Anaïs Nin made her reputation through publication of her edited diaries and the carefully constructed persona they presented. It was not until decades later, when the diaries were published in their unexpurgated form, that the world began to learn the full details of Nin’s fascinating life and the emotional and literary high-wire acts she committed both in documenting it and in defying the mores of 1950s America. Trapeze begins where the previous volume, Mirages, left when Nin met Rupert Pole, the young man who became not only her lover but later her husband in a bigamous marriage. It marks the start of what Nin came to call her “trapeze life,” swinging between her longtime husband, Hugh Guiler, in New York and her lover, Pole, in California, a perilous lifestyle she continued until her death in 1977. Today what Nin did seems impossible, and what she sought perhaps was to find harmony and completeness within a split existence. It is a story of daring and genius, love and pain, largely unknown until now.
Writer and diarist, born in Paris to a Catalan father and a Danish mother, Anaïs Nin spent many of her early years with Cuban relatives. Later a naturalized American citizen, she lived and worked in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Author of avant-garde novels in the French surrealistic style and collections of erotica, she is best known for her life and times in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volumes I-VII (1966-1980).
The next thrilling installment of the Unexpurgated Diaries of Anais Nin, Trapeze gives us the iconic writer leading a teetering, highly-colored, emotionally jet-fuelled existence, torn between her attachment to her husband of decades, Hugh Guiler, and her passion for Rupert Pole, a much younger lover. Unable to break with Guiler--for reasons both material and deeply psychological—or to fully commit to Pole, we watch Nin move between the two men like a woman walking on icefloes, in constant danger of drowning. The intense, outrageous, intimate portrait of the woman behind the mysterious Nin legend—and all the hunger and charm and deception that comprised this high-wire act of a life. Comes out May 15, 2017.
Of the so-called unexpurgated diaries, so far (they are not quite unexpurgated ones), this is perhaps the most chaotic in terms of the upheavals caused by Nin's bicoastal life, especially her relationships with her first husband in new york and her other husband in the west. At the end she marries the second fellow, therefore committing bigamy, though he thinks she's divorced and the first husband has little idea of anyone else in her life that way.
As you can imagine, the writing captures a seesaw of guilt and nervousness, illness and fine health, passion and resentment, aesthetic contentment and extreme frustration as her books fail to get published or talked about sufficiently when they are published in the u.s.a. and, on another front, when she finds herself stuck, for part of each years, in a desolate artistic landscape. That's with the second husband, though she dislikes the first and asks her diary and her therapist why she stays with him. The answer seems apparent: he has money and she needs it.
Other figures make their way in, minor or major artists, but we really are stuck in her head. It's useful to see her anger erupt on why her novels aren't on everyone's lips and why she doesn't get prestigious invitations when the works of those she considers her inferiors are celebrated. Who are they? Ah, Reader, why give away that? But at least she names names.
What a pleasure “Trapeze” is from start to finish! Before “Trapeze,” the last published “Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin” was “Mirages” which concluded with Anais and Rupert Pole meeting. She finally felt she found her perfect match. When I began “Trapeze,” I truly expected the ordinary 'we're so happy, life is blissful' words that most books would continue with, but I should have realized that there is nothing ordinary about Anais Nin! Instead, “Trapeze” is raw, brave and honest.
It turns out that Rupert is overly critical about everything Anais does. He micromanages how she cuts the lettuce for the salad, and he blames her when the car breaks down even though the garage man says the car was just worn out. Anais finds Rupert exceedingly cheap and unbearably frugal, criticizing her for getting her hair washed at the hairdresser's rather than doing it herself at home. She finds his family and friends boring and feels restless with the slow pace of country living in California. Luckily for Anais, she has New York City to return to every month or so where she remains married to Hugo, her longtime husband. She and Hugo have a history together, but she has never experienced the type of passion that she has with Rupert.
“Trapeze” was an eye-opener to me because for the first time, readers get the inside story of Anais' bicoastal lifestyle. I've been reading Anais Nin's Diaries and biographies about her for many years, and my general belief was that Anais only remained married to Hugo out of obligation, and that she was miserable with Hugo any time she had to return to him from the home she shared with Rupert in California. “Trapeze” is the only account I've come across that paints a completely different portrait of how she really viewed these two relationships. Although she definitely enjoyed a more satisfying passionate life with Rupert, she says that passion is not enough. She feels as though she is walking on eggs with Rupert over his constant criticalness of her and his need to control everything she uses and buys, and what they do together. When Anais tells him that housework takes hours away from her writing and suggests they hire a maid, he refuses to do so because he doesn't want to spend the money. Meanwhile, in New York City, Anais and Hugo employ a very dedicated and pleasant woman named Millicent whom Anais treats well and splits household duties with. Anais is completely honest with her readers when she admits that one of the reasons she enjoys life with Hugo is because of the luxuries he gives her. She also finds New York living more exciting since Hugo has quit his job at the bank and has decided to focus his life on his new artistic career of filmmaking. Anais is able to help him on his films and socialize with artistic people, something she rarely does with Rupert.
“Trapeze” gave me the impression that although Rupert was a better sexual partner for Anais, things wouldn't have worked out for them in the long run if she didn't have Hugo and their New York City lifestyle to return to. They each provided a necessary respite from the other when one of them had become too much for her to bear. This was a revelation to me, and I think will be a surprise to Anais' fans. In the beginning of the book, even Rupert seems to be the type of man who shuns a complete commitment. Seems to me that he only got serious with Anais because he could get regular breaks from her which he most likely never got from any of his previous relationships. Plus he has a wandering eye which Anais surmises is due to his need to stroke his ego. He is constantly saying how beautiful other women are. On one of her trips away, Anais finds a poem on Rupert's desk that was written by another woman that says that Rupert kissed her. She is not even attractive, and Rupert claims that it was “nothing,” and she is “of no importance.” Anais is incredibly shaken. When she has a chance to think, she tells him he should do whatever he wants while she is away, but she doesn't want to know about it and doesn't want him to flirt with other women in front of her. Oddly enough, he seems to have a need to flirt with other women right in front of her. She also says that he didn't have to leave the poem out in the open on his desk for her to find and that he should have just thrown it away.
Anais' maturity shines through in “Trapeze.” She is now in her late forties and has been through the ringer with relationships according to the long string of romances she had in “Mirages.” She has nowhere to go but to get real with herself about Rupert and Hugo, both of whom she has chosen to remain with. She doesn't portray a “happily ever after” scenario which seems to be very irrestible in most books. Instead, she just tries to survive and do the best she can with what she's got.
On a lighter note, “Trapeze” describes Anais' discovery of drinking Martinis which allows her to calm her thoughts and ease her intensity. It's something she says she would have done years ago had she allowed herself to relax more and indulge in drinking as a soother.
There is also a beautifully emotional passage at the end of “Trapeze” regarding the death of her mother, Rosa, who is a prominent figure in most of the Diaries.
Overall, “Trapeze” depicts Anais displaying a maturity we hadn't seen before in the previous Unexpurgated Diaries and with the same courageous honesty she's had throughout every volume. I can't wait for the next volume of Anais' Unexpurgated Diaries to be released!
This was an important book for me personally, so this review is not an objective document. When I was first in LA I lived in a sort of basement apartment at the bottom of one of those three story houses built onto the side of a steep hill. My next door neighbor was Rupert Pole, who had been Anais Nin's "West Coast husband". This book is her chronicle of their romance, starting in 1949. It was long past the event of this book when I knew Rupert, but, in a sense, it felt like snooping, to learn the details of this love that he never told me. Rupert was in his '70s when I knew him, but my little patio looked into the office where Anais Nin had written in the last years of her life. She had a Smith Corona portable set up on a very neat desk. He never used the room for anything else. What we talked about was the fact that I was about to be the technical adviser for a film being made of one of my stories, Operation Dumbo Drop, and his experiences as technical adviser for Henry and June. At that time I had read Delta of Venus, and, I think, Spy in the House of Love, and nothing else of Anais Nin's. But years later, when I moved in with my late wife, Myrna Saxe, I discovered that she had all the expurgated diaries, and read them. They were great, terrific expositions of the Haute Bohemia of Paris in the thirties, and of New York in the Forties and Fifties. But all the steamy stuff had been edited out, because she did not want to embarrass her husband or her lovers. Well, I don't think she was worried about embarrassing Henry Miller. What could embarrass Henry Miller? But, in any case, her clear, elegant writing brought the reader right into that artistic life. They were a tremendous read. Rupert had told me he was editing subsequent books of the parts that were edited out, now that Nin and her east coast husband Hugh Guiller had passed on. He did four books of those, and they were also great, encompassing her affairs with Miller, Gonzolo More', her father Joachim Nin, Otto Rank, the psychiatrist, and quite a few others. Very little writing about explicit sex is elegant and eloquent, but this is. This is the latest of her unexpurgated diaries. Rupert did not edit it; he is one of its main subjects. There is another series of her early diaries, starting when she was about nine, started on the boat she and her mother were taking from France to America after her father had deserted them. She wrote better at nine than most people ever do. Reading those it occurred to me that if one read all of her published diaries he or she would know her better than anyone known in real life. Having read them all I know her better than I know myself. Having known about her bigamous marriages and her travels back and forth it was amazing to read the details filled in about her love for Rupert, who was probably her best lover ever, and her residual affection for Guiller. Theoretically he knew nothing of her multiple adulteries, but if experience has taught me anything it is that, on some level, subconsciously, everybody knows everything. Unsurprisingly she suffered from guilt A lot of this book is about her frustrations, about lack of recognition for her novels, which I have read, and consider a bit pretentious and a bit hard to follow, and her frustration at being unable to publish what everyone who read the diaries considered her very best stuff. This books is from the diaries, from letters from Anais, Guiller, Rupert, James Leo Herlihy, who was her protege, and descriptions of her many tortured dreams. Let me be clear. This is a very good book, but it is not as good as the preceding volumes. But I read it with fascination, and hope you will too. It ends in 1954, when she and Rupert still had 23 years of life together coming. Whether any of that will be published I do not know, but if it is I will read it with fascination.
[version 4 2025-01-05 ] In the 1950s, Anais Nin was married to a banker in New York, but had a secret lover in California. The "trapeze" of the title refers to the gyrations and deceptions she needed to employ to maintain two relationships across the continent, while trying to develop her literary career. One of the things that Nin finds maddening is what she considers the relative intellectual sterility and banality of the US in general and California in particular. Another is the maddening frustration of seeing her manuscripts rejected over and over again by so many publishers. So it's ironic that here, in 2024, in one of the 3 largest cities in California, to borrow a copy of this book, I had to order it from the Sonoma public library, hundreds of miles away. There was no single copy in any public or college library in San Diego county. (I suppose I can buy a Kindle copy somewhere easily, but let's not get into that subject.) But it was worth it. Although I always enjoyed the acuity and depth of Nin's writing, her earlier published diaries left me a little frustrated; knowing that there were titanic tumults below the surface that were excised. But with the publication of her unexpurgated diaries, the passionate affairs she had with Henry Miller, Rupert Pole, and others were never hinted at. She didn't even name her husband Hugh Guiler in them. But with the principal characters now gone, the books starting with "Henry and June", show the wild passions that created them. They are not explicit in the way that "Little Birds" and "Delta of Venus" are, but parts are just as erotic in their own way. "Trapeze" explores the depths, exaltations, frustrations, beauty, tenderness, and insanities of all kinds of human relationships. As I read it at an advanced age, I can see the same patterns that Nin went through in my life and those of friends and lovers. (But with 1/10 the intensity of Nin.) These are not for everyone, but I personally think she is gifted and unique. This book stirs up powerful emotions in me, as I now understand the drives and currents that she's writing about. These books will probably affect each person who reads them in a different way. A little side light. In the last few weeks, I've done a deep dive into the story of Anais' long-term doctor, Max Jacobson. It turns out that this guy was a real mega-quack. He was the original "Dr. Feelgood" who "treated" his patients* with a highly addictive witch's brew of amphetamines, animal hormones, bone marrow, enzymes, human placenta, steroids, and multivitamins. But mostly amphetamines. With this in mind, you read Anais' mentions of "Dr. Jacobson's shots" and how they helped her, with slightly different eyes. His medical license was finally revoked in 1975. I still think she is a brilliant writer and fascinating person, and I don't think she ever asked or concerned herself with what she was really being dosed with. Back in that era, a doctor's lab coat conveyed as much respect as a priest's cassock.
*Including, among others: John F. Kennedy, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Leonard Bernstein, Humphrey Bogart, Yul Brynner, Maria Callas, Truman Capote, Van Cliburn, Montgomery Clift, Rosemary Clooney, Cecil B. DeMille, Marlene Dietrich, Eddie Fisher, Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, Alan Jay Lerner, Oscar Levant, Mickey Mantle, Liza Minnelli, Marilyn Monroe, Zero Mostel, Elvis Presley, Paul Robeson, Nelson Rockefeller, David O. Selznick, Elizabeth Taylor, and Tennessee Williams.
DNFed at 75%. I love the edited diaries of Anaïs Nin, but this dragged on and on. I enjoyed the first section deeply, which is where most of my highlights came from. But as it went on, there’s too much unnecessary information and mundane topics discussed. I became overwhelmingly bored with the to-do lists and even many of the letters which held no relevance for the reader. The poetry and prose that Nin does so well is overshadowed by this, although there are sprinkles of beautiful, artistic lines.
Oh Anais, your quest for personal and sexual freedom only caused you to fly back and forth from one cage to another! I adored this book immensely, and wish sometimes that I can time travel and somehow change the outcome for the better.
I had just read the volume 4 of Nin’s diaries and Trapeze. Trapeze I felt was much too long but gave an honest account of two relationships and how women feel trapped and need to escape the confines of one marriage. It spoke to me personally.
Rainer’s book lost Nin’s poetry of words and flattened out the characters with nonsensical dialogue. It didn’t feel at all authentic, nor did the author dig deep to explore her own inner self while keeping Nin’s two marriages a secret. Just facts were offered. If she had swapped Nin out for a everyday character, it would read the same.