Anaïs Nin and the people in her life

French psychoanalyst, author, and cofounder of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society in 1926. In 1932, Anais Nin became his patient and romantic interest and, to pay for her sessions, she did research for him in alchemy and mysticism. He introduced the Guilers to his patient Antonin Artaud, the drug-addicted poet and theatrical innovator, in March 1933. He also analyzed Nin's cousin Eduardo Sanchez and her husband, Hugh Guiler, and stimulated the latter's growing interest in astrology.

Born in Boston, his Scottish parents sent him and his younger brother to a boarding school in Scotland when he was 6 years old. After a childhood spent in the tropical paradise of a sugar farm in Puerto Rico (where his father worked as a design engineer), the dour, restrictive world of Ayr, in Halloway, and later the Edinburgh Academy, proved to be traumatic. In 1920, he graduated from Columbia University with degrees in literature and economics and eventually signed up as a trainee with the National City Bank. He met the eighteen-year-old Anais Nin at a dance in his parents' home in Forest Hills, New York, in 1921. After a protracted courtship they were married in Havana, Cuba, in March 1923, against the objection of his family, who did not approve of the Catholic daughter of a musician father. In December 1924 the Guilers moved to France, where Hugo had been assigned to the bank's Paris branch, and for the next fifteen years they remained there until the outbreak of war in 1939 forced their return to the United States. Encouraged by his wife, who called him the "poet-banker", Hugo pusued his interests in music, dance, the graphic arts, and astrology, but his business life, which involved a great deal of travel and long periods in London, where he developed the bank's trust department, curtailed his artistic impulses. The story of his courtship and marriage to Anais Nin, and their early years in Paris, is covered in great detail in the three volumes of The Early Diary of Anais Nin, spanning the period from 1920 to 1931.

Brooklyn-born American writer with German parents. In 1924, after a checkered career of odd jobs and a lengthy stint in the personnel office of the Western Union Telegraph Company in New York, he quit his last paying job to take up writing "seriously". He was encouraged by his second wife, the former taxi girl June Smith, who, for the next six years provided their often precarious livelihood as a "hostess" or through other schemes. At her urging, Miller left for Europe in 1930. His struggle to survive Paris, homeless, penniless, and often without food, provided the raw material for his first breakthrough book, Tropic of Cancer, which finally appeared in 1934 under the Obelisk imprint when Anais Nin underwrote its publication with borrowed money. Miller met the Guilers in December 1931, and after a brief teaching interlude in Dijon which Hugo had helped to arrange, Miller returned to Paris. The literary friendship with Anais Nin, which had unleashed an avalanche of correspondance, in March 1932 turned into a fiery love affair that was to last for many years. Its details came to light only in recent years, with the publication of Henry and June: The unexpurgated diary of Anais Nin, 1931-1932. June, who had made two brief visits to Paris in 1932, divorced Miller in 1934.
see my pages on Henry Miller & June

Peruvian artist, born in the provincial capital of Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Of mixed Scottish, Spanish, and Indian parentage, he was educated at the local Jesuit school. His father, a well-to-do landowner, sent him to the university of Lima, where he also worked for his brother's newspaper. When he fell in love with the young married dance Helba Huara, the couple fled to the US and eventually settled in Paris. A champion of the Andean-Indian cause, Gonzalo Moré joined the newly established Peruvian Communist Party and in December 1928 together with his friend Vallejo established a communist group in Paris. An occasional art student, Gonzalo exhibited some of his work in Paris, but with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he became deeply involved in the anti-fascist struggle. With Pablo Neruda, Vallejo and others he founded a number of committees for the defense of the Spanish Republic. His relationship with Anais Nin is covered in Fire: From A Journal Of Love. The unexpurgated diary, 1934-1937. it also formed the basis for the novel The Four-chambered Heart.

Austrian psychoanalyst and author (born Otto Rosenfeld). He belonged to the inner circle of the nascent psychoanalytic movement in Vienna for almost 20 years until the publication of his study The Trauma of Birth in 1924 provoked a break with Sigmund Freud and his more orthodox followers. With his wife and young daughter, Rank moved to Paris in 1926 and, eventually, to the United States, late in 1934, when his economic situation in France had deteriorated. His books Art and Artist and Don Juan et son double and his writings on incest had a great influence on Anais Nin. She became his patient in 1933 and followed him to New York in Novbember 1934, after they had become romantically involved.

The relationship between Anais and Otto Rank is described in her unexpurgated diaries Incest and Fire. In an interview late in her life she recaptures how much Ranks book Art and Artist had become a part of her thinking without her even noticing it. A reprint of the book is available at amazon.com with a foreword by Anais Nin.