should want to palm it off on the Holy Ghost. You are the Holy Ghost inside me. You make my spring.”

* * *


I began the day in a golden mood which I carried like a fragile egg. I carried it against my breast, warming it. I rushed to Hans to awaken him, to present him with it, to tell him it was a tropical day, to bring him out into the sun. I offered him my mood like another gift.

But Hans awoke depressed. Some one had been knocking at his door—some devil with a fiendish persistence. And he had refused to open, as usual. He had been lying there in fear, cursing and sweating, unable to get up and unable to dismiss the incident. He had been lying there prostrated, paralyzed with fear. Whenever there came an unexpected knock Hans would imagine it was some one come to threaten him. A knock at the door could fill him with absolute terror. All his life there had been this frightful knocking at the door—creditors, lovers, jealous husbands, inquisitive friends, bores whom he couldn’t shake off, miserable devils whom he had befriended and couldn’t get rid of, lunatics, tramps, chess fiends, rumhounds, etc., etc. A constant evasion, a perpetual fear of pursuit and of persecution, a tremendous feeling of guilt. His life with Johanna had been a sort of elaborate “underground” existence—a maze of lies and intrigues, of scandals and treacheries and petty deceits. A knock at the door could darken his whole day. It made him furtive, upset, distraught. It was impossible for him to pull himself together again.

I laid my mood aside and attuned myself to his. As he talked I saw with naked eyes what our life together was, and what I saw was again an ultimate loneliness with intermittences of companionship.

* * *


Looking around when left alone in the kitchen, as if I were looking at everything for the last time. Looking attentively at the painting on the wall of a couple making love on a bench in front of a urinoir posted with ” Maladies des voies urinaires” and ” Chocolat Menier.” Looking at the menu, hanging on a nail, of the things Hans and Andre imagined they were going to eat every day. Bouchees a la Reine, Pate de foie gras truffe, Dinde aux champignons, Canard a la puree de marrons, etc. Looking at the maps on the walls of the streets Hans had played in as a child, looking at the lampshade made out of a corset which Hans had bought from the Marche aux puces… as if I were parting from them and the roguish spirit playing in them. Looking at Hans’ coat hugging the chair, seeing the form of his shoulders and ribs, and feeling his body without the tightening and clutching pains of suffocating jealousies. Parting not from Hans but from the immense pain of jealousy. Taking only the joys he gave me. Sifting away the whole, the dark dependence, the passion which alone caused torture, so that he might mention Johanna and his whores without bleeding me. The multiple bleedings of jealousy through which all my strength had wasted itself, all my joys dispersed and lost themselves. Taking only the joys, his soft swagger, the rough touch of his coat, his mouth and his coups de belier in my womb. Ejecting the pain, the total giving. Placing a distance between the life-giving climate and that shabby kitchen so that all my substance might not be enclosed in his pranks, the effervescence of his voice when he said: “That’s good.” The word good in Hans’ rich mouth generated goodness and richness. That’s good. And: ” What is it?” He could say “What is it… what’s the matter?” with the most sensitive, the most mellow intonations, as if he cared supremely, supremely, with a melting sympathy. ” What is it?” He awaited the answer, melted, with the softest expression of his otherwise steel-bladed curiosity.

Even his coat could seem to be stirring with his easy flowing life, even to his clothes he gave the imprint of liveliness. Even his coat could stiralive the love in me which wanted only to be liberated from intensity… To enjoy… I wanted to enjoy… to enjoy…

I parted not from the past, but from past pain, retaining only the humor of the sketches on the wall, and the deep flowing grooves of a mellow undemanding love.

* * *


During a sleepless night I thought: Hans, my love, I can love you better now that you cannot hurt me. I can love you more gayly and more easily and loosely. I can endure space and distance and betrayals. Only the best and the strongest for you, Hans, my love, the eternal wanderer, the artist, the faithless one… Nothing is changed except that to-day my courage was born. Lie here, breathing into my hair, over my neck. No hurt will come from me. No judgment. No woman ever judged the life stirring within her womb. To torment you is impossible to me. It is like allying myself with the world against my own flesh and blood. I cannot be against you because I am too close to you. I was harder to-day than I have ever been, for the game of it, but I got no joy. I will always stand by you, with you, against the world. I will laugh with you even if it is against me.

* * *


He sat on the edge of my bed, and I watched the transformations in him. I watched the moist, half-open mouth close musingly, the scattered talk crystallizing. The man so easily swayed, caught, moved, now collecting his strength again. At that moment I saw the big man in him, the man who appeared to take his work like a drug, who appeared to be merely enjoying recklessly, idling, roaming, but deep down set upon a terribly earnest goal. Intent on handing back to life all the wealth of material he had collected, intent on restituting to the world what he had taken from the world with his enormous creator’s appetite.

A moment before, flushed by drink, he had been scattering his riches, ideas, imaginings, fantasies, emotions, all diffuse, fragmented. The moment when he crystallized and set himself to work was beautiful to watch. He was not altogether serious yet, was still laughing while he caressed me.

“What magnetic force have you there? It’s like electricity,” he said, “What have you there inside you that I can’t tear myself away from?”

“At this moment, with your hair uncombed and some of my rouge on your mouth, you look absolutely illiterate!”

“Woman, woman, she’s always holding man back from his high purpose.”




I lay on the bed still sunk in my joy, but watching him with secret pride.

“I’m going to write about the death of the soul,” he said.

“And what of the Lemurian man?” I laughed, jumping up. “And what of the surrender to the biologic?”

“You’re always too quick,” he said, “always too impatient. I’m still in the womb.”

“Listen, Hans, I feel your book swelling up inside me like my very own child. Better than my very own, because your book inside me is like a fecundation, while writing my own books is like Narcissism. I love to be fecundated. I’m a female, I’m absolutely female, and I glory in it.”




I stood in the middle of the room laughing and combing my hair.

“I glory in it. I say, let a woman write books, but let her above everything else remain fecundable by other books—especially if they are good. It’s the woman who writes books in solitude who dies. You paint the gigantic fresco, the cosmic fresco; I bring crumbs like an indefatigable ant.”

“And you laugh secretly at my important speeches… You’re no ant.”

“I’m the night then. The all-mother with enormous protective wings covering the world, blanketing it, lulling it. You sleep on the security I give you, on the warmth. I am the night who watches over you through curtained windows with very wide open eyes.”

“You will put me to sleep.”

“In the morning I awake singing because I know you have slept profoundly, lulled by the beautiful lies I tell you, beautiful lies like fairy tales.”

“You lie awake thinking up new lies every day.”

“I lie awake because you snore. You’re so happy you snore. I love to hear you snore, Hans. I love you because you’re natural. I love you because you forget to have your hair cut, and because you scrub yourself spic and span like a Dutchwoman scrubs the cobblestones in the street. I love you because you live in streets where people wear bedroom slippers and don’t comb their hair. I get rested from my burning fever for perfection.”

“Don’t talk any more about rest,” said Hans. “I haven’t written a line to-day.”

“That’s all right, we’re writing chapters all the time, you and I. We write when we sit in a café doing nothing. We’re writing when we dream at night, we’re writing while we eat and even while we fuck. We’re the most industrious couple alive. I wish we could be lazy, layoff. Our profession is in our blood. We can never walk out on it.”

“I’m going to sit down and add to my Self-Portrait. I want to write about the time when I was fifteen years old and expounding Nietzscheu salready had a dose of clap.”

When I heard the typewriter’s dry crackling, I was happy.

I felt myself softly closing the door upon the world. I drew in long mystical bolts. I pulled in rustless shutters. Silence. I imprisoned within myself that mood and texture of Hans’ being which would never go into his book, that which only a woman could see and know.

* * *


Johanna arrived last night. Johanna arrived last night.

I repeated this to myself as if I could not understand it. Only the night before I had been with Hans, and now Johanna was here.

Day of hallucination. I imagined Johanna in Hans’ room, preparing to possess his life again. I choked over my food. I tried to work, and I choked over my work. Johanna in Billancourt. I remembered Hans’ pleading words: to wait.

When I slept the pain suffocated me. I had to get up and walk about. When I awoke in the morning the pain lay on the back of my head like a stone. What would become of Hans now, of his life, his work, his joys? What would Johanna do to him?

The most terrible pain of all is the pain which does not explode, which makes no sound, which beats against nothing, which refuses to be exhausted by cry or gesture. The most prolonged and intricate of tortures. There is no air, no rain, no thunder, no lighting, no darkness, no fire. There is nothing to fight. The pain is in the tissues, in the cells, in the silence, in the breathing, invisible and soundless. To shift, to move away, to elude the torture was impossible, since there was no separation between me and the pain. No space, no distance, no voice, no face that one could strike.

I took a long walk alone. The “vigne vierge” was blood red on the walls and fences. I walked against the wind, weeping for Hans, for the lover I could never forget, soft, tender, dangerous, defenceless in women’s hands. My love, Hans, whom I had filled with strength and self-knowledge. I would always be there for him, always his. The day Johanna hurt him I would be there to love him again into wholeness. No one knew the softness in me for Hans, the softness, the forgivingness, the patience, the knowledge I had of his weakness, the love of his weakness…

* * *


As she walked heavily towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the doorway, I saw for the first time the woman I had always been hungry to know. I saw Johanna’s eyes burning, I heard her voice so rusty and tragic saying: “I wanted to see you alone,” and immediately I felt drowned by her beauty, felt that I would do anything Johanna might ask of me.

I wanted to say: “I recognize you. I have often imagined a woman like you.” But I was too timid, tead I sat silent in the tall black armchair.

Johanna did not sit still like an idol to be worshipped. She talked profusely and continuously, with feverish breathlessness, like one in fear of silence. She sat as if she could not bear to sit for long, and when she walked about she was eager to sit down again. Impatient, alert, watchful, as if in dread of being attacked. Restless and keen, making jerking gestures with her hands and shoulders, drinking hurriedly, speaking hurriedly, smiling swiftly, and listening to only half of my phrases.

“You’re beautiful, beautiful,” I said simply.

“Women, what things women see,” said Johanna as if she were talking to herself, but looking at me all the while. “The way you hand over the glass of Madeira—you have the gestures of a temple dancer.”

Johanna’s dress shimmered like black water. We sat wide apart on the green couch, fearful of the silence between our phrases and of the way our eyes clung to each other. Johanna left many of her phrases unfinished. She described everything rapidly, hazily, so that the impression was blurred and strange. She would not linger too long over any of her phrases, as if in fear of their effect. If the phrase was bitter she would smile to blunt it.

After a short circuitous anecdote, she would come back to me.

“Hans’ description of you,” she said, “simply left out everything that was important. You are all nuances. Even your pallor is different from mine. Mine is white and yours golden.”

“And you,” I said, “you’re the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.”

“It’s a good thing then that I’m soon going away. You would unmask me too quickly.”

At this I looked at Johanna and my eyes said so clearly, “I want to become blind with you,” that Johanna trembled a little and turned her face away.

“I thought your eyes were blue,” she said, “but I See now they are a strange and beautiful grey-gold. You glide when you walk.”

I noticed the hole in Johanna’s sleeve. And suddenly I felt ashamed not to have a hole in my sleeve, too.

“Let me look at your feet. They are so lovely and delicate and alive. And you wear sandals. I love sandals. I never wore anything else until… until…”

She looked down at her worn shoes. I saw that she was wearing cotton stockings, and it hurt me to see Johanna in cotton stockings.

“Let’s go out and get some sandals,” I said.

“Later, later,” said Johanna hoarsely. And then we both began to tremble. Johanna began to talk again, vaguely. The intimacy vanished. Her talk was like a turbulent river, like a broken necklace. Suddenly Johanna was silent, and then a changed voice she resumed:

“What a lovely way of dressing you have! I love this dress, its faded color, the little velvet jacket, the lacing over the breasts. I love the way you cover yourself, too: there is so little nudity showing—just your neck really. I never wanted to imitate any one else before, but now I should like to become as much like you as possible.”

Her hands were shaking.

“Johanna,” I thought, “I want to touch you.”

“When you look up at me you look like a child. When you look down you look like a sage, very old and very sad,” said Johanna.

There was a long silence.

“Let me sit on the floor and put my head over your knees,” I said.

“No, no,” said Johanna in a low, frightened voice.

“I will make you a cape like mine. I want you to wear my cape draped around your body.”

“Johanna, Johanna,” I thought, “I want to touch you. Why are you afraid? I want to kiss you.”

When Johanna talked again volubly, recklessly, I did not try to silence her. Now I knew we were talking against a deeper, inner talk, against the things we could not say.

* * *


I waited at the corner of the Rue Auber. I would see Johanna in full daylight advancing out of the crowd. I would make certain that such a thing could be, that Johanna was not a mirage which could melt as dreams melt in the morning.

I was secretly afraid that I might stand there at the corner of the Rue Auber exactly as I had stood in other places watching the crowd and knowing no Johanna would ever appear, because Johanna was an invention. As people passed by I shivered at their ugliness, at their drabness, at their likeness to each other. Waiting for Johanna I experienced the most painful expectancy, as if for a miracle. I could not believe Johanna would arrive by these streets, cross such a Boulevard, emerge from a handful of dark, faceless people. What a profound joy to watch the crowd scurrying and then to see her striding forward wearing her shabby shoes, her shabby black dress, her shabby cape and an old violet hat with a royal indifference.

“I hate the daylight,” said Johanna, and under the brim of her hat her eyes darkened with anger. The dark blue rings under her eyes were so deep they marked her flesh. It was as if the flesh around her eyes had been burned away by the white beat and fever of her glance.

In the café her pallor turned ashen. I saw ashes under the skin of her face. Hans had said she was very ill. Would she die? I trembled with fear. Would Johanna die before I had put m arms around her? Then I would follow her there too, I would follow her anywhere to tell her I loved her. I would keep Johanna’s sombre beauty from death.

“There are so many things I would love to do with you,” said Johanna. “With you I would take drugs. I would not be afraid!”

“With you I would do anything, go anywhere.”

I looked at Johanna’s hair, the blond strands tumbling out of the hat, wind-blown; at her eyebrows peaked like a demon’s, at her smile slanting perfidiously, a gem-like smile which made a whirlpool of my life, of my feelings.

“You’re strong, although you look so frail,” said Johanna, taking my hand…

I did not seek the meaning of Johanna’s words. I was suspended to her feverish mouth, to her discolored lips badly rouged. I felt in myself a new, man-like strength, a desire to protect her. I felt dizzy and feverish, and ready to abandon everything for her.

A man passed by and laughed at our absorption.

“Don’t mind, don’t mind,” I said softly, without taking her hand away. I enveloped and disguised my own tremblings and timidities in an Oriental calm. Johanna drank and smoked feverishly.

“I don’t want to do you any harm,” said Johanna.

“You can’t do me any harm.”

“I destroy people without wanting to. Everywhere I go everything gets confused and terrifying. I wish you had known Hildred. She made masks. She had supple and slender hands like yours. She made the Count for me. Oh, you don’t know the Count. Let’s go and get him, please. Let’s go there before we go for the sandals.”

We rushed to her hotel in a taxi. Johanna brought out the Count, a marionette with a depraved face, criminal’s hands, purple hair, violet eyelids, consumptive cheeks. She sat him in front of us in the taxi and laughed. “He was on the stage with me.” When the taxi started, he fell over, bowing to us with the lamentable weeping willowiness of his purple hair.

“I would like to go back to New York now and become beautiful for you. I will go away and make a new start. I’ll become a great actress. I won’t appear any more with clothes that are held together with safety pins! I’ve been living stupidly, blindly, doing nothing but drinking and smoking and talking. I’m afraid of disappointing you, Djuna.”

“I’m ashamed of all I have written. I want to throw away everything and begin anew for you, in a new language,” I said.

We walked down the street aimlessly, unconscious of our surroundings, arm in arm, with a joy that was rising every moment and with every word we uttered. A swelling joy that mounted with each step we took together and with the movement of our legs brushing against each other.

The traf eddied about us. Everything lost in a fog. Only the voices distinct, carrying such half-phrases as we could utter out of the drunkenness that our walking in rhythm caused in us.

Johanna said:

“I wanted to telephone you last night. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was to have talked so much. I didn’t say at all what I wanted to say. I went to a café in the evening as if drugged, full of thoughts of you. People’s voices reached me from afar. I couldn’t sleep at night. What have you done to me?”

I felt dazed with joy.

“I didn’t say what I wanted to say either. I feel overwhelmed. I can’t think any more.”

We went to the shoe shop. There the ugly woman who waited on us hated us and our visible joy. I held Johanna’s hand firmly and commanded. I was firm, wilful with the shopkeeper. Give me this, the best—don’t you see, it’s for Johanna? The best then, the very best you have. When the woman said she did not have broad enough sandals for Johanna’s foot, I scolded her. And then to Johanna: “When people are nasty to you I feel like getting down on my knees before you. I love you, Johanna.”

We walked down the street looking down at our sandalled feet. People stared at us and said: “Look at the actresses.”

“I’d like to get drunk,” said Johanna, “youreyes frighten me. You seem to know so much and yet you’ve never come out of your peaceful house.”

“Drunk! I’ve never once been drunk,” I said.

Johanna laughed.

“But I don’t want you to begin now. It would be like watching a child learning to walk. You don’t need to get drunk—but I would like to because then I could say anything I chose… and I’d want you to think it was because I was drunk, because then you’d forgive me.”

“You too have fears, although you look so strong.”

“It’s good that you never ask questions about facts. Facts don’t matter. It’s the essence that matters. You are all essence… I’d like to have some of the perfume I smelled in your house.”

I thought: “And she needs shoes, stockings, everything!”

Bodies close, arm in arm, hands locked. The city fallen away. We were walking into a world of our own for which neither could find a name. We entered a softly lighted place—mauve, diffuse which surrounded us with velvety closeness. We took off our hats and drank champagne. The Russian singers stared at us. Russian voices and Johanna. The violet rug, the green windows, the dusty lights, the swelling of guitars. Johanna was their essence.

Johanna talked about the effects of hasheesh. I had known such a state without hasheesh. When everything is so clear and transparent, when you know all there is to be known on earth, and you tchild learlike a visionary with a dancing irony and a cool brilliance.

“Let’s take drugs together, Djuna. Let’s take drugs together.”

“Not to-night, Johanna.”

Johanna took off her silver bracelet and put it around my wrist.

“It’s like having your own hand around my wrist. It is still warm, like your own hand. I’m your prisoner, Johanna.”

We walked out again. We crossed the street. We asked a policemen for the Rue de Rome. He laid his white stick on the Count and smiled at us. I said: “Are you going to arrest him?” And we laughed and walked on.

“Do you know,” I said, “there was an old Roumanian woman who had predicted I would love a woman. She lived in a very small house, with small doorways. She had cut off the legs of the chairs and tables so that everything seemed diminutive, like a house in a fairy tale.”

Johanna took my hand against her warm breast and we walked thus, my hand warmed by her breast.

We passed an old doorman we knew. He greeted us. I said to him: “The Count was almost arrested a while ago.” We all laughed.

“You give me life,” said Johanna. “I almost died when I read Hans’ last book. He is so cruelly unjust to me.”

Her eyes twitched now and then as if the light hurt her.

“I don’t want to die now. But he hates me. I don’t know why, but he hates me.”

Her nostrils quivered with furious pride. Her whole body, eyes, mouth, all shriveled with fury as if she had been whipped.

“It isn’t me, Djuna, it isn’t me!”

Even at this moment when Johanna’s vehemence rang so true I feared to ask her: “Did you love Hildred… did you love Hildred more than Hans?”

Then Johanna’s eyes, Johanna’s voice, Johanna’s talk appeared to wither in panic before this question. I could see and feel the flight, the evasion, the tortuousness. Johanna’s glance deviated, her voice became tremulous, uncertain.

“Hildred was a little mad. She used to write poetry for me. I wish you could have read it, you would have loved it.”

“What became of her?”

“I don’t know,” said Johanna. She opened her eyes wide into space, her face became clear, transparent, and I saw it illumined by a halo of innocence. An innocence which permeated her whole being for a moment. An innocence which radiated from her like a gem. So still and crystal pure.

So many questions now rushed to my mind. I wanted to ask: “Is it true what you tell me about the drugs? Is it true you have never taken any?” But I knew already how Johanna’s face darkened when any questions were put to her, and how humiliated she was by any attempt made to clarify her statements. And I knew that was not the way to reach Johanna, that Johanna’s essence slipped out between facts. So I smiled and was silent, and listened to Johanna’s voice, the way its hoarseness changed from rustiness to a whisper, a faint gasp, so that the hotness of her breath touched my face.

I watched her smoke hungrily, as if smoking, talking and moving were all desperately necessary to her, like breathing, and she did them all with such anguish and intensity.

Johanna and I looked at each other, and this look was like a long, long drink which made us shiver with pleasure.

“Did you ever do this,”I asked. “Did you ever walk in rhythm to a word, sing this word to yourself, with each step you take, until you get drunk on it, until it goes to your head. I came towards you repeating the word: ‘danger, danger, danger.’ I love you because you are danger…”

We were standing close together in a dark corner of the station. Standing unsteadily, our feelings spinning, spinning around us, in a maddening turmoil. Our faces drawn violently closer and closer, until the lips almost touched, until we saw each other in each other’s eyes, until our breaths mingled, until we could not speak for the gasp of joy which surged in us. Fever mounting, mounting, the magnet which soldered our mouths together into a blinding, earth-rocking kiss.

* * *


“Your eyes are full of pity, Djuna.”

“Do you need pity, Johanna?”

“I need a refuge from Hans, yes. Always. As soon as I see him again I realize he is my greatest enemy. And you don’t know. Before I came I suspected… As soon as I saw you my doubts were over. Hans has portrayed me as the everlasting liar. Do you trust him, Djuna?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you shouldn’t. I trusted him at the beginning. He not only betrayed me with women, but he betrayed my personality. He invented a cruel personage who caused him suffering in order to whip himself into writing. I don’t believe in him as a writer. I don’t believe in him as a man either. He is all that he accuses me of being. He is a comedian, a buffoon. He is false. He is neither fantastic enough nor simple enough. He doesn’t want simplicity or honesty. He’s an intellectual. He’s false, false, false.”

Her resentment rose as she talked, like a fever. It burned her eyes, her face. There was such a deep-reaching misunderstanding between them, like a wide chasm. Impossible to render any justice, yet justice was what Johanna demanded. She was begging to be judged, absolved.

She was pleading:

“You don’t know, when we first married, what an interest Hans had in evil. It was then I began to invent for him, to create situations, or at least to exaggerate them. I felt that he wanted that.”

I wanted to ask: “Did you never lie before you met Hans?” I knew that no one begins to lie at a certain hour of one’s life. I knew that I lied to-day to Johanna because I had also lied when I was a child—about the games I played which I insisted were real and should be believed by my parents and my brothers. I knew that I lied to-day to Johanna because it had always seemed to me that life must be embroidered on, colored and invented. I knew that when I lied about myself it was not so much because it was expected of me, but because I fancied that my inventions might be more interesting than the truth. From the beginning Johanna too must have taken her fancies seriously. That was the origin of her pretenses. And then some one had come who expected lies, who delighted in unreality, and Johanna had answered this demand. And within her, as within all, there wept and whined a child who was tired of inventions, and who wanted to be loved for her true self, for an unadorned, undramatized self.

I knew that if I asked Johanna to-day: “What were you before you met Hans? What were you when you were ten years old?” Johanna would not answer that she had been an “extra” in a dance hall, nor that her mother had kept a boarding house. Johanna would pause before answering and consider what might come closest to my image of her. I knew that Johanna would not say what she was, or what she thought, but whatever conformed to what she fancied I expected her to be and to think. I knew that to unravel the twistedness of Johanna’s life would take years of gentle and sharp detection. The whole pattern of Johanna’s life would have to be turned inside out. I would have to take Johanna like a fruit and peel the rind of flesh to find the core. Everything which composed the external Johanna was a concealment of her, not an expression. I would have to divest her of her costumes, of her talk, of her facial masks—and then what would I find? Probably a child, a child whining because it was lost and lonely, for lies have that power that they create solitude more effectively than anything else. They disguise the soul. They disguise and conceal and deform, and create enormous distances between the self and the appearance. And everyone is deluded by the appearance. Even love is offered to a reflection, to the appearance.

If I were to unmask you, Johanna, I should only be revealing myself! You are the face of my unmasked self. A thousand times I will unmask you, Johanna, because it is only you and I who know the inexhaustibility of women’s masks. And the last will fall only when we are dust. We see the face beneath the mask, you mine, I yours, because it is the same face. I am your words, Johanna, and you are my acts. You have acted for me. And you have my face, the face of my feelings. I am the bitterness in your words, the softness you are forbidden to betray. The need of mystery you bear like a curse; men have cursed you by enslaving you to your own mystery. I am free because I am able to dispense with mystery.

Johanna was begging to be seen as a martyr to Hans’ work, as the woman who acted always sublimely, as the woman who loved only beauty. See only the beauty in me, only the beauty.

“But I see you all, I e your lies too, I see you exactly as you are, and I love you,” I said.

“You have swallowed Hans’ stories,” said Johanna bitterly. “You also think me a liar.”

“I’ve spent this whole year trying to make Hans understand you, through me. I have trusted him.”

“Well, then you have failed as much as he has. He only pretends to understand in order afterwards to turn round and destroy. He is like a spy who enters your secret life only to report on it later, to expose it.”

“You should not fear exposure,” I said gently.

“Yes, because he only exposes the ugly, the ridiculous.”

I could not deny that Hans was a caricaturist, but only when he was angry, out of revenge.

“But I never did anything to deserve his vengefulness!”

“You betrayed him, Johanna.”

Johanna denied this swiftly, denied it vigorously. She intimated that she could skirt all life, all situations and remain unscathed and faithful. This statement made me angry.

“Don’t say that to me,” I said. “Don’t you dare say that to me. I am a woman, Johanna. I know it is not true. I know that women like us, even when we don’t want to give anything, cannot let a man go without some gift. You can call it pity, if you wish to embellish it. We are not women who take without giving back something. We forget it is ourselves they want. And you know this want touches us, all want touches us, because we are so hungry ourselves, because we are so voracious for love.”

Again all of Johanna’s being seemed to escape before my directness in a panic. Behind the mask a thousand smiles, behind the eyelids ageless deceptions. A deception so ingrained that I knew she would never transcend it.

And I knew that if I wanted Johanna to tell me the truth it was only to answer one question, one vital question which was life and death to me. I knew that Johanna sensed this question lurking behind our talk and our confidences, that she was on her guard against it, that it lay between us like a dagger, which neither of us wanted to pick up. I knew that what I wanted to ask was: “Do you love Hans? Have you returned to stay with Hans? Who is it you abandoned Hans for, and will you hurt him again?”

Johanna knew I wanted toknow this. And so our phrases, even when begun with impulsiveness, would end abruptly and unexpectedly whenever we felt ourselves approaching the core of our anxiety. To elude the ultimate question we crowded the atmosphere with smaller ones. We unearthed the past to evade the present and the future. We watched each other with love and fear. I knew that if I urged Johanna to openness Johanna could say: “It is you who are the liar, the deceiver. It is not for me that you helped Hans, that you served him as I once served him. Such things are only doneched each for love.”

My image ofHans up to now so clear became blurred. Because now that Johanna was living with Hans he was again fighting windmills, exhausting himself in blind, petty rages. She was inflicting venomous wounds, undermining his confidence, attacking his book—because he hadn’t given what she considered a true portrait of herself!

I was tormented with anxiety because I could do nothing for him, noteven see him for a moment. Johanna was watchful and tense, like an animal on a scent.

We sat together at cafés, our knees touching, looking at each other lucidly at first, and then surrendering toour own power over each other as to a consoling drug. We postponed the bitter war, eluded the moment of revelation. I felt like a puppet who was being torn apart. I could no longer keep clear and separate my image of Hans and Johanna. They were drawing me into their own tangle as into a whirlpool. I felt myself being drawn into their war, being forced to admit, to confess my allegiance. Johanna wanted the absolute, the choice, the decisive open choice. She was always insisting: “Whom do you believe, Hans or me?” Always working feverishly to divide us. It was always the ridiculous aspect of Hans, the caricature of him which she revealed to me, knowing well that a defeated Hans would hurt me, knowing well that a raging, frantic Hans was the supreme antithesis to the Hans I had been living with.

Johanna was making a supreme effort to reassert herself, to dominate and possess him again. But why does she want to possess him again only to leave him again dispossessed and reduced?

It was this implacable destruction, this necessity forone to triumph over the other, which incensed me. Why couldn’t Johanna be great without killing Hans? Why couldn’t Hans be great without first killing Johanna? Why must either of them be enriched and saved only by means of the other’s death?

Destruction the sole measure of strength - that was an attitude I found impossible to share. Strength is evinced through creation, I thought. I would not feel greater by triumphing over Hans. I could only feel great if Hans were made greater through me.

War! The necessity of war!

Johanna and I in a taxi, holding each other closely. Johanna saying: “You are giving me life, you are giving me what Hans has taken away from me.” And I heard myself answering with fevered words of passion. Our knees locked, our hands locked, kissing in full awareness of our rivalry. Our enmity rumbling low, deep, watchful.

It was like madness forme to be carrying this diamond lodged in the middle of my forehead, the hard light of my lucidity, of my vision, thinking of means to save Hans while exchanging warm kisses with Johanna. Who is the innocent one?The onewho loves. I feel that Johanna does not love Hans. Who is the human being? The onewho really suffers from the loss of his love. I feel that Johanna would never suffer as I would. She would suffer only in her pride. Who is the cleverest? Who the strongest? The one who loves the least, the one who fights for the triumph of his own ego.




Johanna said: “I am afraid of your eyes,” and she made herself small in my arms. “Your eyes pierce every veil.”

And as Johanna whispered in my ear I recollected the closing words of Hans’ letter: “Thanks to you I am not being crushed this time. Don’t lose faith in me, I beg you.”

* * *


Hans came to see me. He tried to kiss me and I would not let him. No, I could not bear that. No, he should not touch me—that would hurt me. He was baffled.

“I want you more than ever,” he said. “Johanna has become a stranger to me. The first two nights with her I could not feel any passion. I love you, and with you alone I feel the connection between the image I carry in me and my desire. There’s no such thing as loving two women. You have displaced Johanna.”

Before he had finished I had surrendered. The closeness seemed profoundly natural. There was nothing changed.

After a while he said:

“Doesn’t Johanna bore you? I find that she talks too much.”

“We have so much to say to each other.”

“Nobody can say to Johanna: ‘Listen, listen deeply.’ I can only make her listen by violence. What do you do that she listens to you?”

“I just look at her.”

“But what do you have to say to each other?”

“If I gave you my own idea and my own image of Johanna, Hans, you would love her. There’s a great deal of mystery in our world, a great deal that will never be clear to you. You think I must know more, because I am a writer, that it must all be clear to me. But all I can say is that there is a world which is closed to you. Johanna has slipped between your fingers. I won’t tear her to pieces as you have done.”

I touched Johanna’s bracelet without looking at it, like a talisman.

“I sit down and try to tell you, to tell you what I’d much rather go on living ecstatically, unbeknown to you—to all. You beat your head against the walls of our world, yes, and because I am an artist you think I will give away the mystery. I will say what Johanna is. I will tear the veil. But to-day I hate my work, Hans. I don’t want to formulate, to force out the delicate, the vague, the voluptuous into the daylight of words. I renounce my mind and my work. I would much rather just live.”

We were lying on the couch, under the window of colored stones. Many, many afternoons we had lain on this couch, looking up at the light coming through the colored stones.

It was not the window which gave on the garden, on its old ivy like the long arms of a furry-haired monkey twisted around the walls. It was not either the window which opened on the sky, showing the bare skeleton of trees in winter. It was for us a window opening on a world we had made together according to our own vision. The Orient-blue stones, the turquoise, the geranium red, the midnight blue, the Veronese green, the chrome yellow, the carmine, those were like the colors of our own moods which gave to sky, sun and moonlight and daylight their own individual hues, which deformed the shape of trees into unknown trees, an unknown world. This other world we entered as soon as we were alone, with a language of our own. This world, slowly, given them, created out of a particular manner of looking at things, at people at events, at new books, pivoted on the axis of a twin vision and purpose, on my faith in his purpose and his vision, my devotion to his purpose… this widely expanded world, made out of vast ideas, out of caresses, out of faith, out of fears and courage… it was this world we saw lying on the couch after the blood fusions, after the intermingling of breath and blood through the colored window with its constellations of hues like the hues of our moods and our particular vision. At first indistinct, and then so immense and potent and indestructible, because everything always flowered between us. This window opened on our multi-formed and multi-colored universe, with its big rhythms and sweeps and profound intensity.

Everything else was an excursion.

“What did you and Johanna talk about?”

I told him everything that these two days with Johanna contained. I exposed all my feelings to him, all my fevers, all my turmoil. I let him read into me nakedly. All former surrenders to him seemed but half a gift, compared with this exposure of myself, this breaking up of myself, this absolute dissolution of myself into him.

I gave myself to him by truth. Nothing else was of importance but our world, the integrity of our world. It was not important that I should have found another who was part of myself, a fragment of myself. It was not important that I should have found Johanna who completed me, because I as an artist had lived marginally, whereas Johanna had given all her life to sensations and gestures. It was not important that I should have found the face I wanted to see in the mirror, that other side of myself, daring, fiery, manifesting itself in acts. My free self! The incarnation of my imaginations, of my inventions. That was not important—that was the pursuit and the love of the self. To love Johanna was merely to love myself, the desired, unrealized, unformulated half of my self.

What I loved to-day, far, far above this self, was Hans. Hans, the other.

To-day I had been treacherous to woman and to myself and to the shadows of myself. I had yielded up the proud and isolated self and all self-seeking.

And he—he lay there quietly, almost broken by a gentle, tolerant wistfulness.

“You and Johanna have something to give to each other. The love you describe is wonderful. I certainly can’t hate or despise that. I see what you give each other. I’ve just realized that what I give is something coarse plain, compared to that.”

I stopped him.

“You don’t know what you have given me!” I could not continue. My eyes blurred.

* * *


Johanna, Hans and I. His manuscripts spread on the table. Hans was saying very gently:

“I can’t work here. I’d like to go to Djuna’s place a few days. You understand, Johanna, this is the most important period of my life as a writer.”

“You don’t have to leave,” exclaimed Johanna hastily, “I’ll leave, I’ll go away as soon as I can get the money. I’ll go away to-night—I’ll always find some one to stay with.”

“I’m not asking you to leave,” said Hans, “only to leave me alone. I can’t work when you’re around. I can’t work! And the way I feel now I’d commit a crime in order to finish this book!”

I understood this strange, abstract mood, his brassiness. His eyes were black and hard. He was again the supreme egoist, the artist. But Johanna was weeping hysterically, her whole body shaking, raving wildly about him not being a human being, that she must fight him to protect herself against him, that if she stayed with him she would kill herself or do something mad. His work offended her, as a woman. She could only allow it if it glorified her.

At this moment I was not a woman. I was a writer too. I wanted Johanna to go and leave Hans to his work. I felt inhuman myself. Everything was blurred and distorted and magnified by the demon in both of us, the demon of literature.

Johanna’s grief left me unmoved. What stirred was Hans’ cry: “Let me work!”

Johanna got up, trembling.

“You’re better,” she said to Hans, “you’re better in some way that I can’t understand, and you’re worse in a way which crushes me. There’s something in you I can’t seize. I won’t be a slave to your ideas! You’re too spiritual a man. I’m the wrong woman for you.”

I wanted to say: “You love only the man, and the man is only half of Hans.”

Johanna stood ready to leave us, with her hair falling about her shoulders. At this moment her beauty seemed to have reached its climax. I was awed by the ripeness, the opulence of her body under her black cape, by the savage, almost phosphorescent glint of her eyes, by the dewiness and petal transparency of her skin. Johanna at this moment did not seem like a woman, but like some mythological figure of woman. Never did the aureole of this beauty shine so like a legend. I was awed. And awed too that this beauty could be submerged and swept away by a greater power—the great unswerving flow of creation. And it was to this force of creation that I responded as to a greater passion—the great inhuman passion.

Johanna left the room. Hans and I looked at each other with a profound understanding. Then I rose to follow Johanna. In the dark hall I took her in my arms. I caressed her hair, I lulled her with sweet words. I whispered her name caressingly. “My little Johanna, my poor little Johanna.” I caressed her like a child until her sobs subsided.

* * *


Johanna and I in a taxi. My arms becoming strong. It is I who am throwing back Johanna’s head. It is I who am kissing Johanna’s throat. And Johanna melting. An orgy of soft flesh. Johanna in my arms taking refuge from her fears of me, so that I might not judge her, not measure her. I would not see her while she lay in my arms. I could see only the forked lightning of her fear.

When I left the taxi I saw the blurred face of Johanna staring through the window. I saw this face behind the window, pleading like the face of a woman drowning. The face of the child frightened and unsure of love, frightened and struggling to wield power through mystery and mystification. A child caught in the great dark strain of lies and fantasies. Every gesture one of frenzied singularity to compel love and admiration. Johanna, little Johanna, beautiful Johanna, sometimes wise and sometimes empty! Johanna with her life all exterior and without core. Believing only in drama, in gestures, in appearance, in war, in outward and visible movement. Believing that a kiss can silence all judgment, believing like a whore that the soul can be traded, the body offered in exchange. Johanna, the born whore, who would triumph as a whore. But Johanna, the soul will not be traded!

This face behind the window, pleading, I saw in it the face of a woman drowning. I saw Johanna struggling to the bottom of the sea, with terror written on her face, the terror of monsters invisible to men. I could see in her face the submerged continents over which the ghost of Johanna borne on a manticore, had wandered. Johanna had seen the mantic religiosa which waits for its prey in a devotional attitude, and the giant crabs that cling to the marabou hair of shell flowers and choke them; she had seen the slimy coil of the octopus strangling the slippery necks of eels; she had seen the wrecks of ships gathered in glutinous cradles of moss, the rotted wood crawling with worms and the bodies of the dead, swollen and burst, staining the water with twisted entrails. She had been terrorized by the gold clarity of the sea on which the giant black birds threw purple shadows, and by the monstrous, phosphorescent eyes of the night which guided her course. She had experienced every terror and they trembled now in her face as she gazed at me through the watery taxi window.

A smile of immeasurable distress…

But in another instant, like a cloud passing over the face of the moon, it was effaced by another smile, the smile of the whore. It was this old, impenetrable smile which brought back to my mind the full impact of that moment when Johanna’s head, like a heavy flower broken from its stem, had fallen on my shoulder. It was this whore’s smile of Johanna which set the world rocking again as I stood there watching the taxi carrying Johanna off. Pity, protection, solace—they fell away from me like gifts of trivial import. I walked away unsteadi, like a man returning from a heavy debauch. I forgot about Johanna’s terror, forgot the child-face peering hungrily through the taxi window.

The taxi had taken care of my impulse, had thwarted it, with that banal fatality with which the petty and the trivial often arrests the most stupendous gestures. The taxi, the ordinary reality in which it moved, the rhythm it obeyed—allowing just that fatal, ordinary moment it required for two persons to part—it was this which had ordained the evolution of my emotion and the duration of it. It was this which allowed me to let Johanna depart with her deep distress, like a whore one has finished kissing, instead of withholding her and making her the gift of my love.

The trifling incident that had arrested the expression of my impulse, the passivity I had displayed, my inertia when confronted with the need of vital action which ought to follow every flash of understanding, the way I submitted to the taxi driver’s automatism, all this was no more amazing than the feeling I had that this was the moment when I understood Johanna’s potentialities or desires as I would never again be able to. Or rather, that this was the moment when I might have conveyed to her how deeply I understood her aspirations, but that I could only express this if Johanna were dead or removed from me by some contrast in our moods, some effective enmity between us. Thus fulfilling the inner fatality which makes of fusion the most evanescent of human attainments.

UNLESS SOME DAY JOHANNA SHOULD READ THIS BOOK.

* * *


We were walking together over dead leaves crackling like paper. Johanna was weeping, and I was weeping with her and for her. We were walking through the city as it sank into twilight and it was as if we were both going blind together, with the bitterness of our tears. Through this blurred city we walked, hazily and half lost, the light of a street lamp striking us now and then like a spotlight, throwing into relief Johanna’s distorted mouth and the broken line of her neck where the head fell forward heavily, as if she had been guillotined. The buses came upon us out of the dark, violently, with a deafening clatter and we had to leap out of their way, only to continue stumbling through dark streets, crossing bridges, passing under heavy arcades, our feet trembling on the uneven cobblestones, as if we had both lost our sense of gravity, as if we were treading already some other substance.

Johanna’s voice was plaintive and monotonous, like a lamentation. Her eyes wavered, but always fixed on the ground, as if the whole structure of’ her life lay there, burnt and tattered, and she were watching its consummation.

I was looking straight before me, through and beyond the dark, the lights, the traffic, beyond the buildings. Eyes fixed, immobile like glass eyes, as if the curtain of tears had opened a new realm.

Johanna’s phrases surged and heaved like a turgid sea. Unformed, unfinished, dense, heavy with repetitions, with recapitulations, with a baffled, confused bitterness and anger. I could find nothing to say for the moment—because Johanna was talking about God. Yes, Johanna was talking about the god in man—the god she had sought in Hans.

“I wanted to serve him,” she was saying, “I wanted to make him great, because I felt that he was good, that he was so infinitely better than myself… I felt that I was vile and foul, a liar and a beast. But Hans! Jesus, there was something so good, so charitable in him. He had such an immense compassion… And then when I read what he had written about me—the drabness, the cheapness of my life… No, he’s no god, I know that now! I know that he is treacherous. Only the other night, Djuna, after you left, the other night when I came back to him, I came back to confess everything. I wanted to make myself clean again, I wanted to kneel before him—I did get down on my knees—and have him forgive me. I felt then, as I had often felt before, that he was the most wonderful being I had ever known, that he was the only truly human being I knew. I felt him to be holy—truly. He was like a saint to me. I felt so humble, so less than nothing. I came back to worship at his feet… But what happened? I came back to find him hard, indifferent, cynical. He almost laughed in my face. I seemed so insignificant to him that even my devotion, my worship of him, meant nothing to him… No, he’s no god to me… not any more! I am the god now. It’s I, I, who am the god! Not him! The sacrifices I made for him have made me great. I am bigger than he is now! I have known what it meant to sacrifice one’s self, but now I don’t need to sacrifice myself any more. I’m beyond that… beyond him. Once I needed a god to serve. I needed Hans so—he was a god to me—and I had to serve some one. But he failed me. I have served some one who is less than I am…”

She seemed to contemplate for a moment with great self-pity the isolation which this death of Hans as a god had brought upon her. The light of the street lamp struck her and it revealed the gesture of defeat so vividly that I found nothing to say.

This seeking of god in the dark city, this aimless wandering through the streets touching men and seeking god… this was a fear I had known too… seeking god in Hans, in live men, not in the past, not in the distance, but a god with arms, a god with a living breath, a god we wished to possess for ourselves, alone, in our own isolated woman’s soul. God was still inextricably woven with man and with man’s creation. Yet between this realm, this dark immediate realm which Johanna was weeping over, with her eyes fixed on the ground, I saw another sphere in the form of a circle. One circle issuing from the other. And I wanted to tell Johanna that we were moving from one circle into another, moving and rising, and that Johanna was only suffering from the pain of being thrust out of one circle into another, one groove into another, and that this leap it was which was the most difficult to make. The pain of parting with one’s faith, one’s old love, when one’s desire is rather to renew this faith and preserve the passion. But Johanna was weeping because Hans had said: “leave me alone,” or “let me work,” or “let me sleep.” And I found it impossible to explain to her what a struggle was required to emerge from the past clean of haunting memories and regrets. Impossible to explain to Johanna the inadequacy of our souls to cut life into final, total portions. Impossible to tell her that this pain, this great pain could be healed more quickly with a knowledge, a vision into the next circle. Impossible to answer Johanna’s great need of a frontier against which she might lean as upon a closed door, closing a door upon all pain. I could not take Johanna’s hand and make her raise her head and lead her into the new circle, raise her above pain and confusion, above ess of the city. And these sudden shafts of light upon us could not illumine the realm beyond, where the circle of pain closed and ended and one was raised into another circle. I could not help Johanna emerge out of the immediacy of her pain, leap beyond the strangle-hold of the present.

And so we continued to walk unsteadily over the dead leaves of his indifference, weeping together over an injustice which was as irremediable as the fall of dead leaves on our path. And I was kissing her because there was no other way to atone for a crime I had not committed, a crime ordained by the flux and continuity and mobility of life.

Johanna, Johanna, I wanted to say, will you walk thus with me when it is I who comes to the end of a circle, when it is I who shall be thrust out of the circle of Hans’ love?

* * *


When we met under the red light of the café we recognized in each other a mood of irony. We would dance together on our irony as on the chiming sparks of a dizzy star. We would laugh at him now, running with seven-leagued boots over the universe, laughing.

“He’s working so hard, so hard, he’s in a daze,” said Johanna. “He talks night and day about Death. I went to sleep the other night while he was talking to me.”

I was lonely, deep down, to think Hans had been at his work for two weeks without thinking of or noticing either of us. And my loneliness drew me close to Johanna.

“He was glad we were going out together,” continued Johanna rapidly. “He said it would give him a chance to work. He hasn’t any idea of time; he doesn’t even know what day of the week it is. He doesn’t give a damn about anybody or anything.”

A feeling of immense loneliness invaded Johanna.

We walked, as if we had wanted to walk away from our mood, as if we wanted to walk into another world. We walked up the hill of Montmartre, with houses lying on their sides like heather. We heard music, music so off tune that we did not recognize it as the music we heard every day. We slid into the shaft of light from where this music carne—into a room which seemed built of granified smoke and crystallized human breath. A room with a painted star on the ceiling, and a wooden, pock-marked Christ. Gusts of weary, petrified songs so dusty with use. Faces like empty glasses. The musicians made of rubber, like the elastic, cloud-like bouncing rubber-soled night.

“We hate Hans to-night. We hate man.”

The craving for caresses. Wanting and fighting the want. Both frightened by the vagueness of our desire, the indefiniteness of our craving. A rosary of question marks.

Johanna whispered:

“Let’s take drugs to-night.”

e pressed her strong knees against me, she inundated me with the moist brilliance of her eyes, the paleness of her face.

I shook my head, but I drank, I drank. No drink equal to the taste of war and hatred. No drink like bitterness.

I looked at Johanna’s fortune teller’s eyes, and at her taut profile like a tiger sniffing his prey in a bamboo sea.

“It takes all the pain away, it wipes out all the ugliness, all the foul, dirty reality.”

She leaned over the table until our breaths mingled, and she fixed her snake-like eyes upon me.

“You don’t know what a relief it is. The smoke of opium like fog. It brings marvellous dreams, and gaiety. Such gaiety, Djuna! And you feel so powerful, so powerful! You don’t feel any more frustration, you feel that you are lording it over the whole world, with a marvellous strength. No one can hurt you, humiliate you, confuse you. You feel that you are soaring over the world. Everything becomes larger and deeper. Such joys, Djuna, as you’ve never known or imagined. The touch of a hand is enough… the touch of a hand is like going the whole way… the tip of the finger on the breast can give an orgasm. And the time, how it flies! The days pass like an hour… it is all like down, so soft and lulling. You would love the heaviness of the body, the laziness, and the smells, the smells which fill the room. No more straining and desiring, just dreaming and floating and enjoying…”

“I’ve known all this without drugs,” I murmured.

“No, never as strongly, as powerfully. Everything you’ve ever known, every joy is a hundred times more acute, more overwhelming… Take drugs with me, Djuna. I want to do it with you. It’s with you I want to do it.”

I yielded, and consented with my head and my eyes. Then I saw that Johanna was looking at the Arab rug merchant who stood by the door, with his red hat, his kimono, and his slippers, his arms loaded with Arabian rugs and pearl necklaces. Under the rug I saw he had a wooden leg with which he was beating time to the jazz.

Johanna laughed hysterically, shaking her whole body with drunken laughter.

“You don’t know, Djuna… this man… with his wooden leg… you never can tell… he may have some. There was a man once, with a wooden leg like that. He was arrested and they found his wooden leg just packed with ‘snow’. Maybe I’ll go and ask him.”

And she got up with her heavy, animal walk, and talked to the rug merchant, looking up at him alluringly, begging, smiling up at him in that secret way she had of smiling at me. A burning pain invaded me to see Johanna begging. But the merchant shook his head, and smiled innocently, shook his head firmly and smiled, and offered her his rugs and the necklaces.

When I saw Johanna returning empty-handed I drank again, and it was like drinking fog, long draughts of fog.

We danced together, the floor turning under us like a phonograph record. Johanna dark and potent under the brim of her mannish hat.

A gust of jeers seemed to blow through the place. A gust of jeers. But we danced, cheeks touching, our cheeks chalice white. We danced, and the jeers cut into the haze and splendor of our dizziness like a whip. The eyes of the men were insulting us. The eyes of the men called us by the name the world had for us. Eyes. Green, jealous, crucified, tortured eyes. Eyes of the world. Eyes sick with hatred and contempt. Caressing eyes. Eyes ransacking our conscience. Stricken yellow eyes caught in the flare of a match. Heavy torpid eyes without courage, without dreams. Mockery. Frozen mockery.

Johanna and I wanted to strike those eyes, break them, break the bars of green wounded eyes condemning us. We wanted to break the walls confining us, suffocating us. We wanted to break out from the prison of our own fears, break every obstacle. But all we found to break were glasses. We took our glasses and we broke them over our shoulders and we made no wish, but we looked at the fragments of the glasses on the floor wonderingly, as if our mood might be lying there also, in broken pieces.

We danced mockingly, as if we were sliding beyond the reach of the men’s hands, running like sand between their insults. We scoffed at these eyes which brimmed with knowledge, for we knew the ecstasy of mystery, and of fog, and the words they uttered fell like heavy stones through the fog of our ecstasy. The eyes and the words of men fell through like stones, while we danced mockingly away and down the rolling hills of fog, fire and orange fumes of a world we had seen through a slit in the dream. Spinning and reeling and falling, spinning and turning and rolling down the brume and smoke of a world seen through a slit in the dream.

The waiter put his ham-colored hand on Johanna’s arm:

“You’ve got to get out of here, you two!”

* * *


I arrived with a bottle of vodka under my arm. I was already drunk—on the idea of the vodka. A high drunkenness, like an Arabian magic carpet.

I found Johanna in a sullen mood, sullen as a gypsy, a rampant dark sullenness, earth-colored, snake- tongued.

Hans came out of the kitchen looking pale, abstracted. He came out with a dazed expression, as if he had left his body on the table with the thick manuscript he had been slaving over.

“Look at him,” said Johanna, “that’s the ghost I have to live with.”

The bottle of vodka stood on the kitchen table. Hans put his hands around it lovingly, absentmindedly.

The three of us were now sitting around the stained kitchen table, looking mutely at the bottle of vodka. Suddenly Johanna pounced on it, uncorked it swiftly, and spilled out three brimming glasses of it.

“Sometimes,” said Johanna, “when I read what you’ve had to say about me, I don’t know whether I’m a goddess, a whore, or a criminal.”

“You flatter yourself,” said Hans, and I saw that his eyes were cruel and angry, his face flushed, and that he was looking at me too with a secret, vengeful anger which the drink had brought to the surface.

“To-day I was looking at a necklace in the Trocadero,” he continued. “A necklace which would have suited either of you. It was a big, clumsy necklace of bones which the men of Africa used to put around the necks of the women who lied. It would have suited you swell, the two of you!”

And he drank some more.

I felt a deep disquietude. I felt this anger, this hatred flaring up between us like a strong, brutal wind; I felt caught up by it, and at the same time, in some strange, inexplicable way, I felt unwilling to defend myself. It was like the taste of something acrid and new, like a poison, like a simoun storm in the desert, which made one nervous and yet heavy with fever. I picked up my vodka and drank with them—as if to signify my deep desire to sink with them into that dark, fiery realm of war and hate.

And then I noticed that Johanna’s body had begun to loosen visibly, that it had become like lead. I saw her mouth widening, saw her eyes growing bleary, her legs outstretched, heavy, inert, wooden. Johanna had suddenly lost her luminosity. Johanna suddenly looked to me exactly like a common, ordinary whore.

As the fiery vodka dulled me, I felt immensely weary of my constant ascensions. I wanted to be lost with Hans and Johanna, to yield, to forget my name and identity, and all that was expected of me, my promises and my pursuit of perfection. I wanted to follow Hans and Johanna into disorder, and indifference, and carelessness, and unscrupulousness, to borrow and take and beg and live only in the moment…

I laughed and said: “This vodka is like the sun, it burns all caring away, it burns consciousness away, it burns everything away…”

But when I saw the looseness of Johanna’s mouth and the abandon of her body on the chair, I said in a heavy voice:

“I don’t like you when you’re drunk, Johanna.”

Hans toppled over and fell asleep against the table, hiding his flushed red face in his arms, and laughing softly now and then.

Johanna’s Viking body was crumbling. I tried to drag her to bed, but she was too heavy for me. Like David I could fling stones at Goliath, but a drunken Goliath I could not carry to bed.

Hans awakened and helped me, tottering as he did so under the burden.

Johanna laughed, wept, vomited… In keeping with her role Johanna was going through the gestures which I had imagined myself to be making when I had seen Johanna drunk. It was Johanna who vomited for me all the lives and adventures I had embellished by the alchemy of illusion. I vomited with Johann the reality of adventure, my desire for drunkenness, for high color, for excess. Absolute drunkenness cancels the joys of drunkenness, intense living destroys intensity, reality destroys the dream. Everything beautiful has to remain suspended and unfinished.

Johanna wept, laughed, and threw the towels at my face. I wiped the floor.

Johanna raved:

“I love you, you are cruel and clever. You have been cruel and clever, Djuna, that’s why I got drunk. You’re cruel, terribly cruel.”

But when Johanna said I love you, it had the emptiness of a gasp. She had exhausted the meaning and potency of these words with her comedies. It was an automatic gasp. The impetus was feeble, deflated. Automatically she might repeat for ever “I love you,” but the actress in her had exhausted the potency of the words.

She was like a foaming sea, Johanna, a sea churning up wreckage, skeletons of ships which I had glimpsed in full sailing. The debris of her doubts and fears: “Hans, Djuna, you’re both too cruel and clever. I’m afraid of you both.”

At this moment I remembered the face of Johanna, the child staring through the dimmed taxi window, but before this caricature of Johanna’s distress, the pity I had felt then was gone.

Pity, illusion, the dream, all had been spilled in vomit, wiped up, washed down the sewer and lost.

Johanna slid off the bed and had to be hoisted back again. Hans was laughing softly, drunkenly, as he wiped the floor.

But I was unable to laugh. I was enslaved by my own inexorable seriousness. It seemed to have devolved on me, the weary task of representing tragedy, the necessity of bearing up my seriousness in spite of all ridicule. The discarded seriousness of others had fallen on my shoulders because I had known always that those who discard tragedy like an old glove or a frayed collar are throwing away something the preciousness of which was always clear to me. Exactly as if I had become a kind of rag-picker for the fragments of tragedy.

Driven again by this ridiculous seriousness, I stood there in the middle of the room, unable to laugh with Hans. I was caressing Johanna and putting cold rags on her forehead. I was vomiting with Johanna all the illusions, fantasies, grandiose gestures, colorful extravagances, vertigoes so seriously and noiselessly. In keeping with her destiny Johanna was continuing to add to the chain of her external movements, expressions and gestures.

I lay all dressed at Johanna’s side. My first night with Johanna. No more Johanna. The stench of vomit. A body. Earth. A body. Heavy earth. Inert earth. Johanna!

I craved at this moment the supreme drunkenness of creation. I was hungry again for my own ecstasies, my solitude, my lightness, my joys. My ecstasies without vomit: not those which filled the being with poisons which must afterwards be ejected as the whore that men empty themselves into is ejected at dawn.

Then came the moment when a curtain seemed to fall over my life. As this curtain fell, I strove wistfully to gather up the last movements. Johanna and I had been walking together in sandalled feet. I had seen the sandalled feet treading the asphalt. I had looked down at them and said thoughtfully: “I like to see ourselves walking.”

Because I was already no longer walking, neither walking, nor eating, nor sleeping. I was already writing—writing even as the curtain descended. I had yielded my maximum of human feelings. I had ceased to exist. I had lost my humanness. And before Johanna had become aware of this transformation, I had run away. The human being in me was dead.

Johanna had given me violets. I vomited them up too. Violets. More things. Another abortion. Trying to efface the failure of one gesture with another. Objects. The world of things, which in the end turns the stomach. These violets had been extremely touching. Johanna, still heavy-headed, after having torn down her pyramid of illusions, had rushed to buy me violets, to atone. Very sublime, these violets which I had thrown away. But I would not let myself be bribed. The violets were crushed between the tin-voiced typewriter keys. And with violet ink I recorded the night.

The following night I returned to Johanna.

* * *


We were alone.

We were alone without daylight, without past, without any thought of the resemblance between our togetherness and the union of other women. The whole world was being pushed to one side by our faith in our own uniqueness. All comparison was proudly discarded. Johanna and I alone, naked of knowledge and naked of other experiences. We remembered nothing before this hour; we were innocent of associations. We forgot what we had read in books, what we had seen in cafés, the laughter of men, and the mocking participation of other women. Our individuality washed down and effaced the universe. We stood at the beginning of everything. We were naked and innocent of the past.

We stood before the night which belonged to us as two women emerging out of sleep. We stood on the first step of our timidity, of our faith, before the long night which belonged to us. Blameless of original sin, of literary sins, of the sin of calculation, of premeditation, or of experience.

Two women. Strangeness. All the webs of ideas blown away. New bodies, new souls, new minds, new words. We would create it all out of ourselves, fashion our own reality. Innocence. No roots dangling into other days, other nights, or other people. The potency of a new stare into the face of our desire and our fears. Johanna’s timidity and mine. Johanna’s awkwardness and mine. Our fears. A great terror slashing through the room, cutting icily through us, like a fallen sword. A new voice. Johanna’s voice hoarse, breathless, and mine like an exhalation of hers, a breath, almost a voicelessness, because we were so frightened.

Johanna sat so heavily on the edge of the bed, her earthy weight like roots sinking into the earth. Under the weight of her jungle stare I trembled.

Our bracelets tinkled.

The bracelets had given the signal. A signal like the first tinkle of beads on a savage neck. I took my bracelet off. We put them on the table, side by side.

The light. Why was the light so still, like the suspense of our blood? Still with fear. Like our eyes. Shadeless eyes that could not melt.

The dresses. My dress rolled around me like a long seaweed. I wanted to turn and drop it on the floor, but my hands lifted it like a Bayadere lifting her skirt to dance, and it rose like an umbrella slip and then fell, fell, like a leaf under a rain-shower.

Johanna’s eyes were like the forest. The darkness of the forest, the watchfulness behind an ambush. Fear. I journeyed into the darkness of it. I walked from the place where my dress had fallen, carrying my breasts like gifts in my half-opened hands; I carried them to her as if expecting to be thrust by her mortally.

Johanna loosened her hair and said: “You are so extraordinarily white.” With a strange weight, like a sadness, she spoke. It was not the white substance of me, but my significance, the whiteness of my newness to life, which Johanna seemed to sigh for. “You are so white, so white and smooth.” And there were deep shadows in her eyes, shadows of one old with life; shadows in her neck, in her arms, and on her knees, violet shadows.

I wanted to reach out for her. I saw that Johanna wanted as much to become I as I wanted to become Johanna. I saw how we both wanted to exchange bodies, exchange faces. I saw in both of us the dark strain of wanting to be the other, to deny one’s self, one’s form, one’s reality. Johanna and I both struggling to deny our lives and our bodies: Johanna thinking she desired my newness, and I desiring Johanna’s deeply marked body.

I drank the violet shadows, drank the imprint of others, the accumulation of other hours, other rooms, other odors, other caresses. How all the others clung to Johanna’s body, made her heavy, heavy with the loss of herself, lost in the maze of her gifts! How the lies and the loves, and the dreams, and the obscenities and the fevers weighed down her body, and how I wanted to become leadened with her, poisoned with her!

Johanna looked at the whiteness of my body as into a mirror. She was herself standing at the beginning of all things, unblurred, unmarked. She wanted to stand at the beginning of all things. And I wanted to enter the labyrinth of knowledge, to the very bottom of the violet wells.

“Nubile, nubile,” dreamed Johanna. “I could so easily break you in two.”

Through the acrid forest of her being there was a vulnerable opening. I tread into it lightly. Caresses of down, and Johanna could do nothing against the moth invasion. Myrrh between our breasts. Incense in our mouths. Tendrils of hair raising their heads to the passing of wind in the tips of our fingers. The skin flowered under the brushing of lips and we discovered a softness like that of clouds about to burst and spill their honey. Clouds about to burst. Kisses curling into the conch-shell necks. The soft raised mounts touching as the salted pollen burned a passage-wy. Tendrils of hair bristling and between our closed lips a moan, a sigh, a sob.

Pounding of drums. Delirious sensual diffusions. Effulgence of face and breasts.

“How soft, how soft, how soft you are,” said Johanna, “how soft and treacherous.”

Cool. green-eyed fury and passion. The defence of lies. Weaving lies swiftly, like spider webs. Lies. Lies. I love no man. I love no man.

“But I see his image in your eyes. I feel him in you.”

Disguise. Infernos of doubts. Johanna, Johanna, we are not enemies. I was laughing. Peaks of faith and infernos of doubts. The taste of sacrilege. The mouths he kissed. The women whose savour he knows. Poisonous kisses. Culpable joys. Him. The one man within two women. Jealousy dormant, lying at our side, between our caresses, slipping in between our caresses.

(Johanna, Johanna, if you arouse hatred between us, you break the magic alliance and thrust us both into a world which is not as aware of us as we are of each other! All that he has failed to notice! All that he has failed to love in both of us, how delicately we have culled it, nourished each other, assuaged that famine for love, for minuteness in love! Assuaged with a woman-knowledge. Must we awake to the great pain of rivalry, the bleak war, when this hour contains all that slips between his fingers! The jewels in your voice which fall on my fantastic registering, the filigrane of my gestures which your eyes alone can follow, the words fallen which I alone can hear, the arrows of humiliations which I cover with velours and fur and brocade, the velours and incense of our words for each other, our power to lift every ordinary hour to a level of wonder— is it all to be lost, Johanna? It must not be lost. Stay in my arms. Let us keep our perfidious alliance. Together, we are queens, and we triumph. At war with each other, nourishing the hatred, we cripple each other.)

But jealousy had stirred in our flesh. We lay together, hair almost braided together, while the dawn entered the room.

(Johanna, you are afraid? You are doubting? Everything you fear is true. But you should be rejoicing that it is I and none other, I who am half of you! You don’t understand me. There is no treachery, only intermarriage, a trilogy, and passion running triangularly. But you look upon me as upon an enemy. I only completed you. But I am not complete without you. You crush the possibility of a miracle. You and I destroying solitude and fear and pain in one kiss, in one night—all the pain and rancor between women, centuries of war, buried in our twinsoft flesh, Johanna. You and I revolving around him. Your vulnerability and mine. I would always find a way to heal his thrusts.)

The grey dawn entered the room, a grey, gelatinous dawn, which showed the dirt on the window, the crack in the table, the stains on the wallpaper. Johanna and I sat up on the bed as if the dawn had opened our eyes. Slowly we seemed to descend from some dangerous height, with the weight of our fatigue and the appearance of the daylight. I saw on Johanna’s mouth the rouge spread by our kisses so that the shape of her mouth seemed lost. It was as if the colors had run.

Every cell of our dream seemed to burst all at once, with the doubt which had entered Johanna’s mind. Johanna’s face was changed. Her eyes seemed glazed, and her profile shrewd. Her serpent back stiffened, and I saw her gathering herself together as if to pounce. I felt the danger and I struggled to open my eyes, to prepare myself.

Doubt. Doubt was hardening and crystallizing in Johanna. It crystallized her features, her eyes, it tightened her mouth, it stiffened her body. I shivered with cold, with the icy incision of this new day which was laying everything bare.

Bare eyes looking at each other, with bare, knife-pointed questions.

Johanna leaped from the bed and stood before me, tense, ominous, and her words burned and rent the air like summer lightning.

“I’m not duped by your love of me,” she hissed. “I know you’re playing a foul trick on me. But you didn’t fool me. I knew about it long ago. I’ve been acting all the time. I pulled off a Lesbian act on you. You thought I loved you! I hate you! I could murder you. You sicken me with your lies. Say something! Don’t lie there with round, innocent eyes. I know that you and Hans…”

“I love you, Johanna,” I said quietly, “I love you.”

“And I loathe you!” screamed Johanna. “You’re shrewd and you’re devilish. I’ll say this much for you—at last he’s found his mate! Clever you are! Far more clever than him! You’ll devour him… Funny, he always said I would devour him. But wait! When he gets you he’ll get a real spider. Wait till he finds out that he’s got a Lesbian on his hands. He used to call me a Lesbian! Me! Me!”

She strode back and forth like a panther, she jerked her head spasmodically, and then turned on me tempestuously with a shriek in her voice:

“Say something! Say something, will you! I’d like to walk over your damned face, I’d like to crush it out, your damned innocent face, you little viper!”

She took the bracelets and flung them out of the window. Then she walked over to me, and with that hard, gem-like smile of the whore, and that low, begging voice, that obscene, begging voice of the whore, she said:

“Give me the money to go away! You can do that for me at least! I want to go back to the man I really love. Don’t worry—I won’t kill you!”

She moved away, heavily, as she spoke, almost stumbling, and with that crazy, peaked, demonic smile of hers she cried:

“Do you hear me? Now—now you have the final chapter for your book!”

At this I leaped up with a sob: “Cheap! Cheap!” I shouted. “Don’t be cheap! I’ll forgive you anything, Johanna, but for God’s sake don’t cheapen yourself.” Hysterically, my voice thin and desperate, I repeated again: “It’s so cheap! So cheap! Don’t you say that! Not you, Johanna!”

Then suddenly all my anger seemed to be washed away. All my resentment. I seemed to be falling into darkness. Fog. The weight, the tremendous weight ofmy head pulled up by the clouds and swung in space, the body like a wisp of straw—clouds dragging my head, body loose and dangling—dragging me over the world. I could not stop, descend, rest. I could hear the movements of the planets and stars, the rushing, the shifting and shuffling of circles. I could hear the passing of mysteries and the breathing of monsters. I lived within a mystery. In the dark I always stretched my hand and touched Hans. My eyes were closed. The eyes of reality. To feel and to flow without destroying the dewiness of events by dissection… The dew… The night. The moisture of things and of human beings. The aureole of our breath…

But it was not the night. It was day. It was a lead-colored day and Johanna was shaking me violently.

“Put your dress on quickly. I’ve an idea Hans has been listening behind the door all night.”

She seemed electrified. We were both trembling.

“If you won’t admit anything, I’ll make him confess. But I don’t want him to find us in bed together…”

When I was dressed Johanna went stealthily to the door, and then opened it brusquely. There was no one there. I followed her out of the room and watched her open the door of the other bedroom. I looked over Johanna’s shoulder.

Hans was lying there, asleep. His face roseate, his mouth joyous. Even when his eyes were closed they seemed to be laughing.

HE WAS PROFOUNDLY ASLEEP AND SNORING.




LILITH


I am waiting for him. I have waited for him for twenty years. He is coming to-day.

I have almost grown old waiting. Will he be old?

This glass bowl with the glass fish and the glass ship—it has been the sea for me and the ship which carried me away from him after he abandoned me. Why have I loved ships so deeply, why have I always wanted to sail away from this world? Why have I always dreamed of flight, of departure?

To-day this past from which I have struggled to escape strikes me like a whip. But to-day I can bear the lash of it because he is coming and I know that the circle of empty waiting will close.

How well I remember our home near the sea, the villa which was in ruins. I am nine years old. I arrive there with my mother and two brothers. My father is standing behind a window, watching. His face is pale, he does not seem to be happy to see us. I feel that he does not want us, that he does not want me. His anger seems to be directed against all of us, but it touches me more acutely, as if it were directed entirely against me. We are not wanted, why I do not understand. My mother says to him: “It will good for Lilith here.” There is no smile on his face. He does not seem to notice that I am wasted by fever, that I am hungry for a smile.

There is never a smile on his face except when there are visitors, except when there is music and talk. When we are alone in the house there is always war: great explosions of anger, hatred, revolt. War. War at meals, war over our heads when my brothers and I are left in bed at night, war in the room under our feet when we are playing. War. War…

In the closed study, or in the parlor, there was always a mysterious activity. Music, rehearsals, visitors, laughter. I saw my father always in movement, always alert, tense, either passionately gay or passionately angry. When the door opened my father appeared—luminous. incandescent. A vital passage, even when he passed from one room to another. A gust of wind. A mystery. Not a reality like my mother with her healthy red cheeks, her appetite, her frank, natural laughter.

Never any serenity, never any time for caresses, for softness. Tension always. A life ripped by dissension. Even while we were playing the dark fury of their perpetual warring hung over us like a shadow. A constant uneasiness, a continual mystery, blows and threats and curses and recriminations. Never a moment of complete joy. Aware always of the battles that were about to explode.

One day there was a scene of such violence that I was terrified. An immense, irrational terror overwhelmed me. My mother was goading my father to such anger that I thought he would kill her. My father’s face was blue-white. I began to scream. I screamed until they became alarmed. For a few days there was an interval of quiet. A truce. A pretense of peace.

The walls of my father’s library were covered with books. Often I stole into the library and I read the books which I found there, books which I did not understand. Within me there was a well of secret thoughts which I could not express, which perhaps I might have formulated if some one had leaned over them with tenderness. The one person who might have aided me terrified me. My father’s eyes were always cold, critical, unbelieving. He would not believe the drawings I showed him were mine. He thought I had traced them. He did not believe that I had written the poems which were handed to him. He thought I had copied them. He flew into a rage because he could not find the books from which he imagined I had copied my poems and drawings.

He doubted everything about me, even my illnesses. In the train once, going to Berlin where he was to give a concert, I had such an ear ache that I began to weep… “If you don’t stop crying and go to sleep,” he said, “I’ll beat you.” I stuffed my ear under the pillow so that he wouldn’t hear my sobs. I sobbed all the way to Berlin. When we got there they discovered that I had an abscess in my ear.

Another time he was taken down with an attack of appendicitis. My mother was tending him, fussing over him, running about anxiously. He lay there very pale in the big bed. I came from the street where I had been playing and I told my mother that I was in pain. Immediately my father said: “Don’t pay any attention to her, she’s just acting. She’s just imitating me.” But I did have an attack of appendicitis. I had to be taken to the hospital and operated on. My father, on the other hand, had recovered. He was in bed only three days.




Such cruelty! I ask myself—was he really cruel, or was it mere selfishness? Was he just a big child who could not bear to have a rival, even in the person of his own daughter? I do not know. I am waiting for him now. I want to tell him everything. I want to hear what he has to say. I want to hear him say that he loves me. I don’t know why I should love him so much. I can’t believe that he meant to be so cruel. I love him.

Because he was so critical, so severe, so suspicious of me, I became secretive and lying. I would never say what I really thought. I was afraid of him. I lied like an Arab. I lied to elude his stern glances, his cold, menacing blue eyes. I invented another world, a world of make-believe, of illusion, of games, of comedies. I tyrannized over my two brothers. I taught them games, I amused them, acted for them, enchanted them, tortured them. I was a spitfire and they loved me. They never deserted me, even for a moment. They were simple, honest, frank. I complicated everything, even the games we played.

In Berlin, when I was five years old, I ran away from home. I packed a croissant and a dress and I ran away. There was a seven year old boy waiting for me round the corner. His name was Heinrich.

I was a pale, sickly child. The doctor in Berlin had said: “She must live in her native climate. Take her back.” But there was no money for that. My youngest brother had just been born. There was no money in the house—except for books and music, for a fur-lined coat, for the cologne water which my father had to sprinkle over his handkerchiefs, for the silk shirts which he demanded when he went on his concert tours.

At the villa near the sea I lie in bed and weep all night without knowing why. But there is a garden attached to the villa. A beautiful garden in which one can get lost. I sit by the big Gothic window studded with colored stones and I look out through a prismatic-colored stone in the centre of the window; I sit there for hours at a stretch gazing upon this mysterious other world. Colors. Deformations. Trees that are ruby-colored. Orange skies. I get the feeling that there are other worlds, that one might escape from this one which is so full of misery. I think a great deal about this other world.

About my father there is an aureole of fragrance, of immaculateness, of elegance. His clothes are never wrinkled, he wears clean linen every day and the fur collar on his coat is wonderful to caress. Mother is dowdy, busy, bustling, maternal. Mother is never elegant.

Since he often leaves us to go on concert tours we have become so used to father’s departures that we barely cease playing to embrace him. I remember now the day he was leaving to go on tour. He was standing at the door, elegant, aristocratic. He looked the same as always. Suddenly, moved by an acute premonition, I threw myself on him and clung to him passionately. “Don’t go, father! Don’t leave me!” I begged. I had to be torn away. I wept so violently that my father was startled. Even now I can feel again the effort my mother made to loosen my clutch. I can still see the hesitancy in my father’s face. I begged and implored him to stay. I clung to him desperately, my fingers knotted in his clothes. I remember the effort he made to wrench himself loose and how he walked swiftly off without once looking back. I remember too that my mother was surprised by my despair. She couldn’t understand what had possessed me to behave as I did.




Since that day I have not seen my father. Twenty years have passed. He is coming to-day. I am thirty years old…




We entered New York harbor, my mother, my two brothers and I, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. The Spaniards aboard the ship were terrified; some of them were kneeling in prayer. They had reason to be terrified—the bow of the ship had been struck by lightning. When finally we came alongside the pier a group of newsboys clambered up the gangplank shouting “Extra! Extra!” We learned that war had been declared. I saw the passengers reading the papers excitedly. I knew that something terrible had happened, but I was indifferent, I had no desire to read about the war. I busied myself making a last minute entry in my diary, the diary which I had begun when we left Barcelona.

I had intended to send my father the first volume of my diary as soon as it was finished. It was a monologue, or dialogue, dedicated to him, inspired by the superabundance of thoughts and feelings caused by the pain of leaving him. With the sea between us I felt that at least I might be able to reveal to him my innermost thoughts. that I might be able to reveal to him with absolute sincerity the great love I bore him, as well as my sadness and my yearning.

We arrived in New York with huge wicker baskets, a cage full of birds, a violin case and no money. I carried my diary in a basket. I was timid, withdrawn. I caught only fleeting patches of this new reality surrounding me. At the pier there were aunts and cousins awaiting us. The negro porters threw themselves on our belongings. I remember vividly how I clung to my brother’s violin case. I wanted everybody to know that I was an artist.

Entering the subway I observe immediately what a strange place New York is—the staircases move up and down by themselves. And in the train hundreds of mouths chewing, masticating. My little brother asks: “Are Americans ruminants?”

I am eleven years old. My mother is absent most of the day searching for work. There are socks to darn and dishes to wash. I have to bathe and dress my brothers. I have to amuse them, aid them with their lessons. The days are full of bleak effort in which great sacrifices are demanded of all of us. Though I experience a tremendous relief in helping my mother, in serving her faithfully, I feel nevertheless that the color and the fragrance has gone out of our life. When I hear music, when I hear laughter and talk in the room where my mother gives singing lessons, I am saddened by a feeling of something lost.

And so, little by little. I shut myself up within the walls of my diary. I hold long conversations with myself, through the diary. I talk to my diary, address it by name, as if it were a living person, my other self perhaps. Looking out the window which gives on our ugly backyard I imagine to myself that I am looking at parks, castles, golden grilles, and exotic flowers. Within the covers of the diary I create another world wherein I tell the truth, in contrast to the multiple lies which I spin when I am conversing with others, as for instance telling my playmates that I had travelled all around the world, describing to them the places which I had read about in my father’s library.

The yearning for my father becomes a long, continuittle. plaint. Every page contains pleas to him, invocations to God to reunite us—hours and hours of suffocating moods, of dreams and reveries, of feverish restlessness, of morbid, sombre memories and longings. I cannot bear to listen to music, especially the arias my mother sings—”Ever since the day,” “Some day he’ll come,” etc. She seems to choose only the songs which will remind me of him.

I feel crippled, lost, transplanted, rebellious. I am alone a great deal. My mother is healthy, exuberant, full of plans for the future. When I am moody she chides me. If I confess to her she laughs at me. She seems to doubt the sincerity of my feelings. She attributes my moods to my over-developed imagination, or else she lays it to my blood. When she is angry she shouts: “Mauvaise graine, va!” She is often angry now, but not with us. She is obliged to fight for us every day of her life. It requires all her courage, all her buoyancy and optimism, to face the world. New York is hostile, cold, indifferent.

We are immigrants, and we are made to feel it. Even on Christmas Eve we are left alone—she has to sing at the church in order to earn a few pennies.

The great crime, she makes us feel, is our resemblance to our father. Each flare of temper, each tragic outburst is severely condemned. Even my paleness serves to remind her of him. “He too always looked pale and ready to die, but it was all nonsense,” she says. Every day she adds a little touch to the image we have kept of him. My younger brother’s rages, his wildness, his destructiveness, all this comes from Father. My imagination, my exaggerations, my fantasies, my lies, my beautiful edifice of lies, these too spring from my father.

It is true. Everything springs from him, even the lies which originated from the books I had read in his library. When I told the children at school that I had once travelled through Russia in a covered wagon it was not a lie either, because in my mind I had made this journey through snow-covered Russia time and time again. The cold of New York revived the memories of my father’s books, of the journeys I longed to take with him whenever I saw him go away. To face the cold of New York required a superhuman effort. Standing in the snow in Central Park feeding the pigeons I wanted to die. The dread of facing the snow and frost each morning paralyzed me. Our school was only around the corner, but I had not the courage to leave the house. My mother had to ask the negro janitor to drag me to school. “Po’ thing,” he would say, “you ought to live down south.” He would lend me his woollen gloves and slap me to get warm…

Only in the diary could I reveal my true self, my true feelings. What I really desired was to be left alone with my diary and my dreams of my father. In solitude I was happy. My head was seething with ideas. I described every phase of our life in detail, minute, childish details which seem ridiculous and absurd now, but which were intended to convey to my father the need that we felt for his presence. Though I detested New York I painted a picture of it in glowing terms, hoping that it would entice him to come. And when at last I had finished the first volume of my diary, when I had wrapped it tenderly and addressed it to him in my own hand, my mother informed me sorrowfully that it was useless to send it to him because mail from America would never reach Paris. She bade me wait until the war was concluded.




And so once again I am thrust back into my world of illusion. When, in order to amuse my brothers, I impersonate Marie-Antoinette as she marches proudly to the guillotine, I stand on a chariot of chairs with a white lace cap and I weep real tears. I weep over the martyrdom of Marie-Antoinette because I am aware of my own martyrdom. A million times my hair will turn white overnight and the crowd jeer at me. A million times I will lose my throne, my husband, my children, and my life. At eleven years of age I am searching, in the lives of the great, for analogies to the drama and events of my own life which I feel is destined to be shattered at every turn of the road. In acting the roles of other personages I feel that I am piecing together the fragments of my shattered life. Only in the fever of creation can I recreate my own lost life. When in the thunderous voice of Marat I demand a hundred thousand heads I am demanding the vengeance which later I will take with my own hands.

There is a passage in this early diary wherein I say that I would like to relive my life in Spain. It amazes me now when I reread it. Already, at that early age, I was bemoaning the irreversibility of life. Already I was aware of how the past dies. I reexamine what I had written about New York for my father because I feel that I have not done justice to it. I watch each minute of the day as I live so that nothing will be lost. I regret the minutes passing. I weep without knowing why, since I am young and have not yet known any real suffering. But, without being fully aware of it, I had already experienced my greatest sorrow, the irreparable loss of my father. I did not know it then, as indeed most of us never know when it is that we experience the full measure of joy, or of sorrow. But our feelings penetrate us like a poison of undetectable nature. We have sorrows of which we do not know the origin or name.

I had never openly expressed my love to my father. He thought me proud and isolate, and strange and wayward. My mother regarded me as an actress. Neither of them believed in me, neither of them took me into their confidence. And it was so terribly necessary that I have some one to confide in, some one who would listen and silently assent, or silently pass judgment on my doings. But there was no one.

I remember a night before Christmas when, in utter desperation, I began to believe that my father was coming, that he would arrive Christmas Day. Even though it was that very day I had received a postcard from him, even though I was obliged to admit to myself that Arcachon was indeed too far away for my hopes to be realized, still a sense of the miraculous impelled me to expect what was humanly impossible. I got down on my knees and I prayed to God to perform a miracle. I looked for my father all Christmas Day, and again on my birthday, a month or so later. To-day he will come. Or to-morrow. Or the next day. Each disappointment was baffling and terrifying to me.

To-day he is coming. I am sure of it. But how can I be sure? I am standing on the edge of a crater.

My true God was my father. At communion it was my father I received, and not God. I closed my eyes and swallowed the white bread with blissful tremors. I embraced my father in holy communion. My exaltation fused into a semblance of holiness. I aspired to saintliness in order to conceal the secret love which I guarded so jealously in my diary. The voluptuous tears at night when I prayed to God, the joy without name when I stood in his presence, the inexplicable bliss at communion, because then I talked with my father and I kissed him.

I worshipped him so passionately that I grew old and the form of his image grew blurred. But I had not lost him. His image was buried deep in the most mysterious regions of my being. On the surface there remained the image created by my mother—his egoism, his neglectfulness, his irresponsibility, his love of luxury. When for a time my immense yearning seemed to have exhausted itself, when it appeared that I had almost forgotten this man whom my mother described so bitterly, it was only the announcement of the fact that his image had become fluid; it ran in subterranean channels, through my blood. Consciously I was no longer aware of him; but in another way his existence was even stronger than before. Submerged, yet magically ineffaceable, he floated in my blood.

At thirteen I record in my diary that I want to marry a man who looks like the Count of Monte Cristo. Apart from the mention of black eyes it is my father’s portrait which I give: “A man so strong… with very white teeth, with a pale and mysterious face… a grave walk, a distant smile… I would like him to tell me all about his life, a very sad life, full of harrowing adventures… I would like him to be proud and haughty… to play some instrument…”

The image created by my mother, added to the blurred memories of a child, do not compose a being; yet in my haunting quest I fashioned an imagined individual whose fragments I pursued relentlessly. The blue eyes of a boy in school, the talent of a young violinist, a pale face seen in the street—these fleeting aspects of the image that was buried deep in my blood moved me to tears. To listen to music was unbearable. When my mother sang I exhausted myself in sobs.

In this record which I have faithfully kept for twenty years I speak of my diary as of my shadow, my double; I say I will only marry my double. As far as I knew this double was the diary which was full of reflections, like a mirror, which could change shape and color and serve all kinds of imaginative substitutions. This diary which I had intended to send to my father, which was to be a revelation of my love for him, became by an accident of fate a secretive thing, another wall between myself and that world which it seemed forbidden me ever to enter.

I would have liked great love and affection, confidence, openness. My father, I felt certain, would have rejected me—his standards were too severe. I wrote him once that I thought he had abandoned me because I was not an intelligent nor pretty enough daughter. I was a perpetually offended being who fancied that she was not wanted. This fear of not being wanted weighed down on me like a perpetual icy condemnation.

To-day, when he arrives, will I be able to lift my head? Will I be able to keep my head lifted, will I be able to stand the cold look in his eyes when I raise my eyes to his? Will my body not tremble with fear when I hear his voice? After twenty years I am still obsessed by the fear of him. But now I feel that it is in his power to absolve me of all fear. Perhaps it is he who will fear me. Perhaps he is coming to receive the judgment which I alone can mete out to him. To-day the circle of empty waiting will be broken. I am waiting for him to embrace me, to say with his own lips that he loves me. I have made a God of him and I have been punished. Now when he comes I want to make him a man again, to make him a human father. I do not want to fear him any longer. I do not want to write another line in my diary. I want him to smash this monument which I have erected to him and accept me in my own right. To-day when he comes I want to tear out this secret which I have kept inside me so long. It is strangling me. I want him to come and deliver me.

He is coming now. I hear his steps.

* * *


I expected the man of the photographs, the young man of the photographs. I had not tried to imagine what twenty years had done to his face.

It was not any older, there were no wrinkles in it, but there was a mask over it. His face was a mask. The skin did not match the sensitive skin of his wrists. It seemed made of earth and papier mache. It was not pure skin. There must have been a little space between it and the real face, a little partition through which the breeze could sing, and behind this mask another smile, another face, and skin like that of his wrists, white and vulnerable.

At the sight of me waiting on the doorstep he smiled, a feminine smile, and moved towards me with a neat compact grace, ease, youthfulness.

I felt unsettled. This man coming towards me did not seem at all like a father. It seemed to me that his first words were words of apology. After he had taken off his gloves, and verified by his watch that he was on time—it was very important to him to be on time—after he had kissed me and told me that I had become very beautiful, almost immediately it seemed to me that I was listening to an apology, an explanation of why he had left us. It was as if behind me there stood a judge, a tall judge whom I could not see, and to this judge my father addressed a beautifully polished speech, a marvellous speech to which I listened with admiration, for the logic was so beautiful, the smooth chain of phrases, the long and flawless story of my mother’s imperfections, of all that he had suffered, the manner in which all the facts of their life were presented, all made a perfect and eloquent pleading, addressed to a judge I could not see and with whom I had nothing to do. He had not come out free of his past. Taking out a gold-tipped cigarette and with infinite care placing it in a holder which contained a filter for the nicotine, he related the story I had heard from my mother, all with an accent of apology and defense.

I had no time to tell him that I understood that they had not been made to live together, that it was not a question of faults and defects, but of alchemy, that this alchemy had created war, that there was no one to blame or to judge but their marriage. Already my father was launched on an apology of why he had stayed all winter in the south; he did not say that he had enjoyed it, but that it had been absolutely necessary to his well-being. It seemed to me as he talked that he was just as ashamed to have left us as he was of having spent the winter in the South when he should have been in Paris giving concerts.

I waited for him to lose sight of this judge standing behind me for which I was not responsible and then, plunging into the present, into our present, I said:

“It’s scandalous to have such a young father.”

“Do you know what I used to fear?” h said. “That you might come too late to see me laughing—too late for me to have the power to make you laugh. In June when I go South again you must come with me. They will take you for my mistress, that’s certain. It will be delightful.”

I was standing against the mantelpiece. He was looking at my hands, admiring them. I jerked backwards, pushing the crystal bowl against the wall. It cracked and the water gushed forth as from a fountain, splashing all over the floor. The glass ship could no longer sail away—it was lying on its side, on the rock crystal stones.

We stood looking at the broken bowl and at the water forming a pool on the floor.

“Perhaps I’ve arrived at my port at last,” I said. “Perhaps I’ve come to the end of my wanderings. I have found you.”

“We’ve both done a lot of wandering,” he said.

“I not only played the piano in every city of the world… sometimes when I look at the map, it seems to me that even the tiniest villages could be replaced by the names of women. Wouldn’t it be funny if I had a map of women, of all the women I have known before you, of all the women I have had? Fortunately I am a musician, and my women remain incognito. When I think about them it comes out as a do or a la, and who could recognize them in a sonata? What husband would come and kill me for expressing my passion for his wife in terms of a quartet?”

When he was not smiling, his face was a Greek mask, his blue eyes enigmatic, the features sharp and wilful. He appeared cold and formal. I realized it was his mask which had terrorized me as a child. The softness came only in flashes, swift as lightning, like breaks. Unexpectedly, he broke when he smiled, the hardness broke, and the softness which came was so feminine, so exposed, giving and seducing with the beauty of the teeth, exposing a dimple which he said was not a dimple at all, but a scar from the time he had slid down the bannister.

As a child I had the obscure fear that this man could never be satisfied, by life, by human beings… by the world. Nothing but perfection would do. It was this sense of his exactingness which haunted me, an obscure awareness of his expectations which excited me to the great efforts I had made. But to-day I told myself that I had strained enough, that I wanted to rest, that I had waited a long time for it. I felt I did not want to appear before him until I was complete, and could satisfy him.

I wanted to enjoy. My life had been a long strain, one long effort to surpass myself, to create, to perfect, a desperate and anxious flight upwards, always aiming higher, seeking greater difficulties, accumulating victories, loves, books, creations, always shedding yesterday’s woman to pursue a new vision.

To-day I wanted to enjoy…

We were walking into a new world together, into a new planet, a world of transparency, where all that happened to us since that day I clung to him desperately was reduced to its essence, to a skeleton, to a silhouette. His vision and his talk were abstract; his rigorous selection acted like an intense searchlight which annihilated everything around us: the color oom, the smell of tabac blond, the warmth of the log fire, the spring sunlight showing its pale face on the studio window, the flash of his gold ring flashing his coat of arms, the immaculateness of his shirt cuffs. Everything vanished around us, the walls, the rug under our feet, the chair we sat on, the velvet pillow under my elbow, the satin rays of my dress, the orange rim of my sleeve, the orange reflections of the walls, the branches swinging before the windows, the bark of the dog, the clock ticking, the books leaning against each other, the soft backs of French books yielding under the stiff-backed English books, the indoor air like human breath and the awareness of the other air outside cooler and lighter than our breath, the lightness and swiftness of his Spanish voice, his Spanish words bowing and smiling between the French… I could only see the point he watched, the intense focussing upon the meaning of our lives, the clear outline of our patterns, and his questions. What are you to-day? What do you believe? What do you think? What do you read? What do you love? What is your music, your rhythm, your language, your vocabulary? What is your climate? What hour of the day do you love best? What are your whims? Your extravagances? Your antipathies? Who are your enemies? Who is your god? Who is your demon? What haunts you? What frightens you? What gives you courage? Whom do you love? What do you remember? What image have you of me? What have you been? Are we strangers, with twenty years between us? Does your blood obey me? Have I made you? Are you my daughter? Are you my father? Have we dreamed? Are we real? Is our life real? Is anything real? Are we here? Do I understand you?

“You are my daughter. We think the same. We laugh at the same things. I was twenty-five when you came into the world. You owe me nothing, you’ve created your self alone, but I gave you the seed.”

He was walking back and forth, the whole length of the studio, asking questions, and every answer I gave was the echo in his own soul. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Blood echoes. Yes, yes to everything. Exactly. I knew it. That is what I hoped. The same. Father and daughter. Unison. The same rhythm.

We were not talking. We were merely corroborating each other’s theories. Our phrases interlocked.

I was a woman, I had to live in a world built by the man I loved, live by his system. In the world I made alone I was lonely. I, being a woman, had to live in a man-made world, could not impose my own, but here was my father’s world, it fitted me. With him I could run through the world in seven-leagued boots. He thought and felt the same thing at the same time.

“Never knew anything but solitude,” said my father. “I never knew a woman I could take into my world.”

We did not speak of the harm we had done each other. The disease we carried in us we did not reveal. He did not know that the tragedy which had marked the first years of my life still colored it to-day. He did not know that the feeling of being abandoned was still as strong in me despite the fact that I knew it was not me who had been abandoned but my mother, that he had not really abandoned me but simply tried to save his own life. He did not know that this feeling was still so strong in me that anything which resembled abandon created a violent inner storm in me: a door closed on me too brusquely, a letter unanswered, a friend going away on a trip, the maid leaving to get married, the least mark of absent-dedness, two people talking and forgetting to include me, or some one sending greetings to some one and forgetting me.

The smallest incident could arouse an anguish as great as that caused by death, and could reawaken the pain of separation as keenly as I had experienced it the day my father had gone away.

In an effort to combat this anguish I had crowded my world richly with friends, loves and creations.

But beyond the moment of conquest there was again a desert. The joys given to me by friend, lover, or book just written, were endangered by the fear of loss. Just as some people are perpetually aware of death, I was perpetually aware of the pain of separation and the inevitability of it.

And beyond this, I also treated the world as if it were an ailing, abandoned child. I never put an end to a friendship of my own accord, I never abandoned anyone; I spent my life healing others of this fear wherever I saw it shadowed, pitying the whole world and giving it the illusion of faithfulness, durability, solidity. I was incapable of scolding, of pushing away, of cutting ties, of breaking relationships, of interrupting a correspondence, of throwing out a servant.

* * *


My father was telling me the story of the homely little governess he had made love to because otherwise she would never know what love was. He took her out in his beautiful car and made her lie on the heather just as the sun was going down so he would not have to see too much of her face. He enjoyed her happiness at having an adventure, the only one she would ever have. When she came to his room in the hotel he covered the lamp with a handkerchief, and again he enjoyed her happiness, and taught her how to do her hair, how to rouge her lips and powder her face. The adventure made her almost beautiful.

We were talking about our escapades. Skirting the periphery of our lives, maintaining ourselves there because we knew that by dwelling on our adventures, on the gestures we made without love, we saved ourselves from talking about love. We wanted to give each other the illusion of having been faithful to each other always, and of being free to devote our whole life to each other.

My father said: “Take your elbows off the table!” I was telling him about the books I read, the explorations, the voyages, the discoveries.

My father said: “Take your elbows off the table!”

I was explaining to my father that I had been exposing myself to every danger with joy, that I love risk, I love danger. It was very comical of him to frown and to ask me to take my elbows off the table as if I were a child, because I was so much older than he was; all I was telling him was so much older than his stories of perfumed countesses waiting for him in the reception room after the concerts in Poland, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Hungary. All these perfumed women with wrinkless dresses giving him silver cigarette cases. Always the same. Bathed, perfumed, manicured women. Notes. Rendez-vous. The same words exchangeNone of them leaving a memory. He couldn’t even remember their names. So I take my elbows off the table, my father, but I am so much older than you in daring…

Suddenly I stopped and asked him laughingly: “Did you ever take them to the same room, each new woman to the same room, as if you wanted each new adventure to efface the other? Or perhaps only to compare, or to desecrate?”

“I did! I did!” He said this in a tone of exultancy, as if he had discovered the most important point of resemblance between us. This little detail seemed to him to indicate a profound sameness of feeling.

“I wonder why…?”

He did not know, but the very memory of it gave him a colorful pleasure. His face colored with pleasure and laughter.

“I also liked giving the handkerchief given to me by one lover to another, lending the book belonging to one to another; I liked nothing more than to find them together in the same room, to feel the full flavor of my secrets and my treacheries.”

He forgot all about the elbows.

Love had not been mentioned yet. Yet it was love alone which obsessed us. Not music, not writing, not painting, not decorating, not costuming, but love, the orchestration of love, its metamorphosis. I was living in a furnace of love, a blaze all around. Obsessional loves, passionate loves, sensual loves, love in mystery, in darkness, in resistance, in contrast, love in fraternity, gratitude, imagination. Loving maternally, loving as the artist can love with all my senses. A passion for man, for woman, for change… Changing every day from woman to mother, lulling in my arms at night the men whom I fought and tantalized during the day.

“I do think,” he said, “that we should give up all this for the sake of each other. These women mean nothing to me. But the idea of devoting my whole life to you, of sacrificing adventure to something far more marvellous and deep, appeals so much to me…”

“But I have not been living out adventure only…”

He stopped me and said:

“You should give him up. That isn’t love at all. You know I’ve been your only great love…”

I did not want to say: “not my only great love,” but he seemed to have guessed my thought because he turned his eyes completely away from me and added: “Remember, I am an old man, I haven’t so many years left to enjoy you…”

With this phrase, which was actually untrue because he was only fifty-five years old and younger than most men of his age, he seemed to be asking me for my life, almost to be reaching out to take full possession of my life, just as he had taken my soul away with him when I was a child. It seemed to me that he wanted to take it away now again, when I was a full-blown woman. It seemed natural to him that I should have mourned his loss throughout my childhood. It was true that he was on the oad to death, drawing nearer and nearer to it; it was also true that I had loved him so much that perhaps a part of me might follow him and perish with him, just as the child of nine had followed him and perished with him. Would I die again with him? Would I follow him from year to year—his withering, his vanishing? Was my love a separate thing, or a part of his life? Would I leave the earth with him to-day? He was asking me to leave the earth to-day—and this time I could not. This time I felt that he did not have the power to take my life again in his hands. This time I felt that I would fight against locking myself in with him, giving myself up wholly. I would not die a second time.

Having been so faithful to his image as I bad been, having loved his image in other men, having pursued the men who played piano, the men who talked brilliantly, intellectuals, teachers, philosophers, doctors, every man with blue eyes, every man with an adventurous life, every Don Juan—was it not to give him my absolute love at the end? Why did I draw away, draw away and at the same moment decide to give him the illusion he wanted—but not the abdication, not the absolute.

* * *


Six silver grey valises, the scent of tabac blond, the gleam of polished nails, the wave of immaculate hands. My father leaped down from the train and already he was beginning a story. “There was a woman on the train. She sent me a message. Would I have dinner with her? Knew all about me… had sung my songs in Norway. I was too tired, with this damnable lumbago coming on, and besides, I can’t put my mind on women any longer. I can only think of my betrothed.”

In the elevator he over-tipped the boy, he asked for news of the negro’s wife who had been sick, he advised a medicine, he ordered an appointment with the hairdresser for the next day, he took stock of the weather predictions, he ordered special biscuits and a strict vegetarian diet. The fruit had to be washed with sterilized water. And was the flautist still in the neighborhood, the one who used to keep him awake?

In the room he would not let me help him unpack his bags. He was cursing his lumbago. He seemed to have a fear of intimacy, almost as if he had hidden a crime in his valises.

“This old carcass must be subjugated,” he said.

He moved like a cat. Great softness. Yet when he wanted to he could show powerful muscles. He believed in concealing one’s strength.

We walked out into the sun, he looking like a Spanish grandee. He could look straight into the sun, and the tenseness of his will when he said, for instance, “I want,” made him rigid from head to foot, like silex.

As I watched him bending over so tenderly to pick up an insect from the road in order to lay it safely on a leaf, addressing this insect in a soft whimsical tone, preaching to it about its recklessness in thus crossing a road on which so many automobiles passed, I asked myself why it was that as a child I could only remember him as a cruel person. Why could I remember no tenderness or care on his part? Nothing but fits of angerand severity of annoyance when we were noisy, of beatings, of a cold, reserved face at meals.

As I watched him playing with the concierge’s dog I wondered why I could not remember him ever sitting down to play with us; I wondered whether this conception I had of my father’s cruelty was not entirely imaginary. I could not piece together his gentleness with animals and his hardness towards his children. He lived in his world like a scientist occupied with the phenomena of nature. The ways of insects aroused his curiosity; he liked to experiment, but the phenomena which the lives of his children offered, their secrets, their perplexities, had no interest for him, or rather they disturbed him.

It was really a kind of myopia of the soul.

The day after we arrived he was unable to move from his bed. He asked me to find him a pair of pyjamas with a Russian collar; they had to be pearl-grey and soft to touch, because he could not bear coarse textures.

I set out quickly to fulfill his wish. For the moment it seemed enormously important to me that the pyjamas should have a Russian collar and be made of delicate fabric. It seemed important not to offend the regal taste of the man who was lying stiffly in bed with sad, exacting, blue eyes always clouded with discontent.

Everybody in the little shops along the seashore declared that such pyjamas had never been seen.

I came back to him with the feeling that a day in which one of my father’s desires had not been fulfilled was a day wasted.

After the pyjamas a special German medicine had to be found. Samba, the elevator man, was sent out to hunt for it. The bus driver was dispatched to get a special brand of English crackers. Paris had to be phoned to make sure the musical magazines were being forwarded. Telegrams came, letters, telephone calls, Samba perspiring, the bus man covered with dust, the German medicine, the Russian pyjamas, postpone the hairdresser, order a special menu for dinner, Samba is there any mail, will you get the newspaper, no these won’t do all, telephone the doctor, he is having dinner, the spaghetti is overdone, Samba perspiring, the elevator running up and down…

There were no other guests in the hotel—the place seemed to be run expressly for us. The waiters gave us the most minute attention—our meals were brought to the room. Mosquito nettings were installed, the furniture was changed around, his own linen sheets with large initials were placed on the bed, his silver hair brushes on the dresser, the plumber ordered to subdue a noisy water pipe, the rusty shutters were oiled, the proprietor was informed that all hotel rooms should have double doors. Noise was his greatest enemy. His nerves, as vibrant as the strings of a violin, had endowed or cursed him with uncanny hearing. A fly in the room could prevent him from sleeping. He had to put cotton in his ears in order to dull his over-sensitive hearing.

He began talking about his childhood—so vividly that I thought we were back in Spain. I could feel again the noonday heat, could hear the beaded curtains parting: footsteps on tiled floors, the cool, green shadows of shuttered rooms, women in white negligees, the smell of carnations, the holy water, the dried palms at the head of the bed, the pictures of the Vrgin in lace and satin, wicker arm chairs, the servants singing in the courtyard…

He used to read under his bed, by the light, a candle so that his father would not find him out. He had only fifty centimes a week. He had to make cigarettes out of straw. He was always hungry. He gave piano lessons to his father’s pupils, and while they played the piano with one hand, with the other hand they played… on other instruments. It went on like that—five or six lessons a day—and he never got tired. Finally he got the little girls to come without their pants, which made things easier. He cut holes in his pockets so that they could go on playing with their two free hands and nobody noticed anything amiss. He was getting more and more popular as a piano teacher.

We laughed together.

He didn’t have enough money for the Merry-go-round. His mother used to sew at night so that she could afford to rent a bicycle the next day.

He looked out of the window from his bed and saw the birds sitting on the telegraph wires—one on each wire.

“Look,” he said, “I’ll sing you the melody they make sitting up there.” And he sang it. “It’s all in the key of humor.”

“When I was a child I used to write stories in which I was always left an orphan and forced to face the world alone.”

“Did you want to get rid of me?” asked my father.

“I don’t think so. I think I only wanted to struggle with life alone. I think I suffered from pride, which prevented me from coming to you until I felt ready…”

“What happened in all those stories?”

“I met with gigantic difficulties and obstacles. I overcame them. I was handed a bigger portion of suffering than is usual—imaginary suffering. Without mother and without father I fought the world, angry seas, hunger, horrible step-parents. There were mysteries, pursuits, torture, all kinds of danger…”

“Don’t you think you’re still doing that?”

“Perhaps. Then there was another story, a story of a boat in a garden. Suddenly I was sailing down a river and I went round and round for twenty years without getting anywhere.”

“Was that because you didn’t have me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was because I was waiting to become a woman. In all the fairy tales where the child is taken away she either returns when she is twenty or the father returns to the daughter when she is twenty.”

“He waits till she gets beyond the stage of having to have her nose blown. He waits for the interesting age.”

* * *


My father’s jealousy began with the reading of my childhood diary. He observed that after two years of obsessional yearning for him I had finally exhausted my suffering and attained serenity. After serenity I had fallen in love with an Irish boy and then with a violinist. He was offended that I had not died completely, that I had not spent the rest of my life yearning for him. He did not understand that I had continued to love him better by living than by dying for him. I had loved him in life, lived for him and created for him. I had written the diary for him. I had loved him by falling in love at the age of eleven with the ship’s captain who might have taken me back to Spain. I had loved him by taking his place at my mother’s side and becoming logical and intellectual in imitation of him, not through any natural gifts for either. I had loved him by playing the father to my brothers, the husband to my mother, by giving courage, strength, by denying my feminine, emotional self. I had loved him in life creatively by writing about him.

It is true that I did not die altogether—I lived in creations. Nor did I wear black nor turn my back on men and life.

But when I became aware of his jealousy I began immediately to give him what he desired. Understanding his jealousy I began to relate the incidents of my life in a deprecatory manner, in a mocking tone, in such a way that he might feel I had not loved deeply anything or anyone but him. Understanding his desire to be exclusively loved, to be at the core of every life he touched, I could not bring myself to talk with fervor or admiration of all those I had loved or admired or enjoyed because I knew it would hurt his egoism. To be so aware of his feelings forced me into a role. I gave a color to my past which could be interpreted this way: nothing that happened before you came was of any importance… I was only marking time… Nothing ever satisfied me, deep down…

It was this absorption in the need of the other which was at the root of all the mysteries of my life—at the root of my silences, my evasions, my lies. A sensitiveness to what my father did not want to hear prevented me even from picturing the scenes I had enjoyed. I was perpetually recomposing the scene in such a way that it would bring a balm to his egoism, a lull to his jealousy.

The result was that nothing appeared in its true light and that I deformed my true self.

To-day my father, looking at me, holding my book in his hand, studying my costumes, exploring my home, studying my ideas, says: “You are an Amazon. Until you came I felt that I was dying. Now I feel renewed and strengthened.”

My own picture of my life gave him the opportunity he loved of passing judgment, an ideal judgment upon the pattern of it.

But I was so happy to have found a father, a father with a strong will, a wisdom, an infallible judgment, that I forgot for the moment everything I knew, surrendered my own certainties. I forgot my own efforts, my own wisdom. It was so sweet, so sweet to have a father, to believe that there could exist some one who was in life so many years ahead of me, and who could look back upon mine and my errors, who could guide and save me, give me strength. I relinquished my convictions just to hear him say: “In that case yu were too believing,” or “That was a wasted piece of sacrifice. Why save junk? Let the failures die. It is something in them that makes them failures.”

To have a father, the seer, the god. I found it hard to look him in the eyes. I never looked at the food he put in his mouth. It seemed to me that vegetarianism was the right diet for a divine being. I had such need to worship, to relinquish my power. It always made me feel more the woman.

I thought again of his remark—”You are an Amazon. You are a force.” I looked at myself in the mirror with surprise. Certainly not the body of an Amazon. What was it my father saw? I was underweight, so light on my feet that a caricaturist had once pictured me as having floated up to the ceiling like a balloon and everybody struggling to catch me with brooms and ladders… Not the me in the mirror—but my words, my writing, my work. Strength in creation, in life, ideas. I had proved capable of building a world for myself. Amazon! Capable of every audacity in life, but vulnerable in love…

I translated his remark to myself thus: Whenever anyone says you are they mean I want you to be! He wanted me to be an Amazon. One breast cut off as in the myth, so as to be able to use the bow and arrow. The other breast far too tender, too vulnerable. Why? Because an Amazon did not need a father. Nor a lover, nor a husband. An Amazon was a law and a world all to herself.

He was abdicating his father role. A woman-ruled world was no hardship to him, the artist, for in it he had a privileged place. He had all the sweetness of her one breast, together with all her strength. He could lie down on that one breast and dream, for at his side was a woman who carried a bow and arrow to defend him. He the writer, the musician, the sculptor, the painter, he could lie down and dream by the side of the Amazon who could give him nourishment and fight the world for him as well…

I looked at him. He was my own height. He was a little bowed by fatigue and with the thought of his own frailness. His nerves, his sensitiveness, his dependence on women. He looked slenderer and paler. He said: “I used to be afraid that my wife might die. What would I do without my wife? I used to plan to die with her. But now I have you. I know you are strong.”

Many men have said this to me before. I had not minded. Protection was a rhythm. We could exchange roles. But this phrase from a father was different… A father.

All through the world… looking for a father… looking naively for a father… falling in love with grey hairs… the symbol… every symbol of the father… all through the world… an orphan… in need of man the leader… to be made woman… And again to be asked… to be the mother… always the mother… always to draw the strength I have, but never to know where to rest, where to lay down my head and find new strength… always to draw it out of myself… from myself… strength… to pour out love… All through the world seeking a father… loving the father… awaiting the father… and finding the child.

* * *


His lumbago and the almost complete paralysis it brought about seemed to me like a stiffness in the joints of his soul, from acting and pretending. He had assumed so many roles, had disciplined himself to appear always gay, always immaculate, always shaved, always faultless; he had played at love so often, that it was as if he suffered from a cramp due to the false positions too long sustained. He could never relax. The lumbago was like the stiffness and brittleness of his emotions which he had constantly directed. It was something like pain for him to move about easily in the realm of impulses. He was now as incapable of an impulse as his body was incapable of moving, incapable of abandoning himself to the great uneven flow of life with its necessary disorder and necessary ugliness. Every gesture of meticulous care taken to eat without vulgarity, to wash his teeth, to disinfect his hands, to behave ideally, to sustain the illusion of perfection, was like a rusted hinge, for when a pattern and a goal, when an aesthetic order penetrates so deeply into the motions of life, it eats into its spontaneity like rust, and this mental orientation, this forcing of nature to follow a pattern, this constant defeat of nature and control of it, had become rust, the rust which had finally paralyzed his body…

I wondered how far back I would have to trace the current of his life to find the moment at which he had thus become congealed into an attitude… At what moment had his will petrified his emotions? What shock, what incident had produced this mineralization such as took place under the earth, due to pressure?

When he talked about his childhood I could see a luminous child always dancing, always running, always alert, always responsive. His whole nature was on tip toes with expectancy, hope and ardor. The nose sniffed the wind with high expectations of storms, tragedies, adventures, beauty. The eyes did not retreat under the brow, but were opened wide like a clairvoyant’s. The flesh was tender, the appetite keen, the restlessness immense. Everything then seemed fluid and mobile, soft and pliable and yielding.

I could not trace the beginning of his disease, this cancer of jealousy. Perhaps far back—in his jealousy of his delicate sister who was preferred by the father, in his jealousy of the man who took his fiancee away from him, in the betrayal of this fiancee, in the immense shock of pain which sent him out of Spain to Cuba.

To-day if he read a clipping which did not give him the first place, in the realm of music, he suffered. If a friend turned his admiration away… If in a room he was not the centre of attention… Wherever there was a rival, he felt the fever and the poison of self-doubt, the fear of defeat. In all his relations with man and woman there had to be a battle and a triumph.

He began by telling me first of all that I owed him nothing; then he began to look for all that there was in me of himself.

What he noted in my diary were only the passages which revealed our sameness. I began naturally enough to think that he loved in me only what there was of himself, that beyond the realm of self-discovery, self-love, there was no curiosity.

“How are we to know,” I asked him, “when it is we are writing prophetically, or when it is that our desires work miracles and bring us what we wish? Here we are sitting, telling each other all our adventures—and in my diaryI had written long ago: ‘my husband will have a terribly tragic and adventurous life… we will sit together in the evenings and I will listen to his stories… we will write in my diary together’.”

My father said: “Although I was prevented from training you, your blood obeyed me.” As he said this his face shone with the luminosity of early portraits: this luminosity the one trait which had never faded from my memory. He glowed with a joyous Greek wisdom, as he did on the German postcard photographs I had pasted in my diary… Herr Professor… Berlin… Taken soon after we had left Berlin, when he was thirty years old and the beautiful perfumed countess was in love with him but he could not bear the smell of ether which pierced through her perfume.

“We must look for light and clarity,” he said, “because we are too easily unbalanced.”

I felt as if I were entering a finished world, a static world. Was this the end? The goal? A finished world. A creation to which there was nothing to add. The way he saw his life as a completed work. The air was too rarified, too crystallized his vision. Like rock crystal. I could look through it as I looked for hours through glass and colored stones, with a love of transparency, a love of clairvoyance. But I felt I was not where he was.

“You’ve got such strong wings,” he said. “One feels there are no walls to your life.”

I was sitting at the foot of his bed. The waiter was coming in and out of the room with bottles of mineral water. The mistral was blowing hot and dry. It had been blowing for ten days.

“Now I see that all these women I pursued are all in you, and you’re my daughter, and I can’t marry you! You’re the synthesis of all the women I loved.”

“Just to have found each other will make us stronger for life.”

Samba the negro came in with mail. When my father saw the letters addressed to me he said: “Am I to be jealous of your letters too?”

Between each one of these phrases there was a long silence. A great simplicity of tone. We looked at each other as if we were listening to music, not as if we were saying words. Inside both our heads, as we sat there, he leaning against a pillow and I against the foot of the bed, there was a concert going on. Two boxes filled with the resonances of an orchestra. A hundred instruments playing all at once. Two longs spools of flute-threads interweaving between his past and mine, the strings of the violin constantly trembling like the springs inside of our bodies, the nerves never still, the heavy poundings on the drum like the heavy pounding of sex, the throb of blood, the beat of desire which drowned all the vibrations, louder than any instrument, the harp singing god, god and the angels, the purity in his brow, the clarity in his eyes, god, god, god, Isolina with auburn hair, and the drums pounding desire at the temples. The orchestra all in one voice now, for an instant, in love, in love with the harp singing god, and the violins shaking their hair and I passing the violin bow gently between my legs, drawing music out of my body, my body foaming, the harp singing god while all the women of the world lay under him in a ritual of fecundation, the drum beating, beating sex, d pollen inside of the violin cases, the curves of the violin case and the curves of women’s buttocks, cries of the ‘cello, the ‘cello singing a dirge under the level of tears, through subterranean roads with notes twinkling right and left, notes like stairways to the harp singing god, god, god, god, and the faun through the flute mocking the notes grown black and penitent, the black notes ascending the dust route of the ‘cello’s tears, an earth tremor splitting the music in two fallen walls, the walls of our faith, the ‘cello weeping, and the violins trembling, the beat of sex breaking through the middle and splitting the white notes and the black notes apart, and the piano’s stairway of sounds rolling into the inferno of silence because far away, behind and beyond the violins comes the second voice of the orchestra, the voice out of the bellies of the instruments, underneath the notes being pressed by hot fingers, in opposition to these notes comes the song from the bellies of the instruments, out of the pollen they contain, out of the wind of passing fingers, the carpet of notes mourn with voices of black lace and dice on telegraph wires. His sadnesses locked into the ‘cello, our dreams wrapped in dust inside of the piano box, this box on our heads cracking with resonances, the past singing, an orchestra splitting with fullness, lost loves, faces vanishing, jealousy twisting like a cancer, eating the flesh, the letter that never came, the kiss that was not exchanged, the harp singing god, god, god, who laughs on one side of his face, god was the man with a wide mouth who could have eaten me whole, singing inside the boxes of our heads. Friends, treacheries, ecstasies. The voices that carried us into serenity, the voices which made the drum beat in us, sex, sex, sex, sex, desire, the bow of the violins passing between the legs, the curves of women’s backs yielding, the baton of the orchestra leader, the second voice of locked instruments, the strings snapping, the dissonances, the hardness, the flute weeping.

We danced because we were sad, we danced all through our life because we were sad, and the golden top dancing inside of us made the notes turn, the white and the black, the words we wanted to hear, the words we heard, the new faces of the world turning black and white, ascending and descending, up and down askew stairways from the bellies of the ‘cello full of salted tears, the water heaving when the violins sang together, the sea coming on us, the sea of forgetfulness, yesterday grinning through the bells and castanets, and to-day a single note all alone, like our fear of solitude, quarreling, the orchestra taking our whole being together and lifting us clear out of the earth where pain is a long, smooth song that does not cut through the flesh, where love is one long smooth note like the wind at night, no bloodshedding knife to its touch, the touch of music from distance far beyond the orchestra which answered the harp, the flute, the ‘cello, the violins, the echoes on the roof, the taste on the roof of our palates, music in the tongue, in the fingers, when the fingers seek the flesh, the red pistil of desire in the fingers on the violin cords, and all desire mounting in space to fall again on the bellies, the bellies of women he fingered like a musician, their cries rising and falling with the heaving wind of the question-marked opening of the ‘cello, borne on the orchestra’s wings, and hurt and wounded by its knowledge of me, for thus we cried, thus we laughed like the bells and the castanets, thus we rolled from black to white stairways, from bodies rolling to bodies erect and dreaming spirals of desire and spirals of liberation from desire, where is serenity? All our forces at work together, our fingers playing, our voices, our heads cracking with fullness of sound, crescendo of exaltation and confusion, the chaos, the fullness, no time to gather all the notes together, sitting in a hall inside the spider webt, the failures, the defeats. I writing a diary like a perpetual obsessional song, and he and I dancing with gold-tipped cigarettes, wrinkless clothes, vanity and worship, faith and doubt, losing our blood slowly from too much love, love a wound in us, too many delicacies, too many thoughts around it, too many vibrations, fatigue, nervousness, the orchestra of our desire splitting with its many faces, sad songs, god songs, sex songs, quest and hunger, idealization and cynicism, humor in the gaping split-open face of the trombone swollen with laughter. Walls falling under the pressure of will, walls of the absolute falling with each part of us breathing music into instruments, our arms waving, our voice, our love, our hatred, an orchestra of conflicts, a theme of disease, the song of pain, the song of strings that are never still, for after the orchestra is silent in our heads the echoes last, the concert is eternal, the solo is a delusion, the others wait behind one to accompany, to stifle, to silence, to drown, and with this singing of feet, head, tongue, sex, this dismembering to pass into the everywhere, trains moving, bodies separating, arms and legs melting together like the spires of cathedrals, drinking life, music spilling out from the eyes in place of tears, music spilling from the throat in place of words, music falling from his finger-tips in place of caresses, music exchanged between us instead of love, yearning on five lines, the five lines of our thoughts, our reveries, our emotions, our unknown self, our giant self, our shadow.

The key sitting ironically, half a question mark, like our knowledge of destiny. But I sat on five lines, cursing the world for the shocks, loving the world because it has jaws, weeping at the absolute unreachable, the fifth line and the fifth voice saying always: have faith, even curses make music. Five lines running together with simultaneous song.

The poverty, the broken hairbrush, the Alice blue gown, twilight of sensations, musique ancienne, objects floating. One line saying all the time I believe in god, in a god, in a father who will lean over and understand all things; I need absolution, I believe in others’ purity and I find myself never pure enough; I need absolution. Another line on which I was making colored dresses, colorful houses, and dancing. On the top line I danced with a feather on my hat. Underneath ran the line of disease, doubt, life a danger, life with sharp edges, life singing mockery with an evil mouth, or life slobbering, or mouths spitting insults. Everything lived out simultaneously, the love, the impulse, the doubt of the love, the knowledge of the love’s death, the love of life, the doubt, the ecstasy, the knowledge and awareness of its death germ, everything like an orchestra. Can we live in rhythm, my father? Can we feel in rhythm, my father? Can we think in rhythm, my father? Rhythm—Rhythm—Rhythm.

* * *


At midnight I walked away from his room, down the very long corridor, under the arches, with the lamps watching, throwing my shadow on the carpets, passing mute doors in the empty hotel, the train of my silk dress caressing the floor, the mistral hooting.

As I opened the door of my room the window closed violently—there was the sound of broken glass. Doors, silent closed doors of empty rooms, arches like those of a convent, like opera settings, and the mistral blowing…

The white mosquito netting over my bed hung like an ancient bridal canopy…

The mystical bride of my father…

* * *


It was I who told the first lie, with deep sadness, because I did not have the courage to say to my father: “Our love should be great enough to be above jealousy. Spare me those lies which we tell the weaker ones.”

Something in his eyes, a quicker beat of the eyelid, a wavering of the blue surface, the small quiver by which I had learned to detect jealousy in a face, prevented me from saying this. Truth was impossible.

At the same time there were moments when I experienced dark and strange pleasures at the thought of deceiving him. I knew how deceptive he was. I felt deep down that he was incapable of truth, that sooner or later he would lie to me, fail me. And I wanted to deceive him first, in a deeper way. It gave me joy to be so far ahead of my father who was almost a professional deceiver.

When I saw my father vanishing at the station a great misery and coldness overcame me. I sat inert, remembering each word he had said, each sensation.

It seemed to me that I had not loved him enough, that he had come upon me like a great mystery, that again there was a confusion in me between god and father. His severity, his luminousness, his music, seemed again to me not human elements. I had pretended to love him humanly.

Sitting in the train, shaken by the motion, the feeling of the ever-growing distance between us, suffocating with a cold mood, I recognized the signs of an inhuman love. By certain signs I recognized all my pretences. Every time I had pretended to feel more than I felt I experienced this sickness of heart, this cramp and tenseness of my body. By this sign I recognized my insincerities. At the core nothing ever was false. My feelings never deceived me. It was only my imagination which deceived me. My imagination could give a color, a smell, a beauty to things, even a warmth which my body knew very well to be unreal. I could pursue the wanderings of my mind and my imagination but I could never deceive my mouth, my skin, my body, my desire. These could never act. In my head there could be a great deal of acting and many strange things could happen in there, but my mouth, my skin, my desire were sincere and they revolted, they prevented me from getting lost down the deep corridors of my inventions. Through them I knew. They were my eyes, my ears, they were my truth. Through them I recognized love.

To-day I recognized an inhuman love. I knew I was leaving cliffs, abysses, precipices, clouds, twilights, all the regions to which my love of my father would take me, away from earth and away from my own body…

* * *


Lying back on the chaise longue with cotton over my eyes, wrapped in coral blankets, my feet on a pillow. Lying back with a sweet feeling like that of convalescence, lying in a room in darkness but knowing one is no longer ill.

All weight and anguish lifted from the body and life like cotton over the eyelids.

In this state of somnolescence I recognized a mood in which I lived often, perhaps almost continually, in spite of light and sound, in spite of the streets I walked, the things I did. A mood between sleep and dream, where I caught the corner of two streets—the street of dreams and the street of living—in the palm of my hand and looked at them simultaneously, as one looks at the lines of one’s destiny.

There would come cotton over my eyes and long unbroken reveries, sharp, intense and continuous, like those I experienced coming out of the ether when I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel, when I began to hear voices. I began to see very clearly that what destroyed me in this silent drama with my father was that I was always trying to tell something that never happened, or rather that everything that happened, the many incidents, the love of twenty years, the trip down south, all this produced a state like slumber and ether out of which I could only awake with great difficulty. It was a struggle with shadows, a story of not meeting the loved one but loving one’s self in the other, of never seeing the loved one but of seeing reflections of his presence everywhere, in everyone; of never addressing the loved one except through a diary or a book written about him, because in reality there was no connection between us, there was no human being to connect with. No one had ever merged into my father, yet we had thought a fusion could be realized through the likeness between us: but the likeness itself seemed to create greater separations and confusions. There was a likeness and no understanding, likeness and no nearness.

Now that the world was standing on its head and the figure of my father had become immense, like the figure of a myth, now that from thinking too much about him I had lost the sound of his voice, I wanted to open my eyes again and make sure that all this had not killed the light, the steadiness of the earth, the bloom of the flowers, and the warmth of all loves but my love for him. So I opened my eyes and the curtain wavered before me.

The picture of my father’s foot. One day down south, while we were driving, we stopped by the road and he took off his shoe which was causing him pain. As he pulled off his sock I saw the foot of a woman. It was delicate and perfectly made, sensitive and small. I felt as if he had stolen it from me: it was my foot he was looking at, my foot he was holding in his hand. I had the feeling that I knew this foot completely. It was my foot—the very same size and the very same color, the same blue veins showing and the same air of never having walked at all.

To this foot I could have said: “I know you.” I recognized the weight of it, its speed, its lightness. “I know you, but if you are my foot I do not love you. I do not love my own foot.”

A confusion of feet. I am not alone in the world. I have a double. He sits on the running board of the car and when he sits there I do not know where I am. I am standing there pitying his foot, and hating it, too, because of the confusion. If it were some one else’s foot my love could flow out freely, all around, but here my love stands still inside of me, still with a kifright.

There is no distance for my love to traverse; it chokes inside of me, like the coils of self-love, and I cannot say I love you, or feel any love for this sore foot because that love leaps back into me like a perpetually coiled snake, and I am trying to leap out. I want to leap out freely, from the window of my own body, into love. I want to flow out, and here my love lies coiled inside and choking me, because the other, my father, is my double, my shadow, and I don’t know which one is real. One of us must really die so that the other may find the boundaries of himself. To leap out freely and safely beyond the self love must flow out and beyond the wall of confused identities. Now I am all confused in my boundaries. I don’t know where my father begins, where I begin, where it is he ends, what I, the difference between us…

The difference is this, I begin to see, that he wears gloves for gardening and so do I, but he is afraid of poverty and I am not. Can I prove that? Must I prove that? Why? I hate drabness, but I have no fear of poverty. I have loved only poor men. I want to prove this. To whom? Why? For myself. I must know wherein I am not like him. I must disentangle our two selves.

I walked out into the sun. The sun slipped between my legs. I sat at a café. A man sent me a note by the garcon. I refused to read it. I would liked to have seen the man. Perhaps I would have liked him. It is possible some day I might like a very ordinary man, sitting at a café. It hasn’t happened yet. Everything must be immense and deep and extremely complicated. I like complicated games and complicated loves. I play at them seriously. The humor in them is at first invisible, because pity forbids irony. I can only laugh years later, when there is no one around who can be hurt by my laughter.

Walking into the heart of a summer day, as into a ripe fruit. Looking down at my lacquered toe nails, at the white dust on my sandals. Smelling the odor ofbread in the bakery where I stopped for a chocolate-filled roll. The femme demenage passes very close to me. Her face is burned, scarred, the color of iron. The traces of her features are lost, as on a leprous face. The whites of her eyes bloodshot, her pupils dilated and misty. In her flesh I saw the meat of an animal, the fat, the sinews, the blackening blood, the meat we are when fire eats into us. So easily burned and scarred. So easily turned into cinders.

My father had said once that I was ugly. He said it because I was born full of bloom, dimpled, roseate, overflowing with health and joy. But at the age of two I had almost died of fever. I lost the bloom, the curls, the glow, all at once. I reappeared before him very pale and thin, and the aesthete in him said coolly: “How ugly you are.” This phrase I have never been able to forget. It has taken me a life time to disprove it to myself. A life time to efface it. It took the love of others, the worship ofpainters to save me from its effect. In one instant my faith in myself was killed. From that moment on, no matter what the mirror revealed, I remained unconvinced. All I could see was this phrase of my father’s, the dissatisfied look in his blue eyes. Never could I detect in him the slightest expression of love. His paternal role was summed up in the one word: criticism. Never a word of faith, of encouragement, of enthusiasm. Never an elan of joy, of content, of approval. Always the sad, exacting blue eyes dissatisfied and condemnatory.




From that moment on it was not the mirror which served me but others. It was the reflection of myself in desirous eyes which I relied on. What I saw in the mirror until the age of sixteen was not myself but my father’s phrase. Even to-day I do not look into the mirror… I look into men’s eyes, into the mirror of men’s eyes…

Out of this came my love of ugliness, my effort to see beyond ugliness, always treating the flesh as a mask, as something which never possessed the same shape, color and features as thought. Out of this came my love of men’s creations. All that a man said or thought was the face, the body; all that a man invented was his walk, his flavor, his coloring; all that a man wrote, painted, sang was his skin, his hair, his eyes. People were made of crystal for me. I could see right through their flesh, through and beyond the structure of their bones. My eyes stripped them of their defects, their awkwardness, their stuttering. I overlooked the big ears, the frame too small, the hunched back, the wet hands, the webbed-foot walk… I forgave… I became clairvoyant. I saw the aura of persons, the light they threw off. A new sense which had awakened in me uncovered the smell of their soul, the shadow cast by their sorrows, the glow of their desires. Beyond the words and the appearances I caught all that was left unsaid—the electric sparks of their courage, the expanse of their reveries, the lunar aspects of their moods, the animal breath of their yearning. I never saw the fragmented individual, never saw the grotesque quality or aspect, but always the complete self, the mask and the reality, the fulfilment and the intention, the core and the future. I saw always the actual and the potential man, the seed, the reverie, the intention as one…

I loved beyond flesh… because flesh was so often a caricature, a disguise, a mockery. No man’s thoughts could ever be so ugly as the charred face of the femme de menage. It was as if I saw the original innocence. Everywhere I saw innocence. Everywhere I saw a beauty no aesthete ever captured. It was only the body which decomposed, deteriorated, betrayed. Only the body ever emitted a bad smell…

Now with my love of my father this concern with the truth lying beneath the mask, the depths lying beneath the surface and the appearance, became a obsession and a disease because in him the mask was more complete than in anyone I knew; the chasm between his appearance, his words, his gestures, and his true self was deeper.

Through this mask of coldness which had terrified my childhood I was better able, as a woman, to detect the malady of his soul. I remembered a meeting at the reception room of the Salle Pleyel during the years I had not wanted to see him. It was after a symphonic concert; I had come into the reception room to see the orchestra leader who was stifling under the pressure of visitors. As I was drawing away from the crowd I caught sight of my father standing apart. I saw his waxen face and I knew that he was ill. His soul was sick. He was very sick deep down. His skin was that of a man who was dying inside; his eyes could no longer see the warm, the real, the near. He seemed to have come from very far only to be leaving again immediately.

He was pretending to be there. His body was there, but his soul was absent: it had escaped by a hundred fissures, it was in flight, towards the past, or towards to-morrow, everywhere or anywhere which was not here, now. He was very sick. It would be impossible to find him, to unite with him.




We looked at each other across miles and miles of separation. Our eyes did not meet. His thoughts enwrapped him in glass. This glass shut out the warmth of life, shut out the odor of men, the real sound of life, shut out the breath of things that came too near, shut out the odor of men, the real sound of their voices, the smell of their words, of their clothes, the warmth of their bodies. It shut out all the exhalations of life, the temperature. He had built a glass house around himself, a glass invented to shut out the evil rays of the sun. He wanted life to filter through, to come to him distilled, not crude, juicy, perspiring, but sifted, arranged, digested. The glass wall of his thoughts was a prism which eliminated the bad, the fetid; and with this artificial elimination of the bad life itself was affected, altered. With the bad was lost the warmth, the nearness. It was a glass which human breath could not stain. It was created out of a desire not to be touched by life in the flesh, a desire to keep his body perpetually out of the reach of pain. And it had grown too thick. He did not hear me coming near him, he could not feel the hot breath of human love…

There was no change in his love, but the mask was back again as soon as he returned to Paris. The whole pattern of his superficial life began again, his artificial ideal law-making began again. He said: “We must work, we must give ourselves wholly to work.” He made an austere inhuman pattern. Slaving. The opium of work. I did not want to write all day. I wanted my life, my loves, my relationships, people, warmth. He made no room for life. He had to live by a pattern. This period in Paris, he determined, was to be a parenthesis between escapades to the south. Three months of severe work, of austerity, of no communication. He could never live except absolutely on one side of his nature. In the south it was all openness, tenderness, sensibility, confession, intimacy. Now it was work, celebrity, the public, his “business.” He could not keep both going as I did. Or slide easily from one into the other.

To-day it was time to work, to cover up a secret sorrow of some kind, a sorrow which was in reality a kind of sullenness towards the limitations, the imperfections, the flaws in life.

He had stopped talking as we talked down south. He was conversing. It was the beginning of his salon life. There were always people around with whom he kept up a tone of lightness and humor. In between the salon talk he worked intensely as a teacher. There was always singing or violin playing in the salon.

He made this absolute, inflexible plan without regard for what I expected, without regard for life. Life would flower again in the south. Meanwhile it was to be ignored. I was to write, write, write. I was to be alone, and in the evenings appear in his salon and talk with the tip of my tongue about the surface of my life, about everything that was far from my thoughts. There was to be no more intimacy and no more exploration of the bottoms of the sea. Whatever was in my mind must not be shown, shared, mentioned. In that salon, with its stained-glass windows, its highly polished floor, its dark couches rooted into the Arabian rugs, its soft lights and precious books, its silver cigarette boxes and piano shining like jet, the self, chaos, feelings, were as out of place as a horse and carriage, as a drunken sailor or a cow.

This was the winter of artifice. One could not be oneself and at the same time a fashionable musician bowing on the stage with stard shirt and tabac blond on one’s handkerchief. So he discarded his real self altogether and left me stranded in the company of an ultra-civilized man leading a court life of ceremonies.

At least he would have left me stranded if I had kept my promise to break with all my friends.

In reality I did not suffer because of the fact that my father was working and bowing and conversing; the truth is I began to suffer an imaginary sorrow, a remembered sorrow. I began to suffer what I imagined I might have suffered if I had counted entirely on my father for a human relationship. While I reproached him inwardly for having no gift for human relationship, he reproached me aloud for eluding him because he sensed I was not living up to our pact of isolation.

Although in reality he had not abandoned me, but simply resumed his artificial role. I felt impelled to act out the scene of abandon from beginning to end. I wept at the isolation in which my father’s superficiality left me. I told him I had surrendered all my friends and activities for him. I told him I could not live on the talks we had in his salon. Each phrase I uttered was almost automatic.

It was the scene I knew best, the one most familiar to me even though it had become an utter lie. It was the same scene which had impressed itself on me as a child, and out of which I had made a life pattern. As I talked with tears in my eyes, I pitied myself for having loved and trusted my father again, for having given myself to him, for having expected everything from him. At the same time I knew that this was not true. My mind ran in two directions as I talked, and so did my feelings. I continued the habitual scene of pain: “I cannot live this way, I need warmth and gestures. I do not believe in love which does not express itself. I do not believe in life unless it has continuity.” And the other voice he could not hear saying: “I gave myself to you once, and you hurt me. I am glad I did not give myself to you again. Deep down I have no faith at all in you, as a human being.”

He received all this very sadly. Said he had never been able to do two things at once: either he was a human being in love, obsessed with feeling, pouring all of himself into a relationship, or he was the pianist Paris loved who had to play the role of homme du monde.

I wanted to laugh and say: “You know that’s all untrue, I never isolated myself at all.” But the scene which I acted best and felt the best was that of abandon. I felt impelled to act it over and over again. I knew all the phrases. I was familiar with the emotions it aroused. It came so easily to me, even though I knew all the time that, except for the moment when he left us years ago, I had never really experienced abandon except by way of my imagination, except through my fear of it, through my misinterpretation of reality.

There seemed to be a memory deeper than the usual one, a memory in the tissues and cells of the body on which we tattoo certain scenes which give a shape to one’s soul and life habits. It was in this way I remembered most vividly that as a child a man had tortured me; still I could not help feeling tortured or interpreting the world to-day as it had appeared to me then in the light of my misunderstanding of people’s motives. I could not help telling my father that he was destroying my absolute love; yet I knew this was not true because it was not he who was my absolut love. But this statement was untrue only in time; that is, it was my father who had endangered my faith in the absolute, it was his behaviour which I did not understand as a child which destroyed my faith in life and in love.

I knew I had deceived my father as to the extent of my love, but the thought in my mind was: what would I be feeling now if I had entrusted all my happiness to my father, if I had truly depended on him for joy and sustenance? I would be thoroughly despairing and ready to die. This thought increased my pain, and my face showed such anguish that my father was overwhelmed.

After this scene he continued his marionette life. Life was a chain of concerts, of soirees, of hairdressers and shirtmakers, of correspondence, of newspaper clippings, of scrap books being fed, of files being fattened, of telephone calls during which he talked like a man interested in who would attend the funeral more than the fact of death itself. He liked me to visit him in my astrakhan fur, shedding perfume, so that he might introduce me as a Polish princess. The women were distressed. I seemed to have been given a privileged place which had never been offered to them. They felt uneasy and wondered if their own place was endangered, diminished, why it was that little noses, faience eyes, porcelain hands, marquise feet and lace gestures did not retain his attention as they had before.

I began to hate him. The hatred for the being you most adore, who does not escape you in a deep way, through subterranean or tragic routes, but who evaporates into frivolity, who can disguise his soul not by going away, but by dancing, by dancing on a polished floor.

I was filled with doubts. I saw in him a perpetually haunting shadow of something he was not. This man that he was not, or that he refused to continue to be, interfered with my knowledge of him, with my actual knowledge. These encounters where love never reached understanding, where all things ended in clash and frustration, this love which created nothing, this love twisted inside of me like a snake, this love devoured me, this love obsessed me. It was the coil of it which strangled my life. As soon as I lost him, I wanted him; as soon as he was away I began again to imagine him as he might be. I spent hours imagining my father coming to me and talking to me deeply.

Imagining nights of talk wherein we turned over the brilliant facets of our lives as in a game, playing with all that happened, playing with all we knew, playing with new ideas, sharing, giving, discovering, pouring out, exposing the true self as it could only be exposed and given to the twin, to one’s double. I imagined tenderness and understanding.

Imagined! Like a contagious disease withering my actual life, this imaginary meeting, imaginary talk, on which I spent hours and hours of inventiveness. As soon as he came I was frustrated, silenced. His talk would be empty, and above all, marginal. His whole ingenuity was spent making circles, in walking on the margin of everything vital, in eluding it. The more direct I grew, the more marginal he became, dancing on the edge of everything I said. Remaining there so adroitly by an accumulation of descriptions of nothing, by a swift chain of puerile events, by long speeches about trivialities, by lengthy expansions of empty facts.

This ghost of my potential father tormented me like a hunger for something which I knew had been invented or created solely by myself, but which I feared might never take human shape. Where was the man I really loved? The windows he had opened in the south had been windows on the past. The present or the future seemed to terrify him. Nothing was essential but to retain avenues of escape.

This constant yearning for the man beyond the mask, this disregard of the mask was also a disregard of the harm which the wearing of a mask inevitably produced. It was difficult for me to believe, as others did, that the mask tainted the blood, that the colors of the mask could run into the colors of nature and poison it. I could not believe that, like the woman who was painted in gold and who died of the poison, the mask and the flesh could melt into each other and bring on infection.

My love was based on faith in the purity of one’s own nature. It made me oblivious of the deformities which could be produced in the soul by the wearing of a mask. It caused me to disregard the deterioration that might affect the real face, the habits which the mask could form if worn for too long a time. I could not believe that if one pretended indifference long enough, the germ of indifference could finally grow, that the soul could be discolored by long pretense, that there could come a moment when the mask and the man melted into one another, that confusion between them corroded the vital core, destroyed the core…

This deterioration in my father I could not yet believe in. I expected the miracle to happen. So many times it had happened to me to see the hardness of a face fall, the curtain over the eyes draw away, the false voice change, and to be allowed to enter by my vision into the true self of others… It was exactly as if the person confronted had been the monster of the fairy tales, and that the hair, the horns, the leather skin had fallen away to disclose a new man, miraculously handsome.

I always knew why and where the man had become the monster. I loved that moment when the mask fell away.

* * *


When I was sixteen I could feel his visitations very much as the mystics experienced the presence of their god. He would descend on me oftener when I was dancing or laughing. He came like a blight, because when I felt his presence, I felt a curtain of criticism covering all things. I looked through his eyes instead of my own. My mother always said laugh and dance, but my father in me was contemptuous. When his seriousness fell on me I knew I was seeing the world with his cold, blue eyes. That was not me. I was sixteen and my mother had made me an Alice blue dress. “Oh, leave your books alone and go to the dance!” she said. I was pleased with the delicate frills on my dress, with the high heels on my slippers, the curls on my head. I wanted to dance.

I did not know then that my father could not dance.

At twenty-five I was a dancer. I was dancing on the stage. I had just begun the first number, no longer intimidated by the public. The Spanish music carried me away, whirled me into a state of delirium. I was dancing. I could feel the audience surrendering to me. I was dancing, carrying away their eyes, their senses, into my spinning and whirling.

My eyes fell on the front row. I saw my father there. I saw his pale face half-hidden behind a program. He was holding a program in front of his face in order not to be recognized. But I knew his hair, his brow, his eyes. It was my father. My steps faltered. I lost my rhythm. I grew dizzy. For a moment only. Then I swung around and began again, stamping my feet, stamping. I never looked at him again. I danced madly, wildly. I knew he was there.

Flowers. Hands to shake. Music. Pleasure. Interviews. Photographs. Carnation perfume. Jewelry. Dresses scattered in the dressing room like enormous bell flowers. swollen like sails. Petticoats still dancing. Castanets still echoing. Hands to shake. Flowers. Words. Beautiful. Marvellous. Beautiful. Marvellous. Come with my ballet to Cairo. Something new in dancing. The hands said so much. When you came out front, close to the audience, with eyes laughing, and looked at the audience fully, directly, that was electrical. Flowers. Words. Something new in dancing.

I so hot. I all wet, under the dress, the paint, the lace, the flowers, so hot and broken. My father was out there in the front row, without a smile, like an angry statue. Angry? Why angry? I had danced well. The words still poured over me. “Do you know what you are? You are ART. Your name could be used as a definition of art.” My father was sitting in the front row. I was hot and tired. I wanted to close my eyes so heavy with paint. The Hindu dancer had said it was not necessary to paint the eyelashes forthe stage. I must remember that. Out into the cold. Covered with fur and Spanish shawls, but the cold slipped inside them insidiously. Home. I awoke the next day paralyzed. Dancing died. I never danced again.

When I saw my father later I found out he had never been there. I asked him if we could spend ourChristmas dancing. Then I saw him, as I had divined him, sitting cold and formal, and I was angry at the prison walls of his severity. I danced in defiance of his mood, but bitterly, to assert my own self distinct from his. He did not dance, nor drink, nor smile.

As soon as I left him everything began to sing again. Everybody I passed in the street seemed like a music box. I heard the street organ, the singing of the wheels rolling. Motion was music. My father was the musician, but in life he arrested music. Music melts all the separate partsof our bodies together. Every rusty fragment, every scattered piece could be melted into one by rhythm. A note was a whole, and it was in motion, ascending or descending, swelling in fullness or thrown away, thrown out in the air, but always moving.

As soon as I left my father I heard music again. It was falling from the trees, pouring from throats, twinkling from the street lamps, sliding down the gutter. It was my faith in the world which danced again. It was the expectation of miracles which made every misery sound to me like part of a symphony.

Not separateness but oneness was music. Let me walk alone into the music of my faith. When I am with you the world is still and silent.

You give the command for stillness, and life stops like a clock that has fallen. You draw geometric lines around liquid forms, and that which you extract from the chaos is already crystallized.

As soon as I leave youeverything fixed falls again into waves, tides, is transformed into water and flows. I hear my heart beating again with great disorder. I hear the music of my gestures, and my feet begin to run as music runs and leaps. Music does not climb stairways. Music runs and I run with it. Faith makes music come out of the trees, out of wood, out of ivory.

I could never dance around you, my father, I could never dance around you!

You held the conductor’s stick, but no music could come from the orchestra because of your severity. As soon as you left my heart beat in great disorder. Everything melted into music, and I could dance through the streets singing, without an orchestra leader. I could dance and sing.

Walking down the Rue Saturne I heard the students of the Conservatory playing the Sonate en Re Mineur of Bach. I also heard my mother’s beautiful voice singing Schumann’s J’ai pardonne, which aroused me so deeply that it would make me sob. Did I sense the whole tragedy then? J’ai pardonne… Strange how my mother, who had never forgiven my father, could sing that song more movingly than anything else she sang.

Walking down the Rue Saturne I was singing J’ai pardonne under my breath and thinking at the same time how I hated this street because it was the one I always walked through on my way to my father’s house. So often on winter evenings I came out of his luxurious house, heated like a hot-house, where I had seen him pale and tense, at work upon some trifling matter which he took very seriously. Very neat, in his silk dressing gown, with brilliantine in his hair, polished nails, delicate beads of perspiration on his brow—from rehearsing a sonata with a violinist. Or else just coming down from his siesta.

This siesta he took with religious care, as if the preservation of his life depended on it. At bottom he felt life to be a danger, a process not of growth but of deterioration. To love too wildly, he said, to talk too much, to laugh too much, was a wasting of one’s energy. Life was an enemy to him, and every sign of its wear and tear gave him anxiety. He could not bear a crack in the ceiling, a bit of paint worn away, a stairway worn threadbare, a nail hole in the wall, a faded spot on the wall paper. Since he never lived wholly in the moment a part of him was already preparing for the morrow. To economize his strength he would bring himself to a stop—for the sake of to-morrow.

When I saw my father coming out of his room after his siesta I always had the feeling that here was a man who had preserved himself, who was making artificial efforts to delay the process of growth, fruition, decay, disintegration, which is organic and inevitable. He was delaying death by preserving himself from life; it was the fear of life and the effort made to avoid life which used his strength. Living never wore one out as much as the effort not to live. If one lived fully and freely one also could rest fully and deeply. Not trusting himself to life, not abandoning himself, he could not sink into sleep without fear of death…

I always left his house with a feeling of having come near to death, because everything there was clearly a fight against death.

I left the neatest, the most spotless street of Paris where the gardeners were occupied in clipping and trimming a few rare potted bushes in smv>




The light was very strong on the new street sign. I walked up to it. Yes, there was a sign which said: Anciennement Rue Saturne now changed to…

Now changed. Something effaced, something lost. I wished I were a street. I wished my name could be changed and that I might change with the city, that certain houses standing eternally inside of me might be finally torn down, that certain streets forever marked in me might have their names changed, that the whole city of the past might disappear, the whole topography change as after an earthquake or a war—that the map of my life be lost. To change as Paris changed. Streets could die out. New houses could be erected. But always what I had heard, seen, experienced would continue to walk with me down streets with changed names in the labyrinth of loss and change where nothing could be forgotten…

To be able to catch all that walked with me to my father’s house could be done only in one great flash, in one instant of absolute understanding. Each step along the Rue Saturne corresponded to a million steps I had taken during my life, the thousands of steps which had taken me from France to Germany, from Belgium to Spain, from Spain to America, from our apartment in New York, where my mother sang J’ai pardonne to the American school where I told the children I had been all around the world, from there to White Plains where I spent all my time going and coming from the Public Library, from all the studios of American artists, where I once posed, to the dismal shops on Sixth Avenue where I worked as a dress model, back to White Plains where I wrote my first novel. from Paris where I blossomed into womanhood to Italy, to Switzerland. A thousand steps into cafés, night clubs, movies, and above all, away from my father who lived in the same city. Away from him by living in a different quarter, by living a life so different from his that I knew I would never meet him there. I finally lost track of him, my memory of him.

In the same city in which he lived a thousand steps took me further away from him than a trip to India. No trip to Egypt, but a different milieu, different ideas, different people—the people and places he did not like, the ideas he did not like.

Walking in the rain to pass before my father’s house, looking up at the stained-glass window, thinking: I have at last eluded you. I am a woman you do not know. Where it is I take my pleasure, where it is I laugh, you don’t know. Part of my life you never entered. Parts of my life were poisoned by your presence, your will, your ideals. I who stand here am not your daughter, nor my mother’s daughter. It is the me who escaped the stigmata of parental love.

Standing there asserting the self that was not sunk in my love of him. Standing in the rain with tired eyes.

To escape him I had run away to the other end of the world. To be free of his memory I had run away to places where he never went. I had lost him, finally, by living in the opposite direction from him. I sought out the failures because he didn’t like those who stuttered, those who stumbled; I sought out the ugly because he tureight=”s face away; I sought out the weak because they irritated him. I sought out chaos because he insisted on logic. I travelled away from him to the whore Bijoux on the Rue Fontaine, an enormous coal-eyed whore with black painted eyelids and thickly powdered face, who was the quintessence of all whores. So far from my father’s marquises in porcelain to the animal glow of Bijoux’s eyes, the passivity of her body, the nerveless, passive whore flesh. Because my love of him was so great, my frustrated, defeated love, I travelled to the other end of life, to the drab, the loose, the weak, the wine-stained, wine-soggy men in whom I was sure not to find the least trace of him. No trace of him anywhere along the Boulevard de Clichy where the market people passed with their vegetable carts; no trace of him at two in the morning in the little café opposite the Trinite; no trace of him in the sordid neighborhood of the Boulevard Jean-Jaures; no trace of him in the cinema du quartier, in the bals musette, in the burlesque theatre. Never anyone who had heard of him. Never anyone who smelled like him. Never a voice like his. To lose him I almost had to lose myself. Sometimes, sitting at a stained and dirty table, I would ask myself: “Why am I here? How did I get here? How is it I am marketing in this street, next to a woman with a wart-covered face, next to a femme de menage with a stump for fingers, next to drunkards and beggars?”

It was my father who thrust me out into the black, soiled corners of the world. Everything I loved I turned my back on because it was also what he loved. Luxury with its serpentines of light, its masquerade costume of gaiety, everything that shined, glittered, threw off perfume, would have reminded me of him. To efface such a love took me years of walking greasy streets, of sleeping between soiled sheets, of traversing the unknown. I was happy because I had finally succeeded in losing him.

But I almost lost myself too. In those dingy movies, amidst people who reeked of garlic and sweat, I was exiled from my own climate, my light, my temperature.

Only now have I been able to return to the house of my childhood, to warm rooms, to music, to laughter, to pleasure, to softness and beauty…

* * *


My father and I were walking through the Bois. On his lips I could still see the traces of a biting kiss. “We met at Notre-Dame,” he was saying.

“She began with the most vulgar cross-examination, reproaching me for not loving her. So I proceeded with a slow analysis of her, telling her she had fallen in love with me in the way women usually fall in love with an artist who is handsome and who plays with vehemence and elegance; telling her that it had been a literary and imaginary affair kindled by the reading of my books, that our affair had no substantial basis, what with meetings interrupted by intervals of two years. I told her that no love could survive such thin nourishment and that besides she was too pretty a woman to have remained two years without a lover, especially in view of the fact that she cordially detested her husband. She said she felt that my heart was not in it. I answered that I didn’t know whether or not my heart was in it when we had only twenty minutes together in a taxi without curtains in an over lit city.”

“Did you talk to her in that ironic tone?” I asked.

“It was even more cutting than that. I was annoyed that she had been able to give me only twenty minutes.”

(He had forgotten that he had come to tell her he did not love her. What most struck him and annoyed him was that she had only been able to escape her husband’s surveillance for twenty minutes.)

“She was so hurt,” he added, “that I didn’t even kiss her.”

As we walked along I again looked carefully at his lip. It was slightly red, with a deeper, bluish tone in one corner, where no doubt the dainty tooth of the countess had bitten most fiercely. But I did not say anything. I was wondering whether this persiflage of his was not an effort to disguise a scene which my imagination was able to reproduce with more accuracy. Perhaps the little countess had arrived at the steps of Notre-Dame, looking very earnest, very youthful, and very exalted. Perhaps my father had been touched by her demonstration of love. (I remembered the day 1 had meant to tell Pierre that I did not even want to be touched by him, and how difficult I had found it to say so, how I ended by permitting him to kiss me). I did not believe that my father had been annoyed by the countess’s jealousy or worship, but that, on the contrary, it had lulled and caressed his vanity. I believed that he was trying to conceal his pleasure at being pursued by an air of indifference, so that his listener might take him for a casual and cynical Don Juan, the despair of women. On the other hand, it might be that the countess had forgotten him altogether and had simply paid him a visit—that his fancy liked to play with the idea of being harassed by the pursuit of women.

He repeated a story which he had told me before—of how the countess had slashed her face in order to explain her tardiness to her husband. This story had always seemed highly improbable to me, because a woman in love is hardly likely to endanger her beauty. Any explanation would have been simpler than this far-fetched tale of an automobile accident.

I was powerfully tempted to say: “When the countess was angry because you did not kiss her she kissed you rather markedly.” But I did not say it.

Whatever his thoughts he refused to reveal them. Was he lying to me for the same reason I lied to him—because I had discovered his insane jealousy, and because I knew that when he was hurt he withdrew into himself? Here were my own tricks offered me, my own kind of lies. We were both so intent on creating this illusion of an exclusive, isolated twin love, so intent on picturing each other as standing alone in the world, with no ties whatsoever, that we were taken in by our own delusions.

* * *


When I arrived the next day he had not slept all night, thinking: I am going to lose you. And if I lose you I cannot live any more. You are everything to me. You are my only real love. My life was empty before you came. My life is a failure and a tragedy anyway.

He looked deeply sad. His fingers were wandering over the keys, hesitantly. His eyes looked as if he had been walking through a desert.

“You make me realize,” he said, “how empty my activity is, that in not being able to make you happy I miss the most vital reason for living. And here I am putting down notes on paper, playing the piano—it all seems futile to me if I am to lose you because of it.”

I told him that I was thinking of exactly the same thing, that as I was coming along I had been thinking that what made me unhappy was that he had no need of me. “There is no place for me in your life,” I said.

“You are everything to me,” he said, “you are everything I have. If you see me joyous and active it is because of you. If I did not have you I would go under. I am active only because I have you.”

I was amazed to see him weep, to see the mask completely effaced.

“Do you know,” he said, “I can’t play the comedy of love any more. I can’t say anything I don’t mean. You don’t know how you have altered my conception of love.”

He was again the man I had known in the south. His tone rang true.

I wanted to beg him to abandon the comedy of good manners. The elusive gaiety and mockery he presented to the world, his costumes, seemed to me more dangerous than my pretenses. The social masquerade was more harmful than the roles I played for the sake of adventure, or illusion. To lie for illusion, to lie to create a pleasure, did not taint the soul; but to lie to satisfy the vanity of a duchess, or to refuse the dinner of a marquis, to lie with flowers and visiting cards, to lie with the engraved writing-paper, with the complicity of butlers, interviewers, secretaries, this sort of lying was harmful.

I asked myself why it was I wanted to change him, why was it I did not love him as he was. What was it that I thought I could save him from?

Why could we not make room for each other? Every gesture I made annihilated one of his. Beneath our worship of each other we were waging an obscure war. He took it as an offense if I did not smoke his cigarettes, if I did not go to all his concerts, if I did not admire all his friends, if I did not read all the books he loved. He wanted the woman to be absorbed by him, to become selfless. But at the same time, the truly selfless woman he did not like. He demanded a match, duels, resistance.

He could not let me be. If I preferred Dostoievski to Anatole France he felt that his whole edifice of ideas was being attacked, endangered. We were too strong for each other.

Taking a gold-tipped cigarette from his case with infinite care he wiped away a tear and, with a great sigh, said: “It would be much better, anyway, if I died. I’m not of much use in the world.”

I remembered how in moments of discouragement I had often made similar remarks. I had the feeling, when I made such remarks, of believing implicitly that I would soon be dead. I made theith the absolute conviction of being unequal to the battle which life constantly demanded. In my father’s tragic face I saw the same drooping mouth of my weak days. Suddenly, for no reason at all, I was tempted to laugh, not at my father but at myself, because for the first time I realized that this little talk about death was employed for effect.

What a comedy, I thought to myself. Yet, realizing how serious I felt when enacting these scenes, I wondered why the similarity of our behaviour did not help us to understand each other.

Realizing fully I did not love him, I felt a strange joy, as if I were witnessing my father’s pain, as if he were standing there in the throes of his strong jealousy. And this suffering, which in reality I made no effort to inflict, which took place only in my head, gave me joy. This suffering which I had no intention of actually inflicting, which existed only in my own eyes, made me feel that I was balancing in myself all the trickeries of life, that I was restoring in my own soul a kind of symmetry to the events of life. It was the fulfilment of a spiritual symmetry. A sorrow here, a sorrow there. Abandon yesterday, abandon to-day. Betrayal to-day, betrayal to-morrow. Two equally poised columns. A deception here, a deception there, like twin columnades. A love for to-day, a love for to-morrow; a punishment to him, a punishment to the other—and one for myself… Mystical geometry. The arithmetic of the unconscious which impelled this balancing of events. The law of compensation and substitution. Betrayal against betrayal. I could visualize the morrow’s scenes—the countess so exalted and my father loving so much to be loved. Forgetting, as I bad forgotten, that it was himself she wanted; thinking only of the want, seduced by her want, as I was seduced every day by the emotions of others.

* * *


I felt like laughing whenever my father repeated that he was lucid, simple, logical… I knew that this order and precision were only apparent. His order was on the surface only. Beneath the level of his super-rational talk lay oceans of subtle, unformed, unrealized content. He had chosen to live on the surface, like a man who prefers the bus to the subway, but I who lived almost continually in a kind of bottom of the sea atmosphere. I knew that the sifting, filtering power of his language did not do away with the shadows. And I who had a peculiarly good nose for shadows, sensed immense layers of shadow which he refused to explore. My ambition was to descend deeper and deeper within him. His talk, on the other hand, rising in the air like a Parisian sparrow, seemed to say: I want to rise!

“Come to-night,” he said, “there will be many people there.”

“I am not made for the salon,” I pleaded. “I am like the guitar, for chamber music only. I give off my best music in the tete-a-tete.”

He laughed. I knew that intimacy was a rare experience for him, that he covered it always with the din of marginal talk. He dreaded facing all at once the entire panorama of his life, and his fear made him voluble.

If I made a hasty or mad remark, a little askew with emotion, he would say: “You are deraing!”

If he found me disturbed, or confused, or unfocussed, he would say: “Allons mettre les choses au point!” An ideal of symmetry, and the birds still flying in the Bois with an invisible order and discipline.

I got dizzy leaning over his silences. Not because I could not easily guess the multiple facts of his life, but because of the spaces, the vast distances, the widening and infinitely expanding regions impossible to cover, or explore. The more I looked into his clear eyes, as though eager to reveal everything, so open, so transparent, the more I realized all he had not given. And exactly the same thing had been said of me, and now I was writing a book in which I was trying to capture all of my own thoughts, but my father would continue to write music through which his thoughts could escape. As soon as the ground on which he stood was revealed my father abandoned it.

His impression of me, oddly enough, was the same: “You’re the most complex woman I’ve ever known. You’re all mystery,” he would say.

I thought that in capturing our likenesses I had found the key to this mystery which was, fundamentally, a supreme desire to escape pain. Either into the planets, or into human affections, or into another love. One love as a refuge from another. The need of refuge immense in proportion to the sensitiveness.

If I hurt him he would withdraw into his shell. But how I hurt him, or when or where, I could never discover. Was it simply the pain of jealousy which he was running away from? He had been the first to feel anxiety—perhaps because I was so much younger and hence more capable of unfaithfulness. It was the question of my faithfulness which had caused him so much concern.

Instead of coming out of his shell to fight against the possible disintegration of our relationship, he pretended not to mind. Every silence, every comedy enacted was but a weak attempt to avoid pain. He had not yet discovered, as I had, that almost all suffering is imaginary, that by coming out into the world and going forward to meet pain one becomes aware of its feebleness. I had discovered that by meeting the person I feared to meet, by reading the letter I feared to receive, by giving life a chance to really strike at me, I had discovered almost every time that there was no intention of striking at me, that reality was far less terrifying, far less cruel, than my imaginings. This coming out into the open, offering my face, my body, to the shocks and blows and disillusions, was like going to war, because the actual fact of war is less terrible than the imagining of it.

To imagine, I found, was worse than to realize, because the process of imagining took place in a void, it was untestable, it was like a fume rising out of a crater and choking one, or like a snake inside the body. There were no hands with which to strike or defend oneself in that inner chamber of ghostly tortures. But in life the realization summoned energies, forces, instruments, gave us courage, arms and legs to fight with, so that war almost became a joy. To fight a real sorrow, a real loss, a real insult, a real disillusion, a real treachery was infinitely less difficult than to spend a night without sleep struggling with ghosts. The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.

* * *


He told me that he had stayed awake all night wondering how he would bring himself to tell a singer that she had no voice at all.

“There was almost a drama here yesterday with Laura about that singer. I tried to dissuade her from falling in love with me by assuring her she was simply the victim of a mirage which surrounds every artist, that if she came close to me she would be disillusioned. So yesterday after the singing we talked for three quarters of an hour and when I told her I would not have an affair with her (at another period of my life I might have done it, for the game of it, but now I have other things to live for) she began to sob violently and all the rimmel came off. When she had used up her handkerchief I was forced to lend her mine. Then she dropped her lipstick and I picked it up and wiped it with another of my handkerchiefs. After the first fit of tears she began to do as all women do, to calmly make up again, wiping off the rouge that had been messed up by her tears. When she left I threw the handkerchiefs in with the laundry. The femme de chambre picked them up and left all the laundry just outside the door of my room while she was cleaning it. Laura passed by and immediately thought I had deceived her. I had to explain everything to her; I told her I had not talked about this woman because I did not want to seem to be boasting all the time about women pursuing me.”

I was not eager to have him drop his philandering—I was much more eager for the truth and for the destruction of illusion. I was tired of the card-board of illusion. I knew perfectly well he was telling me a lie, because the rimmel comes off when one weeps, but not the lipstick, and besides all elegant women have acquired a technique of weeping which has no such fatal effect upon the make-up. I knew this from my own experience. You wept just enough to fill the eyes with tears and no more. No overflow. The tears stayed inside the cups of the eyes, the rimmel was preserved, and yet the sadness was sufficiently expressive. After a moment one could repeat the process with the same dexterity which enables the garcon to fill the liqueur glass exactly to the brim. One tear too much could bring about a catastrophe, but these only came uncontrolled in the case of a real love affair.

I was smiling to myself at his naive lies, knowing that no change of lipstick could soil two handkerchiefs. The truth probably was that he had wiped his own mouth after kissing her.

He was playing around now just as much as before, but he hated to admit it to himself, and to me, because of the ideal image he carried in himself, the image of a man who could be so deeply disturbed and altered by the love of a long lost daughter that his career as a Don Juan had come to an abrupt end.

This romantic gesture which he was unable to make attracted him so much that he had to pretend he was making it, just as I had often pretended to be taking a voyage by writing letters on the stationery of some famous ocean liner.

“I said to Laura—do yo really think that if I wanted to deceive you I would do it in such an obvious and stupid way, right here in our own home where you might come in any moment?”

I knew only too well the blandness of the voice, the innocence of the eyes, the phrase tailed off with a smile which so melted the heart that one felt—well, if he is lying, I forgive him.

While my father was talking I was chuckling to think that the very same tricks I had played on others were now being played on me. But there was this difference between us, that on certain days I could be as sincere, or more sincere, than the people who never told any lies.

Suddenly I asked myself whether or not I wanted to be lied to. Both my father’s lies and mine were created to sustain the illusions of others. I was coming nearer and nearer to the realization that nobody had ever been grateful to me for my lies. Now they would know the truth. And yet I dreaded to hurt people. People may not appear to be injured, but they are, and fatally so, by certain truths. I had seen people crippled and broken from the knowledge of truth.

The trouble lay not in my lying, but in the fact that we are all brought up on fairy tales. We all expect the marvellous, the miraculous. I had been more poisoned by fairy tales than anyone. I actually believed that I could work miracles. When anyone said I want, or I need, I set out then and there to fulfill this need, this desire. I decided to be the fairy tale. And to a great extent I succeeded.

I could give each man the illusion that the world and I were exactly as he wished them to be. I wanted everyone to have what he wanted. The mistake I made was to encompass too much. I could carry one or two or three fairy tales out, but no more.

What my father was attempting was very much the same. He was trying to create an ideal world for me in which Don Juan, for the sake of his daughter, renounced all women. But I could not be deceived by his inventions. I was too clairvoyant. That was the pity of it. I could not believe in that which I wanted others to believe in—in a world made as one wanted it, an ideal world. I no longer believe in an ideal world at all.

And my father, what did he want and need? The illusion, which I was fostering, of a daughter who had never loved anyone but him? Or did he find it hard to believe me too? When I left him in the south, did he not doubt my reason for leaving him?

When I went about dreaming of satisfying the world’s hunger for illusion did I not know it was the most painful, the most insatiable hunger? Did I not know too that I suffered from doubt, and that although I was able to work miracles for others I had no faith that the fairy tale would ever work out for myself? Even the gifts I received were difficult for me to love, because I knew that they would soon be taken away from me, just as my father had been taken away from me when I loved him so passionately, just as every home I had as a child had been disrupted, sold, lost, just as every country I became attached to was soon changed for another country, just as all my childhood had been loss, change, instability. Even as a child, when I was sailing to America after the loss of my grandmother, I had promised myself never to love anybody again so as not to suffer so much.

* * *


When I entered his house which was all in brown, brown wood on the walls, brown rugs, brown furniture, I thought of Spengler writing about brown as the color of philosophy.

His windows were not open on the street, he had no use for the street, and so he had made the windows of stained glass. He lived within the heart of his own home as Orientals live within their citadel. Out of reach of passers-by. The house might have been anywhere—in England, Holland, Germany, America. There was no stamp of nationality upon it, no air from the outside. It was the house of the self, the house of his thoughts. The wall of the self—erected without connection with the crowd, or country or race.

He was still taking his siesta. I sat near the long range of files, the long, beautiful, neat rows of files, with names which set me dreaming: China, Science, Photography, Ancient Instruments, Egypt, Morocco, Cancer, Radio, Inventions, The Guitar, Spain. It required hours of work every day: newspapers and magazines had to be read and clippings cut out, dated, glued. He wove a veritable spider web about himself. No man was ever more completely installed in the realm of possessions.

He spent hours inventing new ways of filling his cigarette holder with an anti-nicotine filter. He bought drugs in whole-sale quantities. His closets were filled with photographs, with supplies of writing paper and medicines sufficient to last for years. It was as if he feared to find himself suddenly empty-handed. His house was a store-house of supplies which revealed his way of living too far ahead of himself, a fight against the improvised, the unexpected. He was a man who had prepared a fortress against need, against war, change, loss, etc.

Were Paris to be invaded to-morrow my father could go on living off his supply of Quaker Oats, biscuits, tonics, strichnine injections, iodine, etc. He could never use up the shirts he owned, the underwear, the hair lotions, the tooth-paste, the writing paper, the pencils…

Objects, it is true, are a great protection against ghosts. A piece of fur, a bottle of bath salts, my satin negligee, had often consoled and comforted me against invisible sorrows and fears. To turn on the light in my room, to lie on the white fur bed, to put my hand on the telephone and call some one, anyone, to turn on the water for a bath, to throw into the bath sandalwood salts, all this had the magical power of making the world warmer, sweeter. The vague anxieties, premonitions, haunting, invisible misfortunes hanging over me thus evaporated. At night, in the dark, I could touch the telephone and say to myself: I can turn the little disk and a voice will answer. A voice I don’t know. But it will be a real voice, and I will know that I am not gone yet, that the cruelty of human beings has not killed me, that to-morrow there will be a dawn, the sun will shine, the radiators will whistle, the maid will bring hot coffee, and death will be postponed.

In proportion to my father’s capacity for becoming invisible, untouchable, unattainable, in proportion to his capacity for metamorphosis, for disappearance even, he had made the most solid house, the strongest walls, the heaviest furniture, the most heavily loaded bookcases, the most heavily covered walls, the most heavily filled linen closets, the most completely filled and catalogued universe. Everything to testify to his presence, his duration, his signature to a contract to remain on earth, visible at moments. All this he promised, with his house, his possessions, his servants, his luxurious car. It was a lease, a lease on life. He lives in his own house, the neighbors could say, it may be he will stay a while. It took so much to persuade him to stay. At bottom life had offended him, failed him, like a shallow mistress. He didn’t have much use for it, but he would not spit on it. He was an aristocrat. His body continued to be courteous. But no one could tame his wandering spirit. There were consolations. Out of contempt for life, he seemed to be saying, for big sorrows there are consolations, things like bath salts and fur bed-covers. No more.

In my mind I saw him asleep upstairs, with his elbow under his chin, in the most uncomfortable position, one he had finally trained himself to hold so that he would never sleep with his mouth open, because that was ugly. I saw him asleep without a pillow, because a pillow under the head brought wrinkles. I pictured the bottle of alcohol which my mother had laughingly said, when I was a child, my father bottled himself in at night in order to keep young…

Now he was before me, and he was doing a stunt which used to make me laugh wildly when we were living in Brussels. He used to come in and imitate the cackles of a hen about to lay an egg. His cries were comical. He would produce one egg after another, which made the three of us laugh wildly. To-day he was doing it just as of old, but I was no longer able to laugh. Suddenly it occurred to me that his gaiety had never been genuine. It was simulated. It was for others. He did not feel it himself. It was a pretense, and realizing it, I felt sad.

After this prank he left me to wash his hands. He washed his hands after everything he did. He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself.

The fear of microbes played a very important part in his life. The fear of microbes was his rational explanation. The fruit had to be washed with filtered water. The water had to be filtered for drinking. His mouth must be disinfected. The silverware had to be passed over an alcohol lamp before using it. He washed his hands continuously. He bathed meticulously. He never ate the part of the bread which his fingers had touched.

Thus it seemed to me had people washed in the baptismal waters of rivers all through the ages, hut they had always known that it was to wash away the traces of sin.

My father had never imagined that he was trying to cleanse his soul in the waters of his bathroom, to wash it of his lies, his deceptions, his callousness. The microbe for him was a danger to the body. He did not study the microbe of conscience which we carry within us.

When I saw him washing his hands, as I watched the soap foaming, I could see him again arriving behind stage at the concert hall in Berlin, with his fur-lined coat and white silk scarf, and being immediately surrounded by women. I seven years old, sitting in the front row with my mother and brothers, in a starched dress and white gloves, trembling a little because my father had said: “And above all, don’t make a cheap family show of your enthusiasm. Clap discreetly. Don’t have people notice that the pianist’s children are clapping away like a bh of jolly, noisy peasants.” This enthusiasm which was to be held in check was a great burden for child’s soul. I had never been able to curb a joy a sorrow; to restrain oneself meant to kill, to bury. This cemetery of strangled emotions—was it this my father was trying to wash away? And the day I told him I was pregnant and he said: “Now you’re worth less on the market as a woman…”—was this being washed away? No thought or insight into the feelings of others. Incapable of reading into others’ feelings, passing from extremes of hardness to weakness; no intermediate stage of human feelings, but extreme poles of emotions which never made the human equation… too hot or too cold, blood cold and heart weak, blood hot and heart cold…

While he was washing his hands with that expression I had seen on the faces of people in India thrust into the Ganges, of Egyptians plunged into the Nile, of Negroes dipped into the Mississippi, I saw the fruit being washed for his lunch and mineral water poured into his glass. Sterilized water to wash away the microbes, but his soul unwashed, unwashable, yearning to be free of the microbe of conscience… All the water running from the modern tap, running, floating in this modern bathroom, all the rivers of Egypt, of India, of America… and he unwashed… All the taps open in the modern world, and every man standing before it washing his modern body, washing… washing… washing… A drop ofholy water with which to exorcise the guilt.

Hands washed over and over again in the hope of a miracle, and no miracle comes from the taps of modern washstands, no holy water flows through leaden pipes, no holy water flows under the bridges of Paris because the man standing at the tap has no faith and no awareness of his soul: he believes he is merely washing the stain of microbes from his hands…

* * *


My father came in unexpectedly and saw that the outline of rouge on my lips was slightly blurred by kisses just received. My father talked rapidly, breathlessly, and left very hurriedly. I wanted to stop him and ask him to give me back my soul. I hated him for the way he descended the stairs as if he had been cast out, wounded by jealousy. I hated him because I could not remain detached, could not remain standing at the top of the stairs watching him depart. I felt myself going down with him, within him, because his pain and flight were so familiar to me. I descended with him, and lost myself, passed into him, became one with him like his shadow. I felt my self growing empty, and dissolving, and passing into him. I knew that when he reached the street he would hail a taxi even though it was a forbidden luxury. I knew that once in the taxi he would feel a certain relief in having again escaped from the place, the person who had inflicted the wound. There was always a possibility of removing one’s self physically. I knew he would sit in the taxi entranced with the speed of it, and abandon himself to rebellion: “I won’t see her again. I don’t want to be hurt any more.”

The organ grinder would play and the pain would gnaw deeper, hotter, bitterer, because even tuneless music could dissolve the crust we build around our feelings. Coming out of the taxi he would curse the leaden day which engraves its color on our mood, and from which we can never escape because we are born inextricably woven into the texture, color and temperature of nature. p align=”JUSTIFY” height=”0” width=”24”> He would curse the mood which dispossessed him of his own soul, and the tragic sense of life which distorted trees, faces, events, like one long, continuous nightmare. He would overtip the taxi driver because he imagined he might be suffering too, and that perhaps a gift and a smile might prevent him from committing suicide. He would have the feeling in so doing that he had relieved the sufferings of mankind. Then he would breathe a little more lightly. Giving to the taxi driver’s wife and crippled children was to give to his suffering self the gift he wished some one would make him—of a smile and of thoughtfulness.

I wanted to beg my father to tell me that he had done something else, something different from what I would have done. I wanted to beg him to assure me I had stayed at the top of the stairs.

But I was not there. We were standing in the street, looking at our empty pocketbooks and wondering wistfully why we were not given, as we gave others, at least the illusion of perfection. We lamented our isolation, yet we were the ones who had run away. The next time we would meet we would show false, high-pitched gaiety and our sensitive ears would catch the sound of the effort. This gaiety which was false, which made him smile with only half of his mouth, was the same gaiety I used on dark days as my last gift.

I wanted to reach out to my father and warn him. I wanted to reassure him and caress him. But everything about him was fluttering like a bird that had flown into a room by mistake, flying recklessly and blindly in utter terror. A bird bruising itself against wall and furniture while one stands there mute and compassionate. A terror so great that it did not sense one’s pity, and when one opened the window to allow it to escape it interpreted the gesture as a menace. To run away from its own terror it flew wildly against the window and crushed its feathers.

Don’t flutter so blindly, my father!

Or perhaps during that taxi ride he had arranged to sever himself from the situation which caused him pain. I knew how he would plan his escape. He was planning a long trip, he was writing letters, addressing the flowers, waving good-byes, enacting the departure. He was cutting all the cords as if he were a ship being launched, slipping down the ways… He would sever the tie, that was simple. A big sabre cut, once and for all, and he would be free. That would be a fancy too, as fanciful as the idea that music, this music which filled the air we breathed, was silenced when the radio was turned off. Life could not be sliced to separate the regions of pain from those of joy. Everything that happened to us happened deep down, where it could not be hacked away.

* * *


I grew suddenly tired of seeing my father always in profile, of seeing him always walking on the edge of circles, of seeing him always elusive, always covering essentials with long, dizzy phrases about nothing. The fluidity, the evasiveness, the deviations made his life a shadow picture. He never met life full face. His eyes never rested on anything, they were always in flight. His face was in flight. His hands were in flight. I never saw them lying still, but always curving like autumn leaves over a fire, curlind uncurling. Thinking of him I could picture him only in motion, either about to leave, or about to arrive; I could see better than anything else, as he was leaving, his back, the way his hair came to a point on his neck, the birth mark on his neck. I had a three-quarter picture of him taking leave, his face partly turned towards the door, his hand stretched to say good-bye. In his own home the sound of his steps was unreal—he could arrive without being heard.

When I got into the taxi I had a feeling that I was going to bring the tiger in my father out into the open. I was tired of his secret muscles, his feline mysteries, his ballet dancing. I told myself I would begin by telling him the whole truth, and demand the same of him. I would struggle to build up a new relationship.

He was leaving for a concert with a young violinist. He had asked me to rent a private compartment in which he said he wanted to prepare some notes for a conference. When I brought the ticket to him I said I knew that the compartment would be put to other uses. He leaped up in great anger and said: “You suspect me, you suspect me?”

But he refused to admit that he had been lying. He was pale with anger. No one ever doubted him before—so he said. To be doubted blinded him with anger. He was not concerned with the truth or falsity of the situation. He was concerned with the injury and insult I was guilty of, by doubting him.

“You’re demolishing everything,” he said.

“What I’m demolishing was not solid,” I answered. “Let’s make a new beginning. We created nothing together except a sand pile into which both of us sink now and then with doubts. I am not a child. I cannot believe your stories.”

He grew still more pale and angry. What shone out of his angry eye was pride in his stories, pride in his ideal self, pride in his delusions. And he was offended. He did not stop to ask himself if I were right. I could not be right. I could see, that for the moment at any rate, he believed implicitly in the stories he had told me. If he had not believed in them so firmly he would have been humiliated to see himself as a poor comedian, a man who could not deceive even his own daughter.

“You shouldn’t be offended,” I said. “Not to be able to deceive your own daughter is no disgrace. It’s precisely because I have told you so many lies myself that I can’t be lied to.”

“Now,” he said, “you’re accusing me of being a Don Juan.”

“I accuse you of nothing. I am only asking for the truth.”

“What truth?” he said. “I am a moral being, far more moral than you.”

“That’s too bad. I thought we were above questions of good and evil. I am not saying you’re bad. I am not saying you’re a woman chaser. That doesn’t concern me. I am saying only that you’re false with me. I have too much intuition.”

“You have no intuition at all concerning me.”

“That might have affected me when I was a child. To-day I don’t mind what you think of me.”

“Go on,” he said, “now tell me I am selfish, tell me I have no talent, tell me I don’t know how to love, tell me all the things your mother used to tell me.”

“I have never thought any of these things.”

But suddenly I stopped. I knew my father was not seeing me any more, but again that judge, that past which made him so uneasy. I felt as if I were not myself any more, but my mother, my mother with red face and a body tired with giving and serving, a body rebelling at his selfishness and irresponsibility. I felt her anger and despair. For the first time my own image of him fell to the floor. I saw my mother’s image. I saw the child in him who was loved and did not know yet how to love. I saw the child courting caresses and incapable of an act of protection, of strength. I saw the child hiding under her courage, the same child hiding now behind Laura’s skirts. I was my mother telling him again that as a human being he was a failure… and perhaps she had told him too that as an artist he had not given enough to justify his limitations as a human being. All his life he had been playing with people, with love, playing at love, playing at being a pianist, playing at composing. Playing because to no one or nothing could he give his whole soul. He never brought himself to anything intact. There were two regions, two tracts of land, with a bridge in between, a slight, fragile bridge like the Japanese bridges in the miniature Japanese gardens. Whoever ventured to cross the bridge fell into the abyss. So it was with my mother. She had fallen through and been drowned. My mother thought he had a soul. She had fallen there in that space where his emotions reached their limit, where the land opened in two, where circles fell open and rings were unsoldered.

Was it my mother talking now? I was saying: “I am only asking you to be honest with yourself. I admit I lie, but you do not admit it. I am not asking you for anything, except to be real.”

“The violinist is in love with me, but I am not in love with her.”

“Oh God!” I shouted, “don’t get lost in the details. You’re always going off into details.”

“Now say I am superficial.”

“At this moment you are. I wanted you to face me full face. I wanted to make you come to life, by pain, if necessary. But you’re only suffering because your vanity has been wounded.”

“I am working myself to the bone for Laura’s sake.”

“That isn’t altogether true either. Laura doesn’t want you to work. Your work is an opiate. Why can’t you say anything real? I have a good ear for false tones.”

“Then go and have your ears cleaned!”

He was furious. He paced up and down in long strides, pale, his lips blue with anger.

“You only love in me,” I said, “what resembles you. What is different in me you don’t understand.”

“You’re the most complex woman I’ve ever known.”

“You never try to know women—that’s why you never give them more than a night.”

It seemed to me that my father was not quarrelling with me but with his own past, that what was coming to light now was his constant feeling of guilt towards my mother. If he saw in me now a sort of avenger it was only because of his fear that I might say to him what my mother used to say. Against her words he had erected a huge defense: the approbation of the rest of the world.

But in himself he had never quite resolved the right and the wrong. He too was driven now by a compulsion to say things he never intended to say, to make me the symbol of the one who had come to punish. I had come to expose his life of lies and deceptions. Perhaps to prove to him his worthlessness.

And yet this was not the nature of my struggle with him at all. I could have stood in front of him and been silent—still he would have interpreted my words as a reproach. He was so far from accepting my real words. It was as if he feared that whoever came near to him had come to punish him, to expose him.

He was not yet convinced that he had acted rightly. He feared so much that I had come to say: “The four people you abandoned in order to live your own life, in order to save yourself, are here again. They have not died. They are not crippled. It is only faith in love they have lost. You lost it, too, when your betrothed betrayed you. We all lose it at some time or other. Your running away was not a crime. Why are you ashamed?”

Because I had come to ask him for the truth he thought I had come to accuse him, or to condemn. I could not make this clear. I was not aware of it at the moment. The scene between us was taking place between two ghosts, talking at each other, saying things that we could not make clear, because we were both choked by our own anger, blinded by our own emotion.

My father’s ghost was saying: “I cannot bear the slightest doubt, the slightest criticism. Immediately I feel judged, condemned.”

My own ghost was saying: “I cannot bear lies and deceptions. It makes the ground shift under my feet. I need truth and solidity.”

They could not understand each other. They were gesticulating in space. Gestures of anger, of despair. My father pacing up and down, angry because of my doubts of him, forgetting that these doubts were well founded, forgetting to ask himself whether I was right or not. And I hysterical with despair because my father would not understand, because the fragile, little Japanese bridge between the two portions of his soul would not even hold me for a moment, me walking with such light feet, trying to bring messages from one side to the other, trying to make connections between the real and the unreal…

I could not see my father clearly any more. I could see only the hard profile cutting the air like a st stone ship, a stone ship moving in a sea unknown to human beings, into regions made of rock, of granite, of mineral. No more water, or warmth, or flow between us. All communication paralyzed by falsity. Lost in the fog. Lost in a cold, white fog of falsity. Images distorted as if we were looking through a glass bowl. His mouth long and mocking, his eyes enormous but empty in their transparency. Enormous and bulbous, like the eyes of a fish. Not human. The human contours all lost. No longer the voice of a human being saying simple things, like—”I am hungry, I am sleepy, I am tired.” (I could not remember his ever saying these things.) But like voices saying: “You doubt me. You think I have no talent.” And an interruption. The wind blowing. The wind, or a river boat’s siren, or a storm. Then the voice again: “You think I am bad. I am working so hard. The women I have known I never cared to know. I never did them any harm (but I did not say you did). I sent them red roses when everything was finished. I never saw them cry. When they got sick I didn’t like it. I don’t like sickness. It isn’t aesthetic. You haven’t enough scientific spirit. Life is like a marvellous machine. You must run it with exactitude. As you run the body. When I stop making love my machine gets out of order. I get yellow and I don’t feel well. Be rational, my daughter.”

And I thinking while the radio of his quick, smooth speaking continued: “I stopped loving my father a long time ago.” What remained was the slavery to the pain, the habit of thinking that I loved him, the slavery to a pattern. When I saw him I thought I would be happy and exalted. I pretended. I worked myself up into ecstasies. When one is pretending the entire body revolts. There come great eruptions and revolts, great, dark ravages, and above all, a joylessness. A great, bleak joylessness. Everything that is natural and real brings joy. He was pretending too—he had to win me as a trophy, as a victory. He had to win me away from my mother, had to win my approbation. Had to win me because he feared me. He feared the judgment of his children. And when he could not win me he suffered in his vanity. He fought in me his own faults, just as I hated in him my own faults.

Certain gestures made in childhood seem to have eternal repercussions. Such was the gesture I had made to keep my father from leaving, grasping his coat and holding on to it so fiercely that I had to be torn away. This gesture of despair seemed to prolong itself throughout my life. I grew to love everything that fled, everything that vanished before me, and to believe that everything I loved would always be lost. I repeated this gesture blindly, hundreds and hundreds of times. It was so hard for me to believe that this father I was still trying to hold on to was no longer real or important, that the coat I was touching was not warm, that the body of him was not human, that my breathless, tragic desire had come to an end, that the man I was holding to-day was not the man I needed, and that my love had died.

Great forces had impelled me towards symmetry and balance, had impelled me to abandon my father in order to close the fatal circle of abandon. I had forced the hour glass of pain to turn. We had run after each other. We had tried to possess each other. We had been slaves of a pattern, and not of love.

Our love had long ago been replaced by the other loves which gave us life. All those portions of the self which had been tied up in the tangle of misery and frustration had been loosened imperceptibly by life, by creation. But the feelings we had begun with, twenty years back, he of guilt and I of love, had been like railrot>To-day I held the coat of a dead love—and it was hard to believe in the death of it.

This had been the nightmare—to pursue this search and poison all joys with the necessity of its fulfilment. To discover that such fulfilment was not necessary to life, but only to the mind. We were writing myths with our life blood, books in which destiny forbade us to forget our ideal loves, our promises to ourselves. What we call our destiny—the railroad tracks of our obsessions.

Now I was going to enter the Chinese theatre where I would be shown the trappings of the play as well as the play itself, where it was plain to see that the settings were made of cardboard, where there was no attempt made to conceal the wooden rafts, the electric moonlight. I would go behind the stage to see how it was done, in order to stop weeping, in order to make sure that no one was dead, that there was no tragedy.

If I should never be able to look behind my nightmare I would go mad with fear and despair. I wanted to awaken and see the cheerful white face of the clock pointing to one o’clock in the sunshine. I wanted to be at the Chinese theatre, so that I could bear this sight of my life, so that the screams, the tears, the murders would not be too real. I wanted to see the strings which ruled the scenes, the cardboard in the trees, the false storms and the false lightnings. I would sit at the Chinese theatre and be saved.

I could hear the voices of the world just as I heard the voices of the nurses and doctors, coming out of the ether, the world saying: “You are loved, you are wanted, you are not persecuted, he didn’t leave you, no one laughed at you”—but this voice came across great spaces and sounded very faint. The ether was too strong, I could not move or act differently. The upper part of my head was in a fog: I continued to shed real tears, to tremble with real fears, real suffering, as in a nightmare that repeats itself over and over again. My mind and my body were only half out of the ether of the past. I had not opened my eyes altogether; I was still writing in an ancient pattern.

My anger and despair, my hatred and love of my father grew immense, smudged the whole world, tainted the sky. My fury rose, the thermometer of my despair burst…

His face was the face of the world, the world as enemy, as the not-me. I wanted to strike at it, but I loved it. I could not kill it. I had seen it afraid. I could not destroy it. I had heard it weep. My anger fell. The windmills taunted me. My father had hurt me. The world had hurt me. But my love for the world, for my father, for deaf gods, was indestructible. My love for my father. My forgiveness, my forgiveness…

It was enough that a man without legs should pass me—a man, pushing himself along with his hands—for me to cease feeling my own suffering.

The world was a cripple. My father was a cripple.

In striking out for his own liberty, to save his own life, he had struck at me. And he had poisoned himself with remorse.

No need to hate. No need to punish.

I half sat up. I saw the clock marking one o’ clock in the sun. The light was gold. The doctors and nurses were gone. The birds were singing. The dog was barking. The last time I had come out of the ether it was to look at my dead child, a little girl with long eyelashes and slender hands. She was dead.

The little girl in me was dead too. The woman had been saved. And with the little girl died the need of a father.




THE VOICE


Djuna is lying down in a cell-shaped room of the tallest hotel in the City, in a building shooting upward like a railroad track set for the moon. A million rooms like cells, all exactly alike, and reaching in swift confused layers towards the moon. The rapid birds of elevators traverse the layers with lightning flashes of their red and white eyes signalling, and without a single quiver of their wings. Their eyes red and white lights signalling UP or DOWN, to the sun terraces, the observation towers, the solarium, or the storage rooms in the underground. All the voices of the world captured by the radio wires in this Babel tower, and even when the little buttons are marked off, this music of all the languages seeps through the walls of the hotel, a continuous flute chant of complaints. The people riding up and down the elevators are never permitted to crash through the last ceiling into pure space, and never allowed to pierce through the ground floor to enter the demonic regions below the crust of the earth. When they reach the highest tip they swoop down again back to the heavy repose in darkness. For Djuna the elevator does not stop at the sun terraces. When it clicks up there she feels a great anguish. She is certain it will pass beyond and through the ceiling, as she does with her feelings, explode in a fuse of ascension. When it stops dead on the ground floor she feels again a moment of anguish; it will not stop here, but bury itself below, where there is hysteria and darkness, wells, prisons, tombs.

Passing through the carpeted hallways, she can hear the singing, the weeping, the quarrels and confessions seeping out. Her footsteps are not heard in this convent of adulteries. The chambermaid is passing, carrying old newspapers, magazines, cigarette butts, breakfast left-overs. The boy is running with telegrams, special deliveries and telephone messages. He passes and with him a knife thrust of icy wind angrily banging the doors opened on intimate lives. Trays of food for the lovers and for the unloved. The house detective.

Merely passing down the halls noiselessly over the carpeted floor Djuna is aware of confessions seeping out. In all the eyes she sees only the secret desire to confess. The elevators disgorge people feverishly eager to confess. They ask for the room of the modern priest, where a man in an armchair is listening to the unfaithful lying on the divan, looking down at them, with his own face against the light. Looking down at them to keep fresh in him the wound of compassion. When the glance rests on human beings from this position, where he can see the frailty of the hair, how it parts, falls, where it thins, where he can see the brow like a sharp landslide, discover the delicacy of the skin as it alone reveals itself when watched obliquely, all men seem in need of protection. From where he looks all noses slant without audacity, point without impertinence, a tender root to the mouth merely. The eyes are covered by weary eyelids, their motion slower when watched from above, a curtain of hyate livensitive skin lowered with the gravity of sleep or death. Without the thrusting light-duel of the eyes, without the glaze and fervor of expression, courage, cruelty, humor, all men look crucified, passive, covering dolorous secrets. The mouth without its sensual openness, its breath, appears like a target mark, a vulnerable opening, a wound in the human being through which all his sorrows dribble in hysteric foam.

The man listening to confessions is strapped to his armchair and he sees them all struggling, defeated, wounded, crippled. They are laying themselves open before him, demanding to be condoned, absolved, forgiven, justified. They want this Voice coming from a dark armchair, a substitute for god, for the confessor of old.

Djuna, lying down, remembers all this that she has lived, and that so many others are living after her. This talk in the dark with one who becomes a part of herself, who answers all the doubts in her. This man without identity, the Voice of all she did not know but which was in her to bring to light.

The Voice of the man who helped her to be born again.

He was taking her slowly back to the beginning, and this talking to a man she could not see was like a dialogue with a Djuna much greater than the every day Djuna, a Djuna, she felt at times as clearly as one feels the pushing of the wind on street corners. The larger Djuna pushing the smaller one to act and speak greatness, not smallness or doubt or fear. The Voice had unburied this larger Djuna, had confronted her with her desires, permitted them to fuse. Before this they lay separate with an abyss of yearning and hunger between them, one the smaller Djuna in a world she feared as tragic, now the larger Djuna in a world she no longer feared. The Voice had spoken to dispel the turmoil in her, the dissonances, and the divisions: I want to reconcile you to yourself. As if she had grown into two irreconcilable branches and by this lost her strength.

“Hans,” she was telling him, “is both very near to me and at the same time very far. I can’t understand it. I don’t want to lean on you any more, but I must. I feel at times an abyss under my feet. When he moves away I cannot be quiet and alone. He seems bound to me and then completely unbound. He leaps out of my orbit and then inside again. He changes. I look at him one morning and he seems dispersed, ghostly. One day there is warmth in him, the next none. There are times when he kisses me and I feel it is unreal. He is like sand, like water, like wax, like cotton. When he returns to me I can see the imprint of others on him, I hear their voices, their thoughts in him. What does this mean? Does love die in one day, like this? Or is it my faith in the love? Is he gone from me? I feel as if I were running down empty corridors, leading me nowhere. I feel dissolved in doubt. We went out together last night, we drank together. Some one was courting me. And Hans became like soup, and when he is like soup he fraternizes with everyone, even this man who was trying to take me away from him. He falls into states of effusive display, he loves everybody. His whole self opens in warmth and hospitality. There was no longer any Hans but this man for everyone to take hold of, to sit near to. He is promiscuous, I tell you. I can’t bear it, how near they come. They talk in his face, they breathe his breath. Anyone at all has this privilege. He is like a whore. Anyone at all can talk to him in the street, sit at his table, share his house and perhaps me. He gives away everything. He makes all the promises, asks questions, informs himself of everyone’s needs. He melts away in a kind of sensual generosity. When I see him this way, I feel him lost. I returned alone to the hotel. In the hotel room I looked out of my window at the electric signs, and I pictured him like a drunken sailor, embracing everyone in the street, falling into the avid arms of the whores, yielding, laughing with his mouth so open, unsteady on his legs, without memory of me, and the more the electric signs blinked, danced before me, the greater I imagined his debauch. Instead of a heart I felt a hole in my body. A black hole where my heart had been. If this is love, this falling into a mesh, this knotted, bound, knotted union to another body which makes all the gestures made by the other so tormentingly alive in me… what will I do? I cannot stand separate from him. If is as if I am inside of him, the same flesh, feeling all he does even when away from me, and it is me he gives away to other people. I kept looking at the electric signs which were lighting the red dance halls where he was, lost to me. I never thought of the next day, never thought of a return, only of his body torn from me, and this black hole left in its place, and each moment of his betrayal was a life-time. Every movement of this night was slowed up, the electric lights moved more slowly, to make the night last longer. What interminable hours—he had been out for many years, laughing, enjoying the dance hall women. Will I die like this every night? This night without faith was longer than all the rest of my life. I can’t free myself of this image. I am more lonely than before, when I loved no one. This jealousy really stops the life in me, strangles me. What am I going to do? I waited all night for the sound of his door opening. He came back and laid his head right where the hole had been. He was not drunk. I was sobbing. He was amazed: ‘What have I done? I would not hurt you, not you. I would not want to hurt you, but what have I done? How can you suffer when nothing has happened? You must have faith.’ That’s what he said. He was right. There is something wrong with me. I want to live only with the intimate self of the other. I only care about the intimate self. I hate to see people in the world, their masks, their falsities, their surrender to the world, their resemblance to others, their promiscuity. I only care about the secret self. I suppose I only want the dream and the isolation.

“I have the fear that everyone is leaving, moving away, that love dies in an instant. I look at the people walking in the street, just walking, and I feel this: they are walking, but they are also being carried away. They are part of a current. Each moment that is passing takes them somewhere else. I confuse the moods which change and pass with the people themselves. I see them carried into eddies, always moving out of some state they will never return to, I see them LOST. They do not walk in circles, back to where they started, but they walk out and beyond in some irretrievable way, too fast, toward the end. And I feel myself standing there, I cannot move with them. I seem to be standing and watching this current passing and I am left behind. Why have I the feeling they all pass, like the day, the leaves, the weather, the moods of climate, into death? ”

“Because you are standing still and measuring the time by your standing still, the others seem to run too fast towards an end, which, if you were living and running with them, you would cease to be aware of. The death you are aware of is only in you because you are watching.”

“I stand for hours watching the river downtown. What obsesses me is the debris. I look at the flowers floating, petals completely opened, the life sucked out of them, flowers without pistils. Rubber dolls, punced, bobbing up and down like foetuses. Boxes full of wilted vegetables, bottles with broken tops. Dead cats. Corks. Bread that looks like entrails. Torn envelopes. These things haunt me. The debris. Well, when I watch people it is as if at the same time I saw the discarded parts of themselves. Detritus. And so I can’t see their motions except as acts which lead them faster and faster to the waste, the end, to the river where it will be thrown out. The faster they walk the streets, the faster they move toward this mass of debris. That is how I see them, caught by a current that carries them off. “

“Only because you are standing still. If you were in the current, in love, in ecstasy, the motion would not show only its aspect of death. You see what life throws out because you stand outside, shut out from the ferment itself. What is burnt, used, is not regretted by anyone who is the fire consuming all this. If you were on fire you would enjoy throwing out what was dead. You would fight for the lightness of your movements, loving, hating, dancing, caressing. It is not living too fast and abandoning oneself that carries one towards death, but not moving. Then everything deteriorates. When parts of yourself die they are only like leaves. What refuses to live in you will become like cells through which the blood does not pass. The blood must pass.

“There must be change. When you are living you seek the change; it is only when you stop that you become aware of death. Death and abandon. Death and separation.”

Djuna walked out in the street, blind with the rush of memories. She stood in the center of the street eddies, and suddenly she knew the whole extent of her fear of flowing, of yielding, of depending on another. Suddenly she began walking faster than whoever walked beside her, to feel the exultation of passing them. The one who does not move feels abandoned, and the one who loves and weeps and yields feels he is living so fast the debris cannot catch up with him. She was moving faster than the slowly flowing rivers carrying detritus. Moving, moving. Flowing, flowing, flowing. When she was watching, everything that moved seemed to be moving away, but when moving this was only a tide, and the self turning, rotating, was feeding the rotation of desire.

* * *


Djuna no longer watched death. She was dancing, and she was dancing away from Hans, and back to him, leaving more space and air between them. But thinking of him, attentive to her returns. Thinking constantly of Hans but dancing into new lives. Alert, and a little impatient, aware of time (to be there when he returns). She opened many doors. (I am not here to stay. He must not be kept waiting.) He is behind every move she makes. She is still swallowing food for him, looking at women with his eyes, feeling the sensuality of the day through his skin. She laughs his laughter, feels all the currents passing through him.

Could anyone help her to forget Hans for an hour? Could Edgar help her, Edgar with his astonished eyes saying to her: “I cannot tell what you will be to-morrow, that is why I love you. You feed on miracles and transformations. You may have been afraid but you never died.” The whiteness of his room like the whiteness of the streets. The world excluded from his room. They met in quietness and elation. Elation in royal blue and whiteness.

Out in the snow again she does not feel her body. She is afraid of becoming a saint. Edgar might save her, Edgar waiting for her every day carrying flowers in silver paper. Flowers in silver paper! With this bouquet in his hand the world loses all its insensate rotation and askewness.

She has a fear of becoming a saint. She feels her body slipping away from her.

She is dancing with Edgar in the luminous turning disk in a shower of changing lights, but when her dress opens a little at the top she can smell the mixed odor of herself and Hans. She still feels Hans’ moisture between her legs. But she is still afraid of being lured back into the whitest corners of the dream, afraid of the nun’s wings like small ship sails. She likes to feel other desires around her. She would like many men to come and take hold of her, so her body would cease slipping from her. She finds herself so far from her desires, so far from her own flesh, this flesh, these feet walking over wet snow in sandals because she has so strong a sense of wonder she cannot believe her feet will get wet, her throat ache. Her love for Hans spilling over in multiple desires to be made woman many times over again, to remain woman at his side, to stay in his world because it is his world and he is in it. She sees the dirty snow, like the soiled bandages of a crippled city. She loves the world too much, it is implanted in her like man himself; no hatred pours from her, yet she is grateful to Edgar because his desire, his hand on her, the flowers in silver paper, everything that is simple, life-like. Ordinary, like his words ‘I love your gaiety, you’re a thoroughbred,’ because the place the dog tied at the entrance with the coats and hats, the waiter’s smile, the snow brought from the street marking the dance floor with stains, all this can arrest this ascension in her, this vast rotation in space, this proximity to all forms of departure. He said she was a thoroughbred, and not a saint. She had been made woman by Hans. Hans alone held in his hand all the roots of her being, and when he pulled them, in his own motion outward, he inflicted a torture which destroyed all the roots at once and sent her into space. Edgar wanted to come close to her, and she would let him, while imagining Hans’ pain. She would be Hans observing her own severance from him. A meeting of eyes, a silence, a blind meeting with Edgar, covered with flowers in silver paper, in a world that stood still. Below the level of feeling where Hans could watch the scene and be in turn transfixed to the pain of stillness while the nightmare enveloped and pierced him: and so Hans saw the clothes falling, heard the music, witnessed the scene of a Djuna lying down and saying: Why do you leave me so alone, through what fissure between us does this stranger penetrate and approach me? I am quiet and yielding like a plant. Unafraid and full of joy at feeling your pain, Hans. You are the man of the crowd and of the street. Here I lie with a stranger covered with ordinary flowers in silver paper. I am punishing you for being different, I am removing myself to permit you to breathe. What makes me lonely, Hans, are the cheap and gaudy people you go with. I lie here untouched by this stranger, who is only caressing you inside of me. He is complaining like a woman: you are not filled with me. This was a meeting like a curse in a dark, chaotic world to learn to put space between you and me.

* * *


It is as if she were in an eleva shooting up and down. Hundreds of floors of sensations varying faster than temperature. Up into the sun garden, no floors above. Deliverance. A bower of light. Proximity to the stars. Faith. At this height she finds something to lie on. Faith. But the red lights are calling: Down. The elevator coming down so swiftly brings her body to the concert floor. But her breath is caught midway, left in midheaven. Now it is music she is breathing, in which all anger dissolves. It is not the swift changes of floor which make her dizzy, but that parts of her body, of her life are passing into every floor, into the lives of others. All that passes into the room of the Voice he pours back now into her, to deliver himself of the weight. She follows the confessions, each anguish is repeated in her. The resonance is so immense, resonance to wind, to lament, to pain, to desires, to every nuance of sensibility, so enormous the resonance, beyond the entire hotel, the high vault of sky and the black bowl of hysteria, that she cannot hear the music. She cannot listen to the music. Her being is brimming, spilling over, cannot contain its own knowledge. The music spills out overflows, meets with the overfullness, and she cannot receive it. She is saturated. For in her it never dies. No days without music. She is like an instrument so tuned up, so exacerbated, that without hands, without players, without leadership, it responds, it breathes, it emits the continuous melody of sensibility. Never knew silence. Even in the darkest grottoes of sleep. So the concerts of the Hotel Chaotica Djuna cannot hear without exploding. She feels her body like an instrument which gives its strongest music when it is used as a body. Ecstasy reached only in the orchestra, music and sensualitly traversing all walls and reaching ecstasy. The orchestra is made with fullness, and only fullness rises to God. The soloist talks only to his own soul. All fullness rises.

Like the fullness of the Hotel. No matter what happened in each room, what contortions, distortions, growls, devourings, murders, when Djuna reaches the highest floor, the alchemy is complete. Music rises. Ecstasy rises. Like the fullness in herself. No cord untouched, no cells closed, no nerves silent: at the tips of her nerves a million eyes, and her moisture dripping in snow white drops everywhere.

* * *


The telephone rang and announced some one waiting downstairs to see the Voice. It was urgent. And this some one came, shaking an umbrella dripping with melted snow. She entered his room walking sideways like a crab, and bundled in her coat as if she were a package, not a body. Between each word there was a light gasp of hesitancy. Ineach gesture a swing intended to be masculine, but as soon as she sat on the couch, looking up at the Voice, flushed with timidity, saying shall I take off my shoes and lie down? he knew already she was not masculine. She was deluding herself and others about it. He was even more certain while watching her take off her shoes and uncover her very small and delicate feet. Not that the feet were an indication, but that he felt the woman in her through her feet, through her hands. They transmitted a woman current. The simple act of taking off her shoes betrayed that her caresses were those of a girl, girls in school arousing but the surface of each other’s feminine senses and believing when they had travelled on lakes of gentle sensation that they had penetrated the dark and violent center of woman’s response. All this he knew, and he was not surprised when she opened with “I find it hard to confess to you, I’m a pervert. I’ve had a lot of aff with women.” He wanted to smile. He could have smiled, she could not see him, but he could see her passing her delicate girl hand through the strands of her heavy hair with gestures meant to be heavy with disaster and dark implications. She could not, with any of her words, charge the atmosphere of the room as she meant to, with the darkness of her acts. The atmosphere continued delicate like her hands and feet. No matter what she was saying about her last love affairs, about her spread the smell of herbs. She spoke breathlessly, with little repetitions and light gasps of awe and surprise at herself:

“I loved Hazel so. I was swallowed up by her, just as before that I loved Georgia, and she could do anything with me. I would even help her to see her lovers. I would do anything she asked me. She got tired of me, and I went off alone to Holland, and I could not play the violin any more, I wanted to die. I made love to other women, but it was not the same. What terrible things I have done in my life, you can’t imagine. I don’t know what you will think. I can’t see your face and that bothers me. I can’t tell you because maybe you won’t want to see me any more. Georgia told me one lies down and talks, it is like talking to oneself except that this Voice comes and explains everything and it stops hurting. I feel fine here lying down, but I am ashamed of so many things and I think they are very bad things I did, this sleeping with women, and other things. I killed a woman who got married. It was in my birth place, in the South. She got married and then died the night of the wedding, and I did it. I thought all the time before the wedding that she ought not to love a man, there is no tenderness in men, and then I thought of the blood, and I prayed she should die rather than be married, and so I wished it, and she died. And I am sure it was my fault. But there is something much worse than this. It happened in Paris. I was working at the violin. I remember. My room was on the level with the street and the windows were open, and I did not realize the windows were open; I was playing away, and suddenly, I don’t know why, I looked at the bow and looked at it for a long while and I was taken with a violent desire to pass it between my legs, as if I were the violin, and I don’t know why I did it, and suddenly I saw people laughing outside… I nearly died of shame. You will never tell this to anyone? I can’t see your face. I can’t tell what you are thinking about me. When I don’t know what people think I always imagine they are laughing at me, criticizing me. I don’t feel that you condemn me, I feel good here, lying down. I feel that at last I am getting some terrible things out, getting rid of them maybe. maybe I will be able to forget them, like the time I gave a little boy an enema with a straw, and I thought I had injured him for life, and a few years after that he got sick and died, and I didn’t dare walk through the town because I am sure it was the enema that did it. Don’t you think it was? I don’t know why I did that. I wish I could see your face. I want revenge above all, because I was operated on, and I was not told why, I was told it was for appendicitis, and when I was well I found out I had no more woman’s parts, and I feel that men will never want me because I can’t have a child. But that is good. I don’t like men, they have no tenderness. Not being able to have a child, that means I am a cripple, men won’t love me. But I’m sure I wouldn’t like it with a man, I tried how it felt once with a toothbrush, and I didn’t like it. I had the funniest dream just before coming to you; I had opened my veins and I was introducing mercury in them, in each vein at the finger tip. Why can I never be happy? I’m always thinking when I’m in love that it will come to an end, just like now I think if I don’t find more things to tell you, I won’t be able to come again, and I am afraid of this coming to an end, afraid you will not think me sick enough.”

* * *


A week later, ten days later, she is lying down and talking to the Voice:

“Last night I was able to play. I felt you standing like an enormous shadow over me, and I could see your large signet ring flashing, and what was stranger than all this, I smelled the odor of your cigar suddenly in the middle of the street. How can you explain this, walking casually through a street, I smelled your cigar and that made me breathe deeply: I always walk with my shoulders hunched up, you’ve noticed it, I walk like a man, I am sure I am a man after all, because when I was a child I played like a boy, I hated to dress up in pretty things and I hated perfume. I don’t understand why the smell of your cigar, which reminds me of my talks with you, made me want to breathe deeply. It’s very funny. I haven’t thought about Hazel for the last few days; maybe I don’t love her any more, I only feel I love her when we are separating, when I see her going off on a train; then I feel terrible, terrible. Otherwise I am not very sure that I love her, really. I feel nothing when she is there, we quarrel a lot, that is all. With Georgia it was different, she made me feel she was there: Lillian, do this for me, Lillian, do that for me, Lillian, telephone for me, Lillian, carry my music. She was always deathly ill, I had to run around for her all the time; she was always dying, but always well enough to receive lovers. Always clinging to me, talking about her great loneliness, her love affairs. This talking to you is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. How strange it is to talk absolutely sincerely, as it comes, to say everything in one’s head, not to have to think beforehand. I am getting well, but I don’t want you to send me away. When I was a child I always wanted to go to Africa. I had a scrap book all about Africa and maps, time-tables, boat sailings, information, pictures of airplanes, trains, of the ships that could take me there. My school was very far away, I had to walk for two hours, and I called it Africa. I would set out for it all prepared as for a trip. I liked going to school because it was Africa, and I thought about it at night. And then they built a new school right next to my home, five minutes away, and I never went to school again, I never learnt anything; I was expelled and I made a mess of it, my father never forgave me, he was so mad he threw a knife out of the window and it hit our mare in the leg and that made a terrible impression on me, it was my fault too. Yesterday when I left you I was thinking about God, and what do you think happened to me? Walking out of the hotel I stumbled on the steps and I found myself kneeling on the sidewalk, and I did not mind it at all, it was wonderful, so many times I have wanted to kneel on the sidewalk, and I had never dared, and now thinking about you and what I could say to you the next time so you won’t think I’m cured yet and send me away… There is something I have now which you can’t take away from me, ever since I came here I have a feeling so warm and sweet and life-giving which belongs to me, I know you gave it to me, but it is inside of me now, and you can’t take it away. There was another time when I was thankful and I wanted to kneel in the street and that time I pretended to lace my shoe and I just kneeled there, and everybody let me, thinking I was lacing my shoe.”

* * *


nbsp;




Mischa came to the Voice limping, but be only talked about his hand. He can no longer play the ‘cello. His hand is stiff. He is mute about his leg. His mother was a Cossack woman, who rode horseback. His father was obsessed with hunting. He himself had never wanted woman, except when they wore red dresses. Then he felt like biting them. Woman seemed to him something soft and blind, something to hide into. When he saw a woman he wanted to become small and hide in her. He used to call his mother, in Russian, his Holy Secret. His hand had been twisted, cramped for many years. He holds it out to show the Voice. He talks constantly about his hand, how it feels, if it is stiffer to-day than yesterday. He played the ‘cello when he was very young. He was a child prodigy. He remembers early concerts, and his mother afterwards taking him between her large, strong horse-woman’s knees and caressing him with pleasure because he had played well. His mother was like no woman he had ever seen. She had long, black hair which she liked to wear down when she was at home, a sort of forest of black hair in which he would hide his face. His good-night kiss was never anywhere but inside this black hair. Absolute blackness then, the hair tickling his eyelashes and getting inside his mouth. Hair so violent and strong, with a smell that made him dizzy, hair that entwined itself around him. His mother looked like a Medusa. Her hair must have been made of snakes. Her face, somehow, fixed into one expression. The eyes never blinked, he believes. She kept them open on one. And the voice of a man, and a bass laughter. A laughter that lasted longer than any he had ever heard. He could hear it from his bed at night. He dreamed of climbing with the help of his mother’s long, heavy hair to a place where his father could not reach him. His father, all in leather, armed with guns, carrying wounded blood-dripping animals, surrounded with dogs. It seemed to Mischa that he had found his mother’s voice in the ‘cello. There were deep notes in the ‘cello which sounded and resounded in him like his mother’s voice.

For days after this Mischa does not talk. He cannot play the ‘cello, he cannot move his hand freely, and there are things he doesn’t want the Voice to know. But he feels that the Voice is watching, feeling his way deftly into his secrets. He feels that the Voice is not convinced at all that it is the hand which causes Mischa’s suffering. He feels slowly surrounded with intricate questions, pressed closer with unexpected associations. He feels like a criminal, but he cannot remember the crime. The Voice envelops him in questions. The Voice has become a digger. Mischa feels a great anguish, as if he had committed a crime and were now concealing it. And he cannot remember what it is. He feels the place where it is buried. What is buried? There, under the flesh, as it were, at the very bottom of a murky smouldering mud well, there is something buried. Something which the Voice pushes him towards. An image. What? An image of his mother, his magnificent Medusa mother standing in her room. He is a little boy of eight or so. He had not been able to sleep. He had limped quietly to her room and knocked very faintly at her door. She had not heard his knock. He had opened the door very slowly. He knew his father was not there, that he was out hunting. His mother was standing before him, very tall, and in a long white robe, her nightgown. And on this white robe there was a blood stain. He had seen the stain. He had smelled the blood on her. He had cried out hysterically. He ran out of her room to look for the father. He picked up a riding whip. His father was returning from the hunt. He was standing at the door, taking off his leather coat, laying down his gun. There was a blood stain on his sleeve. The animals he had killed were lying in the hall. The dogs were still barking, outside. Mischa went up to his father and struck him, struck at the man who had stained his mother’s white robe with blood, who had hunted her as he hunted the animals.

As he told this he held up before him the stiffened hand.

He thought the Voice would speak about the hand, but the Voice asked him: “And the lameness?”

Mischa winced and turned his face away. Behind this that he told lay his secret. Behind the facade of the image, the scene which he saw so clearly, lay a terrain of broken, pointed, cutting fragments, and on this a dead leg. A heavy dead leg, like some discarded object. But not buried. It had always lain there, unburied. Dead. He was more aware of it than of anything about his life. The dead leg rested right across the whole body. Wooden. He had nailed his hand on it. The life, the present, the colors, the music, women, were all hung around this dead leg, like furniture, pictures. Not alive. There had never been any Mischa. Mischa was in that leg, imprisoned, bound in it, lying on an abandoned plot, and the intense presence of it turned everything else into a transparent film: behind every form of transparency lay the leg which carried him. A casket in which he had enclosed his faith, his impulses, his desires. The pain of lameness, of knowing, even as a child, that one carries a fragment of the death in one. To live with a dead fragment of oneself, as if carrying a tomb around with one. The fierce graspingness of death already setting in. To be crippled, humiliated, left out of games, not to be able to ride horseback. The lameness concealed at concerts, but not before woman. The wounded look in the fixed glance of the mother when she watched him walk. Her love for him not joyous, heavy with compassion. When she kissed others she radiated an animal pride, her nostrils quivered. When she kissed Mischa it was as if part of her died at the very touch of him, in answer to the part in him that was dead. Mischa trembled when he had to walk across a room. He hated women because of his lameness, because they too closed a fierce part of themselves when they approached him, made themselves more tender, more attenuated, and looked at him as his mother had looked at him. He was ashamed. So terribly ashamed. The Voice said very gently: “You preferred to offer your hurt hand to people’s eyes. You offered the whole world your hurt hand. You talked about your hand. You showed your hand so no one would notice the lameness. The hand did not shame you. The hand that struck your father was rightfully, humanly punished by immobility.”

Mischa was weeping, his face turned to the wall. Now that he looked at the lameness, the leg seemed to become less dead, less separate from him. The leg was not so heavy, not so gruesome, as this secret of the pain he had enclosed in it, his fear and pain before the leg. Every nerve and cell in him tense with the fear of discovery, tense with rigid pretending, dissolved in new tears before the fact which appeared smaller, less dark, less oppressive. The crime and the secret did not seem so great as when he watched over its tomb. The pain was not so much like a monster now, but a simple, human sorrow. With the tears the great tension all through the body softened. He was a cripple. But he had committed no crime. He had struck his father, but his father had laughed at the scene—and his mother too. They had hurt him more than he had hurt them. The tears were like a river carrying away the rigid tension. The walls he had erected, the nightmares he had buried over and over again in his being, the tightness of fear, the knots in his nerves, all dissolving. Everything was washed away. And the big knot in his hand, that was loosen teno. It was the same knot. The muted hand that could no longer draw his mother’s voice out of the ‘cello. The static hand that could no longer strike. The crippled hand for the world to look at, while the real shamed Mischa walked surreptitiously before them hoping to conceal his dead leg from the world.

Exaltation lifted him from the couch, out of the room. He was running out of this room filled with knowing eyes, through the softly carpeted hall, passing all the rooms filled with revelations, to the red lights that bore him down to the street.

In the street he did not feel the sea of ice, slush and sleet. The warmth in him was like a fire that would never go out. He was singing.

* * *


Under his feet, in the underground drug store, Djuna sat eating at the counter. The young man was mixing his sallies with the drinks: “Are you a show girl too?” he asked her. The sea elephant, owner of the place, swam heavily toward her with a box: “I kept this box for you, I thought you would like it. It smells good.” The sea elephant sank behind the counter, behind waves of perfume bottles, talcum powder, candy packages, cigar boxes. She was left with the sandal wood box in her arms.

She carried it through the lobby. The lobby was full of waiting people, lumped there, waiting without impatience, reading, muttering, meditating, sleeping.

Every time she passed through the lobby her throat tightened. Behind every chair, every palm tree, every sofa, every face half-seen in the dim light of the lobby, she feared to recognize some one she knew. Some one out of the past. She could repeat to herself as she passed that they were all lost, that in the enormous city they had lost her tracks. She had crossed the ocean, destroyed their addresses. Stretches of long years and of sea lay between that first half of her life. The city had swallowed them. Yet each time she crossed the lobby she felt the same apprehension. She feared the return of the past. They sat in the lobby waiting, waiting for a crevice, a passage-way back into her life. Waiting to introduce themselves again. They had left their names at the desk. So many of them.

They were waiting to be admitted. They wanted to come upstairs and enter her present life. Djuna herself did not understand why this should be such an intolerable idea. Perhaps not so much their coming back, if they came for a visit and sat in a chair and talked. But they might act like a sea rushing forward and sweeping her back again into the undertows of early darkness. Surely she had thrown them out with the broken toys, but they sat there, threatening to sweep her back. Stuffed, with glass eyes, from a slower world, they look at her on this other level of swifter rhythms, and they reach with dead arms around her. She wanted to escape them in elevators which flew up and down like great, swift birds of variety and change. Moving among many rooms, many people, among great secrets and feverish happenings. Their tentacles like the tentacles of earth waiting for the return to where she came from. Could all escape be an illusion? That was her fear, seeing duplicates of the people who had filled her early world.

She would go and have her hair washed, which was as good as weeping. The water runs softly through the roots of the being, like warm rain, and washes away everything. One falls into rhythm again. She would have her hair washed and feel this simple flow of life through the hair. She passed into the hair-washer’s cubicle, out of the lobby of the waiting past.

Djuna was soon poised again on the threshold, suspended, faced with the same fear of traversing the lobby. There was a moment of extraordinary silence in the enormous hotel; she could not tell if it was in her. A moment of extraordinary slowness of motion. Then came a dull, powerful sound outside. A heavy sound but dull, without echo. Djuna felt the shock in her body. The shock traversed the entire hotel, the silence and the panic was communicated, transmitted with miraculous speed. All at once, it seemed, without words, everyone knew what had happened. A woman had thrown herself from a window and fallen on the garage roof. Thrown herself from the twenty fifth floor. She was dead, of course, dead, and with a five month child inside her. She had taken a room in the hotel in the morning, given a false name. Had stayed five hours without moving from the room. And then thrown herself out with this child in her. The sound, the dead heavy body sound, resonant still in the structure of the hotel, in the bodies of the people communicating this image one to another. Djuna could see her bleeding and open. The impact. Fallen, fallen so quickly back to the bottom. Birds fell this way when they died in the air. Had she died in the air? When had she died? Ascension high, to fall from greater heights and be sure of death. Loneliness, for five hours in a room with this child who could not answer her if she talked, if she questioned, if she doubted, if she feared…

The radios were turned on again. People moved fast again, normally. The silence had been in every one, for one second. Then everyone had closed his eyes and moved faster, up and down. One must get dizzy. Move. Move.

Djuna sat in the room of the Voice. The little man no one ever saw, he was standing by the window.

“Look,” he said, “they are skating in the Park. It is Sunday. The band is playing. I could be walking in the snow with the band playing. That is happiness. When I had happiness I did not recognize it, or feel it. It was too simple. I did not know I had it. I only know it when I am sitting here strapped to this armchair and listening to confessions and obsessions. My body is cramped. I want to do the things they do. At most I am allowed to watch. I am condemned to see through a perpetual keyhole every intimate scene of their life. But I am left out. Sometimes I want to be taken in. I want to be desired, possessed, tortured too.”

Djuna said: “You can’t stop confessing them, you can’t stop. A woman killed herself, right there, under your window; that noise you heard was the fall of her body. She was pregnant. And she was alone. That is why she killed herself.”

“I listen to them all. They keep coming and coming. I thought at first that only a few of them were sick. I did not know that they were all sick and bursting with secrets. I didn’t know there was no end to their coming. Did you ever walk through the lobby? I have a feeling down there that they are all waiting to be confessed. They all have more to say than I have time to hear. I could sit here until I die and even then there will be women throwing themselves out of the window on the same floor on which I live.mes ;

* * *


White lights! Going up! Hans opening his door, laughing: “I was just lying in bed and thinking of you, and wanting you.”

It was always different. Sometimes it was like a little tongue of fire inside her that flicked out towards his thrusts, enveloped him like a little tongue of fire circling the thrust that touched the kernel of sweet acid in her, disrupting a current of silver fire passing through the veins. The nerves slept as under an enchantment, the eyes closed, slipping down sand dunes of warm waves lapping over each other. Great pulsations, like the very heart of ecstasy, breaking open a river of pulsations, the body resonant with the heavy horsehoofing gongs against the walls of feeling. Pleasure curling inside of her like leaves burned. In this tumult of blood, wine, incense, the kernel in her quietly opening like a fruit. A gasp in the veins, when the white blood spurts against the soft wall of fruit flesh in which it rolls, the womb breathing it in, flicking its tongue of flame, panting around each turn and flicker, reaching for the hardness with an infinite thirst, like a mouth opening and closing.

She remained full of echoes. Reverberations in the flesh, prolongations. The body still resounding. He, his desire being like a thrust into the woman, reached a finality. He could rise free, and alone again. In her the blood remained. She was impregnated. She awakened filled. She could not detach herself. He could awaken lighter, having passed the weight of his desire into her, without webs or threads around him. His desire a knife, a thrust that had reached its end. Her desire like a casket. She loved with necklaces, with bracelets, with chains, with sediments, with residues. Her spongy antennae had not only drunk like the stems of plants, but the branches had folded themselves around the miracle to perpetuate it. She loved as woman, with echoes, with infinite layers of repetitions, with caves of mysterious deposits, with scars, with mirrors, with a labyrinthian retention. She was, as all women, the perpetually abandoned one. She had a greater difficulty in shifting, in turning away. Every morning, it was the mandragore pulled out of the earth, it was the seed torn out of its fur pockets, it was a return to the void, a tear in the spider web of unity. Her continuity was born of echoes: she was a mirror and an ocean in which he bathed and which she could not reject on the shore of daylight; she was the night enfolding, enwrapping, lulling, encompassing, and she could not thrust out, as he did, into the daylight.

He awakened, and she did not. He passed into other realms. The longer his stay in the enfolding whirls the greater his leap into space again. He awakened, talking of mysticism. He awakened as Laotse, sitting with eyes closed with laughter, laughter sitting on the edge of his high cheeks, laughter in the corners of the mouth, the laughter of great knowingness, but also the laughter of great separateness. The man without wound, sitting on the humorous bull, contemplating the sacrifice of sperm and honey with the great simplicity of a ceremony, a ritual.

She did not awaken. She lay in the darkness of the blood marshes, feeling the tearing between day and night. An ocean bearing nothing on its heavy waves: waves hollowed out in emptiness, waiting for his return. A night hung like a damask ciborium, waiting fo pressure, for a rent in the indigo silk, for an explosion. A plant weighed down by the sap. No laughter runs through plants.

* * *


Lilith was waiting for the steamer bringing her brother from India. She watched the people stepping off the gangplank. She feared she would not recognize him. When he had left he was a boy. A boy in a plaster cast of hardness, of dissimulation. Intent on defending himself against all invasion by others, against feeling, against softness, against himself. A boy swinging between violent, brutal acts, and fits of weeping like a woman. Would she recognize the compressed mouth, the ice blue eyes, the pose of nonchalance, the briefness of speech, the tension and the sudden breaks in the tension? A boy in a plaster cast of hardness. Untouchable. At times she suspected that he had refused to recognize her presence in him. Perhaps it was he walking there, so rigid in his clothes. No. So many people, so many valises, trunks, confusions, explosions of joy. And then suddenly there was no one else passing down the gangplank.

Lilith stopped one of the stewards: “Do you know Eric Norman? Can you tell me if he’s sick? I can’t find him anywhere.”

The steward promised to go and see. Lilith imagines Eric lying in his bunk, sick. She waits, already suffering as she suffered when he was small, in trouble. The steward returns: “I found him. He’s not sick, but his papers are not quite in order, so he can’t step off the boat until to-morrow morning. He wants you to come on board.”

The blue eyes watching behind eye glasses. They face each other without words. There is a break in their pause as if the bodies would break at the shock of the meeting. Then he smiles brusquely, and the talk breaks through the barrier of fifteen years.

“You look swell,” he says. “Are you as bossy as you were? Remember how you wanted to do the fighting for me? You wouldn’t let me fight my own battles with the boys. You came with an umbrella and beat them. They laughed at me for having a sister fighting for me. I had to go so far away to get away from you. You look swell! Who do you fight for now? Who do you help cross the street? Who do you stop the traffic for now, with insults at the drivers? You look swell, much sweller than before. But you can’t boss me now.”

All the passengers had left the boat but a few of the crew and the purser who was adding numbers and names on long green sheets of paper, behind barred windows. A few of the crew were cleaning the cabins and decks. They had drawn the curtains, covered the chairs and pianos and couches. They had waxed the floors, turned over the mattresses, folded up the blankets, put out the lights. The enormous parlors and lounge rooms looked ghostly. So many chairs in rows, with stiffened arms open on emptiness. The ship anchored in earth, it seemed, so steady it was. Room after room without dust, lights, glitter. Funereal. The mirrors reflecting nothing but a brother and sister walking through the enormous ship, through a labyrinth of linoleum hall-ways, passing doors open on a million empty cabins. The bunks like skeletons, showing the springs and the boxlike edges. Silence… A sudden shadow lurking of a sailor polishing brass knobs. Brother and sister walking through the city of abins. No smell in the kitchen, no rolling and swaying or cracking of wood. A carcass at rest. No music in the salons, no glitter of silverware chiming in the dining room. Repose of furniture, windows, lights. A funereal watch of covered chairs. A dead backstage. No vestige of the people who passed. Clean.

Brother and sister stranded. Not allowed to land. Walking on a frontier not marked on the marine or earthly charts. Frontiers of memory. The anchor dug deep into the sandy marshes of memory. Here in the skeleton of the marine monster, with its empty windows unblinking, its empty decks, empty salons, deserted by musicians and sailors, beyond the earth and beyond the sea, they sit before a banquet of memories, with the anchor lying deeply coiled in the octopus legs of memories. The ship was the world of their childhood, filled with indestructible games. He had carried it all to India, he had dyed it in foreign colors, his childhood, he had bathed it in exotic music, rinsed it in poisonous rivers, injected it with Oriental maladies, burned it with unnameable fevers, had choked it in strange incenses, perfumed it with yellow flesh, buried it in Mahometan cemeteries, throttled it in new loves. It had turned to ivory, to a mineral in his breast. She had covered it with hatred, he had lost it in opium deliriums, but there it was in their breast, turned to ore, to stalamite. The more they had pressed down on it the stronger the compression, the more it had gained in rarity, in fixity. In indestructibleness. A diamond lodged in the breast.

Brother and sister walking through the skeleton of the monstrous ship which took him away and brought him back with the same diamond lodged in the breast. Bathing in the acid of the past, they bared the bones unbleached and this diamond.

The first voyage with chairs, tables, rags, fancies, was the most prolonged in all their existence. The one they had boarded together at birth had never moved; they were locked in it forever, without passengers and without landing permits. All the other cabins empty, and they cursed forever to sail inside the static sea of their fantasies. Riveted to the shore of the past, forbidden to land, with the anchor set deep in rust.

* * *


Another day in the confessional. Lilith lying down and talking. Lilith watching the Voice with something like hostility, expecting him to say something dogmatic, some banality, some unsubtle generality. She wanted him to say it, because if he did he would be another man she could not lean on, and she would have to go on conquering herself and her own life alone. She was proud of her independence. She was waiting for the Voice to say something unsubtle that she could laugh at.

They were talking about Mischa. He told her that she was an obsession in Mischa’s life. That he saw her as the mother, the sister, the most unattainable of all women, and for this he wanted to conquer her, to free his manhood. Then she confessed how at first she had loved Mischa, but when she had felt his smallness, his way of hiding within woman, she had felt protection but no desire. She had wanted to give him an illusion but feared not to be able to sustain it to the very end. She begged the Voice not to tell him the truth, which would wound him, but to tell Mischa she was a little mad. This would explain the change in her, put all the blame on herself, and Mischa. a might enjoy discovering there were other abnormal people in the world. The Voice agreed with her. He asked her if she did not mind other people thinking she was not normal. She hesitated and then:

“No, I don’t mind. I like them to think me puzzling, mystifying and unpredictable. I feel then that I keep my real self a mystery.”

The Voice laughed a little at this.

“I see you don’t need any help at all, you are quite content, quite strong, quite able to manage your own life.”

At these words Lilith began to tremble, and then she felt her attitude crumble, the facade crumbling all around her. She became intensely aware of her weakness, her need of another. She said nothing but the Voice understood and continued:

“You have acted beautifully towards Mischa. As few women will act. In general women consider men as enemies, and they are glad when they humiliate or demolish them.”

“I could not hurt Mischa. Whenever I see him I remember the story he told me about his first sensual curiosity. His mother had discovered him weighing his sex in his hand, reflectively examining it, had beaten him with a whip and left him locked up in the room. He wept hysterically, then quieted down and, dipping a finger in the tears, he had written on the wall: evil boy. He waited for the words to vanish, but they seemed to remain like stains on the wall, and he grew hysterically afraid the words would never dry and that the whole city would know about his doings.”

Lilith liked the way the Voice’s questions crackled at her from all directions. He was behind her and she was not ashamed to speak of anything. At the same time she felt that she could not deceive him even by a shade of falsity, for he was so attentive to every hesitation, every inflection of the voice, every gesture she made, and especially the silences. Every silence put him on a new scent. He was really the hunter of secret thoughts. They would reach a kind of blank wall. She would repeat: “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t think so.” But the truth was apparent by what she felt at his words. Whenever something had hurt her, and he touched upon it, she felt a churning of feelings, a warning: Here is the place. He uncovered her wars against herself.

“I see myself always too small or too large. I awake one day feeling small, and another day bursting with a power which makes me believe I can rule the whole world.”

When he talked it was like a stirring of quicksands. She felt the whole sandy bottom of her life, a complete insecurity, a rootlessness. He said perhaps she was a woman who was not the enemy of man, but she remembered days of great hatred for man. He talked about the yielding and fear. Fear of being hurt, he said. Why? She did not know. How could man hurt her? He had hurt her already.

“The first feeling I had was that my father was not tied to anything. He was not tied to my mother, he was not tied to us, he was not tied to the women he made love to. He was tied to nothing. He was always leaving, forgetting, throwing out, betraying. “

font size=”2”>When she made this very simple statement Lilith suddenly felt the most intense anguish. She turned her head to look at the Voice and said: “I can’t go on.”

“You must go on.”

“The first thing I saw was a father escaping from the mother. Running away from us, from the house. From everything. I saw my mother left maimed, like some one who had lost an arm. I saw our house sold and disrupted. It was like a deluge. Everything was carried away. The strange, mysterious atmosphere we lived in as children, our games which were like an enchantment from which we never freed ourselves: nothing was ever the same. I saw the furniture out in the garden, being sold at auction. I saw my father leaving and sending postcards from all over the world. The world was immense, it seemed to me, and he was in all of it except the corner where he left us. He not only took himself away, but our faith in the marvellous too. The world of our childhood closed with his departure.”

“All these departures, these upheavals, gave you a hatred and fear of change. You, in your anger and pain, stood in the center and refused to move, decided to make a fixed core within you. You accepted outer change, but fought against it by an inner static groove. You would not move. Everything else around you could move, change, but you, because of your mistrust of pain and loss refused to move. You would be the island, the fixed center. For fear of a second loss, a second abandon, a second wound. That is why you never again gave yourself, that is why you are cold. You are afraid of giving yourself wholly.”

Lilith felt a deep anguish as he talked. She could not tell if the Voice was right or wrong, but she could feel with his words the invasion of a most dolorous secret. Exactly as if this set, tense, granite core of herself were being touched and found not to be granite. Found to have nerves, sensibilities, and memories. She remembered at this moment that when she heard that stones had a heart beat, a kind of faint pulse which had never before been registered, she had cried out angrily: “How terrible, everything in the world feels. Exactly what I feared. That is why I am always so tender with everything. To think that even a stone can feel!”

And now the Voice was entering into this secret pain, exposing the vulnerability and the fear in her, and the anguish was immense.

Lilith said:

“Now I hate you. You took away the little protection I had, the little cover I kept over things. I feel humiliated to have exposed myself. I who so rarely confess!”

“And why don’t you confess?”

“It is always I who receive the confidences. People confess their doubts and fears to me. I am afraid of showing my weakness. Why? I think I will be less loved.”

“Do you love those who expose their weakness?”

“Yes, even more. I feel them very near to me. I feel them human and I love them.”

“Then don’t you think they might es. Shehe same towards you?”

“I feel I have been given another role, a non-human one. I don’t know why.”

“Because the father failed you… You cannot depend on others. You prefer to be depended on.”

Lilith went out into the street. She felt the day much softer on her skin. The snow was melting. It seemed to her that she let the day get nearer to her, permitted it to touch her. That before she looked at the day like a stranger. Now she felt the day all over her body, the temperature of it, the sensual touch of it. She remembered Djuna laughing and saying: “the kind of day you feel between the legs.”

Djuna felt everything with her skin, her finger tips, her hair, the soles of her feet. She was like a plant. Every time Lilith saw Djuna she felt this strange, continuous vibration life of leaves, plants and water. There was a mobility, a constant motion and vibration, a continuous change and variety. Djuna ate and drank people; they passed into her.

She, Lilith, had never imagined this until to-day. She was breathing with the day, moving with the wind, in accord with it, with the sky, undulating like water, flowing and stirring to the life about her, opening like the night. What had happened? Only the Voice saying to her, “Don’t you love those who confess to you? Don’t you love their blindness, their blunders, their furies, their hatreds? When they talk to you about their crimes, don’t you dissolve yourself with a kind of human passion, with a desire to carry them, share everything that happens to them?” Yes, yes, cried the being of Lilith. Then YOU… Why do you… But then if I, Lilith, if I leaned, the others would find nothing there to rest on. If I become human, then where will the others go? They would go to the Voice, more of them. If I show anything but this strength, what will happen to them? He asks me what will happen to me? I don’t think I care much what happens to me. I have a feeling that I am responsible for them. How restless he got, the Voice, when I asked him if he thought certain people had a destiny which forbade them to be human. I must have touched something which affected him. I will make him talk. I will question him.

But the Voice did not answer her questions. The Voice pried and prodded into her marriage.

The man Lilith had married was very simple. He had not found the way to woo her, to break down her resistance. Every night it had been the same flight, the same locked door against him, a hatred of his desire. She showed all her claws, her wild hair, her hatred of sex. Finally, one day they discussed it, coolly. She asked him: “What is it like? Tell me.”

He did not know what to say, so he made a drawing. The drawing revolted her and frightened her all the more. She would not even let him kiss her after the drawing. Finally he persuaded her to have it done by a doctor. She preferred the idea of a knife. It was a knife which first cut into her being.

“I tried to feel as a woman afterwards. It was a terrible thing, it was as if the knife had made me close forever rather than open, as if it had made me cold forever. There were times when I felt strong excitement in me, warmth, desire. I yielded to anyone who wanted me, all but my husband. I kept myself drunk so I would not see too much. Adventures, but no feeling. No deep response. They all remained strangers to me. I never wanted to see them again. You don’t know how they tried to stir me, what long sieges, what furious attacks. One night I went to the Burlesque. I looked at the chairs and they all seemed stained with sperm. And suddenly I thought: I’m in the wrong world, this is all gymnastics. Do you believe I will ever feel anything? Do you think they killed the feeling in me that time? I can’t bear this any more. I have a constant feeling that I’m living on the edge of something about to happen, and that I can never reach. My nerves are set for a climax of some kind. I feel tense and expectant. It is so agonizing that I begin to wish for a catastrophe which would relieve the expectancy. I wish for all the calamities, all the tragedies to happen at once. I want scenes, quarrels, tears, I want to be devoured, I want to strike at people. I feel restless. I can’t stay very long anywhere. I can’t sit and I can’t sleep. I always have this feeling that I must seek a relief from this waiting, a shattering moment before I can rest, sleep. As if death were waiting, death were pursuing me, watching me. The whole world arouses me. I feel love for people in the streets, music stirs me at times like a caress; I desire violently, and I wait. I feel the storm coming, I feel the anguish, but everything continues the same, sluggish, without break, without lightning. Something in me wants to break, to explode. Instead, I have to take pleasure in breaking the lives of others. I am constantly seducing others, enchanting them, capturing them, while wishing they could do it to me. I want so much to be captured. Every one obeys me but they don’t find the key to me. I like to feel their hearts beating faster, I like to see their eyes waver, their lips tremble, to feel the emotion in them. It is like food. I am fascinated by their feeling. I am like a huntress who does not want to kill, but I want to feel the wound. What do I expect? To be caught in the desire of the other and bathe in it. To burn. But I am always disappointed. No one can take possession of me. It is as if they were all blind, circling around me. I warm myself and then become aware that the current is not passing through me. But they never say the magic word, never make the magic caress that will break this coldness in me. It is as if I were an idol of some kind. I always dream of this: I see myself standing very rigid, and I am covered with jewelry and luxuriant robes. I wear a crown. Don’t you think I will ever turn into a woman? I want to be shattered into bits. Yet at the same time I know I do everything to create my own inaccessibility. I wear strange clothes which estrange people. And then I hate them for failing to reach me. I create the legend, I know. It is not my fault. When I awake I do not look at the weather. I look at the mood I am in. And then I dress for it, and I live it out. It is hard to explain. I have the feeling that I do come from very far. While I sleep I know many things have happened. I do not remember them all. It is true I don’t wake up near everything. That is why sometimes when I come into a room I do look at the people as if they were not of my own race, quite. It is true I feel they look at me and see this distant personage. I sit down next to them and I choose the most remote subject, the most remote from daily life. Immediately they obey this direction, they leap out of their present life into my realm. I feel compelled to do this, while at the same time I want warmth and simplicity. I feel alone. Sometimes they are taken with a furious madness to do violence to me, to clutch at me. But it’s like a desire for a tabooed object, for a secret temple, for some forbidden person. For what is untouchable. And I, the woman inside of all this, I feel this. I feel I have created this personage and that I sit outside of her, lamenting because they are worshipping a sort of image, and they don’t reach with simple, warm hands and touch me. I’s as if I were outside this very costume, desiring and calling for simplicity, and at the same time a kind of fear compels me to continue acting. You are the only one I feel near to, you and Djuna the only ones who don’t make love to my shadow.”

“But it is your own making. We are simply the ones who can’t be mystified and entangled in your appearance. We’re simply the ones who did not get lost in the labyrinth you create. You hide yourself and then you weep because people get lost in all this external form of your life. It’s only locking doors against those who wish to come near, the same door that you locked against your husband.”

Such simple words he said, yet Lilith left him feeling a great warmth towards him, something that resembled love. She was falling in love with the Voice. She felt that he was the subtle detective who made all these discoveries in her, who made her state the very nature of what hurt her. He liked the game of tracking down her most difficult thoughts. It was only after many detours that she could make these long revelations. It was if he possessed her, somehow, in a way she could not explain to herself. There was a silent, subtle force in him. It was not in the words he said. It was something he exhaled. He confronted one with one’s self, naked, one’s true self as it was at the beginning. He destroyed the deformations, one by one, the acquired disguises of the personality. It was like a return to the original self. It was a return to the beginning where everything was pure.

He took her back, with his questions and his probings, back to the beginning.

She told him all she could remember about her father, ending with: “the need of a father is over.”

The Voice said: “I am not entirely sure that the little girl in you ever died, or her need of a father. What am I to you?”

“The other night I dreamed you were immense, towering over every one. You carried me in your arms and I felt no harm could come to me. I have no more fears since I talk to you like this every day. Yes, one more fear, only one. I find it hard to tell you. The day I left school, the day I wore my hair up for the first time, I examined myself naked in the mirror, looking for the first real proofs of the metamorphosis. It was in the moonlight, because I believed in baths of moonlight. I was looking for the woman, and I decided that my breasts were too small. I thought: ‘nobody will love me’.”

The Voice laughed a little: “But of course, that is not true. You only imagined this because you compared yourself to your mother. Didn’t you tell me she was like a Rubens woman?”

“Yes, and I used to think at times that if I were a man I would love women like my mother. I liked her heaviness, her richness.”

“But you are not the mother type, are you? It was all due to your admiration of your mother. You never saw yourself as others see you.”

“But you don’t know really. What I say is true. If you don’t believe me… You are the only one I can ask this from. Will you really tell me? Will you tell me the truth? I’ll show you.”

She unstrapped her blouse and exposed her breasts. She heard him stop breathing. She looked at his face. She saw a smile, a brilliancy in his eyes she had never seen. She had never seen the blood in his face. He made a gesture of the hand, as if to show her they fitted in his hand. He could not speak. Lilith now laughed to think of herself looking at the Voice with round eyes, the eyes of Virgins on stained glass windows. She laughed now at her fear, at the question she put and at his answer. It took him a long time to say finally:

“The breasts of Diana the huntress.”

After this she would not lie down any more.

She sat up and faced him.

“Lately I have become aware that you are not happy. I think of the way you play upon souls. It must give you a feeling of great power, the way they expose themselves.”

“Power, yes… power. But every moment the human being in me is killed. I am not permitted any weaknesses. It’s true, I could take people’s great need of love and understanding and play upon it. When they open their secrets to me, they are in my power. But I want them to know me, and they don’t. Even when they love me, it is a love that is not addressed to me. I remain anonymous. I am only allowed to watch the spectacle, but I am never allowed to enter. If I enter into a life I am still the oracle or the seer. You are the first one who has asked me a question about myself.”

People came to him for strength, and their image of him was of his tallness, his firmness, his wisdom. His strange phrases which acted on them like some one breaking their chains. Simple phrases. He defended them, supported them, transported them. An Apocalyptic strength in him. Something above confusion and chaos. A total man, not made as they were of wavering moods, dispersed fragments, changes and contradictions. An alchemist who could always transmute the pain. The Sphinx who answered all questions. The one before whom one could always become small again, in whom one could find a refuge. He lulled them, lifted them up out of whatever agonizing region they were trapped in. Brought them where they could live better, breathe better, love better, live in harmony with themselves; he reconciled them to the world, conquered the demons and ghosts haunting them. But when they look at the man inside the armour of impersonal phrases they find him smaller, older, different than their image. The little man rises, his shoulders are stooped, he shakes off the stiffness of his limbs, the cramp of the attentive echo, shakes the blood that was asleep during the trance of clairvoyance, shakes off the role imposed on him.

In their dreams they saw him as a god, or a demon. But always above.

When the confession ended he was no longer above.

Lilith said: “I feel the real you behind the analyst. All you say comes out of YOU. No one else could act the same way towards human beings. It is not a system. It is your own goodness, your own compassion. I am sure they do not all use the same words, the same tone. There is magic in you.”

“I am only a symbol.”

“You are more than a symbol; I know separate and personal things about you. I have watched you. You have a love of the absolute, a passion for extracting the essence. You have been denying the human being in you.”

“That’s all very true.”

“You have a gift for life… which you have never used.”

“I was not permitted to use it. I was not loved for myself but for my understanding, for the strength I gave. It was always unreal and false.”

“I could say to you what you said to me: did you reveal your real self? Wasn’t it you who insisted on wearing the mask of the analyst? You who became a Voice? An impersonal Voice? Look how you sit now, while we talk. You never move. You always sit in the same chair. I know nothing about you. Naturally, I can only attach myself to an image. I wish… I’m going to ask you to do something very difficult. Suppose, just for once, that you lie here on the couch and that I sit in your chair—like this—and now I’m you and you’re me. What did you dream last night?”

She was laughing while she made him change places. He looked uneasy, bewildered.

“Why are you uneasy?” she asked, “what are you afraid to reveal? Tell me what you’re most ashamed to tell.”

“Not to you, because you still need me, and while you need me I must remain a mystery to you.”

“I don’t need you.”

“You do. Even what you’re doing now is only because you need a triumph, a victory, over me. I made you confess, you want to make me confess. As soon as you find some one who has the key to you, you want to reverse the roles. You can’t bear to be discovered or dominated.”

“You’re wrong, you’re utterly wrong,” said Lilith violently. “I only did it because I’m interested in you as a human being, because I’m wondering about this man we all use and whom no one really knows.”

“We’ll see who is wrong,” said the Voice, but this Voice was not as firm as when he sat with his back to the light.

* * *


The Voice is talking to Djuna:

“Do you think Lilith loves me? If Lilith loved me I would give all this up and begin a new life. I want to give up analysis. Otherwise I will go mad. Do you know what has happened to me during the last four days? Everything that I think of becomes the theme of the day, and all the people who come talk to me about the same thing. First I had a dream of jealousy. I was crazily jealous of some one, I don’t know whom. I awakened filled with a kind of fury and hatred as if some one were taking the woman I wanted away from me. I may haand begeen jealous of Lilith, I don’t know. But I awakened jealous. I wanted to walk out into the street and kill some one. And then the people began to come, one after another. I had no more time to think over my dream. But every one of them talked about jealousy. First came a woman who was jealous of her husband’s first wife, now dead. It was her own sister who had died, and whose husband had then married her. But he still loved her sister. The first time he took her he called out the name of the dead wife. He sought out the resemblance, he liked her to wear the same colors. And this woman felt it, and was tortured because she loved him and wanted his love altogether for herself. He lived in a dream, wrapped in the past. He took her without really taking her, as in a trance. She was in such despair that she thought of nothing else: how to kill his love for her dead sister, how to kill this other woman who had not died for him. She observed that he had been very jealous of her. She sought out the men he was attached to, and gave herself to them, always in such a way that it would be known to him. And then he began to suffer. He became slowly aware of her, of her being loved by other men. She became more vivid in him, through his hatred of her. By the presence of the pain and anger, he began to awaken to her, to her presence, nearness, seduction. He passed from long periods of dreaming to long moments of suffering. He lived with this violent consciousness of her sensual life. She would not let him touch her. Finally the pain became so intolerable that it aroused him to a violent awareness of her, desire for her; and in this fury somehow, the past was destroyed, like some vague dream. He became aware of the woman in her, her yieldings, her sensual responses, of their life in the present.

“This was the first story I heard in the morning. I was possessed with jealousy of Lilith, and everyone who came to me seemed to be possessed with jealousy. I felt my own jealousy in them, and it increased it, magnified it. I asked myself: what kind of feelings has Lilith toward me? Why has she become so vividly alive and why do I hate the way she gives herself? It seemed to me the world was full of jealousy, and that it was contagious. It lay at the bottom of every nature. I saw everyone as being jealous either in the past, the present, or the future. One man talked to me continuously about scenes which had never taken place, which he imagined. He lies for hours imagining this betrayal, reconstructing the scenes in every minute detail, until he goes nearly crazy believing it. His jealousy was really infernal, suffocating, dark, blind, not knowing where to strike and without any reality to support it. A continuous state of doubt. At the end of the day I was shattered. It seemed to me that whatever was in me was awakened in these people and that I was only awakening things which ought better be left asleep. I was increasing the awareness of pain, and breaking down all defences against it. Yes, I know they are false defences, but they are at least as good as the stones over a tomb. They give the illusion that the dead cannot return. But I do not even leave the stone. I take away the symbol of the burial. And that’s not all. The next day I awakened with anguish, with a kind of fear. A nameless fear. A kind of universal doubt. I doubted everything. Above all, Lilith. I feared to know, to really know what she felt. I would have given my life then to lose all my lucidity. And all day, all day the cripples talked to me about fear. I asked them questions I never asked before. Describe what you most fear! They exposed so many fears. But as I asked them it was like asking myself, and awakening my own fears. Fear. The whole world is based on fear, even behind the jealousy of the day before lay fear. Fear of being alone, fear of being abandoned, fear of life, fear of being trapped in tragedy, fear of the animal in us, fear of one’s hatred, of commiing a crime, fear of one’s violence, bestiality, of cancer, of syphilis, of starvation. I asked myself: was it the fear in me which uncovered all this? It was like opening tombs again. It was contagion, Djuna, I tell you…

“To-day I don’t know whether this is a healing or a contagion. I am only discovering that we are all alike, and my patients desperately do not want me to be like them. The third day I dreamed of death. And the first man I talked with said: ‘There is something I must know, I must absolutely ask some one. You must tell me this: when a man is dead is his sex stiff, too? Is it as hard as it is in the morning? This has been an obsession with me, all my life. In death… if one died while inside of a woman, would one lie stiff in her? Or could one, after being dead, still have one last spasm? The nails keep growing, the hair too. Could it happen again after death if one died inside of a woman?’ “

* * *


Djuna walked slowly after leaving Lilith. The day was softer and the snow was melting under her feet. She felt in love with everyone, in love with the whole city. She remembered the tendrils of wild hair on Lilith’s neck, and felt herself inside of Lilith, burning with the cold fire which devoured her. She heard again her voice charged with secret pain, a voice wet with tears passing through a wide mouth made for laughter, a wide, laughing mouth, avid and animal.

She felt the restlessness of the Voice, sitting and listening all day, pinned to his confessions, disguised by the anonymity of vision, and desiring to play an active, personal role in these scenes perpetually unfolding before him. Too near, everything was too near. She felt the multiple footsteps of those walking along with her, not like a march, but like a symphony. In the shock of feet against pavements she felt the whole collision and impact of human being against human being. They resounded in her. Everything resounded in her. She smiled, thinking of what an immense music box she was. The relation between music and living was not merely an image. What a heavy connection between the sound box of instruments and the body, and what sameness between the caresses of the hands! Djuna felt at once so aroused that it was unbearable. She felt all her loves at once. Maternal, fraternal, sensual, mystical. So many loves. What was she? The lover of the world? Crazed with love, with remembrance of every touch and flavor, of every caress and word. And simultaneously with the communion, this communion with eyes closed, this taste of the wafer on her tongue, this sonorousness of sea in her ears, this constant simoun wind burning inside of her, came the pain of separation again. When people came as near as this, and breaths were so confounded and confused, then Djuna knew she was possessed.

In the morning the body had been clear like a statue, and as cool. The body moved with the harmony of its form, it stood in altitude, like the spire of a cathedral, it was light and free and passed through the moments easily like the wind, feeling neither doors nor walls, nor anger. There was in it the tranquillity of depths, of what lay below the level of storms. It was a mountain asleep without fire in its bowels. It lay asleep as it arranged itself, it moved in accord with its own pattern, with an even tread.

It was the moment of silence. The day begun in crystal cearness was blurred by the ascension of blood passing through the cells. The blood rising through the body like the sap in the trees. Antique vases filling with wine.

Djuna stopped walking. Everything had come too near, too near. The cells were full to overflowing with the warm invasion. The moon was shining hypnotically round, a fixed stare, and all the taboos which held the body upright were dissolved by this stare of the moon calling the blood to its own cycle. The moon was circling now inside of her body, with the same rhythm. Djuna lost her face, her name. She was tied to the moon by long threads of red tangled blood. She moved now like one much larger than herself. She moved like a woman tied to the moon, in a space so vast, pushed by a rhythm so strong that the small woman in her was lost. The moon enveloped her and it opened her to an absolute night without dawn.

Before the storm in her there was a suspense, there was time for fear. The trees were afraid, the sky was breathless, the air rarified, the earth parched.

Now her heart was no longer a heart, it was a drum beating continuously. The skin of her body was stretched like a drum. The tips of her hair were no longer hair, but electric wires charged with lightning. The hair was linked to lightning, the heart was a drum; the skin was a fruit skin exposed to warmth and cold. The teeth were sharp, lustful, sharpened with appetite.

The blood was rising and drowning the smaller world of the woman, a curtain of red falling over the eyes, drowning pity. Her tongue lashed like a whip, her voice whirled like a simoun wind, her hands tore everything apart, breaking all bonds with man, father, son, lover, brother. What erupted in her body was no longer love but hunger and hatred. Her body filled with teeth, with a drumming fever, with a delirium. Djuna was in a jungle, alone with her storm. She was alone in the forest of her delirium. Desire leaping wild and blind. The human eyes were closed. The storm was panting in her, the moon smiled, her anger seemed immense like the space around her. An enormous fury, as of an animal long taunted, so that when the blood rose every word withheld, every act of yielding, erupted. She trusted no one as she drank alone in the jungle of desire. Her nails were longer, tearing apart everything she had lulled. The storm of blood brought a cloudburst of laughter, the lightning struck down the love, broke all the bondages, drowned the pity.

Djuna was one with the moon, thrusting hands made of roots into the storm, while her heart beat like a drum through the orgy of the moonstorm.

* * *


Lilith talking to the Voice. Lilith had a headache.

My father had headaches like this, and he went mad. Do you think I will go mad? I dream of being under ether and I awake in terror. My father’s madness started with headaches. He began slowly to lose his memory. But I kept thinking—perhaps my father is not mad, but has had a dream. This dream has come and installed itself in his life. The dream is his life. What was this dream? Could I understand it? If I could see it, share it with him, enter his world and stay in it, perhaps he wouldn’t go mad. I feel that madness is only solitude. Ynly go mad when you see something no one else sees. There is a moment before madness when people have not yet cut the cord of connection and at this moment some one can hold them back. It’s what you do every day. There was the dream of the man who ate flowers so that the Revolution might not come… He was locked up. Only because he got confused with the symbol, he lived in the symbol. But if you understand it, nothing is mad. Everything is a dream, but we don’t always know the meaning. I wanted to know my father’s fantasy but he enclosed himself in it. I only discovered it when it was too late. And now I will admit all this I’m saying is to elude something I find very hard to tell you. You’ll be angry. The truth is I accepted an invitation to spend a night with Harold and a woman. When I arrived I was shown into his apartment, but he had not yet returned from a party. He had left a note, an erotic book for me to read, and drinks. I just sat there and dreamed about all my curiosities, all my erotic longings, my desire for woman. Arline came first and sat on the edge of the bed which was set in an alcove. Then Harold. Arline was blonde, with lax gestures, as in sleep. She began by taking my hands and admiring them, then she kissed me like a man. I slipped my hand under her skirt. Harold was kneeling down before the two of us and looking under our dresses. Harold made love to me more than to Arline. Do you think it was because I was the guest of honor? We took all our clothes off. I tasted a woman for the first time, and I didn’t like it. It tasted like a sea shell. But I loved her breasts and mouth. And it amused me that while we both caressed Harold we kept looking over his body at each other with something like human closeness. The man seemed the stranger. We would stop caressing him to kiss each other. When Harold, satisfied, fell asleep, Arline and I went on kissing and saying, how lovely you are, how soft you are. It was the abandon I liked. I felt nothing. I was desperately craving for love.

I took Arline home in a taxi. In the taxi, facing an Arline all dressed, I felt shy. The intimacy when we were naked and now the strangeness. Arline telephoned me and it was strange. I know nothing about her except her body, the feel and odor of her, and yet when she called up I felt less lonely, I felt a sort of body warmth, almost like love, just because I had touched her, and felt her. Arline’s voice was lax, and like the voice of a plant. She wanted to spend the night with me. She wanted to see me alone. Arline came as if she were dancing, displacing everything around her, she was terribly drunk. We had dinner together and hardly talked. Just smiled at each other, held each other’s hands, asked foolish questions. Whatever she told me was not part of her body at all. Her body suggested infinitely more, but everything in it was asleep.

Arline was blind. Her eyes said nothing, her mouth said nothing. Her eyes so blind, her speech drunken. When she talked she was just a little girl taking small parts in second rate shows, often out of work, not caring, yet not able to do anything but act. She was indifferent towards the part she acted, and indifferent to the actions of her body, as if she were separate from it. In my room she asked for another drink. She opened the drawers of the dressing table, looked at my clothes, pulled everything out, laughing. Then she said: Kiss me! She caressed me. The night we had been with Harold I felt that Arline did not respond ultimately, completely. I had not felt the violent, quick throbbing under my fingers. I wondered if Arline knew that I hadn’t. And then Arline asked me, asked me with a very slow, very implicit smile. I told her the truth. She said: “That’s why I loved you, you were making believe too. I knew it.” We laughed together, caressed each other into drowsiness; Arline fell asleep,h her body lying right across mine, so that I could not move. My hand was still resting on her leg. I lay there wishing violently to be hypnotized. I felt that if some one made me sleep like this and then took me something would happen to that unyielding part of me. I dreamed of some one caressing me until I fell asleep and then taking me. I remembered the time when I first began to feel with my body. I was in the bath tub. By mistake I turned on the water of the shower, and a jet came down on me and fell between my legs. Like a caress. I thought to be in love must be like this, this marvellous, warm water falling. And every night I fell asleep imagining these caresses falling over me like the water of the shower. Lying there, with the body of Arline asleep, her mouth a little open as if some dream would issue from it with a ribbon, as if she were about to tell me what extraordinary things she was seeing while asleep. There was so much space around her now, and her breathing changed tonalities, as if she were watching a spectacle.

I envied her her sleep, I thought if some one would force his desire upon me when I am asleep I would close around it like a plant. It would be so simple and soft, speckled with goldness. When Arline leaves me her gestures will fill my room. It is the only thing I believe in. The gestures! What a terrible need of the voice, of body warmth, what a need to put my head where the heart beats, to watch the palpitation of the throat. Afterwards Arline will recede and vanish. Something else will fill the room, some dream of her which will decompose her simplicity, which will disincarnate her, make smoke and fog and ribbons of her. Far away Arline will become a dream. It is that which gives me anguish. When she leaves she will sink into enormous space.

Lilith lying there, tangled, restless. Finding the absolute only in multiplicity, an absolute composed in space, an absolute in fragments. The smile of Arline, who laughs because she is making believe, as if by this she had escaped tragedy. The eagerness of the Voice, with his finger pointing: “You see? You see? That is what it means. You live in the myth.” Living in the myth. Perhaps. But she was lost in it. Even Arline did not remain Arline. Now, because she was asleep, she was bathing in a world much larger than she knew. Lilith touching Arline asleep, wishing she would remain Arline.

But the next instant she is caught in the whirl again, a quest, a continuous, incessant, diabolical quest of an absolute that does not flow serenely but is pursued and grasped by sheer wakefulness. In flight always, and she fearing to sleep for fear of its passing. Desire unexploded in her, but the cord lit and the little flames running up and down the cord with Dionysian joyousness: a dancing, the little flames running around the heart of the dynamite and never touching it. The little flames kept her breathless, nerves bristling with their heads up, necks stretched, thirsty eyes, peaked ears, all the little nerves waiting for the orgasm that will send the blood running through them like an anaesthetic and put them to sleep.

Lilith, lying sleepless, seeing in the yellow faces at the bar the faces of future crimes, drug fiends who with knife or poison would bring a kind of sleep, a pause, a rest from this pursuit of a fugitive absolute. Lilith wishing for the crime, the drug, the death, as deliverance. But the nerves are still awake, waiting for the pause of sleep or death, waiting for the dynamite to explode, for the past to crumble, waiting for an absolute uncapturable. Do all violent fires have a hundred flames pointing in all directions, was there ever one round flame with one tongue? Why did this force which did not erupt in quicksilver through the veins, why did it rush out in a typhoon whirl to round only the monsters walking through the streets, to question their intentions, to imagine their perversities, to slide between the foam of lust, between the most knotted and twisted desires? This man with his little girl, why were his eyes so wet, his mouth so wet, why were her eyes so tired, why was her dress so short, her glance so oblique? Why was that young man so white? There was scum on his lips—the scum of veronal. Why did that woman wait under the lamplight with a hand in her muff? This force which did not explode in Lilith was a poison; it spilled into the streets, ran into the gutters. She wanted to be dismembered, devoured, and she met always with wings, with eyes opening on the heavens, flames turning to the mystic blue of the night lamps in convents and hospitals.

Arline was still asleep. In Lilith the seed would not burst; the body left the earth, pulled upward by a string of nerves, and spilled its pollen only in space, because the fairy tale wore too light a gown, a gown that made a breeze, a space between the feet and earth. Lilith’s footsteps would soon not be heard, the blood would remain quicksilver, blue like the night flames of places where people weep.

* * *


Lilith entered Djuna’s room tumultuously, throwing her little serpent skin bag on the bed, her undulating scarf on the desk, her gloves on the book shelf, and talking with fever and excitement:

“I’m falling in love with the Voice. I feel he is like a soul detective, and that the day he captures me, I will love him.”

“It’s a mirage,” said Djuna.

She went to the window. There was snow and ice on the rim of it, like a window giving on Iceland. She tried to open it a little, but it was jammed with snow and ice. She had a feeling they were blocked in, snowed in with tremendous obstacles. She knew Lilith was pursuing another mirage. Adventures, a mirage. The love of the Voice for what the Voice said to her, because the Voice reached into the roots of her being.

“A mystical illusion,” repeated Djuna. “A mirage. If you know what happens to woman when she pursues a mirage, when she has a love affair with a mirage?”

“What can happen to her? It’s poetry.”

“It may be poetry, Lilith, but her nature revolts against it. At some moment or other your body will revolt, because it’s not real.”

“But it is only in his presence I feel true, natural.”

“But don’t get closer to him. If you come closer you will defeat your own salvation. But then… you are too lovely, he won’t let you pass without making an effort to retain you. That is what happened to me. I lost the father in him—perhaps I wanted to. I tempted him as a man, and then he became a man and desired me, then I was angry at him, as if it had been only a test, a test of the saviour in him. And he’s noe’s noee’s trying to save himself too.”

“You bitch, you bitch,” laughed Lilith.

“I liked upsetting him. Then, when he became a man and ran after me I was very angry—it seemed to prove that he was only human.”

“The world is very small, Djuna. If what you say is true it is very small. I’m going to choke in it. He can’t be merely human. He must be something else, something more. He has a magic power.”

Lilith enveloped Djuna in great softness. They lay talking in the dark. Only the softness, the glistening touch of legs mixed together, only to feel the softness and warmth of woman, the weight of her arm, the curve of her neck. Only to hear her breathing and talking and laughing in the dark. To lie there, wishing perhaps to be a man for a moment, but as a woman knowing there is no way of possessing a woman but as a man.

“Try and close your eyes, you’ll find another world that is immense, at night, Lilith.”

“I never remember the night. Why don’t I find a man who makes me feel what I feel with you? You are so warm, you are so quick. You are always where I am. Our impulses towards each other happen at the same moment. You are never late or slow or indifferent, and you have the gift of gesture. When I feel anguished, lost, alone, you always have the gift for saying what I need to hear, as if you knew when I am wandering alone, when I need to be called. After we are together you write me letters, and I need so much to feel again what we said, to be able to touch the words, to feel palpably that what happened to us is real. It’s the only thing I believe in, Djuna, everything else is ghostly. You say everything with your body, like a dancer. All your body talks, your hands, your walk. I believe you.”

“But none of this is love, Lilith. We are the same woman. Every woman in this hotel is the same woman. There is always a moment when all the outlines, the differences between women disappear, and we enter a world where all feelings, yours and mine, seem to issue from the same source. We lose our separate identities. What happens to you is the same as what happens to me. Once a month, you and I are exactly alike; and you know it. Listening to you is no longer watching a world different than my own, it’s a kind of communion.”

“And meanwhile everybody laughs, jeers and calls us all kinds of names.”

What softness. To lie on a wave. The marvellous silence—two women, one woman becoming plants. To turn over and watch the rivulets of shadows between the breasts, to lie on the down of the bed sleeping over one’s own body, like sleeping in the forest at night. The marvellous silence of woman’s thoughts, the secret and the mystery of night and woman become air, sun, water, plant. Feel the roots resting in the soil, the feet well planted in the coolness, in the brown pressure, firm against this creamy wall of earth. When you press against the body of the other you feel this joy of the roots compressed, sustained, enwrapped in its brownness, with only the seeds of joyousness stirring. A pleasure ebbing back and forth. Sun pressed luxuriantly against the body. Mystery and coolness of darkness between the four walls of another’s flesh. The back of Lilith, this soft, musical wall of fleh, the being floating in the utter waves of silence, enclosed by the presence of what can be touched. No more falling into space. No more quest, anxiety, seeking, yearning, turning, within this compact wall of tender flesh. Touch the delicate tendrils of hair, you touch moss and an end to hunger. This hand holds a strand of hair, the world complete, reduced, in the palm of the hand. You have entered from the dissonances of the street, from the separate, hard fragments walking without legs or head or arms, always mutilated, into the immense vault of an organ chant. Djuna lay at the centre of a wheel. Lilith warm and near. Or Hans talking rumblingly into her ear. The earth turns with a chant of roundness, fullness. It turns into a smooth, full round of plenitude. The spokes pass fast and are not seen at this moment. Only the drunkenness of rotation. Other days the wheel slows down and one gets caught in the spokes. One falls between them, they cut and mangle one. You are caught. The rhythm broken, you dangle, you are dragged, you are mutilated.

* * *


The steps of Georgia at the door. A voice with a mustache, the heavy pounding of her enormous feet. Her hands about to strike. Her breath like a beaver, her feet like giant ducks’ feet, her hands slapping the air. When she entered the room of the Voice it was like an attack. Thrusting herself into it as if her shoulders would hatchet down the obstacles.

She made the room seem small. She was not talking to the Voice, but smelling him, breathing over him, with her tongue flicking constantly over the wet lips, as if she had just finished eating him and were seeking the flavor again with her saliva.

Her lips were wet with appetite. She breathed, she snorted, warm and musky. She sat down as a gorilla sits on a branch with her arms ready to climb. When she said: I love, it was incongruous. She ought to have said: I am hungry. I am thirsty.

She had hair on her upper lip, hair in her nose, and hair like seaweeds on her head. The Voice was haunted by the vision of this hair, imagined that she might have hair inside her too, that her sex must be lined like the backs of sea-urchins.

She was very angry because the Voice had not answered her telephone call during the night. She had needed him desperately.

“I never answer the telephone at night,” said the Voice.

“And why not?”

“Because everyone would telephone at night. That is the moment when everyone feels the solidtude. Didn’t you ever sit by a telephone at night when in anguish and feel like calling some one, just to hear a voice? At night people don’t resist their impulses, their obsessions. One feels like addressing another human being just to make sure one is still among them.”

“That’s true. But I called for a more important reason. I have to conduct my orchestra to-morrow, and I have a new obsession. If you don’t help me somehow I’ll never be able to conduct. There was a story about my father which I didn’t tell you yesterday. I remembered it as son as I left you. When I was a girl I knew about his affairs with women. He confided in me. I knew exactly how he behaved, and the most cynical details. There are times even now, when I am making love, I suddenly become aware that I am acting like my father, I feel like him at the moment. One of his favorite amusements was to come to my door in the morning to wake me up, because I was lazy and found it hard to get up. He would knock very hard with his stick, then say: ‘Guess what I’m knocking with, guess!’ At first I didn’t. I laughed without knowing. Then one day I understood his laughter. For years this caused me a great shock. I used to hear this knocking of my father in my dreams. Then I forgot about it. I became an orchestra leader. One day, wanting to amuse a woman I loved, I knocked at her door with my orchestra baton: guess what I am knocking with? That night while conducting, while I was waving my stick, the whole scene came back to me. Do you think that’s why all women are so fascinated by me? I think about it day and night. The stick burns my fingers; I will never be able to conduct again.”

“Didn’t you often wish to be a man?” asked the Voice.

“Yes, often. I envied my father. When he told me about his adventures—and he always gave me the fullest details—I used to feel what he felt as he talked about women. I was aroused by his stories. I used to envy him his enjoyment of woman. I felt being born a woman was a curse. I could take a woman, but not the same way… I didn’t feel I could possess her. Very often I had dreams in which I was a man. If only you would come to my concert!”

“Why?”

“Because you alone make me feel I am a woman. I feel that I get confused, lost, that somehow or other I butt my head against obstacles, blunder, but that you can take all this and direct it, transform it; that you lead me out of this great disorder. I fall into fears. Will you come? I will feel that you are the director, not I—you conducting me. Mischa is playing a solo—he wants you to come too.”

* * *


Lilith came to Djuna’s room, shed the long, white cape, and sat pulling the petals of her flower open. She could not bear buds. She would take the closed flowers and open them completely, like the flowers Djuna had seen floating dead on the river.

Lilith filled her room with perfume, turned around it several times as if it were too small for her.

“Come with me to the concert.”

“I am too tired.”

“You have a secret. You’re expecting some one.”

“No, Lilith. But it’s true, I have a secret. I have an opium. It’s the dream. I go to bed thinking: will I dream to-night? I await the dream with the same impatience as the lover.”

“Hans is not coming?”

“Not to-night.”

“Come to the concert.”

“Not to-night.”

“You mean the dream, the dream means so much to you? It isn’t that you love me less?”

“No, Lilith.”

Djuna locked her door: Will I dream to-night? Turned out the light. What will I dream to-night?

Awareness hurts. Knowingness hurts. Ideas hurt. Lucidity hurts. Relationships hurt. Life hurts. But to flow, to drift, to live as nature, does not hurt. Her eyes were closing. She was drifting, drifting. Drunkenness. It was not the Hotel Chaotica which had many rooms, but she, Djuna, when she lay on her bed, folding them all together, the layers, and all the things that she was not yet.

When she entered the dream she stepped on a stage. The lights cast on it changed hue and intensity like stage lights. The violent scenes happened in the spotlight and were enveloped by a thick curtain of blackness. The scenes were cut, interrupted, cut out in sharp relief, or broken with entr’actes. The mise en scene was stylized, and only what had meaning was represented. And very often she was at once the victim and the observer. She was on the stage and at the same time sitting before the stage and watching. She was at times aware that it was only a spectacle, and at other times engulfed by the images, so that she was one with them, and then one with the nightmare.

When she sat and watched what was happening to her on the stage of the dream she felt a deeper anguish, like that of a passive, chained prisoner watching out of a cell window. If she was in action, even when tortured, she felt less pain. In passion and drama there was no time for anguish.

The dream was composed like a tower of layers without end, rising upward and losing themselves in the infinite, or layers coiling downward, losing themselves in the bowels of the earth. When it swooped her into its undulations, the spiralling began, and this spiral was a labyrinth. There was no vault, and no bottom, no walls and no return. But there were themes repeating themselves with exactitude.

If the walls of the dreams seemed lined with moist silk, and the contours of the labyrinth lined with silence, still the steps of the dream were a series of explosions in which all the condemned fragments of herself, the cemeteries of the murdered fragments of herself, burst into a mysterious and violent life, with the heavy maternal solicitude of the night ever attentive to their flowering.

On the first layer of the spiral there was awareness. She could still see the daylight between the fringe of eyelashes. She could still see the interstices of the world. This was not altogether the dream, nor was it daylight. It was the penumbra, the frontier, the edge of the world where the thoughts were inlaid in the filaments of lightning. It was the place where the lights were arranged like foot lights, where the images and gestures were delicately filtered and separated, and their silhouettes thrown against space. It was the place where footsteps left no traces, where laughter had no echo, but where the hunger and fear were immense. It was the place where all the sails of reverie could swell and yet no wind was felt.

The light was stained with bright colors brought into being by the friction of the eyelid upon the eyeball, and this eyeball turning on its axis threw the light full on a buried world. The air was different, it was saturated with knowingness, it transmitted perception. The vegetation no longer concealed its breathing, its sleepiness, its lamentations, its shrivellings.

The sand no longer concealed its desire to enmesh, to stifle; the sea showed its true face, its insatiable craving to possess; the earth yawned open its caverns, the fogs spewed out their poisons. The dreams were full of danger, like the African jungle. The dream was full of animals. All the animals killed, stuffed, imprisoned by man, walked alive in the dream. The faces mocked all desire to identify, to personalize: they changed and decomposed before her eyes. They were evocative only. They puzzled and baffled, exposing only the identity of a whim, altering perpetually, eluding continuity.

There was no time: events passed without leaving a trace, a footprint, an echo. They left SPACE around them. Even a crowded street lay perpendicular between two abysses of blackness, as if it belonged to a planet without gravitation, reposing against space.

The dream was a filter. The world was never admitted. It was a stage surrendered to fragments, scenes telescoping, slices interweaving, with many pieces left hanging in shreds…

On the tip of the spiral she felt passive, felt bound like a mummy. She was lying down, with chains and bands of cloth around her. As she descended these obstacles loosened, the body moved. At first she was voiceless, numbed, feeling only the descent into the dream and a blanket covering the face.

The loss of memory was like the loss of a chain. With all this fluidity came a great lightness. Without memory she was immensely light, vaporous, fluid. The memory was the density which she could not transcend.

She was not lost, she had only lost the past. Sand passing through the hour glass which never turned. Passing.

By day, as if obeying a command, she followed the dream, step by step, blindly. She felt lost and bewildered if the day did not bring its replica. She felt compelled to recover a flavor, a color, to recapture the personage, the moment, the place. If she found it she remembered it. But at the same moment she became aware of the part of the dream which was missing. The missing fragment was unrecoverable. Yet she felt its presence. It was lying under the earth. It was like the broken arm of a statue, lying near the statue, but buried in the earth. The mutilated structure loomed in vivid colors, but static. So it presented itself during the day, attended with an uneasy, yellow aura of incompleteness.

If she could find the missing fragment of the dream in the daylight she might reconstruct the entire tapestry. She was seeking a window she had seen in a dream. She was walking through the city at night, looking for the window, and she found it. It was the window of a house open on two avenues. In the dream it was the window of Proust’s house. It was also the window of a house she had lived in, she could not remember wheity at nt she was certain that she had already known the feeling of standing at this window looking down at the two avenues like opened legs. She was certain that she had stood many times hesitating between these two avenues. Her route constantly split in two, the whole structure of her life constantly splitting open into two sections. The nature of her mind running like a double river. She could never make a choice. She would follow the avenues until the pain of being thus quartered became ecstasy and the two avenues fused together into a point of absolute sorrow. The drama was this window opening on the dual aspect of existence, on its dual face. The drama was this window she had seen in a dream, which was the window of Proust’s house when he was writing the endless book in which he made no choice, but followed the contours of the symphony and the labyrinth of remembrance. She had chosen as an answer to the dream this pursuit of the dream without memory. Yet she left behind her a ribbon of memory which wove itself inexorably and slowed up her walking and dreaming. But while she followed the dream she was free.

At some point the pattern of her life hung like a frayed cloth and the street of dreams turned into blackness.

That is why she left certain places in great precipitation. She was following a dream. She was in a hurry. When she entered certain rooms filled with people she had never seen in the dream, she became instantly aware that THIS WAS NOT THE PLACE. The need of flight was imperative, compulsive.

When she found the place, she sat very still and satisfied. She sat in a trance remembering the dream and seeking to recapture the lost pieces. She had caught her dream. Or her nightmare. Caught up with it. Then it seemed to her that all the clocks in the world chimed in unison, for the hour of the miracle. As the clocks chimed at midnight for Cinderella, for all metamorphoses. The dream was synchronized. The miracle was accomplished. All the clocks chimed midnight for the metamorphosis. It was not time they chimed for, but the catching up, catching up with the dream. The dream had a way of always running ahead of one. To catch up with it, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle. The life on the stage, the life of the legend dovetailed with the daylight, and out of this marriage sparked the great birds of divinity, the eternal moments.

When the dream fell to one side, wounded, and the daytime into another, what appeared through the cracks was the real death. The crack of daylight between the curtains, the slit between night and day was the mortal moment, for it killed the dream. The soul then lost its power to breathe, lost its space.

Nights when she awaited the dream, as one awaits the ship that is to take one far away, and the nightmare came in its place, then she knew she had something to expiate. The nightmare was the messenger of guilt. The nightmare brought her whatever suffering she had rejected or eluded during the day, or given to others. The dream was the refuge which permitted her endless voyages; the nightmare imprisoned and tortured her.

Now it was not altogether the dream, nor was it daylight. It was the place where many of the effects were due to shadow, to silences and to space. A marvellous mise en scene, such as human beings knew nothing of when they awakened. It was the moment when one was more than awake, a million times awake, awake backwards and forwards, with a circular fever faster than the rotation of earth, awake with a million eyes and a mouth that had said everything and was now struck with silence; a place so high that breathing ceased and divination began.

It was the twilight of mercury.

The room was turning black. She was splitting herself into two women, and she felt the half of her that was standing up and the half of her that was lying down.

It was here that everything happened to her. The daytime was only a sketch. In the daytime all the gestures were thickened by obstacles, by remembrance. Only in the dream was the loved one wholly possessed, only in the dream was there ecstasy without death. Life only began behind the curtain of closed eyelashes.

The woman who walked erect during the day and the woman who breathed and walked and swam during the night were not the same. The woman who breathed and walked during the day was like a cathedral spire and the opening into her being was a secret. It was inaccessible like the tip of the most labyrinthian sea shell.

But with the night came the openness.

The day body made of rigid bones, made rigid with fears and dissonances, was set against yielding. At night it changed substance, form and texture. With the night came fluidity. With the night there ran through the marrows not only blood which could always commingle with other bloods, but a mercury which ran in all directions, swift, mordant, uncontrollable, spilling and running in star points, changing shape at each breath of desire, spilling and dispersing without separating.

With the night came SPACE. No crowded city. The dream was never crowded. It was filtered through the prism of creation. The pressure of time ceased. Joy lasted longer and suffering less, or else all the feelings were telescoped into a second. Time was arranged and ordained by feeling. Fear was eternal, anger immediate and catastrophic. Sifted and enveloped in a mineral glow, each object of the eternal landscape appeared on the scene with space around it. The space was like an enormous silence in which there was no sword of thought, no rending comments, no thread ever cut. She walked among symbols and silence.

She ceased to be a woman. The secret small pores of the being began to breathe a life like that of plant and flower. She went to sleep a human being and awakened with the nervous sensibility of a leaf, with the fin knowledge of fish, with the hardness of a coral, with the sulphurous eyes of a mineral. She awakened with new finger tips, new tendrils, new wings, new legs, leaves, branches. She awakened with eyes at the end of long arms that floated everywhere and with eyes on the soles of her feet. She awakened in strands of angel hair with lungs of cocoon milk.

With the night came a multiplied breathing and new cells like honeycombs filled with a strange activity. Filling and refilling with white tides and red currents, with echoes and fever. Cells, beehives of feelings, inundated with new forms of life dissolving the outline of the body. All forms became blurred and the woman who was lying there slowly turned into a heavy sea, carrying riches on her breast, or became earth with many fissures of thirst, drinking rain.

With the night came the boat. This boat she was pushing with all her strength becase it could not float, it was passing through land. It was chokingly struggling to pass along the streets, it could not find its way to the ocean. It was pushed along the streets of the city, touching the walls of houses, and she was pushing it against the resistance of earth, of cobblestones, of sand, of lava. So many nights against the obstacles of mud, marshes, garden paths through which the boat labored painfully.

She was not altogether asleep. The night was like a very black silk curtain, but there was still a slit of daylight. She felt the approach of the dream. But while there was a slit of daylight there were words floating around her. They were sharp, they cut like knives into the feelings, they separated, they scalped, they uncovered the skin, they exposed, they killed the feelings. The moment words cut into the dream, into the feeling, they cut into the pulse and the pulse ceased to beat. The slit of daylight was made of steel.

The boat was passing through the city, unable to find the ocean that transmitted its life voyages.

The light cut into the bones with bony words that could not commune with anything or change substance for communion.

She recognized him. He was the transformable man. He was the man without identity. He came into the dream and acted like a lover. He took her, but if she looked at him a second time he was no longer the man she had given herself to, he was changed. He was not the lover, he was the father. Or if it was the father who first came into the dream now he turned into the Voice, or oftener still into a woman with dishevelled hair as in moments of love. And the woman, when she was approached, turned out to be the long-haired Mischa. She could not hold the identity for more than a moment. The faces changed. All the personages were constantly altering, and the moment she recognized them they become some one else.

She was wearing a light, airy green dress. She was expecting the Voice, but it was Hans who came. She felt his tongue in her mouth. He began to embrace her but then he vanished. She felt a great despair. The atmosphere was yellow and heavy. When she came back the Voice had killed himself with a knife. He lay crumpled up and he looked like a child. She begged him to come to life.

In the corner, watching, was the father. She was embraced and possessed by Hans, but when she looked at him it was the father. The father had more sperm than any man. The richness of the father in sperm was frightening. He said: “My daughter, I have no more god. I have no more god.” He was the god. His embrace awakened her because she had come to an unutterable place. She was struck blind. She had no more feelings. She let this inhuman, this impossible flow of sperm into her from the god and she became blind. The other women around him wept because the daughter was being loved by the father.

She was going to the father with her face tattooed with needles to impress him with her beauty. She felt very beautiful with all the needles in her face. But when she returned home and looked at herself in the mirror her face fell apart, in triangular pieces, shattered. She rushed to her mother: “What shall I do?” The mother took out a comb with great simplicity and began combing her hair, which was silver white. She said: “This is all you do, just comb your hair gently.”

Te father was reconciled to the mother. They wrote messages to each other on a pad. She read what was written on her father’s pad: “Thou shalt love thy daughter, it is written in the Bible.”

She was beautifully dressed, with gold and jewels, a long cape of brocade, with furgloves, and she entered a hall where the music came out of the walls. It was the King who wanted to dance with her and who whispered adoring phrases in her ear. She was laughing and the laughter trickled through the walls. The King put his ear against the wall and said: “Instead of listening to the sea in sea shells I listen to your laughter. We will dance to it.” She did not feel the ground under her feet. She said: “We are inside the music, that is why we don’t see the musicians.”

There was a secret between them. A fire burst upon the hall from the garden. It moved forward like the waves on the shore, waves of smoke and flames rolling in a long line across the garden. She wanted to close the door, but then she understood that if she shut the door the others would be locked outside with the fire, so she opened the door and called them. Her dress was vaporous and enormous around her, like sails. It was raining. The rain was spoiling her dress. She took a carriage. The carriage moved too slowly and they were lost. She wanted to get back to the castle and the dance hall. Her feet were twinkling. She did not mind being wet, she was so happy.

There came the woman so round and full-fleshed, like the mother. So large and full, the Rubens woman, with enourmous breasts. But it was not her mother. She loved her breasts and caressed them. As she caressed the woman she felt her masculinity. She asked: “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” The woman answered: “I thought perhaps you would not like it.” No, it was true, she did not like it, she turned away. But the Rubens woman came back in another form. She was not deluded, she knew it was always the same woman. She was the whore, the woman animal, the lioness. She came back as a heavy luxuriant goddess, too, the goddess of abundance. Her flesh was down, a bed of sensuality, every pore and curve of her. She was the immense statue, the oldest of all the whores, with her mask of avidity. Her hands were grasping, her flesh throbbing in a mountainous heaving way, without electric sparks, rolling, fermenting, saturated with moisture, folded in many lapping layers of voluptuous inertia. Her flesh was without eyes, without antennae. It was without ears, without nerves, without currents. It was a bed of flesh, burning without fire, trembling only from caresses and then dying again. Dead when not touched; like layers of silk, tempting the hands. A river bed of engluing moss, of adhesive rubber plants. Perspiring milk from the heavy flow of desires, the moist currents flowing into the canals of her prone body; all the fluid currents of desire seeping along the silver bark of her legs, around the violin-shaped hips, descending and ascending with a sound of wet silk around the cones and crater edges of her breast. Flesh mother, the oldest of all the whores, who on dark nights of punishment took Hans away from her and left her weeping. She the whore and goddess of earth, whom on other nights Djuna destroyed with lightning, standing like an idol covered with splendor, breathing out a fire which turned the woman into a crumpled heap, like a dead animal. But the woman reappeared. She reappeared in the sparkling costume of the burlesque queens, she came dressed in the tight skirt of the street walker, always preying and waiting. And Djuna did not always hate her; she loved her heavy, obscene walk, her navel glance, her animal passivity, her spreading herself at a café table like a seal, her drunken sullenness. Djuna wanted to enter the woman in her, and be lost in her too, like the feelings of man when he entered and lay in her. She was inside the whore feeling the entrance of man, aware of her feeling, the woman’s feelings and the man’s feelings.

Djuna wanted to kill the Rubens woman. She prepared a bath for her with a strong acid. She said to her: “Let’s take a bath together.” The Rubens woman slapped her when she was naked, laughing. Djuna covered her own body with wax so that the acid would not touch her. She said to the Rubens woman: “This bath comes from Egypt.” The Rubens woman began to dissolve, still laughing. She dissolved completely. The bath was full of jellied substance. She touched it. It was like Jello which she did not like to eat as a child. She felt she must conceal this somewhere. She dug a deep hole in the earth. She filled the hole with the acid. It took her a long time; the hole seemed to get deeper and the jelly more and more abundant. She was so tired she fell asleep. When she awakened it was daytime and the jelly had all come to the surface again. The Voice was looking at the spectacle with his eye glasses shaking. His little hands rubbing together, and his voice unsteadily saying: “Everything is a symbol. The poet is the one who calls death an aurora borealis.”

* * *


While the concert was going on the Voice sat at the back of the box and showed only the refracted light on the rim of his glasses. Georgia, in her long black dress, looked like Rasputin. Her heavy hair straight and long, her two black arms, the chaste black monk gown, agitating herself over the instruments, projecting her strength into them.

Lilith sat below, but not lost among the other faces. Watched by the searchlight of the Voice’s glasses, her face, very white, was open to the music and her restlessness was for a moment suspended. When Mischa came out she thrust herself forward as if she wanted to envelope him in her own strength.

Lilith had gone backstage before the concert.

Georgia had fixed her with her wolf eyes and said: “I am playing for you.” So Lilith felt as if the concert were coming from her. And the Voice had told Georgia: “You will conduct well,” as if it were an order. So the Voice felt the concert was his creation; he was leading, he was the strength of it, in it, directing. And the music had been ordained to transmit the currents of his desire across the space to a Lilith on fire with desires. Mischa was giving a silver icy chant which Lilith accepted as an expression of her disenchantment. All the disenchantments—the Voice stepping out and metamorphosed into a man such as she had seen by the million all around her, less than all, a non-face, a non-body, a non-presence, a vanishing of his force, all the light gone out of him as soon as he stepped out of his mysterious Voice role; in the daylight his skin the color of death, his eyes the blurredness of death, his words the dullness of death. Music carrying in its immense waves a foam crest of delusions, in its falling, running, spilling downfall a moment of suffocation, in its undertows waiting for the moment of despair to engulf one. Lilith falling over with a vertigo of despair, struck in the center of her being by the constantly inaccurate shafts of sex—never thrusting her for life but bleeding her, mereaccuounds.

Georgia would pursue her, panting, having sensed in Lilith the response—and not the ultimate non-response. Throughout the multitude of identical rooms Lilith could see men and women embracing convulsively. The same images—but resonances of all kinds, as varied in power as this music now swelling and dying in plaits of sand combed with silver combs. All the little rooms alike and Djuna lying swathed in the fumes of her dreams from which she would never awaken, wanting only the scenes which resembled the dream and skipping the vast deserts and infernos of daily living.

Lilith had skipped no part of the voyage, yet remained unsatisfied—plunging nowhere for a permanent place in which to erect her illusion, like this music passing and vanishing, leaving no signs of its passage.

* * *


Mischa is falling asleep. The room looks the same as the Voice’s room, or Djuna’s room, or Lilith’s room. Mischa is asleep in the same kind of bed, with the same radio over his head, and the furniture stands around him in the same mathematical order. Where the desk ends, with its little glass top, covering a laundry list, a telephone list, a card from the drugstore, the dressing table begins. And where the dressing table ends there is space for the lamp. The armchair is placed against the window. The room looks like the inside of a chestnut. The furniture is made of chestnut, the rug has the color of new chestnuts, the lamp has the color of old chestnut. In the same sized drawer in which Djuna folds her lace nightgowns Mischa keeps his faded shirts, Lilith her boyish scarfs, the Voice his notes of what he has heard during the day for future conferences. All the letters are written on the same paper. Mischa feels a shiver of horror, feels the madness of sameness. He thinks of all the rooms at once, and what may be happening in them. They are all washing at the same moment, quarreling, writing letters, or twisting themselves with desire or pretense of desire. Mischa thinks that if everyone died to-night and the great city were left abandoned for a hundred years, the tall, empty structures left to mold and rust… those who would come with their geological passions, their instruments, their research maps, they would be convinced that these people were all absolutely identical. Not alike as twins, but a million beings soldered together, forced into the same motions.

While he looked at his room he could not sleep. It seemed to him that the room was made to efface Mischa. Mischa’s moods, his differences, his disharmony with everyone. In the corner stood his ‘cello in its black sarcophagus.

He wanted to sleep. He wanted to sleep.

The room did become smaller and smaller, and darker, as if he were being placed in a real chestnut which closed around him. And as soon as it became smaller, he saw windows flung open and flames bursting from them. Behind the flames the faces of madmen shrieking and grimacing. The walls crumbled. The bars were twisted open. The madmen crawled out between them, then ran in all directions, with their hair standing on end. Some of them still wore their straight-jackets. They fell on their backs and could not pick themselves up. They lay there like scarabs and the crowd ran over them. Bells. Whistles. Dust raised. Stones rolling. Hands twisted trying to rend the air. When the people crashed into each other they looked at each other. They saw the same face. It was the face of a madman. The eyes protruded and the mouth hung lower on the right side. They touched each other. It was a mirror they were touching. Another mirror. Another mirror. A thousand faces all alike. They ran, they bowed, they kneeled, they fell on their faces, they wept, and all of them were doing exactly the same thing… They rushed into a house. A tall man was sitting in an armchair. He was looking down at his insides which were exposed. He was watching how the blood moved, how the liver functioned. Intestinal functioning, like the wheels, chains, canals, labyrinths of a factory. Microbes climbing through the arteries in military order. Food deteriorating. Canals like inside a coal mine; little wagons travelling up and down, carrying food. Bridges. Canals. Plants growing. Seeds falling. It was the Voice who was oiling the mechanism with an eye-dropper. The Voice who picked up a few drops and placed them in a bottle. He examined it with a microscope. Enlarged it showed the inside of an egg. Inside of this egg there were clouds, and resting on the clouds two eyes shedding tears, with their roots dangling behind. The tears fell into an oyster opening and closing. A woman slipped her tongue into the oyster.

The inside of the Voice was now like a printing press shaped like a liver, a heart, the entrails. Words fell into separate letters inside a small drawer. Words and letters were running through the intestines like the words in a printing press. The pages came out in neat piles. The Voice read them. The pages were dripping blood on the rugs. The Voice closed the little door of his insides and leaned over towipe the stains away. The mad crowd surrounded him. He pointed to the sky. The sky was the roof of his room. The stars and moon were made of cardboard and moved with strings like puppets. The Voice pressed a button. The motions of the planets were reproduced, but shakingly, hesitatingly, as if the machine were not working very well. The madmen looked on, bewildered. The Voice opened the little door to his brain. The brain like the skeins of tangled wool. The ribbon of a movie film, a travelogue picture passing very fast. Monuments, streets, churches, but appearing upside down. A little boy was buying a newspaper from another little boy in the street. In his room he spread the newspaper on the floor and made a paper boat and a bird. He wrote in big letters: “Dear Papa and Mamma, please return Pinocchio to the library or you will be fined for it.” He sat on the paper boat and immediately it sank. Then the paper boat floated up again, half open, lying on its side, floating down the river.

The Voice closed the little door to his brain. He turned the X-ray machine on the crowd. He turned it upon the women standing there. On the stomach of one of the women. One could see inside her womb a dead child. Inside another woman twins lying entangled. One twin is dead and the other is writhing, seeking to escape. Inside another woman there is a child asleep, covered with fur. Inside another woman lies a coiled snake, asleep.

A woman is following Mischa stealthily. He falls. She leans over with a heavy stick and beats his legs until they break. She leans over to look at them. They are the knotted roots of trees; mushrooms are growing all over them. The woman runs to the village to get a coffin. They try to place Mischa in the coffin, but he is too long for it. They begin to saw off his legs, and then the body is placed in the coffin. The woman picks up the legs. They stand alone like a pair of boots. The boots begin to sink into the sand.

The noise of strong suction was not the noise of the sand finally sucking his legs down, but the breakfast contraption being violently sucked closed again, and on the rug lay the tiny box he hated, with a breakfast arranged like a mathematical calculation. He looked at it from the receding shores of his dream. He wanted to return to the dream. There was nothing left of it. An island there, a deserted island where many things had happened. He could see it receding. The sand must still be in his clothes. His legs buried. He looked at them. They were asleep. But no scar left where they had been sawed off.

* * *


“I never noticed,” said Lilith to the Voice, “that the sun comes into this room. I always felt it was a dark room, because of all the secrets.”

“Maybe it’s in you there are no more secrets.”

“I don’t know. Your understanding saved me from confusion and pain. I feel dependent on you. You have the vision. I get lost. You teach, you are humanly tender and protective. Do you really think a woman can find her way all alone, completely alone?”

“Not if she’s a real woman.”

“I must have become a real woman right here, for I feel the dependence now, and I don’t mind it. I like it.”

Then Lilith stopped because she saw he did not like what she was saying.

“Do you know the meaning of your own name?” asked the Voice. “It’s the unmated woman, the woman who cannot truly be married to any man, the one whom man can never possess altogether. Lilith, you remember, was born before Eve and made out of red earth, not of human substance. She could seduce and ensorcell but she could not melt into man and become one with him. She was not made of the same human substance.”

“Do you think I am altogether like the first Lilith?” she asked without looking at him.

“I don’t know. The way you talk about dependence does not mean love. It means the love for the Father, who is the symbol of God. You are seeking a father… How exactly do you think of me?”

But before she could answer his question the little man left his analyst’s chair and walked up to her. Lilith heard his breathing and felt he did not want to hear the answer.

What she read in his eyes was the immense pleading of a man, a man imprisoned inside a seer, calling out for the life in her, and at the very moment when every cell inside her body closed to the desire of the man she saw a mirage before her as clearly as men saw it in the desert, and this mirage was a figure taller than other men, a type of saviour, the man nearest to God, whose human face she could no longer see except for the immense hunger in the eyes. And she felt a kind of awe, which she recognized. Every time she was faced with a sacrifice of the self, with the demand of another, a hunger, a prayer, a n, there came this joy. It was like the joy of a prisoner who finds the bars of his cell suddenly broken down. The mirage took the place of all actual physical sensation. It was if all the walls, all the limitations, all the personal desires were transcended. It was not an ecstasy of the body, but a sudden break with the body, a liberation and a stepping into a new region. With the abandon came this joy as of a transcendent flight upward, breaking the chains of awareness. Abandon brought a drunkenness, the fever of generosity, the joy of self-forgetting. A joyous victim, a victim of the imperfections of the universe which it was in her power, for the moment, to redress, to alter. In her power, for the moment, to make all the gifts promised so long ago in the fairy tales of childhood. What had prevented the fairy tales from materializing was the lack of faith and the lack of love.

Human life at this moment seemed the unreal and miniature city, with too many boundaries, too many laws, and too many simplicities. Giving was the only flight in space permitted to whomever could abandon the human substance. Better to be made of red clay, as she was, for she would never die, and she would never die because of this joy that came in being more than one woman, and for the moment the woman the Voice wanted.

What would he demand of her?

While the Voice, who was no longer the Seer, talked, what she saw was the dark-skinned mythological crab, not quite a man, but an animal, with the cavernous, pre-historic sorrows of the monkey, the agedness of the turtle, the tenderness of the kangaroo, the facile humility of the dog.

In the Voice she felt the ugliness of tree roots, of the earth, and this terrific dark mute knowing of the animal, for though he was the one most aware of what happened inside others he was the one least aware of what happened in himself. It was too near. He could read the myth, and man’s dreams, but not in himself. The man had been denied. He was begging her to be made a person, a man. The man had been buried, had grown very old, withered, without having achieved his life on earth. That is what his eyes were asking for: a life on earth.

Lilith knew it was all based on a lie, and he could not be lied to. That is why he never lived: he had not learned to let himself be lied to. He will be another victim. I don’t know, I feel possessed and diabolical. I like the pleasure I give him.

It was a father I was looking for. And I found him. But he is a father who turns white with passion, who trembles with doubts and jealousies. He says that with me one travels so far away from reality that it is necessary to buy a return ticket. He is afraid of not being able to come back. I like him better serious than laughing; he doesn’t know how to laugh. His pranks are pranks of the mind, his humor is paradox, the reversal of ideas, the trickeries and trapeze stunts of ideas. He has not learned what I have learned—to not clutch at the perfume of flowers, to not touch the dew, to not tear all the curtains down, to let exaltation and breath rise, vanish. The perfume of the hours distilled only in silence, the heavy perfume of mysteries untouched by human fingers. Flesh touching flesh generates perfume. The friction of words generates only pain and division. To formulate without destroying, without tampering, without withering. An awe of the senses. Silence.

His understanding was infinite, like a sea, but Lilith was sailinon it alone. He was everywhere, immense, but not a man, because his understanding ended where the life of silence and mystery began.

He was walking at Lilith’s side now, in full daylight. His clothes hung about him as on a cross of wood. The clothes did not dress him, make him incarnate. His small hands made brusque gestures as if made of bones. Clothes take the shape of a man’s body, of his gestures. They bear the imprint of his character, his habits, his moods. The hat reveals if he is mellow and tolerant, if he is gay or lavish. Every line, fold, wrinkle, testifies to how he sits, to his tenderness or roughness, his sensuality or asceticism. The hat is moulded by the hand and is carried either with pride or insolence, with nonchalance or rigidity.

The Voice’s clothes did not fit him, were never a part of him. They were not moulded by his body, kneaded to his moods. Nothing that men wore seemed to be made for him. The tailors had not cut for his body, his body was not made for clothes. His hat stood stiffly detached from him. It seemed either too large or too small for him. Either his hats were formal and the face under it too lax, or the hat was humorous and nonchalant and his face tooserious and heavy. Or else he looked humiliated. In every detail his clothes were a misfit. The body was denied: it did not flow into the clothes, espouse them. There was a kind of blight upon his body; it was the idea made flesh, the idea always standing in the way of natural gestures, the idea upright and standing in the way of rhythm. His flesh was the color of death. He had died in the body and never been resurrected. It was heavy with melancholy, jealousy. The life of the mind had shrivelled the body too soon. It was a sad flesh tyrannized by the idea, drawn and quartered on a pattern, devoured by concepts. No matter how clear or divine the soul was, the flesh was dark and sad and muddied, like very ancient flesh exiled from joy and faith to the kingdom of thought.

When they returned from the theatre or a dance and stood before the door of her room there was always a pause. The Voice would say: “Come and talk with me a while longer. I hate to surrender you to sleep.”

If she refused she would find a note under her door the next day: “You belong to the night. I have to give you up to the night, to your mystery.” She smiled. Her mystery was so amazingly simple, but he could not understand it.

The next day he wrote her a long letter and slipped it under her door. Tied to it was a diminutive frog. “This,” he wrote, “is my transformation, to permit my entrance through the closed door.”

But this diminutive frog she held in the palm of her hand resembled him so much that it made her weep. Indeed the frog had come just as in the fairy tales; and just as in the fairy tales, she must keep her faith and her inner vision of him, must keep on believing in what lay hidden within this frog’s body. She must pretend not to notice that the Voice was born disguised, to test her love. If she kept her inner vision the disguise might be destroyed, the metamorphosis might occur.

She sat on the floor with the letter in her lap and the frog in the palm of her hand, weeping over his ugliness and humility and the faith she must hold on to. She remembered Djuna’s words: if you fall in love with a mirage your body will revolt.

She was asking him questions about his childhood. He stopped in the middle of a story to weep. “Nobody ever asked me anything about myself. I have listened to the confessions of others for twenty-five years. No one has ever turned and asked me about myself, has ever let me talk. No one has ever tried to divine my moods or needs. There are times, Lilith, when I wanted so much to confess to some one. I was filled with preoccupations. Do you know what I most fear in the world? To be loved as a father, a doctor. And it is always so I am loved. I am like a man who fears to be loved for his money.”

She used his own formulas against him. When he complained that she left him alone she gave him mysterious explanations: that the reality of living always brought tragedy, that she preferred the dream which never culminated in tragedy. The Voice was forced to admit he preferred the dream. The explanations enchanted and deluded him, and saved her from saying: “I don’t want you near me because I don’t love you.”

His concern with the accuracy of the psychological was so tremendous that once, after the discovery that she had lied, he said: “Let me solve this thing alone. Don’t bother about details of any kind. What do our lives matter when the whole manmade world is at stake.”

The only joy she experienced was that of being completely understood, justified, absolved in all but her relationship to him. He always asked her what she had been doing. No matter what she told him, even about the trivial purchase of a bracelet, the Voice pounced upon it with excitement and raised the incident to a complete, dazzling symbolical act, a part of a legend. The little incident was all he needed to compose and complete this legend. The bracelet had a meaning—every thing had a meaning. Every act revealed more and more clearly this divine pattern by which she lived and of which the Voice alone knew the entire design. Now he could see. He repeated over and over again: You see? You see? Lilith had the feeling that she had been doing extraordinary things. When she stepped into a shop and bought a bracelet it was not, as she thought, because of the love of its color, or shape, or because of her love of adornment. She was carrying in herself at that moment the entire drama of woman’s slavery and dependence. In this obscure little theatre of her unconscious the denouement brought about by the purchase of the bracelet was a drama which had everlasting repercussions on her daily life. It signified the desire to be bound to some one, it expressed a yielding of some kind. She had voluntarily bound and enslaved herself. You see? You see? Not only was the bracelet or the lovely moment spent before the shop window magnified and brought into violent relief—as an act full of implications, of repercussions—but all she had done during the week seemed to open like a giant hot-house camelia whose growth had been forced by a travail of creation from the moment she first drew breath.

While the Voice tracked down each minor incident of her life to expose the relation between them, the fatality and importance of the link between them, the heavy destined power of each one, she felt like an actress who had never known how moving she had been, she felt like a creator who had prepared in some dim laboratory of her soul a life like a legend, and only to-day she was reading the legend itself out of an enormous book.

This was part of the legend, the little man brusquely deciphering each incident, marvelling always at the miracle which had never seemed a miracle before, her walkin heng and buying a bracelet, as miraculous to the Voice as liquid turning to gold in an alchemist’s bottle. She had not only covered the earth with a multitude of little spontaneous acts but these acts accomplished so slidingly, so swiftly, could all be illumined with spiritual significance, divine intentions, loved for their human quality or feared for their monstrous uniqueness. He worshipped them for the very act of their flowering.

He revolted now and then against her uncapturableness but she subtilized the situation. She did not want reality. She feared reality. She was really a flame. One could not possess a flame. She annulled the boundaries, confused the issues, effaced the black and whiteness. All the definite decisions, outlines, realities, she melted into a dream-like substance. She enchanted him with a sea of talk, hypnotized him with inventions and creations, so that he would cease his clutching, become cosmic again. She talked him out of the reality of her presence.

What he did not know was that at the same time she was losing her faith in all interpretations, since she saw how they could be manipulated to conceal the truth. She began to feel the illusory quality of all man’s interpretations, and to believe only in her feelings. Every day she found in mythology a new pretext for eluding his desire for her. First she needed time. She must become entirely herself and without need of him. She was waiting for the moment when she would have no more need of him as a doctor. She was waiting for the man and the doctor to become entirely separate, and never to be again confused in her. This he accepted.

But when he was not being the doctor, she discovered he was not a man but a child. He wept like a child, he raged, he was filled with fears, he was possessive, he invaded her room without delicacy, he complained and lamented about himself, his own life. He was desperately hungry and awkward in life, clutching rather than enjoying. The human being hidden in the healer was stunted, youthful, hysterical. As soon as he ceased to be a teacher and a guide, he lost all his strength and deftness. He was disoriented, chaotic, blind. As soon as he stepped out of his role he collapsed. Lilith found herself confronting a child, a child lamenting, regretting, impatient, fretful, lonely. He wrote inchoate love notes with ink blots, he leaped to meet her in the street, perspiring, nervous. He was jealous of the man who washed her hair. The child that she awakened in him was like the child in all those who had come to him for care, unsatisfied, lamenting, tearful, sickly.

* * *


He wanted to go to the sea shore with her. Lilith and the Voice then, walking along the boardwalk. Crowds. Discord between sea and voices, between wind and flags, between shop windows and sand. Grating. Or was it Lilith grating at the touch of the Voice’s hands, like sticks of wood falling on her.

The crowd walking, chewing, breathing, grunting. The wind slicing open dyed hair, teasing false feathers. The salt so bitter on this skirt of the sea’s dance trodden by bold houses with mangy-faced facades.

Open-jawed shops with loud speakers selling furniture and horoscopes. The Voice slipping coin after coin in the slot machine for music. “Do you want more music? Do you want more music?&qot Coins in the slot machine for music.

Long boardwalk of monsters with walrus faces, the rictus of the ray fish, the eyes of telescope fishes, and woodpecker’s voices. Sand in everything, lips which seemed peeled of their skin. The rust, the rust in reality slowing down her rhythm to a sob.

The sea sullen, withdrawn.

Men dragging the enormous net thrown from the end of the pier for deep sea fishing. The net was empty. The fish were being carried away. On the ground lay the jellied star fish unwanted, unsaleable. The sailors jerked out their knives and threw them into the fishes, pinning them to the boardwalk. Laughter. Another knife. No blood stains, but stains of sea ebbing from the wounds. Entrails of gelatine breaking. Coiling and recoilings of gelatinous pain. The sailors laughing.

The sea inside Lilith churning with revolt. The sea in her ebbing heavily back and forth away from human touch.

He moves wooden arms around her: they fall crossed in front of her, clasping nothing. The scarecrow is agitated. Do you want to dance? Do you want waffles? What do you want?

The sea inside of her recoiling angrily against all touch. Recoiling from the sand in his voice. He is chaining words together to establish a current. Words chained together. The chaplet of meaning might produce the semblance of a symphony. He was chaining together with meaning what need never have been separated and should have been continuous like a symphony in the blood.

“Everything was unreal before you came, Lilith. No woman loved me for myself. I created and invented them. I did not have to create you.”

All that he said vanished faster than music and was without echo in her.

Only the flow of words, dying quickly because underneath her is this sea, her nature which will not flow into him; underneath was her lie and his blindness to the lie.

The Voice talked to create the semblance of a symphony, seeking to conjure up life by interpretation. This rhythm was illusion; it was only the rhythm of thought. He could not touch her. The sea was angry. People were walking without rhythm, caressing without rhythm. People were talking and weeping and dancing without rhythm. The miracle did not take place. It did not happen in the body. The miracle did not happen, the simple miracle of love.

According to the pattern written with indelible philosophical ink, this is the moment when life should glow. But the sea in her heaves with discontent and has no answer, no yielding either.

She no longer heard the music from the boardwalk, the angry snoring of the sea. Before her stood a tall man in armour. She was kneeling before him. She was caressing the polished armour, seeking the sex with her mouth. The man in the armour did not move. She struck at it with a hammer. As the pieces of armour fell off, the body fell apart. All the pieces lay on the floor—the heart, the hands, the head, the feet, but no sex. The woman was still seeking it with her mouth. Another man was walking towards her. There were noeyes in his face. He turned around. The eyes were placed in the back of his head. He saw her. He walked away from her with arms outstretched. She followed him. He saw her but he walked away faster and faster. Finally he sat down and sobbed. Enormous tears came out of his eyes, but they were like soap bubbles, they rose in the air. He sat there weeping from the back of his head.

A kitten was biting her toes. She sat down and covered her feet with her dress. A man took the kitten and opened its paws with a knife, as if they were oysters. A man who was pursued came into her room through an attic window over her head and threatened to choke her. Hearing a noise he tried to hide. The door opened and four men were there to catch him. But Lilith loved the man and felt pity for him.

She was sitting in front of the Voice, their knees were touching. He was saying that she was not ill, she did not need any more care, but she must wear this dress of which he showed her a picture. It was a flowing white dress. Lilith said: “But it’s a wedding dress!” He said: “You were never really married.” She saw that they had been living together in a completely padded apartment, sound-proof. Satin-lined. But she was not a woman. She was a lamp-light, five-pointed, standing in the fog. She felt the black-rusted iron casing around her, and the glass chapel head. Inside the glass chapel there was a tongue of light, and on her shoulder was a sparrow. She was awake and twinkling without eyelids. She felt yellow, wet, and multiplied hundreds of times along the street; she felt dust in her eyes which she could not shake off because of the iron frame.

In the Castle there were twelve guest rooms. The rooms were richly furnished but with beds only. Each room had a different kind of bed. In the first one there was a luxurious four-postered bed with a silken canopy. In the second twin beds of rose-wood. In the third an immense crib of carved wood. In the fourth a small Russian crib lined with horse fur. In the fifth an Empire style bed with gold ornaments. A copper bed, and a bed of white fur. On the white fur bed she saw a beautiful fig split open with the red pulp looking like flesh. She touched it and it felt like the inside of a woman. A crime was committed in one of the rooms. Everyone was looking for the body. She knew where it was, but she would not tell. Some one spotted a line of blood along the wall. There was a violently bad odor, the smell of a cadaver.

Looking out of the window she saw a lake. There was a woman in an automobile riding over it, trying to land. But she drove into the wing of the wharf and could not free herself. Lilith reached out with her hand, took up the automobile, and laid it on the narrow sidewalk before the hotel. The woman was old and haggard. Lilith said to her: “Do you want some coffee?” She began to make coffee and the coffee pot grew immense—it boiled and sputtered and danced beyond her control. It was a huge factory grinding and smoking and boiling. The woman before Lilith is monstrous, paralyzed in a posture of agony. Hands contorted as if cut off at the wrist. Her legs are covered with blood-suckers. Everybody turns away from her, fainting with horror. Lilith did not want to hurt her feelings: she continued to look at her as if she were beautiful. The monster sprawled on the floor and stretched her swollen legs, saying: “I have six toes on each foot.” As Lilith looked at her she was aware that the monster’s eyes were piercing and divinatory. Lilith looked at her more fixedly, disregarding her ugliness. Then slowly the monster’s body straightened, her hands grasped Lilith softly, and she looked almost beautifulered wi<…>

It was not a woman, but the Voice. And the Voice was knocking at her door. He stood there with his pulpy hat in his hand, entangled in his valises.

Neither her powers of illusion, nor her dreams, nor even the night itself had worked the miracle. He remained nothing but the Voice with a death-like breath.




Copyright


Derived from The Winter of Artifice: a facsimile of the original 1939 Paris edition

(c) 2007 Sky Blue Press


notes



NOTES





1


The titles listed in this note — all published after Nin’s death — are arranged chronologically within categories. I cite only first editions. The volumes of Nin’s diary are Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914-1920, translated by Jean L. Sherman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978); The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1966-1974, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980); The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Two, 1920-1923 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982); The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Three, 1923-1927 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983); The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Four, 1927-1931 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985); Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986); Incest: From a Journal of Love, the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992); Fire: From a Journal of Love, the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995); and Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love, the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1937-1939 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996). The volumes of letters are A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987); Letters to a Friend in Australia (Melbourne: Nosukumo, 1992); and Arrows of Longing: The Correspondence between Anaïs Nin and Felix Pollak, 1952-1976, edited by Gregory H. Mason (Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1998). The volumes of erotica are Delta of Venus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977) and Little Birds (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979). The volumes with contents drawn from one or both of these books are The Illustrated Delta of Venus (London: W. H. Allen, 1980), with photographs by Bob Carlos Clarke; A Model and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1995); Stories of Love (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia: Penguin, 1996); Fragments from the Delta of Venus (New York: powerHouse Books, 2004), with illustrations by Judy Chicago; and Artists and Models (London: Penguin, 2005). The collection of stories is Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories (Weston, CT: Magic Circle Press, 1977). The volume of erotica attributed to Nin and others is White Stains (London: Delectus Books, 1995).

The collections of Nin’s entirely or mostly previously published works are Portrait in Three Dimensions (N.p.: Concentric Circle Press, 1979); The White Blackbird and Other Writings (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1985); Conversations with Anaïs Nin, edited by Wendy M. DuBow (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994); and The Mystic of Sex and Other Writings, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1995). The novella published separately is Stella (London: Phoenix, 1996).

The vast majority — almost all — of titles that were in print at the time of Nin’s death remains in print in late 2006: diaries, fiction, and criticism.

Pollak thought that Nin should republish The Winter of Artifice. In a 1960 letter to her, he writes, “I wonder whether you should not consider republishing now the original version of Winter — if someone like Grove Press would bring it out. It may make the stir it ought to make and bring financial rewards besides. Have you ever thought of it?” (Nin and Pollak 1998, 152). Nin responds only by saying, “Grove Press would never publish me” (154).




2


Excerpts from “Djuna” appear as “Hans and Johanna” in Nin 1989. They are from The Winter of Artifice, 9-13, 14-16, 16-18, 18-20, 24-26, 26-27, 34-35, 35-36, 39, 40, 49, 66, 67, 69-70, 74-76, 76-79, 82-83, 83-85, 85-89. In titling the excerpts “Hans and Johanna,” Gunther Stuhlmann, the editor of Anaïs: An International Journal, shifts focus from the narrator, as Nin has it with the title “Djuna,” to the objects of Djuna’s desire. The novella seems more about Djuna than Hans and Johanna.

The other editions of Winter of Artifice (with no definite article in the title and with contents different from those of The Winter of Artifice) are N.p.: n.p., 1942 (the first publication of Nin’s own press, which became the Gemor Press); in Under a Glass Bell (London: Editions Poetry London, 1947); in Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories (New York: Dutton, 1948); Denver: Alan Swallow, 1961; London: Peter Owen, 1974 (with House of Incest) and 1991 (without House of Incest); and Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1992. Since 1961 in the United States, Winter of Artifice has been continuously in print, first with Alan Swallow in Denver, next with Swallow Press in Chicago, and then with Swallow Press/Ohio University Press in Athens. The novella published as “Lilith” in 1939 appears without title in the edition of 1942, as “Winter of Artifice” in that of 1947, as “Djuna” (entirely different from the “Djuna” in the 1939 edition) in that of 1948, and as “Winter of Artifice” in every later edition.




3


For a history of Nin’s press, see Jason 1984. Nin writes about the press in Nin 1973.




4


I cannot determine the number of copies printed of The Winter of Artifice. Almost certainly, there were not more than 1,000. In the 1930s, the Obelisk Press published several books by Henry Miller. Lawrence J. Shifreen and Roger Jackson, Miller’s bibliographers, note that it published 1,000 copies of Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), Max and the White Phagocytes (1938), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939); 200 copies of Scenario (1937); and 150 copies of Aller Retour New York (1935) (Shifreen and Jackson 1993, 5, 55, 78, 81, 72, 51.)

In a guide to writings about Nin, Rose Marie Cutting lists two reviews of The Winter of Artifice, one by Emily Hahn published in Shanghai and another by Alfred Perles published in London (Cutting n.d., 2-3).

Maurice Girodias, son and successor of Jack Kahane, owner of the Obelisk Press, relates the understanding between publisher and authors about the payment of printing costs for the three books that Obelisk published in the Villa Seurat series, a series named after Miller’s Paris residence, 18 Villa Seurat. According to Girodias, his father would pay the costs for the first volume, Miller’s Max and the White Phagocytes ; Nin, for Durrell’s The Black Book ; Durrell, for Nin’s The Winter of Artifice. Girodias also records that, at Durrell’s suggestion, Nin and Durrell would pay for the printing of each other’s book rather than their own in order to avoid the sense of defeat that vanity publication might have created (Girodias 1980, 239). However, Gunther Stuhl-mann and Jay Martin claim that Nancy Durrell, wife of Lawrence, paid the printing costs for all three books. Martin also notes that the Villa Seurat series ceased publication (with The Winter of Artifice) when she could no longer support it (Nin 1996, 379; Martin 1978, 330). Commenting about underwriting Nin’s “Chaotica” (a working title for The Winter of Artifice) in a letter to Lawrence Durrell (5 November 1938), Henry Miller writes, “Let us know, will you, if the money is still available for this book? Hope you are not bankrupt yet” (Durrell and Miller 1988, 107). Lawrence Durrell’s biographer observes that “the PS150 it cost to print the three titles came from Nancy’s capital” (MacNiven 1998, 183). In a diary entry dated 1 November 1937, Nin states that “Larry is putting up the money [to Kahane] for three books” (Nin 1996, 162). In an entry dated 13 December 1938, she notes that “Durrell is bringing [The Winter of Artifice] out in February [1939],” implying that Durrell published this book (Nin 1996, 280). In an entry dated January 1943, Nin records that “Lawrence Durrell backed the publication of Winter of Artifice ” (Nin 1969, 259). Nin dedicates The Winter of Artifice to the Durrells: “To/NANCY and LARRY/with love.” James Armstrong addresses the date of Kahane’s death in Armstrong and Miers 2003, 31, 41 n91. A statement in The Winter of Artifice indicates that it was published in June 1939; Nin reports receiving her copies in mid July (Nin 1996, 345).

The context of Nin’s comment about censorship indicates that she means United States censorship. Conceivably, she means French censorship. I cannot confirm that The Winter of Artifice was censored or banned in either country. James Armstrong does not include Nin’s book among the Obelisk Press publications “banned in Britain and the United States” (Armstrong and Miers 2003, 24). Jay Martin details Henry Miller’s successful effort to smuggle into the United States copies of his banned books, “one at a time.” Drawing on a letter from Miller to Emil Schnellock, Martin notes that Nin “held the unofficial book-smuggling record by managing to bring in fifty copies on one trip” (Martin 1978, 330). If she smuggled in so many copies of Miller’s books, she probably would have attempted to smuggle in copies of a banned book of her own ( The Winter of Artifice) if she had access to them.

On 4 October 2006, abebooks.com listed for sale three copies of The Winter of Artifice. The prices, in United States dollars: $600, $962, and $1,000.




5


Before Johanna’s arrival, scenes shift between the residences of Hans and Djuna; yet, Djuna says that “I had been living with” him (Nin 1939, 81). Johanna’s hotel is mentioned on 71.




6


In a diary entry dated 8 February 1939, Nin mentions reading proofs of The Winter of Artifice with Henry Miller (Nin 1996, 309). I cannot determine when Nin became aware that Miller’s influence on her composition of this book was too great, although in a diary entry dated November 1941 she notes that she is “revising Winter of Artifice ” (Nin 1969, 162). What Nin means by “just beginning to write” is unclear. The Winter of Artifice was her third book; in 1937 and 1938 — the two years before the publication of this collection of novellas — ten of her short pieces appeared in little magazines.




7


Manuscripts and typescripts of Nin’s fiction — including those for much of The Winter of Artifice — are Northwestern University, which bought them at the suggestion of Felix Pollak. See Pollak 1952. For an inventory, see Van der Elst 1978 and Zee 1972.




8


In the draft, the character speaking with Rab is Mandra, who is Djuna in the published version.




9


For an example of Miller’s sensitive, positive analysis of Nin’s writing, see Miller 1988. Responding in the 1960s to the question “Did you [and Miller] influence each other as writers?,” Nin states, “No, except in the sense that we encouraged each other…. But above all it was an understanding of what the other was doing” (Vaid 1987, 52-53).




10


Characters based on the Millers appear in fiction Nin published subsequent to The Winter of Artifice. In most of her novels, she uses the characters Jay and Sabina, who were inspired, respectively, by Henry Miller and June Miller. A character (first named Alraune, then Sabina) based on June Miller appears in The House of Incest (editions after the first omit the definite article).




11


Deirdre Bair explains why Nin’s original diaries do not exist. Five years after engaging Virginia Admiral and Robert Duncan to rewrite her diary, in the mid 1940s Nin engaged Lila Rosenblum to help, mostly to correct her grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Anaïs wrote new versions of old events on lined pads, which Lila corrected. Then Anaïs recopied the corrected pages into booklets, some of which she had Lila type. This generally led to further rewriting and correcting, and when she was finally satisfied with the typed copies, she destroyed the originals. It was a process that went on and on, sometimes “hundreds of times.” She inserted all these carefully typed pages into loose-leaf folders, and when she gave them to someone to read, always insisted they were reading her original diaries. Anaïs Nin carried on this process of self-expurgation all her life. (Bair 1995, 324-25)

In The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1934 (apparently superseded by the presumably unexpurgated Henry and June), the paragraph about the sandal shop, dated 30 December 1931, reads as follows:






We walked to the sandal shop. In the shop the ugly woman who waited on us hated us and our obvious happiness. I held June’s hand firmly. I commanded: “Bring this. Bring that.” I was firm, willful with the woman. When she mentioned the width of June’s feet I scolded her. June could not understand the French-woman, but she sensed that she was disagreeable. (Nin 1966, 32)







12


As early as 1932 Nin considered her diary a source for fiction: “Everything goes into it that I may use for novels” (Nin 1966, 58).




13


Nin writes in early 1939 that she intends to have “a special version made of Winter of Artifice omitting the Henry-June novel [“Djuna“], all in part one, for Hugo and Gonzalo” (Nin 1996, 305). This she did in 1942 with Winter of Artifice. She might have omitted “Djuna” because, as Noel Riley Fitch asserts, “it reveals more than she wishes to reveal about the June-Hery-Anaïs triangle” (Fitch 1993, 252). Engravings by Nin’s husband Hugh Guiler (as Ian Hugo) appear in the 1942 edition, a volume that Nin’s lover Gonzalo More helped print.