The Private World of Artistry
MACADAM, ALFRED J.
The Private World of Artistry THE DIARY OF ANAIS NIN 1931-34 Edited and with an Introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann Hai court, Brace & World 360 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by ALFRED J....
...His energy overwhelmed her at first, and not until late in 1931 when his wife arrived did she see the anguish behind Miller's "gangster-author" mask...
...As the first step in empowering her to discover who she was, Rank ordered her to abandon her journals, to concentrate on artistic creation instead of false auto-analysis...
...June did not have Henry's balance between passion and reflection and seemed determined to destroy herself in physical pleasure...
...He led her to investigate the effects of her father's having abandoned her when she was a child and her subsequent attitude toward any man who represented authority to her...
...Rank believed that a cured male neurotic became an artist and a cured female neurotic became a woman...
...In November 1933 she visited Dr...
...In her post-Rank experiences with her father Miss Nin confronted him as an individual, while he continued to act out his role of the elegant, successful concert pianist...
...Although the 1966 reader will find no picture of the times, and no belated political prophecies, he will encounter a penetrating account of a woman-artist's finding her way into life as well as a display of esthetics in motion, life turning itself into fiction...
...In March 1933, Ana'is Nin met Antonin Artaud, creator of the "Theater of Cruelty...
...When he became sick in 1934 she felt "illusionless love" for him, but did not subjugate herself to him as his wife did...
...Now we need an edition of Ana'is Nin's letters to Henry Miller...
...A face less furrowed, less carved, less masklike, and at the same time I liked the new face, the depth of the lines, the firmness of the jaw, the femininity and charm of the smile, all the more startling in contrast to the tanned, almost parchmenttoned skin...
...Gunther Stuhlmann says in his laconic Introduction that some people, notably Miss Nin's husband, preferred to have all mention of them cut from the published text, but the reader is never given any idea of how much and where material has been omitted...
...Then she declared her own superiority, in the Diary by defining him as "the obscure, buried, sunken, eclipsed man who was stifled by his mother...
...Miss Nin could feel herself dividing between the opposite attractions of Henry and June...
...Miss Nin's diaries had been a source of conjecture even before Henry Miller wrote his essay ("Un Etre Etoilique") on them in 1938...
...She seems almost defensively abstract because psychological events are rarely related to specific life incidents...
...Soon she was able to see that her constant withdrawal to her journals was a search for her lost father, the concert pianist Joaquin Nin, and that all her relationships with men were somehow warped by his cruelties...
...Only by an occasional sign does Stuhlmann indicate that something is missing or that time has elapsed...
...She turned in the spring of 1932 to a psychoanalyst, Dr...
...June's influence is described fully by Miss Nin, who saw in her a mirror of her own personality...
...There is also no way for the reader to separate the real names of people from those changed by the editor...
...As they appear now in 1966 they fall short of our expectations because of severe editing, but they are nevertheless an important contribution to our knowledge of the artist as private individual in 20th century intellectual history...
...His blue eyes are cool and observant, but his mouth is emotional and vulnerable...
...It describes Miss Nin's psychic development in great detail, yet tells almost nothing about Ana'is Nin as a concrete person dealing with other concrete people...
...In the entry dated August 1934, Miss Nin gives a moving account of giving birth to a stillborn child, but the reader is unaware of her pregnancy until its last hours...
...A refined self examination of Miss Nin's personality as it grew in the ebullient Paris of Henry Miller and Antonin Artaud, it is the first contribution of its kind to American letters and provides unique insights into the private world of an artist in the early '30s...
...He enabled her to see that Henry Miller had become, physically and in temperament, a symbol of her father, but he did not show her that in her relationships with dominating men she had unconsciously tried to overthrow their authority by finding faults in them...
...She saw herself, or what she thought was herself, reflected in aspects of both and her old methods of self definition began to falter...
...The last words of the Diary are: "good-bye, goodbye, good-bye "; her departure from one life to begin another...
...The initial impressions she gives of the unpublished, impoverished Miller are almost totally physical: "He looked like a Buddhist monk, a rosyskinned monk with his partly bald head aureoled by lively silver hair, his full sensuous mouth...
...Her own self-definition was still weak and her father seemed to reflect so much of her that: "When he left, I felt as if I had seen the Ana'is I never wanted to be.' Allendy's therapy was not sufficient...
...Ana'is Nin began to live in the present, to enjoy the infinite possibilities and mysteries of living, and to concentrate on perfecting her own talents...
...Miss Nin realized that she could not accept a woman's role because it meant centering her life around one man, subordinating her ego to his...
...June constantly surpressed her self-awareness, showing Anaïs a spontaneous approach to life which opposed Ana'is' constant self examination, begun with her diaries when she was 11...
...Perhaps a glossary of small biographies, such as the one in Stuhlmann's edition of Henry Miller's Letters to Ana'is Nin, would have eliminated this confusion...
...René Felix Allendy, founder of the Société Française de Psychoanalyse and a friend of Antonin Artaud...
...Her own self-confidence wavered, however, and the section degenerates into a descriptive narrative in which she tries to capture her father by making him into one of her characters: "I expected the man of the photographs, a more transparent face...
...The Artaud sequences are a departure from Miss Nin's inquiries into psychoanalysis but they move the Diary forward in time, counteracting the evocations of the past in the Allendy passages...
...Reviewed by ALFRED J. MacADAM Department of Romance Languages, Princeton University The Diary of Ana'is Nin 19311934 is not a diary but a memoir...
...The Diary also provides a partial key to Miss Nin's enigmatic prose works, since writing the Diary was her method for converting life into art...
...Confronting Artaud with his opium addiction and his persecution complexes was like confronting a whirlwind, and Miss Nin gives a fascinating description of his constantly changing moods...
...She was, however, able to control him because of his love for her, and although they had been married since 1924, Miller was unable to work effectively when she was with him...
...Allendy shattered the confidence Miss Nin had developed composing her diaries...
...The hiatus in Henry Miller's Letters to Ana'is Nin (Putnam, 1965, 356 pp., $6.95), between October 1931 and January 1932, corresponds to the period in which June lived with him and disrupted his routine of action combined with reflection...
...yet the reader learns from the Diary itself that Miss Nin had to abandon the diaries completely during her analysis with Rank...
...Otto Rank, who became the most important influence in her life...
...The friendship between these physical and spiritual opposites was so strong that Miss Nin eventually made June into a female type which appears in her novels, especially in This Hunger where she is juxtaposed to a character who represents Ana'is Nin...
...Allendy introduced Miss Nin to psychoanalysis, but she soon felt that he could not comprehend her artist's sensibility...
...Many passages of the Diary, more than Stuhlmann indicates, reappear in her novels with the "I" changed to "she...
...She chose instead an enlightened solipsism in which she could exercise her capabilities as an artist and still have relations with men...
...Miss Nin did to Allendy what she had done with Henry Miller and what she was to do with Otto Rank: She became increasingly intimate with him until she caught him in situations where his public face was demolished by personal crises...
...He gives almost no indication of Miss Nin's life before 1931 and how she was able to support herself and partially support Henry Miller during the 193134 period...
...His laughter is contagious and his voice caressing and warm like a Negro voice...
...Perhaps the editing is responsible...
...She found in him another frenzied, self-destroying personality she could not control...
...He possessed a brilliant mind which always seemed on the verge of disintegration, mutating so rapidly that it remained coherent only for a very short time...
...The passage is reproduced verbatim in the novella Winter of Artifice and it shows that she was so overawed by her father's presence that all she could do was observe him and not provoke a direct confrontation of their personalities by demanding an explanation of all his cruelties...
...For all its memorable passages the Diary is a disappointment...
...By maintaining her sense of self-importance in this situation she proved her independence from her father and her past...
...Past and present intersected in May 1933, when Ana'is saw her father again...
...It seems curious that Miss Nin should never give her opinion of her sexual experiences or tell if she ever fell completely in love...
...Ana'is Nin met Henry Miller in Paris in 1931 when she was 28 and he almost 40...
...Even at this stage of her self-awareness Miss Nin could not avoid trying to dominate the authoritative male in her life, and she repeated her pattern of increasing intimacy until she discovered that the analyst himself was a frustrated artist...
...Anaïs Nin needed a psychoanalytic method which would enable her to define herself as a woman and as an artist...
...He made it possible for her to free herself from the eternal chronicling of the past in order to live in the present and be a woman...
Vol. 49 • July 1966 • No. 15
