I had just finished a first novel, Williwaw, based on my experiences as the first mate of an army freight supply ship in the Aleutians. Before I enlisted in the army at seventeen, I had lived in Washington, D.C. My family was political-military. I give these little personal facts to set the scene for my first meeting with Peggy Guggenheim. In the early part of that winter I had met Anaïs Nin. I was twenty. She was forty-two. Our long and arduous relationship, or Relationship, began in the cold, as the sweet singer of Camelot would say. Anaïs was a shining figure who looked younger than she was; spoke in a soft curiously accented voice; told lies which for sheer beauty and strangeness were even better than the books she wrote—perhaps because what she wrote was always truthful if not true while what she said was intended only to please—herself as well as others. “I shall take you to a party, chéri,” she announced. We were in the five-floor Greenwich Village walk-up where she lived with her husband (a banker who made movies and engravings and helped Anaïs play at being a starving Bohemian).
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