Nin and Truth

In my twenties I was obsessed with Anaïs Nin. Her writing and her life awakened me. Her loves and lovers, her art, her circle of friends, it all aroused a hunger in me for words and for a more creative life.

Sadly, in my early twenties I didn’t have a lot of outlets for creativity, nor did I have a lot of artists as friends to bounce ideas off of or to inspire and be inspired by. It took more than a decade to cultivate those things as well as moving across the country and back again, having an ill fated six year relationship, and pretty much destroying and rebuilding my entire life.

Circling back and reading more Nin and Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell at 41, I find myself examining things in a new light, since my life is a lot more like that lot than it was when I was 22.

The thing that strikes me is the openness of my friends and my lovers and the pivotal place honesty plays in our lives, our relationships, and our art. I keep trying to figure out Nin and her group and if there was that same need for honesty and how they functioned if it wasn’t there.

The prime example is that in the 1920s and 30s, in Paris, Nin was married to Hugh Guiler. He was a somewhat well off banker who was very supportive of her writing and her modeling and other artistic endeavors. At that time Nin and Henry Miller became lovers. Miller himself was married, though his wife was in New York during most his time in Paris.

These affairs went on. Nin had other lovers, sometimes supporting them with money she got from Hugh. Miller certainly had many varied lovers as well, but what is never made clear in Nin’s diaries or Miller’s accounts of that time, is what exactly everyone knew and didn’t know. In fact the contrary is often stated, that Hugh knew nothing and that it would crush him if he did, that Miller’s wife June was in the dark, and that all of the affairs were illicit and secret.

Nin’s love life became even more complex when she moved to America. She began what biographer Deidre Bair called her “bicoastal trapeze,” wherein she maintained a married life with Hugh Guiler in New York, as well as having a somewhat faux marriage to Rupert Pole (her once therapist) in California.

Even upon Nin’s death in 1977, when the truth came out, her two husbands claimed they didn’t know about the charade. It is not clear if this was said to conform to some social pressure or if they actually never figured it out. It seems absurd now to think that could go on with someone who has some fame. Even then, Nin was in society papers on both coasts.

There is a fundamental cultural difference that I may not ever be able to fully understand. That is tied not only to my privilege as a man, but the huge changes in the world since 1930 or even 1970. The ability for people to get and maintain careers and get published was tied to their “respectability” even when they were considered artists or bohemians. Women were economically tied to their husbands in a way it is difficult to conceive of today (for me at least in contemporary New York City.)

Still, between friends? Between lovers? Nin gives special insight because it is her diaries that are published. In those diaries she oscillates between doting and taking care of Hugh and feeling contempt for him and feeling trapped in her marriage.

Then there is the drama of it all. The tension, the lies, the mystery. To some, like Henry, those things were burdensome, but there was certainly a part of Anaïs that enjoyed the thrills of creating illusions, planning out elaborate lies, living two lives. That is something a bit alien to me in my current life, but perhaps I felt like that a little in my 20s or at least imagined I could feel like that.

In the end I am left with these questions unanswered. It makes my artistic and literary heroes more complex and mysterious to me. To think that even in the 70s when Nin had become a feminist icon of sorts and spiritual and progressive she was still lying to both of her partners about so much. I can’t imagine that.

I wonder what aspects of my life will see inscrutable in the future. Will my kinks seem horrific or pedestrian? Will my relationships seem progressive or antiquated. I feel like the things we worry most about in life will one day be trivial and that is both heartening and depressing.

However it goes and however the differences between the way life is now and was then, it does make me swoon to feel like I am connected to a circle of amazing people the way she was. The way we write and paint and sing and dance and make spaces for each other is so energizing. It’s so inspiring. Luckily that’s what I take away most when I look back at Nin.