Passion for literature messages Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller

Here, for the first time, the record is published of a deep friendship and a romantic love relationship with literature that continued throughout the long path of the lives of two writers, despite all circumstances. It began with a coincidental lunch in the vicinity of Paris in late 1931, when Inez Nen, wife of Huo Parker Guller, aged twenty-eight, was at that time a young woman ready to embark on a mental and physical adventure, with Henry Miller, the "homeless writer," as one friend called him, who would turn forty on December 26 of the following year. All signs indicated that they were incompatible, but they shared one thing: both were emerging writers and passionate lovers of words. After a few months of exchanging intense intellectual conversations — at French café tables, in the Guller family home in Loffsyen, and through a stream of letters — the relationship exploded into a violent relationship. Over the next ten years, the always bankrupt man who called himself "Brooklyn Boy" and the overly sensitive Spanish "child woman" (as Edmond Wilson described her) tried to establish a life together. When those efforts failed, for reasons clarified through correspondence, Henry Miller and Inez Nen resumed their separate lives in the early forties. But they remained connected by a fundamental bond. After shedding fleeting emotions, and after each fulfilled the other's material and emotional needs, and after the dangerous companionship of breaking social taboos, their relationship remained steadily based on their mutual need to create themselves through writing. As Henry Miller later wrote, it was a pursuit "to realize myself with words." For him, it was a obsessive quest, Proustian in his past and the suspicious role women played in it. For Inez Nen, in her diaries she kept since childhood, it was an unrelenting pursuit of a detached emotional present. In February 1932, Miller wrote to Inez Nen, "Oh God, I almost go crazy when I think that a single day must pass without me writing. I can never speed up. And surely this is why I write passionately, and with despair." After a few months, Inez Nen wrote in her diaries: "The same thing that makes Henry resilient makes me so too, is that what lies deep within us is a writer, not a human being."