The author wishes to acknowledge the following publishers and copyright holders for permission to quote copyrighted material and/or to quote via “Fair Use Law” for critical/scholarly writing:

DuBow, Wendy M.: ed. for quotes from Conversations with Anais Nin copyright 1994 University Press of Mississippi.

Franklin (V), Benjamin for chronology within Anais Nin: A Bibliography copyright 1973 Kent State U Press; editor of Recollections of Anais Nin copyright 1996 Ohio U/Swallow Press.

Harcourt Brace & Company for excerpts reprinted by permission from The Diary of Anais Nin 1931-34 copyright 1966 by Anais Nin and renewed 1994 by Rupert Pole and Gunther Stuhlmann; The Diary of Anais Nin 1934-1939 copyright 1967 by Anais Nin and renewed 1995 by Rupert Pole and Gunther Stuhlmann; The Diary of Anais Nin 1939-1944 copyright 1969 by Anais Nin; The Diary of Anais Nin 1944-1947 copyright 1971 by Anais Nin; The Diary of Anais Nin 1947-1955 copyright 1974 by Anais Nin; The Diary of Anais Nin 1947-1955 copyright 1974 by Anais Nin; The Diary of Anais Nin 1966-1974 copyright 1980 by Gunther Stuhlmann; Linotte, The Early Diary of Anais Nin copyright 1978 by Rupert Pole as Trustee Under the Last Will and Testament of Anais Nin; The Early Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. Two 1920-1923 copyright 1982 by Rupert Pole; The Early Diary of Anais Nin Vol. Three 1923-1927 copyright 1983 by Rupert Pole; The Early Diary of Anais Nin Vol. Four 1927-1931 copyright 1985 by Rupert Pole; Fire: From a Journal of Love copyright 1995 by Rupert Pole; Henry & June: From a Journal of Love copyright 1986 by Rupert Pole; Incest: From A Journal of Love copyright 1992 by Rupert Pole; Little Birds: Erotica copyright 1979 by Rupert Pole.

Harms, Valerie for quotes from Anais Nin’s Waste of Timelessness published by Magic Circle Press copyright 1977 and Harms’ Stars in My Sky... copyright 1976 Magic Circle Press.

Henderson, Bill, ed. The Publish-It Yourself Handbook copyright 1973 Pushcart Press for quotes in Anais Nin’s “The Story of My Printing Press.”

Herron, Paul, ed. for quotes in A Book of Mirrors: Anais Nin. copyright 1996 Sky Blue Press.

Hoy, Nancy Jo for quote in The Power to Dream: Interviews with Women in the Creative Arts copyright 1995 by Global City Press.

Jason, Philip K., ed. for quotes in The Critical Response to Anais Nin. No. 23 copyright 1996 by Greenwood Press; Anais Nin & Her Critics copyright 1993 by Camden House; Anais Nin Reader copyright 1973 by OSU, Swallow Press.

New American Library for quotes from A Casebook on Anais Nin edited by Robert Zaller copyright 1974.

New Directions Publishing for quotes in Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire copyright 1947; Henry Miller Reader copyright 1959.

Rupert Pole, executor of the Anais Nin Estate & Trust.

Princeton University Press for quotes in Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts by Lrynski and Maguire.

The Putnam Berkley Group, Inc. for quote from The Artist’s Way by Julian Cameron with Mark Byron copyright 1992.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons for quotes from Anais Nin: A Biography by Deidre Bair copyright 1995.

Spencer, Sharon, ed. for quote in Anais, Art & Artists: A Collection of Essays pub. by Penkevell Pub 1986; Spencer’s Collage of Dreams published by Ohio U/Swallow Press in 1977.

Stuhlmann, Gunther, Anais Nin’s Author’s Representative for all the volumes within Cities of the interior: Ladders to Fire; Children of the Albatross; The Four-Chambered Heart; A Spy in the House of Love; Seduction of the Minotaur as well as House of Incest; Under the Glass Bell; Waste of Timelessness; Winter of Artifice; D. H. Lawrence...; Mystic of Sex...; Novel of the Future; A Sensitive Man...; A Woman Speaks ed. by Evelyn Hinz; Conversations with Anais Nin, ed. by Wendy DuBow. All the Diaries of Anais Nin; Delta of Venus; Little Birds, etc. (Special gratitude to Gunther Stuhlmann for reading the first draft of this manuscript and pointing out errors in dates, names, etc. that were later corrected.)

Young, Noel pub. Capra Press for quotes in Anais Nin’s The White Blackbird... copyright 1985 and The Mystic of Sex... copyright 1995.

“Today my work is in harmony with the new values, the new search and state of the mind of the young. This synchronicity is one nobody could have foreseen, except by remaining open-minded to innovation and pioneering.”

Anais Nin “The Story of My Printing Press”

in The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook ed. by Bill Henderson
“Understanding
Is Love”
—Anais Nin

Art is the journal of artist’s journey,
letter from daughter to distant father
aboard ship to America by sea
for immigrant Anais destiny
with two younger brothers and her mother,
Art as the journal of artist journey.

First impressions tangle child’s secrecy:
ideal love of past in music waves stir
aboard ship through America by sea.

Unconscious atonement, conspiracy,
preserve quiet flow of philosopher.
Art is long journal of artist’s journey:
record of dreams that transfer reality,
fairy tales and poems that swam her to shore
aboard ship to America by sea.

In Diary she still sails as Captain Free
from the double labyrinth of minotaur
with Art as journal of Artist journey
aboard ship past America by sea.

by Rochelle
INLET TO
UNDERSTANDING
The Art of Anais

In New York, when Anais Nin (1903-1977) was twelve years old, she wrote a poem titled “Those Eyes” (May, 1915 Linotte) about dark eyes piercing the night and her heart when she ran away from their anger or sweetness. The last stanza ended:

Those eyes, an illusion, perhaps. They are the eyes of the conscience of my soul.

Winter 1931-1334 Diary 1 entry, by a writer half a century older, was released in 1966 to give a glimpse into Anais’ life before age thirty when she was living in Louveciennes and thinking her view of “the large green gate from the window” took on “the air of a prison gate.” Anais then blamed herself for the same feeling she had poetically recorded as a girl. “...I know I can leave the place whenever I want to...the obstacle lies within one’s self.”
When Anais read D. H. Lawrence, she understood her own path to liberation which she identified as his philosophy: “a transcending of ordinary values ... to be vivified and fecundated by instincts and institutions.” This is what she set out to do in her work and in her life.
Julia Cameron (with Mark Bryan), author of The Artist’s Way states: “The unexamined life is not worth living but consider too that the unlived life is not worth examining.” The diary was Anais’ sketchbook for the portrait of herself and (eventually) others which she first painted in fiction for a limited audience, concealing private parts of her image and personal inner thoughts much like the painter Rousseau whose The Dream delights viewers on a primitive, primary/vibrant color level while symbolically pleasing those critics who find deeper psychological meaning for what may be hidden beneath and between leaves, branches, trees.
Woman, traditionally, was construed for centuries in the same respect as the Native American and African American — as mysterious and unfathomable by man who chose not to look beneath the surface. In Novel of the Future, Anais said, “It is the function of art to renew our perceptions. What we are familiar with we cease to see.” However, Anais was referring not only to external reality but to her own purpose as a writer. “This emotional reality which underlies superficial incidents is the keynote of my fiction.”
To understand the art of Anais, one may approach her work with any book as I did when I first read the short stories in Under A Glass Bell at age eighteen to find a kindred soul engaged in writing lyrically, as little in fashion in the late Sixties as it is barely tolerated in the late Nineties. Wherever anyone begins, you will be inspired to read more by (hopefully first) and about Anais, becoming part of a widening circle, like the one that formed around her in the Underground days before, during and after Anais, at a time when she was privately printing her own books or beyond, inspiring others to do the same, i.e. my own letterpress Ragnarok Press 1970-1978 (with D.H. Stefanson in Iowa, Mississippi and Alabama).
As Anais said of Lawrence, you will come to say of her: “any stability is merely an obstacle to creative livingness.” You will be then in that inlet between two islands: the visible Self in Life as we perceive it and invisible “hidden self.” How you travel (via Anais as inlet) might mirror my own route with Anais’ map, her Proustian quote predominant: “‘Style is a matter of vision, not technique.’”
We do not question the navigator about her personal life when we sign on for any voyage, but we certainly hope our skillful guide will make the journey worthwhile. For many who have sailed often in Anais Nin’s books, issued annually now for two decades following her passage to another sphere (or possible inletting between several), the fascination becomes more intense whenever a new port is promised.
That is what I intend with this vision. If I omit certain novels by Anais or studies of/on her, I do so only because I feel they have been analyzed and probed elsewhere. I am in accord with Gunther Stuhlmann who responded to me in a personal letter (4/21/97) that he “find(s) it difficult to reduce the very complex nature of Anais to the somewhat reductive bi-polarity of ‘manic-depressive’ since her elations and dejections were usually based on ‘real’ things that affected her...”*
However, “The molten and amphibious nature of artistic imagination represents not only a crucial element in creativity but an important link between the manic-depressive and artistic temperaments as well,” Kay Redfield Jamison avers in Touched with Fire (Free Press/McMillan ‘93). Thus, I offer you my act of love in the same way Anais did when she said, “Then she sat down and began a book,” neither adulation nor scholarly criticism, but Anais Nin: Understanding Her Art.
TWO DOORS
THROUGH THE
HOUSE OF MIRRORS:
The Real
and the Symbolic

“I have an immense hunger for life.”
This is “the madness of the poet,” that key for entry into the art and artifice of the artist Anais Nin who reveals in Diary 1, that her passion was compassion. “For me, understanding is love.” Her hero was the soul, in both her journal, an engraving of pain and her poetic prose, timeless fiction, like psychological fairy-tales to mask presentably secrets she could only bare or share in necessary mystery, while identifying them wrongly as “lies instead of myths.” According to her second psychoanalyst, Otto Rank, “this was the art of creating a beautiful disguise.”
“From Catholicism to Lawrentianism,” the woman in the child and the child in the woman sought to seduce an unholy ghost, her “double. My evil Double,” the father she named as her male half who abused her bodily, possibly engendering her “Diana complex,” which belongs to the “woman who envies man his sexual power.” The child, conflicted about the pain and pleasure of punishment, thus unconsciously (or consciously and secretly) in her diaries yearned to be similarly powerfully free. “All but freedom, utter freedom, is death.”
Her diary was a drug “covering all things with a mist of smoke, deforming and transforming as the night does.” Her “love of exact truth” was possibly characteristic of a self-identified jealous neurotic, although in direct opposition with her “lies in life,” the eye of the lie that opens and closes to reality not as one “I” but with double vision in “the nightmare of herself as two women,” the “multiple selves” she had labeled “a disease” in Henry Miller’s second wife June, one reflection of woman Anais yearned to become while already on her forked path to becoming.
Coupled with emotional, compassionate, almost mirrored-identification, was Anais’ desire to be ubiquitous, in so many places, almost a thousand women, with her “infernal vision of freedom” while “wanting to be alone,” and “ask(ing) too much of life ... be(ing) cruelly disappointed.” At the same time, she realized “the only difference between the insane man and the neurotic is that the neurotic man knows he is ill.” Anais thus struggled with many secret selves, her early desire for bisexuality, no more sanctioned as healthy or normal in her era as the real preference is now. However, her emotional, psychological and sexual problems led her to psychoanalysis beyond books.
“Anxiety devours me,” she wrote in the unexpurgated Incest: From a Journal of Love where she noted that her “season in hell” was the prose poem House of Incest. All the while, her undiagnosed bipolarity continued to stamp “emotionalism and sensibility,” her art, her very existence.
“I want to go to Rank to get absolution for my passion for my father,” she wrote, or possibly as well, unfulfilled wishes that made her restless and neurotic, her “fears of sickness and madness.” Before, during and after analysis, the woman and the artist suffered to comprehend her “savage” side, the dark shadow, really the other woman in Anais who can be seen as typifying a rapid-cycler manic-depressive. Anais could only equate such shifting swift moods into a traditional societal term. “For no one has loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men.”
Any artist longs to be free, but the Linotte, aware of inheriting more than her father’s faults, had no idea she may have been genetically predisposed for a disorder now known as bipolarity. She reflected optimistically, even in her thirties, “I don’t believe I was born melancholic.” Not that her burgeoning disorder at times led Anais into actions (behavior), feelings (emotions), thoughts (ideas) even sexual experiences. However, for the child and woman, these “dark moments” when she was not “good and useful” may have been the spreading branches of a barely perceived mood disorder, rooted already in her artistic desires.
Otto Rank, her second psychotherapist, explained her angst as “a manifestation of imagination,” in contradiction to what Anais had been religiously taught not to adapt to wholly as a dutiful daughter. “Rank teaches transmutation and mobility,” the best advice available at the time for one who confirmed herself often in the Early Diaries (Vol. 1-4) as being “in the grip of an attack of melancholy, and as usual for no apparent reason.
“A tragedienne and a poet,” Anais as Linotte saw life as spiritual sacrifice, the body “a veil each of us must wear before passing on elsewhere;” to counteract the sadness of reality, she proclaimed she was “in love with Beauty,” finding both solace and exacerbation of sorrow in music, represented by her musician father, of whom she had mixed feelings, just as she did for the Catholic God who failed to answer her prayers to reunite her in childhood with her paternal ideal. When she does meet her father, the second time in twenty years, Anais has “discovered (or believes) she does not need him.”
She already had found a path to survival in a truly innovative way through the “journal as a product of (her) disease” while including real portraits, “first impressions,” as well “observance of other people’s outsides” and using same as substance for her symbolic stories, even if she was “taken in, in good faith by my own inventions,” noted in Henry & June.*
Linotte

I. GYPSY IN HER BLOOD

In Linotte, the Early Diary 1914-1920, Anais reveals “that there are two people in me,” the nun and the writer, both separate and yet related, connected as “Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin et Culmell” who, at age eleven in New York, separated from her father, could confess: “At the moment of Communion, it seems more as though I am kissing and hugging Papa, rather than receiving the body of Christ.” At the same time, a few months later at age twelve, she would rationalize, “I prefer to give myself to my pen, I prefer to write, to let those who want to understand my heart know it, in order to reform it.”
Catholicism traditionally preaches that if one does good deeds or makes sacrifices (a.k.a. Christ), then one is rewarded for such obedience to ideals. Although devoutly Catholic (“Being the Catalan type pleases me, for I think and suppose that Papa would be happy”), the artist is also aware of something more nonconforming and gypsy-like in her soul when at fourteen she began to pose as a model to earn money to help both her mother and two younger brothers (Rosa; Thorvald and Joaquin).
Still, simultaneously, she was writing poetry and fairy tales, her stories of “a mirror,” the word she used to refer to “My diary. Isn’t it a mirror that will retell to oblivion the true story of a dreamer who, a long, long time ago, went through life the way one reads a book? Once the book is closed, the reader can go on his way with all the treasures it had to teach.”
Although Anais admits at age thirteen she has “two companions: my earthly diary and heavenly prayer...(to) hope (while) I plant the virtue that I want to imprint forever on my second soul...,” a year later she is balking at obedience: church, parents, the role of woman, school. “Why must our whole life be a long heavy chain of obedience? ... Nothing but laws, commandments. Why?”
The diary, originally begun as a letter to the father, at this point does not include him in her reasons for “Why am I living? ... Out of love for my mother, I would be useful. Out of love for my creator, I would work. Out of love for eternal peace, I would suffer. Out of love for God, I would serve. And out of love for myself, I would do my duty.”
By age fourteen, she had “found a motto. Let’s live in order to be useful and let’s be useful in order to live,” something she witnessed in her mother, “more than a man at that moment, for joining energy and kindness, courage and beauty, strength and gentleness ... a guardian angel, an incomparable woman;” whereas a year earlier she had challenged her father with the question: “Isn’t there a single man on earth who isn’t selfish? ... if they are all selfish, do you think I shall have to get married when I am grown up?”
Indeed, she was her “father’s own daughter,” her mother noted, probably because Anais had written him: “if I don’t become famous or rich, I shall and can be happy with a pen and a morsel of bread, daily bread.”
Conflicted regarding why she feels her father will never come to America, the child reflected on an array of possible reasons. “Papa is angry with Mama ... Papa was severe, and often Mama tried to intervene ... Could the parting be my fault? ... of all the bad things in the world, divorce is the worst.” Still, she knows “that with my disposition I couldn’t be a good mother and I prefer not to be one.” Because Anais realized, “Dreams are my life, the dream that sustains the solitary person that I shall be, for ... no man will want to be master. A disposition such as mine is made to live in union only with solitude.” Already, she had determined her method of survival amid her circumstances in a broken family and a strange new land. “I think that dreams which so far have helped me to live, will be my only guide.”

II. INSIDE OUT BEHIND THE PAST

Anais, who refers to herself at the end of her first journal Early Diary (Linotte) as “a poor bird without wings!” because of “That brain! ... affected with a sickness as unknown as the patient,” still recognized precociously — “When I am angry, I write and my anger cools; when I am sad, I write and my melancholy wears off; when I am happy, I write,” unaware that she might truly be her father’s daughter and double, not merely because of her temperament, but because of an inherited bipolarity, a disorder not identifiable as such in her youth or even years beyond but said to pass through the mother’s genes, i.e. her paternal grandmother’s.
“I remember Papa’s strong, unshakable, even stern disposition. There is something in me that gives me an impatience and anger that I can’t combat, and it hurts me terribly ... “
Other characteristics of the manic-depressive nature Anais identified almost explicitly in her Linotte wisdom: “they have nicknamed me ‘Miss Absent-Minded.’ I go through the day putting salt instead of sugar in my coffee, hanging my dresses in the kitchen, answering yes to any question or not answering at all, ... putting the plates in the oven ... sewing things backward ... putting the silverware in a flowerpot...” Thus, no matter her promise at beginning of 1917 “to be joyful ... not to suffer without any reason during the entire year ... I am again with my ‘black thoughts’! Black as ink ... “ However, her “‘attacks of sadness,’” part of her disposition, great fluctuations of mood, primarily prevalent and preserved in the Early Diaries (1-4) are minimized when later the mature writer excises many references to same for the first published public Diary.
At sixteen, she nonetheless said: “I have lost my enthusiasm, my energy, my gaiety ... I can’t be ‘good’ for very long ... I am so terribly, terribly tired and that’s why I am sad.” She attributes her melancholy as coming “from indifference, bitterness ... and a liver attack.”
If her father influenced Linotte’s temperament both positively and negatively, so did her mother’s attitude towards marriage and motherhood in Rosa’s silence regarding why they journeyed from France to America without the father, who the artist/child could only interpret as more devoted to his art than the family. “I always compare my career as a bluestocking to a victory and marriage to a defeat,” she wrote, adding, “Maman has such a bad opinion of the masculine sex, and even my brothers are examples of supreme selfishness, in spite of their good qualities.” No wonder Anais is most surprised to learn of her father that “‘He deserted us?’”
Rosa Culmell responds to her, “... he made our life very unhappy because he was very brutal. He would lock me up in one room so as to be able to beat you ... You must remember many scenes of brutality, don’t you?”
Thus, not yet seventeen, a more enlightened Anais writes in her diary, “I have really lost my faith in ... men.” Still, as the dutiful daughter, she continued to write her father, the artist: “I am not yet a cynic ... However, I am full of contradictions because I never stop idealizing all the people around me ... I realize regretfully that it is in vain.”

TRANSCENDENT
THINKER:
Influences Before
D. H. Lawrence and
The Phoenix as Mentor

SELF-TAUGHT EXPLORER

At twelve, Anais wrote that every time she heard the Marseillaise, she felt as though she had wings, “as though a divine force has hold of me. Could it be Joan of Arc ... ?” Perhaps she gained a certain moral strength from this martyred Frenchwoman, “girl who incarnated the soul of courage” (childhood poem Dec 9, 1915.) However, her empathy had intensified the month before when she saw the life of Edgar Allan Poe at the cinema.
“I understood the sorrow he felt in losing Virginia, his wife, and it seems to me that the life he led, full of dreams and illusions, will also be mine. Yes, I shall live in dreams because reality is too cruel for me.”
Two years later, disenchanted with public school, Anais persuaded her mother Rosa to permit her daughter to “drop out.” Anais said, “I go there to learn, but soon I shall leave it and learn what I want to know with my friends, my best companions: my books.” Simultaneously, young Anais was also becoming disillusioned with religion. At sixteen, she knew herself well enough, however, “to realize that all the disillusionments that I find in others, I also find in myself.”
Without using the word reincarnation, the transcendent thinker expresses a rare belief when she says that same year: “There are times when I feel as though I have already been an old, old woman and that I am now in second childhood (without anyone knowing it, of course) and with some ideas still remaining with me from the time of my old age.” With this intuitive wisdom, she adds, “I shall write a book that describes life exactly as it appears...”
In that same year in a letter to her childhood friend Frances, Anais writes, “... it does pay to explore human nature” and “that everything almost that causes loss of faith in others is the lack of faith in ourselves.” Most boldly and much like an adventurous explorer, she proclaims at the end of 1919 in the first childhood diary, Linotte, “My favorite poet is Nature” while consciously berating herself for “liv(ing) the books that I am reading.” In a truly Catholic voice beyond the boundaries of church or school, she states, “I must live for others, and live with my heart and imagination joined.”
Always learning, Anais responds to her father’s gift of modern French books, that she is “bewitched by the language” but that she has difficulty forgiving “the realism.” In spite of these disenchantments, she can affirm, “I still hear the fairies murmur. Everything speaks to me, everything is alive — and simply sublimely simple and beautiful!” She is the explorer of Mother Nature, Human Nature and the Nature of her Self. She parallels “the intransigence of life’s beauty” with “change — like the seasons.”
When her mother calls her “fickle,” Anais responds with a mind of her own as any explorer would. “I have the right to love many people at once, and to change my Prince often.”
Her entries in the diary at this time seem to reveal an unconscious awareness of a possibly undiagnosed and clinically unidentified bipolar nature. “I am here with two fixed ideas in mind: write until I become reasonable (for I am morbid and unhappy), and tell you what is happening.” The romantic vs. the realist is still founded in despised obedience as the dutiful daughter who seems to have inherited tendencies toward manic-depression. “Even if I must search around the world, I shall find my Shadow — tall, and strong, and noble, generous, faithful ... He will be poor, very poor, and he will need me.”
At the end of Linotte,* on Jan. 4, 1920, Anais notes that the “Nin family is always difficult, because they are aristocrats who have never had much money but who have princely tastes...” Still, for Anais, the “Prince of Princes and ... only King on Earth” remained “sir Diary.”
According to executor for the Anais Nin Trust, Rupert Pole says in Note (preceding her brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell’s Preface,) in The Early Diary Volume 2 (1920-1923): “Anais wrote that Spanish was the language of her ancestors, French, the language of her heart, and English the language of her intellect.” Nonetheless, “Journal d’une Fiancee,” written in English is as philosophical as Linotte composed in French. Anais had titled each of her hand-written volumes although “‘Journal’ contains ... first title for a diary book,” Rupert Pole adds.
At seventeen, while discussing religion with her cousin Eduardo, Anais finds herself “calmly expressing my disbelief in Heaven after death,” although adding she was not “certain of the causes of my disbelief...(or) of their accuracy.” If there is no heaven, one must be immortal in another way. “I am going to be useful and do something worthwhile during my life.” In another letter to Frances, she relates her reading of Socrates and Plato and her thoughts “that long before we existed our souls were living and loving in other worlds, then they come to us, then they leave us again when we die ... can I remain a poet and a philosopher in one?”
Still tormented by rapid cycles of shifting mood, the inner explorer within Anais staunchly says, “Happiness is foolish, but sorrow is inexcusable.” What aids her is “the calm one has while studying, the lasting serenity and inward contentment derived from books,” with the conflict haunting her regarding the use and necessity of these very diaries. “Of course, this scribbling is a waste of time, but I could not give it up now for anything in the world.”
She quotes Bossnet as a further rationalization: “‘To become a perfect philosopher, man need study nothing but himself ... in noticing only what he finds within himself, there will he recognize his Maker.’”
This discovery reverses her thought that “Imagination, its fights, passions, and ecstasies, live in the winged, free, immortal soul. But it is apparently all wrong.” The realist in Anais, struggling privately with her idealism about her absent father, says, “I can please father dimly. I know he was always grave and strict and absorbed ... Father was fond of spanking us ... I feared Father was going to kill Mother ... I would do anything to keep him from lifting my dress and beating me ... Father once killed a cat with a broom.” The dutiful and romantic dreamer remains rightfully conflicted about the father who is the musician she would become, only of language.
“Father! Father! All my life has been one great longing for you. A longing for you as I want you to be.” She is as tormented and confused about his nature as her own which she sees as inherited. “I do not believe in Hell at all, however, and still less in hell on this earth of ours. I do believe ... that we expiate our faults on earth, by sacrifice and suffering; that we atone for our great weaknesses every day.”
By eighteen, Anais has “Emerson for a friend! ... Perhaps you understand the great malady in my spirit better than anyone in the world.” The philosopher intends “to prove that true intellectual friendship can exist” between man and woman, contrary to what she’s read by Tolstoy and others. Maybe she feels her mother was never her father’s friend. In any event, she identifies her love for her cousin Eduardo as “a hunger of the spirit.”
Still battling fluctuating moods, ranging from the ecstasy of mania to the dismal swamp of melancholic despair, Anais finds solace in Emerson who “tells us not to allow ourselves to fall into these extremes. There is a medium state of mind, of quiet self-control, when one is not swayed by each mood and is yet keenly living and conscious and sensitive.”
Thus, when the poet/pragmatist Hugh Guiler, known as Hugo, enters her life, she is enraptured with their spiritual conversations. “And poetry, after all, being divine, is another name for the Divine Idea.” This is what Anais believed, symbolized in a dream that night after their discussion, in “the shape of a bird...like the pursuit of happiness in Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird.”
So, even though books have “always answered all my needs,” Anais was “long(ing) for good, wise and true friends ... the most beautiful ... in the world, next to love?” However, two years before her marriage to the American banker Hugo in Cuba and before she was out of her twenties, she admits the meaning of her “vision of truer happiness for mother. God help me!” She has sacrificed herself for the financial security of everyone, despite her premonition about Hugo. “I find him too cold-blooded, too deliberate ... I long for a contradiction. I do not want things to happen according to law and order and plan ... what troubles me: his wisdom, his calmness!”
At nineteen, Anais, the explorer, had stated with certainty: “I worship not so much the actions of men but what moves them to such actions ... I want to know the inner self.” For this reason “like a scientist, I analyze, classify, separate, eager to get at the truth ...”, with all her journals serving as “an honest biography.” Very few writers have given humankind an honest recording of emotions and events, moment by moment, shaped only by the present as opposed to memories of the elusive past.
Whenever self-doubt dwindled her confident spirit, Anais recalled Emerson. “‘Self-trust is the essence of heroism. Self-trust is the essence of heroism.’” While reading her selected books, Anais was also formulating her own beliefs about the “creators with words, the significance of all changes, small or great, deep or superficial” as “in our hands. And so are the new ideals, the changes in love’s forms, the modern demands implied by happiness, the modern interpretation of our freedom.”
Early Diary Volume 2 ends with the resolute Anais stating before her twentieth birthday and marriage to Hugo: “Destiny (is) working out its plan surely and mysteriously toward an end which is to the human mind impossible to devise; the wheel of evolution turning, turning with a blinding swiftness...” She reaffirms that what allows her to accept Hugo’s proposal is not merely divine intervention but intervention of the divine; herself, and her desire to be a writer, an artist.
“God help me, for I am entrusting all to love and binding my very soul to the fulfillment of my human mission. And while the knowing ones whisper: ‘Love passes, Marriage is a failure, Man is selfish,’ I stand unwaveringly, in expectation, my soul filled by visions which elevate me above myself.”
THE PHOENIX AS MENTOR

Anais discovered D. H. Lawrence via Women in Love, two years after her marriage when she was now twenty-two; she wrote of Hugo: “My love for him is tyrannical because it is ideal ... It is with the same puritanical (sic) soul that I look on my father ... to be for me something which he is not in reality ...” She had “sought peace in marriage, and there is none.”
Just as she hoped to invent a new marriage for herself, Anais longed to do the same with literature. “The pure novel does not seem free enough. I have a feverish desire to invent a form for myself, to follow my inclinations, my impulses, to give free play to the queerness within me. For I repress my queerness.” More than a year later she still admits, “My very real self is not wifely, not good. It is wayward, moody, desperately active and hungry.”
In Louveciennes outside Paris, Anais was writing the short stories Waste of Timelessness and other Early Stories (Magic Circle Press ‘77). In the preface, Anais wrote: “I realized that it is valuable for other writers to follow the development of the total work, to observe each step of the maturing process ... Two elements appear here which were to be affirmed in later work: irony and the first hints of feminism.” The influence of D.H. Lawrence, her mentor, is apparent in these early stories, both poetic and philosophical, everything she admired when she read her first novel by the man whom she said understood women so well.
“I read a strange and wonderful book ... concerned only with the description of feelings, sensations, conscious and unconscious, with ideas, and with the physical only as the transcription of spirit — though recognized as having a life in itself ... To do it, Lawrence had to torment and transform ordinary language ... he has an occult power over human life and sees deeper than almost anyone I know.”
Yet, she could even pass judgment on her mentor in her longing to surpass him. “Lawrence is dangerous to the mind ... He knows and he doesn’t know. At least, he doesn’t know what to do with what he knows.”
Interpreting Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Anais’ philosophy was melting and melding into that of her mentor. “Lawrence’s man (Mellors) ... Desire, when selective, ceases to be obscene ... Here is Lawrence the poet and mystic — uncovering the very mystery of true passion, which is half-mystical.”
At this time, Anais was still dancing, yearning to become a Flamenco dancer. “I feel only my body, its burning, its languors, its desires, and its defects.” Five years into her marriage, Anais writes, “... I cannot stay at home. I have a desperate desire to know life, and to live in order to reach maturity ... Unless I am mistaken, Hugo will forgive me.”
In spite of these yearnings, Anais adds, “I can’t live within reality — I must live within stories. Then I will fuse both and surrender the real me to Imagy (her invented, imagined other identity) to the world as One.”
What Anais wrote of D.H. Lawrence in her first published essay, “The Mystic of Sex” (Canadian Forum Oct ‘30) can be said of her as well. “Lawrence was not the man to be defined by one book, and in one moment. He was a language, a setting, a world entirely of his own ... Even within one love there is divided feeling; even within one truth there is divided dual truth ... The poetry and the bare truth exist side by side ... Lawrence knew there was no finality, no solution, no ground one could be certain never to want to move away from ... you will have to shift with shifting truth.”
In “Waste of Timelessness,” title story of Waste of Timelessness, the character Alain Roussel “is the symbol of the unattainable,” Anais’ husband’s own mentor, the best-selling novelist John Erskine. Anais was attracted to the married author, yet he was not the man or the writer to awaken and satisfy all that she craved intellectually and physically.
“The fact is that John is out of my ken because he does not know how to express his feelings, and he is unconscious of mine ... I have made up my mind not to be taken in by imagination again.”
The essay “The Mystic of Sex” was a springboard for the woman ready to dive into sensuality and swimming even deeper into the Mystic’s writing which became her first published book, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (Obelisk ‘32). Anais thus had become the mystic as woman. “He was, like all true poetry, against tepid living and tepid loves ...; he wanted a fulfillment of physical love equal to the mental; he wanted to reawaken impulse, and the clairvoyance of our intuitions.” Exactly what Anais was in the process of doing.
Yet, when her cousin Eduardo told Anais of a marvelous idea he had to write about Lady Chatterly’s Lover and why it should not be banned, generously, Anais replied, “but that is what I have done in my essay ‘Sex or Mysticism?’” Nonetheless, she urged him to try and even offered her notes.
“Lawrence not only gave full expression to the gestures of passion ... he indicated precisely those feelings surrounding sexual experience, and springing from it, which make passion a consummation both of our human and our imaginative life.”
Now, Anais had been reading Marcel Proust, a writer with whom she also identified. “I live too intensely in the Past and outside the usual boundaries of time ... What Proust does not have is an intuition of the future, the power to imagine places never seen, the patience to build up preconceptions ... Proust finds little unity (of past, present, future), besides his central idea of Time and Timelessness, found and fixed by memory, and by observation only. I think I shall find more unity in life.”
She was on the way to this unity when she philosophically allied with Lawrence who said in his “Sex Versus Loveliness” essay (1928): “If you love living beauty, you have a reverence for sex.” Another tenet that became Anais’ was: “The deep psychic disease of modern men and women is the diseased, atrophied condition of the intuitive faculties,” an idea that couldn’t be any more political or ahead of its time, especially in her era. Thus, it was only natural for Anais to support the futuristic poet whose work was banned and misunderstood by many, even after his death, almost a week before she could send “her letter and review of his books.”
Less than a year later, when she had gone to Titus*, a publisher in Paris, with “The Woman No Man Could Hold” akin to Lawrence’s “The Woman Who Rode Away,” Anais then mentioned that she also “had written a book about Lawrence ... a Latin exaggeration,” for she only had “notes, and many ideas.” However, she went home and wrote the study in two weeks since Titus was more interested in the book on Lawrence than in her poetic prose.
“I relied on my instinct. I even wrote the book with my body, as Lawrence would have it — not always intellectually.” Her original title was “D. H. Lawrence: A Study in Understanding,” a totally new criticism that related and identified with the writing as part and parcel of D.H. Lawrence’s identity. “To begin to realize Lawrence is ... to realize philosophy not merely as an intellectual edifice but as a passionate blood-experience ... To him any stability is merely an obstacle to creative livingness ... ‘The secret of all life is obedience ... to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations.’”
Anais recognized the “personages in his book as symbolical” as they would be for her own. If she quoted Lawrence: “‘Love is a relative thing not an absolute,’” it is because she herself was on the path to new human relationships ... Ordinary idealism is composed mainly of dead ideals. And to stick to dead ideals is to die.” What she says about Ursula in Women in Love also befits Anais, “Emptiness in life is more unbearable than death.”
Amazed that “D.H. sought the core of woman ... who has effaced her real self in order to satisfy man-made images,” Anais was aware that her fiction typified exactly this struggle even though she may have erroneously misquoted herself in the first published Diary of Anais Nin 1931-1934 when she said, “The core of the woman is her relation to man.” If she also praises Lawrence’s second talent as a painter (“He would give it (writing) the bulginess of sculpture ... nuances of paint ... rhythm of movement, of dancing ... sound, musicality, cadence,”) the same can be said of her own style since Anais had been a dancer, always was around musicians, created her own fashions and designed the interiors of her abodes with an artist’s mind. In addition, she had tried sculpting and painting after she modeled for both a painter and then a sculptor.
The poet in Anais could easily recognize the poetry in Lawrence’s prose. “Poetry as distinguished from prose is essentially that moment of ecstasy, like a moment in music, in which senses and imagination fuse and flame.” This is precisely what the young writer had set out to do in her unique stories that show she loved and breathed her dead mentor while aiming to create something intrinsically her own and totally distinct from Lawrence.

GROWING WINGS:
WASTE OF
Timelessness vs.
House of Incest

Waste of Timelessness

In the title story of what was originally Anais’ “Woman No Man Could Hold” book, Alain’s wife says, “There must be a trip one can take and come back from changed forever ... I am tired of struggling to find a philosophy which will fit me and my world. I want to find a world which fits me and my philosophy.”
At age 27, Anais writes in her diary, “When I am less afraid of filling in, between intend and poetical writing, with human, consciously written pages (the diary?), the work will be more complete and have more blood.” Already, her writing is diverging from her mentor’s because of Anais’ subtle sense of the comic.

“Come and see our wisteria. It has grown to the left after all, in spite of everything.”
“During the night?” she asked.
“Have you Irish in you? Don’t you remember how the wisteria looked twenty years ago...?”
“I have been wasting a lot of time,” she said.

Thus, in “Waste of Timelessness,” Alain’s wife (Anais) lets readers know that indeed she has been dreaming, creating art for a long time and only now in her twenties awakening to the “real” world and to “the reality” of what her senses need, that to which she has been heretofore oblivious. “I made the sacrifice of marrying a banker and few people know what a misfortune that is!” Anais, the wife, tells her diary.
In “The Song in the Garden,” the narrator “watched herself as an insect,” thinking “she might be growing wings, such as she had seen in holy books.” In keeping with Anais’ growing disenchantment with idealism, this character/narrator reflects: “She needed not the key to the universe; the universe was in her.” Always licking her wounds regarding the father who abandoned her, now Anais wonders if she has erred in her marriage. “If up to now she knew one had to live with fervor, and with intelligence, she soon learned one had not only to live for an idea, or die for it, but also fight for it.” The idea is her independence as an artist.
Valerie Harms, whose Magic Circle Press published her own Stars in My Sky in 1976 (a year before the press published Anais’ youthful stories of Waste of Timelessness) says that Anais’ first novel was written when she was 19 “... about a girl named Aline who poses for artists in order to earn money for her father and brother.

“And what did he give you to amuse yourself...?”
“Books of poetry, instead of dolls,” Aline laughed.
“And now I feel like taking a good look at the world outside.”

Anais’ next novel, written when she was 25, focuses on “Rita, a muse of the men but a strong believer in the talents of women. The men are rather chauvinistic ... but by the end they learn to be more sensitive.”
Harms says that in this 150 page unfinished novel, Rita’s husband, Joseph, replies: “I can’t say I find our marriage is peaceful or as secure as before. You have shown a spirit which frightens me ... I suppose now it is up to me to keep you from wanting to go.”
Anais’ third unpublished novel, known as the John novel (first identified as Duncan) is about 170 pages long, written when Anais was living in France again; however, the first person point of view makes the writing less Lawrentian and more Anais. “The leading character ... is a woman who paints. She is married to Duncan ... (who) talks about when he will create but cannot match the constant creative force of his wife.”

She was afraid of her body. When she looked at it in the mirror, she observed the mystery of its separate individual life.
Harms interprets this narrator/character as realizing she has deceived herself about Alain (a playwright) and “she dispels the illusion she built” around him. “... she had discovered in several ways that there was no sensuality in Alain, that it was all on the surface.” (Valerie Harms and I both had the opportunity to read unpublished early novels by Anais with Moira Collins at the Northwestern U. Library — Special Collections in Evanston, Illinois in the Seventies.)
Only in 1996 did I realize that Anais had rewritten totally Lawrence’s two stories “The Princess” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.” Anais said of the former story in her Study that it was a “fairy tale of mysterious individuality,” with “The Princess” learning from her father: “in the middle of everybody there is a green demon which you can’t peel away ... and it doesn’t care at all about the things that happen to the outside leaves of the person.”
In “The Princess,” the girl experiences the sensuality she has yearned for, only after her father dies ; but she rejects it as base and false when offered to her by a common man (much like Henry Miller). She prefers instead to marry a man like her father, who will treat her as “The Princess.” Many of the men Anais was attracted to in her life bore a strong physical resemblance to her father, as may be evidenced in photographs within the diaries.
Harms interprets that Anais in the John novel “chronicled death in a relationship and followed it further than she had ever gone before.” Anais, however, may only have chronicled suppression of her own conflict, i.e. the woman as self-contained, solitary artist vs. “the Woman No Man Could Hold.” In any event, Anais therapeutically had worked through her obsession with John Erskine, her husband’s mentor, a married novelist she may have imagined might serve her as Mellors did, Lady Chatterly’s Lover.
In Lawrence’s “the Woman Who Rode Away,” the tragic heroine, a mother and wife who longed for time alone as well as adventure, rides off into the mountains and is sacrificed in a primitive ritual. Of course, she is never to return to the sameness of her routine marriage. However, in “The Gypsy Feeling,” Anais creates a more positive ending to a woman’s desire, also the rudimentary conclusion of the later House of Incest prophesied in the beginning of “The Gypsy Feeling” when Mariette sees Lolita dance.
“She made Mariette think ... of the sun stirring in generous gold bodies an ever rising and spurting sap ... slow undulations ... and then riotous dancing with feet, body and arms all at once ... arms curling and uncurling with joy, spiral movements of the body, turn and swirl ... and a smile of knowing intimate triumph, for the blood of the audience has caught up with her rhythm and they too are panting with ardent joy ...”
Anais also had been dancing, thinking she might become both a Spanish dancer and a writer, “melting more and more into the universal woman, by my physical attributes, my coquetry, my desire to please, my dancing.” She believed she had freed herself from her obsessive attraction to Erskine, “his book, his work, his life, his lack of understanding — and I feel free of him.” Thus, Anais ended her youthful story: “And all the strength she gathered from the freshness and the solitude would burst into dancing, dancing to the rhythm of her blood, and to the climax of her own emotions ... dancing a gypsy feeling.” Ironically and humorously, Marietta is approached by the suitor of her mother named Lolita.

“What about Lolita?”
“She’s mending socks. By the way, did I tell you I was a poet?”
“I would have guessed it,” said Marietta.

Vicariously, Anais writes, “through the imagination, I am living out those things which are forbidden to me.”
“The Russian Who Did Not Believe in Miracles and Why “ affirms this belief (even though she has not yet met Henry Miller). The Russian says, “I like to imagine I have died, and then suddenly come into a new life.” The woman in the story tells him, “You could do that without dying ... we can throw off yesterday’s man like an old coat we don’t want anymore, and actually enter into a new life ...”
When the Russian says he wants to make love to her, she tells him, “For a change the one woman you won’t have. Isn’t that interesting?” Anais is still at war with the inner and outer woman, the one who would be content to dream of love vs. “the woman no man could hold.”
This is expressed in “The Dance Which Could Not Be Danced,” which is “within herself ... hidden to human eyes” as the dancer wears “shawls and flowers ... a dance within a dance, a dream within a dream ... with the perpetual cadence of inviolate living.”
From drifting on the boat “away from this world down some strange wise river into strange wise places,” in the title story, Anais longs still so very much for “red roses, red roses” that in “Red Roses,” the narrator ordered them to be delivered to herself, symbolic of the fiery passion she feels guilty for craving. However, the protagonist “carries them running to the Church” where she will add them to the flames of “flowers and candles perpetually offered in sacrifice,” the opposite climax that occurred in Lawrence’s “The Woman Who Rode Away,” wherein the woman herself was sacrificed for her secret desire.
Anais writes, “She could add her dead roses ... sent by man to the virgin ... as an offering, of secret joy, and abdication.” In essence, Anais has added her own postscript to Lawrence’s story, allowing this sensual woman to return, to live again and tell her sensuous tale.
Still, Anais feels somewhat guilty for being so “modern as truly an inner feminist (a free woman) when in “Red Roses,” the character says, I cannot bear it when my desires are fulfilled,” just as Lawrence’s “The Princess” could not.
“Our Minds Are Engaged” concerns two people who reunite “after eight years of separation.” In her premonitory way, Anais has written a story that could apply to herself and her love for cousin Eduardo; her husband Hugo; her father; and prophetically, her lover Henry Miller, the latter two whom she would meet in less than two years after this story was written.
“He went to the very edge of the bowl and fell out of it ... He exhausted his physical impulses, and then returned. He did not want that climax ... What he desired was wholeness and normalcy.”
As they “talk ... about their desire for connection with life through love and through creation ... all the while they wished a connection between themselves.” Anais longed for the Prince who would be her equal. However, “She was tired of a man who could fear a woman’s strength.” Yearning to be the liberated woman in contrast to Hugo’s belief that “the test of great love is endurance,” Anais also bemoaned the fact that her type of writing was unrecognized and unappreciated. “Today I swear to continue in my seclusion, never to desire to be known, to go on with my work, as I have always done, without any popular encouragement,” she reveals in Early Diary IV.
In “Alchemy,” an author’s wife receives his visitors, curious to see and know all details depicted in his novel Desperate Caverns. Anais admits her own dalliance with Erskine in this story (probably not consummated, as revealed in The Early Diaries) when she has the author’s wife openly understand her husband’s “illicit passion to ... a lovely woman.” The wife confesses to her guests that she is the plot and substance of her husband’s stories. But the truth falls on deaf ears.
Does the same hold true for modern times and those critics who do not comprehend the gravity of what F. Scott Fitzgerald did when he used his wife Zelda’s life and sometimes even her written words as his own? Harms asks us, as have other critics who happen to be women. (We shall later see how Anais’ words were also used without acknowledgement in reference to Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire, possibly inspired by her “Stella” and certainly followed by her own bold answer with A Spy in the House of Love.)
“Tishnar” may remind readers of a gothic Poe tale with its opening of fog, shadows, rain; a composite of the character’s inner, sorrowful state (Anais’?). The poetic prose is prelude to House of Incest, the prose poem that ended the writer’s private conflict (at least on a public basis because hidden in her diaries) regarding an artist’s need for solitude and a woman’s craving for companionship for others.

“Please,” she said to the conductor. “Will you stop for me?”
“This bus never stops,” said the man ... We make this trip only once ... Didn’t you see the sign in the front?”
“What does it say?”
“Another world,” said the conductor.

Realizing she does not want to leave her life, even as she knows it, the woman cannot exit at the exact moment she sees “the face she had long carved in her mind and wanted to find and to love all her life.” Anais had thought of suicide as any young, spurned woman might (or one swayed dangerously by her bipolar disorder?) However, as always, her words were the process of therapeutic self-healing.
In “The Idealist” Edward says to Chantal, “I suppose you have guessed it. I am obsessed by that woman,” the model they both sketch although he thinks her “a legendary apparition.” The story explains any person’s obsession, i.e. Anais’ for John Erskine (and later Henry Miller’s own insatiable need for whores that remind him of his bisexual wife June, depicted in Henry & June.) Hugo once said to Anais, “You fall in love with people’s minds” (referring to Henry Miller explicitly, but serving also as an acute observation of his artistic partner).
Chantal says to Edward that she understands his obsession. “I know. I know ... I have known all those feelings. My will has been dissolved.” He looks “crushed” because he states that he has “lost my ideal of you.” (his ideal of her as woman, embodiment of pure perfect untouchable illusion, virgin?)
“The Peacock Feathers” is very Lawrentian about “a lady in the white house who had collected birds from all parts of the world.” She invites a singer to her home where “the peacock paced up towards the voice and listened ... The next day the peacock was dead.” The singer is given the peacock’s feathers, but strange calamities begin to befall her: a musician kills himself at a concert when she begins to sing the compositions of others; she writes her memoirs, but they are “misinterpreted ... Many people ... satirized her ... It is the fault of the peacock feathers.”
The singer smokes “a long pipe,” but when “she ceased smoking she was empty of all energy and looked haggard.” Although the singer blames everything on the peacock feathers, she keeps them, “to say to those who observed her ruin: It was the fault of the peacock feathers.”
The theme of this story juxtaposes with Anais’ chapter in her Study titled “Fantasia of the Unconscious” where she quotes Lawrence in his Studies in Classical Literature as saying, “‘Commandments should fade as flowers do ...” Anais notes that Lawrence “expressed the instinct that there was a moment for ... the utmost clarity ... ‘individuals who would create each one his own living formulas ...’”
In “Cocksure Women and Hensure Men,” within Sex, Literature and Censorship edited by Harry Moore, Lawrence said, “It is the tragedy of the modern woman ... cocksure ... without ever listening for the denial which she ought to take into count. She is cocksure, but she is a hen all the time ... Having lived her life with such utmost strenuousness and cocksureness, she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness!” This is precisely Anais’ conflict, cocksure, but henny (at this age) as Hugo’s wife.
In “Faithfulness,” irony abounds when Aline is visited by Alban, the playwright, who tells her, “Nobody talks about the unconscious with fashionable consciousness ... You should be the wife of a writer.” He refers to Sherman, her husband, and to the businesslike milieu of the room. “Here are the pipes ... the office armchair”
as not befitting her temperament.
Another friend visits her and says, “I may be a clumsy old brute, but it seems to me you don’t love him.” Of course, Aline responds, “You’re all wrong there, Mr. Bellows.”
When Sherman returns home, she reports the whole conversation as something totally absurd. “Can you imagine such nerve, such nerve!” He laughs and replies, “You dear, faithful, honest little wife.”
Anais longs to be truthful, but she cannot hurt the man who has been so good to her, to her two brothers and to her mother.
“A Spoiled Party” includes a woman “beautifully costumed in emerald green, watery silk,” (Anais disguised again?) “personification of self-knowledge” as Harms interprets. The stranger, like two faces of Eve or Janus, eye to eye, recognizes herself as a split woman, one who longs for cocksuredness while in the henny state, and this is Anais’ dilemma: whether to be the psychoanalyst of the creator exclusively or to be truly passionate beyond imagination. “The experiences of this woman are imaginary — most of her which fascinates ... is imaginary!”
In Early Diary IV, Anais had written: “I understood Lawrence’s writing for what it was. Someday they will understand mine for what it is.” She proclaimed, “I am a whole woman. I have put my soul into everything my body has done ... I ... have had no need of sophistry, no need of pride to sustain me. I have given, often unwisely, and I have lost nothing!”
The final story “A Slippery Floor” in this early sequence approved for release by Anais, reveals “A new woman, daring and assured.” In (December ‘31 when the author met Henry Miller through Richard Osborn, a young lawyer in the same department of the bank where Hugo was employed, Anais had consulted Osborn regarding the publisher’s contract for her Lawrence book.)*
Anita, the Spanish dancer in the story was “at the end of (her) ephemeral career,” aspirations in that art. “She wanted a fantastic destiny instead of a wise one ... endless voyages, the perpetually shifting ground of stage life, rather than security.” As “a dream-swallower,” she knew Boris was right when he told her, books don’t teach everything.”
Confronting Vivien, the actress who had made Anita’s father unhappy (no doubt representative of Anais’ musician father), she is told her rationale for Vivien’s absence which is stirring in Anais at this time since she too is “growing wings.”
“Passion is exacting ... It never thrives on an idea ... of faithfulness ... I have loved white heat living.”
Anita meets her mother’s lover Norman and is shocked to learn, “I don’t love her anymore ... I love you.” Anita relays this to Vivien who tells her to go with her feelings and not “spoil it all with scruples.” Anita, however, prefers to “resist” the unscrupulous loving style of Vivien; her indecisiveness sends Norman away, back to her mother. The masochistic and/or sacrificial theme is apparent: An artist seeks what is self-destructive, whether consciously or unconsciously. (Possibly a tormented artist more than a mature one, or a bipolar artist who receives no help with a serious mood disorder because schizophrenia and bipolarity were mistakenly identified as the same if even distinguished separately.)
Anais is conflicted about which path she herself will follow. She wants to be a dutiful spouse, yet within her is also the Donna Juana temperament of the artist, associated with her long-lost, moody father.
Anais has a conversation with Hugo, her husband, on this very subject of fidelity versus freedom with its jealous ramifications for either partner. Hugo says that his “jealousy would be stronger than his fancy for anyone.”
Anais responds, “then I must find a way to help you calm your jealousy so you can enjoy yourself — by secrecy. If we say nothing to each other it will not arouse your jealousy ...”
When Hugo says, “No more of this nonsense talk,” Anais repeats, “But I do think it ought to be a secret.”
“I agree,” said Hugo.
Anais thus believes (or wants to believe) everything settled although Hugo has considered the discussion hypothetical. September ‘31 entry includes Anais’ further belief: “But I never wished for our old, peaceful, falsely ideal and unreal marriage.”
Constantly unsettled with this tormenting inner desire, Anais writes: “life is also in desire, also in work. When one fails you the other two can keep you alive.” Of course, she feels this way because of the double standard of that society and her Catholic upbringing, as well as example of her mother, Rosa Culmell, too involved working to even have time for matters of the heart.
“But a man without means can always find an object. The only way out is to eliminate feeling,” Anais wrote. “One man is as good as another, biologically speaking. I write this and I absolutely cannot convince myself.”

House of Incest

While Anais was living “in a quiet house once lived in by Turgenev,” (actually Madame du Barry) according to photographer Brassai* in The Paris Years, Henry Miller was living with Richard Osborn, “the Diary consisting of no fewer than forty-two volumes.” Brassai recalled how Anais “remembered having read an article about Bunuel’s Golden Age by someone of that name ... and been struck by the savage, primitive exuberance of the prose ... his fierce appetite for living, his verile sensuality ...”
Miller, a German-American born in Brooklyn, may be the incarnation for Anais for “The Russian Who Did Not Believe in Miracles and Why.” In Henry & June from the Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, Anais describes Miller, upon their meeting in December 1931. “Henry has imagination, an animal feeling for life ... the truest genius I have ever known. ‘Our age has a need of violence’ he writes. And he is violence.” She adds, “I enjoy his strength, his ugly, destructive, fearless, cathartic strength.”
However, talking to her diary later, Anais reveals, “You don’t know what sensuality is. Hugo and I do. It’s in us, not in your devious practices: it’s in a feeling, in passion, in love.” Anais was now more drawn to Miller’s second wife, June Mansfield. “I was like a man, terribly in love with her face and body ... I wanted to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, ‘You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence ... If I love you, it must be because we shared ... the same madness, the same stage.’”
Influenced by her cousin Eduardo and having read Problems of Destiny, written by Dr. Allendy, Anais goes to see him, with varied conflicts, even though she writes, “Analysis is for those who feel paralyzed by life.” While she does not feel paralyzed, she longs for her Mellors as Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly did to awaken her to everything, including her duality: the lesbianism June knows, made a caricature of by Henry Miller in Crazy Cock “without charity, without feeling.” (Not what Anais has planned to create for June at this time.)
She writes “fifteen little pieces like bits of prose poems” as her beginning “to achieve Debussyism;” after this, she “made a note on the psychoanalysis of the creator: ‘creation by undirected imagining — a trance — produces subconscious poetry.’” She believes herself surrealistically “influenced by transition magazine and Breton and Rimbaud.” She is half-aware also that Henry has cast a spell over her. “My father had icy blue eyes ... I became a child listening to Henry, and he became paternal ... I felt as if he had discovered a shameful secret ...” Anais has often referred to House of Incest as her own “Season in Hell.”
Her apparent bipolarity is overshadowed by a greater childhood trauma; she yearns to be the Don Juan her father was as well as an artist in addition to Hugo’s dutiful wife and Rosa’s “good” daughter, an obsessive notion that had preoccupied her for years. At 18 when she read Sydney Smith on “Female Education,” Anais rightfully interpreted these early nineteenth century essays when she reflected, “they seemed to mean but one thing: Choose between your home and domestic happiness — and your pen and your books.” The choice seemed unbearable, i.e. “to banish ... love ... (for) absolute loneliness in the life of study and labor.”
Anais resolved this conflict with “the key to contentment, the charm which dispels my ‘dark clouds’ .... (as) ‘work for others. Never cease working for others. Do not think of yourself!’” Yet, she admits she could easily be tempted “to hide somewhere, to be left alone with my ‘dark cloud.’” This is not only characteristic of the Nin temperament but also the absorbed artist in conflict with the evolving woman who, even after six months with Miller as her lover, could write: “With all the tremendous joys Henry has given me I have not yet felt a real orgasm.”
She tells Dr. Allendy, “I have imagined that a freer life would be possible to me as a lesbian because I would choose a woman, protect her, work for her, love her for her beauty while she could love me as one loves a man, for his talent, his achievements, his character ... remembering Stephen in The Well of Loneliness.” This is the secret to the mystical prose-poem, first published in 1936 in Paris as Siana Editions (Anais spelled backwards.) However, in Diary of Anais Nin, the first one released in 1966, years before the posthumous Early Diaries, Anais veils the theme as she did those truths that might be painful to others or herself.
On December 31, 1931, Anais writes:

“My descent into the inferno is a descent into the irrational devil of existence, where the instincts and blind emotions are loose ... pure impulse ... my misery is a great joy. It is when I become conscious again that I feel unutterable pain.”

Valerie Harms in The Stars in My Sky has interpreted House of Incest with the added research of early drafts of this work “composed in seven psychologically sequential sections ... narrated in the first person.”
The Preface is germinal:

ALL THAT I KNOW IS CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK WRITTEN WITHOUT WITNESS, AN EDIFICE WITHOUT DIMENSION, A CITY HANGING IN THE SKY.
In Henry & June*(Aug, 1932), Anais wrote: “I have remained the woman who loves incest.” In Incest (from Journal of Love)** she assessed “the schema of my lyrical book ... franker than Lawrence’s treatment of homosexuality ... as, for instance, incest does not mean only possession of the mother or sister — womb of women — but also of the church, the earth, nature. The sexual fact is the lead weight only ...”
The essence of the plot is the narrator (Anais) and Sabina (June), “one woman within another, eternally.” This does not mean only sexually but possibly unconsciously also two personalities joined, the manic with depressive. Anais sought the opposite of Miller’s style: “when he writes, he does not write with love, ... (but) to attack.”
“I AM THE OTHER FACE OF YOU” in House of Incest refers to more than the mystery of love between women that Anais explained in the first released Diary I (Harcourt, 1996) the same as she had in Henry & June; for she was now devoted to Miller’s “intellect and emotionalism” while admitting her affinity to June Mansfield. “I have her in myself now as one to be pitied and protected.” However, Anais added, “I was a fettered etheral being; in spite of my intellect.”
Anais’ words also refer to acceptance/rejection of her two personalities:

“The love between women is a refuge and escape into harmony. In the love between man and woman there is resistance and conflict. Two women do not judge each other, brutalize each other ... They surrender to mutual understanding ... Such love is death.”

Although the narrator (Anais) believes she now knows what it means to love a woman (Lawrence’s Women in Love), she does not, literally, in as much as she does not understand the bipolar temperament.

“There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through ... I am an insane woman for whom houses wink and open their bellies ... I am enmeshed in my lies, and I want absolution ... I prefer fairy tales.”

Harms translates that “through dream imagery she (Anais) tries to understand her birth and the woman she is becoming.”
However, Anais may also be masking the truth of another merging, a childhood trauma she can never reveal to anyone, which we know now may have involved the first seduction by her father when she was barely ten years old.
Anais’ mentor, D. H. Lawrence, said in “The State of Funk” essay published a few years before she began House of Incest, “As a novelist, I feel it is the change inside the individual which is my real concern ... I am going to accept my self sexually as I accept myself mentally and spiritually ... My sex is me as my mind is me, and nobody will make me feel shame about it.” Anais may have created House of Incest to minimize the deep shame she still felt for what happened in her childhood at a time when she also was guilty for betraying Hugo who did not satisfy her physically in the passionate way Miller did or the delicate, poetic facade of June’s persona.
In her Study on Lawrence (Anais appears to have created her prose-poem in the same fashion), she analyzed “Fish” in the chapter “The Poet.” Anais stated, “We are not merely looking at fish ... We are by a kind of magic shedding our human feelings like a costume, to enter ... -the world of the fish.” In the first released Diary of Anais Nin (Harcourt ‘66), July, 1932, she still reveals her affinity to Lawrence and not Henry Miller; however; “I see the symbolism of our lives. I live on two levels, the human and the poetic. I see the parables, the allegories. “
Although the mature Anais who wrote Novel of the Future has said, “All my stories are based on reality,” while prefacing that admission with, “The external story is what I consider unreal,” the psychoanalyst of the artists and herself knows: “Psychoanalysis may be the study of neurosis, but while studying illness, it has given us techniques for discovery of the hidden self.”
At one point Anais had both a housekeeper named Jeanne and a friend, very attached to her brothers, which Anais certainly identified with because of her own admiration for Joan of Arc. Anais had translated one of her middle names Juana as Jeanne. In House of Incest, the narrator says, “But Jeanne ... only the fear of madness will drive us out of the ... sacredness of our solitude,” when Jeanne confesses, “I LOVE MY BROTHER!” *
For BROTHER, substitute FATHER since Anais wrote in Incest (published diary volume of previous expurgated material of October 1932): “I will put pages of my journal into the book but never pages of the book into the journal.” When she visited Dr. Allendy, Anais was also well aware of “The pathological basis of creation!” In June, 1932 in The Diary of Anais Nin (Vol. I, first Harcourt ‘66) she relates a memory when her youngest brother Joaquin was taken to the hospital with appendicitis. “He is not only my brother, he is my child ... I love my brother ... man, my brother. Needing care and devotion.” In the simultaneous (but unpublished until 1992) Incest from Journal of Love:

“I am so absolutely woman that I understand my Father the human being — he is again the man who is also child ... I meet my Father and I am strong ... My Father comes when I have lived out the blind, cruel instinct to punish ...”

This masks the punishment she wanted to return to him for having abused her as a child.
Unlike Henry Miller or anyone who might gaze in horror upon those who love differently, Anais had “compassion” early on as revealed in House of Incest. “We all looked now at the dancer at the center of the room dancing the dance of the woman without arms” who does not grow these wings of flight again until she realizes why “she was condemned not to hold.”
So too, Anais, as Brassai notes when she met Henry Miller, tried “everything: travel, pleasure, creativity, drunkenness, even drugs” while still searching “for the ‘eternal moments’ not in the reminiscence or in the ‘ruminescence,’ but in the very same instant and life as the spirit of photography.”
In House of Incest, the dancer’s arms and hands returned to her because she did not cling; nonetheless, such a conclusion may only describe one facet of Anais and the narrator, who says: “All flowing, all passing, all movement choked me with anguish.” Still, the dancer turns “to light and to darkness calmly, dancing towards daylight.” Anais who took up dancing to escape the pain of her fluctuating moods and insulation as a writer/reader was certainly also turned to the light as the dancer in her prose-poem. However, since Anais may also be the narrator, we know that She looked upon all that was before her as though it were a play on stage.

TOUCHED BY FIRE:
Is the Bipolar
“The Double” ?

“THE WHITE BLACKBIRD” — THE BIPOLAR?

Strangely enough, aside from Harms’ “Witch of Words” in Stars in My Sky, very few critics acknowledge why Anais “by writing ... can examine her wounds privately ... The act of creation itself ... a balm, a tonic.” Spencer in Collage of Dreams refers to Anais’ “occasional moods of despair” although notes in Preface to Anais, Art and Artists: A Collection of Essays of being told, before seeing Anais in “the process of death from cancer,” that “Anais is in control of the mood. She sets the tone. What we have to do is wear our brightest, most exotic clothes and sing and dance for her.’”
As she had lived, apparently unaided by anyone regarding her moods, so Anais died. The posthumous Early Diaries I-IV, however, present sufficient evidence of the writer’s ability to wear two masks: her duality of persona, related directly to her undiagnosed but self-acknowledged, characteristic bipolarity; and the secret in her childhood, either buried consciously or (over time) unconsciously, in any event, hidden in reference to the possible child abuse that may have exacerbated her fiercely, rapid-cycling moods.
According to Noel Riley Fitch in her biography, The Erotic Life of Anais Nin, that Anais’ father “seduced his daughter ... is borne out by her subsequent behavior, which fits the classical patterns of a child who has been seduced.” Fitch quotes a fragmentary entry in Anais’ later diary: “‘Guilt about exposing the father. Secrets. Need of disguises. Fear of consequences.’”
In “The White Blackbird,”* that appeared in The Mystic of Sex (two years after the release of Noel Riley Fitch’s biography), Anais depicts a visit with Carteret to the psyschiatric ward of a Paris hospital. “The white blackbird entered into me and that is why the haddock are pursuing me” is a quote based on what the “mad man” told the doctors during his interview.
The doctor in this entry responds, “‘You see, he’s incoherent. It doesn’t make sense, it isn’t logical ... And I am not telling you a mystery story.’”
A similar exchange precedes Tennessee Williams’ depiction of Blanche DuBois which may be a misinterpretation of a disturbed woman or even his misunderstanding of Anais Nin herself (although she remained supportive of him).
However, the characteristics of the bipolar seem evident to the discerning eye in the Diaries as well as the fiction of Anais Nin, even within the Diary of Anais Nin 1931-1934, the first journal edited for commercial publication.
In Linotte, Anais, at age eleven, includes a photo of her pianist father and notes, “The way he plays tells me whether he is sad or gay.” Describing her own disposition, she writes, “I get angry easily.” At age thirteen, she notes, “For me, life is: noise, madness, amusement or pleasure, bitterness.” Two months later, “... when I am sad everything looks dark ... I feel that everything in me is breaking ... except the thread that keeps me on earth ...” At age sixteen, Anais believes “that the predominant feeling in my heart when I am not melancholy is tenderness and pity for the whole world. That doesn’t prevent me from being afraid of it.” She alludes to her return to the state of “the horrible Serious One of the old days!”
At almost seventeen, Anais writes: “no one can understand my strange feelings and my moods. I don’t even understand them myself.” She notes that her friend Frances writes “about melancholy too, so I am wondering if this strange emotion is just a crisis, at our age — and it may pass away.” Anais adds, “I will be happy some day when I have learned how ...” while wondering “who will teach a little philosopher, poet, and linotte to laugh?” On Valentine’s Day a week before this 17th birthday, “Once again it’s a feeling of sad and absolute loneliness — and without any reason. I can’t sleep and would rather write.”
Even though she has Marcus as a boyfriend, Anais says he could not “really understand my strange Desert, my moral solitude.” This isolation and disassociation from humanity she describes adeptly: “the feeling of being alone on a mountain-top, detached from other people, as I observe them.”
The state of paralysis when a depressed person is incapable of concentrating is also depicted perfectly a few days later when rapid-cycler Anais writes: “The days that have passed without my writing were days of ‘attack.’ I went to bed early so that I would sleep instead of think ...Perhaps it is because I am in this state of mind that a simple accusation seems to me unjust.”
Hypersensitivity is a marked trait of the bipolar as is flirtatiousness and, at times, a “hunger” for sensuality, the “blood connection” Lawrence often referred to.
“They call me a coquette? ... Well, fine, a coquette I am.”
Absent-mindedness is another characteristic of bipolarity. “I always regret the scatterbrained things I do!” Anais said, who, like her father, imagined she had varied illnesses and loathed either being “sick” or around people who were. “Oh, Incurable Sickness, Hypochondria!” Workaholism, another trait, is exhibited in Anais’ Early Diary II: “Whenever I dream I feel sadness creeping into my heart, and so I work all day long and it makes me contented.” However, she had actually and intuitively been engaged in art as self-healing since childhood for reasons of the “traumatic experience” and her desire to be an artist like her father. “This seems to be the list of necessities for a would-be author: Imagination, Industry, Perseverance, Patience.”
Acutely cognizant of her severe moods, Anais rationalized, “I suppose I am sleepless and troubled just because I have been very happy lately.” Mania, that extreme elation known as bliss beyond compare (to the bipolar) often is also the cause of insomnia. She metaphorically notes in the same September 1920 entry: “Were I to be made into a pie, I know that at the time to be eaten, blackbirds would fly out of me ... because my mind is indeed in a sad state of contradiction and ecstasies and doubts,” germinal to “The White Blackbird.”
Only one month later on a “rainy, rainy day,” Anais records: “What a lot of things I burned today,” referring to “Plans for the future, at ten years of age, a mania for charity and ambitions then to erect orphanages, asylums, convents, all this with the money I would earn as a painter ...” as well as “confessions, and long articles describing Father and Mother.” At the end of the same month, “Sometimes my heart overflows with a queer happiness. And yet no one is the cause of it, no incident ... nothing outside of my very own self.” At seventeen, Anais rationalizes, “Just as I create the greatest portion of my sorrows, sometimes I create a happy day ...”
Without any direction or guidance, Anais identified the therapeutic value of nature, “the greatest consolation for human woes that heaven ever gave us ... and ... books.” She labeled abnormal curiosity “a pedantic mania” and granted: “I do believe I am developing bibliomania.” Temporary relief, escape, invented explanations for her fluctuating moods combined to provide Anais solace in “these pursuits” from childhood throughout her life. “God sends us our sorrows, and though we, with our human minds, cannot understand His designs in doing so, we must know that they have a divine cause.”
The young artist tried to convince herself stoically of such a stoic belief, but “when the sorrow does come to me ... it takes possession ... and leaves no space for thankfulness.” The determined Anais truly believed that she could balance her moods through self-education and her art, her diaries, for “... wisdom is, after all, a matter of balance and proportion ... (while) sadness is an illness of the heart, and it should be conquered.”
Like Byron, who Jamison in Touched by Fire says, “exerted extraordinary intellectual and emotional discipline ... over a kind of pain that brings most ... to their knees,” Anais fought to overcome the negative associations of a “Byronic” temperament: theatrical, Romantic, brooding ... heroic ... cynical, passionate” which Jamison asserts “from part of the argument for a diagnosis of manic-depressive illness.”
Anais sought her own intuitive cures also when she urged her mother to let her go to the city (NY): “If I stay home ... I write and read all day and when night comes I want to throw myself into a river ...” Ever the idealist and psychoanalyst of the artist and herself, she adds, “Sadness gives you a greater knowledge of the Soul, and a joy of knowledge of what is tangible and real in life.”
In Journal d’une Fiancee,* from June 1922 to January 1923, Anais further identifies the fear most bipolars have regarding whether the severe mood known as manic (or its opposite, the state of depression), is visible to others. This fear, coupled with Anais’ rebellious and growing feministic attitude, may explain her statement: “If you have a mind, make a secret of it, or bury it in some sort of secret place, but for heaven’s sake do not use it ... my spirit will never bow to these things ... I shall teach my body, and the outer envelope, to endure, and to appear resigned, and neither by word nor by look shall I betray the fire within me.”
At this time, Anais, however, is not only mentally fluctuating but physically burgeoning with her natural desires as a woman which she attributes to her fluctuating moods. “I struggle against ... the animal in life, against which my whole nature rebels violently.” Why? one might ask. She hints at something greater than abandonment by the father, even greater than her moods, always intensified by either insensitive remarks and certainly some traumatic experience as well as evincing the nature of a bipolar.
“The gift of seeing beyond the facts ... into the thing itself ... That is what truth is!” Anais writes. “I am still and shall forever be alone in my sorrows, because they are always deeper than the normal and reasonable and can be neither shared nor communicated to others.” This entry only a few months before she will marry at age twenty.
When Hugh Guiler, her American fiancee, has doubts about Anais, she writes him, “I am intent on dissolving all your fears of the ‘high peaks of life’ habit which so distressed you.”
Towards the end of this second Early Diary (Journal d’une Fiancee), Anais also has doubts about herself: “Will I lose myself in these labyrinths of personalities, assumed yet unassumed, sincere and yet unstable, real and yet fictitious ...?” Anew, however, she rationalizes that her duality may be the result of knowing three languages which may conflict her regarding all thoughts. English poetry brought her “a deep and enduring enchantment besides which all the evanescent qualities of the Spanish, the fire, the passion, the enthusiasm, gradually fade.”
By the end of this diary, Anais still denies that she hides from her journal the reasons that worsen her varied moods, in her mind, “my two personalities,” although she may have known why she had “shame ... courage’s shadow.” Readers only learned of the seductions by her father after Anais’ death which may allude to “self-condemnation” and “I am going to be good.”
Susan Kavaler-Adler says in The Compulsion to Create ...: “From Nin’s descriptions of her father, we can infer that she suffered severe oedipal humiliation, seductive paternal exploitation, and her father’s use of her for his own narcissistic mode of mirroring in which he sought a compulsory reflection of his own grandiosity.” The clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst indicates that “Nin’s anguish, confusion, and manic and depressive reactions to despair” are normal, but she does not acknowledge that Anais herself is a manic-depressive (as Nin’s father appeared to be) in reference to Jamison’s description of the Byronic mercurial Don Juan temperament often associated with bipolars.
April 7, 1921, Anais wrote: “I am suffering still, suffering with the fear of suffocation ...Someday the long pent-up emotions will break forth in some furious, dangerous rebellion. Music doubles the pain.” The next day, “I am so glad to be alive!” She “humbly recognize(s) the fault to lie in me” which shows she has disassociated herself from her father and any memory of a painful experience in her past childhood, conscious only that she had to work more assiduously at becoming “balanced.”
In Early Diary Vol. III, R. Maynard, the painter of Anais’ “Unfinished Portrait” asks if she ever has fears of her diaries “falling into other’s hands.” Anais confides in him that she has used “a sort of protection by generalizing ... by vagueness ... by maintaining a peculiar impersonality.” At 21 she admits she does this less often but that there is “one subject I often long to write about particularly,” although she does not because it “might cause a great deal of trouble.” She also notes that her “idealism has been mixed with fatalism.”
When she sees her father in December 1924, she has forgiven him “for the most illogical of causes ... the heartrendering (sic) pity ... for what I once hated.” Cryptic? Later, she notes her Father “was Paris — intelligent, insidious, cultured Paris.” Her “reaction to sensuality causes ... infinite pain.” And not long after this traumatic event of seeing her Father a decade after the “abandonment,” Anais is “struggling against one of my worst ‘crises’ — a deep, unreasonable, intensely painful melancholy.”
Anais has to cope with her intense moods as well as endure the repressed (or recalled?) childhood event which may combine with inexplicable guilt regarding the pleasure of her punishment, distinctly aggravating to any depression.
“In dancing, I shake off sorrow,” she writes, because the daily act of self-analysis for so long a time only intensifies “dissatisfaction, my doubts, my desires, my restlessness ... a kind of madness.” But Anais was a workaholic obsessed with “not wasting time,” another characteristic of fastidious bipolarity.
Kavaler-Adler commends Anais for “working through her wounds ... Nin used her creative work to express her struggle and navigated her way through it.’ Silently, “Nin gains affective awareness of childhood traumas so that they can be resolved.” Indeed, by the end of the third Early Diary, Anais surely was familiar with the pattern or cycle of her moods: “Have been depressed and self-centered and critical. Such a familiar mood had to come alter a month of insouciance and action and exhilarating fullness.” Returned to Paris, she takes up smoking, “tense with memories of another arrival.”
In Early Diary IV, Anais is preoccupied with another “eternal problem” as the artist who struggles with her best vehicle for her work. “Turn the Journal into a novel? Copy out the Journal as it is?” She acknowledges “Erskine’s own writing” as liberat(ing) my intelligence from scruples” while crediting Sherwood Anderson as the writer “who liberated my feelings and dreams from timidity and self-consciousness ... Dancing (though) has liberated my body ...” Nonetheless, Anais, who describes her life as “rich, beautiful, creative,” confesses that she “continue(s) to suffer” while blaming no one but herself.
“I only mark Time with experience, and learning and suffering.” She is bent on “conquer(ing) faults ... for lying (another bipolar trait); ... jealousy (another form of obsession/compulsion/neuroticism, all bipolar characteristics); desire to outdo everybody;” (perfectionism which is that side of mania that becomes the other side of despair when failure occurs. )
Jamison’s research of artists and writers “in the group with no history of treatment showed mood and productivity curves that more closely corresponded with one another.” (It would be an equally intriguing project for someone to chart Anais’ moods with her work patterns although she may also have been a victim of SAD — Seasonal Affective Disorder, which would have to be figured in along with the rapid-cycling bipolarity.)
“The sunshine healed me, the smells, the colors, the dry air.” Throughout her diaries and fiction, Anais alludes to her healing “sunbaths” a.k.a. D.H. Lawrence’s story “Sun.” April 5, 1928: “An inexplicable sadness, a terrible emptiness, a burning of the blood ... I suffer most of all from a breaking up of myself ... I feel weak, soft, multiple.”
The diary that has been her friend and constant companion is now seen as something much more. “I owe to it what some people owe to psychology: knowledge of myself.” Formally, her cousin had introduced her to psychoanalysis. “Eduardo wants to get rid of the past, as I want to get rid of it ... I have been, until yesterday, my own analyst.” Anais realized she needed help. “I’m sick. I have been too unhappy and too tired ... Winter is here ... my old enemy and tormentor.”
While she waited for the right opportunity or analyst, Anais began “the Second Book drawn from my Journal ... I am beginning to feel the need of fiction, of a disguise.” Hugo commented on the transformation. “You seem to have finished just suffering life and are beginning to dominate it.”
Like Byron, whose poetry Jamison indicates “masks his passion and makes it endurable art,” quoting Byron himself, an extraordinarily disciplined bipolar: “‘Yet — see, he mastereth himself, and makes/His torture tributary to his will, “ Anais too had decided to conquer her temperament. “I possess a power of magic” to “destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny — with my diabolical mind.”
That doesn’t mean she will be the master of her moods. For the artist who is bipolar relishes mania not despair. “I am always afraid when I have reached a peak of life, of its being the highest and the last.” A few pages later, “My sadness is so strong that my body aches.” On October 3, 1929, Anais noted that she wrote “eight stories in two weeks or so” (the posthumously released but approved with her own preface: Waste of Timelessness). While praising her output, she simultaneously chastised herself: “Why must I be so excessive, always leaning one way or another...?”
In spite of this, Anais knew the result of her moods was worth the art she felt balance had to (and for) be sacrificed. “When I write I feel exulted. When I feel exulted and excited mentally I want to act ... Having such a temperament is like having a shameful illness.”
Physicians in her time, of course, knew little about the bipolar temperament. When Anais visits one doctor, he says her problem is “nothing but a strong nervous depression ... and pernicious anemia.” Shortly thereafter, she deduces, “You can only return through the mind, to get your balance again.” This is incredible fortitude and will-power which has been consciously developed by her self-education with hundreds of books as well as her devotion to her journal, her fiction, her study of Lawrence and her “companionship” with cousin Eduardo since he cannot love woman.”
“ I believe in poetic prose. I’m doing it,” Anais writes, gaining strength mentally and emotionally. “My philosophy ... will grow with me, out of my defects and my shame and my madnesses.” She reads Freud and Jung, anything that will help her understand the psyche of the artist, of her Self. She determines though: “consciousness and knowledge of our phantom world, of our neurotic instincts, is perhaps not sufficient for the cure.” Anais believes Eduardo (as herself) should be “urged to an energetic application of consciousness to living.”
She had crafted the key to cracking a narcissist’s shell so that she might connect with others; to intensify her distinct individuality (the bipolarity and the childhood trauma). “A rich personal intensity breaks its own shell and its own obsessions — and touches the mystic whole.” At the end of Early Diary IV, Anais thinks she has “discovered my own illness and am taking care of myself” when she reads Freud’s symptoms for “anxiety neurosis. Cause? Sexual.” And, certainly this particular disorder can indeed be caused by something related to sexuality. But, bipolarity is more than nervous disorder; however, bipolarity intensified, made worse by a severe childhood sexual experience may be exactly what Anais stumbled upon.
Jamison makes “a literary, biographical, and scientific argument for a compelling association, not to say actual overlap, between two temperaments — the artistic and the manic-depressive — and their relationship to the rhythms, cycles, or temperament of the natural world.” That Hugo understood and accepted Anais and her moods throughout their marriage is prophetically acknowledged by Anais in October, 1931:

“We may both be again pulled apart physically. But we know that our marriage stands, our love will accept and understand, and that we will not tell each other until the experience is over, because we cannot know, at the moment we are in it, what the meaning of it is, or estimate its importance.”

With this self-assurance, Anais has resolved that her temperament may be cured with conscious action, i.e. relevant to her past and “the double” (her father); there is nobody to guide her in any other direction (manic-depression was not in her youth seen as a genetic inheritance. Heaven knows there was no consciousness of the gravity of childhood abuse on the bipolar.) “Though I double the dose of my sedatives, it is no use. I’m dancing inside myself with a new bliss.” Awakening to her sexual desires, Anais surely must have felt herself justified to opening the door to anything or anyone that might come her way to remedy her existence as a rapid-cycler writer, weary of her studies and her singular devotion to the diary.

‘THE DOUBLE’

In Linotte, Anais wrote, “It seems that all my gestures are like him (Papa), the way I walk, talk, my profile, etc., etc.” She expressed her “loss of faith in men” and referred to “the selfish attitudes” of her brothers, Thorvald and Joaquinito. She also noted a quote from Heller in her reading: “‘True artists are all a little pagan,’” identifying her Papa as an artist, not herself, while realizing, “I have inherited almost all his ... faults!”
A few months later in the spring of 1920, she reflected on coquetry as “the horrible fault I was born with and that I can’t help.” She was referring to the reason her father abandoned the family, ultimately to wed a younger woman. At 17, her cynicism of men was aided by Rosa when Anais answered her brother why loaves of bread are called “married.” She opened the two loaves and explained, “You see, something is missing. They don’t have a crust on one side.” To her mother, Anais asked, “It’s just like people — they are lacking something when they get married, aren’t they?”
Rosa replied, “that’s true — common-sense!”
Notwithstanding her own cynicism, Anais proclaimed in Early Diary II, “I am not like Mother. I am like Father.” Told that she looks like him and likes being alone like him, “proud and haughty,” Anais reflected that she wanted “a different outlook on life ... I want that passionate temper curbed and that disdain softened.” She did not want “to act like a savage” but wrote that she was “cursed with a strange dream, one I dare not dream too often.”
At 18, Anais appeared to be cured partially of that secret dream when she wrote, “I thought you were lost for a while and would return, but ... you are not loved anymore by anyone under this roof ... and I love you only because you are my father.” Filial love is dutiful and expected; however, only Anais writes her father many letters, aware that he “is a critic and a champion of musical opinions ... using his pen when he is not at the piano. I have ink in my blood.”
At 16 she had acknowledged the flaw of her similarity to her father. “I am my own severest critic!” Looking at her incorrigible brothers, she noted what she observed was necessary to improve her own behavior and spirit, since “... as the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined, unless the faults are corrected.” Anais realized she was her father’s double, “the phantom of the Nin lies.” Or when her moods were deeply fluctuating, “I know that Papa is sometimes sarcastic, skeptical, pessimistic and sullen without any reason.” She called herself “fickle” in more ways than the ordinary definition since Anais, who had been like a mother to her younger brothers and a helpmate to her own mother for years, was really quite weary of being “angelic and compliant” when she would rather express her rage. However, “I will continue to be good, I suppose,” she confessed as Linotte.
When Anais married Hugh Guiler in March of 1923, she may have hoped he would be her Sun, her dream-love, her father in a more perfectly stable and loving role. She had, however, been haunted by “persecution from Man, my only evil and terror up to now on this earth...” while drawn to Hugo because she felt she must atone for why her father abandoned the family. One month before her marriage, Anais wrote: “I am torn by regret, by shame, by pity, by the desire to atone, to soothe, to console,” to escape marrying a man who looked like her father and therefore might be oddly like her self.
Early Diary III reveals that Anais dined with her father in 1924 “and met the little lady he is about to marry.” On the day before when first she and her father had met, she described her feelings in this manner: “I forgave, consoled and deceived him for ... pity! — the heartrendering (sic) pity I feel now for what I once hated.” A day later, she wrote, “My problem just now ... is Father — Father in relation to mother rather than me.” Anais was aware of her father’s temper and moods, because she had been analyzing her own since childhood. “What is this feeling which has pursued me through childhood and now and which I can trace all through my journals?”
Hugo knows only that Anais is the struggling writer at this time. He said to her, “‘... you know that our ideal is the truth, and truer than ourselves. If you don’t believe, I shall not love you any more ...’” in response to her verbal suffering regarding her self-doubt and deep despair. By Early Diary IV, she has recognized, “it is not only the bad qualities which are inherited. Like father, I love a tidy house, filed papers ... no confusion in any detail ...” to rationalize away both the moods and the associations they have with her father.
Nonetheless, Anais, who identifies always the two women in her, has no conscious awareness that she is suffering the disorder of “the Double.” (And, how could she when modern medicine had not even identified manic-depression, now known as bipolarity and more currently, an inherited “mental challenge.”) Anais wrote, “I was tempted today to keep a double journal, one for things which do happen, and one for imaginary incidents ... I live double. I’ll write doubly ... feeling myself split into two women — one, kind, loyal, pure, thoughtful; the other, restless and impure, acting strangely ... seeing life and tasting all of it without fear ...without restraint ... I have the capacity to live several lives — one does not satisfy me.” She still appears to feel unconscious self-doubt regarding her part in the childhood episode, told only cryptically in her Early Diaries (I-IV, 1914-1920, released posthumously).
Married five years, Anais exhibits typical disillusionment; however, added to this is her natural stirring as a woman versus the disciplined writer who must find an outlet for her growing sensuality and an escape from her insular mental activity. “In spite of the dancing and writing I still have this terrible hunger for a friend, the desire to love and be loved. Hugh is never there ... (and if he knew, I am mad most of the time) ...”
When she met Henry Miller, a passionate, intellectual artist, impoverished and in need, Anais confronted the shadow again of “the Double,” her father, whom she will meet for the second time in 1933, two years after Miller and the other side of her self, the other woman who was ready to melt into John Erskine but did not. “I have lost my balance. I feel only my body, its burnings, its languors, its desires, and its defects. I cannot think, but I will find measure.” Consciously and with determination, she wrote in April, 1928, “I never, never want to hurt him ... But I cannot stay at home ... Hugh will forgive me.”
Anais has told us Hugo was “incredibly wise, loyal, whole, balanced,” which means (she adds) that “he knows everything except only one secret.” That secret Anais would keep from Henry Miller as well the world. Conflicted by her desire for passion and her need to create in the torment of fluctuating moods, Anais “concentrated on the art of understanding. I’m going to make a science and a religion of it,” which she did until she agreed to meet her father, three years after she had written: “ — if you think you lie, you lie. If you know what you are doing, you know the real meaning of lie; a lie is not something you tell others, but yourself.”

Piercing “the Double”

Anais had written in Henry & June* (Harcourt 1986) that she “had a terror of being driven again to the point of suicide,” a fate that has befallen many bipolars and manic-depressive artists before, during and after medication. She has mentioned her “neuritis” and pills for same as the only expedient for her moods. Engaged in lying, she knew her “continued craving to be loved and understood is certainly abnormal,” in reference to Henry Miller and other varied meetings, sexually and intellectually stimulating. When she meets Dr. Allendy, her first therapist, because Anais is involved with both Henry Miller and his wife June, Anais confides that she “had imagined seeing ... father at my dance recital in Paris.”
Allendy responds that she wanted “to dazzle” her father yet was “frightened. But because you have wanted to seduce your father since you were a child and did not succeed, you have also developed a strong sense of guilt.” Already, he has explained to Anais that “sometimes the sense of sexual inferiority is due to a realization of one’s frigidity.”
At this time, Anais reported in her diary that “Hugo has at last been taken up by men. He has loved it,” which may explain Anais’ affinity toward homoemotional men (and women) most of her life. Strangely enough, most photographs of her father depict a man who outwardly appears effeminate. Perhaps Anais intends to free both herself and Hugo when she tells him, “Go away, travel a great deal. We both need that. We can’t have it together. We can’t give it to each other.” A few pages earlier, Anais admitted to herself, “My love for Hugo has become fraternal.”
No doubt, there were other reasons why Hugo did not want to be mentioned in Anais’ public diaries or why she chose to stay legally married to him all her life, besides his reputation as a banker, but Anais was not a financially independent writer until very late in her lifetime.*
When she abandoned Allendy, Anais wrote in the expurgated Journal of Love: Incest, “I was fucked by death;” apparently, this psychoanalyst had simulated her father’s brutality or merely verbalized what Anais could not admit: pleasure in punishment (which may have explained her later attraction for Antonin Artaud, originator of Theater of Cruelty). “Allendy accentuates the ambivalence of my desires. He senses that he is also approaching the sexual key to my neuroses, and I realize he is, too, like a deft detective.”
In addition, Allendy had deluded Anais’ “conquest of her father through other men,” no doubt as “The Woman No Man Could Hold.” Afraid to be hurt, Anais hurts instead. Finally, she reveals to herself, “I have remained the woman who loves incest;” perhaps she means this only partially figuratively, disallowing still the impact of the childhood trauma, even disguised in Early Diary II when she writes at 18: “Oh, I must not look back or I will be frightened by what I am.” Recall too that in Linotte,the first volume of Anais’ Early Diaries, she had “decided very firmly only to love boys as little brothers.”
In her (unprofessional) Study of D.H. Lawrence (Paris, 1932) Anais has certainly made a few readers wonder about a particular reference to the subject of incest. “Suppose that psychology contends that a certain incest dream is a wish-fulfillment. According to Lawrence: ‘an incest dream would not prove an incest desire in the living psyche.’ Rather the contrary ...”
Hidden in Early Diary II, however, Anais recalled her “Father ... a mystery, a vision, a dream,” when for her tenth birthday she was allowed to stay at Arachon. Villa les Ruines, “where Father was already staying” to recover from appendicitis. “Strange forebodings caused me to weep uncontrollably the greater part of the night ...” However, “a few months later Father left us ... I kissed him wildly ... weeping hysterically and clinging to him, a scene nobody could understand.”
At 18, Anais still retreat(s) far into my shell and remain(s) sadly brooding there for hours ... Yet it is my true self ... who thinks painful thoughts. Deep down in my heart ... I do not like boys.”
A year before her marriage, she was “haunted by the ugliness ... I feel now when I look at a child’s face that I could ... shield him forever from what I have undergone ... Can I forget all I have learned of ... harsh, unrelenting truth? ... a jungle of ... men waiting to touch me, grasp me.”
Hugo, however, appeared to have the personality opposite of her father. And “Henry’s blue eyes reminding me of my father’s,” in the first published Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1934) (which journal we will see contains all the truth about Anais even if veiled for the sake of public prudency, the possibility of slander and/or genuine compassion towards her family.)
In the posthumously released diary Henry & June, before the meeting with her father, Anais accused herself of being “the most corrupt of all women, for I seek a refinement in my incest ... With a madonna face, I still swallow God and sperm, and my orgasm resembles a mystical climax. The men I love, Hugo loves, and I let them act like brothers.” She seriously sought to rid herself of “the Double” once and for all and was only half-joking when she wrote, “It only remains for me now to go to my father and enjoy to the full the experience of our sensual sameness, to hear ... the obscenities, the brutal language I have never formulated, but which I love in Henry.”
Still, if Hugo was Anais’ anchor and her rock, “June... (was her) adventure and ... passion, but Henry is my love.” What then was her father, “the Double?” In Journal of Love: Incest, Anais quotes Henry Miller as telling her she had “an incapacity for cruelty.” However, on May 5, 1933 Anais wrote in her journal, “I look at my Double, and I see in a mirror ... When I look at him I am sick of my lies.”
She added, “I have lived not to be my Father ... a ghost of my self-doubts, self-criticism, of my malady.” Already she had admitted to herself a few days earlier, “I am aware that in my unconscious there is a fund of cruelty and fear which makes me want to punish and abandon man.”
Allendy’s use of the whip as re-enactment of punishment by her father, to rid Anais of the scar of those beatings “was not really, deeply savage ... I liked that whip ... virile, savage, hurtful, vital. It still stings!” She knew that if she met her father and gave him back a taste of his own seduction, perhaps this Allendy technique would work on him even though she says it did not on her. She wants to punish her father who “used to call me his betrothed after I sent him a photograph of myself at sixteen.”
Jamison reminds us that Byron was “a victim of ‘his restless moods, his sensual appetites, his wild gaieties and glooms,’” as were Poe (recall his marriage to youthful cousin Virginia) and the poet Anne Sexton (who repeatedly slept with her daughter out of loneliness). Include Anais Nin and her musician-father, although in this case the daughter may have intended only to be a coquette with the idea of seducing her father to a certain point (punishment for child-seduction abuse?). However, “lying on his back” and unable to move,” her father asked to kiss Anais’ mouth. “I hesitated ... We kissed, and that kiss unleashed a wave of desire.” (On his or her part?)
Even though the father deceived Anais by admitting, “We must avoid possession,” and Anais “resisted, I resisted enjoyment. I resisted showing my body,” she wrote, “I lay over him ... He uncovered himself ... With a strange violence, I lifted my negligee and I lay over him” to re-enact (more or less?) a reversal of a pose from childhood.
“Still, in some remote region of my being, a revulsion ... I wanted to run away ... But I saw him so vulnerable ...” She then went to her room. “I was poisoned by this union.”
There may have been no one to blame but the Father who had no guilt, no shame, according to Anais who said to him, “You are still a child.” Anais recalled her father, saying at the moment of penetration, “‘I have lost God.’”
This event, no doubt, drives her to seek out a more-known second analyst, Otto Rank. “Is this love of my Double that self-love again? ... Is it always ... my Father, the male half of me?” In the meantime, before and during all doctors, she credits “my journal (that) keeps me from insanity,” because “No one can teach me to enjoy my tragic incest-love, to shed the last chains of guilt.”
Did Anais re-enact the traumatic childhood experience as retribution, or to free herself from the self-doubt and guilt she had felt all her youth regarding her pleasure in the seduction? If she intended merely to “tease” her Double to the point of insane pain, was she forced to follow through with her seduction-plan because she had to rid herself of “the Double?”

TRANSMUTATION:
ANOTHER STAGE OF
CONSCIOUSNESS-
Stella in Streetcar Named
Desire before A Spy
in the House of Love

Stella*

In the first Swallow edition of Winter of Artifice (1961), published for a larger audience than earlier private press versions of certain novelettes, Anais included Stella (from This Hunger — 1945), title long story (originally Lilith in 1939 Winter of Artifice); and The Voice (same for all versions.) “I have never planned my novels ahead,” Anais said in 1974 Preface to her continuous novel, Cities of the Interior. “I have always improvised on a theme ... a study of women.”
Stella is a star, the sun, basis of the solar system, an actress whose father “was an actor. In Warsaw he had achieved fame and adulation.” However, she “almost hated ... her ‘double’ (on screen) ... a work of artifice.” Stella may represent Sabina (June/narrator/youthful Anais) of House of Incest as well Lillian and Djuna (moon in all phases) of This Hunger in Anais’ struggle to dance D. H. Lawrence’ s “dance with the elixir of life” (from his essay, “Making Love to Music”).
“For Stella ... love had been born under the zodiacal sign of doubt. For Bruno, under the sign of faith ... Stella consumed with a hunger for love, and Bruno by the emptiness of his life.” Bruno and Philip may be representative of Anais’ father, Henry Miller, Otto Rank, that man who is unaware that “no love (is) ever self-sustaining, self-propelling, self-renewing.”
Stella is conscious, however, of the negative power of “a colorful ballet of lies” (her own, others) and sees how she too is like the men she has been involved with. “The child is passive, yielding and accepts everything, giving nothing in return but affection,” which she employs to give “them the illusion that each was the center of the other’s existence.”
In “On Writing” (1947), Anais wrote, “Naked truth is unbearable to most, and art is our most effective means of overcoming human resistance to truth.” (Her own included?) Stella “is no longer and actress willing to disguise herself ... Yet there is no blindness or deafness as strong as that within the emotional self.”
D.H. Lawrence has said in his essay “Love” that the human must act “creatively” with others and “separately and distinctly” to “have understanding.” In Stella, “Seeing has to do with awareness, the clarity of the senses (as) linked to the spiritual vision, to understanding.” When Bruno walks away (as in reality Anais’ father did from her), taking “everything away with him because he took away the faith, her faith in love,” as Anais had written in Early Diary III, both Stella and Anais were left “the prey of doubts and fears.”

A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams’ play, published by New Directions (1947) in the same year of its presentation at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947, contains elements of Anais’ Stella, even to the point of including certain lines of hers. She first met him in 1941, noted in Diary III (1939-1944): “Tennessee was inarticulate and his eyes never met mine fully. “ She mentions casually in Diary IV (1944-1947) that “Tennessee Williams sent me tickets for his new play.” (Streetcar ...) In Diary V in May 1954 she writes, “Dylan Thomas, Tennessee, Truman Capote ... What support did they give me?” Fall, 1954, she adds: “... in Tennessee Williams, in Proust, the time which counts is the time of the mother’s youth. They like antiques, objects from the past.” Anais had gone beyond this theme she had noted as “the fixation upon the past seems to be a homosexual trait and may be connected with the fixation on the mother.” (Or “father?”)
In 1942, Tennessee Williams, who wore an eye patch after another operation, was doubling as a waiter-entertainer in Greenwich Village and as a night elevator operator in a New York hotel. In 1945 after The Glass Menagerie fame, he had gone to Chapala, Mexico where he wrote “The Poker Night,” later incorporated in Streetcar. Falk in his critical study on Williams (Twayne Series ‘61), determined that “If the third scene was the beginning of the play, then the southern gentlewoman (earlier referred to by Falk as symbolized in Blanch DuBois, “too delicate to withstand the crudeness and decay surrounding her” as well as “clue to theme ... that life is equated with passion, and its opposite is death”) ... must have been a later edition.
Anais’ The Winter of Artifice, third and last volume released by the Villa Seurat/Obelisk Press (1939), again appeared in May 1942 a year after she established the Gemor Press in Greenwich Village; the novel was available through Frances Steloff’s Gotham Book Mart since Ms. Steloff had loaned Anais $100 to start her own letterpress in the Village (New York). Anais’ privately handprinted This Hunger (STELLA, LILLIAN & DJUNA) was “nearly sold out” in late 1945 (according to her letter to Henry Miller in A Literate Passion). The first British edition of Winter of Artifice (1947) originally appeared as “Lilith” in The Winter of Artifice (Paris: Obelisk 1939) released as revised First American edition in 1942 with untitled story and “The Voice.”* The father-daughter theme was extended to conclusion of former long story in Swallow edition (1961 — three novelettes) as “their destiny — the railroad track of their obsessions,” the opening of Williams’ play.
Scene One of Streetcar has Blanche taking “a street-car named Desire, and then transfer(ing) to one called Cemeteries ... (to) Elysian Fields!” The play concerns the rape of Blanche DuBois by her sister’s husband, her brother-in-law Stanley, originally Bruno in “The Poker Night.” Stanley Kowalski, of Polish descent, is “a ruthless exposure of ... dreams and delusions and deceit ... affectations and pretenses,” according to Falk who explains how the brutish Stanley mocks Blanche “to look at herself and her ragpicker outfit (A.N.’s “Ragtime” in Seven ‘38) to recall that she may think of herself as a queen but still has been swilling his liquor.”
In Williams’ play, Blanche tells her suitor Mitch, when he confronts her with the truth of the Flamingo hotel, frequented by prostitutes (information passed on to him by Stanley), “I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth ... I didn’t lie in my heart.” This precedes a symbolic Mexican woman vendor outside who repeats, “Flores, flores. Flores para los muertos ... “ (Flowers, Flowers. Flowers for the dead...) among the last lines of Anais’ Stella, wherein the character acknowledges that she is aware her fans send flowers for a screen star who is not real. Stella is similarly cognizant of her posing and position.
“Flowers for the dead, she murmured. With only a little wire, and a round frame, they would do as well.” Although Oliver Evans (introduced to Anais by Williams) end notes in the first critical study on her work (1968) that there is no other resemblance “between Blanche and Stella.” he may have erred since Ladders to Fire (Dutton ‘46) contains “This Hunger” (Gemor ‘45), whose contents included Prologue; Hedja; Stella; Lillian and Djuna*. In “Stella,” her novelette within Winter of Artifice (Swallow ‘45) “the window of the solitary cell of the neurotic” opens to the “name of the enemy (as) an emotion of helplessness against him! What good was naming it if one could not destroy it and face one’s self?”
Scene 9 in Streetcar ends with stage directions of Blanche “[rushes to the big window ... and cries wildly] ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’” foreshadowing her own real enemy. After “[she smashes a bottle on the table and faces him]” even “[strikes at him with the bottle top but he catches her wrist]” similar to the symbolic broken crystal bowl in the version of Anais’ “Winter of Artifice,” before Stanley, who rapes his half-willing victim, Blanche, says, “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning.” Recall Anais’ “Today she recognizes an inhuman love.” (page 90 in novelette “Winter of Artifice” within same Swallow collection.)
In Ladders to Fire, Djuna hears the same one-note song of a mechanical bird in her dream which “seemed more real to me than the callous hands of the orphan asylum women when they changed me into a uniform.” Streetcar- Scene Eight incorporates Blanche’s parrot story in the same way. “The only way to hush the parrot up was to put the cover back on its cage so it would think it was night and go back to sleep,” before another monologue foreshadowing Blanche’s deliverance to the doctor. “I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in clean white sack and dropped overboard — at noon ... into an ocean as blue as (chimes again) my first lover’s eyes!” (The male character pitted against woman in almost all of Anais’ novels has the color of her father’s eyes, blue.
The comparison of daughter/father veiled in “Stella,” This Hunger, “Winter Of Artifice,” Ladders to Fire is fascinating when juxtaposed against Blanche/Stanley in Williams’ play from Bruno’s double cry of “Stella ! ... Stella ! in Anais’ “Stella” to drunk Stanley’s “baying hound” repetition of his pregnant wife’s name after he has struck her, “Stell-lahhhhh! ... STELL-LAHHHHH.” Both writers were invariably influenced by D. H. Lawrence, using literally and symbolically, elements from “Cocksure Women and Hensure Men” essay from the ribald cock and hen joke in Streetcar to Stella’s “responding with her answering blood rhythms” while desperately struggling to become Lawrence’s “dauntless” as well as “demure” woman.
A Spy in the House of Love

First edition of this novel appeared in 1954 about which Anais said in Novel of the Future, “I wanted you the reader, to know Sabina (Spy) better than you ever knew Tennessee’s Blanche DuBois ... I wanted you to feel as if you had been intimately related to her.” There she identified also that “Stella” was her “first attempt to extend the poem (House of Incest), to carry into prose the poetic condensation and abstraction of the poem.”
Sabina, the main character’s name, may be derived from “Carl Jung’s longtime operatic affair with his patient Sabina Spielrein” of which recently Susan Baur has noted in The Intimate Hour (1997): “However questionable Jung’s behavior was from a moral point of view ... somehow it met the prime obligation of the therapist toward his patient: to cure her.”
Anais must have had her own ideas about her liaison with Otto Rank or similar type relationship between Jung/Sabina, for she has Sabina (herself)imagine a lie detector as a spy who is symbolic of her animus, that inner masculine personality of a woman, more evolved than Stella and unlike Blanche (Streetcar), who does not depend on “the kindness of strangers” but is free “as man ... to enjoy without love. Without any warmth of the heart as a man could ... (to) enjoy a stranger.”*
That is Sabina’s definition and “meaning of freedom. Free of attachment, dependency and the capacity for pain” which was preceded by House of Incest and “Stella,” where both narrator/Djuna, who identified vicariously with Sabina/June, “become the actress who loathed her false image on screen,” and are struggling to accept the external “exact portrait of herself as she felt inside.” Sabina now mirrors Blanche, that “poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives,” to whom she might throw always “an unexpected ladder ... and ordained, ‘Climb!’” even though Sabina knew her “ladder led to fire.”
Although there is no reason for Sabina to feel the guilt of betraying her husband, Alan, since man never feels guilt (a.k.a. Stanley’s more gravely violent lies), Sabina half-conceals from herself mentally, as well as by wearing a long black cape, her “desire to feel the brutality of man, the force which can violate? ... perhaps a need in woman, a secret erotic need” to which Anais adds in Diary II (1934-1939), “I have to shake myself from ... these violent images, awaken.”
However, Sabina (unlike Blanche, who was forced unwillingly and deceptively to a mental asylum at the end of Williams’ play) admits to herself honestly that she lies “to protect one human being from sorrow ... (while) wishing to be that (‘role of a whole woman’) ... not altogether a lie.” Anais’ personal desire echoes in Spy with “Anger ... at this core which will not melt, while Sabina wills to be like men, free to possess and desire in adventure, to enjoy a stranger.”
In Novel of the Future, Anais offered more information about how her “women did not break. They sought by every means to walk the tightrope between various roles, conflicts, and dualities of a personality.” She repeats how she wanted her readers “to know more about Sabina than you were allowed to know about Madame Bovary (Flaubert’s sensual wife protagonist who was punished by the author with suicide!) or Blanche DuBois.” A few pages earlier Anais alluded to her theme in Spy. “Identification and empathy are the opposites of alienation and separation.”
When Sabina says, “I am an international spy in the house of love,” she is Donna Juana, no longer living “according to (society’s) taboos against multiple lives” or multiple loves. She is conscious of her desire for pure sensual freedom, pleasure arising initially out of guilt for loving the father, her “double,” (her self) in every man she unconsciously sought to punish like Stanley (Streetcar) who has no qualms about raping Blanche, blaming his sister-in-law as the seducer and then coupling shortly thereafter with his wife Stella, returned from the hospital with their first baby, to disbelief of Blanche’s tale.)
In Spy, Sabina “wanted to prove to him” (her father, Hugo, John Erskine, etc.) that this guilt was a “distortion, that his vision of her and desire” and of “his hunger as bad, was a sickness.” The parallel of a Sabina more powerful than Blanche in Streetcar spirals to her certain self-knowledge surpassing Stanley’s primitive and cowardly deception which punishes Blanche as the helpless woman-victim (or Blanche herself doubting sanity, allowing herself to be escorted to an asylum!).
Anais through Sabina “wanted to erase” the creation of Portrait of Madonna (Williams’ play of 1947) about the frustrated southern spinster which Falk has described as “a study of repression and a sense of guilt (which) may have inspired (earlier) final scene in Streetcar” to make him (Stanley?) aware “of a mutual guilt which only an act of love could transmute into something else than a one-night encounter with a stranger.”
Anais already told us at the end of the Henry & June diary in Oct, 1932 that she no longer loved “with a child’s blind faith, ... my eyes were opened to reality — to Henry’s selfishness, June’s love of power” and her own realization that “I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly.” This means Anais admits she can never abandon her husband, Hugo, as her father abandoned her and Rosa, his wife, Anais’ mother. “I will not do to others what was done to me, ever.” But she will not be contained either.
No doubt, the theme of all Anais’ fiction as well her diaries which depict the same evolution of one woman (who may be Everywoman under varied names), remains what she determined was her philosophy of life, connected to Lawrence’s “flow,” yet surpassing such mobility with true self-awareness. “Understanding means love.” In Incest, she added, “He (Henry Miller) did not understand me, but he nourished me.” In Spy, Donald (one of Sabina’s young lovers) shares his letter to an actress with her, unlike Blanche who could not share her letters from Alan with anyone because of the guilt she felt that somehow she was responsible for his suicide after he confessed to her his homosexuality.

“... you touched that point at which art and life meet and there is only BEING ... That is why we love the actress. They give us the intimate being who is only revealed in the act of love.”

Sabina knew that disparate lovers had to be taken for what they were, not as alchemical passions “to weld these fragments together ... (which) had failed! ...” for “the mood of lostness persisted.” Anais invented Sabina’s lie detector because “Guilt is the one burden human beings cannot bear alone ... She needed a confessor.” And this animus within Anais, Sabina’s lie detector, assures her that she has only “been trying to, beginning to love. Trust alone is not love ... (because) Some shock shattered you and made you distrustful of a single love.”
The ending of Spy is reminiscent of the beginning of House of Incest, except with a homeopathic panacea offered therein, “a remedy called pulsatile for those who weep at music” (symbolic of Anais’ musician father), chameleon ... as ineffective as her pre-earth birth,” those “water-veiled” memories wherein the eyes of the House narrator “looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self ... Born full of memories of the heels of the Atlantide ... standing forever on the threshold like one troubled with memories, and (but) walking with a swimming stride.”
THE MIRACLE OF
METAMORPHOSIS:
Voice of Djuna in
the Winter of Artifice

The Voice of DJUNA

Djuna, Lilith, and The Voice in 1939 Paris edition of Winter of Artifice were revised to include Stella, Winter of Artifice and The Voice in Swallow Press 1961 edition. In between was the 1942 release by Gemor Press of Lilith and The Voice before Ladders to Fire (1945) with “Hejda” of Under a Glass Bell stories, Stella, Lillian & Djuna.
Although Anais has said that she found the name Djuna in an anthology of Welsh names and that “it’s actually a man’s name” as response to the “angry letter” she received from Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood (1937) for using her name as a character, Anais may have reversed that order (neither here nor there) since originally “Djuna” was Anais’ “Henry & June” novel, her “Hans & Johanna” (before that “Hans & Alraune” manuscript) which evolved simultaneously with the more disguised “poetic version of The House of Incest ...” wherein the narrator admits, “The only thing I do not tell Hans is that I too am a Johanna ... I want to live out the evil in me.” However, Anais had written in April, 1933 Journal titled Henry & June that she deemed her deception necessary for varied reasons. “But, lying, too, is living, lying of the kind I do.” A month before this, she had equated herself with Miller. “I am like Henry. I can love Hugo and Henry and June.”
In “Hans & Johanna,” Anais identities herself as “the witch of words ... forgetting myself, my human needs, in the unfolding of the tale ... — a watcher who never let life flow into herself because this life belonged to another.” This was Anais’ winter of artifice (Rimbaud’s Season in Hell)* where she was engaged in loving myriad people. The narrator (Anais) described both June as well herself: “Everything which composed the external Joanna was a concealment of her, not an expression ... for lies have that power that they create solitude ...You are the face of my unmasked self.”
(Intriguing that the name Johanna if lexigrammed includes Hans=Henry; June and Anna each literally a jo or sweetheart of the other while Djuna includes June and You (Henry?) as well Una=One, first person as well as all combined.) The face/phase of June was not only the “daring, fiery, manifesting in acts. My free self! The incarnation of my imaginations” for the narrator but “the desired, unrealized half of my self,” that type woman Anais longed to be: “Johanna, the born whore, who would triumph as a whore” although “the soul will not be traded!”
“Chaotica,”* a working title for what became “The Voice” was the name “Anais Nin had christened her work space where she saw her analytical patients,” says a March 1935 editorial footnote in Fire where Anais writes, “My next book will be called White Lies,” while she was living at the Barbizon in New York. “The Voice” is the story of a therapist who becomes troubled by the complicated problems of her patients as did Anais, a lay analyst who assisted her own therapist Dr. Rank in America, while empathizing with the difficult profession of The Voice, “an alchemist who could always transmute the pain” until Djuna realizes she cannot become like him (or Proust), lost in “the labyrinth of remembrance.” Djuna’s choice is to live for “the eternal moments” instead.
The patients in this novelette are extensions of Djuna who has had not
“a lot of affairs with women” (but bonding/identification/understanding of June): Lillian, the violinist who clings out of loneliness (recall the dancer without hands in House); Mischa, the cellist whose assumed limp is a decoy for his crippled hand (Anais’ persona with a hypochrondriacal as well as theatrical penchant for costumes); Lilith Pellan, ill and pale, who “loves only a mirage in The Voice” (Anais before her own epiphany regarding Rank).
Lilith “found the absolute only ... in multiplicity ... lived in the myth.” When she asks The Voice if she is “like the first Lilith,” Anais is cryptically referring to herself as Stella, originally “Lilith” as well as the Biblical woman who is said to have existed before Eve as a more powerful first wife, unsatisfied with her mortal role because she was “seeking a belief, a God, a father who is God, a God who is father. “* Anais echoes her own (and/or) The Voice’s (Rank) wisdom, when the Voice tells her “a woman can find her way alone ... In the world of feeling ... not in the world of interpretation” which is a circular spiral that leads always back to the original obsession.
By the end of Voice, Djuna is still June/Lilith/Stella, “the layers and all the things that she was not yet “ in spite of and because of the spiral labyrinth wherein a troubled woman has sought to evolve, rise to heights above but not yet truly away from the foundation of House of Incest, much like Poe’s House of Usher which will devour Roderick (or Djuna) in the cursed swamp that yields ghosts every time a foundation is built over it just as coiled tower is attached always to its dangerous base (Tarot allusion). “On the first layer of the spiral there was awareness ... where the sails of reverie could swell while no wind was felt.” In the middle, “There was no time ... a stage surrendered to fragments ... At the tip of the spiral I felt passive, felt bound ...”
Thus, at the conclusion of The Voice, the same boat from “Waste of Timelessness” returns as an immovable symbol; for there is nothing to guide Anais or all her characters, women who are reflections and fragments of herself, away from the memory within her past, which may be as simple as abandonment by a father or as complex as a double trauma, one from childhood and the successive reunions with her father, especially in 1933. Nonetheless, Djuna/Anais will recreate and translate that event into art as she had been doing all her life.

The Winter of Artifice

In Early Diary III Oct. 1926, Anais expressed her disappointment in Hugo, because he seemed to escape into “coarsely beckoning nakedness” when he examined prurient photographs of women that were in direct opposition to her “belief in love as the ‘poetry of sex’ — sex without love I hate.” She had preceded this perturbance with the idea that “In the end his love of the body will estrange us.”
A month later Anais personified Paris as “the city ... full of sounds that tell stories ... faces that scream tragedies ...whispers that reveal secrets.” Of a ragpicker, she asks, “Where does he come from, where does he sleep at night when his bag is full of rags?” which may have been the seed of “Rag Time” wherein broken objects (fragmented personality) “could be transformed ... the beginning of transmutations” for both narrator and author. “Nothing is lost but it changes” is seminal, remaining in Anais’ unconscious when she rereads Marcel Proust with a more discerning eye two years later after initially not being drawn to his work.
“Proust may be right; there is no unity ... broken necklaces, dead leaves, scattered mosaics, a kaleidoscope.” However, Anais insists she “see(s) things ... the opposite of Proust.”
In Early Diary IV, she writes on June 30 about a child in a yellow dress whom she chases playfully before the child runs away, then back before the mother calls. “I felt a second of struggle, as if the child were demanding a kind of surrender. And though my body was sore with passion, with hunger, with pain, I smiled ... & will never escape from myself, neither by love, by maternity, by art ... and can never escape the vision that haunts ...”
With that realization, Anais confronts herself and her double, the father, while she was having a relationship with Miller in Clichy who wrote her on Oct 17, 1933, “Do you want to express yourself as a child? Is that sufficient?” In her response to him from her home outside Paris in Louveciennes, she replied on Nov 1 in a letter that she had decided to transform “Alraune ... the dream-like book” into “the human book .... more reality ... I will refer from now on to ‘Alraune One’ (House of Incest) as the fantasy, and ‘Alraune Two’ (Winter of Artifice) as the human book.” Instead of escaping into the traumas of her broken past, Anais consciously decided she would transcend experience to make something new of what she could never deny or escape.
Anais intended to conquer her obsession regarding her father in an imaginative confrontation which she believed might rid her forever of this ubiquitous living ghost father and her fixation with John Erskine while at the same time creatively yielding to her sensual Donna Juana urges for both June and Henry Miller. Miller wrote her a week after she had been with Joaquin J. Nin Y Castellanos (her father) that: “You do need each other. You never had a proper relationship.” A month later, Miller’s letter reveals a different opinion with perhaps greater understanding. “Jesus, he’s courting you with a vengeance,” Miller wrote, aware now that Anais “wanted to spare him (Miller) something.”
Yet, only “the journal shares (her) duplicities,” and Dr. Rank, to a certain extent, for Anais was now seeing him because she knew from Dr. Allendy that “to lie, of course, is to engender insanity” and because she was “beginning to love (the Voice) ... there is in him a certain element of homosexuality” (which may refer to Hugo/Eduardo) since she could no longer love her former and first analyst, since he represented “the father” to her. “I have lost a father.”
Although Anais wrote in Journal of Love: Incest May 18, 1934 that she was upset Dr. Rank did not appreciate Miller’s ongoing work on D. H. Lawrence; and “This is all the more tragic to me because it comes at the same time as the discovery that I carry in my womb the seed of Henry’s child,” a year later in Fire, the third volume of the “Journal of Love” series following Henry and June and Incest,* Anais revealed she could not tell Rebecca West “about my love affair with my Father, and that I killed my child ... (abortion) I do not show the chaos, ever, outwardly.” Rebecca West “in her analysis ... uncovered a memory — her father raped her ... Rebecca said it was real but now she did not know.”
One might speculate why Anais could not reveal her own past to West, but perhaps there was a hint of guilt she was still concealing beneath a public mask of serenity. No matter. On Oct. 16, 1933, Anais said, “I write my Neptunian book (House) at the same time as the human ‘story,’ and I also add fuel to the journal.” This line and the last one that follows three days later might have been written to instill doubt in any reader regarding Anais’ connection with her father at any time. “I have had a great yearning for absolution. It is nonsense.” Nonetheless, on May 18, 1934 she also had written, “Henry doesn’t want it. I can’t give Hugh a child of Henry’s.” August 29, 1934 she continued, “You are a child without a father ... You are born of man, but you have no father. This man who married me, it was he who fathered me.”
Now, Anais already had revealed that after Allendy introduced Antonin Artaud to her (the one who took drugs to induce or escape his fantasies and/or reality), she felt an “extraordinary twinship” with him, as well to “use” him as “using everything, of turning all things into nourishment ... imaginative writing!” She admit(s) ... “abnormality” with her “neurosis” related to the fact that “I elude my own detection. I do not tell all my lies.” adding: “I am aware in my unconscious there is a fund of cruelty and fear which makes me want to punish and abandon man.” This desire linked her emotionally, if not physically, to June: “Her duplicities and my enigmatic/symbolic, hieroglyphic words. Her inventions and my mad fantasies, through which nobody can trace the fact.”
But, when Anais wrote on May 10, 1933, after her sexual dream about the father she is again meeting, following “another interim of a decade,” readers are appropriately engaged in the author’s technique. “I jerk backward suddenly and push the crystal bowl against the wall. The bowl breaks and the water splashes all over the floor. The meaning of this I don’t know. “ Her Early Diaries had indicated that Anais read Edith Wharton; in Diary III, Anais referred to The Glimpses of the Moon as a novel “exactly as I would like to write ... in the manner of a clever woman” to become “more mature in (her) writing,” as Hugo urged would only happen, he said, when she “stopped being surprised by evil.”
Anais then may have incorporated the symbolism of Wharton’s own crystal bowl, using it as foreshadowing in her human book, “Winter of Artifice,” first titled “The Double” which she had to retitle, remembering Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same name. In Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911), Mattie, the housekeeper, accidentally breaks the wedding dish belonging to Ethan’s wife, her distant relative gone to the doctor. This universal broken symbol foreshadows not only the climax of the Wharton novella but the first physical union of Ethan and Mattie after they attempt to glue back the pieces of the broken bowl. Anais also may have used the shattered bowl that flows water onto the floor as she confronts her father, as a womb-like symbol, sexually maternal and daughterly dutiful, but also the opportunity for rebirth of a new relationship with her father.
Before the entry in Journal of Love: Incest that may or may not be a combination of fabrication and “fuel” for diary and fiction, Anais admitted, “the evil I do not act out, I write out.” which leads readers to wonder about the purpose of the “strange violence” possibly placed in the diary for superimposition on the novel. Still, Anais also may have been sincere when she wrote, “Now I will live as in the journal, and write as I live.”
For, if Anais is living as she writes and writing as she lives, which is the truth and what the fantasy? August 30, 1933, her father says, after meeting Henry Miller who has just left, “‘What more can you want than a gentlemanly husband and an ardent lover?’” Three months later, Anais writes in her journal: “sitting near him (Father) while he was reading, I felt the melting liberation of my sensuous feelings. It was my first going out to him since our sensual bond, because until then I had yielded. My love was yieldingness, submission, with a mixture of fear and joy.” (almost a re-enactment of the childhood seduction?)
Grist also for the human book with confrontation to punish and abandon her father in the same way he abandoned her? Violation to reproduce childhood trauma and therefore be rid forever of this neurotic obsession that had plagued Anais since her youth, along with the other side of that emotion, jealousy? However, in August 1932 Anais had written in the Henry & June diary (half-fiction , half-fact): “I am not the slave of a childhood curse. The myth that I have sought to relive the tragedy of my childhood is now annihilated ... I am going to run away from Henry as actively as I can.”
We know that she did not flee so easily or quickly, either from Miller or her father. On December 21, 1932, Miller, Hugo and Anais together read Rank’s Art and Artist when Anais wrote, “I am an artist, but I am not living as an artist.” She was still longing for the freedom of Miller, of Hugo, of man. Five days later, she was “experience(ing) the need of making it (diary) more artistic, or a notebook for my creation.” Development of the crystal bowl symbol may have even begun in January 1, 1933 diary entry when Anais referred to her mental preoccupation, talking to herself, about how she would use her home as a setting for her fiction: “Louvenciennes ... some laboratory of the soul.”
She talks to herself internally about the process of making art out of the mundane while “nailing down a torn carpet,” seeing the loss of “the goldfish ... in the cement pond outside ... replaced by glass monsters swimming in an electric bowl — psychologic fish that have no problems ... Fish who swim motionlessly — as a substitute for living ...”
What began as a need for passion and experience with Henry Miller turned into “Mothering” which Anais knew she was weary of from her childhood and adolescence in New York. “Winter of Artifice,” originally titled “Lilith” was begun in 1933 and completed in 1934, according to Spencer in Collage of Dreams. Nonetheless, in Early Diary II, Anais wrote at age 18, “If I were a man, I would certainly make love to someone, like Don Juan.” The character’s name “Lilith” may then also refer to John Erskine’s mistress and a character in his novel. “Pauline knew about Lilith. She knew John was returning to New York to see her.” Anais met Lilith and said, “We clasped hands like two real, honest friends, elated by a moment of understanding,” the dark woman, counterpart to Eve, “her docile replacement.”
In Walker’s Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, “Admission into the underworld was often mythologized as a sexual union. The lily or lilu (Lotus) was the Great Mother’s flower-yoni, whose title formed Lilith’s name.” Lilith,” originally narrated in the first person was revised deliberately by Anais to the third person point of view in the 1939 publication of “Winter of Artifice” with a specific intended change because of the association that “She” and “He” have to each other sexually, woman and man, not daughter and father.
“I am waiting for him ... He is coming today.” versus “She is waiting for him ... He is coming today.” “She” is more definitely the dark, devouring disobedient Lilith of the original version, transmuted beyond the “I” of the daughter who realizes she is or can be like Don Juan not “the mouse, the tin, cold mouse of Richmond Hill ... (who) is dead.”
Anais has masked the relationship of daughter to father, often referred to by critics as “a mystical rather than a physical relationship,” because there is art in artifice. “This was the winter of artifice,” a line from Winter of Artifice novelette. Anais has said in the Henry & June diary that, “The Journal is a product of my disease, perhaps an accentuation and exaggeration of it” after acknowledging that Hugo had kept her “from misery, suicide, and madness.” Thus, we know Anais chose to stay with Hugo at this time (and, in fact, was legally married to him all her life) not only because she “heard Hugo tell Allendy he’d kill himself if he lost her,” but because Hugo was “the father-figure/brother” she could depend upon always to understand and to accept her no matter where her manic-depressive moods and artist’s will took her.
Winter of Artifice is “dreaming spiral of desire” where the ghost of her potential father who tormented her (Anais) is buried like a hunger for something which she was not certain had been invented or created solely by herself ... Where was the man she really loved? ... She was coming out of the ether of the past ... The little girl in her was dead too. The woman was saved. And with the little girl died the need of a father.”
Reading all of Anais’ published diaries to date is like never reaching the end of a non-stop continuous novel as she intended all her fiction to be although Cities of the Interior Vol. 1 was not published until 1959. In December 7, 1932, Journal of Love: Incest entry, Anais wrote that she had “believed my own lies, as my father believed his own lies” even though she added, “I hate lies, double lives ... this keeping up of many lives and loves, this living on three or four levels.”
Nonetheless, what Anais said of D. H. Lawrence, she, no doubt, hoped might be said of her: “his convictions were the emanations of a life deeply lived through all its failures and contradictions.”
BIRTH AND REBIRTH
OF A NEW LILITH
ON EARTH:
The Philosophic Poet
Breathing Propethically
In/On Prose

Birth and Rebirth

“Birth” (Twice a Year Fall/Winter ‘38), published oddly enough, in the same year as “The Labyrinth” (Delta/Xmas), describes vividly the painful process of delivery, an aborted abortion become stillbirth, like a maze that almost comes to a conclusion to banish the minotaur from Anais’ life.
August 29, 1994 Journal of Love: Incest entry details some of the reality she was facing with fragments included in the short story where Anais explains how she visited a Weed Woman to rid herself by imbibed potion of what would not be immediately miscarried. “... if you came, you would take him (Hugo) for a father and this little ghost would never let me alone.” Besides, she added, “there is no father on earth. The father is this shadow of God the Father cast on the world,” since Hugo was not the father. “You are ... the child of an artist, my child unborn. And this man is not a father; he is a child, he is the artist.” (Henry Miller.)
These diary details appear almost accidentally within the story. “It looks dark, and small, like a diminutive man. But it is a little girl ... like a doll ... About one foot long. Skin on bones. No flesh ... and long eyelashes. The head was bigger than average. It was black.” Anais no doubt made a reference to a tumor in the infant’s dark head. “One more day and ... I would have died.” She mourns her “first dead creation,” before translating the experience of the “nightmare,” referred to in “Birth” as “a savage mystery,” where the narrator must primitively deliver herself of “a demon strangling me,” as she “Drum drum drum drum drum(s),” to release the “fatherless child” (because Anais admits she herself is not certain of who the father might be).
However, almost immediately afterwards, in retrospect, Dr. Rank told Anais about “a humorous book he wanted to write on Mark Twain. ‘The suicide of the double.’ We struggled against tragedy with humor.” Anais knew the child in her who needed a father was dead!” (That she made the right agonizing decision to abort/miscarry!) Or as she concluded “Winter of Artifice,” the unnamed female protagonist (Anais): “At last she was entering the Chinese theater of her drama (a.k.a./before Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire) and could see the trappings of the play as well as the play itself ... the settings ... made of the cardboard of illusion.”
The July 23, 1934 Journal of Love: Incest entry had reinforced this realization, “... I did not go to the end with June and Henry. I stopped somewhere and I wrote the novel ... I did not go to the end with my Father in experience of destructive hatred ... I created a reconciliation, and I am writing a novel of hatred.”*

Images as Structured Poses

The symbolic images in Anais’ work have been analyzed already by myriad, varied critics; however, their interpreted origin may not derive from Jung’s “Proceed from the dream outward” mandate so associated with the poetic author, but rather from the reality of Anais’ life, shaped by her imagination and possibly a childhood whipping/beating from her father which she may (or may not) have magnified for retaliation; no one will ever know. Anais’ tools of masking were learned from her youthful experience as a model for painters and photographers which taught her well the poses that produce art and beauty in “the period when I discovered I was not ugly.” (Sept 12, 1935 in Fire).
Her images are relative to “a house is a mental quality” as she noted June 18, 1930 in Early Diary IV. “There must be logic in it ... to show only the poetry.” Like Djuna in Ladders to Fire, “She lived in the cities of the interior, she had no permanent abode.” She “sank into a labyrinth of silence” to mask her assumed guilt for enjoying the corporal punishment from her father (with what we can only imagine: “His hard penis continued to torment” in Delta of Venus or “his big penis erect pointing at them” in Little Birds — both books published posthumously) revealing surreptitiously her awakening to the pleasure of physical touch in “the dark room of her adolescence, to the long white nightgown and hairbrush” which she re-enacted with Hugo and Henry Miller (early-on) without the orgasms she so sought and finally achieved (first through art before other lovers). However, Anais’ Catholic background had taught her to repress sensuality which she was unable to do in spite of her use of cape, costume, mask, paint, veil to conceal desire and ultimately resultant gratification.
In the Forties, Anais wrote “tongue-in-cheek” erotic stories, “pretending they were from the diary of a woman” since “a book collector had offered Henry Miller a hundred dollars a month” for graphic sex which she “ironized,” including facts in her life commingled with fantasies.* Delta of Venus was published in 1977, the last year of Anais’ life, successful commercial book that she did not equate with literature and never wanted to see in print; notwithstanding, she came to realize this part of her unfolding as a sensual being as valuable, both for herself and for other women, denigrated to the label of “whores” if they expressed enjoyment of their sexuality.
Of “A Model” in Little Birds, she had written that most men “believe in keeping pleasure for (their) mistress. In fact, if he (a Spanish man) sees a woman enjoy sensuality, he immediately suspects her of being faithless, even of being a whore.”
Anais who had seen herself in her “double, “ her Don Juan father, did not want to be so externally callous or cold; she chose (like “the ragpicker”) to make something new out of the old, including the childhood memory followed by paternal abandonment. Her methods of mental flight (“transcendence”) varied from containment/cocoon (both positive and negative) with landlocked boats, glass bell labyrinth puzzles; ladders leading into the fire; mirrors that by their nature never reveal a person’s true image, shells. She employed these methods of escape while seeking inherently normal experiences non-delineated by sexuality via classical music and its rebellious child, jazz, as well as spirals (from surrealistic paintings) that are always rooted in a base that was for Anais the Catholic puritanical guilt she yearned to shed.
In Aphrodisiac,** “each act of love is ... an act of birth and rebirth.” Mirrors and images of timelessness continue to reflect, however, the isolation of Anais’ existence as a writer, an artist, even if removed by Eros, the Greek God of Love, and in psychiatry, the sum of all instincts for self-preservation. Selected passages of her diaries were juxtaposed against John Boyce’s erotic drawings, because: “What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion, but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life ... (where) poetry becomes the greatest truth ... the only reality, the moment when we are completely alive.”
Anais, the “albatross” (Children of the Albatross) who fosters and nurtures creative younger peers, was like the martyred Joan of Arc or another far-vision revolutionary, Susan B. Anthony, who also sought to liberate every woman beyond the circuitous plot of her existence. For this reason, Anais was never part of “The Lost Generation,” since to be merely inventive in the language of fiction, as was Gertrude Stein, another brilliant thinker, was not her sole (soul?) goal. Anais had learned that psychoanalysis “achieves to make one more conscious of one’s misfortunes” which is why she had to invent a new form to satisfy not only herself but future generations through the rhythmic poetry of reflection, a “drug given to prisoners of distinction,” like Jean Carteret in “The All-Seeing” who knew that the symphony of language, which was a prison, could also become a liberator for the innocent child grown to a more enlightened woman.
The noted critic Anna Balakian may have said it best in her “Introduction: Poetic Reality of Anais Nin” when she assessed Anais’ “unifying motif” as “the theme of liberation ... search, whether inward or outward ... motivated by the drive towards freedom ... from heritage ... binding memories ... growth-stunting inhibitions ... ill-conceived notions.”

The Philosophic Poet

October 28, 1972 at a meeting of the Otto Rank Association, Anais lectured “On Truth & Reality,” offering another path that led not only into her own deeper understanding of why she created the diaries as well as her fiction but serving as the wellspring of her philosophical non-fiction on varied subjects following her Lawrence ... Study. She reminded herself of having “read in (her) early thirties” Rank’s Truth and Reality. “I rediscovered it and found that my whole life as a woman artist had been influenced by it, and proved its wisdom,” (woman as artist, artist as woman). Anais pointed out the French title of Rank’s book as La Volonte du Bonheur (The Will to Happiness).
No one will ever know whether Anais was consciously aware of bipolar inheritance (beyond the four Early Diaries which clearly reveal some) although she did admit in Diary of Anais Nin: 1931-1934, the first one available to the public, that “I had no in-between existence: only flights, mobility, euphoria; and despair, depression, disillusion, paralysis, shock, and a shattering of the mirror” when she met Dr. Rank in November, 1933; this genetic disorder no doubt had combined with the struggle of a woman (who may have married for the sake of her family as much as her security as an artist), yearning for a separate and valid identity as one not only engaged in meaningful work, Art, but deserving of personal freedom on all levels (emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually).
If Anais initially sought relief through adventures as panacea for her mood swings (manic-depression) as well as substance for her art in her combined “refusal to despair,” she followed this with psychoanalysis while continuing to understand her own motivations and those of her characters, representative of many human beings who may or may not suffer any identified bipolarity. “The story of Sabina (Spy) is that in ten years of married life, she had known two lovers and one platonic friendship with a homosexual ... the first study of a woman who tries to separate love from sensuality as man does, to seek sensual freedom.”
Anais learned, however, that for her, such separation was not possible since “understanding” was “an act of love,” not a mechanical gesture, the same as for her writing: a fusion of poetry with realistic prose. Dr. Rank taught her, Anais adds in the Rank lecture: “that guilt accompanies every act of will — creative will or the assertion of our personal will.” She was delivered from that to “individual growth” and came to see all of her “writing was the act of wholeness.” By reaching out to others without sacrificing her own identity, she was “revivified,” reborn and shared her continuous evolution in the re-evolution which is revolutionary in her public diaries, a new genre combining fact with fiction for a purpose: her poetic prose; non-fiction; erotica; childhood journals; permission for release of expurgated segments from diaries, etc. (For detailed analysis of Anais’ other significant novels: the Four-Chambered Heart — 1950; Solar Barque — 1958; Seduction of the Minotaur — 1961 and Collages — 1964, the reader may refer to her own Novel of the Future and the numerous interpretations of same available elsewhere.) They are all higher steps to “balance between outer and inner, between past and present, between psychological reality and nature.”
With her Preface to Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), Anais began a lifelong practice of celebrating “The restorative value of experience, prime source of wisdom and creation” for a world in “need (of) a blood transfusion ... drink, food, laughter, desire, passion, curiosity, the simple realities which nourish the roots of our highest and vaguest creations.” A dozen years later in the Alicat Bookshop pamphlet, her “Realism and Reality” essay, she explained why novels of her ilk were rejected by American publishers who had not caught up to modern art — dance, music, painting, theater. “The pattern of the deeper life covered and disguised will be ... demasked by the writer’s process of interpretation of the symbolic meaning of people’s acts, not a mere reporting of them or of their words.”
(Quite deftly and gently, Anais was subtly critical of any artistic medium, including Williams’ Streetcar, which used the artificial voice of a doctor to imply “that neurosis in a character made it a ‘case’ and not an experience very common ..., which it is.”)
Her essay “On Writing” (1947) again guided Anais’ readers into the future; concerns of literature and of society that have been the issue of the past thirty-five years, “a form of protest against an unnatural life” which “has led to the absence, or failure, of relationship between men and women (beyond stereotyped roles) so prevalent (even now) today, and ... dramatic proof of the absence of relationship between man (human) and nature.” Anais again was prophet/visionary of the upheaval in America, begun in the Fifties, regarding destruction of natural resources in a society oblivious that such abuse mirrored the battle between the sexes. However, after the segregated, sequestered Fifties came the Sixties.
The times then (and now) or the pundits of publication, still failed to recognize, not only Anais’ fiction but her diaries as “a strong antidote to the unrelatedness, incoherence, and disintegration of modern man.” Modestly, Anais acknowledged that the fusion of poetry and realism would “be accomplished by ... younger, unpublished writers,” and she was prophetically correct, to a certain extent, what with Dow Mossman’s Stones of Summer in the early Seventies, along with Daryl Henderson’s Ditch Valley; the novels of Anna Kavan through Peter Owen in England; more recently The Garden of the Peacocks by Anthony Weller in 1996; all of the Nobel Prizewinner Toni Morrison’s novels; all of Amy Tan; Andrea Louie’s Moon Cakes, etc. (including Panes — Fiction As Therapy novel comprised of short fiction*) But, these creatively fused novels are still singularly exceptional and not generally accepted or recognized by either critics or readers as more than a unique phenomenon until endorsed by a national vehicle, i.e. Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club (for revival of interest in Morrison’s Song of Solomon) or the popular motion picture following Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club in the late nineties.
In “The Writer and the Symbols” (1959) Anais again removes obstacles like fallen timber on the rough path to greater consciousness for a society (and literature) sitting on the edge of the Sixties (Seventies?) still maligned and considered “insubordinate” because sit-downs became stand-ups to march into the danger of adventurous Change. “There is no adventure without danger,” she wrote, noting that “few aside from doctors and a few novelists have been willing to plunge into the unexplored territory of our irrational life.”
Anais thus justified why she “chose to write about artists ... rather than those who had to fit themselves into accepted social patterns.” Why do people write, anyway? “The creation of a story is a quest for meaning.” Elaborating on this, Anais said, “There are so many fears ... exposure of self ... multiple taboos society has imposed on literature.”
Society, now gone to the other extreme with literature/media that is a portrait of violence or flesh for the sake of voyeurs, lacks sense/taste with regard to image in language, and may again be posed on the precipice of new awareness: that books/films based on reality, documentaries, in essence, still fail to “give us an emotional experience, and nothing that we do not discover by way of feeling has the power to alter our lives.” Anais redefined “This quest for the self through the intricate maze of modern confusion (as) the central theme of (her) work.”

The Novel of the Future (1968)

Two years after the commercial publication of Diary I (1931-1934), Anais’ earlier and prophetic philosophy regarding modern fiction and its relationship to contemporary readers/thinkers appeared as The Novel of the Future to continue her edification of the masses (publishers, literary critics, writers, readers) in the present of the late Sixties and the future which is now. Referring to America in the Thirties as not innovative but “aim(ing) ... to please the majority ... to submit to the major trends” which is still true, Anais in her Introduction states the purpose “of this book is to study the development and techniques of the poetic novel.” Nobody else in America had done so or would until Sharon Spencer with Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel (Swallow ‘74) which placed Nin therein (to her detriment) as an international writer rather than one truly based in America.
Anais stated she would “try to evaluate some of the writers who have integrated poetry and prose” while also addressing her own work to show “more clearly ... the way to achieve such an integration.” After all, her fiction had been available in private press editions, along with recordings and Dutton edition of Ladders to Fire (1946) and Duell, Sloan & Pearce The Four-Chambered Heart (l950) for more than thirty years. No one else had seen her work as path blazing in this genre, new to America, although now so readily accepting of autobiographical fiction. (All or most diaries, however, are blindly still read as factual although we know many are probably not.)
In 1968, Anais admitted that the diary was her sketchbook for fiction which should immediately have enlightened readers and critics to the second new genre she was openly inventing: combination of life mixed with art for a purpose (not to mention her own private reasons which ought to be granted to any individual.)
Anais notes that she began lecturing at universities as early as 1946 when “Stella” was reprinted in Harpers’ Bazaar. “I was speaking of psychological reality to an audience conditioned to representational social realism.” She added, “With time the nature of psychological reality became a subject of controversy.” We know now that drawing on the right side of the brain, so valued in the Nineties, was demeaned in prior decades because of a conscious trend in schools (and society) to emphasize the left side of the brain for purposes of elevating students’ poor abilities in math and science which did not improve until a wholistic hands-on sensory approach was employed for all subjects, including writing.
The euphemism of Jung’s “Proceed from the dream outward” was misinterpreted by many to mean literally something that occurs only in sleep. Anais’ reference was the more expansive, of course: “reverie, imagination, daydreaming ... any experience which emerges from the realm of the subconscious.” In other words, Anais delineated through her own work, as well as the writing of other unknown writers (Maude Hutchins, Anna Kavan, Marguerite Young) along with some known ones (early Capote and Hawkes, Tennessee Williams and Ralph Ellison) what she intended by Jung’s phrase.
Anais did not write about the past in a clinically graphic-porn style. As she told Henry Miller in a letter from New York, June ‘46, when World War II was ended, “The present is always healing, at worst — the past is the abscess.” Henry Miller had written her from Hollywood Sept. 19 ‘42 that “On the fringe is the realm of art. A luxury which almost no one takes seriously.”
However, Miller (first aided in publication of his work by Anais) already had New Directions as his publisher as early as 1939 when The Cosmological Eye appeared and then The Henry Miller Reader (l959) before Anais’ work was published commercially on a consecutive basis. His “Un Etre Etoilique,” a “purplish” prose portrait (caricature of one who writes poetic prose?) within the Reader, from Max and the White Phagocytes (Obelisk ‘38)* did little to encourage critics, readers, scholars, writers to consider Anais as a serious artist. “In every diary we assist at the birth of Narcissus, and sometimes the death too ... The result is harrowing and hallucinating ... The diary becomes the confession of her inability to make herself worthy of this lost father who has become for her the very paragon of perfection.”
In “Genesis of the Diary” (Novel), Anais refers to “A notebook or diary ... (as) a discipline, like sketching for the painter....dealing always with the immediate present ...the emotional reaction to experience which revealed that powers of re-creation lie in the senses rather than in memory or critical, intellectual observation.”
Speaking always to those in her present (as well as past and future), Anais (who had taken LSD as part of a professional experiment with Dr. Timothy Leary to scientifically prove her lifelong thesis) stated in modern words: “The young would have no need of drugs if they had been educated in the life of the senses and emotions ...” still true in current times when amid innovations in computers, poetry (as published by private press) is experiencing a resurgence. (One can only see this revival as representative of a need for something human in a society more mechanized than ever!)
What could be more political or more definitive as to the purpose of the poetic novel (her own included) than: “We carefully observe and watch the happenings of the entire world without realizing they are projections of our inner selves.”? Elementary students sending short letters of opinions or suggestions to the President via computer, for example, in 1997, will not relate them personally to politics, their peers, society, the world, or themselves. Such action is still a left-brain activity that will neither create “understanding ... love ... conquer(ing) loneliness.” (nor character!) “Understanding creates compassion, sympathy, and empathy. I was faithful to motivation,” Anais reminds us.
This significant treatise on the novel of the future as the future of the novel, a regenerative tool for readers, aside from having considerable literary merit and serving as mass enlightenment, depicts the prophetic purpose of poetic prose, achieved via Anais’ diaries (serving primarily and initially as chronicle of the evolution of a woman who was an artist or an artist who was a woman) while prophetically transporting the prose poem to another realm, the beyond late Twentieth Century, which may be even more accepting of and acceptable to such literary creations.
“The creative writer is the one who teaches expansion and liberation of the human mind.” Why or how? “... death of emotion has led inevitably to excess violence ... a symptom of ... violence in order to feel alive because the divided self (not consciously because of any diagnosed bipolarity) feels its own death and seeks sensation to affirm its existence.” The key to Anais and her writing which she also reveals to us in this philosophical criticism is again prophetic regarding the future direction of the poetic novel.
When we deny the “Evita” (overwhelmingly successful 1997 herstorical musical starring Madonna) in our selves, we acknowledge the boring masks of routine, our lonely lives as isolated from the goal of self-knowledge which should allow each of us to relate to another and then other human beings as a whole in a caring and compassionate manner.* “Without poetry which makes its appeal to the senses we cannot retain a living relationship to all things.”
In Favor of the Sensitive Man and other essays continues Anais’ androgynous guidance; she knew “each (of us) is endowed with both masculine and feminine qualities.” But “the new type of man to match the new type of woman” is still in the process of evolving for each sex more than two score years following her title essay. (Note popularity of Bly’s Iron John.) “... I feel we might be approaching a humanistic era in which differences and inequalities may be resolved without war.”
Anais’ decade of road-runner, cross-country lectures to colleges and universities existed right up until her death in Jan. ‘77 from cancer, as she shared her writing, her visions on “the novel of the future” and her suggestions for parallel-living, with or without the freedom she managed to achieve in her lifetime. “The integrated circuit is really for the human being ... the channel of feeling that has to be kept open ... (by) build(ing) up a sufficient inner spiritual resistance ... ‘the spirit house’ while not close(ing) off the ... emotional circuits ... to separate from others ... from what is happening in the world ...,” Anais said in one (and, no doubt, many) of her lectures included in A Woman Speaks edited by Evelyn Hinz.
That is Anais’ literary motif and her life/philosophy.

Psychosynthesis

Robert E. Kelly, in Manic-Depression: Illness or Awakening, refers to Assagioli’s four stages of the concept detailed by the latter therapist in his book, Psychosynthesis (1965) that, in essence, may lead to spiritual transmutation of the ego. (Assagioli was a colleague of Jung and Freud.) Greater knowledge of one’s own personality is the first stage, which Anais began at the tender age of eleven. The second stage involved manipulating of the new fragments of ego, the new puzzling parts, as opposed to being manipulated or controlled by them, Anais’ concern in her twenties and thirties. The third stage is devoted to creating a higher “ideal” identity or achievement of same which was Anais’ fourth decade of life and her fifth. The fourth stage is the formation of a new image to match this created projection which occurred for Anais Nin when the first volume of her Diary 1931-1934 was published in the Sixties.
To Kelly “Mania is the genesis of awareness to the dawning of the soul.” However, he adds that he enlisted the guiding help of a good therapist along the path. So too, for her own reasons, Anais sought out several therapists during her lifetime, with Dr. Inge Bogner in New York City, probably of longest duration from June 1951, according to Volume 5 of her Diary (1947-1955) where Anais “discussed ... the increase in my courage to be myself rather than disguise myself,” to Volume 7 Diary (1966-1974).
Winter, 1972-1973, Anais wrote, “Being famous is only destructive if taken as a narcissistic appraisal, but creative if taken as means of discovery of other people, other lands, other ideas, other artists ... I look for faces I can love, friends, daughters, a moment of contact, of intimacy, of revelation ... Every year we have to make a new synthesis ... There is no conflict if I appear in public as I truly am, do not accept their image of me, maintain my values and my severities toward myself.”
Kelly concludes his book, by saying, “The path to self-knowledge is a personal path that can only be taken by the individual.” He quotes Kay Redfield Jamison who equates “the manic-depressives of society ... (with) our mystics.” Anais Nin was that great artist, manic-depressive mystic, able “to record ... (her) experiences, letting the ineffable speak for itself.”
We have the Early Diaries, released posthumously, to shed light on Anais’ marked and prevalent fluctuating moods and the cryptic references in the Diaries Volumes 1-7 (released before the earlier-written ones), all published in her lifetime to focus on the evolution and journey of a soul to guide readers to their own Selves. If she chose not to release certain parts of her diaries, then we may be assured that Anais was aware of her deep duality which she preferred be known only through the fiction. Always in touch albeit not in tune with her times, she also sagaciously determined that there are just some personal details that must be omitted until the time is right.
“The true struggle is to achieve an image which conforms to the spirit of a person so he can become visible to the world ...” she ended Volume 7 Diary (1966-1974).
AESTHETICS IS ETHICS:
Diary 1 and
Aroundabout Anais

Diary 1— 1931-1934 (1966)

In Early Diary IV on June 10, 1931, Anais wrote, “I began my life’s real work, the transposition of my Journal into a printable form ... of continuous inward consciousness ...” Thirty pages later, “Old pages of my Journal certainly do appear ... sentimental, exaggerated, unwise ... Blunders (however) are part of all the movement.”
Some readers may forget that it was Anais Nin, the mature writer, who edited the diaries (along with Gunther Stuhlmann) to make them palatable for the times which must have led to the decision to begin public dissemination with Diary I (1931-1934), in keeping with the burgeoning Women’s Movement. Anais stated early in her first winter entry therein: “I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”
That writing which awakened her senses was by D. H. Lawrence; then Henry Miller himself, “the gentle savage that I’d like to be;” as well, June, Henry’s second wife: “Her life is full of fantasies,” because Anais heretofore had been living in lyrical dreams, what became Waste of Timelessness. Dr. Allendy first helped Anais see, “One is not in bondage to the past which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background.” Dr. Rank later helped her see “‘the revelation of creative activity which becomes a channel of redemption for ... obsessions.’”
Anais’ obsessions involved her father who had abandoned the family for another love; her own duality (also real but clinically unidentified), which she saw astutely as negative reflection of her “double,” her father (“I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves.”); her “fever for knowledge, experience”; her need “to create ... a richer life,” conscious of being an “imaginatively ... complex ... illusionist,” which she also determined as “lies create(ing) solitude.”
Often criticized for omitting true facts of her life, in reference to Scholar’s allusion to Roy Pascal’s “cone of darkness,” the particulars of her love life (evident, nonetheless, in Anais’ autobiographical fiction), scholars/critics seem blind still to the purpose of the diaries, as that “bridge to the world” Anais named them in this Diary I. However, Anais did include the facts of her life, cryptically, but there (for all sensual, astute readers) in Diary I (1931-1934) where she includes a “letter from Father ... ‘We must spend hours to know each other intimately ... “(conversation or the original definition of the word ‘intercourse’?) before September 1933 entry where she notes (while looking at an old photograph of her father “taken when he had just left us ...”) that she “felt nostalgia for a soft face which no longer exists, who might have been, then, the lover of my dreams ...”
Anais’ own art and Dr. Rank guided her to realize that her “double,” her Don Juan father “‘reinforce(d) the resemblances (so) he could love his feminine self in you as you could love your male self in him.’” Rank added that while Anais was being “‘loved by the men he (her father) wanted to be loved by ... (she) could have been the perfect Androgyne.’”
If readers missed Rank’s “‘more in all this than the simple fact of incestuous longings,’” no doubt many also missed hers, even though Anais told us the doctor is “a seer ... healer ... Even though they deal with ... illness of the soul, the cure they offer is vaguely understood to be a sexual one.” This subject continues to be a major one in the Nineties where the movement of “inner child,” evolved or unborn, has been spawned by an unacknowledged or denied parental attachment.
Anais included fragments of her later story “Birth” in August ‘34 entry of Diary I, even thought she omitted certain especially poignant parts that might alert careful readers to the artist’s personal illness. “During the night, all night, I heard the groaning of a woman dying of cancer.” However, she returns our consciousness quickly to the “prolongation of myself,” for Anais boldly reminds, “man the father, I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father.” to be taken figuratively and literally.
Diary I ends in the manner of a continuous novel, a new non-fiction genre, semi-fictional autobiography, as Anais concludes with what she praised about D. H. Lawrence in her 1932 Study: the importance of “follow(ing) the waywardness of life itself, its oscillations and whims and mobility.” What better way to appeal to an audience of readers ripe for “the birth of the real me (the new woman so ahead of her time) ... for no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men.”
Who among us cannot identify and smile wryly with Anais’ proclamation, “I may not become a saint, but I am very full and very rich.” as we wonder, no longer, why she so loved “the telephone ringing all day, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye ...”

Aroundabout Anais

There have been a number of academic books on Anais Nin, including Evelyn Hinz’s The Mirror and Garden: Realism and Reality in the Writings of Anais Nin (OSU Press ‘71), creative criticism followed by Sharon Spencer’s Collage of Dreams (Swallow ‘79) and Bettina Knapp’s Anais Nin (Ungar ‘78), all sensitive and scholarly with, as Philip K. Jason notes in Anais Nin and Her Critics (Camden House ‘93), Spencer “articulate(ing) clearly and at some length the proto-feminist impulse in Nin’s life and work’ as well as “explore(ing) the Jungian underpinning of Nin’s ‘expansive’ view of woman ... in the portrayal of sensual and sexual feeling and behavior.”
Jason’s own Anais Nin Reader (Swallow ‘73) introduced his personal selections with “Introduction: The Poetic Reality of Anais Nin,” drawing on The Novel of the Future, stating, “the diary and the creative work are like two communicating vessels,” but perhaps too simplistically interpreting this transmutation: “the division is an imaginary one ... they feed each other constantly ...” However, if Jason acknowledged “the trend in ... criticism” on Anais as “works of enthusiasm ... to ... cautious and limited praise,” the acerbic biographies to follow by two individual and separate women certainly unbalanced that scale with almost venomous manipulation of facts to judge, unfortunately, their subject’s life separate from Anais’ art.
Anais — The Erotic Life of Anais Nin by Noel Riley Fitch (Little Brown ‘93), remains worlds apart from the biographer’s Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation. Instead, readers are led to believe the biographer has nothing substantial to note, again assessing “Both her (Anais’) life and her diary ... (as) artistic creations” (in a rather pejorative, not positive sense). However, Anais already had stated in Novel of the Future that “I do not think it is love of the novelist which drives (some) critics to play sleuth to the personal lives and personal genesis of their art ... as this continues to be the favorite sport ... it might be well for the novelists to make their own confessions for the sake of greater accuracy.”
Precisely that which Anais has allowed aesthetically through Rupert Pole, her executor, with the timed release of varied diaries, the material expurgated from original published ones for the sake of prudence and protection of those who sought anonymity or exclusion, including her husband, Hugo. In “Genesis of the Diary,” (Novel), Anais also had said, “it was my experience as a novelist which enabled me to edit The Diary at all ...”
A Casebook on Anais Nin, the first collection of critical works on the author, edited by Robert Zaller (NAL ‘74), although dismissed by Jason as “tilted more toward adulation than critical objectivity” contains articles and essays by most reputable critics including Zaller, a professional historian, a professor at Drexel University in Pennsylvania. Deena Metzger* in her essay therein, “The Diary: The Ceremony of Knowing” reminds that “for us to be born is, she (Anais) tells us, to return to the place of our origin,” analyzing the diaries as the evolution of a soul (a woman and artist, in this case) and documenting a human struggle for beauty and meaning ... a reconciliation of the worlds within a world.”
Conversations with Anais Nin edited by Wendy M. DuBow (University Press of Mississippi ‘94) reveals “the tension Nin felt between her public and private personas.” If so, why not? Anais has said, “The external story is what I consider unreal,” the theme of her fiction. As early as 1968, she also told us “A character in the novel is always someone I have known and recorded in the diary,” which includes herself. She explained clearly that “Not only conventions dictated the journals, but personal censorship.”
Nonetheless, this edited collection of interviews “between 1966 and 1972 ... portrays a friendly, well-read, self-educated, cosmopolitan artist,” in DuBow’s Foreword to support Zaller’s Casebook that Anais Nin, always the writer, was “a uniquely dynamic person because she influenced people of quite different intellectual backgrounds and political persuasions.”
Anais Nin, A Biography was created by Deidre Bair (Putnam’s ‘95) author of Simone De Beauvoir (whose personal inscription in my own ‘90 biography refers to her subject as “this remarkable woman’s life.”) Edmund White praised this second biography as “full-dress portrait ... (of) a woman of strong passions, both intellectual and sentimental ...” in direct opposition to Bair’s undressing of her subject, Anais, attempting judgmentally to negate not only the art but the life of someone she deems personally “a major minor writer.”
Anais, however, already warned in Novel of the Future that “A human being who reveals himself should be treated with the same care we accord a new type of fish ... We must protect him from injury if we are to share his life.” That which she did throughout the edited published Diaries I-VII during her lifetime, Bair chose not to do after Anais’ death.
By blatantly labeling Anais a bigamist (“she married Rupert Pole without divorcing Hugh Guiler”), Bair passed judgment on a ceremonial ritual that occurred in 1955, performed by a Justice of the Peace, which Anais knew was a gesture, symbol of “‘deeper ritual’” while never intending to divorce Hugo, an intelligent, also by-now recognized creative film-maker, who, most likely was not blind to Anais’ quests for experience as attested to in Early Diary IV, Dec 26, 1929: “... we have mingled beyond dissolution ... in my fitful way there is a consistency and a loyalty, because I always worship him even when I do not desire him.” What Anais wrote there was no doubt applicable to her father and to God. Jan. 1, 1930, she wrote, “... he (Hugo) is the indirect cause of all I do, and am, since he has made it materially possible.” On April 18, 1931: “The center of my existence is my love for Hugh. How is that proved? He is the only one for whom I would make sacrifices — any sacrifice.”
Fitch had included on the last page of her biography on Anais, part of her interview with Dr. Jean Fanchette* on July 17, 1991 where he said, “‘When Hugo came to Paris after Anais’ death ... he told me he knew everything all the time.”**
That Anais’ two biographers failed to realize or read April 23, 1931 entry: “The secret of what is called my condensation is that I am writing in English for French minds” is reproof to their repudiative research. “I could say, like Lawrence, ‘They all wish to destroy me because of my non-conformity.’” (April 22, 1931) However, it is precisely Anais’ non-conformity in her art and life that was so beloved by readers, friends and strangers.
Recollections of Anais Nin by Her Contemporaries edited by Benjamin Franklin V (Ohio University Press ‘96) is a compilation of “honest, accurate impressions,” uninfluenced by the editor “of this woman all of us would agree was extraordinary ...” with recollections “arrange(d) (primarily) ... chronologically.” Victor Lipari, (filmmaker and writer), ended his memory with a legacy-message Anais had left him. “Know yourself in every way and don’t stop the growth, whether emotional, sexual, or spiritual.”
Anna Balakian (former Chair of Comp. Lit at NYU) said, “The three most significant innovators in the novel form are women: Natalie Sarraute, Marguerite Young, Anais Nin ... Of the three, Nin gets the most current exposure — but for the wrong reason.”
Anais Nin: A Book of Mirrors edited by Paul Herron (Sky Blue Press ‘96) is the most recent tome available, 432 pages with a Foreword by Anais’ dedicated editor, Gunther Stuhlmann, her literary agent and editor (also originator and editor of ANAIS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL in existence for more than a decade with fifteen issues, thus far). He says, this “array of personal testimonials, reflections and refractions ... seem to accomplish ‘what no biography, no single study can do’” (quoting Herron, the editor) and that is “attract so many people to her person, her ideas, her work.”
Unlike Recollections, there is a combination of creative criticism with memories of Anais, personally and/or via her writing, to shimmer Book of Mirrors (a new private press’ amazing first publication) like a musical mural heard stretching across the universe. Within the volume, Fairid Naim Tali in “My Pilgrimage to Louveciennes,” (translated from the French by Jane Eblen Keller) said: “Anais is my mirror without reflection, and I recognize myself in her and in several of her characters.”
Irving Stettner in his “Anais Nin: A Memoir” equates Anais to the “20th century full-realization of Rimbaud’s vision ... woman ... free to be herself ... before we put her in domestic shackles: ... seer, joyous creator.” Daisy Aldan in “Anais Nin: A Great Villager” (“written circa 1959”) notes “She ... has achieved a new dimension in character depiction.”
Maryanne Raphael in “Who Is Anais Nin?” (edited by Dr. Eve Jones) responds: “Her work is described as the most candid and process — conscious record drawn by a 20th century writer, eclipsing both Simone de Beauvoir and Mary McCarthy in its reflections on the emancipation of women.”
This book, a modern critical, as well emotional collection, supports Mkrynski and Maguire’s assessment of 1996 Nobe1 Prize Winner poet, Wislawa Szymborska’s “recurrent theme” in her “critical writing.” In Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts, a translation from Polish of Szymborska’s “Seventy Poems,” the editors in Preface about the Nobel prizewinner remind that she “insisted her biography does not much matter .. The artist is the work, the work the artist...”

***

The Critical Response to Anais Nin edited by Philip K. Jason (Greenwood Press, 1996) is Number 23 of Critical Responses in arts and letters; Series Advisor, Cameron Northouse, says in Foreword: “... each volume is designed to present a documentary history of highlights in the critical reception to ... individual works that are generally considered to be of major importance.” However, he qualifies that “each volume is the work of an individual editor.” Thus, a 271 page volume* appears to offer dated criticism selected to criticize Anais Nin, with the exception of sparse new interpretations of her work, i.e. “The Diaries of Anais Nin” by the late Lynn Luria-Sukenick (Shenandoah ‘76).

“... Candor does not guarantee integrity of spirit or freedom from self-deception ... The mode or attitude of sincerity does not insure honesty; to behave as if you are telling everything does not mean that you are ... Discretion is, in effect, an open refusal of information less misleading at times than the confession which accidentally or deliberately conceals ...
“... The diaries, however, unconfessional, contain a wisdom in their obliquity and omissions ...” (p.177)

“Lillian Beye’s Labyrinth: A Freudian Exploration of Cities of the Interior” by Suzette A. Henke is equally revelatory, psychoanalytic essay that first appeared in Anais: An International Journal 2 (1984).
Henke says of Lillian: “Self-doubt and depression prompt her to commit quotidian acts of spiritual suicide, erupting from nightly bouts with the syndrome Freud described as ‘melancholia.’” (p.136) Briefly illuminating the role of each protagonist in the novels within Cities of the Interior, Henke notes that Sabina (from Spy), although “Supposedly ‘liberated’ in her pursuit of hedonistic pleasure ..., is actually a tormented spirit who lives dangerously on the edge of schizophrenic breakdown.”
Henke later assesses “The minotaur that torments (Lillian) is a monster of her own creation ... a fragmented personality, torn between the desire for egoic independence and ... an ‘ego-ideal’ fashioned by a critical conscience.” (p.143) Anais sought to understand this dichotomy within her body, mind and spirits through a microscopic dissection of “‘multiplication of selves’” which was not associated with herself as bipolar, because she had an aversion to illness of any sort.
Anais Nin explains in the first volume of her Diary (1931-1934 journal): “I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease.” (p. 33)
Nonetheless, out of her life Anais created her art; all her life she also sought to create her reality as malleable music; dance; painting; poetry; sculpture, etc. A prophet who perfected “autobiographical fiction” (invented it?) and “the aesthetic literary journal,” she was as dual a persona as her name: without being (to experience the flow of “is”) as much existence itself, all “is” and flow which must forever be natural duality in acceptance of day versus night, also inherited and possibly secretly, consciously hidden or unconsciously continuous battle with bipolar characteristics, tendencies prevalent.
Finally, The Spirit of Loving... edited by Emily Hilburn Sell (Shambala ‘95) contains two quotes from The Diary of Anais Nin: Volume 1 (1931-1934) that support this thesis, inherent to understanding Anais and her Art in total and combined. Anais quotes D. H. Lawrence. “Every human being is treacherous to every other human being. Because he has to be true to his own soul.”
“But we dream of union, faithfulness.” (p62) Union of polarities that always will separate those parts fragmented in divided relationship(s), society and individual spirit. Yet, “One always loves the person who understands you.” (p77)
“Hugo knew about Rupert, and Rupert knew about Hugo, and each knew the other knew, but they conspired not to let Anais know they knew because they both loved her. Isn’t that the ultimate form of love?”

Nancy Jo Hoy to Maxine Hong Kingston

in The Power to Dream: Interviews with Women
in the Creative Arts by Nancy Jo Hoy
NOTES FOR QUOTES

(Notes appear in order of reference for each chapter.)

1. Inlet to Understanding the Art of Anais
1. Linotte p. 70
2. Diary 1 p. 4
3. D. H. Lawrence ... Study p 13
4. The Artist’s Way by Cameron (& Bryan) p. 12
5. Novel of the Future p. 25, 47
6. D. H. Lawrence ... p 14
7. Novel p. 44, 59
8. Early Diary IV p. 332
9. Gunther Stuhlmann personal letter to Holt 4/21/97
10. Touched With Fire p. 99

2. Two Doors Through the House of Mirrors:
The Real and The Symbolic

I. Two Doors
1. Diary 1 p. 329, 47, 52
2. Incest p. 71
3. Diary 1 p 107
4. Henry & June p. 207
5. Diary 1 p. 273, 71
6. Incest p. 55
7. Anais: Erotic Life of Anais ... by Eitch p. 149
8. Henry & June p. 131
9. Diary 1 p. 42, 334, 290, 256, 290, 256, 52
10. Incest p 261J 199, 26SS 281
11. Diary 1 p. kb9, 11
12. Incest p. 2z1, 284, 308
13. Early Diary II p. 92
14. Diary 1 p. 360
15. Linotte p. 420
16. Incest p. 103
17. Early Diary II p sOB
18. Diary 1 p. 298, 3UO
19. Linotte p. 420, 4B6, 427, 429
20. Early Diary II p. 164
21. Incest p. 152
22. Henry & June p. 26t
23. Linotte p. 512, 470
24. Henry & June p. 231

II. LINOTTE
A.Gypsy in her Blood
Linotte p. 169, 65, 27, 64, 180, 109, 160, 133, 134,
182, 160, 161, 137, 138, 184, 145, 85, 85, 94, 96
B.Inside Out Behind the Past
Linotte p. 204, 206, 228, 114, 149, 150, 198, 311, 367, 316, 365, 395, 397

3. Transcendent Thinker: Influences before D. H. Lawrence &
the Phoenix as Mentor

I. Self-Taught Explorer

1. Linotte p. 63, 103, 90, 194, 240-241, 250, 264, 375, 387, 390-391,
397, 220, 419, 462, 463, 468, 486, 491
2. Early Diary II p viii, 16, 22, 35, 44, 46, 50-51, 54, 86-87, 184, 206,
219, 226, 251, 515, 314-315, 340, 390, 422, 396, 525, 528

II. The Phoenix As Mentor

1. Early Diary III p. 94, 143
2. Preface Of Waste of Timelessness
3. Early Diary III p. 208
4. Early Diary IV p. 266-267
5. Mystic of Sex (Capra Press) p. 13
6. Early Diary IV p. 308
7. Mystic of Sex p. 15
8. Early Diary IV p. 81, 48
9. Mystic of Sex p. 1S
10. Early Diary IV p. 78, 79, 87
11. Mystic of Sex p. 21
12. Early Diary IV p. 374, 378-379
13. D. H. Lawrence: Sex, Literature & Censorship edited by
Harry R. Moore “Sex Versus Loveliness” p.50
14. Early Diary IV p. 285, 379
15. D. H. Lawrence...Study by Anais Nin p. 13,
14, 26, 35-36, 45, 49
16. Diary I p. 106
17. D. H. Lawrence...Study p 63, 102

Growing Wings: Waste of Timelessness vs. House of Incest

Waste of Timelessness

1. Waste ... p. 4
2. Early Diary IV p. 303
3. Waste p. 6
4. Early Diary IV p 75
5. Waste p. 8, 14, 15
6. Stars in My Sky by Valerie Hares p. 89, 90, 92-93,97
7. D. H. Lawrence...Study p. 105
8. Stars p. 97
9. Waste p. 25
10. Early Diary IV p. 35, 242
11. Waste p 27
12. Early Diary IV p. 263
13. Waste p. 34, 40-41, 45, 47
14. Early Diary IV p. d24, 250
15. Waste p. 59, 63, 68-69
16. Henry & June p. 10
17. Waste p. 70, 73-74
18. D. H. Lawrence...Study p. 87
19. Lawrence... ed. by Moore in “Cocksure Women
and Hensure Men” essay p. 48
20. Waste p 75, 81
21. Stars p. 98
22. Early Diary IV p. 402, 4]4, 398, 408
23. Waste p. 87, 94, 89, 92, 101, 104, 105
24. Early Diary IV p. 454, 469, 473

House of Incest

1. Henry Miller by Brassai p. 49, 47, 50
2. Henry & June p. 10
3. Diary I p. 75, 15, 77, 80
4. Early Diary IV p. 424
5. Early Diary II p. 264, 268-269, 271
6. Henry & June p. 130, 133
7. Diary I p 36
8. Stars p. 103
9. House of Incest Preface
10. Incest p. 51, 52
11. House of Incest p 22
12. Henry & June p. 50
13. House of Incest p. 28
14. Henry & June p. l0, 33
15. House of Incest p. 3S
16. Henry & June p. 13, 20, 31
17. Stars p. 105
18. D. H. Lawrence ed. by Moore
“The State of Funk” essay p. 60, 61
19. D. H. Lawrence...Study by Nin p. 99
20. Diary I p. 130
21. Novel of the Future p. 45, 44
22. House of Incest p. 47, 46
23. Incest p. 28
24. Diary I p. 111, 116
25. Incest p. 152
26. Stars by Harms p 106
27. Incest p. l98, 199
28. Stars p 107, lub
29. House of Incest p. 51, S2, B5-, 70
30. Henry Miller by Brassai p. 50
31. House of Incest p. 71, 72

5. Touched by Fire: The Bipolar is “The Double”

“The White Blackbird” — The Bipolar

1. Stars p. 85
2. Collage of Dreams by Spencer p 6
3. Anais, Art, Artists ed by Spencer Preface Vli
4. Anais: Erotic Life or ... by Fitch p.3, 4
5. The White Blackbird ... Capra BacktoBack p 12
6. Linotte p. 9, 65, 104, 124, 333, 385, 420, 422,
426, 441, 444, 445, 451, 453, 458
7. Early Diary II p. 50, 2r, 40, 49, 67, 75,
77, 114, 336-337, 35b, 371
8. Touched With Fire by Jamison p. 165
9. Early Diary II p 372, 417, 450, 454, 462, 476, 482, 508,
513, 514, 102, 103
10. The Compulsion to Create by Kavaler-Adler p 89
11. Touched ... by Jamison p. 126, 151
12. Early Diary II p. 164, 168, 518
13. Early Diary III p. 33, 34, 80, 143, 218, 259
14. Compulsion ... by Adler p. 96
15. Early Diary III p. 285, 286
16. Early Diary IV p. 23, 7/, 95, 96, 113, 120, 128,
17. Touched ... by Jamison p. 190
18. Early Diary IV p. 181, 188, 195, 231, 237, 261-262,
280, 318, 329, 321, 365, 372, 437
19. Touched ... p. 5
20. Early Diary IV p. 487, 489

“The Double”

l. Linotte p. 353, 395, 421, 457, 486
2. Early Diary II p. 93, 92, 123, 208
3. Linotte p. 370, 395, 447, 449, 460
4. Early Diary II p. 524
5. Early Diary III p. 81-82, 80, 83, 154
6. Diary IV p. 23, 56, 57, 69, 78, 7S, 83, 193, 252, 310

Piercing “The Double”

1. Henry & June p. 120, 117, 138, 151, 143
2. Incest p. 145
3. Henry & June p. 166, 156, 246
4. Early Diary II p. 339
5. Linotte p. 429
6. D. H. Lawrence...Study p. 88
7. Early Diary II p. 87, 88, 196, 459, 460
8. Diary I p. 77
9. Henry & June p. 246
10. Incest p. 154, 156, 143, 148, 205
11. Touched ... by Jamison p. 159
12. Incest p. 209, 212, 221, 217

6. Transmutation: Another Stage of Consciousness —
Stella in Streetcar Named Desire before A Spy in the House of Love

Stella

1. Anais Nin: A Bibilography by Franklin p 8-11
2. Cities of the Interior Preface vii
3. Winter of Artifice p. 33, 7
4. H. Lawrence... ed by Moore
“Making Love to Music” essay p. 44
5. Winter of Artifice p. 14, 34,
6. Mystic of Sex p. 39
7. Winter p. 33
8. Lawrence ed by Moore “Love” essay p. 37-38
9. Winter p. 33, 54

A Streetcar Named Desire

l. Diary III p 132
2. Diary IV p. 102
3. Diary V p. 164, 194
4. Tennessee Williams by Falk p. 17, 80, 83
5. A Literate Passsion Miller/Nin letters p 372
6. Winter p. 118
7. A Streetcar Named Desire by Williams p. 6
8. Williams by Falk p. 70, 88
9. Streetcar p. 136, 147
10. Winter p. 54
11. Anais Nin by Oliver Evans p. 210
12. Stella in Winter p. 25, 27
13. Streetcar p. 50, 162
14. Ladders to Fire p 34
15. Streetcar p. 130, 170
16. Stella in Winter p. 19, 66, 67, 28
17. D. H. Lawrence ed. by Moore p. 46
18. Anais...Bibliography by Franklin 33-34
19. Novel of the Future p. 58, 12
20. The Intimate Hour... by Susan Baur reviewed by Anne Bernays in Jan. 19, 1997 NY TIMES p. 16 “However questionable Jung’s behavior was from a moral point of view ... somehow it met the prime obilgation of the therapist toward his patient: to cure her...” (Baur in above reviewed book)
21. A Spy in the House of Love p. 49, 112, 7
22. Diary II p 209
23. Spy p. 22, 39
24. Novel p. 76, 79, 69-70
25. Spy p. 72, 73, 87, 90
26. Williams by Falk p. 53
27. Spy p. 91
28. Henry & June p. 274
29. Incest p. 111, 121
30. Spy p. 102-104, 115, 126, 129, 39, 136-140
31. House of Incest p. 15

7. The Miracle of Metamorphosis: Voice of Djuna in of The Winter of Artifice

The Voice of Djuna

1. Anais ... Bibliography p. 9-11
2. A Woman Speaks ed. by Evelyn Hinz in “Furrawn” p. 231
3. Diary Vol. VII p. 3, 7, 17, 20, 21
4. Henry & June note bottom p. 44, 43
5. The Voice p. 50, 175, 126
6. Anais Nin: An Introduction by Franklin Schneider p. 37, 38
7. Winter p. 157, 163, 162, 170-172, 175

The Winter of Artifice

1. Early Diary III p. 235, 254, 243
2. Under a Glass Bell p. 61
3. Early Diary IV 122, 180, 199
4. A Literate Passion p. 226, 158, 157
5. Henry & June p. 144, 231, 250, 251
6. Incest p. 329
7. Fire by Anais Nin p. 131
8. A Woman Speaks in “the Artist as Magician” p. 199, 198
9. Incest p. 277, 279, 329, 374, 118, 119, 139, 141, 143, 144
10. Early Diary III p. 96
11. Fire p. 23 footnote
12. Incest p. 203, 204, 209, 244, 251
13. Henry & June p. 234
14. Incest p. 73, 74, 79, 82
15. Collage of Dreams by Spencer p. 26
16. Early Diary II p. 297
17. Diary III p. 268
18. Early Diary IV p. 127, 132, 162
19. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths & Secrets
by Walker p. 541-542
20. Anais Nin: Intro... by Franklin/Schneider p. 27
21. Early Diary IV p. 38
22. Anais Nin: Intro by Franklin/Schneider p. 31
23. Winter of Artifice p. 95
24. Henry & June p. 207, 274
25. Incest p. 31
26. Winter p. 87, 97, 119
27. Incest p. 62, 87
28. D. H. Lawrence...Study p. 21

8. Birth and Rebirth of a New Lilith on Earth: The Philosophic
Poet Breathing Propethically In/On Prose

Birth and Rebirth

1. Under A Glass Bell inside cover for first date
appearances of some of the stories
2. Incest p. 374, 375, 374, 381, 383
3. “Birth” in Under Glass Bell p. 99, 100
4. Incest p. 380
5. “Winter of Artifice” in Winter p. 119
6. Incest p. 357 fire p. 144
7. Fire p. 144
8. Early Diary IV p. 307
9. Ladders to Fire p. 139
10. Delta of Venus p. 10
11. Little Birds p. 7
12. “The Labyrinth” in Under Glass p. 65
13. “Bread & Wafer” in Ladders p. 152
14. Delta of Venus Preface p. xi
15. Little Birds p. 75
16. Aphrodisiac (with drawings by Boyce) pages unnumbered

17. Henry & June p. 252
18. “The All-Seeing” in Under p. 77
19. Anais Nin And Her Critics ed. by Philip Jason p. 24, 27

The Philosophic Poet

1. In Favor of the Sensitive Man by Anais Nin in
“On Truth and Reality” p. 57
2. above book “Eroticism in Women” p. 5
3. above book “On Truth...” p. 61, 60, 59, 65
4. Diary I p. 270
5. Novel Of the Future p. 140
6. Anais Nin Reader ed. by Jason p. 277, 279
7. The Mystic of Sex — “Realism & Reality” p. 28,29
8. above book “On Writing” p. 32, 33, 37, 38
9. above book “The Writer & The Symbols” p. 57, 55, 48-49, 41
10. Novel of the Future p. 173

Novel of the Future

1. Novel p. 1, 4.
2. Anais Nin...Bibliography
3. Novel p. 3, 5
4. A Literate Passion p. 380, 347
5. Henry Miller Reader p. 287, 293
6. Novel p. 147, 96, 16, 2S, 39, 151, 169, 173, 175
7. In Favor of Sensitive Man p. 47, 53
8. A Woman Speaks p. 13

Psychosynthesis

1. Manic Depression: Illness of Awakening
by Robert E. Kelly p. 229-231, 243
2. Diary V p 70
3. Diary VII p 246-247
4. Manic Depression... by Kelly p. 25
5. Diary VII p 319

9. Aesthetics is Ethics: Diary I and Aroundabout Anais

Diary 1

1. Early Diary IV p. 433, 475
2. Anais Nin by Nancy Scholar, p. 20-21
3. Diary 1 p. 7, 15, 27, 28, 126, 283, 47, 65, 85, 132,
163, 217, 287, 255, 297, 340, 346, 357, 360

Aroundabout Anais

1. Anais Nin & Her Critics p. 8, 14
2. Anais...Erotic Life p. 217
3. Novel of the Future p. 157, 153-154
4. Anais...Critics p. 11
5. A Casebook on Anais Nin ed. by Zaller p. 133, 143
6. Conversatsons With Anais Nin ed. by Wendy DuBow p. ix
7. Novel of the Future p. 44, 108, 155
8. Conversations p. xi, xix
9. inscription by the author, Deidre Bair
on her copy to Holt of Simone...
10. back cover blurb on Simone...
11. Anais Nin, A Biography by Bair p. xviii
12. Novel of the Future p. 28
13. Anais by Bair p. 373, 374
14. Early Diary IV p. 267, 269, 419, 421
15. Anais by Fitch p. 414
16. Recollections of Anais Nin ed. by Franklin p. ix, 131, 107
17. A Book of Mirrors ed. by Paul Herron in Foreword
by Gunther Stuhlmann p. 411, 17, 37
18. Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems
by Wislawa Szymborska translated and introduced
by Magnus J. Krynski & Robert A. Maguire p. 6
19. The Critical Response to Anais Nin ed. by Philip K. Jason.
p. 177, 113-126
20. Diary I (1931-1934) p. 33
21. The Spirit of Loving ... edited by Emily Hilborn
Sell. p. 62, 77
A SELECTED
Bibliography

Bibliographical Note: The items included here are in addition to works by or about Anais Nin compiled in Anais Nin: A Bibliography by Benjamin Franklin V of the University of South Carolina (Kent State University Press, 1973) and updated checklist through 1976 by Reesa Marcinozyk (Under the Sign of Pisces: Anais Nin and Her Circle, newsletter published by Ohio State University Libraries, edited by Richard R. Centing for a number of years from 1970 until Anais: An International Journal edited by Gunther Stuhlmann available through the Anais Nin Foundation in Los Angeles, California.)
Anais Nin: An Understanding of Her Art is the first book to make extensive reference to the Early Diaries as well as Nin’s characteristic bipolar temperament and the marked influence of D. H. Lawrence on her work and philosophy. The two recent biographies on Nin by Noel Riley Fitch and Deidre Bair, along with Wendy Du Bow’s edited Conversations with Anais Nin, her myriad interviews have also been consulted and quoted under “Fair Use Law” as well as recent prose by contemporaries in Recollections of Anais Nin edited by Benjamin Franklin V (Ohio University Press, 1996) and the more extensive 450 page volume, Book of Mirrors edited by Paul Herron (Sky Blue Press, 13149 Balfour Huntington Woods, MI 48070, 1997 release.) There are, of course, several academic books of criticism available after Oliver Evans’ Anais Nin (1968).

Bair, Deidre. Anais Nin. A Biography. (NYC: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995).
Baur, Susan. The Intimate Hour. Love and Sex in Psychotherapy. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997).
Boyce, John. Aphrodisiac: Erotic Drawings by John Boyce for Selected Passages from the Works of Anais Nin. (NYC: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1976).
Brassai. Henry Miller: The Paris Years translated from the French by Timothy Bent (NYC: Arcalde Publishing, 1975,1995).
Cameron, Julia (with Mark Bryan). The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Highor Creativity. (NYC: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam Book, 1992).
Du Bow, Wendy, ed. Conversations with Anais Nin (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1994).
Durrell, Laurence, ed. & intro. The Henry Miller Reader. (NYC: New Directions, 1959).
Evans, Oliver. Anais Nin. (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968).
Falk, Signi. Tennessee Williams. (New Haven, Conn: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1961).
Fitch, Noel Riley. The Erotic Life of Anais Nin. (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1993).
Franklin V, Benjamin. Anais Nin: A Bibliography. The Serif Series: Number 29, Bibliographies and Checklists, William White, general editor. (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1973).
————: Recollections of Anais Nin. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996).
Franklin/Schneider. Anais Nin: An Introduction. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1979).
Harms, Valerie. Stars in My Sky: Zaria Montessori, Anais Nin, Frances Steloff. (Weston, CT: Magic Circle Press, 1976)
Herron, Paul, editor. Anais Nin: A Book of Mirrors. (Huntington Woods, MI: Sky Blue Press, 1996).
Hinz, Evelyn, editor. A Woman Speaks: The Lectures. Seminars, and Interviews of Anais Nin. (Chicago, IL: The Swallow Press, 1975).
Hoy, Nancy Jo. The Power to Dream: Interviews with Women in the Creative Arts. (NYC: Global City Press, 1995).
Jamison, Kay Redfield. Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (NYC: Free Press/ Macmillan, 1993).
Jason, Philip K., ed. Anais Nin Reader. (Chicago: The Swallow Press, Inc., 1973).
Anais Nin and Her Critics. (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993).
————: The Critical Response to Anais Nin. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
Kavaler-Adler, Susan. The Compulsion to Create: A Psychoanalytic Study of Women Artists. (NY: Routledge, 1993).
Kelly, Robert E. Manic Depression: Illness or Awakening. (NY: Knowledge Unlimited, 1996).
Lawrence, D. H. The Complete Short Stories Vol I-III (NYC: The Viking Press, 5th printing 1967).
Moore, Harry T., editor. D. H. Lawrence: Sex, Literature, and Censorship. (NYC: The Viking Press, 1959).
Nin, Anais. “The Story of My Printing Press” The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Tradition and How-To edited by Bill Henderson. (Yonkers, NY: Pushcart Book Press,1973).
Waste of Timelessness and other stories. (Weston, CT: Magic Circle Press, l977).
The Mystic of Sex: A First Look at D. H. Lawrence and other writings 1931-1974. (Santa Barbara, Ca.: Capra Press, 1995).
The White Blackbird and Other Writings. (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1985).
Scholar, Nancy. Anais Nin. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984).
Sell, Emily Hilburn, ed. The Spirit of Loving ... (Boston, MA: Shambala Press, Inc. 1995).
Spencer, Sharon, ed. Anais, Art and-Artists: A Collection of Essays. (Greewood, FL: The Penkevell Pub. Co., 1986).
————: Collage of Dreams: The Writings of Anais Nin expanded edition. (NYC: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981).
Szymborska, Wislawa. Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems translated and introduced by Magnus J. Krynshi and Robert A. Maguire. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983).
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. (NYC: New Directions, 1947).
Zaller, Robert, ed. A Casebook on Anais Nin. (NY: New American Library, 1974).
Index

Allendy, Rene, 33, 34, 48, 49, 50, 62, 63, 78
Aphrodisiac, 69, 70
Artaud, Antonin, 49, 63
The Artist’s Way, 9
Bair, Deidre, 81
Balakian, Anna, 70, 82
Barnes, Djuna, 59
Baur, Susan, 56
Bly, Robert, 76
Bossnet, 19
Brassai, 33, 37
Carteret, Jean, 70
Compulsion to Create, 42-43
Culmell, Rosa Nin, 14-18, 32, 46, 57
Dubow, Wendy, 81
Emerson, 19, 20
Erskine, John, 22, 28, 43, 48, 57, 62
Falk, 54
Fitch, Noel Riley, 38, 80, 82
Fitzgerald, F. Scott & Zelda, 29
Franklin V, Benjamin, 49, 82
Guiler, Hugh, 20, 21, 29, 32, 34, 41, 44, 45, 48, 57, 61, 63, 67, 81, 82
Harms, Valerie, 26-27, 34-36, 38
Henke, 84
Herron, Paul 82-83
Jamison, Key Redfield, 11, 41, 43-45, 50
Jason, Philip 80, 83
Joan of Arc, 17, 36
Jung, Carl, 68, 74, 76
Kelly, Robert E., 76, 77
Lawrence, D. H. (on or about), 9, 21-23, 27, 30-31, 33, 35, 36, 40, 78, 85
Madame Bovary, 57
Miller, Henry, 29, 30, 33, 47, 50, 53, 54, 57, 59, 62, 64, 67, 71, 74, 78
Miller (Mansfield), June, 58-61, 63
Nin, Anais, works by,
Cities of the Interior, 52, 66
Ladders to Fire, 55, 59, 68
Children of the Albatross, 70
The Four-Chambered Heart, 73
A Spy in the House of Love, 55-58, 71
D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, 30, 36, 49, 79
Delta of Venus, 69
Diary of Anais Nin, 1931-1934, 9, 12, 23, 37, 50, 71, 76, 78, 79, 85
Diary of Anais Nin, Vol 2, 1934-1939, 56, 65
Diary of Anais Nin, Vol 3, 1939-1944, 53, 61,63
Diary of Anais Nin, Vol 4, 1944-1947, 31, 53
Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 5, 1947-1955, 53, 76
Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 6, 1955-1966, 81
Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 7, 1966-1974, 77
Early Diary of Anais Nin, LINOTTE, 1914-1920, 9, 13-16, 18, 39, 46, 49
Early Diary of Anais Nin, Vol 2, 1920-1923, 18-20, 40-42, 46, 49
Early Diary of Anais Nin, Vol 3, 1923-1927, 42, 43, 47, 53
Early Diary of Anais Nin, Vol 4, 1927-1931, 43, 45, 47, 62, 68, 78, 82
Fire: from “A Journal of Love” 1934-1937, 68
Henry & June (late 1931 to end of 1932) also from unexpurgated diary as
is Fire and Incest, 14, 35, 48, 50, 57, 63-65
House of Incest, 13, 27, 29, 33-37, 53, 56, 58, 60-64
Incest: from “A Journal of Love”, 1931-1934, 13, 35, 37, 49,
50, 57, 62, 63, 66-68
In Favor of the Sensitive Man, 76
Little Birds, 69
Novel of the Future, 36, 57, 71, 73-75, 80, 81
“On Writing,” 53
“Realism & Reality,” 53
Under a Glass Bell, 10, 59, 67-68
“The Voice,” 52, 59-61
Waste of Timelessness, 21, 22, 25-31, 44
“The White Blackbird,” 39, 40
Winter of Artifice (all references), 52, 54, 55, 59, 62, 65, 68
Woman Speaks, A, 76
Nin, Joaquin (Anais’ father), 14-16, 19, 29, 42, 45-51, 57, 62
Panes — Fiction as Therapy, 72
Poe, Edgar Allan, 17, 29, 50, 61
Pole, Rupert, 18, 63, 81
Proust, Marcel, 22, 60, 62
Ragnarok Press, 10
Rank, Otto, 12, 13, 53, 60, 62, 64, 70, 71, 79
Rimbaud (Season in Hell), 60
Scholar, Nancy, 79
Spencer, Sharon, 38, 65, 73, 80
Spirit of Loving, 85
Stars in My Sky, 34, 38
Steloff, Frances, 54
Streetcar Named Desire, 29, 53-58, 68, 72
Stuhlmann, Gunther, 10, 11, 31, 33, 36, 49, 52, 56, 69, 78, 82
Sukenick, Lynn-Luria, 84
Well of Loneliness, 34
West, Rebecca, 63
Wharton, Edith, 63, 64
Williams, Tennessee, 53, 72, 74
Zaller, Robert, 80-81
Zymborska, 83

AFTERWORD
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

In the early Sixties at the University of Illinois (Chicago, Navy Pier campus), Rochelle’s first English Composition professor suggested to her class, “If you really want to understand a writer, become a specialist in that person’s work.” Simultaneously, in Karl Shapiro’s poetry course, she was introduced by a friend to Anais Nin’s poetic short stories, Under a Glass Bell. Rochelle immediately decided this writer would be her lifelong study. A few years later, Rochelle wrote Anais Nin a fan letter, including a poem created in response to Winter of Artifice. To her delight, Anais Nin responded.
Accepted into the Fiction Workshop at the University of lowa (lowa City, 1968), Rochelle then wrote an essay for a book collecting contest and won first prize with her growing Anais Nin collection. She decided Anais Nin would be her subject for the mandatory written and oral examination at the end of the two year program, along with a long poetic story and novella she wrote as her MFA thesis, each published separately a few years later. In her last semester, she enrolled in a printing course taught by the late Harry Duncan; with D. H. Stefanson, she formed Ragnarok Press (1970-1978), directly inspired by her mentor’s own experience in Greenwich Village.
Not long thereafter, Rochelle was astounded to be invited by Anais Nin to read with her at the University of California in Berkeley, their first meeting. As a graduate student and beyond, Rochelle had been reviewing numerous books sent her by this famous, literary friend. She also had become an official member of the Anais Nin Circle, featured often in Under the Sign Pisces newsletter edited by Richard Centing. At this time, Rochelle was also creating varied glass case library exhibits on Anais’ work and that by Circle members while in Sioux City, Iowa (and, subsequently, in numerous other states).
Shortly before Anais Nin’s death in 1977, Rochelle was invited by Deena Metzger of the Women’s Center of Los Angeles to give a talk and had the opportunity to meet her mentor the second and last time, although she admits that often she has been visited since by the spirit of Anais. In 1978, she edited Valhalla 5 — Networks, the first festschrift anthology honoring Anais Nin.

***

When Rochelle was an adolescent, she had decided she would publish in every genre which she continues to do. Her work has appeared annually in book form through varied presses since 1970. This critical study satisfies another genre and offers new information regarding Anais Nin, who labeled Rochelle in a personal letter, “the Queen of Creativity.”
In addition to teaching a score of years in seven states (including on St. Croix), Rochelle has been a professional dancer, painter, printer and stone sculptor.
She has had her own book review column in The Pilot (Southern Pines, NC) for the past twenty years. Her most recent books include: Tree of Life poetry duet with Marie Asner of Kansas (KS: Chiron Press ‘96); Three Southwest Mysteries with her mother, Olga G. Holt (Phoenix, AZ: Rose Shell Press ‘96); Infamous in Our Prime prose duet with Virginia Love Long of North Carolina (Chgo: Scars Publications and Design ‘97). Dracula’s Lost Sister is forthcoming from Dark Regions Press in ‘98 as well as a larger volume of poetry from Scars Publications and Design titled “Shadows Full of Secrets.”
Since 1995, Rochelle has lived in Fort Myers, Florida where she teaches part time at International College, leads special workshops at Watermark Books, and is monthly columnist (“Panache”) for Gulf Coast Woman. In the Summer of 1997, she received a grant from Fl. Humanities Council for her multicultural novel of the future project: “Coming of Age Together: A Shared Identity,” now an approved statewide lecture. Her philosophy of life matches Anais’: “We are all giving birth to each other.”

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Bopok design Copyright Scars Publications and Design. Writings copyright Rochelle Holt. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission.