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enjoy this Rochelle Lynn Holt writing in the 2010 RE-release of her book Anais Nin: an Understanding of her Art |
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Enjoy this perfect-bound paperback book! Click on the cover or any linked text to order this book. |
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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.
