By Jamie
The years I spent in graduate school were a sort of tug-o-war. On one end of the rope, I wanted to keep reading the writers, the pioneers of poetry and fiction, that had inspired me to that point. Of course, one of the first epiphanies to shatter my naïveté was that grad school is not about studying the writers you love; it’s about studying what other people say about those writers. Still, for a while I found ways to stay engaged on my own terms. On the other end of the rope, my free-range reading introduced me to numerous books and authors who burrowed into my brain and remain there today. These squatters occupied the places inside me where postmodern literary theory was supposed to take up residence. Ultimately, the power of my free-range discoveries proved irresistible, and I abandoned my naïve, perhaps misguided academic pursuits with little regret.
One of the books I rescued during one of my frequent secondhand-book forays was Henry & June, that cherry-picked sampling of Anais Nin’s diaries that focuses on her affairs with the controversial writer Henry Miller and his wife, June. Eventually the book served as source material for a movie by the same name, which remains better known for receiving the industry’s first NC-17 rating than for its box-office or critical success. When I bought the book, all I knew about Miller was that his work was attached in some way to overturning censorship laws in this country. I knew even less about Nin or her work. But titillated by the dust-jacket blurbage, I made the purchase. I don’t remember when I started reading it – probably not right away – but once I started, I no longer could remember what life looked like before I did. Anais Nin had superb writing chops and acute insights, and she applied these tools to the subject of her own sexual awakening. She used the phrase “sacred completeness” to describe the blending of mind, imagination, and blood within her.
I still have my original copy of Henry & June. Thumbing through it, I can see that I marked the pages more carefully than any text I used in graduate school. The book has no table of contents, so I made my own notes listing page numbers and key words. This book is like a time machine, taking me back to the roots of my own sexual awakening. Memories flutter back to the surface. So do feelings. I remember feeling exhilarated to discover this description of awakening, so historical and yet so timeless and fresh and honest and real. I now realize I also felt deeply frightened—the book served to peel away the vanilla mainstream assumptions by which I had already begun to live my adult life. To embrace this new vision would be to embrace chaos, radical change, and the loss of certain kinds of stability. But I had no choice, and the chaos came, and my adult life became an ongoing process of movement from one worldview to the other, and in some ways this blog is the ultimate result, a balance between chaos and courage.
Sophie jokes that I am making her read this book. She has the freedom to read and respond to whatever she wishes, of course. But I think, and I think she agrees, that Henry & June offers some parallels to our own efforts, sexual and creative, that are worth exploring. She may not feel Nin’s work in the same way that I did. But I think she comes to it and to me ready to take up the mantle, to honor the example, of these two fearless unblinking word warriors. And I think maybe I have grown into my ability to do the same. It’s nice to have friends, to have people who get us, even if they died long ago and the experiences we share happened almost a century apart.
The poetic element is so strong in Nin’s writing that at one point it seemed like the most natural thing to make one of her passages into a poem. I don’t know whether this is an act of praise or presumption. Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write superior prose by copying the good prose around him, so maybe that is what I was up to back in the day. Certainly Nin is a writer worth emulating, and the life she lived is a model for honesty and self-awareness. She may be the original ethical slut. It is safe to say that whatever skills and attitudes of mine are on display in this blog, often praised by Sophie to my embarrassment, can trace their growth (if not their origins) to this book.
So with that in mind, the following is a passage describing “date night” of a sort between Nin and her husband. Nin is struggling to reconcile her married love with the passion she feels toward Henry Miller and, to some extent, his wife June. For her the answer was to get her husband “caught up” to her in terms of desire and exploration. Along the way she discovers new avenues for her own growth. This passage describes one event along that road.
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32 RUE BLONDEL
Writers make love to whatever they need.
—Anais Nin
One evening I suggest to Hugo
that we go to an exhibition together,
just to see. “Do you want to?” I say,
although in my mind I am ready to live,
not to see. He is curious, elated.
We call up Henry to ask for information.
The taxi drops us in a narrow little street.
We had forgotten the number.
But I see “32” in red over one of the doorways.
I push a swinging door. Noise.
Blinding lights. Women surrounding us,
calling us, trying to attract our attention.
The patronne leads us to a table.
I feel that we have stood on a diving board
and have plunged. And now we are
in a play. We are different.
Still the women are shouting and signaling.
We must choose. Hugo smiles, bewildered.
I glance over them. I choose a very vivid,
fat, coarse Spanish-looking woman,
and then I turn to the end of the line
and call a woman who had made
no effort to attract my attention—
small, feminine, almost timid.
Now they sit before us. We talk
oh, so politely. We discuss each other’s nails.
I ask Hugo if I have chosen well.
He says I could not have done better.
We watch the women dancing. I see
only in spots, intensely. Certain places
are utter blanks to me. I see
big hips, buttocks, and sagging breasts,
so many bodies, all at once.
We had expected there would be a man
for the exhibition. “No,” says the patronne,
“but the two girls will amuse you.
You will see everything.” The women smile.
They assume it is my evening because
I have asked to see lesbian poses.
Everything is strange to me and familiar to them.
I feel at ease only because they are people
who need things, whom one can do things for.
I give away all my cigarettes.
I wish I had a hundred packets.
I wish I had a lot of money.
We are going upstairs. I enjoy
watching the women’s naked walk.
The room is softly lighted
and the bed low and ample.
The women are cheerful
and they wash themselves.
How the taste for things must wear down
with so much automatism.
We watch the big woman tie a penis
on herself, a rosy thing, a caricature.
And they pose nonchalantly, professionally.
Arabian, Spanish, Parisienne,
love when one does not have the price of a hotel room,
love in a taxi,
love when one of the partners is sleepy…
Hugo and I look on,
laughing a little at their sallies.
We learn nothing new.
It is all unreal
until I ask for the lesbian poses.
The little woman loves it, loves it
better than the man’s approach.
The big woman reveals to me
a secret place in the woman’s body,
a source of a new joy, which I had sensed
but never definitely—that small core
at the opening of the woman’s lips,
just what the man passes by.
There, the big woman works
with the flicking of her tongue.
The little woman closes her eyes,
moans, and trembles in ecstasy.
Hugo and I lean over them,
taken by that moment of loveliness
in the little woman, who offers to our eyes
her conquered, quivering body.
Hugo is in turmoil. I say,
“Do you want the woman? Take her.
I swear to you I don’t mind, darling.”
“I could come with anybody
just now,” he answers.
The little woman is lying still. Then
they are up and joking and the moment passes.
Do I want … ? They unfasten my jacket.
I say no, I don’t want anything.
I couldn’t have touched them.
Only a minute of beauty—
the small woman’s heaving,
her hands caressing the other woman’s head.
That moment alone stirred my blood with another desire.
If we had been a little madder…
But the room seemed dirty to us.
We walked out.
Dizzy. Joyous. Elated.
One fear was over. Hugo was liberated.
We had understood each other’s feelings.
A mutual generosity. I had been able
to give Hugo a portion of the joy that filled me.
And when we returned home, he adored my body
because it was lovelier than what he had seen
and we sank into sensuality together
with a new realization.
We are killing phantoms.
amaranthine border 