Significant Others by Whitney Chadwick

Author:Whitney Chadwick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
Published: 2018-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

9

THE LITERATE PASSION OF

Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller

NOËL RILEY FITCH

She was a delicate European flower and he a gravel-throated Brooklyn-bred vagabond when they met one December day in 1931 in a small village outside Paris. As he approached her home in Louveciennes, she noticed his lean body, balding head and piercing eyes; he looked like a Buddhist monk with a full sensuous mouth, she thought. He first noted her large round eyes and shy manner. It was to be a casual lunch, but he was penniless and hungry. He came with the man who was putting him up in his apartment, Richard Osborn, who worked in the same bank as her husband, Hugh Guiler. Osborn had been telling the two writers that they should meet. He had been giving Anaïs Nin Guiler legal advice on her manuscript, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, which he showed Henry Miller; to Nin he had given Miller’s review of L’ge d’or, Luis Buñuel’s Surrealist film. Each had expressed interest in the work of the other: she thought Miller’s piece was “primitive, savage”; he was more than a little interested in a woman who would write about Lawrence, with courage and delicacy. They did, indeed, like each other and slipped into lively dialogue. He ate heartily, grateful for the free meal, hoping this would lead to more invitations. She confided to her diary, which she had been keeping since her eleventh year, that she found his “toughness” fascinating and “new.”1 She sensed that she had something to learn from his primitiveness; he, in turn, intuited that he might be instructed by her refinement.

They met frequently in the days and weeks afterward to talk about books, philosophy, and history, for he was as hungry for new ideas as he was for a free meal, and she too was an autodidact. She lent him copies of Proust; he spun great tales of Brooklyn. But the subject he seemed most obsessed about and in which he most engaged the interest of Nin was his wife, June Mansfield, who was then in Paris for a visit. It was June, whose dark blond earthiness embodied Nin’s concept of female beauty, with whom Nin fell in love (“You are that woman I want to be. I see in you that part of me which is you”). Only after June left France did Nin and Miller fall in love. It happened after they had written many letters (he tried teaching English in Dijon in January) and had long discussions about June (he read portions about her to Nin from a manuscript called Tropic of Cancer). She read to him portions of her diary that analyzed June. Soon, they moved from an intellectual relationship to a physical one.

Now, with fuller access to their life-writing, one can see the extent of their remarkable mutual enrichment, their pollination, of each other’s intellectual and artistic capacities. They shared what Nin called the two lives that writers live: the living/tasting and the writing/reaction. They shared ideas, quotations, and books, their essays and journals.

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