Hard-Boiled Fiction and Dark Romanticism, Vol. 19 Book

Anais Nin is a fascinating woman, and this book is a solid survey of her life. And what a life Fitch tells us about. Nin, born in the early years of the 20th century, recorded almost all of her experiences and thoughts from the age of 11 in 35,000 pages of diaries until she passed in 1977. In those pages she traced love affairs, literary failures and achievements, her incestuous affair with her own father when she was an adult, her experiences as both a therapist and a patient when Freudian analysis was dominant, her bicoastal bigamy when she had one husband in NYC and one in California, neither knowing of the other for decades, and her eventual arrival as a celebrity in the last decade of her life.

So why only three stars? Because despite the dramatic material, there is very little drama to the prose. It is far too academic at times, but lacks the poetry and the passion that Nin deserves, as well as a sense of staging. There is instead a sense of cramming, of listing in great detail all the people Anais knew, rather than spending more time with deeper discussion of fewer. One example--Anais was surrounded from about 1940 on by a coterie of much younger gay men. There was a bit of the "Judy Garland" effect going on. But instead of focusing on the four or five most important, the author gives a bit about each young man. And fails to really explain the pattern effectively. It would be interesting to learn more about how someone who was, by our standards, quite anti-gay in many of her attitudes, could persist in these lengthy and sometimes intimate friendships.

That said, the book does make some important observations. The author convinced me that Nin was a victim of her father's sexual abuse before the age of 11, and that this abuse lingered in its effects throughout Nin's life, leading to her eventual seduction of/by her father after 19 years of separation. It also explains how she went from a sexually repressed, unconsumated 2 years of Catholic marriage to a remarkably active sex life (trying to avoid the pejorative term "promiscuous"). Her list of lovers is stunningly long, with some famous literary figures among them, including Edmund Wilson, Henry Miller, and Antonin Artaud, who was much more known for his homosexual liaisons.

Much more important is her literary output. And here, as has long been known, we find that every novel and short story was ripped from her diary, occasionally altered in various details, but always based on fact. And yet--the diaries were constantly altered, sometimes to protect her first husband from her affairs, other times to change reality for Nin's own ego. When finally published, they were heavily edited, with all sex removed, and many other facts omitted.

So we are left with an enigma, a woman who became a feminist icon of sorts, who lied to her public about supporting herself, hid BOTH her husbands from that public, when it was in fact those two men, particularly the first, who supported her financially (and emotionally) for almost her entire life.

Anais Nin--riveting and talented and seductive--led a life that most women her age could only dream of. She was relentlessly self-made, and self-remade.

Oh, forgot to note one other disappointment--I've seldom seen a major press biography with a more pathetic collection of photos of the main subject. When you google Nin, you come across all kinds of unbelievable images of her in her prime, some with Miller. This book, you barely see her face in most of the pics, and the two of Miller show him at a distance. You don't see either of her husbands very well except late in life.