Anais Nin

Even after the annulment of her marriage with her second husband Pole in 1966, she continued to live with him until her death; he was given all the rights to her literary works and thus he published many of her novels that she herself hadn’t.

She died in Los Angeles on January 14, 1977 after suffering with cancer for almost three years. She was 74 years old.

Though she was raised a Roman-Catholic, she desired to cremate her body instead of burying it. Her ashes were sprinkled over the Santa Monica Bay in Mermaid Cove.

Anais was born to Joaquin Nin, a composer by profession and Rosa Culmell, a Cuban classical singer, in France on 21 February 1903.

After her parents separated,she moved with her mother and two brothers first toSpain and then to the United States.

In the States she attended formal school until the age of sixteen; shortly afterward she dropped out of school, began modelling for artists and became a dancer too.

However, as a student she was brilliant; she quickly began to correspond fluently in English, both written and orally, and at the same time she held onto her French roots.

On 3 March 1923, at the age of 20, Anais fell in love and married the established banker and experimental film maker, Hugh Parker Guiler in Cuba.

A year after their marriage they moved to Paris where she began writing towards the late 1920s. She wrote her first book in a meagre 16 days, it was called ‘D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study’.

In the mid-1930s, she wrote several diaries, which contained dauntless statements of affection and intimate conversational verbatim between the famous American author, Henry miller and herself.

This gave rise to speculations of an affair between the two that mainly was speculated to be physical. Her husband had declined any reference to his name in her diaries and thus, her diaries include hardly any mention of her husband.

During this time she learned psychoanalysis under the guidance of Otto Rank, an assistant of Sigmund Freud with whom she shared an intriguing and intimate relation.

At 44, Anais Nin met the young and suave actor Rupert Pole in an elevator at Manhattan. She was on her way to a party and the two immediately fell in love and began living with each other.

She was still married to Guiler, who did not know about her affair with Pole. Taking a step further with her new found love, she secretly married Pole in 1955.

It is said that Guiler was uninformed of the matrimonial alliance between Anais and Pole. It is also debated that he chose to remain oblivious to the marriage, with remote knowledge of the affair his wife had with Pole.

Thus, began her dual life that she describes as ‘filled with lies.’ In one of her diaries, she states that she was often so steeped in lies that she had to maintain two check books, one labelled ‘Anais Pole for Los Angeles’ and the other ‘Anais Guiler for New York.

She had to tell so many lies and keep a track of where she said what, that most of it she noted down so as they wouldn’t turn against her.