The Round by Eduardo Sanchez

Paul Herron, Editor, Sky Blue Press

September 1, 2025

The Round by Eduardo Sanchez (under the nom de plume Edward Santiago) is a long-lost and underground, legendary introduction to astrology, which ultimately not only influenced the author’s life, but those of his cousin Anaïs Nin and her husband Hugh (Hugo) Guiler, and it earned praise from luminaries such as Henry Miller. Originally published at Morning Star Farm in Massachusetts on a handpress, typeset by Eduardo himself, the book was published in 1942 in a 125-copy edition. All 125 copies were distributed to Eduardo’s friends and family and never saw the light of commercial publication.

Only a few of the original copies still exist, and I am lucky enough to have found one at a rare book dealer earlier this year. When it arrived in the mail, I tore open the package with excitement and anticipation—and was stunned to discover that my copy once belonged to Martha Jaeger, Anaïs’s psychoanalyst in the 1940s. Her name sticker is affixed to the inside cover, and her lightly penciled annotations appear throughout the text. One illumination she provides is her identification of a psychoanalyst whom Eduardo dubs “the Breton”—Jaeger writes “René Allendy” next to the passage, the famed French analyst who helped Eduardo and, with Eduardo’s recommendation, Anaïs Nin.

The book itself reveals why Miller called it a “fine” piece of work—it is a concise history and explanation of the practice written in a style that is highly personal and unique. I daresay no other such book exists, with its mix of memoir, history, science and its application. Eduardo discovers that his life is ruled by Jupiter, whose 12-year orbit around the sun seems to mimic his own life events, from the time he was born (1904) until the final stage of his life, which began in 1976 upon his meeting of a fellow astrologer, Judith Hipskind, who would become his companion for the last decade and a half of his life. He arrives from the West Indies to the US in 1916; he leaves for Europe in 1928 (and becomes a significant figure in Anaïs’s life); he returns to the US in 1940 at the outbreak of war… Not only does Eduardo use these cycles to explain his past, but also to predict his future, a fascinating use of astrology that can be applied to the lives of readers as well as to world events. Judith Hipskind explains in a podcast that Eduardo declared, after carefully researching world events through the lens of planetary conjunctions and historical events, that we are in a “dark age” that began in the 1880s and is due to end sometime during this decade (we can only hope).

Who knew? Who knew that Anaïs’s beloved cousin (and early love interest) had such a broad mind and the ability to express it so well in The Round, his only book? Who knew the extent of his efforts to research the past and its geniuses (think Nietzsche and William Blake) and to use his studies to clarify his own life and explain today’s world events? The Round provided its few, carefully selected readers with insights into Eduardo’s own psyche and perhaps a blueprint to those of others, including the readers themselves. It was not only an introduction to astrology—it was a guidebook for its application by anyone at all.

Once I read The Round from cover to cover, I was left in awe of its depth and breadth. Then I realized that I—of all people—had a new mission, which was to find out who owned the rights to this work (Eduardo left this earth in 1990) and to make this gem of a book available to anyone with a desire for self-awareness and clarity within the context of world history and events as explained or predicted by planetary positions. The book appeals to every realm of my mind—I love the science involved, the history, the examinations of important figures in the arts and sciences, and especially the “how-to” aspect of the applications of astrology. It makes me feel like a curious mind discovering an unknown world, one that is worthy of plunging into.

I knew Judith Hipskind Collins from more than 30 years ago when I asked her (upon suggestion from a friend) to contribute to my first book, Anaïs Nin: A Book of Mirrors, and I had long and fascinating telephone conversations with her about Anaïs and Eduardo. In an effort to find the owner of the rights to The Round, I called her to inquire if she knew. Not only did she know, it is she who owns them! So a deal was struck, and the book is being republished in a facsimile edition by my Sky Blue Press, with Judith’s introduction. This is a dream come true.

As the title implies, the republication of The Round has come full circle. I can say I am proud and honored to present Eduardo Sanchez’s gem to today’s world.

 

Art Imitating the Life of Nin, or Vice-Versa?

Paul Herron, Editor, Sky Blue Press

March 27, 2025

When Anaïs Nin went through a major transformation in her fiction in the early 1930s, moving from what she called “old-fashioned” efforts that resulted in several unpublished manuscripts piling up, toward a new “surrealism” or automatic writing, it is important to note that there were several external factors that may have inspired her. For one, she had discovered Breton, the so-called father of surrealism, and she had met maverick writer Henry Miller and his incredibly fascinating wife, June, who inspired both Miller and Nin to pen some of their most famous works.

But the Germanic myth of Alraune too was a major contributor to Nin’s new direction in writing, and, in parallel, her life. She saw the femme fatale title character in the 1928 German film Alraune as a reflection of June Miller: both were beautiful; both were mysterious; both were “rushing towards death,” as Nin put it; and both were hypersexual man-eaters.

The working title for Nin’s surrealistic prose poem House of Incest was “Alraune,” named after the fictional character in the 1911 book, which was adapted into the afore-mentioned film. Nin, who was exploring surrealism and modern film, saw at least one of the two Alraune films (the 1928 version silent and the 1929 film with sound), according to her unpublished diary.

A bit of history: The legend of Alraune (the German word for the mandrake plant) began in the Middle Ages—it was thought that when men were hanged they orgasmed, sending the sperm into the ground, which spawned the mandrake plant (Alraune in German), which, when injected into women, produced offspring who grew quickly but had no soul or capacity to love. These “Alraunes” essentially were femmes fatales according to the legend.

There is another interesting connection with Nin: the 1928 film presents a scientist who procured a prostitute, and, with artificial insemination, impregnated her with the mandrake root. The offspring was a physical goddess without a soul, who had few human qualities except promiscuousness and, ultimately, the capacity for revenge. The scientist adopted her as his daughter, and had forbidden her to see other men—he had fallen for her, and the air of incest is rife in both the book and the film. When Alraune discovers the father-scientist’s secret diary and its descriptions of how she was conceived, she decides to seduce him and then to cruelly abandon him. Readers of Anais Nin will recognize this pattern, which appears in much of Nin’s work, especially in the novella “Winter of Artifice” (or “Lilith”) in the book Winter of Artifice (1939; 1942). And, as we now know, this was a pattern that Nin lived out with her own father.

One has to wonder if, in some ways, Alraune was a blueprint Nin followed in both her art and life. Judge for yourself. Here is a link to the entire 1928 film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItfKsdWecwA

 

On Anaïs Nin’s 122nd Birthday

Paul Herron, Editor, Sky Blue Press

February 21, 2025

On Feb. 21, 1903, Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside of Paris. I’ve written this sentence numerous times, but with each year it astounds me of how long ago this was. Back then, most of us had no electricity, no running water, no telephone, and we got around with the help of horses. Fashion was a holdover from the nineteenth century, and modern literature was in its infancy. In 1903, Madame Curie was an up and coming scientist, and the Wright brothers flew their prototype airplane for the first time. Trains and ships ran on coal-fed steam generators, and our only means of telecommunication was the telegraph. So how is it that someone born then became the very essence of modernity, who wrote from a futuristic point of view, expressing thoughts that only now we actually can grasp. It was her very misunderstood gift. She was indeed ahead of her time, which is admirable from our point of view today, but until the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, she was misunderstood by readers and critics, lambasted for her “out-of-touch” philosophies, vilified by those whose vision was limited to the times they lived in. Nin’s existence, then, seems multidimensional, defying the notion of time, past, present and future. When she began writing in the 1920s, she wasn’t actually writing for contemporary readers—she was writing for us, and we weren’t even alive yet. So when we read her, we are reaching beyond time, and we are experiencing her words in a way most of her contemporaries could not. Every time we open one of her books, we are with her, in the same room, at the same time, and her words are alive to us.

And, more than ever, we need Anaïs Nin’s philosophy that world peace begins with the individual, that when we heal and enlighten ourselves, conquer neurosis, we are better equipped to create a livable and bountiful world for all of us.

To celebrate her birth, let’s visit her in one of her very-much-alive books and do what we can to become kind, loving, compassionate human beings.

 

A Word about Editing Nin’s Unexpurgated Diaries

Paul Herron, Editor, Sky Blue Press

January 26, 2025 

WHEN, AND COMPLETELY BY SURPRISE, Kazuko Sugisaki of the Anaïs Nin Trust handed me a neat cardboard box filled with the typescript of Nin’s 1939-1943 unexpurgated diary, I was faced with a true dilemma, one that my predecessors John Ferrone, Rupert Pole and Gunther Stuhlmann faced: How to edit this raw material in a way that allows Nin’s story to be told clearly, interestingly, and in a way that doesn’t replicate the original expurgated text ad nauseum or desecrate the holiness of the original writing, which Pole insisted should be touched only slightly, if at all.

After Nin’s husband, Hugh (Hugo) Guiler, died in 1985, some eight years after Nin herself, there was no longer the major impediment to revealing the totality of Nin’s intimate writings in the diary, since, it was reasoned by Pole, Nin’s literary executor, and John Ferrone, the master editor of Delta of Venus and Little Birds, bestselling versions of the erotica Nin wrote for a dollar a page in the 1940s, the one person Nin sought to protect from the truth was gone.

Ferrone, a longtime editor at Harcourt, was tapped to edit the first unexpurgated volume, Henry and June (1931-1932). While Ferrone was accustomed to Nin’s permission to “edit as you see fit, I trust you,” he was not prepared to deal with Pole’s constant insistence that the original writing should be barely touched by any editor’s hand because to him each passage Nin wrote was sacred and not to be tampered with. Ferrone, who eventually went on to make Alice Walker a literary star as he did with Nin and the erotica, had other ideas: to produce a best seller, an editor must operate freely, boldly, without fear, without impediment. Ferrone’s and Pole’s polar-opposite editorial philosophies, of course, led to a series of conflicts between these two passionate men, both of whom loved Anaïs Nin, and both of whom wanted desperately to present her in the best possible format. As a collection of letters between them reveals (see “The Making of Henry and June” in A Café in Space), Ferrone’s severe—radical, even—editing won out, and the book was not only a commercial and critical success, it also inspired the first NC-17 film in history by the same name in 1990. But this success came at a cost—Ferrone vowed to never work with Pole again, citing his constant struggle to suppress Ferrone’s editing. I, for one, don’t blame him, although I see the merits of Pole’s position. The conflict was between bestsellerdom and literary veracity; neither could find a compromise, which is a shame, especially to scholars who are interested in what Nin wrote, how she wrote it, and when. Ferrone’s rearranging life events for the sake of flow, removal of significant passages in the name of plot development, or entire characters key to Nin’s life because they are irrelevant to the story are blockades to the truths they seek in the diaries.

So, when it was time for the next unexpurgated volume, Incest (1932-1934), the heavy lifting of editing was left to Nin’s agent and co-editor Gunther Stuhlmann, under the strict supervision of Pole. While Stuhlmann was no John Ferrone, he did seek to produce a readable text that readers would find engaging, informative, and interesting. Stuhlmann soon realized that Pole’s demands for textual preservation were sometimes counterproductive and presented a major roadblock to the editing process, but unlike Ferrone, he capitulated for the sake of getting the job done and preserving a good working relationship with Pole. The results are clear: Incest contains little of the literary and dramatic flow of Henry and June; indeed, perhaps the book contains too much—incest and late-term abortion, both considered taboo subjects by many readers and critics. In the end, Incest inspired a mighty backlash, moral outrage and crucifixion by the critics. It, along with the publication of Deirdre Bair’s unflattering if not hostile biography of Nin a few years later, sparked a sudden and steep decline of Nin’s reputation, legacy, and popularity. Harcourt published two more volumes edited by Stuhlmann/Pole, Fire and Nearer the Moon, and refused any further submissions by Pole. For seventeen years, no new Nin diaries were published, and there was mostly silence surrounding Nin studies and readership.

So, when Kazuko blessed me with one of the manuscripts that Harcourt rejected many years before, I was faced with my own challenge: how to proceed. Rupert had suffered a stroke and could not get involved; Gunther had passed the year prior; but John Ferrone would reach out and guide me in certain ways: “Be brave! Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. We are here to help Anaïs tell her story. Sometimes we have to save her from herself!” John sent me xeroxes of his handwritten markups in the working Henry and June manuscript; there seemed to be no paragraph, no sentence, no word untouched. Cross-outs, arrows in every direction, sections interchanged sometimes from different months or years, insertions of revised text, a sea of red ink bloodying the pages. No one could argue with the outcome: a critical and commercial success and a movie. But when I compared John’s edited pages with the originals, I suddenly could see (and almost hear) Rupert’s point—while the finished product was a compelling delight to read, it wasn’t what Nin actually wrote. It was as severely edited as the original Diary of Anaïs Nin, which was devoid of Nin’s intimate life; now we had the intimate life, but where was the rest? The context was lost, as were personages who, in some cases, were ultimately important to Nin’s life. No, I had to go my own way with editing the diaries.

I naturally sought the thread of the essential story Nin was telling in the early 1940s, after having been torn from her beloved Paris by war and supplanted in a land hostile to her kind of writing, her kind of lifestyle, a land where she felt disconnected, isolated, criticized, rejected, one in which she sought ways to recapture the magic of Paris, her plunge into impossible romantic adventures with younger men and sometimes women, her escape from the realities of war-era New York City, its robot-like, soulless society, its crass capitalism, its narrow literary views, its consumerism, its mindlessness. She was a woman navigating a strange land, going from one mirage to another, failed efforts to be published, hopeless love affairs, her aching search for the “One” who could be everything to her, who could love her as she loved others. Thus, the title of the book revealed itself: Mirages. And the ending came not in 1943, but in 1947 when Nin meets Rupert Pole. Since there was such a distinct cast of characters occupying Nin’s life for long stretches of time, the book naturally took the form of chapters, one for each major event, each notable lover, mini-diaries within the major one. I chose to retain mention of what some may regard as “minor” or “insignificant” characters to give readers a concept of the immensity of Nin’s social and professional circle; I also chose to include Nin’s dreams and musings that may have been cut for the sake of streamlining in favor of revealing the inner workings of her mind, the flavors she carried with her throughout her daily life. In other words, I was neither John Ferrone nor Rupert Pole, if they may be considered the infra- and ultra- ends of the spectrum; I was somewhere in between. I also didn’t hesitate to change the format of the subsequent three volumes—Trapeze was divided into years because the events were too; The Diary of Others consists of two books because her life and diary writing were divided too; and A Joyous Transformation needed no such divisions because all the pieces of her life and written accounts were interwoven on more than one level. They are what they are, not what I am, or what my vision is.

So the era of unexpurgated Anaïs Nin diaries has concluded, the end of a third series of diaries—the original Diary, the early diaries, and the unexpurgated ones. It seems only logical to me that the entire diary collection from 1931 to 1977 be published, as Rupert put it, “just as she wrote it.” Readers deserve to see it—there is no longer any reason for them not to.