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Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) |
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French-born novelist, passionate eroticist and short story writer, who gained international fame with her journals. Anaïs Nin was largely ignored until the 1960s, when the first volume of her diary came out. Spanning the years from 1931 to 1974, they give an account of one woman's voyage of self-discovery. Today Nin is regarded as one of the leading women writers of the 20th-century and a source of inspiration for women challenging conventionally defined gender roles. "I want to live only for ecstasy. Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers." (The Journals of Anaïs Nin 1931-1934, edited and with an introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann, London: Quartet Books, 1973, p. 182; first published in Great Britain by Peter Owen Limited 1966) Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France, to artistic parents. After a cosmopolitan childhood in Europe, Nin came to the New York City with her French-Danish mother, Rosa Culmell Nin, and two brothers in 1914. The Cuban-born composer-pianist Joaquín Nin, her father, had deserted his family when she was 11. Nin idolized him in her early year. Rosa Culmell was a classical singer and society woman. According to Nin, she never stopped loving Joaquín. They had first met in a music shop Havana. He was nineteen years old, Rosa was twentyseven and still unmarried. "He was handsome, dark-haired and blue-eyed, with a very fair skin, a small straight nose, fine regular features, beautiful teeth, and beautiful manners." (The Journals of Anaïs Nin 1931-1934, p. 111) In Incest: from"A Journal of Love" (1992) she tells of her lovemaking with her father, after his absence of 20 years. However, Nin often combined truth and fiction, and many of the details surrounding her life are part of her myth, especially those published in her unexpurgated diaries. In one of her other books, Winter of Artifice (1939), Nin also wrote about daughter's relationship to her father. Largely self-educated, Nin spent her youth reading in public
libraries. At the age of eleven, she began keeping a diary; it was a
kind of long letter to her distant father. Initially Nin wrote in
French and
did
not begin to write in English until she was seventeen. The diary was
her confidante, or as she said in an interview, it was her hashish, her
opium pipe, serving as a retreat from the world. In New York Nin
studied art, and married in 1923 the banker and artist Hugh Guiler.
Later known also as an engraver and filmmaker, he illustrated her books
under the pseudonym Ian Hugo. When she began writing fiction, Nin moved in 1924 with Guiler to Paris, France. They first stayed in a Left Bank hotel, and then rented a small room in a pension on rue d'Assas, before moving to the Avenue Hoche. In August 1925, they settled down in a flat on rue Schoelcher. After the stock market collapse, Nin and Guiler rented a house in the village of Louveciennes, just outside Paris. While Guiler worked in the Paris office of the National City
Bank, Nin associated with the villa Seurat group. Especially important
person in her life during this period was the American writer Henry Miller, whom she met in 1932 and with
whom she started a long-time affair. He and Nin both influenced each
other in their work - their correspondence
was published in 1987 as A Literary
Passion. Nin claimed that Miller was impotent much of the time. (Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin by Noel Riley Fitch, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993. 306) With Otto Rank, also one of her lovers, Nin worked as a lay
analyst. On
her second visit to Rank as a patiet, he asked Nin to leave her diary
with him. "It is your last defense against analysis," he explained. "I
do not want you to have a traffic island from which you will survey the
analysis, keep control of it. I don't want you to analyze the
analysis." (The
Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis,
edited by E.James Lieberman & Robert Kramer, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2012, p. 261) When Nin's affair with
Miller had cooled off, she accused him of reducing all women to "an
aperture, a biological sameness". "I cannot tell the truth because I have felt the heads of men
in my
womb. The truth would be death-dealing and I prefer fairytales. I am
wrapped in lies which do not penetrate my soul. As if the lies I tell
were like costumes. The shell of mystery can break and grow again over
night." (House of
Incest by Anaïs Nin, photomontages by Val Telberg, Athens:
Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1989, p. 40) To understand
the problem of her divided selves
(actually her tendency to fabricate lies), Nin asked the
Freudian psychiatrist René Allendy was her "costumes" an armour for her
vulnerable
self. When Allendy suggested that she rid herself of her play-acting,
she hesitated: "if psychoanalysis is going to divest
me of all decoration, costume, adornment, flavour, characteristic, what
will be left?" ('Aesthetic Lies' by Suzanne
Nalbantian, in Anais Nin: Literary
Perspectives, edited by Suzanne Nalbantian, London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1997, p. 17) Allendy treated her simply as a
neurotic. Nin's literary career began with the publication of D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932). She wrote it in 16 days. Because it was not sold in the United States, Nin sent copies to Frances Steloff, who ran the Gotham Book Mark in New York City, and told her to sell them for a dollar a piece. This work was followed by several books, including House of Incest (1936), a prose poem dealing with psychological torments concerning her relationship with Miller and his wife, June Mansfield. In 1933, Nin lost an unborn baby daughter; she called it her "first dead creation". Her short prose pieces appeared in such journals as Dyn, The Booster, and Circle. Her most famous story, 'Birth,' was originally published in the anthology Twice a Year (1938), which she edited. Her early stories were collected in Under a Glass Bell (1944) and Waste of Timelessness (1977). All of Nin's works have an erotic quality – "sensuality is a secret power in my body," she once said. In the early 1940s she wrote a series of specifically sexual pieces, which were edited and published posthumously as Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979). The stories in Delta of Venus Nin produced for a dollar a page in the 1940s. Cities of the Interior, Nin's famous series
included Ladders to the Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart
(1950), and A Spy in the House of
Love
(1954). Nin focused on different female types and followed their lives
through lovers, art, and analysis. Traditional realism is replaced by
impressionistic style, dreams, and interior monologues. With its use of
improvisation around a theme, jazz served as a model for writing: "[The
unconscious] is first of all ruled by flow, as life itself. It has,
like life, a capricious lifeline and a different way of arranging its
patterns." (Anaïs
Nin, Fictionality and Femininity: Playing a Thousand Roles by
Helen Tookey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 139)
Similar themes and characters reappear from one novel to another. In
the center is her female protagonist, to whom all Nin's artists,
musicians, writers, dancers, and actresses are drawn to. Ladders to Fire she first dedicated to Gore Vidal, because he got her published by E.P. Dutton when she was still unknown. From later editions the dedication was removed. "We are the two nascissi of the Forties," Vidal later said. In Vidal's Malibu house, Nin met Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but dismissed her as a Southern Belle lacking in grace and charm. She was more interested in Newman, whom she regarded just as much of a narcissist as she thought Gore Vidal was. In the early 1940s, Nin returned to New York, where she set up the Gemor Press and published her books at her own expense. During her three-day visit at Black Mountain College in 1947, she met the writer James Leo Herlihy, who was a student there at that time. He became one of her closest confidants. Nin encouraged students to print their own work. "Picture, if you will," Herlihy recalled, "youngster who were just developing after the drab grayness of wartime, and who saw this sparkling, tinkling creature as perfection itself. When she told us that we, too, could live out our dreams, well – we were converted, so say the least." (quoted in Anaïs Nin: A Biography by Deidre Bair, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995, p. 330) With the understanding Hugh Guiler, who stayed out of the way of her extramarital affairs, Nin enjoyed a secure marriage for over 50 years. Nin was also able to have in California a second husband, Rupert Pole, without divorcing Guiler. For at least 25 years, she commuted between between New York and California. Pole's stepfather, Lloyd Wright, was the son of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Nin's and Pole's home in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles was designed by Eric Wright, Pole's half brother. Among their friends was the underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Hugh Guiler died in 1985. Rupert Pole arranged the cremation. In the 1960s, Nin began to gain fame with her diaries. They
arouse also interest in her earlier publications, which she kept in
print for the people who asked for them. The diaries cover the years
from 1931 to 1974, providing an insight into her development as a woman
and artist. The first volume appeared when she was 63. Nin started the
diary as a logbook when her family left Spain for America. More than a biographical document, the diary is both a work of art and a search of the real self. Usually Nin focused on journal writing in the evenning, the day was devoted to her fiction. Each volume has an unifying theme. Individuals and scenes are vivid, conversations are presented in dialogue, lengthy observations are juxtaposed with cryptic comments. Henry Miller, who was first nervous about what she was writing about himself and June, ended up liking her analyses and urged to continue. Only Rebecca West wanted to withdraw her portrait completely. "Although I wrote about her with great love, she just didn't like to be written in any way," Nin said. The feminist perspective of her works and her search for self-knowledge made Nin a popular lecturer in the
universities across the U.S. However, in A Woman Speaks (1975) dissociated herself from the political activism of
the feminist movement: militant women have frightened men, she argued. Nin did not
have faith in exchanges of systems,
"because systems are corruptible, and until we have worked for the
uncorruptible human being, we will not have an uncorruptible system." (A Woman Speaks: The
Lectures, Seminars, and Interviews of Anaïs Nin, edited witn an
introduction by Evelyn J. Hinz, Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975, p. 3)
Nin spoke for the benefits of journal keeping. She poured in them her negative feelings. "What is so wonderful
about the journal is that it helps
you to make the inner journey and the finally to make a synthesis
between all the parts od yourself, so that they become unified. The
diary does help us to do that. Otherwise we experience negative
feelings without sorting them out." (Ibid., pp.
164-165) The last volumes of the diaries appeared posthumously in the
1980s. Anaïs Nin died on January 14, 1977, in Los Angeles. "I only
believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire.
Never death. Fire and life. Les Jeux." Nin's ashes were scattered over San Monica Bay. For further reading: Critical Analysis of Anaïs Nin in Japan, edited by Paul Herron (2023); Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies by Léonie Bischoff, translated by Jenna Allen (2023); Anais Nin's Lost World: Paris in Words and Pictures, 1924-1939 by Britt Arenander (2017); Anais Nin: the Last Days by Barbara Kraft (2013); Anaïs Nin Character Dictionary and Index to Diary Excerpts by Benjamin Franklin V. (2009); Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity: Playing a Thousand Roles by Helen Tookey (2003); Aesthetic Autobiography by Suzanne Nalbantian (1997); Anaïs Nin: Literary Perspectives, ed. by Suzanne Nalbantian (1997); Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self by Diane Richard-Allerdyce (1997); Anaïs Nin: A Biography by Deidre Bair (1995); Conversations With Anais Nin, ed. by Wendy M. Dubow (1994); The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin by Riley Fitch (1993); Anaïs Nin: An Introduction by Bemjamin Franklin and V. Duane Schneider (1979); Anaïs Nin: A Reference Guide by Rose Marie Cutting (1978); Anaïs Nin by Bettina L. Knapp (1978); Collage of Dreams: The Writings of Anaïs Nin by Sharon Spencer (1977); The Mirror and the Garden: Realism and Reality in the Writings of Anaïs Nin by Evelyn J. Hinz (1973); Anaïs Nin by Oliver Evans (1968) - Note: Film Henry and June, dir. by Philip Kaufman, starring Frew Ward and Uma Thurman, depicted the relatioship between Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. In 1973 Nin was the subject of a documentary film, Anaïs Observed. Note: The American critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was an early champion of Nin's works. Selected works:
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