Anäis Nin in Paris

Diaries, love triangles and city life

Camille Pissaro, French Theatre Square, Paris, 1898

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Much like Virginia Woolf across the channel, Anäis Nin spent much of her time walking the urban streets of her city—in her case, Paris—writing her books in her mind.

Having been born in France in 1903 to Spanish and Cuban-Danish parents, she felt that Paris was her truest home, despite spending her childhood being moved around between various other European cities and Havana in order to support her father’s musical career.

At the age of eleven, however, following her father’s desertion of the family, she moved with her mother and siblings to New York, learning to speak English, a language in which she would eventually feel most comfortable writing. New York inspired her to walk the city streets and this became the first fertile ground on which she developed her keen eye for people watching.

“About six we came out of the theatre and once again walked up Broadway…and this time Broadway was full of people of every kind. That’s what I want to try to describe.”¹

Whilst Nin was pounding the streets of New York, developing her powers of observation of the life around her for use in her diaries, she also observed the behaviours of men on the streets, noting how their masculinity and virility was on constant display and how they “prowled”, following the women who passed them by. What became clear in her early diaries and which she later developed however is this sense that she herself felt immune from the male gaze: she saw herself as merely an observer of the life of the streets; distinct and unattached to the life around her.

The Journals of Anäis Nin, Volume One

In 1924, a twenty six year old Nin moved back to the city of her birth, Paris, with her new husband Hugo Guiler and quickly fell in love with her surroundings. Within her first few months of arriving, she was roaming the streets and filling the pages of her diary day and night, honing her craft as a constant voyeur of the city's inhabitants.

“The fever has begun again. Thoughts about everything are burning me, and on top of this, in the usual sequence, the desire to write. So I am working again to the tune of my Parisian life.”²

Nin’s diary entries began to develop a literary style of her own, filled with evocative imagery and colourful descriptions.

“Paris is like a giant park, riotous in colouring, festive in its fountains and flowers, glorious in its monuments…I feel as if I were biting into a utopian fruit, something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.”³

Nin remained in Paris for the next sixteen years, continuing to roam the city streets in search of inspiration in all weathers. She appeared to remain free or ambivalent around the usual risks associated with women on the streets in the early part of the twentieth century, most often choosing to walk alone, although she also strolled on occasion with her lovers, most famously Henry Miller, and less so, her husband.

At the outbreak of WWII, however, Nin was forced to return to New York, something she regretted bitterly. In fact, many years after the war ended, when she was finally reunited with the furnishings she had been forced to abandon when she fled France, she refused to look at them, preferring to sell them on.

Anäis Nin

Although Nin was also a novelist and short story writer, it was her sensational, tell-all diaries of both her time in Paris and the other cities she had spent her life in for which she would come to be remembered. Her reflections detail her movements and emotions from living and wandering around vibrant urban spaces. She had amassed an incredible one hundred and fifty volumes of diaries by 1966, and continued to keep more over the remaining eleven years of her life before her eventual death in 1977 aged 73. Her output was phenomenal—around 100,000 words a year—and it was reported that she was somewhat obsessive about her diaries.

What was clear was the role the cities and urban walking had on her creativity. The pleasure and escapism Nin responds to through her words speak to a larger phenomena of the time: that of female freedom. Creative freedom; the pursuit of pleasure; the intoxication of being a woman walking alone through the world, and the pursuit of female sexuality.

“When I am sad, I sometimes tire my sadness away by walking. I walk until I am exhausted. I give myself a fête des yeux (feast for the eyes).”⁴

The role of the male flâneur was commonly aligned with the city streets from the nineteenth century onwards, mainly due to the observations of male writers such as Baudelaire, whose pronouncements on city walking wholly utilised male pronouns, so unthinkable was it that women may also be on the streets as observers.

The female experience is markedly absent in such narratives. The disregard for the possibility of women’s solo wanderings of urban spaces was undoubtedly due to the assumption that no ‘respectable’ woman would undertake such reckless activity. The busy city streets were seen as unsafe for women to walk unaccompanied by men; if they were there at all, they ran the danger of being presumed to be ‘streetwalkers’— prostitutes—and were in danger of being sexually assaulted. (An interesting, if depressing aside: there is still an element of ‘blame’ portrayed on the part of a woman out alone at night- something I wrote more about here).

As Lauren Elkin points out in her brilliant book Flâneuse, the women may have been restricted in their visibility on nineteenth- and early twentieth- century urban streets, but they were undoubtedly there. As she discovered in her own studies and city wanderings, writers such as Jean Rhys, George Sand, Kate Chopin, and of course, Virginia Woolf, were all keen walkers, finding both the creative inspiration and much needed freedom that Nin had also found.

For Nin, her own sexuality and apparent confidence in this appears to have allowed her to disregard much of the inferred sexual threat of the street.

Marrying Hugo Guiler in 1923, she openly reports in her diaries that their relationship was sexually unsatisfactory to her, leading her to engage in sexual experimentation, including orgies and affairs with both sexes and at points, with several men at the same time, unbeknown to the others. Such revelations are related back to her feelings of sensual arousal on the streets of Paris, referencing ‘vibrations’ or ‘sensations’ similar to a sexual encounter.

For Nin, it appeared that the development of her literary voice, her love of walking the city streets, and her sexuality were inextricably linked in her mind and her writing. She also, interestingly, refers to the importance of her walking as a way to be alone; her solitude is of the utmost importance to her.

“The true expression of myself. As I walk for hours alone, I accept myself, I accept what I am. I no longer censure myself, nor will I let others censure me.”⁵

Nin has continued to be a controversial figure; seen by some as a proto-feminist trailblazer who shared her sexuality on the page, paving the way for future women writers; by others, she is seen in a rather less than favourable light.

Her diaries revealed the love triangle between herself, Henry Miller and his wife, June, something which was made into a standalone book of its own and later, a film. She also wrote about her incestuous relationship with her father, as well as it coming to light that she had committed bigamy, marrying Rupert Pole in 1955, despite still being married to Guiler. It seems she maintained this double marriage with one husband in New York and the other in Los Angeles. Following Nin’s death, obituaries featured in major media outlets with some referencing one husband, whilst others referenced the other, causing further scandal.

Whatever the dissection of her personal life however, her diaries, novels and erotic short stories have continued to fascinate readers since her death in 1977. I plan to return to her fiction writing at a later point; my interest here lies more in the ways in which women such as Nin utilised the urban environment in which to develop both their writing and creative impulses, as well as to subvert the expectations and restrictions of women’s movement.

As Elkin and others have more eloquently written, women have always been beneath the surface of the city, finding solace and solitude, creative inspiration and freedom amongst the crowds. There appears no doubt that the very existence of Nin’s diaries owe themselves to her time spent on the streets of the cities she inhabited; none more so prolifically than the Paris she adored.

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1. Anaïs Nin, diary entry for 30th March 1919, in Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914-1920, (San Diego, CA, 1978), p213.

2. Ibid.

3. Anaïs Nin, diary entry for 6th May 1925, in The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol III, 1923-1927, (Boston, MA, 1983), p142.

4. Anais Nin, diary entry for 18th September 1935, in Fire: From ‘A Journal of Love’: The unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1934-1937 (San Diego, CA, New York and London, 1995), p174.

5. Anais Nin, diary entry for 27th April 1934, in Incest, p324.