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Sophie Taam

Awakening
The men in Anaïs Nin’s early life

In 1924, banker Hugh (Hugo) Guiler was transferred to Paris and,

preceded by his in-laws, settled there with his wife Anaïs Nin, then
twenty-one years old. For the puritanical Anaïs, it was hate at first
sight; she found the city filthy, backward and decadent. By 1927,
though, she felt a bit more comfortable and began laying the
groundwork for her ultimate artistic and sensual journey. Because of
Hugo’s salary and stock market investments, Anaïs enjoyed the sort of
wealthy lifestyle that she had longed for since childhood and began to
meet interesting people who would trigger her personal liberation.
Hugo bought their first car, a Citroën, on credit. Anaïs, to the great
surprise of her family and friends, learned to drive. She forced herself
to be more independent, especially when her husband was away on
business. Previously, plagued by loneliness, she would go see three
movies in a row or engage in shopping sprees to fill the void. As for
artistic expression, she was still trying to find her own voice, and she
went through a phase where she hoped to unite all her scattered talents
into one profitable activity: fashion design.
In early October, she began a flamenco course with a Spanish
teacher, Paco Miralles, who taught professional dancers. She threw
herself frenetically into this new activity and in the process discovered
that she was gifted. Miralles was a coarse man around forty years old,
with no special charisma, but he overpowered Anaïs. One day, after
class, he invited her to a coffee shop and said the two of them would
make a great team if she trained seriously. She relished the rhythm of
the body and movement, which soothed her innate mental restlessness.
Dance gave her the strength to combat physical exhaustion, which had
plagued her since childhood. With Miralles, she learned much about
dancing, but, above all, her interaction with him freed her long-time
repressed sensuality. “Miralles,” she wrote in her diary, “is a little too
free with his hands.” She resisted at first but finally yielded. This
submission to her sensual nature and to male desire was the first time—
but not the last—even if their contact did not go beyond a few kisses or
caresses. Symbolically, Miralles opened the floodgates to Anaïs’s
raging eroticism, and they were never to close again.
Anaïs was attracted by the stage, the spotlight and applause, which
she had already discovered as a teenager performing skits for friends
and family. She started performing with her teacher. She also enticed
Hugo into her new passion, and he became her favorite dance partner
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during family parties. She bought lavish costumes, shoes and castanets.
On the recommendation of her husband, she chose a nom de scène,
Nina Aguilera, then sent invitations for musical evenings at their rue
Schoelcher studio.
Anaïs befriended Gustavo Morales, a young, seductive and
cultivated Cuban composer she had met at a party through her brother
Joaquin. They saw each other regularly, exchanged views on art, music
and literature. In the Paris of 1927, she began to cultivate her Latin
roots; through them could she access her sensuality.
But this sensual awakening made her feel guilty. Since she did not
lock up her diary, she pondered keeping two separate ones. “I live
doubly. I write doubly.” One of them would be the diary of the faithful
housewife, devoted to her husband,and the other one would focus on a
character she called “Imagy,” who took her name from the imagination,
who was “restless and impure, acting strangely […], seeking life and
tasting all of it without fear…”
Hugo was happy to see his wife thrive in artistic activity. She was
less prone to her periodic bouts of depression. Thus, he supported her
by all means: he danced with her and even invited Professor Miralles to
dinner. Anaïs regularly attended the Music Hall to keep abreast of the
latest dances.
She was truly determined to become a professional dancer, even
though she remained conscious of a final hurdle to overcome: her self-
restraint. The very term that Hugo’s former professor John Erskine
used to describe her writing, Miralles now used for her dancing. When
Anaïs compared herself to Colette on the stage, a chasm seemed to
separate them: “I am too often outside. Colette was inside.” So her
struggle to master her self-restraint would be her focus, and it is
undeniable that Anaïs Nin succeeded brilliantly in the end, on a
personal as well as an artistic level.
She continued opening herself up, going out, exploring the
simmering modernity of the 1920s Paris: as for music, she only needed
to follow her younger brother who rubbed shoulders with the Parisian
scene. She attended a concert by Manuel de Falla and was haunted by
the beauty of the music. She identified with Debussy’s operatic heroine
Mélisande-Melisendra, who would later be her one-time only nom de
plume. She went with her friend Hélène Boussinescq to a surrealist
event—a poetry reading at Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier with actor
Henri Verneuil, which degenerated into pugilism.
She read the journal of Katherine Mansfield, which inspired her
despite its “closeness to death.” But the greatest literary revelation
came in the form of her reconciliation with Marcel Proust’s work
during an Easter holiday in Switzerland. She had already struggled to
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read him in the past with no hint of pleasure, but now devoured him
voraciously: she was finally ready. He shed light on her current
intellectual problem, i.e. the notion of time, as well as the concept of
the “decentralization of personality.” In their mountainside hotel room,
while Hugo read stock quotes in the newspaper and celebrated his
financial gains, Anaïs told him about her recent metamorphosis in
veiled terms. How far could she go in her quest, in her exploration of
femininity, without betraying him? Hugo, who enjoyed his wife’s
awakening sensuality, replied very open-mindedly: they had no
religion, they did not adhere to a conventional interpretation of
marriage, and their only faith lay in their love. He trusted her; her
evolution could never be wrong.
She insightfully concluded: “I feel there are a thousand
inexpressible subtleties that I will have to meet, and work out alone.”

Anaïs Nin, Paris, 1920s

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Upon their return to Paris at the end of April, they were stricken by
bad news. Hugo’s father, who was supposed to visit from New York in
May with the whole family, passed away. Hugo fell apart. The
relationship with his father was never really sorted out; his father died
thinking his son was still Catholic. Hugo and Anaïs were obliged to
attend the funeral in New York.

Hugh Guiler, Paris, 1920s

Another bad surprise awaited them in New York: Hugo’s father

had disinherited them. Anaïs remained as far away as possible from her
in-laws and socialized with friends and former flirtations. Although the
stay in New York was distressing for several reasons, it opened up an
essential door for Anaïs: Eduardo, the cousin for whom she had
changed her diary from French to English at age seventeen (so he could
read it), would once again have a decisive impact on her life. He
confessed his homosexuality, which disturbed Anaïs, who only knew
about homosexuality in an abstract and literary manner through Gide or
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Proust. But most importantly, he had commenced psychoanalysis,

which was transforming his life. During their short visit to New York—
a month—Anaïs observed her cousin’s progress. He was becoming
someone new, and he was no longer the inconsistent and ethereal
person she had once known. Finally, Eduardo urged Anaïs to undergo
psychoanalysis herself. She pondered this idea and realized that the
journal served as a form of psychoanalysis. She shared this discovery
with Hugo during their return to Paris. Open and logical as always, he
began to read Freud and thought about whether the couple should
embark on this new adventure. But it was actually Anaïs who was the
intellectual and spiritual guide of the couple, and for now
psychoanalysis was not on the agenda. It would take another four years
before she knocked on Dr. René Allendy’s door.
Despite the tense situation with her in-laws because of the
disinheritance, she felt compelled to welcome and accommodate them
during their visit to Paris that summer. Next it was her Cuban family’s
turn, her aunt Antolina and uncle Gilbert, accompanied by her younger
brother Thorvald, who was now residing in Havana. She hardly
recognized him: he was a new man but in ill health and mood.
In spite of these social obligations, Anaïs began a novel, but as
with her former ones, she admitted at the end of thirty-five pages that it
was very bad and aborted it: “I had better stick to dancing.” She
reunited with Miralles and flamenco, but she soon tired of her teacher.
Her new crush was Gustavo Morales. He occupied a lofty place in
her mind and her journal, or more precisely Imagy’s one, her wicked
double. He often came to dinner at the Guilers’ studio, and all three of
them engaged in long and interesting conversations. He had written an
erotic novel and let Anaïs and Hugo read it. Anaïs felt he was more
attracted to Hugo than to her, which undoubtedly hurt her ego.
John Erskine and his family also visited Paris in the fall. The
couple was going through a crisis. With his last two books, John had
become a celebrity in America, and he had given in to the temptations
of other women. His wife Pauline decided to separate from her husband
for a while and chose Paris. She settled in with her two daughters for
the winter and John was to return to New York. Anaïs was attracted by
Erskine, father figure par excellence. Still attractive, intelligent,
cultivated, recognized, and revered by Hugo, Erskine had all the
attributes to seduce her. Anaïs helped his wife with her move to Paris
and had several conversations with John. He was unknown in France,
and Anaïs, to impress him, exaggerated her French behavior. Thinking
Anaïs was sensually experienced, Erskine talked about his relationship
with an American woman, Lilith, whom he made the heroine of his
latest novel. And, as a beneficial side effect to all this, Gustavo, feeling
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neglected, confessed his jealousy and expressed a renewed fervor for

Anaïs.
Erskine complimented her after she shared passages from her diary
with him. He perceived literary genius in her, and confided to Hugo
that she now needed to find her voice and that her writing would
“coagulate into something absolutely her own.” This assertion erased
her temporary discouragement; she was enchanted and volunteered to
serve as an alibi when Lilith came to join her lover in Paris, more than
ever the city of depravity.
1929 began with Hugo’s promotion as the Assistant Director of the
Parisian branch of the bank, which meant a substantial raise. For the
first time, Anaïs, who in the past had always condemned the frenzied
commitment of her husband to the bank, was proud of his professional
success.
Meanwhile, Anaïs was criticized from all sides for her relationship
with Gustavo. Even if he was homosexual and theirs was only a
Bohemian friendship, her mother nonetheless asked her to see him less;
Joaquin did not like him; her uncle Gilbert, visiting from Cuba, still had
his doubts; John Erskine disapproved, and all of them feared for the
Guilers’ reputations. Anaïs yielded in and limited their rendez-vous
to…three times a week. In fact, Anaïs’s passion for the young artist had
given way to compassion after witnessing him accepting, without the
slightest pride, financial assistance from Hugo. His behavior embodied
a painful and dangerous mirror of her own situation. “Once or twice I
have compared myself to [Hugo and Gustavo], thinking that I am cared
for by Hugh on account of my sex—but no, I know I am not.”
To reassure herself, she recalled her eagerness to pose as a model
for painters in New York some years earlier. But the fact is that Anaïs
Nin would be supported throughout most of her life by men, and her
attempts at financial independence would fail one after the other—
including the self-publication of her novels with her own press—and
she would only start earning money with her writing towards the end of
her life. This biographical aspect always embarrassed her and later on,
to not disappoint her feminist fans, she avoided the topic of finances in
her lectures and interviews. It was only with the publication of her
posthumous unexpurgated diaries that the public at large became aware
of the truth.
But this financial dependence that Anaïs Nin never totally admitted
might merely have come from her poor health which did not allow her
to take on a side job along with her artistic activities. Regularly, in her
journal, she cursed her physical limitations, her depressive bouts which
confined her to bed, the need for an inordinate amount of sleep and to
eat certain foods, to get sun in the winter. And if this vulnerability
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saddened her, it is possibly because she subconsciously suspected that

it did not stem from childhood diseases or even a fragile metabolism. Is
it possible that these maladies had their root in a form of sexual abuse
as a child? Nin, later in life, considered the possibility that her father’s
brutal spankings may have somehow aroused her, that the pain may
have been mixed with sensual pleasure—did this scar her for life?
If so, then what is more logical than being repaid by men for what
the first man, her father, damaged?
—Translated from the French by Paul Herron and Sophie Taam

This article is excerpted from Chapter Nine of Sophie Taam’s book

Anaïs Nin: genèse et jeunesse, published by Chèvre-feuille étoilée,
Montpellier, France, 2014.

Anaïs Nin as Nina Aguilera, 1920s