In one of his many stand ups, comedian Louis C.K. talks about the effectiveness of lying. He says children lie because it’s an effective solution against trouble, or more specifically, against their angry parents. He asks the audience, how can children be taught not to lie when it’s the perfect way to avoid getting grounded? These simple lies don’t hurt anyone and help children deal with problems. Whereas adults, “Grown ups, we can take trouble. We don’t care. We’re just like: ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Am I in trouble?’” Of course, he makes this comparison for comedic reasons. However, if we were to take this argument seriously, I’d disagree, because let’s accept it, adults don’t really know how to face trouble either. And regardless of how old you are, a good lie can come in handy in some situations. Whether they’re pretexts to procrastinate, to get out of a bad date, to not offend someone, or to keep a secret safe, there’s a point where lying isn’t as harmful as one would think. There are some instances where it helps avoid unnecessary problems. However, what happens when lying not only becomes an incidental means in your life, but a way to mask it and sell others an idea of yourself? This is what happened, to some extent, in the life of French-American writer Anaïs Nin, who is mostly known for her diaries and erotic writings.
Born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell in France on February 21, 1903, she was daughter of the Spanish composer Joaquin Nin. After being abandoned by her father, she moved with her mother, Rosa Culmell, and her brothers to the United States in 1914. She would spend most of her life between France and the US. If we could describe Nin’s life with one word, perhaps that would be free-spirited. She dropped out of school when she was 16 to work as a model and dancer. Later on she met Otto Rank, one of Freud’s disciples, with whom she learned psychoanalysis so she could practice it herself, and who would later become her lover. In the thirties she lived in Paris, where she also met two figures who would define her life and association with erotic literature: Henry and June Miller.
By the time she met them, she was married to artist Hugh Parker Guiller, also known as Ian Hugo. However, she established a passionate relationship with both the Millers. It’s even believed that her husband was well aware of it, yet he did not say anything about it. On the one hand, Anaïs’ love for June Miller was platonic, to the point that she turned her into an archetype of female beauty and liberation in her works. On the other hand, she had a passionate relationship with Henry –which is registered in both her diaries and the letters they exchanged–, which resulted in a pregnancy she later terminated. It was with Henry Miller and some friends that Nin, out of the need for money, began writing erotica for an “anonymous” collector. This would earn her a special place in this genre, since she became the first female author to openly publish this type of writings without a pen name. However, these works would not be published until the late seventies.
As if Nin’s love life wasn’t torrid enough, in 1947 she met actor Rupert Pole in Manhattan. They started dating and, in 1955, they got married while she was still married to Guiller, who was also aware of this affair. Nonetheless, Pole knew nothing about his wife’s double life. To keep the appearances, especially for her new husband, Nin created a “lie box”. According to Deidre Blair, Nin’s biograher:
“She had this absolutely enormous purse and in the purse she had two sets of checkbooks. One said Anaïs Guiler for New York and another said Anaïs Pole for Los Angeles. She had prescription bottles from California doctors and New York doctors with the two different names. And she had a collection of file cards. And she said, ‘I tell so many lies I have to write them down and keep them in the lie box so I can keep them straight.’”
This lie box would help her remember the stories she told to each of her husbands, as well as the different versions of her life each of them knew, so she wouldn’t mix them up and reveal her affairs. Nonetheless, this device would not work forever, and as Nin started to become more famous, around the sixties, she decided it was best to tell the truth and got divorced from Pole, although she lived with him until the end of her life.
Anaïs Nin owes her fame to the publishing of her journals in the sixties, and her erotica works in the seventies. For a while her writings were embraced by feminist groups, who admired the way she openly exposed her life and dealt with taboo issues such as abortion, the alleged incest with her father, as well as her romantic and sexual affairs with the aforementioned men and other artists. However, she was also heavily criticized because of her affairs. Some frowned upon the fact that she was not economically independent and used her “feminine charms” to seduce men and take advantage of them. Even though this led to Nin disassociating herself from feminism, she believed all those features that make a woman feminine are as equally valuable as those of masculinity, and she invited everyone, regardless of their sex, to embrace those characteristics that are traditionally associated to women, such as intuition and sensibility.
She died in January, 1977 after battling against cancer. Later on, her ex-husband, Rupert Pole, would be in charge of publishing the unexpurgated editions of her diaries, which led to a sort of disenchantment from many of her fans, as they realized many of the stories and anecdotes they read were heavily edited, changed, or invented. In the end, many felt “betrayed” by the version of her life she first displayed to her readers, to the point that some have even nicknamed her diaries as liaries.
Anaïs Nin’s numerous lies worked as a means to create a public persona and a literary character of herself, and even as a way to avoid trouble with her husbands. However, by doing this, she voiced those themes which were previously forbidden for women to speak about: sexuality, lust, self-ownership, and the value of being feminine. Her case is one that invites us to leave any moral judgments aside and, instead, ask ourselves: are her actions that far from what we do with our own? Do we truly narrate our life objectively or show ourselves as we are? Or we are more than just the persona we present to others? Maybe truth is just a puzzle of fictions, a big white lie perhaps?
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If you want to know more about the amazing life of some writers, check out:
The Enigmatic Writer Who Broke Stereotypes By Becoming A Spy
The Epic Love Story That Led Its Famous Protagonists To Insanity
