Unapologetically erotic: the sexy, duplicitous double life of Little Birds author Ana?s Nin
It’s a tricky thing, juggling two husbands each with no idea the other exists, but Ana?s Nin was as nimble – and daring – as they come.
The French-born writer’s uncensored sexual diaries had made her world famous and a feminist figurehead at the grand age of 63. Beautiful, outré and despicably arrogant, Nin, who lived in Paris and then New York, had spent years writing provocative fiction – including Little Birds, a posthumously published collection of erotic short stories that has been adapted for TV by Sky – but it wasn’t until she published the first volume of her diaries in 1966 that her work caught fire.
Beginning as letters to her estranged and abusive father, which she wrote from the age of 11 and rewrote endlessly throughout her adult life, the diaries graphically detailed illegal abortions, incest, marital infidelity, and affairs with prominent intellectuals including Freud collaborator Otto Rank and American writer Henry Miller.
She wrote of her literary ambitions: “It is my thousand years of womanhood I am recording, a thousand woman.” Her works, including Little Birds, were dominated by unconventional women who did as they pleased with whomever they pleased. Nin was hailed as one of the first women to write erotica and to push the female experience into the mainstream.
It wasn’t until after Nin had died in 1977 of cervical cancer, however, that her bigamy came to light – two obituaries highlighting a curious conflict. In the New York Times, she was listed as being survived by her husband, Hugh Parker Guiler. In the Los Angeles Times, she was apparently survived by her husband, Rupert Pole. A damning thread was pulled loose, the truth emerged and her dazzling reputation was thrown into the mud.
Nin first became intrigued with the erotic shortly after quitting high school in New York aged 16 and moving to Paris. In an apartment she rented with her Cuban, mother (a singer) and two brothers, she came across a collection of French paperbacks from literary greats Proust, Gide and Rimbaud.
“One by one, I read these books, which were completely new to me. I had never read erotic literature in America…” she wrote in volume one of her diaries. “They overwhelmed me. I was innocent before I read them, but by the time I had read them all, there was nothing I did not know about sexual exploits... I had my degree in erotic lore.”
Nin only began writing erotica as a joke, and when in dire financial straits – her work as an artist’s model and flamenco dancer no longer enough. An anonymous “collector” offered her and a couple of friends, including Henry Miller, a dollar a page for pornographic narratives. Nin never intended these stories to be published, but changed her mind in the Seventies, where they were printed as Delta of Venus and Little Birds.
While the stories were pure fiction, they revelled in a promiscuity that Nin herself was unapolgetically accustomed. After marrying banker and artist Hugh Parker Guiler, she embarked on an affair while studying psychoanalysis with Otto Rank in New York. Nin even took on patients of her own next door to his office, and had sex with them on the couch meant for patients. She romped with John Steinbeck and Lawrence Durrell, among a league of others, and after her death there were even rumours she might be bisexual.
Philip Kaufman’s 1990 film Henry and June, based on Nin’s diary of the same name about her affair with Henry Miller, alluded to the idea Nin was obsessed with Miller’s wife to the point of delusion. “I have become June”, Nin (played by Maria de Medeiros) says in the film. The reality was not too dissimilar: Nin was known to heap gifts onto June, including clothes and jewellery, often leaving herself broke. While Nin pursued sex in all its forms, her husband Guiler turned a benevolent blind eye. Even as Nin married someone else.
Nin, 44, met 28-year-old Rupert Pole in a lift in Manhattan, 1947, on her way up to a party hosted by Hazel Guggenheim McKinley, an heir to the Guggenheim fortune. Rumour has it that the pair hit it off because they both had ink on their hands – their creative synergy apparent – but in fact Pole was a forester and Nin was feeling low after having been dropped by her publisher following flagging fiction sales. “Danger! He is probably homosexual,” wrote Nin in her diary the night they met, before detailing miraculous sex and her rakishly handsome new lover’s tantalising interest in Eastern philosophy.
The next day, Pole, who thought Nin divorced, invited her to travel with him around the West Coast. He procured a pretend wedding ring from Woolworths so they could register at motels as husband and wife. Despite Nin writing in her diaries that she found her first marriage an “imprisonment”, she married Pole in Arizona after he dropped a real diamond ring in her glass of orange juice. They settled in Los Angeles, where Pole had a little cottage on the edge of Sierra Madre, and while he spent his days cutting wood, Nin wrote and played housewife. Her first husband Guiler thought she was at a “rest ranch” that forbade the use of phones.
Soon, however, Guiler became suspicious, and Nin needed a better alibi. So she convinced her close friend and English student Tristine Rainer to steal a pile of university letter headed paper, and send an official invitation to Nin’s home in New York, asking Nin to give a series of university lectures. She also became impressively crafty, renting a letterbox in Rainer’s name so Guiler could send her post.
When Pole came to visit her in New York once weekend, where Nin said she was staying for a writing assignment, she audaciously booked him a hotel room opposite her own apartment, and spent her time swinging between both abodes, and both husbands. The volume of her diary chronicling these remarkably agile years is appropriately named Trapeze.
In fact, Nin's lies came so thick and fast she resorted to writing them on index cards and filing them in a box for reference. According to her biographer Deidre Blair, “[Ana?s] would set up these elaborate fa?ades in Los Angeles and in New York, but it became so complicated that she had to create something she called the lie box. She had this absolutely enormous purse and in the purse she had two sets of checkbooks. One said Ana?s Guiler for New York and another said Ana?s Pole for Los Angeles. She had prescription bottles from California doctors and New York doctors with the two different names. And she had a collection of file cards.”
Eventually, Nin’s sexy double life lost its sparkle. Adultery was becoming tedious – as were both her husbands. In her diaries she bemoaned Pole’s penny-pinching (refusing, for instance, to pay for a maid) and his controlling nature, while Guiler was achingly uninspiring. “He is still,” she wrote of him in 1952, “after four years, technically deficient in moviemaking, has no ingenuity, no gift for mechanics… In the one room in the apartment we have for entertaining he would put a dining room set. The bourgeois in him is incurable. Everything he touches takes on that inanimate quality; I struggled so he would not dress like an old man.”
Nin seemed completely unaware of her own tepid success, or was at least stubborn to refute it. When reviews mocked her for being “mercilessly pretentious” and “a great bore”, Nin wrote furious and condescending letters to the editors. “I am very curious to know by what qualifications you were given such a book to review… I would like to know who you are to pass judgment, evaluate a work you have not even been able to read accurately, and to pass judgment on poetry, imagination, or psychological depth,” she wrote to Jerome Stone of the Saturday Review of Literature. Those who knew Nin often criticised her narcissism: she could only write, and think about, herself.
In 1966, just as Nin was experiencing her late blooming fame from her just-published diaries, she annulled her marriage with Pole. The decision was spurred on by legal logistics rather than a tortured heart – both Guiler and Pole were trying to claim her as a dependent on their federal tax returns.
Her success filled the gaps left by love, and she spent her remaining decade touring relentlessly, giving talks and hosting signings. It’s possible her promiscuity was only filler all along – Nin was waiting for something bigger. Her brother Joaquín described her as “a steel hummingbird … determined to be famous.”
Nin tolerated living with Pole until her cancer in 1977, and before her death, she wrote to Guiler asking for forgiveness. He absolved her of everything. “They both realized,” Nin’s friend Rainer wrote in her book Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Ana?s Nin, “that having half of Anais Nin was better than all of any other woman.”
Little Birds airs tonight (August 4) on Sky Atlantic/NOW TV, 9pm & 10pm
