Anais: The Erotic Life of Anais Nin

A candid biography provides a look at the mysterious woman known for her sexual exploits and scandalous affairs, revealing the truth about her famous diaries and uninhibited private life

Anais Nin (1903-1977) projected the image of a free woman designing her own life and world into something beautiful, but the multiple selves of her diaries, in Fitch's estimate, are fictive constructs. Tapping hundreds of interviews, library archives and Nin's unpublished erotica and fiction, Fitch ( Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation ) convincingly portrays Nin as a complex, neurotic artist, alienated from her own anger and pain, who worked out her neuroses through her art. She traces the psychological damage inflicted by Nin's father, who photographed her nude, beat her and seduced her in childhood, then seduced her again in 1933. Fitch ably reconstructs Nin's simultaneous romantic involvement with Henry and June Miller in Paris, and her bicoastal, bigamous life divided between Hugh Guiler in New York and Rupert Pole in California. Written in the present tense, a risky device that wears thin, and occasionally marred by rose-tinted Nin-like prose, this remarkably intimate, hypnotic, probing portrait nevertheless helps explain the charismatic power and abiding appeal of Nin. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fitch (Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, 1983) draws on Ana‹s Nin's voluminous self-revelations (150 volumes of diaries, correspondence, and fiction) to produce what the publisher says is the first biography of the French writer--and what turns out to be a wary and defensive work, the very antithesis of Nin's free spirit. Abandoned and deprived in childhood, Nin enjoyed an enduring marriage (for over 50 years) to Hugo Guiler--as well as a series of affairs with Henry Miller, Otto Rank, Gore Vidal, Edmund Wilson, even her own father (who had seduced her in childhood): with men and women of all kinds, culminating in a bigamous marriage to Rupert Cole that had her commuting between New York and California for at least 25 years. Nin dissected her own protean personality in endless psychoanalysis--to her both a religion and a hobby--and delighted in the deceptions, incarnations, and masquerades that she revealed in her diaries in a fascinating display of a personality constantly reinventing itself. In her lifetime, she inspired parodies, films, scholarly newsletters, dissertations, even a perfume, and served as a catalyst between Hollywood, academia, and the feminists, who competed for her attention even though she reviled much of what they represented, choosing to spend most of her life as a sex object. Here, in a work that focuses on her sex life, Nin comes off--perhaps unintentionally--as trivial and culturally insignificant. Fitch overinterprets at the beginning of her text and is excessively factual toward the end, seeming to have either abandoned her method or simply lost interest in her subject. In spite of her use of the present tense and some vulgar familiarities (``Every spring her sap begins to rise''; ``Desire makes her body ache''), the author seems uncomfortable with Nin. No substitute for Nin on herself. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

When Nin's diaries began appearing in the mid-Sixties, their popularity earned her a bigger audience than she had ever had. The question that always teased readers of the Franco-American novelist was whether and how her fiction depended on her life experiences. It is now generally acknowledged that her novels are pallid reflections of her own journey, detailed here by Fitch, author of Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation ( LJ 8/83) as well as literary guides to Paris. Fitch presents more than a sensational biography of a sensual woman, also depicting a tumultuous and harrowing life. From her early life, Nin suffered acutely, first after her father deserted the family, then during years of solitude and loneliness. As Fitch shows, her struggle to achieve as a woman and artist was arduous. Recommended for large collections and as a companion to Nin's diaries where they are popular.
- Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.