Anaïs Nin On Walking The City
In her book Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, Kerri Andrews looks at how women found a sense of themselves and their creativity, through walking. From Virginia Woolf to Cheryl Strayed, Andrews points out that “while women walked at times for the same purposes as men, the experience of being on foot has frequently meant markedly different things for women.”
In this extract, Andrews looks at the peregrinations of writer Anaïs Nin.
Anaïs Nin, the diarist, essayist and novelist, spent much of her life walking the streets of the cities in which she lived, and walking her writing into being. Having reached adulthood in New York, it was in Paris, where Nin moved in 1924, aged 26 and newly married, that she began to really hone her observational writing. It was also a city with which Nin fell quickly and powerfully in love. This relationship was developed and maintained as Nin roamed the streets at all times of day and night. The city’s creative energy electrified her diary writing:
““Paris is like a giant park, riotous in colouring, festive in its fountains and flowers, glorious in its monuments. When I stand at the top of the Champs-Elysées … I feel as if I were biting into a utopian fruit, something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.””
Throughout her time in Paris, and in the numerous other cities Nin would call home during her itinerant life, she maintained a detailed diary in which she documented how she moved and felt and lived in urban spaces. Her journal documents, among other things, the importance of walking to Nin’s life, from its function as a mechanism to manage her emotional health, to the role it played in her writing, to its involvement in the ways in which she expressed and experienced her sexuality. City walking offered creativity, escape, fantasy, pleasure and solace. “When I’m sad,” she wrote in 1935, “I sometimes tire my sadness away by walking. I walk until I am exhausted. I give myself a fête des yeux [feast for the eyes]. I look at every shop window. Rue Saint-Honoré, rue de la Boétie, rue de Rivoli, avenue des Champs-Élysées, Place Vendôme, avenue Victor-Hugo.”
Most histories of urban walking discount the possibility of women experiencing the streets in the ways Nin’s diary records, or even of there being women’s accounts of walking the streets at all. Instead, books have concentrated on the phenomenon of the male urban wanderer, a figure made iconic by French writers of the 19th century including Honoré de Balzac and Charles Baudelaire. it was certainly not an exclusively male experience to feel the “electrical energy” of city walking: Nin’s prose hums with it.
The absence of women’s experiences from studies of the city, or of city walking, has in part been the result of assumptions about what it was socially possible – or permissible – for women to do. Most accounts of walking in the city see urban walking as extremely dangerous for women because of a perceived risk of sexual assault, and the additional possibility that, historically at least, a respectable woman walking the streets might be mistaken for a prostitute – the archetypal “streetwalker”.
For Nin, the city was a complex place in which sexual violence was certainly a possibility, but this possibility was, for her, much less important than the opportunities she found for both sexual and creative self-expression. Key to Nin’s confidence is an acute awareness of her own sexual power and appetites, an awareness which was articulated in explicit detail in the diaries from the late 1920s onwards.
In 1923 Nin married Hugh “Hugo” Guiler, an American-born son of Scottish parents, whom she met in New York. Not long after, Nin began to engage in a range of extra-marital sexual adventures which included orgies, experiments with homosexuality and parallel affairs with up to five men at a time: for a period in the 1930s, she was in committed relationships with three men – Guiler, Henry Miller and Antonin Artaud – each of whom believed she was living and sleeping only with him. Nin’s diaries document dozens, perhaps hundreds, of affairs, and outline an apparently perpetual sensitivity both to her sexual attractiveness and sexual arousal. Her sexuality determined in various ways how and to what purpose Nin walked the city, with implications for her work as a writer. In the midst of one of her more involved affairs – with Peruvian writer Gonzalo Moré – she recorded in her diary how, as a result of their relationship:
““I feel vibrations through all my senses at the bodies and faces I see on the streets; it is the moment when I am sensitive and open to every leaf, cloud, wind gust, the eyes around me.””
Walking the streets of Paris in this hyper-aroused state seems to create within Nin an almost-orgasmic connection with everything she encounters, whether that is a “body” or a “leaf”. These sensations are enhanced by the state of partial dress, with little by way of underwear, that Nin describes as “walking poor”, enabling her to access even more sensations, or “vibrations”.
For Nin, there was an important link between sexual experience, sexual confidence and the development of her literary voice, all of which were bound up with the ways in which she walked through the city. Her experiences as a walker in Paris are significantly enriched because every street, every cafe, is overlaid repeatedly with memories and loves. These memories would sustain Nin through the years of the Second World War and her exile in America.
As a walker, Nin was able to transform the world in which she lived in astonishing ways: she had the ability, honed while she walked Paris and New York, to reimagine the city as a series of interconnected lives giving shape to, and being shaped by, the streets on which they were experienced. She conceived of walking as a kind of bodily inscription in which the path is the page, in a world where we can touch and hold all the thoughts we have ever had.
The diaries and fiction which emerged from Nin’s walking gave form to these impossible worlds and enabled others to enter those strange places. As a walker-writer, the rules of the ordinary, physical world did not apply to Nin. Instead she was able to escape “in space, fluid, beyond all walls, all doors”, to a place only her feet, with the help of her imagination, knew how to find.
This is an edited extract from Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews, published by Reaktion Books.