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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 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)
