The Theme Is Self
KEENE, FRANCES
The Theme Is Self A Spy in the House of Love. By Anais Nin. British Book Centre. 136 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Frances Keene Free-lance editor and critic; specialist in contemporary...
...The right of the author to keep his own preoccupation inward, without apology, is important...
...This astonishing feat is just what Anais Nin has done...
...I was all ready to say it to you.' "'You have to set yourself free...
...Beyond the roman a. clef lies verity, "the fissure in reality...
...Oh, I've loved enough, if that could save one...
...I've said that to so many men: "Are you going to set me free...
...Why do these writers, and their critics, sometimes admit that less spadework fell to them because Anais had opened certain roads a bit beforehand...
...When anger has corroded me, I rise, I always rise after the crucifixion, and I am in terror of my ascensions...
...It tells the story of Sabina, a would-be actress with all the instinct for miscellaneous coupling of an alley-cat in heat, yet cursed with the anchorite's perpetual guilt...
...Anais seems to be saying that any outward similarities are purely intentional, thank you, and let's get on with the job of true insight...
...She has, by her unique skin-inside-out technique, managed to bridge the chasm from the reader to the unknowable self without having to resort to those stutterings of language which the initiate alone, whether of psychiatry or professional word-play, are able to fathom...
...A Spy in the House of Love is no exception...
...and, most astonishing of all, it has been accomplished with a technical perfection which saves the separate works from appearing disjointed, and the opera omnia from being repetitious or dull...
...They are present, sometimes barely altered, in each of the "finished" works...
...A third gift, hard to define, has been Nin's unself-consciousness about the Djunas, the Sabinas, the I's...
...The fissure in reality...
...Look at your notebook...
...specialist in contemporary literature What is it that permits a writer to draw upon herself for over a generation almost to the exclusion of the rest of humanity...
...And in the so-called creative books (as if her criticism, e.g., that of D. H. Lawrence, were not creative !) the characters are always the same, the id and the ego cavorting in barely-exteriorized torment to "make a story...
...There is but one character in Nin's work...
...Set me free...
...What she is looking for is, of course, what she is leaving...
...That will come with love,' said the lie detector...
...I've loved plenty...
...She is the racked protagonist who always rises, as Nin writes in House of Incest, "when human pain has struck me fiercely...
...Sabina is none other than the Djuna of Four Chambered Heart and Children of the Albatross, the I of House of Incest...
...I'm sure it is full of addresses.' " 'You haven't loved yet...
...call her Djuna, Sabina, I. But if Anais Nin's major, indeed only, theme is Self, what can have been her contribution to such younger writers as Capote, Vidal, Flannery O'Connor and even the subtle-canvassed Tennessee Williams...
...Here Nin is talking with herself in a pattern of Sabina-cloaked situations...
...That she finds a reasonable facsimile of love in three of her five encounters does not fool Sabina...
...This believable, haunted penitente starts forth from the womb of her husband's love to beat the bush in a series of determined sorties...
...And she does not bow her head because the canvas is limited, self-limited, to one...
...A second gift has been the staked-out right of revelation of inner turmoil, without the previously concomitant sniggering over whether this or that detail corresponds to "fact...
...At the brief story's close, she unburdens herself to herself in a clear analysis of what is wrong: "'Free me,' said Sabina to the lie detector...
...Nin's diaries are everywhere, in all she thinks and writes and does...
...The divine departure...
...Nin's gifts are three, and she has broadcast them open-handed: First of all, she has carried the stream-of-consciousness gambit, so essential at its historically right moment, back into perspective...
...Thus, she talks and writes of self not as Joyce did or, God knows, as did Rilke—with both of whom she has a subtle bond—but as do the young, mingling fact and fantasy, restricting the canvas to the true preception...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 31
