Light in the Dark

...their gifts, their charm, their beauty " She describes their parties, their wit, and concludes "It is a magic circle " But why, she wonders, is she attracted to them7 "Was it that I found most ordinary men harsh, power-driven, obsessed with their goals, not with life''" A year later, however, she observes a failure in the homosexual life?this theme of paralysis, inability to love, linked to noncreation For they are all tied together " And m a typical psychological response, the result of years of analyzing patients, she adds "Very little is created out of hatred " Conscious of her own neurotic drives, Miss Nm gives more space here than in earlier volumes to the problems of neurosis "While neurosis rules," she writes, "all life becomes a symbolic play " Therefore politics in a society of sick individuals supplies no relief We are "still in the labyrinth The unreality we are suffering from is what I want to make clear, to dispel The hero of this book is the malady which makes our lives a drama of compulsion instead of freedom " The only solution is "to confront human nature itself"?each one of us must recreate the world " Impossible7 Perhaps—and Miss Nm knows it Yet she sees no other answers Awareness, she asserts, is more powerful than politics Just as the youth of today are attracted to the ideas of Anais Nm, so are masses of women—in and out of the liberation movement Though her fiction has always been concerned with the special powers and problems of women, she is not merely a "woman's writer", her perceptions reveal the masks worn by men as well as by women Dedicated to the resources of the inner life, Miss Nin feels "all the various women may converge into one because down deep, in the unconscious, there are resemblances " This insight has led her to fictional techniques that many critics have misunderstood (as critics misunderstood Pound, who m his Cantos looked upon Aphrodite, Circe, Helen of Troy, and Eleanor of Aquitaine as one) They saw the vaporous shifting resemblances of the party scene in Ladders to Fire, for example, as pejoratively 'poetic " In the current volume of The Diary Miss Nm tells us that her depiction of the neurotic visions of the party guests was inspired by the dance style of Martha Graham—an extraordinary transference from one artistic medium to the other Early m the '30s Miss Nin realized that the liberation of woman requires a devotion to the art of hfe, an art that would allow her to "be free and in command of her own destiny, responsible without loss of her womanliness " Anais Nin has always been the woman "No analytical dismemberment or separation of elements As a woman, I shall put together all that was divided and give new birth to everything that was killed...

...Light in the Dark The Diary of Anais Nin: Volume IV, 1944-1947 Edited and prefaced by Gunther Stuhlmann Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 235 pp $7 50 Reviewed by Harriet Zinnes Author, "Waiting and Other Poems," "An Eye for an I", Associate Prof essor of English, Queens College In the space of five years and with the publication of four volumes of her famous diary, Anais Nin, once the "underground" goddess of the world of letters, has become a public figure Today she is a frequent lecturer on campuses throughout the country, and her words are sought not only on Henry Miller but on such questions as the Vietnam war and women's liberation I remember seeing her familiar face in the bookshop windows of Geneva in 1969, heralding the appearance of Volume II on that staid city's best-seller lists Miss Nin's call to go from the dream outward, to make an "odyssey from inner to outer life" was a far cry from the exhortations of John Calvin, yet Geneva evidently listened Her time had come Such poets as Robert Bly, W S Merwrn and James Wright have recently found that the dream is truth, illumination Anais Nin long ago recognized the power of the unconscious to shape the chaos of the "real world" As she says in the current volume "The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythic, symbolic " If it is deep enough I It is Miss Nin's special talent to probe deeply—to expose the reality behind the gesture, to hail the "night-self, in which are embedded the seeds of all we do and are in the day " Miss Nin's faith in the transforming power of dreams is what attracts the young, whose cry echoes her own "/ see, I hear, I feel " Aware of "failed communications, failed communions," the young too perceive the danger of a "time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty m intimacy and human vision " The response of both the young and the diarist to this stark paradox is "the secret of the full life" —an interior resurgence The present installment of this personal drama covers the period 1944-47 Significantly, even these mature years are colored by the threat of the father Here Edmund Wilson is the paternal surrogate for the celebrated musician Joaquin Nin, whose separation from his family initiated the diary of the lost European girl adrift with mother and brothers in an America that was seemingly hostile to art and sensibility "Invested with an unquestioned authority over writers," a "dictator up there on his New Yorker throne," Edmund Wilson is the "enemy"?a destroyer of everything Miss Nin stands for, all she wants to "write, seek, love " He is at an opposite pole from her "children of the albatross," the young and such writers as Gore Vidal (whose portrait m this volume is as memorable as that of the poet Robert Duncan in Volume III) Maturity has robbed Wilson of the magic and poetry of the young They are "still tender, still vulnerable, still struggling", their world is a "shadowy labyrinth" Wilson lusts for power, hates the young and would crush their hopes, his world is one of "disguises and masks," without the "sweet dehghts of intimacy, admission of doubts " But the father torment which Wilson represents is only one of The Diary's recurrent themes—there is also the innocence of the young (wonderfully interwoven with Jakob Wasserman's story of Caspar Hau-ser) and the problem of the homosexual Unlike contemporary writers who describe the gay world with stark sensationalism to conceal their squeamishness and voyeurism, Miss Nin writes of it in her diaries and fiction with equanimity and a sensitive psychological understanding "I have become aware," she writes, that "homosexuals live in groups, almost communally promiscuous, and sustain each other professionally Once they feel accepted, they surround you subtly with a barrier made of a chain of friendships First I met one, and then his friend, and then their friends, and now I find myself surrounded " The dianst notes a singular brilliance among the homosexuals...