Read Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) for Free Online Page A

June came, all in black velvet, black cape and plumed hat, paler and more incandescent than ever, and carrying Count Bruga, as I had asked her to do. The wonder of her face and smile, her smileless eyes...
    I took her to a Russian tearoom. The Russians sang as we felt. June wondered if they were really burning, as it seemed from their voices and intense playing. Probably they were not burning as June and I were.
    Champagne and caviar with June. It is the only time one knows what champagne is and what caviar is. They are June, Russian voices and June.
    Ugly, unimaginative, dead people surround us. We are blind to them. I look at June, in black velvet. June rushing towards death. Henry cannot rush on with her because he fights for life. But June and I together do not hold back. I follow her. And it is an acute joy to go along, giving in to the dissolution of the imagination, to her knowledge of strange experiences, to our games with Count Bruga, who bows to the world with the weeping willowness of his purple hair.
    It is all over. In the street, June says regretfully, "I had wanted to hold you and caress you." I put her in a taxi. She sits there about to leave me and I stand by in torment. "I want to kiss you," I say. "I want to kiss you," says June, and she offers her mouth, which I kiss for a long time.
     
    When she left, I just wanted to sleep for many days, but I still had something to face, my relationship with Henry. We asked him to come to Louveciennes. I wanted to offer him peace and a soothing house, but of course I knew we would talk about June.
    We walked off our restlessness, and we talked. There is in both of us an obsession to grasp June. He has no jealousy of me, because he said I brought out wonderful things in June, that it was the first time June had ever attached herself to a woman of value. He seemed to expect I would have power over her life.
    When he saw that I understood June and was ready to be truthful with him, we talked freely. Yet once I paused, hesitant, wondering at my faithlessness to June. Then Henry observed that although truth, in June's case, had to be disregarded, it could be the only basis of any exchange between us.
    We both felt the need of allying our two minds, our two different logics, in understanding the problem of June. Henry loves her and always her. He also wants to possess June the character, the powerful, fictionlike personage. In his love for her he has had to endure so many torments that the lover has taken refuge in the writer. He has written a ferocious and resplendent book about June and Jean.
    He was questioning the lesbianism. When he heard me say certain things he had heard June say, he was startled, because he believes me. I said, "After all, if there is an explanation of the mystery it is this: The love between women is a refuge and an escape into harmony. In the love between man and woman there is resistance and conflict. Two women do not judge each other, brutalize each other, or find anything to ridicule. They surrender to sentimentality, mutual understanding, romanticism. Such love is death, I'll admit."
    Last night I sat up until one o'clock reading Henry's novel,
Moloch
, while he read mine. His was overwhelming, the work of a giant. I was at a loss to tell him how it affected me. And this giant sat there quietly and read my slight book with such comprehension, such enthusiasm, talking about the deftness of it, the subtlety, the voluptuousness, shouting at certain passages, criticizing, too. What a force he is!
    I gave him the one thing June cannot give him: honesty. I am so ready to admit what a supremely developed ego would not admit: that June is a terrifying and inspiring character who makes every other woman insipid, that I would live her life except for my compassion and my conscience, that she may destroy Henry the man, but Henry the writer is more enriched by ordeals than by peace. I, on the other hand, cannot destroy Hugo, because he has nothing else. But