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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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“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).
