Scaring the pants off men
Janet Barron
ANAIS NIN: NAKED UNDER THE MASK by Elisabeth Barille, translated by Elfreda Powell Lime Tree, f17.99, pp. 245 Irresistible and impossible, Anais Nin drove men mad. She was the femme fatale of a set of fantasies of her own creation, spinning myths about her person like so many tantalising veils. Duplicity and desire were intimately related in her passions. She could not be trusted ever to tell anyone the truth. In this new biography, which is part fiction and part fantasy, Elisabeth Barille explores the essence of the character of this woman who was as devious and as fascinating as the star of a Hitchcock film. Anais was not likeable, but she made you fall in love.
She steps from these pages as a high- heeled siren, her capacity for manipulation as deadly as her stilettoes. She was like a little girl with a dressing-up box, forever experimenting with identities, but basically vulnerable, for all of her make-up. She married a dependable banker, whose money financed the career of her lover, Henry Miller. She wanted to be both a wife and a mistress, unhappy with either role, yet almost schizophrenic in her alternation between them. Her husband gave her stability; her lover gave her sex, and she loved nothing more intensely than the feel- ing of living dangerously.
The stories in this book are already liter- ary myths, yet one never begins to wonder why they are being re-worked. Elisabeth Barille has taken the difficult decision of simply breaking away from a genre. A fictional voice for Anais alternates with speculations about her motives, as one woman writer attempts to fathom another. It is very fluently translated from French, which is entirely appropriate, as Anais never entirely settled into the restraints of a single language. The biography makes for absorbing and inventive reading, although it might appeal more to the secret dreams of women than it will to men, whom it will probably scare.
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