Purely Human Growls
KNOX, MELISSA
Purely Human Growls Fire: From "A Journal of Love," the Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin 1934-1937 Harcourt. 434 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Melissa Knox Assistant professor of English Literature,...
...But a reader gets little sense of what transpired beyond energetic horizontal, and occasionally vertical, gymnastics—in one case an elevator proved to be the only space available for a quickie...
...her mother, trying to calm her, suggested that she write her father a letter...
...One wonders why she loved the men she loved, why she seduced her father, what her romantic and sexual escapades really meant to her...
...Fire suggests, too, that the influence of Nin's ideas on Rank would be worth exploring...
...I play a thousand roles...
...It would be interesting to trace his impact on American feminism in the 1970s, when several installments of Nin's diary appeared and won an impressive audience...
...The whole Nin resurgence has a surreal quality—one wag dubbed her "Dali without the talent"—but her impact was and is considerable...
...It's true I can't write," Nin admits, "but 1 can live...
...Nin was such a shy child that she could hardly bear to speak, but she blossomed into a siren, carrying on at least two different affairs every day with the likes of Henry Miller and Otto Rank...
...The name of the houseboat where she conducted her affair with Gonzalo More was Nan-ankepichu, a Peruvian Indian word meaning "not really at home...
...Pablo Neruda arrives for a political meeting with More on Nin's houseboat, but he is merely "the inert and sickly poet," not the author of Veintepoemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (1924) or Residencia en la tierra (part I, 1933...
...In fact, for all of her amazing mass of text, Nin's inner thoughts remain remarkably opaque...
...Certainly their relationship was complex...
...Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows—a woman whose womb is empty...
...For a time she worked as a psychoanalyst, but not all of her patients paid up...
...This pops up in a letter to Lawrence Durrell and actually concerns her writing, but it sounds like a lot of other sentences intended to convey the intensity of her orgasms...
...She speaks of Rank "sobbing," yet writes, "I could only think of Henry...
...Neither her thoughts on writing nor her manner of achieving exquisite orgasms—if achieve them she did—are elucidated...
...Her dissimulations are clues to the abiding mysteries of women's emotional and erotic lives...
...Says she feels it was due to me...
...my genius into my life...
...Rebecca West is "launched on her happiest love affair...
...Lawrence—and 35,000 pages of a diary begun at age of 11 as a letter to her father, who had abandoned the family...
...This alone justifies serious study of her work...
...I gave her faith...
...The Rank period appears to be one of daily ecstasies but extreme ambivalence...
...And we learn that many of Rank's important ideas about birth, the artist, creativity, and personality states found their way into her thinking and writing...
...She supported a large group of hangers-on, among them Henry Miller and his wife, June, Gonzalo More and his wife, Helba...
...A typical sentence: "The roots, the peaty soil, the water, the blood and flesh, the stutterings, and the purely human growls exceed the quintessence, without conquering...
...In the course of her 74 years (1903-1977), Nin produced novels, tales, erotica, letters, an "unprofessional" study of D.H...
...She had to shut her eyes in order to kiss him, and thought he had bad breath...
...Obscure articles she wrote and odd novels she published on a printing press purchased for that purpose, have recently been reissued...
...Sex for me is not only the joy of the orgasm, it is the holding of man inside my womb...
...I can create life around me, give strength, stimulate, love, save...
...But I was," she sighs...
...Man lies in the womb only to gather strength...
...She supplied them with food, rent and medicine—nearly all on the allowance she got from her banker husband, Hugh Guiler...
...Sharing Wilde's gift for self-promotion, though not his talent for self-analysis or self-exposure, she did indeed make herself into a strangely enduring cultural icon...
...Many have credited her with a significant role in the sexual liberation of women...
...Was there no satiation...
...This is not a wholly happy circumstance...
...Her diary avoids exploring why "I cannot be myself without causing tragedy," why "Everywhere I walk, I seduce," and why she endured a "20-year Calvary of doubt...
...Why the Austrian psychoanalyst identified himself with Twain's wisecracking hero, and why his patient saw herself as Shakespeare's mischievous sprite can only be discovered in this book, destined to be an essential source for biographers...
...He suddenly gushed out endless stories...
...Reviewed by Melissa Knox Assistant professor of English Literature, St...
...She came to Rank for treatment on November 7, 1933, after her love affair with her father...
...The diary is perhaps most remarkable for its energy and its effort to reproduce raw experience on the page...
...Yet Nin was a voracious reader, knew Antonin Artaud well and was immersed in the literary culture of the day...
...We also learn that Rank could not stand her infidelities, but she refused his demand that she leave Henry Miller, who had followed her to New York...
...For Nin, writing a diary was a method of keeping emotion and event separated, so that she would not understand herself...
...At the same time...
...What is it about Nin's works that won her a place in Bartlett s Familiar Quotations...
...It tells us that Rank (the author of a scholarly treatise on the double in literature) wanted her to translate and edit his work, and sawheras his twin...
...He begged her to join him in New York, where he hoped to begin a new life and a new psychoanalytic practice...
...I hope you are not disappointed," he said...
...Nin's notion of explanation is not a great help: "Man lies in my arms, crawls and rests in my womb...
...Otto] looked pathetic, but I felt only Henry...
...With whom is West happy, and why...
...Peters College...
...They called each other "Huck and Puck," and kept a diary together...
...She confides that he "was seduced" and invited her to spend a weekend in Boston...
...For all Nin's conquests, one senses no peace in her, no fulfillment...
...I have never lit a fire that has gone out," she exults...
...Nin won't tell...
...A faint awareness of the Spanish Civil War creeps in toward the end of the volume, probably because her father is Spanish and one of her lovers, Gonzalo More, is involved with Spanish Communists...
...She did follow him, leaving behind her husband and a very anxious Henry Miller...
...No wonder Henry Miller said to her, "I believe in your vagueness...
...Nin emerges from these pages as someone as full of cruelty as she was of kindness—a tortured soul gasping to keep her head above water...
...No less an authority than Kate Millett calls her "the mother of us all...
...Still, her failures of insight, her lies, are integral to Fire's portrait of the confusions of female sexuality...
...Underlining women's need to know their own lives, Millet expresses the belief that they can do so by reading Nin...
...The story of Nin's relationship with Otto Rank, who until 1926 was Freud's right-hand man, is itself worth the price of Fire...
...I have to listen to others all the time.'" (Can it be that Freud, who paid for Rank's university education, never asked about his boyhood...
...Nin could be the attentive comforter and analyst: "I was asking questions about his childhood...
...Hans Sachs, a prominent lay analyst in Freud's inner circle, makes a cameo appearance as "the monster again, the inhuman face, the lips which seem to be peeled of their skin, the bulbous eyes, the joyless flesh...
...Nin was not really at home in any of her love affairs, and desperately did not want to face that reality...
...Although she spent the greater part of her days sleeping with a variety of men, Nin came up for air long enough to record many a tryst...
...Fire, covering the period from December 1934 to March 1937, describes the relationships with those two men, among others, and alludes to her affair with her musician father, Joaquin Nin y Castellanos, detailed in Incest (1992...
...Two biographies have appeared in the last two years, the latest being Deidre Bair's knowing and eminently readable 654-page exploration...
...Was every affair just a fanning of the flames...
...And she did...
...Then stopped to weep.' Nobody ever asked me this before...
...For despite Nin's exuberant exhibitionism, she had an iron will to conceal her erotic, not to mention her intellectual, life...
...She loved his mind and hated his body...
...Eventually Rank became her lover...
...How did Nin manage this...
...author "Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide " ANAIS NIN grandly claimed: "Like Oscar Wilde, I put...
...This is surprising...
...On board a ship heading toward New York from her native Paris, the frail Anais, always in delicate health after a burst appendix that nearly killed her a few years earlier, could not be consoled...
...One is rarely conscious, reading this volume largely written in a Paris recovering from the First World War and on the eve of the second, that Hitler and Mussolini have recently met, that Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night and T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral have appeared, that Graham Greene is writing, and, much closer to Nin's home, that Jean Cocteau's La Machine Infernale and Andre Mau-rois' L'Instinct du Bonheur have been published...
Vol. 78 • July 1995 • No. 6
