Anaïs Nin: The George Turner Affair by Rehan Qayoom
47 Boulevard Suchte (Paris, 1929) - By kind permission of The Anaïs Nin Foundation
Henry Miller described George Turner as one of ‘the hundred or so’ of Anaïs Nin’s lovers he never got to meet. He was an American business acquaintance of her husband Hugh Guiler who was infatuated with her. They first met in the late 1920s when they danced together and she was charmed by him. She realised that the rumours about his amours and how he was pursued by women were true, after all. Yet, there was no spark between them then, one that could lead to desire. That would come a few years later.
June 1934
Anaïs Nin trembles as she dances with George Turner at a party in his apartment only a few hours after being with Otto Rank. He clutches her tightly to himself and she can feel his ‘tremendous erection’ that arouses a ‘sexual upheaval’ in her, ‘a violent desire;’ as she closes her eyes and dances ‘like a Negro, … with complete abandon’ to the amusement of onlookers; ‘sensuously stirred by his languid eyes and sensuous, Venusian mouth, and by his desire.’ When they meet again just over a week later, she can feel Turner’s hand trembling as she shakes it. Lawrence Durrell recalled ‘She really liked men, but on all fours …’:
Turner tells me I have been on his mind for years. First he found me proud, then strange and perhaps a drug addict and indifferent; then suspected me of lesbianism. Thought of me as so entangled with loves, inaccessible. Said that at the Guicciardis’ I gave him the feeling of great “illusion”, a feeling he believed dead in him. Last night I liked the mouth open and shivery, the tongue all ready to flicker.
In November of that year, she records in her diary, that the telephone rang all day, with Turner’s ‘sensual voice requesting,’ what, exactly? One can only guess. Millers refers to him as his rival who ‘tries to fuck me behind my back.’
January 1935
Nin lies with Turner on the couch in Dr. Otto Rank’s room ‘pulling down everything sacred, desecrating, cheapening,' just so that when they are discovered by Rank who is working in the next room, she wants him to feel betrayed, enjoys it, acting innocent and annoyed at having been ‘pursued by Turner.’ She uses him as scapegoat – ‘I don’t hesitate for a moment to hurt … to hurt Turner’. She later recalled that she did not want to be with him ‘because of Henry and Rank and yet yielded.’
She remembers lifting the snow-heavy windowsill one afternoon in Jericho Long Island, after lying down with Turner. With Henry Miller’s sperm still fresh inside of her!
June 1936
George Turner getting feverish again, disobeying my order (in New York): just once and then forget all about it. He and I, with his wife and Hugh, crowded in the elevator, pressed against each other, and great excitement through the red globules and the white. We feel each other through this excitement. In the taxi, his knee against mine makes me feel as in the swift elevator in the Barbizon Plaza shooting down, oh, so aware of this warm life between my legs while I walk. And so when he telephones and pleads I concede some meeting in the future.
Nin recalls Turner’s power over her that distracts her from hurting, ‘such a refuge from pain’, a defence against the obsession of love ‘One afternoon, he came to see me and I felt shivery and desirous, and we lay on my bed but I was nervous and did not enjoy it.’
At the housewarming party for her apartment on the ‘flowing, shining’ Seine (she could look across to the Eiffel Tower), she hires Tahitians to dance and play music. Turner and Nin dance under ‘dim paper lanterns’ as Tahitian music plays amidst the laughter as others kiss out on the balcony. Gonzalo More is there too and she wishes he had held her as Turner now did ‘hotly, … sexes soldered, hot, burning, saying: Open your legs, God, I want you like hell, I could take you right here. Whore, whore, whore at last.’ To her diary she confides the memory of his ‘lascivious, erotic, mouth red, eyes languid. George jealous of Gonzalo, always emotional, erotic, George pinching me, clutching me, breathless, sick with desire.’ Gonzalo, too, is jealous when he spots her dancing with Turner in the darkest corner with Allendy watching them, ‘(kissing was not necessary, we were occupied by other stronger sensations and he was holding me as tightly as he possibly could).’
On 25th they both sit on the couch oblivious to people in adjoining rooms and apartments, feeling ‘surge after surge of the most violent desire and our mouths were opening with a craving to kiss and bite and his eyes were drunk’. He tells her how excited he was at the very thought of coming to see her, that she was the most exciting woman he had ever known and he would like to take her there and then so desperately that he was physically aching for it, entreating, panting, begging her – “Open your legs, open your legs.” Only last night he was imagining them playing wild games together. Standing by the window he lifts her dress, asking “Can I slip my finger there, can I?” She is soaking, dizzy as they melt into each other ‘yearning for mouth and sex.’ They run downstairs to the empty apartment which she suggests he could rent out and live in but finding it occupied she suggests pushing the button to the eighth floor of the tiny elevator as she grips his erect penis in her hand, wet with desire, demanding he fuck her ‘right there in the little elevator, wildly, oh, wildly, as we went up and down several times. And who is George Turner? It does not matter. Nothing matters but this drunkenness.’
She remembers it the following day while meeting Miller and is relieved to find no love for George, only ‘pure sensuality;’ ‘eroticism, pure sex.’. She enjoys his words, their coupling, the sex, ‘his emotionalism, his feminine mobile face, passionate blue eyes’:
Lying down with him, and Gonzalo telephoning at that moment, and Turner caressing me between the legs while I am talking with Gonzalo. Turner, whose excitement is powerful, who gets an erection when he hears my voice over the telephone, the honey flowing but no orgasm because Gonzalo's face is before me, while Turner whispers obscenities, whispers hot words. And an hour later I meet Gonzalo, divinely beautiful Gonzalo, … I dream at night of orgasm at the very touch of Turner's sexual fire, and awake to images of Gonzalo's face. All in pieces. And yet ... all in pieces, in pieces, body and soul pulling, creation pulling, fire calling me, water and air, on all planes. I flower, weep, kiss, love, desire.
July 1936
Nin and her husband Hugh Guiler pay a visit to the Turner household and all she can see is Gonzalo’s face everywhere. Before the year is out, Nin confesses to her Diary that she no longer desires Turner.
20th April 1937
Back from a cruise around the world, Turner telephones Nin, begging to see her and confessing that he is still “crazy” about her. She is elusive ‘I want to be alone.’
SOURCES
Bair, Deirdre. Anaïs Nin: A Biography. (Bloomsbury, 1996).
Fitch, Noël Riley. Literary Cafés of Paris. (Starhill Press, 1989).
Nin, Anaïs. A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932–1953. (1987)
Incest: From "A Journal of Love" – The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932–1934.
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992).
Fire: From "A Journal of Love" - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934–1937. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1995).
Nearer the Moon: From “A Journal of Love” - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1937-1939. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1995).
