By Vern Bullough

Woman as Seducer
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977)

During her lifetime diarist, eroticist and feminist icon Anaïs Nin compiled an extraordinary erotic diary of some 35,000 pages in 150 separate volumes. From this wealth of material she extracted characters, situations and events for her stories and novels. She might be called the female Casanova, but her work also has touches of the unknown Victorian gentleman who wrote "My Secret Life," late in the 19th Century.

From a shy and easily hurt girl, Nin developed a unique ability to pick up male partners of all ages and types wherever she went and even as she aged. She was a courtesan in Paris, a goddess to a group of gay artists, the center of a literary coterie in New York, and ultimately in her Los Angles period ended up a guru of the women’s movement. Erica Jong has written that no writer has told the "story of woman’s sexuality more honestly" than Nin.

But Nin also created a fiction of her life. Sorting out the actual from the imagined in her diaries is not always easy. Adding to the frustration is that her adult diaries have never appeared in a complete set. Rather they have appeared piecemeal, often sometimes expurgated or at least condensed. Nin did some censoring herself since she often rewrote parts of her diaries. Still a reading of the available diaries underscores Jong’s point. Nin’s diaries reveal her life as few women ever have revealed theirs. Nin had a unique ability to attract men. She recorded her active sex life in detail.

Born in France of a Spanish-Cuban family, Nin intermittently lived in the U.S. throughout her life. She died in Los Angeles. Her early novels, the House of Incest (1936) and Winter of Artifice, (1939) are believed to be fictional recreations of her own early life. Noël Riley Fitch, one of Nin’s biographers, strongly believes she had incestuous relations with her father. However, the only hint from Nin herself, of any sort of sexual relationship with her father, comes from his interest in nude photographs, which he took of her as a 10-year- old girl.

Shortly after that, Nin’s father left his wife and family for another woman. Young Anaïs’s mother took her and her two brothers to the United States. On board ship Anaïs began writing the diary she faithfully kept all her life.

In 1923 she married Hugo Guiler and the couple soon moved to France, where she entered into the artistic and literary circles of the Left Bank. As war clouds gathered in Europe, the couple returned to the U.S. where her writing continued. Hugo was aware of his wife’s sexual activity, but more or less ignored it. The pair were soul mates but not very sexual ones together. They lived apart for much of their married life.

Usually he gave her a small allowance each month to support herself, but this was not enough for her, and she supplemented her income in the 40s by writing erotica. She earned a dollar a page, a job she had taken over from Gershon Legman, who was also for a time her sexual partner. Nin and Henry Miller, her old friend and lover who had also returned to the United States, gave typescripts of their erotic writing to an agent in New York. He sent them to Roy Melisander Johnson of Ardmore, Oklahoma, an old man who, in Gershon Legman’s description, had "all the printed erotica in English, but who found that each story excited his imagination and his jaded virility only once."

Johnson therefore continually wanted fresh manuscripts for him and received two a week, one from an agent in California, and the other from New York, solidly bound by airmail. For each of these Johnson paid $200 to be split between the agent and the writer.

Nin wrote stories for Johnson for two years, and on Legman’s advice, kept copies of them. After Johnson’s death, the best of which were published as The Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979), based on them. (Both are still in print and highly recommended.)

Interestingly, Johnson’s wife knew of his collection, but would not let him keep it in her house. After his death, Johnson’s pornography collection served as the source of many pornographic books that hit the market in the 1960s.

During the last few decades of Nin’s life, she split her time between Los Angles and New York City. Nin’s remarkable sex life was no less scandalous in her times than Catherine Millet’s today – as revealed in her current biography The Sexual Life of Catharine M. Nin seduced or had affairs with the major father figures in her life, including, when she was 30, her own father.

Among her other sexual mates were the well known Otto Rank and Edmund Wilson, along with less lights such as her husband’s professor, John Erskine. She had simultaneous affairs with Henry and June Miller. She was called by some the "Madonna of the Clitoris." One friend described her as embodying a "touch of the geisha, a touch of the governess, and a touch of the Gish sisters." Writer Lawrence Durrell, another bedmate, called her a "diva with a shy, virginal side."

Henry Miller who read her unexpurgated diary in the 1930's, claimed that when published, it would take its place "besides the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Abelard, Rousseau, Proust."

For more on Nin:s life, we recommend these books:
Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin by Noël Riley Fitch (Little, Brown and Company, 1993..ISBN: 0-316-28428-9)

Anaïs Nin by Deirdre Bair (Putnam, 1995. ISBN 0-399-13988-5)