“Horizontally Piled Clouds”: An Interview with Paul Herron of Sky Blue Press
“I am living too swiftly; the fruits are falling, they are too heavy for the trees. I look at the sky, driving home with Hugo, a sky all in horizontally piled clouds, and I look through it at the infinite liberation of my feelings and my expansion.” (Incest, 242)
Promotional Photo of Anaïs Nin for Under a Glass Bell, 1944. Ian Hugo’s (Hugh Guiler) engraving in background. [Photo courtesy of The Anaïs Nin Trust]
Creating a space for oneself is the bridge between spectral living and automation. French-Cuban diarist Anaïs Nin illustrates the tight rope of humanity through her life and work, a gamble of balance enacted by the first drop of black ink.
The diary—as document—is a portal to that private river of thoughts and sensations that construct our inner worlds. Nin’s unexpurgated diaries uncover the personal mythology of a woman whose experience intersects language (English, French, Spanish), love (Ian Hugo, Henry Miller, Otto Rank, Rupert Pole), space (Paris, New York, Los Angeles), and time (spanning the entirety of the 20th century). Locating her experiences among these material axes give weight to her work; that Nin was present in Montparnassian literary circles in the 1920s/30s, in the corona of post-WWII Gotham Book Mart, and on Santa Monica beaches alongside Kenneth Anger in the height of 1950s experimental cinema, are all of remarkable import. That Nin would also help build a psychological frontier to witness and expound on the boundaries of the soul through her diaries is what lifts them to such glittering heights.
Nin’s work has always lived on the fringes of our cultural glow, giving her a need to conceive a publishing press of her own. In 1942 Nin established Gemor Press with one of her extramarital lovers, Gonzalo Moré, whom she named the press after. Though the press was mobile for a short 5 years—long years on Nin’s body, which used every inch of blood and muscle to manually type-set 12 works of literature and visual art—it represented a freedom from the publishing world in New York City that chiseled at Nin’s well-being.
Nin’s late literary agent and editor Gunther Stuhlmann, and presently, Paul Herron, have preserved and instigated both the continued publishing of Nin’s work and the dialogues that encircle it. Herron’s A Café in Space (2003-2018) which was, up until recently, the only living literary journal dedicated to Anaïs Nin, was birthed at a moment of double significance: on Anaïs’ 100th birthday, and a year after Stuhlmann’s death left a sizable lacuna in Anaïs lore.
Herron developed Sky Blue Press in 1996 to publish Anaïs Nin: A Book of Mirrors, a collection that marks a foreshadowing of A Café in Space. Instead of handing the submissions to a university press editor to “perform the inevitable surgery to the manuscript,” Herron decided to publish it himself:
Paul Herron: I valued every contribution to Mirrors. Yes, I had work from Allen Ginsberg and Erica Jong and a preface by Gunther [Stuhlmann], but I also had work from an English ex-con pornographer who wrote as a woman, and another who liked to make obscene drawings, like a drawing of House of Incest impaled on an erect penis. I didn’t want any of that touched. It would have gutted the book. In fact, when I took sample copies to Gotham Book Mart in NYC … the buyer chose to purchase Mirrors when he read the article “Looking for Anaïs,” about a personal ad asking to hook up with a ‘Henry [Miller],’ and all the writer’s experiences with various Anaïs’s.
1992 watermarks a pivotal moment in the preservation of literature as art. Louveciennes, a Western commune of Paris, is laid out like a quiet gallery. Nin’s home, where she lived with her husband Hugh Guiler at 2 bis rue Montbuisson from 1930-1936, was the site of a series of Rimbaudian illuminations for the young writer. At 2 bis, “her consciousness changed,” an alchemy divined from two major catalysts: her first contact with Henry Miller, who would be her lover and lifetime friend, and her dive into the unconscious through psychoanalysis with René Allendy and Otto Rank. When Herron, a chemistry major born in Michigan, made his first pilgrimage to the infamous “laboratory of the soul” in 1992, it fostered in him similar shades of gold. Herron was driven to France by need.
PH: [I wanted] to see if any echoes remained … It was a life-changing event for me: I was taken in—as a lost American wandering the streets—by an elderly couple who loved Americans—he was a resistance vet who was liberated from a Nazi prison camp by Eisenhower. They introduced me to the town historian and author, Jacques Laÿ, who led me to Anaïs’s empty house, which was literally falling apart at the time. The experience was so profound that I wrote an entire book about it in a single night, start to finish.
Herron secretly uses the Xerox machine to run pages at his work, stealing to Kinko’s to bind them, though he still has an original copy held together by staples. Herron prints 20 copies of his experiences in Louveciennes and hands them out to his friends in the quiet town.
PH: Later, when a Miller junkie named Roger Jackson was following in my footsteps and wound up in Louveciennes, he was introduced to the same couple I’d met—and they showed him my book.
Jackson would be one of a handful of individuals who would rip open the ceiling of the publishing world for Herron.
Herron’s exploration of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller begins with the first NC-17 rating in the United States, Henry & June:
PH: I just wanted to see a sexy movie in Paris … I was enraptured by the characters in the film—Anaïs, Henry, June, Hugo—and the sense of freedom and adventure. I got swept up. When the credits rolled, I realized it was based on Nin’s diary, and that Tropic of Cancer was a real book. On the way home, I bought both books at the used bookstore.
It is jet set, flash, and heat. Herron burns through the complete works of both authors, an explosive pursuit for one who, prior to this moment, considers himself alliterate: “I was a non-reader ... You can read, but just don’t.” At the back of one particular Miller biography, Anaïs: An International Journal is listed as a reference, and Herron picks up the phone to call the library for more information. He receives a number to the office of the journal, and calls it immediately:
PH: This big booming voice with a German accent answers the phone, never identified himself, and I told him I had been to Louveciennes, and I was interested in his journal. He sent me a copy [of the journal] that had another person’s account of going to Louveciennes for the first time, similar stories to mine. And so I got this book, and the letter is signed by Gunther. I almost dropped. I didn’t realize it was him [on the phone]. It had never occurred to me. And to me, he was famous! He was famous because his name is on all of the diaries. It’s like Elizabeth Taylor answered my letter!
Anaïs bends any notion of singular personhood; in Anaïs, the pleasure-seeking woman is the maternal, and the artist.
How extraordinary it is to find another familiar with Anaïs Nin, let alone one who is responsible for the editing, publishing, and circulating of her work; meeting others draws her presence into the present moment.
PH: The first person I ever talked to that knew anything about Anaïs was Gunther … I kept writing back and forth to him, we became friends, he became my mentor. But as far as where I used to live in Detroit, I didn’t know a single person who knew Anaïs. Not a single person.
It is by chance that Nin’s own return to America in 1939—fleeing war-torn France—is marked by a shift in editorial voice that matches her transatlantic transition. Stuhlmann, born in Germany, concludes his final editorial contribution with Nearer the Moon, Nin’s Unexpurgated Diaries from 1937-1939; Herron, American by birth, picks up where Stuhlmann left off in the same year.
PH: Through Gunther, many doors opened. He became my mentor. And he gave me credibility. He spoke of me to Rupert Pole [Anaïs’ second husband], who supported my work, and Rupert introduced me to Kazuko Sugisaki, who eventually entrusted me with the unedited manuscript that eventually became Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939-1947 (2013), the first new diary to appear in 17 years.
A Café in Space—which is celebrating an Anthology of all 15 journals—is a holding place for diasporic conversations, mirroring the multitudes that are contained in the diaries themselves. Anaïs bends any notion of singular personhood; in Anaïs, the pleasure-seeking woman is the maternal, and the artist. The need for stability and the need for freedom, all encompassed by the author’s mercurial movements between her husband, Hugh Guiler, her lovers, and her second, bigamous husband, Rupert Pole. The Self is always in motion.
PH: I could see aspects of myself in her, which were nebulous and undefined until she clearly expressed what she was feeling. Suddenly I knew myself better and could identify my mysterious longings, desires, motivations, angsts. She blew away the mist we sometimes surround ourselves with. I liken reading her to seeing yourself in a mirror, only psychologically.
In going through Anaïs’ studio after her second husband, Rupert Pole’s, death in 2006, Herron finds a series of letters between Anaïs and her father, Joaquín Nin, “in a folder buried under piles of old newspapers.” Joaquín Nin, a musician whose abandonment of his family would cause Anaïs to begin writing her diaries at age 11 as a letter begging his return, would meet his daughter again 20 years later. The two folded into an infamous incestuous relationship, one that will be commemorated by Herron in the upcoming Father Letters: Correspondence between Anaïs and Joaquín Nin, 1933-1940.
PH: Her father was taking her to task because of the late-term abortion she had. And Anaïs wrote back and said that she loved to die and then to be reborn, over and over and over. That’s how she put it. To her, it was an old self of hers dying, and a new one being born.
Those whose needs fluctuate in every peg between stability and freedom, earth and water; the mist we sometimes surround ourselves with, and the breeze that clarifies the contours of our bodies once more.
Anaïs’ value is in these orbits: her shifting boundaries create the fluid persona that feels most in line with our millennia. There is room here for the dynamic, for the anti-categorical, for women, for men, for those in between, and those that bend. Those whose needs fluctuate in every peg between stability and freedom, earth and water; the mist we sometimes surround ourselves with, and the breeze that clarifies the contours of our bodies once more.
Despite Anaïs’ shifting effervescence, the feminist dialogue surrounding her work has sought to locate her in either/or factions: in service to, or in opposition of, a feminist trajectory.
Paul comments about women who barracked Anaïs in the late 1960s when her diaries were first published and read widely across the United States.
PH: When some feminists found out she had a husband who supported her financially, they rebelled, saying her originally published diaries were a lie, because there was no mention of a husband (because Hugo did not want to be included—he wished his professional and personal lives to be completely separate). But all one had to do was read Gunther’s intro, in which he clearly says Nin had a husband who was absent from the diary. To me, any friction between Nin and the feminists was due to a lack of communication and the problem of jumping to conclusions.
Feminism, too, is multiple, and retrospection gives us the benefit of seeing its movements in waves. Celebrating a woman’s agency means taking off the father’s pantsuit, and returning the calculating gaze for one of true vision—of recognition, of acknowledgement, and of faith. Speculating on how Nin could have or should have lived as she wrote one of our most human documents feels out of touch with some of these core tenets. It is separate from feeling.
PH: Some women heckled Anaïs because she had a husband or because she had too much make-up on, or she dressed in clothes that were too feminine, whatever the offence might have been … I think some people who are at the extreme end of any spectrum, they often times speak before they’ve had a chance to think about what they’re going to say … and Anaïs discovered that she just could not communicate with these people because they wouldn’t listen, their points of view were so entrenched in their heads that anybody who said anything that opposed those views, or seemed to, or even acted like it, they lashed out at them. There’s a lot of anger there. And rightly so!
Anger is a useful tool when it is channeled into the creation of space. The alienation resulting from a lack of true contact has the ability to foster anger as a destructive force. Projecting this rage onto an individual removes them from their community, doubling the destructive possibilities of what can be a noble emotion. The idea of being too feminine is a misogynist illusion, and a distancing one.
Anaïs speaks directly to anger in a lecture at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, in 1972:
Anger can be an energizing thing that will make you act … When I was angry at something—for example when I first came to America and nobody would publish me—instead of getting angry and then bitter and turning in, I bought a press and published a book … Anger can be effective when we know what we are angry about. (Lectures, 23-24).
First comes understanding, then comes action.
Those who experience this kind of alienation systemically know firmly what it means to be angry. It is a blessing to recognize anger as a source of knowledge, and consequently transform its tense grip into something breathable.
The word feminism conjures a great many contradictions, and it is unfortunate that it has been branded by anyone other than those who believe in the independent pursuit of creative freedom, and our responsibility for the collective life: “You grow only insofar as people around you are also growing and expanding and becoming freer.” (Lectures, 16)
I have never “outgrown” Nin—as I grow, I notice new and different things in her writing; layers seem to fall away, exposing deeper and more profound ones.
PH: There were people in the [Second Wave] movement that were sympathetic to Anaïs, and understood her, and there were people that didn’t … [Anaïs] believed in equality, but she felt that men and women are different: they approach things differently, they think differently, they act differently, and it was her job to get them to understand each other. That’s what she was trying to do. When she wrote as a woman, she was not just writing for women … she was writing so that the two sexes could understand each other better.
Anaïs’ writing is the current between land masses; a tendon connecting bone to muscle. That she bridges a gap for the biological sexes is one true interpretation. Another rides on the conviction that within each of us is a man, a woman, and a child in infinite oscillation. According to Nin, “the child is usually an orphan. So we have a tremendous task to do: we have to take care of this orphan in ourselves and in others; we have to act out our creativity in every moment of our life.” (Lectures, 17-18).
Another more sublime truth sees an internal infinitude of selves to elude definitions like man, woman, and child, and these inexplicable elements through Anaïs’ writing are given space to remain as mystery. The blossoms above ground bloom, wilt, then bloom again; the rhizome that remains underground, rooted.
Anaïs’ work is in the recognition and disintegration of external divisions; her writing portrays people so deeply that she moves beyond judgement into a more nuanced realm that requires conscious feeling and thinking. The dynamism of the human psyche, for Anaïs, is the admission of multiple forms at once, stacked high: to live symphonically.
In Robert Snyder’s documentary, Anaïs airs her own momentary ellipsis in separating from the unconscious:
If there is a block due to something I’m concealing, first I try to find out what I am afraid to say: a revelation or a secret fear of being destructive or harming others. But there are other times when you are stuck in a very strange way, you don’t quite know your direction. In that case, I found I either put on some music, which restores that flow, that impressionistic, oceanic flow, or else I read Proust, which has the same effect on me. A few words of Proust will set me afloat again.
The flow and its current are a form of restoration and an antidote to the loneliness that persists in division.
PH: My own experience with Anaïs Nin is something I cherish; it changed my life in many ways. I have never “outgrown” Nin—as I grow, I notice new and different things in her writing; layers seem to fall away, exposing deeper and more profound ones. For me, Nin is not a fad, not a phase. She is a force that is present in my life.
On this presence, Herron adds a profound moment of iridescence on cleaning up her studio at Silver Lake after Rupert Pole passed in 2006:
PH: There were boxes, there were folders that were laying wide open on the floor, the papers spread out all over the place, there were old newspapers, there were garbage bags, there was rat poop, there were insects, there was a broken window, the floor was wet, and they had a shag carpet in there, and it was soaking wet in one area. It smelled terrible. I was almost getting sick from being in that room because of the mildew. I think it was at the end of the second day, I had finally gotten down to the floor, in this wet corner that I talked to you about. And at the very bottom of this was a pile of clothes. And as I started picking them up, I realized they were all dresses. And they were Anaïs’. And some of them I recognized from photographs. At the very bottom of this pile was a kimono. And the kimono was wadded up, and it was damp. The weird thing about it was that when I picked it up, it didn’t smell like it should have smelled. It should’ve smelled awful. It should’ve smelled like mold. But instead it had a fragrance to it. I probably sound like I’m spinning some yarn, but this is God’s truth, and I’m a chem major, I’m a scientist, and I don’t jump to conclusions. All I can say to you is that my observation was I could smell perfume of some kind; a rich, not overpowering, but a rich, full aroma. I’m holding this kimono in my hands, and I put it up to my face to smell it, and suddenly when I did that, my whole body warmed up. When I was holding this kimono, I felt like there was somebody in it. I felt like there was a person in the kimono, even though it was a wadded up thing on the floor. I was amazed by that. So anyway I’m hangin’ them up, and the next day, the third day, I come back, and the kimono is still there, and I put the kimono back up to my nose again, and it smelt terrible. It smelt like all the other dresses. Moldy.
Herron reminds me again of his scientific entry point and that he would never jump to conclusions. But I already know what he is sharing is true: there is no need for scientific language when we are not dealing with a problem scientific in nature. Herron’s discoveries in the Silver Lake home range from the fantastic to the banal.
PH: I realized that 90 percent of what I went through was trash and just had to be discarded. There were things of dubious value, like old insurance bills, stuff like that, that really had no value. They weren’t really telling a story. And then there were the treasures. And the treasures were numerous. Once you got to those treasures, it was kind of like, I don’t know what it feels like to be a gold miner and come across giant nuggets of gold, but I imagine it was the same feeling. I was coming up with all these fantastic things that no one seemed to know existed.
Among these rare metals were private photographs and a folder of letters between Anaïs and her father Joaquin. After Gunther Stuhlmann passed, his wife Barbara Stulhmann sent along more materials which included “clues about the book of unknown erotica, Aulteris,” which Sky Blue published in 2016. Herron experienced shocking levels of censorship as he tried to share Auletris with the world.
PH: I had all kinds of problems trying to get Auletris published on Amazon. I won out, and the reason I won out is because I went to the press, at the suggestion of someone in Los Angeles who said, “Let people know about this.” So I did. And then the Guardian published a big article about this censorship on Amazon, and the very next day [Amazon] lifted the ban. But you know, I was really shocked that I had to fight that hard to get that book published, to be seen by people. There is a swing to the right in the whole world right now … China’s locking up their erotic authors. You can go on down the list, they’re talking about banning certain kinds of pornography in England. It’s like going back to the ’50s and ’60s in this country where you couldn’t buy a dirty book because they’re illegal. And you could go to jail if you sold it or wrote it, or bought it. When you look at somebody like Anaïs or Henry Miller, there are some people out there who believe that neither of those authors should be published. Because they’re immoral, they’re dirty, they’re pornographic.
You can’t have a manual for [reading Anaïs], because you’re looking at a mirror. She has to be experienced, not just read.
That Herron has excavated these works of art and shared their contents with our greater public—especially in light of Amazon’s initial throwaway of Auletris into their ‘adult content dungeon’—is the higher purpose of Sky Blue Press. Herron writes about Auletris on the Anaïs Nin blog: “There are tales of incest, sex with children, rape, voyeurism, cutting, sadomasochism, homoeroticism (both male and female), autoerotic asphyxiation … all set in Old Provincetown, Paris, and other exotic locales … [and some] largely based on Nin’s own experiences recorded in her unexpurgated diaries.” A whole look into Anaïs Nin means staring at each truth as it presents itself. At times, Herron notes, this can be extremely demanding.
PH: You can’t have a manual for [reading Anaïs], because you’re looking at a mirror. She has to be experienced, not just read. It’s hard work, but in the end the rewards are worth the effort—the reward of self-identity. And sometimes when one delves deeply under the surface of one’s self, things come up that are frightening, troubling, ugly—but identifying these buried feelings is the first step in dealing with them, evolving, expanding into a higher place where life is better, stronger, purer. And sometimes we discover things about ourselves that are completely amazing.
I ask Paul over the telephone why he chose to name the press Sky Blue. “To me, that’s the colour of optimism,” he says without hesitation.
I am reminded of M. Legrandin, who forecasts the constitution of Proust’s young mind in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu: “Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy …” marking his soul of a rare quality, the artist’s nature. “Never let it starve for lack of what it needs.” The printing press as one possible doorway in the search for expansion, the patch of sky above our heads.
Sky Blue, piled above, stretches its longitude to cover greater distances.
PH: I truly believe in the value of [Anaïs’] writing. I feel like if we can share stuff that no one’s seen before, it needs to be done. So that’s what I’m doing, and will continue to do. As long as there’s material, and as long as I’m still alive.
Paul Herron [R] with Joaquin Nin-Culmell [L]. [Photo by Sara Herron]
Paul Herron is the founder and editor of Sky Blue Press, which, since 1996, has specialized in the works by and about the diarist/novelist Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), beginning with Anaïs Nin: A Book of Mirrors, a compilation of reactions to Nin by 60 authors including Allan Ginsburg and Erica Jong. Other publications include Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939-1947, Trapeze: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947-1955, Auletris: Erotica by Anaïs Nin, The Quotable Anaïs Ninand the 15-volume annual A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal. Upcoming titles include Father Letters: Correspondence between Anaïs Nin, 1933-1940 and The Diary of Others: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1955-1966. Herron also runs The Official Anaïs Nin Blog and is the host of The Anaïs Nin Podcast, which can be found on iTunes.
