Miller Henry - Henry and June From A Journal of Love The unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1931–1932

Copyright 1986 by Rupert Pole as Trustee under the last will and testament of Anas Nin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

Some of the material in this volume previously appeared in The Diary of Anas Nin, 19311934, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann, copyright 1966 by Anas Nin. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Jean Sherman for her skillful translation of the passages in French.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Nin, Anas, 19031977.
Henry and June: from a journal of love: the unexpurgated diary of Anas Nin, 19311932.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-15-640057-2
1. Nin, Anas, 19031977Diaries. 2. Authors, American20th centuryDiaries. 3. Miller, Henry, 18911980Relations with women. 4. Smith, June Edith.
I. Title.
[PS3527.I865Z4642 1993]
818'.5403dc20 92-34598

Top cover photograph Wartenberg/Picture Press/CORBIS
Bottom cover photograph David & Peter Turnley/CORBIS
Cover design by Liz Demeter

e ISBN 978-0-547-54023-8
v5.0317

Anas Nin knew very early that she would be a writer. At age seven she signed her stories Anas Nin, Member of the French Academy. In her schoolgirl French she wrote numerous stories and plays that seemed to spring spontaneously from a most dramatic imagination, heightened by Anass need to control her two younger brothers. This, she discovered, could only be accomplished by telling them endless stories and casting them in her theatrical productions.

In 1914, when she was eleven, she began the now-famous diary as a series of letters to her father, who had abandoned the family. She treated the diary as a confidante and wrote in it almost daily throughout her lifein French, until 1920; after that, in English. (The handwritten journals, comprising some 35,000 pages, are now in the Special Collections Department of U.C.L.A.) The discipline of daily writing without readers or censorship gave Anas, over the years, an ability to describe her emotions of the moment, an ability not fully realized until the period of Henry and June, which began in 1931.

She wrote continuously, both fiction and her diary, for another forty-five years. Anas the diarist and Anas the novelist carried on an uneasy relationship. She wrote in the diary in 1933: My book [a novel] and my journal step on each others feet constantly. I can neither divorce nor reconcile them. I play the traitor to both. I am more loyal to my journal, however. I will put pages of my journal into the book but never pages of the book into the journal, showing a human faithfulness to the human authenticity of the journal.

In the late twenties John Erskine told Anas that her diary contained her best writing, and she began to work on an idea that would allow her to publish many pages of it. At this time it could have been published complete; she had nothing to conceal. Thereafter she would devise a number of plans for publication: transforming the diary into fiction, doing it in diary form with fictitious names, or doing it in diary form with both fictitious and real names. But from 1932 on, when she began with Henry Miller what became a lifelong search for the perfect love, she realized she could never publish the diary as she wrote it without hurting her husband, Hugh Guiler, as well as others. She turned, instead, to publishing fiction.

By the mid-fifties, after her stories and novels had failed to bring her more than underground recognition, she thought of another, more workable method of publishing the diary without risk of injury to others. She decided to use real names and to simply edit out her personal life, her husband, and her lovers. After reading Henry and June, anyone familiar with the first published diary (1966) will realize what an ingenious accomplishment this was. Anas the diarist would probably have begun that initial diary at its actual beginning in 1914. But Anas the novelist, always dominant, chose to begin in 1931, her most interesting and dramatic period, when she had just met Henry and June Miller.

The present volume reexamines that period from a new perspective, releasing material deleted from the original diary and never before published. It was Anass wish to have the full story told.

The text is taken from journals thirty-two through thirty-six, titled June, The Possessed, Henry, Apotheosis and Downfall, and Journal of a Possessed, written from October 1931 to October 1932. It has been edited to focus on the story of Anas, Henry, and June. Material that appeared in The Diary of Anas Nin, 19311934 has been deleted, for the most part, but some of it has been repeated here for the sake of giving a coherent account.

Anass diary writing was at its most prolific during this period. In 1932 alone she completed six journals. These include her first experiments in erotic writing. The puritanical Catholic girl who could not bring herself to describe to her diary her salacious (to her innocent mind) experiences as a model was now faced with recording her awakening to passion. She was influenced, of course, by Henry Millers style and vocabulary. Ultimately her own unique voice prevails, and her writing reflects her emotional and physical frenzy during this momentous year. She is never to be quite this wild again, although her sexual odyssey will continue for many years to come.

Rupert Pole

Executor, The Anas Nin Trust

Los Angeles, California

February, 1986

My cousin Eduardo came to Louveciennes yesterday. We talked for six hours. He reached the conclusion I had come to also: that I need an older mind, a father, a man stronger than me, a lover who will lead me in love, because all the rest is too much a self-created thing. The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.

As we were talking, Eduardo suddenly began to tremble, and he took my hand. He said that I belonged to him from the very beginning; that an obstacle stood between us: his fear of impotence because at first I had aroused ideal love in him. He has suffered from the realization that we are both seeking an experience which we might have given to each other. It has seemed strange to me, too. The men I have wanted, I couldnt have. But I am determined to have an experience when it comes my way.

Sensuality is a secret power in my body, I said to Eduardo. Someday it will show, healthy and ample. Wait a while.

Or is this not the secret of the obstacle between us?that his type is the large, buxom woman, heavy on the earth, while I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.

For a whole week Hugo has come home very late, and I kept cheerful and unconcerned, as I had promised myself. Then on Friday he got worried and said, Do you realize it is twenty minutes to eight, that Im very late? Say something about it. And we both burst out laughing. He did not like my indifference.

On the other hand, our quarrels, when they come, seem harder and more emotional. Are all our emotions stronger now that we give vent to them? There is a desperation in our reconciliations, a new violence both in anger and in love. The problem of jealousy alone remains. It is the one obstacle to our complete freedom. I cannot even talk of my wish to go to a cabaret where we could dance with professional dancers.