A literate passion: Anais Nin & Henry Miller

“I want to both combat you and submit to you, because as a woman I adore your courage, I adore the pain in engenders, I adore the struggle you carry in yourself, which I alone fully realize, I adore your terrifying sincerity. I adore your strength. You are right. The world is to be caricatured, but I know, too, how much you can love what you caricature. How much passion there is in you! It is that I feel in you. I do not feel the savant, the revealer, the observer. When I am with you, it is the blood I sense.
This time you are not going to awake from the ecstasies of our encounters to reveal only the ridiculous moments. No. You won’t do it this time, because while we live together, while you examine my indelible rouge effacing the design of my mouth, spreading like a blood after an operation (you kissed my mouth and it was gone, the design of it was lost as in a watercolor, the colors ran); while you do that, I seize upon the wonder that is brushing by (the wonder, oh, the wonder of my lying under you), and I bring it to you, I breathe it around you. Take it. I feel prodigal with my feelings when you love me, feelings so unblunted, so new, Henry, not lost in resemblance to other moments, so much ours, yours, mine, you and I together, not any man or any woman together.

“Come closer to me, come closer. I promise you it will be beautiful.”

You keep your promise.

Listen, I do not believe that I alone feel that we are living something new because it is new to me. I do not see in your writing any of the feelings you have shown me or any of the phrases you have used. When I read your writing, I wondered, What episode are we going to repeat?

You carry your vision, and I mine, and they have mingled. If at moments I see the world as you see it, you will sometimes see it as I do.”
— Anais Nin to Henry Miller

A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

Henry Miller & Anaïs Nin on Death and Dreams

Anais and Henry corresponded for nearly twenty years. Their literary friendship turned sexual in 1932, this led to some of the most passionate letters ever written. Anais also carried on a sexual relationship with June Miller, Henry’s second wife. The love triangle was the subject of the 1992 film Henry and June.

Film:

Anaïs & June (1/3)

Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (full title Henry and June: From A Journal of Love: the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931–1932)) is a 1986 book that is based upon material excerpted from the unpublished diaries of Anaïs Nin. It corresponds temporally to the first volume of Nin’s published diaries, written between October 1931 and October 1932, yet is radically different, in that that book begins with a description of the landscape of and around her home and never mentions her husband, whereas “Henry and June” begins with discussion of Nin’s sex life and is full of her struggles and passionate relationship with husband Hugo, and then, as the novel/memoir progresses, other lovers.

This, the first of currently four volumes of unexpurgated diaries, concentrates on her passionate involvement with the writer Henry Miller and his wife June Miller.

Henry Miller – Reflections on Writing -Part I