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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, 2d Rev. Ed. Anaïs Nin Born: Paris, France; February 21, 1903 Died: Los Angeles, California; January 14, 1977 Principal Long Fiction House of Incest, 1936 Winter of Artifice, 1939 Winter of Artifice: Three Novelettes, 1945 (contains Winter of Artifice, "Stella," and "The Voice") This Hunger, 1945 Cities of the Interior: A Continuous Novel, 1959 (contains Ladders to Fire, 1946; Children of the Albatross, 1947; The Four-Chambered Heart, 1950; A Spy in the House of Love, 1954; Solar Barque, 1958) Seduction of the Minotaur, 1961 Collages, 1964 Other Literary Forms Anaïs Nin published numerous volumes of perceptive literary criticism. Highly acclaimed, her first book of nonfiction, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, appeared in 1932. In 1968, near the end of her career, she wrote The Novel of the Future, partly as an attempt to explain the literary philosophy that inspired her innovative fiction. In 1976, a collection of her essays appeared, entitled In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays. During the last decade of her life, Nin was extremely active as a public speaker; her lectures, seminars, and interviews have been edited by Evelyn J. Hinz and published as A Woman Speaks (1975). Nin's published short stories, like her criticism, span her career. The most distinguished collection is Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories (1944). Her apprentice writing is available in another collection, Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories (1977), while two volumes of erotica were published after Nin's death: Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979). In addition to her works of fiction and criticism, Nin's extensive diary has been published. Edited from a vast manuscript, this autobiographical work has appeared in two series. The first series, entitled The Diary of Anaïs Nin, comprises seven volumes which appeared periodically since 1966. The second series contains two volumes, Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914-1920 (1978) and The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume Two, 1920-1923 (1982). Achievements Nin's achievement in literature is of two distinct kinds: artistic and sociological. Strongly influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust, and D. H. Lawrence, Nin conceived of and developed a uniquely personal approach to style and structure that places her within the modernist tradition as it evolved in the French literature of the early decades of the twentieth century. Nin persisted in articulating, refining, and extending an avowedly "feminine" ideal of the novel; this resulted in lyrical novels in which the imagistic manner of the poet is fused with the psychological penetration of the novelist. In her treatment of character, of time and of space, Nin belongs with such writers as Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Anna Kavan. Nin's sociological importance is related to her intention to create a specifically "feminine" novel in which the emphasis is on the evocation of feeling, and to portray as deeply and as honestly as possible an authentically female emotional experience. In this respect, her achievement may be compared with that of Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Marguerite Duras, and a number of French writers, including Annie LeClerc, Hélène Cixous, Monique Witting, and Julia Kristeva. The audience for Nin's novels is smaller than for either her diary or her collections of erotica. As the diary has increased Nin's audience, it has also brought her fiction to the attention of well-qualified critics and scholars, many of whom have been able to interpret it in ways that make it more accessible to a general readership accustomed to the conventions of realism. Considering the climate of growing respect for and interest in Nin's novels, it seems that her reputation as a literary artist is now securely established. Biography On February 21, 1903, Anaïs Nin was born in Paris, the oldest child of musicians Joaquin Nin and Rosa Culmell-Nin. Her parents’ marriage was turbulent, and in 1913, Joaquin Nin deserted his family at Archachon, France. The following year, Rosa Culmell-Nin transported her daughter and two sons, Thorvald and Joaquin, to the United States. For some years, they lived in New York City and in Queens, actively participating in the lively Cuban community there, many of whose members were musicians. Nin has recorded this period of her life in Linotte. What stands out most poignantly is her inconsolable grief at the loss of her father and her intense worship of her mother. At this time, Nin's aspiration to become an artist of one sort or another strongly manifested itself, and her account of her adolescence is a rich study of the formative years of an artist. In 1918, Nin left school in order to manage the household for her mother, who worked for Lord and Taylor as a special buyer for the Cuban clientele, and in 1923, Nin married Hugh P. Guiler (known as an engraver and filmmaker under the name of Ian Hugo). As a young married woman, Nin lived in France. Marriage caused her to experience intense conflicts which she has described and analyzed in her diary. During those years, as in adolescence, Nin continued to write, and in 1932, she published her first book, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study. This work brought about the explosive friendship with Henry and June Miller which she describes in the first published diary. Nin and Miller maintained a relationship until Nin's death. In Paris during the 1930’s, Nin embarked upon a lifelong devotion to psychotherapy. Her therapeutic relationship with the renowned Viennese psychoanalyst Otto Rank is recounted in the first volume of The Diary of Anaïs Nin. An independent, original, and forceful thinker whose special area of interest was the artist, Rank was of great assistance to Nin in the fulfillment of her artistic aspirations. His influence on her was so persuasive that for a time she actually considered making a living as a lay psychoanalyst. For a few months in 1934, she lived in New York and assisted Rank with his practice. In 1935, however, she resumed her literary work and returned to France to rejoin her husband, but with the outbreak of World War II, she again returned to the United States. This move in 1939 was to become permanent. It was not easy for Nin to give up her "romantic life" in Paris, as she called it, and her difficulty understanding Americans’ disdain for the arts is a recurrent theme of her diary in the 1940's and 1950’s. Throughout her life, Nin maintained many friendships with writers and other artists. Among her friends and acquaintances were Lawrence Durrell, Robert Duncan, James Merrill, and Kenneth Patchen; performers Canada Lee, Josephine Premice, and Louise Rainer; Caresse Crosby, proprietor of the Black Sun Press; composer Edgard Varèse and his wife, translator Louise Varèse; collage artist Janko Varda; and the owner of the influential Gotham Book Mart, Frances Steloff. Even though Nin had widespread contacts among writers and artists in New York City and on the West Coast, she experienced continual frustration in the publishing world. On the whole, editors and critics were either hostile to her work or simply ignored it. The breakthrough of this period was the acceptance by Alan Swallow, founder of the famed Swallow Press then located in Denver, Colorado, of the five works that constitute Cities of the Interior: A Continuous Novel. For many years, Nin was an underground literary figure with a small but enthusiastic following. In 1966, Nin's status changed suddenly; she had already published all her fiction, the last book, Collages, appearing in 1964. When Harcourt Brace and World, with The Swallow Press, brought out the first volume of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Nin quickly became a public figure. Because the content of the work expressed the feelings of many women who were experiencing deep evolutionary changes in their own lives, Nin involuntarily became a spokesperson for the women's movement. She achieved the "dialogue with the world" for which she had longed since childhood. During the remaining years of Nin's life, individual volumes of her diary continued to appear, and Nin, although viewed as controversial by leaders of the women's movement, received considerable public acclaim. Traveling throughout the United States, she gave hundreds of talks at colleges and universities and undertook trips to various countries, including Sweden and Bali. In 1970, she was awarded the French Prix Sévigné, and in 1974, she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Nin's books have been translated into all the major Western languages as well as Serbo-Croatian and Japanese. Analysis It was natural that Anaïs Nin should grow up desiring to be an artist. Her father was a friend of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Before Nin's parents separated, their household was filled with the aura of the fin de siècle Symbolist movement. The Symbolists’ ideas about art had a decisive and lasting influence on Nin, although she greatly transformed the influences she absorbed in the process of adapting them to the expressive needs of her own temperament. Like the Symbolists, Nin believed that phenomena possess hidden meanings, significances that escape most people. The artist's task is to penetrate surfaces to reveal the truths they conceal. "The symbol," she wrote, "is an acknowledgement of the emotional and spiritual content of every act and every object around us." Equipped with heightened perception and expressive talent, the artist can interpret the vast confusing world of phenomena, revealing essences in a world of masks and misleading surfaces. Nin described a story as "a quest for meaning." With the Symbolists, too, and with the later Surrealists, Nin shared a positive attitude toward dream and fantasy. Her books are poetic defenses of her belief in the unconscious as a source of the visions and imaginary experiences that complement verifiable reality, compensating for its limitations and endowing it with the richness of mental play that "reality" is not capable of providing. Nin stressed the positive aspects of fantasy in order to balance what she perceived as American society's mistrust, fear, and even condemnation of any sort of activity that is not directly productive in a materialistic way. Nin's literary aspiration was formidable; she wanted to express passionately and powerfully that of which others were not aware, or if they were, could not express because they did not possess a creative medium. Throughout her life, Nin was searching for "another kind of language, the inspirational, which is one that penetrates our unconscious directly and doesn’t need to be analyzed or interpreted in a cerebral way. It penetrates us in the way that music does, through the senses." That is why Nin, like so many other twentieth century writers, borrowed as widely as possible from the nonverbal arts. "My only structure," she wrote, "is based on three forms of art - painting, dancing, music - because they correspond to the senses I find atrophied in literature today." Inspired by many artists, including Claude Debussy, Paul Klee, her friend Janko Varda, Richard Lippold, Jean Tinguely, Edgard Varèse, and many others, Nin looked not so much to poets (although Arthur Rimbaud influenced her style as well as her ideas), as to those novelists who were masters of a lyrical style: D. H. Lawrence, Jean Giraudoux, Pierre Jean Jouve, Djuna Barnes, and, above all, Marcel Proust. Nin's approach to the novel was that of a poet with a heightened and highly developed sense of language. Oliver Evans, who wrote the first book-length study of her work, called Nin "one of the best imagists writing in this country today." The image was her indispensable medium of expression; free association, which she learned to trust as a patient in psychotherapy, became the process through which she allowed literary structures to emerge. Always, Nin's subject was the self in its evolution, especially the self in relationships with others; her perspective was always psychological (she called psychology her "philosophy" and psychoanalysis her "school"), although her books do not demonstrate any particular school of psychoanalytical thought. Dispensing with conventional plots and with the framework of linear chronology, Nin portrayed her characters in a series of "shots" that derive their power from the carefully selected detail of their imagery. Her language, never purely decorative, is metaphorical in a truly organic sense. It is the language of lyrical poetry; the essence is compressed into a few words or phrases. Nin does not describe, she interprets, and in the act of interpretation, she recreates her subjects. To know Nin's characters, the reader, too, must interpret their action, their gestures, look beneath the surfaces. Free association creates its own unique structures. Nin's writing is filled with patterns that are natural and spontaneous, having emerged from the associative flow of images. The form of her books is organic. Repetitions, inversions, and superimpositions are artfully arranged into significant patterns. Increasingly in Nin's later prose, readers will discover improvisatory flights in which images are treated as are themes in jazz. Fluency, fluidity, a sense of motion as well as continuity are what Nin sought in her fiction, an orchestration of a great many elements into a composition that moves through time horizontally and vertically at the same instant, an orchestration that expresses emotion with sensuousness and with emotional power that are impossible, she believed, to achieve in conventional realistic fiction. House of Incest House of Incest is not, technically speaking, a novel, but it is pertinent as being the source, as Nin herself said, of all her later fiction. House of Incest is the earliest and most extreme example of her "symphonic writing." It also introduces the essential questions of her lifelong exploration of the problem of reconciling human love with the needs of ever-evolving, mobile people, always in the process of transformation, growing through the process of change. A prose poem, House of Incest was envisioned by Nin as a woman's version of Rimbaud's famed confession, Une Saison en enfer (1873, A Season in Hell, 1932). She wrote the book between 1932 and 1936, when she was intensely involved with psychotherapy, and it is composed entirely of dreams that have been cut, altered, polished, and artfully arranged to express an agonizing journey into the psyche of the nameless first-person narrator. Her suffering is caused by the sundering of feeling from sensuality, of emotion from sexuality, of body from soul. House of Incest is filled with images of fragmentation and mutilation. Like A Season in Hell, Nin's prose poem is a confession. The narrator yearns to express her pain and to confess that even when she imagines that she loves another, it is only a projection of herself. In the other, then, she loves only herself. The "house" of the title refers to the self, perhaps specifically to the body; "incest" suggests the sterility of feeling imprisoned inside this self, unable to transcend its boundaries through the supreme act of loving another. Two types of "incest" are suggested by the book's two personae, both of whom strongly attract the narrator. They are Sabina, lush, sensuous, and irresponsible, freely engaging in sex without emotional commitment; and Jeanne, an aristocrat with a crippled leg, a woman who "strangles" her guitar when she tries to make it produce music. Jeanne is hopelessly in love with her brother. The emotional damage caused by such an inverted fixation is explored in Nin's later works, "The Voice," Winter of Artifice, and "Under a Glass Bell" (from the story collection with the same title). The extreme difficulty of achieving a stable, committed love while continuing to "turn and change" is at the center of all Nin's novels. A positive resolution appears only in the later books, Seduction of the Minotaur and Collages, both of which are lighter in tone than earlier works. Nin's passionate advocacy of love, all forms of love, suggests an affinity between her work and that of the Surrealists. In this respect and also in the great importance placed upon the unconscious and the dream, Nin is an ally of Surrealism. At the same time, her methods of writing were opposed to those stated emphatically by André Breton in his famous manifestos and by other Surrealist poets. (In The Novel of the Future, Nin took up the question of the relationship of her writing to Surrealism, perhaps because so often her work has been erroneously labeled surreal.) Winter of Artifice Winter of Artifice comprises three "novelettes" (Nin's term): "Stella," Winter of Artifice, and "The Voice." Written in 1944, when Nin was planning a series of interconnected novels and struggling with the psychological problems of the woman artist, "Stella" explores the failure of connection between a woman's personal life and her work; this failure is caused by a neurosis that is unchallenged. As a film star, Stella is much more glamorous, vital, self- assured, and daring than in private life (her "mask" may be said to dominate her "self"). The contrast is so great that when Stella sits in the audience watching one of her own films, she is never recognized. The most important object in her apartment is a "very large, very spacious Movie Star bed of white satin," which she usually occupies alone. The connection that Nin sought between the personal life and the artistic expression of this life does not occur for Stella. Like others, she has been damaged by her childhood, but she has done nothing to repair this damage. Because Stella "did not grow," Nin decided not to include her as one of the major characters in Cities of the Interior. Viewed as a psychological portrait of a narcissist, however, "Stella" is an insightful piece of work, and it is brilliantly expressed. When evaluated exclusively as art, "The Voice" is one of Nin's most original and daring pieces. It is both an extended portrait of a kind and self- neglectful psychotherapist (perhaps suggested by Otto Rank), and an animated essay or exposition of ideas through a seemingly random selection of characters and incidents. "The Voice" is a virtuoso piece that spins off from contrasting motions: soaring, plummeting, floating, sinking, spiraling, rushing, and flowing; it is an excellent example of Nin's deft way of translating characters and incidents into imagery. The center of this active world is a psychoanalyst's office located in a skyscraper. Tortured New Yorkers, The Voice's patients include Djuna (who becomes one of the principals in Cities of the Interior), a young violinist who wishes to be released from lesbianism; Mischa, a cellist whose emotions are paralyzed; and Lilith, who suffers from frigidity. The Voice himself falls in love with Lilith, the only one of his patients who can see beyond her own needs to the hungers of the man whose voice is so comforting to the others. As in Nin's later books, Djuna plays the role of comforting confidante to both parties in this impossible dream of love between analyst and patient. Winter of Artifice is perhaps the most "musical" of Nin's works; it is also among the most courageous in its subject: an adult daughter's flirtation and near-union with the handsome, seductive father who abandoned her when she was a child. The theme is "musique Ancienne," to quote Nin, the Oedipal temptation told from the point of view of the highly intelligent yet vulnerable daughter. Winter of Artifice was begun in 1933, when Nin started therapy with Rank, and was completed in 1939, the year of Rank's death. The novelette is organized in thirteen "movements." A climax of emotional and erotic yearning occurs in the sixth, central movement. From this excruciating height of desire, the work subsides into a slower rhythm and a sadder tone. Eventually, Winter of Artifice becomes a solo for the daughter. When she sees her father's "feminine-looking" foot, she imagines that it is really her foot and that he has stolen it. Now she understands that he would like to steal her youth and her capacity for action, her mobility. "Tired of his ballet dancing" (formal, traditional movements), the daughter symbolically reclaims her foot and, with it, her ability to flee from the dangers of the attraction: "Music runs and I run with it." Cities of the Interior The five novels found in the final version of Cities of the Interior, Nin's "continuous novel," are Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur. They were first published individually during the 1940's and 1950’s. Entries in Nin's diary indicate that she began writing Ladders to Fire in 1937; she made substantial revisions as late as 1962. Seduction of the Minotaur, which was published individually in 1961, was begun in 1938 and expanded in 1958 to include Solar Barque. Alan Swallow, a pioneer among small-press publishers, brought out the five novels under their collective title in 1959. When it was first published, Cities of the Interior had been growing for twenty years. An extraordinary work, it displays a brilliance of conception, a mastery of image and metaphor, and a refinement of structural technique that make it the equal of many better-known modern masterpieces. The title, Cities of the Interior: A Continuous Novel, suggests the timeless scope of this work. The "cities" are both ancient and modern. Nin set out to excavate the buried "cities" or the psychic worlds of her three main characters: Lillian, Djuna, and Sabina. The idea of "continuity," however, is more complex. It suggests that Cities of the Interior is an "open" work, like certain modern sculptures that extend into and penetrate the space which surrounds them, interacting with their setting. This multifaceted work is not set apart from life, not carved out of it, not bounded by the conventions of classically written fiction with its concluding "resolution." "Cities of the Interior" remains "open" to the addition of new parts and to the rearrangement of its five basic novel units. The individual books are entirely self-contained. As Nin uses the word, "continuous" does not mean "to be continued." It does not refer to linear progressive time. There is no fixed starting point and no concluding point. The books have been bound - because books, seemingly, must be bound - in the order in which they were written. A reader can begin with any one of the five volumes and move to the other four in any order, losing no essential connections. In short, the five novels of Cities of the Interior are interchangeable in the total composition, which can be viewed as a type of mobile, an innovation in fiction inspired by the example of modern sculpture. Nin's characters are totally immersed in the flow of internalized psychic time, in the patterns of their own growth. One of the main figures in Collages quotes the Qur’an, saying, "Nothing is ever finished." The French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose ideas influenced a number of modern novelists, including Proust, stated the concept of personal evolution succinctly and elegantly: "If matter appeared to us as a perpetual flowering, we should assign no termination to any of our actions." To Nin, life does indeed appear as a "perpetual flowering." In Cities of the Interior, she has selected and expressed significant relationships and states of feeling in the ever-changing, continuous process of growth. Life, as distinct from existence, is possible only for those who can accept mutability, knowing that while change promises growth, it also demands inevitable loss. Ladders to Fire Lillian's development spans Cities of the Interior, opening and closing the work when it is read in conventional sequence. The first part of Ladders to Fire describes "This Hunger," Lillian's ravenous need for love. Spontaneous, impetuous, unsure of her physical attractiveness, and compulsively generous, she gives up her career as a pianist so that she can support her lover's ambition to paint, but this sacrifice does not bring her the loyalty and security she desires. Jay repays Lillian's devotion by having affairs with other women. The most threatening of Lillian's rivals is Sabina. The relationship between these two women is the most compelling in the novel and a superb example of Nin's brilliance at unmasking psychological motivations. When Lillian attempts to stop Sabina's pursuit of Jay by overwhelming the other woman with friendship, she discovers that she, too, is powerfully attracted to Sabina. For different reasons, both women are angry at Jay: Lillian because he has neglected her, Sabina because he would like to conquer her. The two women form an alliance against him. After dancing together in a working-class tavern, they go to Sabina's room to make love, but they discover that it is not sensuality they are seeking in each other so much as an exchange of feminine qualities. They both feel a "mysterious craving . . . to become each other." During the dazzling party scene with which Ladders to Fire closes, Lillian commits "invisible hara-kiri" with an outburst of harmful self-criticism. It is clear to the reader that she has grown, that her anger at herself is partly an expression of this growth, and that she will soon end her unsatisfying relationship with Jay. Children of the Albatross A delicate, playful book with an undercurrent of sadness, Children of the Albatross traces a theme that is familiar in French literature but something of a novelty in the United States: the initiation of a young man by an older woman. Djuna, in her late twenties, becomes involved with Paul, seventeen. The other "children" of the novel's title are their friends, young gay men who meet with Paul and Djuna in her "house of innocence and faith." Here, they dance, paint, and play, celebrating their love of freedom from responsibility. The young men and Djuna are drawn together by their mutual fear of tyrannical, authoritarian fathers. For Djuna, this figure is represented by the cruel and lecherous watchman who terrified her when she was a child living in an orphanage. The positive creative act of evoking a counterworld to erect against the conventional and materialistic values of the "fathers" ignites sympathy among the rebellious "children." From the start of Children of the Albatross, it is clear that Djuna's affair with Paul will be brief and will provide her with little emotional sustenance. Predictably, Paul's family disapproves of her, not only because she is "older" but also because she is a dancer. A crucial dream, in which Djuna imagines herself as Ariadne, predicts that after she has guided Paul safely through the passage from adolescence to early manhood, she will be abandoned. At the novel's end, Paul embarks upon an exciting journey to India, leaving Djuna behind. Feeling empty and dissatisfied, she searches the unexplored "cities" of her self. She begins to seek a fuller emotional life with a more mature partner. The Four-Chambered Heart In The Four-Chambered Heart, Nin explores the psychological complexity of a woman's involvement with a married man. Romantically ensconced in a houseboat on the Seine are Djuna and Rango, a tempestuous vagabond, so she imagines. Their relationship is initially enthralling but ultimately frustrating; both parties are weighed down by responsibilities to demanding hypochondriacs: he to his wife Zora, Djuna to her father. Heavy rains force the lovers to move their houseboat up and down the river. Like their relationship, the boat does not "go anywhere"; it merely plies its way back and forth over the same area. Djuna and Rango's passion attains its height in the novel's first thirty pages. After that, there is conflict and threatened violence. Zora makes a bizarre attempt to kill Djuna. Rango comes to the boat very late one night and falls into a heavy depressed sleep. Djuna, desperate to initiate a change of some sort, rips up floorboards in a wild attempt to sink the boat. It is swept down the river; everyone survives, though not in the same form. A fisherman rescues a doll from the water with a joke about its having tried to commit suicide. The doll is a comment on Djuna's passivity with regard to her own life and to the image of conventional femininity that she has been struggling to maintain, at the expense of her "true" self. It is time for her to move beyond the static situation she experiences with Rango, to give up the illusion of her generosity toward Zora, and to recognize and accept the negative qualities she has been "acting out" through Rango. Djuna must grow. A Spy in the House of Love In A Spy in the House of Love, Sabina is portrayed as a glamorous woman seeking to express herself as "Don Juana." Married to a fatherly, indulgent man, she is free to fulfill her desire for adventure, which she experiences through relationships with men. Each of Sabina's partners embodies an aura, a sense of place, an ambience that lies waiting for her exploration and participation. There is the opera star Philip; he represents "Vienna before the war." There is Mambo, a black musician transplanted to Greenwich Village from a Caribbean island. There is John, a former aviator who has been grounded because of uncontrollable anxiety. Finally, there is Donald, a gay man who returns Sabina's maternal love with an irresistibly flattering letter-portrait of her idealized self. This balances the grossly sexual and cruel portrait given to her by her former lover, Jay, a painter. A Spy in the House of Love is a musical novel both in style and structure. There is a prelude in which Sabina invites the detection of her "crime" (experiencing sex without feeling) by phoning a "lie detector." There is a coda in which Djuna, Sabina's consoling friend, plays a late Beethoven quartet to soothe and heal the dejected Don Juana. The body of the novel is a series of variations on the central theme: Sabina's attempt to live through her relationships with men who - so she deludes herself into believing - have far more exciting lives than she herself has. Each man is associated with a particular type of music, while Igor Stravinsky's "Firebird" is said to be Sabina's "unerring musical autobiography." Seduction of the Minotaur At once the most mature in theme and the most resplendent in imagery among Nin's novels, Seduction of the Minotaur takes up the story of Lillian. She has developed considerably since Ladders to Fire. Now a jazz performer instead of an interpreter of the classics, Lillian journeys to Mexico, imagining that she has finally freed herself from everything that imprisoned her in the past. Traveling alone, Lillian meets a series of men, each of whom becomes a teacher or guide of sorts, revealing something of great significance in her own circuitous passage through the labyrinth of the self. The most engaging of these figures is Dr. Hernandez, a male version of Ariadne. He helps Lillian to see that she is not yet as free as she has imagined, wisely telling her that "we live by a series of repetitions until the experience is solved, understood, liquidated." The monster Lillian confronts is a "masked woman," the part of herself that she has previously been unwilling to recognize. In Lillian's journey to Mexico and her confrontation with herself, Nin creates a living dream simultaneously in the past, present, and future. The meaning of freedom is not flight, as Sabina imagines, but commitment. If a woman can discover and love the many aspects of one man, she can be fulfilled with a single love. Lillian learns to see her husband Larry, from whom she has been separated, as a complex, multidimensional person. This discovery brings a new excitement, a forgiveness, the grace of understanding to her feelings about him. Because she untangles the knots in her own past, Lillian rediscovers the love of her husband. Thus, there is reconciliation instead of separation. Collages A more ambitious and a deeper book than its easy surface and gentle humor suggest, Collages is composed of nineteen short blocks of prose, showing once again Nin's preference for constructed rather than narrated fiction. Collages begins and ends with the same passage. Its circular structure encloses twenty-two characters portrayed in a wide variety of quickly sketched settings. The cement that binds these colorful elements into a composition is Renate, a woman artist who "makes her own patterns." She weaves in and out of the lives of the others, bringing inspiration not only to her paintings but also to her friends. Collage art is shown to work magic transformations. In this book, Nin once again stresses the many ways in which dream and fantasy enrich life. There is an intense relationship, for example, between a young woman and a raven. An elderly man feels closer to seals than to human beings; he finally develops the courage to renounce people in order to live with the animals he loves. A gardener pretends to be a millionaire in order to fulfill his dream of financing a literary magazine. A woman whose husband has rejected her for a younger woman replaces him with an exotic phantom lover. In Collages, imagination is sovereign. The healing power of genuine relationships is shown as complementary to that of creative fantasy. Collages closes with the reluctant emergence of a woman writer from a bitter, self-imposed isolation. Elderly Judith Sands allows herself to be "courted" by Renate and an Israeli admirer, Dr. Mann. Made more trusting by their friendship, Sands actually shows the visitors one of her manuscripts. Its opening words are the same words with which Collages begins. This repetition helps endow Collages with its circular form and also underscores Nin's conviction that there is an unbroken connection from one person to another, from one imaginative writer to another, and that life is redeemed through the alchemical transformation of art. Collages is an assured and accomplished example of Nin's skill at adapting techniques from the nonverbal arts to literature; it is also the most imaginatively conceived of display of her convictions about the mutually nourishing exchange between art and life. Sharon Spencer Other Major WorksSHORT FICTION: Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories, 1944; Delta of Venus: Erotica, 1977; Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories, 1977; Little Birds: Erotica, 1979. NONFICTION: D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, 1932; Realism and Reality, 1946; On Writing, 1947; The Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1931-1934, 1966; The Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1934-1939, 1967; The Novel of the Future, 1968; The Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1939-1944, 1969; The Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1944-1947, 1971; Paris Revisited, 1972; The Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1947-1955, 1974; A Photographic Supplement to the Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1974; A Woman Speaks: The Lectures, Seminars, and Interviews of Anaïs Nin, 1975; The Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1955-1966, 1976; In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays, 1976; Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914-1920, 1978; The Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1966-1974, 1980; The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume Two, 1920-1923, 1982. Bibliography Bair, Deirdre. Anaïs Nin: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1995. A massive biography by a scholar steeped in the literature of the period and author of biographies of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. Supplements but does not supersede Fitch's shorter but also livelier biography. Evans, Oliver. Anaïs Nin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. The result of a twenty-year study of the work and life of Nin. Through extensive research, reading, and lengthy personal interviews, Evans provides new and insightful interpretations of House of Incest, Nin's first two diaries, and other major fiction works, but omits Nin's nonfiction works. Nin is presented as a writer in the genre of her good friend Henry Miller. Also contains detailed end notes and an index. Fitch, Noel Riley. Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. As the subtitle suggests, Fitch is concerned with tracing Nin's erotic relationships and close friendships with male and female writers. A biographer of Sylvia Beach and an expert on Paris, Fitch writes with verve and expertise. Franklin, Benjamin, and Duane Schneider. Anaïs Nin: An Introduction. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979. A complete study of the canon of Nin's works, encompassing all of her early fiction works (Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories through Collages) and devoted to much discussion of the first six volumes of her diary (written between 1931 and 1966). A third section briefly covers Nin's criticism and her nonfiction and presents Nin as a feminist writer. Notes to every chapter are included, as well as an excellent selected bibliography (with an annotated list of secondary sources) and an index. Jason, Philip K., ed. The Critical Response to Anaïs Nin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. A selection of essays examining Nin's works. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Zaller, Robert, ed. A Casebook on Anaïs Nin. New York: New American Library, 1974. This collection of essays is useful as a chronological study of the emergence of Nin as a feminist and novelist. Focuses on her early novels, including House of Incest, and moves on quickly to Cities of the Interior and the first and fourth volumes of her diary. |
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