NIN?
Anaïs Nin is commonly considered an American writer despite the fact that her birthplace was France.5 Born in Neuilly, near Paris, on 21 February 1903, she was the first of the three children of Joaquín Nin y Castellanos and Rosa Culmell y Vaurigaud. She was followed by two brothers: Thorvald and Joaquín. For the first eleven years of Anaïs’s life, the family moved around in Europe—France, Germany, Belgium, Spain—as her father was determined to make a success of his career as a pianist. Joaquin senior abandoned the family in 1913, and a year later, Anaïs’s mother took her three children to the United States. Aboard the ship to New York, Anaïs Nin started her lifelong pursuit—her diary. At first her intention was to record everything for her father, but her diary quickly became her confidante and daily habit. The first volumes of her diary were written in French; she switched to English in 1920.
Nin dropped out of school early. At the age of sixteen, she managed to convince her mother that she did not benefit from formal schooling and that she was capable of educating herself. Soon afterward she started working as an artists’ model at the New York Art Workers’ Club for Women. In 1921, she met Hugh Parker Guiler, a banker of Scottish origin, whom she married on 3 March 1923. The newlyweds moved to Paris in December 1924 and remained there until the outbreak of World War II. In 1931, Nin met Henry Miller and his wife, June, and a year later she published her first book, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, which, as Philip Jason notes, “appeared in a limited edition and received limited attention.”6
The other two works released in France in the 1930s, House of Incest and The Winter of Artifice, fared no better. House of Incest was self-published in 1936 by Siana Edition: a printing press established by Nin, Henry Miller, and their mutual friend and fellow author Michael Fraenkel. Despite “all the enthusiasm and promotional zeal, the first edition of House had a tiny print run that did not get far beyond Nin’s immediate circle.”7 The Winter of Artifice—a collection of short novelettes—printed by the Obelisk Press came out in the summer of 1939, just a few months before Nin moved to the United States because of the commencing war. Circumstances were not conducive to the promotion of the book, and its release did not boost Nin’s literary career either.
In the early 1930s, Nin attended her first psychoanalytic sessions with Dr. René Allendy, whom she left later for Dr. Otto Rank. She maintained sexual relationships with both therapists. Around the same time, she also reunited with her father, and this reunion went beyond a usual father-daughter relationship, as it developed into a sexual affair. In 1934, she underwent her first abortion, which she later described in her Diary as a stillbirth. Nin engaged in many sexual liaisons during her Parisian years, her last major lover in Paris being Gonzalo Moré, a married communist who followed Nin to New York.
After spending fifteen years in France, Nin and Guiler moved back to America in 1939. Nin swapped the bohemian Parisian society of Miller for the artistic circles of New York writers, painters, photographers, and filmmakers such as, to enumerate a few, Maya Deren (a choreographer, dancer, and experimental filmmaker), Robert Duncan (a poet), Dorothy Norman (a photographer and editor of the journal Twice a Year), and the writer Gore Vidal. In the United States she continued her therapy, first with Martha Jaeger, then with Dr. Clement Staff, and finally with Inge Bogner. She also continued to have numerous love affairs. Nin’s biographer, Deirdre Bair, observes that while her “lovers in the 1930s represented what she called ‘years of erotic madness’ with adult men . . . the period 1945–1947 represented erotic madness of a different kind, usually with mere boys half her age.”8
Nin engaged energetically in the enhancement of her literary career from the very beginning of her stay in New York. She established important acquaintances and did her best to see her works, both diary and fiction, in print. In the 1940s, she started writing erotic stories for a private collector, and these were released after her death in two volumes: Delta of Venus: Erotica (1977) and Little Birds (1979). She also began submitting shorter pieces and articles to alternative magazines such as Twice a Year, the Phoenix, and Furioso. Bair comments, “Anaïs, realizing that the path to commercial publication was uncertain, intended to build up a solid list of publications in various little magazines as a way to bolster her planned assault on commercial American publishers.”9
Nin intended to reprint The Winter of Artifice in the United States, but when neither she nor her literary agents managed to interest publishing houses in her work, she bought a printing press in 1942 and named it Gemor Press after her lover, Gonzalo Moré, with whom she ran it. However, the publication of Winter of Artifice (1942) not only failed to boost her literary career but also brought financial losses.10 Her next book, the collection of short stories Under a Glass Bell (1944), which was published by Gemor Press, sold three hundred copies in the first three weeks and received several reviews, one from the prominent critic Edmund Wilson, writing then for the New Yorker, who commented that the volume contained “really beautiful little pieces.”11 However, neither these two collections nor her novel This Hunger (1945), which was also self-published, brought her any considerable degree of popularity. Even when her novels started to be printed by commercial publishers—beginning with E. P. Dutton’s release of Ladders to Fire in 1946—they received mainly unfavorable evaluations, and none of them brought Nin the recognition she craved (although it is worth mentioning that one of her novels, A Spy in the House of Love, sold over 100,000 copies in the late 1950s, thus becoming her first commercial success).12
The year 1947 was significant for Nin personally, as she met two men who played a crucial role for the rest of her life: the writer and actor James Leo Herlihy, the author of Midnight Cowboy (1965), who became her devoted friend and supporter; and Rupert Pole, sixteen years her junior, who became her lifelong partner. Beginning in 1947, Anaïs Nin led a bicoastal life, shared between Los Angeles and New York and between Rupert Pole and Hugh Guiler, respectively. Nin married Pole in 1955, thus committing bigamy, because she had never divorced her first husband, Hugh Guiler.
In 1957, Nin met the young literary agent Gunther Stuhlmann, who would thereafter represent her interests. Stuhlmann—whom Nin introduced rather briefly in her diary as “an intelligent man who loves literature, does translations, worked in films”13—turned out to be a very loyal and dedicated representative who took good care of Nin’s literary business, even after her death. In 1961, however, impatient at the lack of publishing opportunities, Nin took the initiative into her own hands and got in touch with an independent publisher, Alan Swallow, and offered to collaborate with him. Swallow agreed and set out to reissue her short stories and novelettes. He also released the collection of her five novels in a single volume entitled Cities of the Interior. These reeditions did little to boost Nin’s status. Not until the joint release of the first volume of Nin’s Diary by Swallow Press and Harcourt, Brace and World in 1966 did she became popular with the general public. The publication of the first volume of her Diary turned her instantly from an author followed by a small coterie into a celebrity writer.
When Nin became a public figure with her own income and when her name started to appear in the records of the Internal Revenue Service, she had to annul her marriage to Rupert Pole. Nin, who until then had kept both husbands in the dark about each other’s existence, revealed to Pole her marriage with Guiler, explaining that their relationship had ceased to be sexual. She also informed Pole that she felt obliged to provide Hugh with both emotional and financial support because he had maintained her for most of her life (not only did Hugh Guiler support Nin’s daily needs but he also financed the publication of some of her books, gave her money to buy her own press, and helped out—sometimes oblivious to the fact—many of her friends). Pole did not object, and he remained her partner until her last days. Guiler, with whom Nin met more and more reluctantly, excusing herself with her declining health, allegedly remained oblivious to Pole’s existence until Nin’s funeral, where the two men met. Anaïs Nin died of cancer on 14 January 1977. The obituary in the New York Times mentioned Hugh Guiler as Nin’s husband, while
