by Nicole F.
The name Anais Nin may not sound familiar, but in the 1960s she was considered a feminist icon. Born in France in 1903 to Cuban parents, Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, professionally known as Anais Nin, was a writer. At the age of eleven she started what would be her life-long work of art in the form of a diary. A diary she began when her father abandoned her family and they were forced onto a ship to America. It was on that ship that Nin wrote a letter for her father, attempting to lure him back to her family, but never sent it. That letter was the start of her diary.
Once she had settled in New York, Nin learned English and become a lover of books. She was a true reader, but was forced to dropout of high school to help her mother support her family. All the while, she continued to establish a routine of writing in her diary to release some of the sadness caused by her father’s abandonment. For her, writing was her escape.
When she turned twenty she met Hugh Guiler, a young banker. They were married and they both moved to Paris where Nin did her best to be a conventional wife for her husband. She never lost her love of books though and went on to write an analysis of D.H Lawrence’s controversial novels even though it was controversial at the time for a woman to do so. It was while she was living in Paris in 1931 that she met a destitute writer named Henry Miller and his wife June. This meeting began her period of personal fulfillment where she spent her time among artists and attempted to free herself from societies confining rules.
She was an early devotee to the ideas of psychoanalysis and even became a patient of Otto Rank, who was a college of Freud. She began to fictionalize aspects of her diary and garnered some underground success, even publishing a novelette that featured a fictionalized dramatic reconciliation with her father, titled Winter of Artifice. All of this changed once more in 1939 when Europe was on the brink of war and Nin and her husband were forced to move back to the states where she struggled to continue to publish her highly stylized works of fiction.
Eventually, Nin became so frustrated with the publishing industry that she purchased her own printing press and began to print her own novels, including artwork that her husband contributed to the books. Her life was then altered once more in 1947 when she met and fell in love with a man named Rupert Pole. She began a secret relationship with him after being unable to break things off with her first husband and even ended up marrying Pole without ever getting a divorce from Guiler. Nin never really was a believer in laws. During these very emotional years, Nin continued to write and ended up writing a series of continuous novels fictionalizing her experiences that was published under the title, Cities of the Interior.
While she was living a dual life in both L.A and New York in the 1960s, Nin made the very risky decision to publish her personal diaries, though she made the choice to remove the most private details of her romantic relationships. The first installment of The Diaries of Anais Nin were almost an instant success. Though is was profoundly personal it struck a lot of people as being incredibly relateable and was particularly successful among women. This was how Anais Nin became known as a feminist icon of the 1960s and 70s.
As more of her diaries were published she traveled around, meeting fans of her writing and speaking about writing. Her diaries totaled to seven volumes and covered all the way to the end of her life in 1977 when she died of cancer with Rupert Pole by her side. Before passing, she continued to shock those around her by instructing to have her early diaries publishes as well as an erotic story she had written in the 1940s. In an extremely controversial move, she even requested to have the ‘secret’ parts of her diaries published. One of these stories was even turned into a feature film and was titled Henry & June.
During her 63 years of highly personal and yet ultimately public writing, Anais Nin forged a style of expression that befits the 21st century. She seemed to foresee our modern era of Internet communication, even wishing for what she called a “café in space” where she could keep in touch with others. Nin believed that consciousness is a stream of images and words that flow from us as long as we live, and something to be shared.
Anais Nin was an amazing woman who is sadly unknown in this modern era. She was a woman who lived her life to her fullest and who refused to follow any of the normal rules of the time. She was a woman who could very easily have blended in to this current era and still made her mark on the world. I highly recommend that if you are a woman you read her diaries and experience life through the eyes of a woman who once said, “we write to taste life twice”.
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