1953 DESIRE WILL BUY ANOTHER AIRPLANE TICKET
1954 WITH HUGO THERE IS NO RELIEF
PREFACE
Trapeze was transcribed from the handwritten diary of Anaïs Nin, which was no longer kept in bound journals, but mostly on loose paper. When Nin left New York with Rupert Pole in 1947, she reported that she had put her diary “into the vault.” During her long trip to California, she kept no diary, no notes . . . the account of the voyage found in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4, 1944-1947 is based on recollection long after the fact. Trapeze contains only original material.
Because the paper was loose, oftentimes it became out of sequence. Once the entire collection was transcribed, a significant amount of detective work had to be done to put it back in order—and one extremely valuable aid in this endeavor was a massive calendar Nin kept that was found in her Silver Lake house recently. It not only assisted in sequencing, it also filled in some of the long and mysterious gaps in the diary. Nin’s diary-keeping had become erratic and intermittent due to her “bi-coastal” life, the constant swinging between a husband in New York and a lover in California. A habit she developed was the use of her eight-hour flights to record the events of the previous month or two, and these passages were often very long and detailed. But sometimes she went for months without writing anything at all, and that’s where the calendar became critical . . . in Trapeze, entries from the calendar are used to identify where Nin was or what she was doing during those gaps. Even so, there are events found neither in the diary nor in the calendar, such as Nin’s visit to Gore Vidal in Antigua, Nicaragua, in 1947, and they therefore do not appear in this volume.
Once everything was in sequence, then the true editing could begin, the elimination of repetitions, irrelevant correspondence, etc., but Nin’s prose remains intact except in cases of misspellings or serious grammatical errors; sometimes translations of obscure phrases or terms in foreign languages are provided. The transcription of some 4,500 handwritten pages of the original diary yielded nearly 1,400 typewritten pages, from which this volume has been edited.
What Trapeze boils down to is the previously unknown account of one of the most fascinating periods of Nin’s life—the incredible feat of secretly maintaining two men, two houses, and two lives, not to mention the enormous strain this put on her both physically and psychologically. Here, we find out exactly how Anaïs Nin was able to perform this seemingly impossible juggling act.
PAUL HERRON, EDITOR
San Antonio, Texas
May 2016
INTRODUCTION
Despite publishing six novels and numerous short stories from the 1930s into the 1960s, Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) failed to gain acceptance as a fiction writer. Yet she became famous in the mid-1960s with the publication of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1934 and The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1939 (volumes 1 and 2). These books appealed to a wide audience and still please not only because of their attractive authorial persona but also because they record Nin’s involvement in Paris with such memorable, fully drawn individuals as Henry Miller, June Miller, Otto Rank, and a man known only as Gonzalo. With friends less significant and less detailed, with themes less developed, and with an increasing reliance on letters to and from Nin to chronicle her life, the next five volumes of the diary are not so impressive as the initial two.1 All seven diaries leave questions unanswered. In The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947-1955 (volume 5), for instance, a reader might reasonably wonder why the cosmopolitan Nin, a resident of New York City, also dwelled in Sierra Madre, on the edge of a woods outside Los Angeles. Did she live alone on the two coasts? And then, how could this author whose books did not sell well and who held no job afford to maintain two homes, fly frequently between them, and take occasional trips to Mexico? Covering the same years as The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947-1955, Trapeze answers these questions while providing a compelling narrative of Nin’s life during this period.
Trapeze is the sixth volume to offer versions of Nin’s life substantially different from those Nin presented in the initial sequence of diaries.2 Described as unexpurgated, these alternative treatments of events resulted from her withholding information from the diaries as originally published, information that would have embarrassed and probably harmed her and certain of her associates. Her death and the deaths of her friends eliminated such concerns. The first revised volume, Henry and June, divulges, among many other things, that Nin had a husband, the banker Hugh Guiler. The name of this man she wed in 1923 and to whom she remained married is absent from all diaries published during her lifetime.3
The year after their marriage Guiler was transferred from New York City to Paris, where the couple lived until 1939 and where he provided funds for his wife to live as an independent woman. As such in the 1930s, Nin devoted herself to literary pursuits and had sexual affairs with some men, including, first and most notably, Henry Miller. Trapeze reveals that Guiler continued supporting her even when, after repatriation, she established a residence in California in the 1940s. There she cohabited with Rupert Pole, a printer and failed actor as well as, later, a forest ranger, which accounts for her presence in Sierra Madre. He was the son of the actor Reginald Pole and stepson of the architect Lloyd Wright (son of Frank Lloyd Wright), his mother’s second husband. These relationships explain why Reginald Pole and the Wrights appear in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947-1955, which does not mention Rupert Pole.
Trapeze primarily documents Nin’s lives with and attitudes toward Guiler and Pole. The one mainly provided security; the other, passion. Her feelings for these men were complex. Ambivalent toward them, Nin sometimes even pitied them. Guiler was too stolid and willful for her; he lacked charisma. His personal habits disgusted her. She disapproved of his profession, even though his banking success, which she belittled, enabled her to live as she wished to a large degree. Some of his business decisions upset her, including one to retire before being made a vice president. More than once she stated that she did not love him, yet guilt over being indebted to him and the need of his munificence kept her from divorcing him, despite vowing to end their marriage. When he adopted the name Ian Hugo and entered the art world as engraver and filmmaker, though, she supported him, including by using some of his engravings as illustrations in her books and by appearing in his films. Ultimately, his kindness, generosity, and seemingly limitless love permitted her to have a rewarding physical life with Pole, about which he was then unaware.4
With her ardor for longtime lover Gonzalo Moré dead, with her most recent paramour Bill Pinckard stationed in Korea, with the impossibility of an affair