Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes of a sexual nature.

One of the fascinating things about Nin is that she is 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 womaniser, he was a liar.

And she's this intense child who's been unwell,

who doesn't seem to have anyone around her 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.

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 them and he was sent to work in the Paris branch

'of the bank, so we moved over there.'

LANGUID MUSIC PLAYS

'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 my diary.'

'I am young and 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 rocked 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 worked

'through the virginity and the blood came and it was done.'

'Hugo made no caresses 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.

A gilded cage of sorts.

But she was locked away with her books...

She really lived off of dreams, off of her imagination.

1920S JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

'I know there is more than 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 accord with the Surrealists,

'searching for the marvellous.

'But the marvellous does not happen.

'I mend socks, 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.'

1920S JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

I think if any of us had the chance in a time machine to go to

Paris in the '20s and '30s, we'd take it.

It was the centre 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 wonderful Bohemian paradise of pre-war Paris.

Paris must have been extraordinarily exciting in the 1920s and '30s.

The time of incredible social mixing, glamour, creativity...

FLAMENCO MUSIC

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.'

SHE MOANS

'I take pleasure in my transformations.

'Few know how 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 staid existence.

But she began to realise 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 I could 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 is who is kind, loyal,

pure of thought, but then there is another.

She's restless and impure, acting strangely loose and wondering,

seeking life and wanting to taste all of it without fear or

restraint, principle... A demon.

And this one, how far will she go?

You would never do wrong. You would never jeopardise our relationship.

I want experience.

Hugo's 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 heavy and 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 straightaway he was a great artist.

'I wanted to meet him and our lawyer knew him, so 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, borrowing, begging, sponging.

'He is almost a hobo.'

The relationship between Anais Nin

and Henry Miller is really interesting.

They clearly had quite a riotous, ribald 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 the wildest 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 empty cages.

I am 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 books as he writes it.

'Notes on the back of menus of small restaurants and shabby 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 16, I wrote in my diary that I had dreamed of putting myself'

'under the protection and ability 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 am 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 rigour.

'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.

'Artifice is art.

'The paradise, the only paradise.

'Paradise is a place with white-feathered palm trees.

'With foamy rivers, with glass fishes, silk-lined walls,

'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 her 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 faded. She was colour, 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.

JUNE SIGHS

Oh, and one time, we hired a room where

I could be a prostitute with a client and he could watch.

HENRY LAUGHS

Remember, Henry? He watched me with women.

Don't all men like that?

I guess not.

'By the end of the evening 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 men.

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 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 theatre.

'We love costumes and changes of selves and wearing masks and disguises.'

'But I always know what is real.

'Does June?'

JUNE:Happier!

'She has the body of the women who climbed every night

'upon the stage at music halls and gradually undressed.'

You're beautiful.

Oh, I want to dance for you, Anais.

'I am fascinated by her eyes and mouth.

'Her discoloured mouth - barely rouged.

'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 theatre.

'Outside smoking in the interval, I tell her,

'"You are the only woman who ever answered

'"the demands of my imagination."

'She answers, "It's a good thing for me I am going away."'

Watch, watch, watch, watch, watch!

'She had to go back to New York for a while.

'You would soon unmask me.

'I am powerless before a woman.'

I want to kiss you.

'After June, filled with June,

'I could not bear 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 man and woman

'there is a resistance, conflict.

'I am trapped between the beauty of June

'and the genius of Henry.'

Every account of June Miller that we have is this...

very exciting,

charismatic,

androgynous, kind of stocky,

earthy figure - who was very, very attractive.

'So, there was this tantalizing flirtation and kissing,

'but no 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 centre 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 receive one every day.

'Deep down, I am afraid of this man.

'His sensual being,

the ferocity enveloped in tenderness,

'his heavy rich mind.

'Writers make love to what they need.'

Henry wrote to me...

"I could stay here all night, writing to you..."

"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 twists,

'make me gasp with pleasure.'

# Going to see the river man

# Going to tell him all I can... #

'I have no words for it.

'It is all new to me.

'That afternoon in Henry's room

'was like a white hot furnace.'

# If he tells me all he knows

# About the way his river flows... #

'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 the 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

and there was such a splendour to it.

THEY BREATHE HEAVILY

I want to breathe your presence, for a few hours,

feed you,

cool you...

..fill you with the heavy breath and earth...

of the trees which whip the blood.

I realised that I don't want June to come back.

As a muse, I couldn't have asked for more,

and yes, as a woman, I was fully awakened and 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 realises,

"THIS is what I can write about."

I mean, she just breaks free -

it 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."

Well, 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, appeased and so joyous.

'He says I have never been so happy with you.

'I'm always concerned over Hugo as if he were my child.

'It is because I love him best.

'I wish he was ten years older.'

'I cheat him,

'I deceived him -

'yet the world does not sink into sulphur-coloured mist.

'I just cry and laugh.'

SHE MOANS

'He desires me.

'My conscience dies at that moment.

'Hugo bears down on me

'and I instinctively 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 lovemaking

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 the fantasy life

and that there is a second diary which is the real diary.

'I ran quickly and 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, they allowed me to live and...

to watch myself live at a distance.

I called it "dedoublement."

It turned me into an observer,

reporting.

Did it make your betrayals bearable?

Perhaps some things are bred in the bone.

And then June Miller came back from New York.

'June arrived last night,

'I was stunned.'

PHONE RINGS

'I am like a person drowning...

Miss Nin, 245...

'..and I felt no pang 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 are playing.

'Who is the demon? Who the liar?

'Who loves the most?'

What have you done to 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...

Henry rushed over to me

and we plunged into work.

'There is, in our relationship,

'both humanness and monstrosity.

'Our love is human - I sense when he is cold, I get him blankets

'but our work is monstrous.

'When we write - we heighten, exaggerate, colour.

'There are Satanic joys known to writers only.'

June is a storyteller,

drugged in her own romances.

I began to notice discrepancies in her stories,

childish lies.

She lives without logic.

'He is rewriting his novel, Tropic Of Cancer, immersed in the past.

'I give 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, "All right, well, let's really destroy her.

"Let's take who this person was, a human being,

"and write her as a character" -

and so I feel that 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 that it was until she met Miller

that she really began to realise that as a possibility for herself.

What she wants to do is to 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 her own way

or in her own womb.

She has to create something different from man.

To create within the mystery, storms and terrors of sex,

woman must not fabricate,

she has to descend into a real womb and...

and expose its secrets and labyrinths.

She is the mermaid with her fishtail dipped into the unconscious.

So, this way of life simply carried on?

Yes, 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.

You see, it gave me absolution and...

helped me to see that I should feel no Catholic guilt.

It was a great influence on my writing.

Yung said, "Proceed from the dream outwards"

and that is always how I've tried to write.

'I'll say this is a wild dream.

'But it is this dream I want to realise.

'Life and literature combined.

'Love. The dynamo.

'You with your chameleon soul

'giving me a thousand laughs.

'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 fetters

and the shackles

through various men.

So, you had freed yourself from guilt

and now you can do as a man does and take many lovers.

It was not just Henry Miller, was it?

There are others too...

SHE FLICKS PAGES

Gonzalo, the South American revolutionary.

Oh, Gonzalo - le tigre qui reve.

And you're my tiger who dreams.

My tiger...

Le tigre qui reve.

And do I have claws?

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 grandeur and heroism.

I want to go to Spain with you,

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 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 host of communism as it must have been in Russia.

Little idiot Anais,

you are 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, don't cling.

At dawn he must put on his armour.

He will leave you for a crusade.

So, what did Gonzalo feed 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 blubbering God

'or dead words in epilepsy or insanity.

'All pulsations leading to explosion,

'gongs of pleasure,

'sounding church bells

'or death knells.'

'I rented a house boat on the Seine to meet Gonzalo and to write.

'I wrote on the title page "Les Mots Flottante" - the floating words.

'I had to find a house boat for them.'

HE READS ALOUD

Was Henry jealous of Gonzalo?

Yes, and they both vied 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 draft in Henry's tea

'and by ten o'clock, he was asleep.

'I dressed and crept to Gonzalo.'

SHE LAUGHS

'He was so frightened by what Henry would do if he woke,

'that he couldn't perform.'

At 5:30am, 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 current in the body

'which creates a warm contact with a woman.

'I feel so many people -

'physically, amorously

'because I am in a state of love.

'Like a mystic...

'it is immensely overflowing.

'But mainly it was Gonzalo More,

'Henry Miller

'and, my husband, Hugo.

'They were the three main men during that later time in Paris.

Please.

It feels as if Paris was a love affair too -

that all this couldn't have happened anywhere else.

Well, there was...

There was such a magic about Paris.

The smell of aperitif and charcoal burners,

tobacco and cafe au lait...

..and the people...

'We went to the Mariners' flophouse

'to eat an omelette with the pickpockets

'and then to play chess at the cafe

'where old actors meet for a game

'to the tunes of those tired classical musicians playing quartets

'and we stayed until dawn

'as those tired prostitutes walked home.'

And the music inside of me.

I feel the microbe of jazz.

It entered my blood.

AIR SIREN BLARES

RADIO: Chamberlin said yesterday that England is determined

that the rule of violence must cease.

Premier Daladier today told the Foreign Affairs Commission

of the Chamber of Deputies that France does not wish, any longer,

to live 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 mist 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.'

Departing from Paris,

departing 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, the wrenching from Henry.

RAPID GUNFIRE

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, no-one opened the cloth bag

where 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

because I felt small and sick,

and powerless, at that moment.

I think Paris was this gorgeous bubble

and that 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 striving.

She describes Americans as robots,

and she's 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 baths, service -

the lonelier I feel...

As one can only feel in a palace.

I landed with my diaries

but without my soul.

The machine in Europe is killing people,

and here it is canning them.

It would have been better for all of us

to die in flames than this kind of death.

And then the others arrived -

Gonzalo and Henry.

I paid their fares, their rent.

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 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 he suggested I give it a go.

I wrote a few stories

and sent them off

and then I received a phone call.

PHONE RINGS

Washington Square, 349.

ON PHONE: 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 Kama Sutra,

and listening to friends' most extreme adventures.

And what does the beast do?

'I had this feeling that here was a Pandora's box which...'

contained woman'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 flicks of his quick 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 a 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 woman 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 centre 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 a, 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 bestialities,

there's paedophilia,

there's necrophilia,

there's lesbian scenes -

there's everything.

She's just running through this gamut of fantasies,

some of it, presumably, based on her own experience.

"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

which administered the powerful spankings

"must have awakened a region of pleasure."

I'd never before been aware of the 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.

SHE MOANS SOFTLY

SHE MOANS SOFTLY

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 is 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, cos there's nothing left.

As she started getting into the affairs,

I myself was a young woman and was shocked.

And, um, 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 recognise in him the king,

the leader of the mental world I'd 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? ANAIS LAUGHS

"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, slip, 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 who's,

"OK, now I want to get this work out there and no-one will take it."

So she just buys her own press and publishes her own work.

Gonzalo was a trained printer, so he helps,

but she typesets and hand cranks all the work herself.

Work has integrated 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 fervour and intensity.

June 1942.

The book was finished at 11:45 at night.

My brother once described me as a steel 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, some photographs.

And...slowly, very slowly, I began to get a following for my fiction.

And by the end of the 1940s, she had quite a few things published -

short stories, novels like House Of Incest and Winter Of Artifice,

and some volumes of the early diaries.

And on these university tours,

she was met with a lot of avid, young feminists,

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?

I'm not a muddle along sort of person.

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't...Scott Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts in American lives.

Of course, we know that he's wrong.

He looks like Hugo 20 years ago.

ANAIS LAUGHS

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 '40s 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 cheque books,

different sets of prescriptions either side of the Atlantic,

and she had to have a lie box

so she knew what she was telling each husband.

She's behaving like a character in a 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 he 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 travelling 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 bestseller

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.