Seciet vice
PATRICK ANDERSON
The Journals of Anais Nin 1939-1944 edited with an introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann (Peter Owen 55s) The third volume of Miss Anais Nin's cele; brated Journals covers the years 1939 to 1944. A refugee from Paris and the Parisian avant-garde she attempts to start a new life in New York, a city she knew in the later years of her girlhood and which she had also visited in 1934 as a would-be psychoanalyst in the train of Dr Otto Rank.
Adjustment proves difficult. The United States is too brash, materialistic and imper- sonal for the delicate perceptions and crystal- line fantasies of Miss Nin's ultra-feminine private world. She finds Europe spoken of as decadent, a sinking ship; she replies that this `decadence' is no more than 'the courage to experience all of life'. When her American friends boast of their nation's health, she can only see a 'hygienic steriWty'. Visiting the editors of Partisan Review, she is filled with the same horror that the youthful Beckford felt when he was introduced in 1780 to the philosophes of Geneva. Her cry of despair is valuable because it echoes the feelings of so many who crossed the Atlantic on the out- break of war: 'Overtones are missing. Relationships seem impersonal and every- one conceals his secret life, whereas in Paris it was the exciting substance of our talks, intimate revelations and sharing of experi- ence.'
Inevitably she is drawn to the negroes and the Haitians, to jazz rhythms and dark laughter; she dances all night at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem (where I may well have brushed past her on many nights during the feverish destructive summer of 1940). She likes the stately elegance of Caresse Crosby's mansion in Virginia but Caresse fills it with artists, including the Dalis, and is promptly driven away and then divorced by an out- raged husband. A summer in Provincetown offers Miss Nin an operatic boyfriend and some alleviation of her sufferings but it is soon back to the cold-water flats of the Vil- lage, the clothes from Lerner's, the crassness of publishers, 'the lamentable story of my publications', and the various lame ducks who turn her into a mother figure and ask her for the money she no longer has.
Chief lame duck is Henry Miller, back from Greece with the Colossus of Maroussi in his head and about to start off on the journey which will lead to The Air Condi- tioned Nightmare. She prints a number of his not very interesting letters and from time to time cables him cash. Then there is Gonzalo, the Peruvian revolutionary, with his neurotic wife and his nagging marxism; he helps her with the printing press she sets up in Mac Dougall Street, hand-printing her own Winter of Artifice and Under a Glass Bell, and later she establishes him in a business of his own.
The sullen inarticulate Kenneth Patchen be- comes her problem because her friends all insist that she should see something in him, although she can't bear either his bad manners or his snarling Journal of Albion Moonlight; he will mutter about his gas bill when she wants to discuss `the underground rivers of dreams, of deeper and deeper selves running underneath'.
Far preferable is Robert Duncan, the beautiful homosexual poet with the slight squint who goes to bed with Paul, is imme- diately furious about being turned into a woman and soon engages himself on the seduction of Bob, which is a bit hard on Virginia, Bob's wife. For a time Duncan and Miss Nin merge into a kind of opalescent hermaphroditic blur; they not only read each other's journals but also write in them— `Robert's diary could flow into this one and become a part of it because the quest is similar'; it goes without saying that Miss Nin accompanies her friend to a queer bar and offers consolation when he fails to make a pick-up. And then, a bigger fish indeed, Luise Rainer appears, the Viennese actress and film star, all 'trembling antennae, a breath, a nerve, a vibration', who is having such a wretched time with her husband Clifford Odets; a sharp-nosed man with a twangy Brooklyn accent, he empties her gift of rose petals into the waste paper basket, slaps her lightly on her diminutive bottom and dashes off unromantically to another business con- ference. No wonder poor Miss Rainer enters into psychic intimacy with Miss Nin.
In the midst of all this—which, within its narrow limits, its claustrophobic egotism, is often beautifully told—Anais Nin earns money by writing erotica for a mysterious 'old man' who constantly advises her to cut out the poetry and concentrate on the sex.
She prints several passages which illustrate her skill with trouser buttons, missing panties, pearls, pistils, 'the hair of a soft animal like a rabbit', although the cruder touches are no more than lipstick smeared on the glass of her style.
The question remains: are these Journals a masterpiece? Mr Gunther Stuhlmann speaks in his introduction of their being 'the multi-levelled novel of her life, the ultimate instrument of her art' while she herself con- fesses towards the close of the book: 'For many days I lived without my drug, my secret vice, my diary. And then I found this: I could not bear the loneliness. That writing the novel about other women there were still so many things I could not give to them ... That to stay within them meant a shrinking of horizons and perceptions, a restricted consciousness . . . I found that none of the invented characters could contain my obses- sion with a limitless, expanded life, its com- pletion.' This is a strange thing for a novelist and writer of stories to admit t ut it is cer- tainly not an argument in favour of the diariSt. A vice is not an art; an obsessive need invites pathos rather than the triumphs of order and control.
As a recorder of her times Miss Nin lacks breadth and the common touch. As a recor- der of herself and her friends, she makes too many psychoanalytical generalisations about too many rivers of fantasy; her absorptions, poetic, mannered, brilliantly intense, do occa- sionally raise a masculine smile. On the other hand she is a highly interesting woman and, although I thought I might be bored by her book, I in fact thoroughly enjoyed it.
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