Daughters & Lovers
Anaïs Nin began her diary in 1914, shortly after her father abandoned the family. The initial entries into her diary consisted of letters to her father asking him to return. The damage and pain she suffered would be avenged nearly twenty years later when she had an incestuous affair with the father who had abandoned her.
The details of this affair are found in her diary books numbered 37 through 46 which cover the period between October, 1932 and November, 1934. These entries were collected and published in a book called Incest in 1992.
Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell was born February 21, 1903 just outside of Paris in Neuilly. She was the eldest daughter of a well-to-do Cuban family. Her mother, Rose Culmell, was a singer. Her father, Joaquin Nin y Castellanos, born in Spain, was a composer and concert pianist. Anaïs, as a young girl, spent a considerable amount of time with her father, accompanying him on his concert tours. After Joaquin abandoned his family, Anaïs moved with her mother and two brothers to New York. It was in New York, at age 14, that Nin began her diary.
When she was 19, Anaïs went to Cuba where she met and married Hugh Guiler, a well-to-do banker. He took her back to Paris. After six or so years of marriage, Nin was feeling trapped. There was not much passion, erotic or otherwise in her marriage to Guiler. Not content with mending socks and canning fruit, she began reading and became inspired by the novels of D.H. Lawrence. Nin wrote a small book in appreciation of Lawrence and also had a brief sexual affair with her editor on the Lawrence book, Lawrence Drake. Nin writes in her diary how she allowed Drake to climax between her legs, not inside her. This was the beginning of a lonf erotic journey. The combination of ennui at home and D.H. Lawrence's passion in her mind released in her a wild sexual desire that continued in one form or another for nearly forty years. Nin's sexual odyssey, recorded in detail in her diary, was also, psychologically, about avenging her feelings of abandonment by her father.
In December 1931, Nin met the American writer Henry Miller. Miller was the perfect individual to get her more deeply involved in her passionate quest for passion. Both Miller and Nin shared the desire to let their art define their lives and values.
I feel inexhaustible! Tonight I will love my Henry. I would like to be his wife, to have a home with him, to make him supremely happy; we would forgive each other our little infatuations for others; we would work and read together, have informal bohemian but exquisite banquets...Work, work with that ecstasy in both of us which is great enough to shatter the world. [Diary Entry: February 18, 1933]
Nin's love affair with Henry Miller unleashed a torrent of erotic behavior. In addition to Miller, Nin had an affair with Rene Allendy, her psychoanalyst. Allendy fell in love with Nin and practiced an unconventional form of therapy with her. He whipped her.
Experience. Curiosity. Coldness. I don't know yet how to treat that whip. When Allendy tries a few preliminary lashes I'm simply angry and feel like hitting back. I don't see any "voluptuous" quality in it...Allendy laid me on the bed and whipped my buttocks hard. But I noticed this: His penis, after all this excitement on his part-- lashes, struggles, caresses of fury, kisses on the breasts-- was still soft. Henry would have been already blazing. Allendy pushed my head toward it, as the first time, and then, with all the halo of excitement, threats, he fucked no better than before. [Diary Entry: April 19, 1933]
Nin had a brief affair with the mad playwright Antonin Artaud.
I do not think of Artaud as a body. Of his body I know only his eyes. I like his leanness, his gestures. He looks like his thoughts...I do not want to be near his body. Why does he want this nearness? I lie to him about it. I have no desire for him.. I'm in love with his mind, with the most subtle of all intelligences, of all supernatural manifestations. I would like just to write him, not to be with him. He is the genie of abstractions. He rules over the abstract. There he holds me spellbound. [Diary Entry: June 22, 1933]
But during the summer of 1933, the most intriguing sexual affair occurred with her father, who she saw after a 20 year absence.
Father asked me to move nearer..."Let me kiss your mouth." He put his arms around me. I hesitated. I was tortured by a complexity of feelings, wanting his mouth, yet afraid, feeling I was to kiss a brother, yet tempted-- terrified and desirous...We kissed, and that kiss unleashed a wave of desire...Another kiss. More terror than joy...He caressed my breasts and the tips hardened. I was resisting, saying no, but my nipples hardened. And when his hand caressed me-- oh, the knowingness of those caresses-- I melted. But all the while some part of me was hard and terrified. My body yielded to the penetration of his hand, but I resisted, I resisted enjoyment...I was timid and unwilling, yet passionately moved...With a strange violence, I lifted my negligee and I lay over him...Ecstatic, his face, and I now frenzied with desire to unite with him...undulating, caressing him, clinging to him. His spasm was tremendous, of his whole being. He emptied all of himself in me...and my yielding was immense, with my whole being, with only that core of fear which arrested the supreme spasm in me.[Diary Entries: July, 1933]
If Nin's father-complex made her compulsive about sex, then would the incestuous affair free her from the neurosis?
She sought out the therapeutic help of Otto Rank, a disciple of Freud. In November 1933, Rank was living and working in Paris and Nin became his patient. By June, 1934, Nin writes in her diary:
Today [Rank] was not shy. He dragged me toward the divan and we kissed savagely, drunkenly. He looked almost beside himself, and I could not understand my own abandon. I had not imagined a sensual accord. [Diary Entry: June 1, 1934]
By August, Nin was falling in love with Rank:
I cannot live without seeing him. It is a hunger, an unbearable hunger. I rushed to him today. It is like touching fire. He makes me terribly happy. [Diary Entry: August 14, 1934]
And the neurosis, if that's what it was, continued.
Nin's diary and her other work provide a very intense look at a woman who has, most self-consciously, examined the inside soul of the female. Nin has studied the fragmentation of the self as it searches for love and meaning.
We are proud to honor Anaïs Nin with this Honored Cosmic Player Plate for her contributions to cosmic baseball and to humanity as an enchantress of the erotic.
Portrait of Nin by Henry Miller
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