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.”