A literate passion : letters of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, 1932–1953

God, it is maddening to think that even one day must pass without writing. I shall never, never catch up. It is why, no doubt, I write with such vehemence, such distortion. It is despair.

I didn’t want love because it is chaos, and it makes the mind vacillate like wind-blown lanterns.

I was dreaming of you—you are like that boat going out to sea, and your sails are full spread, and the sunlight is playing all over you

“He was warm, joyous, relaxed, natural. He would have passed anonymously through a crowd. He was slender, lean, not tall. He looked like a Buddhist monk, a rosy-skinned monk, with his partly bald head aureoled by lively silver hair, his full sensuous mouth. His blue eyes are cool and observant, but his mouth is emotional and vulnerable. His laughter is contagious and his voice caressing and warm like a Negro voice.”

I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one's time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible. Where has gone the time when men fought, killed, died for a glove, a glance, etc?

In the last letter included here, Anaïs Nin writes: “I see you clear of distortions [now] and it makes me write you for the first time without the stiltedness due to hardening of the personal vision. Probably if I had then the sense of humor I have today and if you had then the qualities you have today, nothing would have broken

Anaïs Nin’s diary would receive worldwide recognition. “It is a great pageant of the times,” he had stated in his essay “Une Etre Etoilique,” “patiently and humbly delineated by one who considers herself as nothing, by one who had almost completely effaced herself in the effort to arrive at a true understanding of life. It is in this sense again that the human document rivals the work of art, or in times such as ours, replaces the work of art.”

“When I first gave Henry and June a big sum of money,” she wrote in her diary, late in November 1932, when the final act of Henry and June’s disintegrating marriage was being played out, during June’s ultimate sojourn in Paris, “and they spent it all in one night on drink, I was humanly hurt, but my understanding was disciplined. I gave because I wanted to—I gave them liberty at the same time. Otherwise I would not be giving, I would be taking.” Looking back on her first year with Henry Miller, she added this: “Later I gave love. . . . Henry used my love well, beautifully—he erected books with it.”

In turn, Henry Miller seems to have responded to her writing. (For years thereafter he became a devoted editor and critic of her work.) “Henry says I write like a man, with tremendous clearness and conciseness. He was surprised by my book on Lawrence, although he does not like Lawrence.”

When I collect my notes for my first Paris book there is the tender sentimental regretful feeling of putting between covers what was once a rich throbbing life, and which literature will never reproduce, as indeed it should not