Compiled by Monica Martin
February 21, 1903
Anaïs Nin is born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, France.
July 25, 1914
Nin and her family (her mother and her two brothers) set sail to America after her father, Joaquin Nin, had left them and they had spent some time in Barcelona.
She said it was during this journey, at the age of 11, that she started to chronicle her life in letters to her father, and the letters later evolved into the journal. But it seems that, actually, she had already started to write in a notebook in Spain.
The separation from her father has a great impact on Anaïs and she will write about it often. They won’t meet for 20 years and when they do, he will become one of her lovers.
I was eleven years old when I walked into the labyrinth of my diary. I carried it in a little basket and climbed the moldy steps of a Spanish garden and came upon boxed streets in neat order in a backyard of a house in New York. […] I wanted to remember in order to be able to return. […] An anguish about returning, and about seeing these things but once. There was a definite feeling that their meaning could only be revealed the second time. If I were forced to go on, unknowing, blind, everything would be lost. I was infinitely far from my first steps. I did not know exactly why I must return. I did not know that at the end I would not find myself where I started. The beginning and the end were different, and why should the coming to an end annihilate the beginning? And why should the beginning be retained? I did not know, but for the anguish in my being, an anguish over something lost.
(The Labyrinth)
August 11, 1914
The ship arrives in New York.
Transiting Chiron Rx at 17º 55 Pisces —
conjunct Nin’s natal Nessus (16º39 Pis) and Vesta (18º48 Pis)
square natal Pluto (17º42 Gem)
sextile natal Lilith (12º07 Cap) and Chiron (20º00 Cap)
March 3, 1923
Anaïs marries her first husband, Hugh Parker Guiler in Havana, Cuba. In 1924 they move to Paris.
Transiting Chiron (direct) at 14º59 Aries — in her 7th house:
conjunct South Node (17º02 Ari)
opposite natal Mars (16º13 Lib)
square natal Lilith (12º07 Cap)
trine natal Ceres (19º15 Leo)
1931
She publishes D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study.
December 1931
Nin meets Henry Miller and his wife June Mansfield, in Paris. Her relationship with both of them transforms her and her life. The sensual life she had been craving in her marriage to Hugh starts to unfold when she meets them.
(In October 1931 she had written: “The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.”)
The story is told in Henry and June.
“Both Henry and June have destroyed the logic and unity of my life. It is good, for a pattern is not living. Now I am living. I am not making patterns.”
(“Henry and June”)
One year later, she writes about June:
“Last night I missed June. June is the only woman I will ever love in the manner I loved June, fantastically, erotically, literarily, imaginatively — the only woman who has deeply stirred me as an artist, who makes all others pale and lifeless. I miss her. I miss her.”
(Incest, 1932-1934)
And about Henry:
“I work, and every moment I imagine a life with Henry as repudiation of all things but art and passion– class, society life, comfort, refinement, hell, hell, hell. It is all empty– all but these ten days, a desk, books, a typewriter, a bed, ordinary food. I hate lies, double lives, continuous insincerity, shifting, transition, deceits. I want wholeness, wholeness with Henry!”
(Incest, 1932-1934)
“I can never say enough about the influence we have had on each other — I on the artistry of Henry’s work, he on the matter, substance, vitality of mine. He has given me impetus, and I gave him the depths.”
(Incest, 1932-1934)
Dec. 01 (lack of exact date)
Transiting Chiron Rx at 20º16 Taurus — in her 8th house
trine natal Chiron (20º00 Cap)
sextile Vesta (18º48), Venus (22º12)
April 1932
She meets psychoanalyst René Allendy and, although she has mixed feelings about psychoanalysis, starts to see him, both for therapy and as a lover.
Later, she will be psychoanalyzed by Otto Rank — who will be her lover as well — in Paris and Martha Jaeger in New York.
Transiting Chiron at 20º40 Taurus — in her 8th house:
trine natal Chiron (20º00 Cap)
sextile Vesta (18º48), Venus (22º12)
May 18, 1934
On May 16 Nin finds out she’s pregnant. On May 18 she decides to have an abortion.
Transiting Chiron (03º40 Gemini) — in her 9th house,
opposite her natal Juno (04º47 Sag), trine her Ascendant (03º19 Lib)
Transiting Moon conjunct Transiting Pluto (22º54 Cancer) — trine natal Eris (23º03 Pis)
Transiting Saturn (27º49 Aquarius) — opposite natal Pholus (24º02 Leo)
Transiting South Node (13º15 Leo) — conjunct natal Ceres (19º15 Leo)
On May 19 she goes to a sage-femme (midwife) but the treatment is postponed, and although it should last a few weeks it takes months. In the end she will go into labor with her stillborn child on August 27. She relates the whole process of labor in her diary and also publishes it as a short story in “Under a Glass Bell”.
May 18:
This is all the more tragic to me because it comes at the same time as the discovery that I carry in my womb the seed of Henry’s child. I became pregnant five or six weeks ago. I discovered it positively two days ago. I know it is Henry’s child, not Hugh’s, and I must destroy it. I have experienced the most terrible mixture of emotions– pride to be a mother, a woman, a complete woman, the love of a human creation, the infinite possibilities of motherhood. I have imagined this little Henry, desired it, refused it, weighed it against love (it is a choice between the child and Henry). I have been sad, elated, hurt, bewildered. I have hated the idea of destroying a human life. I have watched the transformation of my body– the swelling of the breasts, the weight of the womb, the feeling of being pulled downward, of a growth, of a transformation. I have desired the serenity in which alone a child can be born. Now, at this critical moment of my life, I cannot have it. Henry doesn’t want it. I can’t give Hugh a child of Henry’s.
I am offered this at the time when I am most awake to myself as an artist, as a solitary, unmated woman.
Night. I refuse to continue to be the mother. I have been the mother of my brothers, of the weak, of the poor, of Hugh, of my lovers, of my Father. [Mars sextile Ceres] I want to live only for the love of man, and as an artist– as a mistress, as a creator. Not motherhood, immolation, selflessness. Motherhood, that is solitude again, giving, protecting, serving, surrendering. No. No. No.
(Incest, 1932-1934)
[natal Lilith in the fourth house; natal Moon conjunct Uranus square Venus-Eris in Pisces]
November 1934
Nin disembarks again in New York, after almost twenty years. Otto Rank was moving from Paris to NY and she came to assist him in his psychoanalytical practice.
June 1935
Overwhelmed by her patients’ problems, she returns to France, leaving the practice of psychoanalysis behind forever.
April 1936
She makes a short trip to Fez, Morocco that turns out life-changing and intense.
“The last vestiges of my past were lost in the ancient city of Fez, which was so much like my own life, with its torturous streets, its silences, secrecies, its labyrinths and its covered faces.”
“In the city of Fez I became aware that the little demon which devoured me for twenty years, had ceased eating me.”
(“Through the streets of my own labyrinth”)
June 1936
Nin meets Gonzalo, a new lover and a Peruvian Marxist with whom she becomes interested in politics and gets in touch with exiles from the Spanish Civil War. Later she will become disenchanted with politics, and discusses with him its value as opposed as that of psychoanalysis:
Psychoanalysis can dissolve delusions, worlds built on pathologic lies. It can dissolve false superstructures and reestablish life and a more simple human base. Analysis can bring one face to face with the problems created by a bourgeois society and can lead the individual to achieve greater liberation and growth. It does not counsel revolution, but if enough people struggle against limitations of all kinds the world would be altered anyway, and changes made from the inside.
(Volume Three: 1939-1944)
September 1936
In Paris, she moves to a houseboat in the Seine, in order to live out a dream that she once had.
As soon as I was inside the houseboat, I no longer knew the name of the river or the city. Once inside the walls of old wood, under the heavy beams, I might be inside a Norwegian sailing ship traversing fjords, in a Dutch boyer sailing to Bali, a jute boat on the Brahmaputra. At night the lights on the shore were those of Constantinople or the Neva. The giant bells ringing the hours were those of the Sunken Cathedral. Every time I inserted the key in the lock, I felt this snapping of cords, this lifting of anchor, this fever of departure. Once inside the houseboat, all the voyages began. Even at night with its shutters closed, no smoke coming out of its chimney, asleep and secret, it had an air of mysteriously sailing somewhere.
(The Houseboat)
[natal Sun conjunct natal Jupiter]
December 1939
Nin is forced to leave Paris after the outbreak of World War II.
She moves to New York and misses her life in Paris:
“We all knew that we were parting from a pattern of life we would never see again. It was the end of our romantic life.”
“All around us there is excitement in place of exaltation, rush and action in place of depth, humor in place of feeling.”
(Volume Three: 1939-1944)
Dec 01 (lack of exact date)
Transiting Chiron Rx at 19º22 Cancer — in her 10th house
opposite natal Chiron (20º00 Cap), Lilith (12º07 Cap)
square natal North Node (17º02 Lib)
trine natal Nessus (16º39 Pis), Vesta (18º48 Pis), Venus (22º12 Pis), Eris (23º03 Pis)
December 1940
Anaïs starts to write erotica for an anonymous book collector for money, with Henry and other friends. After she sends him the pages, his answer always is: “It is fine. But leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex. Concentrate on sex.” (Volume Three: 1939-1944) Which makes Nin angry and one year later, she writes to him the famous letter:
Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.
You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.
If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.
How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry Cut the poetry. No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gesture; for a lover, when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore. What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, perversity and art…
We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses upon silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must be by now completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
(Volume Three: 1939-1944)
January 1942
Nin sets up her own small press in a loft.
“The creation of an individual world, an act of independence, such as the work at the press, is a marvelous cure for anger and frustration. The insults of the publishers, the rejections, the ignorance, all are forgotten. I love the studio. I get up with eager curiosity. The press is a challenge. We make mistakes.”
(Volume Three: 1939-1944)
1947
Nin meets Rupert Pole, who will become the second of her two simultaneous husbands.
March 17, 1955
She marries Rupert Pole in Arizona, while she was still married to Hugh Guiler. Concerned about legal consequences, Nin annuls the marriage to Pole in 1966, but continue living together until her death in 1977.
Transiting Chiron at 03º44 Aquarius — in her 4th house
conjunct her natal Saturn (03º49 Aqu), Mercury (06º02 Aqu)
trine Ascendant (03º19 Lib)
sextile natal Juno (04º47 Sag)
“As Nin’s literary executor, Mr. Pole oversaw the posthumous publication of four unexpurgated volumes of her diaries, which chronicled her affairs with an international cast of luminaries, including the novelist Henry Miller; the critic Edmund Wilson; the psychologist Otto Rank, who happened to be her therapist; and the Spanish composer Joaquín Nin, who happened to be her father.”
(The New York Times)
After the death of Hugh Guiler and some members of the family, Pole managed to publish the unexpurgated version of some of Nin’s journals. Previously, her diaries had only been published with the erotic content and the parts related to Hugh Guiler both edited out.
January 14, 1977
Anaïs Nin dies of cancer in Los Angeles, California.
Transiting Chiron at 27º19 Aries —
trine natal Uranus (25º01 Sag)
square natal Chiron (20º00 Cap)