Gurus Behaving Badly: Anaïs Nin’s Diary & the Value of Gossip

Alexis Turner

This is a story about Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, who wanted us to know that she did not care for Timothy Leary. As far as she was concerned, Leary wasn’t in or of the world and so he had no feel for people. When her dear friend Virginia Denison’s husband was in Europe, Virginia’s lover André came over and found her in bed with Leary. André proceeded to beat the yogini, breaking mirrors and chairs and pottery, screaming wildly. He threw a bottle through a window. Slapped her. Proposed to her. Stormed out in a huff. The episode was troubling enough that the writer set it down in her diary multiple times, trying to get it just right. There’s one detail that always stays the same, though. It’s how you know it was the point. The point, for Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell—or Anaïs Nin, for simplicity’s sake—was Leary. He’d taken his hearing aids out the night before and he slept through the whole thing. The point was that he was a shitty lover, walled off from others. Oblivious. She could tell as soon as she met him. The Denison affair just cemented what Anaïs already knew with that uncanny writerly insight she liked to brag so much about. But this story is not about Timothy Leary. It is about the role of expertise and truth in American politics... continue reading.