Anaïs and Henry
One day in December of 1931, Anaïs Nin and her husband, Hugo Guiler, hosted a lunch for lawyer Richard Osborn, whom Nin had to consult regarding a literary contract on her book on D. H. Lawrence and who brought along Henry Miller. This was years before the publication of Tropic of Cancer, and Miller was poor, only coming along for a free meal at a fashionable home in Louveciennes, just outside of Paris.
What began as a casual lunch would turn into one of the most famous literary love affairs, with every graphic and elicit detail documented in Nin’s erotic diaries. Physically, they were a mismatched pair. She was 28 then, tall, slender, and most exotic, the result of her mixed Cuban, Catalan, and French background. Miller was 39, short, balding, myopic and awkward. His Brooklyn accent and speech were full of slang and sexual expletives. But she loved it, likening it to Lawrence’s directness and forcefulness in talking about modern sexuality. Their initial hours-long conversation was followed by subsequent invitations to the Guiler home, lengthy literary discussions in cafes around Paris, exchanging of manuscripts, and passionate confessional letters to each other.
When Nin’s husband expressed his fears and jealousy, she replied, “I am in love with Henry’s mind only.” After reading his manuscripts, she taught him a genius, loved his raw and obscene way of writing, and even admired his willingness to endure poverty for his art.
Anaïs and Hugo
At this point, Anaïs and Hugo have been married for eight years. At the beginning of their marriage, the sex was frustrating and unsatisfying for Anaïs, who had too many inhibitions from her Catholic upbringing. Hugo was equally inexperienced but loved her innocence and conservations nonetheless. When they moved from New York to Paris two years later, Anaïs was appalled at the openly sexual Bohemian lifestyle prevalent in the city. Hugo, on the other hand, was piqued. He began to scour bookstalls for erotica, pornography and Indian sex manuals, encouraging her to experiment. She only became more confused, even repulsed. In her diary, she wrote, “Sex without love, I hate.”
Anaïs and June
Weeks after Anaïs and Henry met, his wife came to join him in Paris. Anaïs already knew about June and wondered about the wife who would let her genius husband roam free. She was even more intrigued by June’s escapades as told by Henry, including her many lesbian affairs and the times she sustained their living by setting up their Greenwich Village apartment as a brothel while he became her manager. Anaïs fantasized about her own husband doing the same, acting as a voyeur while she takes on other men, then replaying the scenes on their marital bed afterward.
When June arrived at the Guiler household on December 29, 1931, Anaïs found her irresistibly beautiful. As Hugo and Henry conversed over after-dinner cigars and brandy, the two women retired to the bedroom. While Anaïs constantly fantasized about other women, she and June never went farther than fondling. The fact of the matter was, at this time, she had no idea what lesbians actually did to each other.
The two women continued an intense and flirtatious exchange. After June went back to New York, the jilted Anaïs began a sexual relation with Henry, who suggested she try what they did when she next makes love to her husband.
Feeling guilty with Hugo, she used the Millers’ overtly sexual lifestyle, open marriage and numerous conquests to convince him to expand their own extramarital sexual activities. She took him to a brothel and, after discovering they couldn’t pick a heterosexual couple to be with, chose two women to perform “exhibitions” for them instead. Afterward, she began to seduce other women, including the wives of acquaintances, distant female cousins, even her sister-in-law. The account of this time of her sexual awakening would be taken from her diaries and published posthumously in 1986 as Henry and June.
Anaïs and therapy
When her cousin, worried about her burgeoning sexual promiscuity, urged her to seek help, she made weekly appointments with the psychoanalyst and co-founder of the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris, René Allendy. The sessions began conventionally enough, with her relating her childhood, marriage and diaries to him. They discussed his theories on dreams and the “collective unconscious.” He addressed her fears of abandonment and inferiority. But soon, she began to talk about her many affairs in lurid details to arouse him. Her game of seduction led to hotel trysts and often violent sex. Now, she needed to find another therapist.
One of Sigmund Freud’s closest disciples, Otto Rank, was both writer and psychologist. His book, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, explores the relationship between artists and society. He stated that the artist’s urge to create usually sets him apart from a society that often shuns him when people are unable to understand the meaning or intention of his work. As a female erotic writer in the 1930s, Nin was the perfect example, and his writings had a profound effect on her. Unlike with Allendy, Rank and Nin engaged in a sexual relationship from the start, their sessions always a mix of bed and couch therapy.
Soon, he sailed her to New York to be with him and to work for him, arranging for her to see patients despite the fact that she made no progress from her own treatments from her double therapist lover. She split her nights between him and Henry, both men insanely jealous of each other. During the day, she saw patients and despite the chaos of her own life, was able to help some of them. Her approach was positive and self-affirming, which today might fall under the category of self-help, as she encouraged patients to be courageous in their quest for self-understanding. Other times, however, she couldn’t help but play seductress once more and the session would turn into another sexual encounter. Of course, numerous men set appointments in the exact hopes of this.
Anaïs and Joaquín
When Anaïs was nine, her father left the family, later marrying a younger, wealthy music student. It’s no surprise that losing a father and the ensuing feelings of abandonment were at least partly the catalysts to her promiscuity and lifelong search for a father figure. When she was 11, her mother, Rosa, bought her a diary. And this was the beginning of a lifetime of writing. Initially, she wrote letters unsent to her missing father, fashioning life and memories she wanted to share with him, and her longing for him cannot be understated.
Twenty years later in Paris, father and daughter would meet again. He invited her to visit him in Saint Raphael. It was 1933, around the beginning of Nin’s sexual explorations, and Joaquín, ever the Don Juan, regaled her with stories of his own exploits, going as far back as to her own mother. As they continued to exchange accounts of debauchery, boundaries began to blur. One day, as he was bedridden with back pain, he asked her to sit on the bed with him and chat. By the end of the night, they were lovers. The following two weeks of sexual frenzy would be described, again in graphic and explicit details, in her diaries and later published in a book aptly titled Incest.
A literate passion
Throughout all this, Anaïs kept up her affair with Henry Miller, albeit in between her husband and countless other lovers. It was she, using the allowance she received from Hugo and money she borrowed from Otto Rank, who financed the publication of Tropic of Cancer. This was 1934, and the book pushed the limits on laws of pornography and publication, culminating in a 1964 Supreme Court ruling that upheld it an example of freedom of speech. Today, the book is considered a seminal work of autobiography and one of the best books of the 20th century. But it was Nin who believed in him from the beginning. And while much of her work would not garner any attention until decades later, he was the one who correctly predicted that if ever published, her diary would receive worldwide recognition. In a 1933 essay, he wrote of her diary writing –
“It is a great pageant of the times by one who had completely effaced herself in the effort to arrive at a true understanding of life. It is in this sense that the human document rivals the work of art, or in times such as ours, replaces the work of art.”
And he was right. Nin’s diaries, some 35,000 pages of her life, both erotic and poetic, sensual and emotional, have been groundbreaking in the canon of feminist culture and literature. The collection of diaries is also one of the few expansive accounts that offer unprecedented insights into the female psychology, the conflicting sides of dreams and desires, neuroses and anxieties, fears and abstractions.
While the sexual aspect of their affair would end in 1942, they remained lifelong literary soulmates. Their letters to each other span over 20 years. They were prolific letter writers. In one year alone, Miller would write her over 900 pages. Their correspondence included deep discussions on Lawrence, Proust, Dostoevsky, Joyce and other writers, detailed criticism and edits of each other works, ruminations on art and life. And evident in the exchange is the sheer and mutual admiration of intellectual equals, two towering minds of contemporary literature, avant-garde writers whose love of writing eclipsed all other love. This she found in him something none of her other lovers could give her.
