Sins of the Nins

by

Katha Pollitt

MY idea of hell is to be stranded on a desert island with nothing to read but Anais Nin's diaries, but some people, apparently, can't get enough of them. Her publishers, for instance. Having brought out seven volumes drawn from Nin's adult journals (1931-74) and supplemented those with four early volumes covering her teens and 20's, they are starting all over again with "unexpurgated" versions of the same material.

Carroll Tyson

"Incest," the second volume in this new series (it follows "Henry and June"), displays all the hallmarks of Nin's style -- tremulous and vaporous prose, staggering self-absorption and endless analysis of this or that tiny flutter of emotion. But like all unexpurgated books it is an improvement on the bowdlerized version, if only because it has more sex.

A lot of sex. "Incest" finds Nin living outside Paris and conducting overlapping affairs with Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud and both of her psychoanalysts, Rene Allendy and Otto Rank -- as well as vague and complicated flirtations with Henry's wife, June, Henry's roommate, Fred Perles, and just about every other man mentioned in the index. How she managed to accomplish all this while keeping her banker husband, Hugh Guiler, in the dark is left rather mysterious, especially given that Miller seems to have moved in every time her husband left town, and sometimes when he was home. "When is that fellow Henry going to leave?" he asks plaintively at one point.

These affairs all follow the same pattern: outrageous hero worship and masochistic self-abasement ("I give the woman's only gift: love, love, love") lead to suppressed resentment ("I must always make myself believe I am making a sacrifice for somebody"), disillusionment and a new infatuation with someone else. I found myself losing patience with this cycle, which Nin tended to attribute to the emotional insufficiency of everyone but herself: only she is capable of love, love, love.

But no question about it, Nin is much more readable as a female Don Juan than she was as the dreamy princess in the tower depicted in the earlier series of diaries. When she is not rhapsodizing about her feelings, she can write earthily and entertainingly about sex, although unfortunately not in a way that can be quoted in a family newspaper.

The central "unexpurgated" event of "Incest" is, well, incest. Nin had an affair with her father. It is not quite as horrifying as it sounds: she had seen her father, a well-known pianist and composer, only once in the 20 years following his desertion of the family when she was 11. As depicted here, father and daughter are a matched pair: equally self-infatuated and self-mythologizing, equally sex-obsessed and equally crazy. Her steamy account of their trysts exudes a sense of triumph: at last the cold, aloof father who destroyed her childhood appreciates her at her true worth! But eventually father, too, is found wanting -- as indeed he was.

I was less impressed by the other revelation uncovered in "Incest": the gruesome stillbirth described in the earlier published version of this diary was actually a late-term abortion (Miller was the father). That Nin would have disguised this fact when she published the passage in 1966 is, I think, significant: it shows that she was hardly the bold truth-teller of women's secret experiences that she claimed to be. She knew just how far she could go without risking real controversy and calling into question her image of ethereal femininity and selfless nurturance. In the 1960's, when abortion was illegal, it would have done some good for a well-known older woman to have gone public about her abortion. Now, no thanks to Nin, it's old news.

The history of the abortion passage does, however, raise the question of reliability: how far should we trust the "unexpurgated" diary? After all, we were led to believe that the first series of diaries constituted an amazingly veracious document, in which a woman laid bare her inner life and the mysteries of womanhood. Now we are asked to accept "Henry and June" and "Incest" on the same grounds, although in important respects they falsify the earlier volumes. Like its predecessor, however, the new series consists merely of extracts of the voluminous original manuscript, so how do we know that it, too, is not a carefully crafted cut-and-paste job that omits whatever material undermines the image of Nin that her executors wish the world to see?

The answer is that we do not know. "Incest" should probably be read as middling autobiographical fiction that sometimes rises to the level of first-rate pornography. For the real Anais Nin, and the real story told in the diary, we'll have to wait for her biography. SOME SENSE OF GUILT WEIGHED DOWN ON MY JOY

"I don't feel toward you as if you were my daughter."

"I don't feel as if you were my father."

"What a tragedy. What are we going to do about it? I have met the woman of my life, the ideal, and it is my daughter! I cannot even kiss you as I would like to. I'm in love with my own daughter!"

"Everything you feel, I feel." . . .

Then I wanted to leave him. Still, in some remote region of my being, a revulsion. And he feared the reaction in me. I wanted to run away. I wanted to leave him. But I saw him so vulnerable. And there was something terrible about his lying on his back, crucified, while yet so potent -- something compelling. And I remembered how in all my loves there has been a reaction away -- that I had always been so afraid. And this flight, I would not hurt him with. No, not after the years of pain my last rejection had caused him. But at this moment, after the passion, I had at least to go to my room, to be alone. I was poisoned by this union. I was not free to enjoy the splendor of it, the magnificence of it. Some sense of guilt weighed down on my joy and continued to weigh down on me, but I could not reveal this to him. He was free -- he was passionately free -- he was older and more courageous. I would learn from him. I would at last be humble and learn something from my father!

We spent another day in his room. He moved with great difficulty and pain, yet he shaved and bathed. He sat in an armchair and read me his manuscript on musical opinions and sketches. In between, there were autobiographical sketches and poems -- romantic poems. The whole book was romantic, idealistic, not as muscular or as dynamic as his own life. It is his own life which is a masterpiece.

At night -- caresses. He begs me to undress and lie at his side. His caressing suppleness and mine, the feelings which run from head to toes -- vibrations of all the senses, a thousand new vibrations . . . a new union, a unison of delicacies, subtleties, exaltations, keener awareness and perception and tentacles. A joy which spreads in vast circles, a joy for me without climax because of that deeper, inner holding back. Yet missing only the climax and revealing by this very absence what intensity he and I could bring to the envelopment, to the radius and rainbows of a climax.

We sat up until two or three, talking. "What a tragedy that I find you and cannot marry you." It was he who was preoccupied with enchanting me. It was he who talked, who was anxious, who displayed all his seductions. It was I who was being courted, magnificently. And he said, "How good it is that I should be courting you. Women have always sought me out, courted me. I have only been gallant with them."

Endless stories about women. Exploits. Teaching me at the same time the last expertness in love -- the games, the subtleties, new caresses. I had at moments the feeling that here was Don Juan indeed, Don Juan who had possessed more than a thousand women, and I was lying there learning from him, and he was telling me how much talent I had, how amazing an amorous sensibility, how beautifully tuned and responsive I was. . . . "You walk like a courtesan from Greece. You seem to offer your sex when you walk." -- From "Incest."

Credits:  This article originally appeared in 1992 in The New York Times.