One of the fascinating things about Nin, is that she's the first,
she's the great forerunner of women's confessional sex writing.
You know at that period, there wasn't a western woman writing about sex.
She got up and brought a long mirror, and stood it against the chair.
The sight was enchanting.
She was a woman of tomorrow. She wrote about being a woman, what an orgasm was like,
what sex was like. And she tried to find the words to describe what it felt like.
She thought it was like the gum plant leaf with its secret milk, that the pressure of the finger
could bring out.
I think Anais Nin's erotica is really unique. You read her describing
women's bodies as though they're flesh and fruit, there's a real poetry to her.
I will not rest until I have told of my descent, into a sensuality,
which was dark, magnificent, wild.
Anais Nin's diaries described all of her fascinating sexual adventures and they were
the very explicit material, that she mined for the short stories, the novels,
the erotica.
She began to write them, as a very young girl.
Anais Nin's diaries were her lifeline.
I think they were her secret friend, I think the way she describes
them as a labyrinth, is really telling.
She was born in France in 1903, but the family later moved to New York when she was 11.
Her father was Cuban, and a womanizer, he was a liar.
And she's this intense child, who's been unwell, who doesn't seem to have anyone
around who's like her. She has these unhappy, battling parents,
she's caught in the middle.
And then the father abandons them, and she's devastated.
But that was when she began to write.
And so Nin starts to write the journal as almost a kind of set of letters,
or postcards to her father.
Entreating him, to come and join the rest of the family,
in New York.
But then she goes on writing the diaries almost every day, for the rest of her life.
And they set her off, on this incredible journey to become a great writer.
- Miss Nin. - What a pleasure to meet you, please.
You're a real role model, for women writers Miss. Nin.
Well, for all women. And now the diaries.
I appreciate that they're censored to protect people, but Miss. Nin,
I'd like to know the truth about your life.
And I have agreed to tell you the whole story.
I thought my life would really begin with my marriage to Hugo Guiler.
There were problems at first, the family were against it.
I was a skinny little immigrant girl, a superstitious catholic and he was,
from a wealthy, protestant, banking family.
But we defied it.
And he was sent to work in a Paris branch of the bank,
so we moved over there.
Louveciennes resembles the village where Madame Bovary lived and died.
It is old, untouched, and unchanged, by modern life.
On a clear night, one can see Paris.
Behind the windows of the village houses, old women sit watching
people pass by. The dogs bark at night.
My house is 200 years old.
Every day he goes to the bank, I write in my diary.
I am young, I am full of hope, and dreams.
But I am innocent, in particular, I am sexually innocent.
On my wedding night, Hugo was exalted and romantic, he added wonderful words
of worship.
But he was inexperienced.
He worked his body against mine, until he came, all over my nightgown.
I was so amazed at the wetness.
I felt sad, vague.
I thought that he did not love me.
He liked to get me to lie on the bed with my clothes on, and to raise my legs
so that he could look.
That was all he wanted, to look up between my legs.
It was I who incited him one night to push in, until he broke through
the virginity, and the blood came, and it was done.
Hugo made no crisis before, he didn't notice that I had no time to grow moist.
He had to spread Vaseline between my legs to penetrate me.
At such times I hated him, I lay like one who had been murdered.
She wanted to be a good wife and,
couldn't understand initially, this kind of, very deep,
rooted sense of dissatisfaction. It wasn't just sexual dissatisfaction,
I think it was much more diffuse than that, she was just dissatisfied
with her life.
She felt that she was, almost in prison.
You know a gilded cage, of sorts. But she was locked away,
with her books. She really lived off of dreams, off of her imagination.
I know that there is more to life, than sitting at home
polishing the furniture. I know ordinary life does not interest me.
I seek only the high moments, I am in accordance with the Surrealists.
Searching for the marvelous. But the marvelous does not happen.
I mend shops, prune trees, polish furniture, I am not living.
But I am not like Madame Bovary, going to take poison.
Instead, I am going to Paris.
I think if any of us, had a chance in a time machine, to go to Paris,
in the 20's and 30's, we would take it.
It was the center of the globe, the artistic globe, at that time.
And for Nin, it was just a train ride away. So, with Hugo away all day,
she'd just go and wander the streets of this bohemian paradise,
of pre-war Paris.
Paris must have been extraordinarily exciting in the 1920's and 30's,
a time of incredible social mixing, glamor, creativity.
And then she began to take these dancing lessons in Paris, which began as an escape
from boredom, but turned into something much more thrilling.
Later my Spanish dancing teacher fell in love with me.
He had the power to make me dance.
Below the dancing studio, there were little dressing rooms.
And as I stood against the dresses and shawls, he lifted my skirt,
and kissed my sex, until I grew dizzy.
[MOANS]
I take pleasure in my transformations. Few know many women
there are in me.
When ordinary life shackles me, I escape one way, or another.
No more walls.
Nin did experience herself, as an amazing person,
trapped in a very bourgeois, and bland, and stale existence.
But she began to realize the possibility for another kind of life.
And Hugo sensed, that she was changing.
Hugo accompanies me to all the salons.
He buys me everything that I want, but I am not happy.
Imprisoned I feel I am a day-tripper from the village.
I press my nose, to the window of life.
I feel I am becoming two women.
One who is kind, loyal, pure of thought. But then there is another.
She is restless and impure, acting strangely, lucid, wandering, seeking life
and wanting to taste all of it. Without fear, restraint, principle, a demon.
- I just wonder how far she will go? - You would never do wrong.
- You would never jeopardize our relationship. - I want experience.
[MOANING]
Hugo is clearly one of those men who finds his wife so erotic, such a kind of incredible
sexual geisha; that eventually his desire, is more stimulated,
by seeing her being this goddess for other men.
But he never actually agrees to her having affairs.
He just doesn't want to know the truth, and so she lies to him.
They find this way, of making their marriage work.
Dreams, are necessary to life.
The earth is every day opaque, without dreams.
I have days of illuminations, and fevers.
I want to be a writer, who reminds others that these moments exist.
Throw your dreams into space, like a kite, and you do not know what
it will bring back. A new life, a new friend, a new love?
She needed a life to write about and she needed someone bold, confident, and who could
help her become a writer.
And then Henry Miller arrives, and he's all those things, and he's not necessarily
the world's most attractive man, but he's charismatic, and he needs her.
The first time I read something of Henry, it was like a bomb
in me exploding. I knew straight away, that he was a great artist.
I wanted to meet him, and our lawyer knew him, so I invited him to a meal.
He is a man who life intoxicates, who is floating
on self-created euphoria.
He is immersed in writing his book,
sleeps anywhere, a railroad station waiting room, a park;
he lives from day to day, buying, begging, sponging,
he is almost a hobo.
The relationship between Anais and Henry Miller is really interesting,
they clearly had quite a riotous, rivaled friendship, where they
challenged each other. And he was much older than her, but he hadn't been
published yet, and he was living this down and out life,
writing his first novel, Tropic of Cancer.
Anais gets restless here during the day, on her own.
I'm always restless. Things just keep carrying me away.
I feel like as though, my hair is being pulled into the stars again.
The moment I am deeply rooted, I have to utmost desire to uproot myself.
I close my eyes for an instant, to see him by some other inner eye.
- You don't want a real bird? - No, I prefer antique ages.
I'm waiting to find a unique, strange bird.
One that I've seen in my dreams.
But as yet, I have not found it.
He has no typewriter, I give him mine.
He gives me a world of writing, parts of his book, as he writes it.
Notes on the backs of menus in small restaurants, and Chevy quarters.
A torrent of realism.
I too love everything that flows, rivers, sewers,
lava, semen,
words, sentences.
I love the words of hysterics. And the sentences that flow on, like dysentery,
and mirror all the sick images of the soul.
His writing is treacherous, and dangerous.
At sixteen, I wrote in my diary, that I had dreamed
of putting myself, under the protection and nobility of a great writer.
Henry was such a man.
Hugo is worried he will lose me to Henry, I tell him he won't.
I'm devoted to Henry's work only. I separate my body from my mind.
To begin with, they weren't sleeping together, but they did have this strong
creative relationship.
She saw that Henry Miller was dedicated to being a writer, so he had discipline,
he had rigor.
Henry read my work, he tells me I write like a man, with tremendous clearness.
His imagination is relentless, and fertile, a demon loose in the world.
You have your version of the world, as somewhat monstrous,
and I have mine.
But I'll fight you Henry Miller, I'll fight your realism, with all the magical forces
of poetry.
Art is art, the paradise, the only paradise.
Paradise is a place with white feather palm trees, with formulas,
with glass fishes, silk lined balls, invisible music,
dishes shaped like stars, costumes of cellophane,
paradise was artifice.
Would you mind, telling me about,
- June, Henry's extraordinary wife? - I didn't know Henry well.
I admired his mind, his work enormously, but well,
that paled into insignificance, when I met June.
I saw for the first time, the most beautiful woman on earth.
Her beauty drowned me.
A startling white face, burning eyes, my first sight of her,
I felt that I would do anything mad for her.
Henry feared, she was color, brilliance, strangeness.
Over dinner, she and Henry told all their secrets,
their sex, their fighting.
You see we're at war with each other, Henry and I.
Oh, and one time, we hired a room where,
I could be a prostitute, with a client, and he could watch.
- Remember Henry? - [LAUGHING]
- He watched me with women. - [LAUGHS] Don't all men like that?
I guess not.
By the end of the night, I was like a man, terribly in love with her face,
and body, which promised so much.
I think June had, a huge influence on Nin.
Her shamelessness you know, she speaks really coarsely,
and she's a complete fantasist, she lies all the time. One time she's telling Nin,
that she was raised in the circus. And then you never knew
when she was going to arrive, and you never knew when she was going to leave.
June and I live life, as theater.
We love costumes and changes of self's, and wearing masks, and disguises.
But I always know what is real, thanks June.
Come here!
She has the body of the women, who climbed every night upon the stage of music halls,
and gradually undressed.
Beautiful.
Oh I want to dance for you Anais.
I am fascinated by her eyes, and mouth.
Her discolored mouth, badly bruised.
I do not make out her words, I see ashes under the skin of her face.
Disintegration, she is dying before my eyes.
Truth comes from confessions, in the darkness of the bedroom, or from,
violent tearing of masks.
I want to kiss her fantastic beauty and say, "I dreamed you,
I wished for your existence".
A few days later we went to the theater, outside smoking in the interval,
I tell her, "you are the only woman whoever answered
the demands in my imagination".
She answers, "it's a good thing for me, I'm going away".
What, what, what, what, what, what? She had to go back to New York,
for a while. June would soon unmask me. I am powerless,
before a woman.
I want to kiss you.
After June, filled with June, I could not bare Hugo reading
the newspaper, and talking about trust funds, and a successful day.
He was immensely lovable, and warm, but I could not come back.
The love between women, is a refuge, an escape into harmony.
In the love between a man and a woman, there is
resistance, conflict.
I am trapped between the beauty of June, and the genius of Henry.
Every encounter of June Miller, that we have is this,
very exciting, charismatic,
androgynous, kind of stalky, earthy figure, who was very very attractive.
So there was this tantalizing flirtation, and kissing but not evidence
of a full sexual relationship. Just this powerful attraction, on Nin's side.
When June left, she went back to New York.
I waited sometimes where we used to meet, expecting to feel again
the joy of seeing her walk towards me, out of a crowd.
I went for a massage, the masseuse was small and pretty.
I saw her breasts when she leaned over me, small but full.
I was stirred, madly.
Aware of the frustration of my desire.
I knew that June did not reach the same sexual center in me that a man reaches.
So what then had she moved in me?
But there is no life in the love between women.
The animal strength which satisfies women, lies in brutal men.
In the realists, like Henry.
A letter from Henry, I received one every day.
Deep down, I'm afraid of this man. His sensual being,
the ferocity enveloped in tenderness, his ever rich mind.
Writers make love to what they need.
-Henry wrote to me, I could- -stay here all night writing.
I see you before me constantly, with your head down, and your long lashes
lying on your cheek.
It seems to me, that from the very moment when you held out your hand,
I was yours.
I met Henry in a small dark bar.
Suddenly he leans over, and engulfs me in an endless kiss.
I do not want the kiss to end.
Later a small dark room, so shabby like an alcove,
the richness of Henry's voice and mouth.
The feeling of sinking into warm blood.
And he overcome with my warmth and moisture,
Slow penetration, with pauses and with twists,
make me gasp with pleasure.
I have no words for it, it is all new to me.
That afternoon in Henry's room, was like a white hot furnace.
Before I had only the white heat of the mind and the imagination,
now it is of the blood, sacred completeness.
I come out dazed in a mellow spring evening, and I think,
now I would not mind dying.
So it was Henry Miller, who awakened you?
Sexually. And who inspired your work, your writing,
and you inspired his?
It was my writer's soul, that loved Henry.
He was doing his best writing, there was, such a splendor to it.
I want to feel your presence for a few hours.
To feed you, cool you,
fill you with every breath on earth of the trees which reap the blood.
I realized that I don't want you to come back.
As a muse, I couldn't have asked for more, and yes as a woman,
I was fully awake, and then fully alive.
I have only three desires now.
To eat, to sleep, and to fuck.
I want to dance.
I want drugs. I want to bite into life, and be torn by it.
And as soon as she begins to have fantastic sex,
she realizes, this is what I can write about.
I mean she just breaks free, and unleashes the shackles.
Of both her imagination, and her body.
But, you aren't a published writer yet, you're just a woman writing
a diary. You still had your nose pressed against the window,
you're a banker's wife, a muse, but you're
serving them dinner, and giving them money.
I believe someone called you a,
little bourgeois banker's wife?
While I was writing the diaries, they were my material.
And, I was learning to create art out of them.
To describe an adventure?
I come back to Hugo pleased, and so joyous.
He says, "I have never been so happy with you".
I am always concerned with Hugo, as though he were my child.
It is because I love him best, I wish he was 10 years old.
I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink into
sulphur colored mists.
I just cry and laugh.
He desires me, my conscious dies at that moment.
Hugo bears down on me, and I immediately obey Henry's whispered words,
I close my legs about Hugo, and he exclaims in ecstasy,
"you're driving me wild".
Henry whispers to me, what my body must do.
I obey, and new instincts rise in me.
I am woman, a man has made me submit.
How did you conceal this from your husband?
Wasn't, keeping a journal a dangerous thing?
Well yes, and,
there came a time, that Hugo found it.
One day he read my diary, the red one.
I told him that it was fiction.
Hugo finds the diary about Henry, in which Nin is talking wildly
about their love making, and how sensual she feels when she's with Henry.
She becomes terrified that, the life that they have built together,
is going to be shattered. And so she tells Hugo, that this diary,
the diary that he has read, is a diary of her fantasy life.
And that there is a second diary, which is the real, diary.
I ran quickly, bought a green journal,
while he was at work, I wrote quickly and secretly, to bring it up to date.
The imaginary account, of my sensual life.
Does writing about this, extremely unconventional web of relationships
also justify it? Does it absolve you of any issues of morality?
Well you see, it allowed me to live and,
to watch myself live, at a distance.
I called it, the double monde.
It turned me into an observer, reporting.
Did it make your betrayals bearable?
Perhaps some things are buried in the bone.
And then June Miller came back from New York.
June arrived last night, I was stunned.
I am like a person drowning.
And I found no pain, at the sound of her voice,
no bliss.
June is my adventure, and my passion, but Henry is my love.
I cannot face them both.
At first, June had wanted to fight me.
At the first sight of my eyes, she trusted me again.
On the bed with June, she began to kiss me saying,
"how little you are, I could break you in two.
We kissed each other, passionately.
Her light moth kisses showered on me,
she said, "you look beautiful now".
I said, "let me see your body".
I was aware of a standstill, June said "not yet".
I ought to strangle you.
She began to extract confidences from me.
I was wary, I depicted the quality of my love for Henry,
while deforming completely the facts about him.
What a superb game, the three of us were playing.
Who is the demon? Who the liar? Who loves the most?
What has he done for me?
They had both betrayed her, so Anais Nin herself,
had a sort of sexual involvement with June.
But it was very twisted. And it resulted in the end of Henry and June's marriage.
So Anais now got Henry all to herself, and they could just be
writers together.
June told Henry "I know everything, that you love Anais, and Anais loves you".
June left and, and Henry rushed over to me.
And we plunged into work.
There is in our relationship, both humanists, and monstrosity.
Our love is humane, I sense when he is cold, I get him blankets.
But our work, is monstrous.
When we write we heighten, exaggerate, color,
There are satanic joys, known to writers only.
June is a story teller.
Dragged in our romances.
I, begin to notice discrepancies in her stories.
Childish lies, she lives without magic.
He is rewriting his novel, Tropic of Cancer, immersed in the past.
I gave him my ideas on June, and he uses them.
When June leaves with great dignity, it's as though Anais and Henry
say to themselves, "alright well, let's really destroy her.
Let's take who this person was as a human being, and write her as a character".
And so I feel like Anais Nin, and Henry Miller got famous, off the back of writing
about June Miller.
And it says something about how cruel writers can somehow be,
I think they both did her over.
I think that she considered herself to be a diarist, and had fantasies
of being a published author. But I don't think it was until she met Miller,
That she really began to realize that as a possibility, for herself.
What she wants to do, is put sex into writing.
She can't stop writing, she can't stop having sex, she can't stop gathering
experiences to herself. She needed the writing to make sense of the experience.
But also, she was having the experience, to do the writing.
A woman artist, has to feel creation and life in our own way,
or in our own womb. She has to create something different from a man.
To create within the mystery storms, and terrors of sex,
women must not fabricate, she has to descend into a real womb and,
and expose its secrets, and labyrinths. She's the mermaid with her
fish tail dipped into the unconscious.
So this way of life simply, carried on?
Yes when,
when Hugo went away on business, Henry would come and live with me in the house.
Did you feel much guilt? I know you had therapy throughout this time.
Well yes, I had therapy for many years.
This here gave me absolution, and helped me to see,
I should feel no Catholic guilt.
It was a great influence on my writing.
Jung said "proceed from the dream outwards", and that is always how
I've tried to write.
I say this is a wild dream.
But it is this dream, I want to realize.
Life and literature combined.
Love, a diamond.
You with your chameleon soul, giving me a thousand loves.
Being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are.
In the mornings, continuing where we left off.
Resurrection after resurrection.
When, Anais experienced that first taste,
of sexual pleasure, and sexual fulfilment, it blew the doors wide open.
And she, had a glimpse into what is essentially a very mysterious
part of human life. That we still to this day, are not particularly
comfortable in talking about.
So she went on an odyssey, searching to throw off
the fevers and the shackles.
Through various men.
So you had freed yourself from guilt, and now you could do
as a man does, and take many lovers.
It was not just Henry Miller, was it? There are others too,
Gonzalo, the South American revolutionary?
Oh, Gonzalo.
[FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
Then you're my tiger of dreams.
My tiger,
[FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
- What do I have to do? - He whispered, while we danced.
You are the perfume and essence of all things.
You have bruised your head, against the world's reality.
You don't see the city, houses, men, you see beyond.
But I don't want, always what is beyond.
I want this world.
This world but, with grandchildren, and heroism.
I want to go to Spain with you now, I want to see war.
When she met Gonzalo, interestingly he was,
in a sense, the traditional Spanish man.
And he brought out, the passive, feminine,
woman in her. And she thoroughly enjoyed it.
And I think she was also attracted to what, initially seemed to be his,
radical politics, and his fieriness, and his kind of seriousness,
and his passion. Which was a counter point, both to Henry and to Hugo,
I would say. In terms of temperament.
Here is Gonzalo, ardently breathing out the fire of revolution.
He wants to kiss me wildly, and talk vehemently.
With Gonzalo I entered that dream of communism, its essence.
The white ghost of communism, as it must have been in Russia.
Little idiot Anais, you're given a spider web,
and you want to make a sail out of it, and sail a boat.
Oh I want a boat, I want to get outside of the world with Gonzalo.
He is a pirate, an anarchist, lover, and warrior.
Anais Donclay, at dawn he must put on his armor.
He will leave you for a crusade.
So what did Gonzalo feel in you?
The writing, the diaries.
I was surrendering to great passion, and reporting back
through the diaries, the experience of a woman.
Revolution is another orgasm, sainthood is another orgasm.
They are made of wafers, on the lip, of blood and wounds,
experiencing while blabbering odd or dead words, in epilepsy,
or insanity. All pulsations leading to explosion.
Gongs of pleasure, sound in church bells, or death mills.
I wanted a houseboat on the sand, to look Gonzalo and to write.
I wrote on the title page, Les mots flottants, the floating words.
I had to find a houseboat for them.
Was Henry jealous, of Gonzalo?
Yes, and they both fought desperately for my attention.
There was a Saturday night, when Henry insisted that I was with him,
so Gonzalo insisted on the same night.
That evening, I put a sleep drug in Henry's tea,
and by 10 o'clock, he was asleep.
I dressed, and crept to Gonzalo.
And he was so frightened, by what Henry would do, if he woke,
that he couldn't perform.
At 5:30 am, I rushed back to Henry.
He hadn't woken, the luck of the bandits.
I gave Henry everything that he wanted and,
then went home and gave Hugo a gift.
Was it just sex or love?
I had at that time an,
emotional love tapeworm, never enough.
When you vibrate deeply, sexually,
when you love passionately,
then it is like a warm current, in the body, which creates a warm contact
with all. I feel so many people.
Physically, amorously, cause I am in a state of warmth,
like a mystic, it is immensely overflow.
But mainly it was Gonzalo More, Henry Miller, and my husband Hugo
They were the three main men, during my lady time in Paris.
It feels as if Paris, was a love affair too.
That all this, couldn't of happened anywhere else.
Well there was, there was such a magic about Paris.
The smell of pate, and charcoal burners, tobacco, and cafe o'lait,
and the people.
We went to the madness club house, with an omelet,
with a big pockets.
And then to play chess at the cafe, where the old actors
meet for a game, to the tunes of those tired classical musicians
playing quartets, and we stayed until dawn.
As the tired prostitutes wore down, and the music inside of me.
I feel the mad hope of jazz, it ended in my blood.
[RADIO BROADCAST]
England is determined that the violence must cease.
Premier Deladier told the foreign affairs commission, to the chamber of deputies
that France does not wish to live any longer, in the state of insecurity,
prevailing in the last few years. And both Allies,
have said that they cannot trust the word of the present German government.
The bombs aren't literally falling around her, but they might as well be,
at that point.
It suddenly dawns on her, that perhaps being in Europe,
in the midst of World War II, is not the best idea.
At the first air raids, I would not hide.
I wanted to encounter war, and feel its burning face.
A shell fell in my courtyard, Hugo was ordered back to the United States.
It was time for us to leave for New York.
The parting from Paris, the parting from a form of life,
from mysterious nights, the menace of war,
the sound of anti-aircraft guns, of airplanes passing, of sirens.
When Gonzalo came to see me, I was weeping.
I felt too wrenching from Henry.
I carried the diaries, in a little blue cloth bag.
The time on the train, was so long and sad.
A glimpse of the tragic face of Spain, its hunger, its ruins.
At the frontier, locked up in the cloth bag, lies the hidden story
of these eight years.
When I felt so uprooted, torn, split,
I reread two volumes, and felt again, the force of my life,
the fire of it. I warmed myself, to my one flame.
It was, I felt small and sick, and powerless at that moment.
I think Paris was this gorgeous bubble, I think the war was
a real reckoning.
And it was reality, slamming down.
So Anais Nin goes to New York, which she describes as,
brutal, and mechanistic, and hard, and full of concrete, and poverty, and strife.
She describes American as robots, and she is rootless.
New York, I feel like a ghost.
Hugo's bank takes care of us, so I enter a palace of Byzantine luxury.
The more comforts, warmth, luxurious beds, service,
the lonelier I feel.
As one can only feel in a palace.
I landed in my diaries, but without my soul.
The machine in Europe, it is killing people, and here it is canning them.
It would have been better for all of us to die in flame, than this kind of death.
And then the others arrived.
Gonzalo, and Henry,
I paid their fares, their rents.
I was overstretched financially, but I felt responsible for them all.
But you managed, you supported them all.
With a little bit of help, you see Henry was offered 100 dollars a month,
to write erotic stories about a wealthy client.
At first he wrote all these wild stories but,
but then he got annoyed, because of course he wanted to do his proper writing, so
so he suggested that I give it a go.
I wrote a few stories, and sent them off and,
and then I received a phone call.
It's fine, but leave out the poetry, and the descriptions
of anything but the sex. I just want the sex.
So I began to write, a bit tongue in cheek.
I was so outlandish and inventive, I thought it would be too much.
I spent days studying the Karma Sutra.
And listening to friends' most extreme adventures.
And what does the beast do?
I had a feeling that here was a Pandora's box which,
contained women's sensuality.
So different from a man's, and from which man's language,
seemed inadequate.
- Would you like me to read some of the stories? - Please.
She remembered Martinez, the flick of his tongue covering the distance,
from the pubic hair to the buttocks.
How do I look to him, she asked herself.
She got up and brought a long mirror, and stood it against the chair.
Then she sat down in front of it, and slowly opened her legs.
The sight was enchanting.
She thought it was like the gum plant leaf, with its secret milk,
that the pressure of the finger could bring out.
The odorous moisture, that came like the moisture of the seashells.
Women discovered in Anais Nin's writing, a kind of delicacy,
and a poise and intelligence, that are really unique.
It wasn't about how do men see women? It was about how do,
women see women? How do, women experience the world
and experience their sexuality?
She described a woman being able to pleasure herself, for herself, with herself.
And, also men were there, but it was women
as the center of everything.
And with her fingers, she opened the two little lips of the vulva.
And she began stroking it, with cat like softness, back and forth.
She writes in her sort of,
dream state. She just slips into this far more, free fall,
impressionistic state. Which is quite original, it's sexy,
there are no boundaries. There's bestiality,
there's paedophilia, there's necrophilia, there's lesbian scenes,
there's everything. She's just running through this gimmick of fantasies.
Some of it, presumably based on her inexperience.
While writing the erotica, I remembered this,
I was seven or eight years, my father always took us to the attic to be whipped.
We all hated this, and begged to be forgiven.
Now I ask myself, if the hand that administered the powerful spankings,
must have awakened a region of pleasure.
I never before was aware, of a link between them.
Until one night I entered one of those booths, where they show erotic films.
And I saw a scene where a woman bent another over, and began spanking her sharply.
I felt the most amazing pleasure. I grew wet between the legs,
and began to palpitate, almost reaching orgasm.
I entered into a period, of erotic madness.
Some were young, too young.
Deliver me from obsessive love.
People think I only crave love or worship.
Nobody knows I am crying out for my very existence.
I only exist in the body of my lover.
How can I go anywhere, alone?
I have written not to be alone.
I see her as this, quite broken individual.
Who had lots of pathologies, which are clearly survival mechanisms.
She's not, she's not this abusive woman,
who's deliberately mistreating others, she's someone who is skating
on thin ice, psychologically.
With huge amounts of ambition, and desire, and energy, and of course,
you know what does a woman have to sell, if she's got nothing?
Her sexuality, because there's nothing left.
As she started getting into the affairs, I myself was a young woman,
and was shocked. And I had to grapple with my own
feelings of judgment.
When it came to reading about her affair with her father,
I, threw the book across the room.
And, had to take a few deep breaths.
I await my father with deep joy and patience.
I recognize in him the king, the leader of the mental world I had created alone.
I am dazzled, his hair was perfumed, his nails immaculate.
She meets him again, when she's 33, and he's about 53.
And he is a dashing man, who flirts with her.
Now what a fascinating thing, for her to,
perhaps turn the tables, on him.
He was watching me, constantly.
He said, "what a tragedy I meet the woman of my life,
and it is my daughter".
We looked at each other, as if in a dream,
we kissed, and that kiss unleashed a wave, of desire.
"We must avoid possession", he said, "but oh let me kiss you".
He uncovered himself, and with a strange violence,
I lifted my negligee, and lay over him.
Anais he cried, "I've lost my god".
Were you happy?
Happy?
I have never described before,
the act of self-murder, which takes place after my being with someone.
A sense of shame, for the most trivial defect.
Lack, sleep, error, for being too passionate.
For not being free, or being too impulsive.
For not being myself, or being too much so.
-That is, very touching, it sounds so… Desperate.
It was.
I had finished with Gonzalo, and, I had finished with Henry,
Hugo was more of a brother to me, most of the time.
And the diaries? At this point everyone, knew about them,
but they didn't get published.
The thing that, made me very sad was that,
everything that I wrote, the stories, the novels, originated from the diaries.
But I couldn't get the diaries past the censor.
She suddenly changes from the person who only wants to have love affairs,
and see where that takes her, to being someone that says now I want to get this work
out and no one will take it.
So she just buys her own press, and publishes her own work.
Gonzalo was a trained printist, so he helps, but she types it,
and hand cranks all the work herself.
Work has degraded me, I have no time for obsessions. I began typesetting.
I go to work regularly at the press, morning and afternoon.
Setting by me, printing by Gonzalo. We work with fervor,
and intensity.
June, 1942, the book was finished at 11:45 at night.
My brother once described me as a still hummingbird, determined to be famous.
And I was determined, 20 years of work behind me.
I wrote to colleges, asking for invitations to speak, and I sent them copies
of my books, and photographs, and,
and slowly, very slowly I began to get a following for my fiction.
And by the end of the 1940's, she had quite a few things published.
Short stories, novels like House of Incest, and Winter of Artif, e
and some volumes of the early diaries.
And on these university tours, she was met with a lot
of avid, young feminist students, in particular.
Who had been very inspired by the diary, and by the sense
that Nin had lived, what seemed impossible at the time,
this truly liberated life, as a woman.
And so for certain feminists, she was somewhat of an icon.
You said you're still with your husband.
- Do you sort of muddle along? - Not muddle along as a person.
- Oh I'm sorry, I didn't. - F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts,
in American lives.
Of course we know that he is wrong.
He looks like Hugo, 20 years ago.
Everybody says that.
His name is Rupert Pole, he works for the forestry commission in California.
I have two husbands, it's complicated.
What's really interesting about Nin, is that from the 40's onwards,
she has two husbands. One on the east coast, Hugo the original husband,
one on the west coast, Rupert Pole. And she flies between
the two husbands. Neither of them know about each other.
In her day it was so shocking, that it could never come out, so she had to have
two check books, two sets of prescriptions, either side
of the Atlantic, she had to have a lie box, so she knew what she was telling
each husband. She's behaving like a character in her book,
so she's maintained these facades of lies. And she has these
multiple diaries where one of them, is the real diary.
In which she writes about what she's truly getting up to. And the other one
is just like a prop, in a drama. What's astounding really,
is that she was able to keep those two lives going for so long,
we're talking around about 30 years, that she kept up,
this traveling back and forth.
The salacious details of her life, tend to obscure
how good a writer she actually was. And you don't get to be
a New York Times best seller, without being a good writer.
People wanted to read this stuff, and people still want to read
this stuff.
And that's a testament, I think to the power of her writing,
and how interesting her ideas are.