Word: nin
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...simply out of "young-people-today" defensiveness that I cite the conclusion to Anatole Broyard's review in the New York Times of Anais Nin's fourth diary. However undeveloped and inadvertant his point may have been, it gets at the heart of what there is to be said about Anais Nin. "It seems that the diaries are enjoying a tremendous vogue among the young people today. It is a good thing, for Miss Nin is certainly an improvement over The Prophet, Love Story and The Greening of America." How much of an improvement, he cannot bring himself...
...emotive, as inarticulate, as narcissistic and, in a word, as adolescent as the adolescents who, according to Anatole Broyard, are her public. The qualities of adolescence are welcome in an adolescent, but in an adult, adolescence is better termed irresponsibility. To whom is Anais Nin irresponsible? Her personal life does not warrant our moralizations. Is she irresponsible to her own talents? The question is tenuous, but provocative. Is she irresponsible to the personnages in this diary, most notably Gore Vidal, Edmund Wilson, and Henry Miller? It is tempting to dismiss the question of Anais Nin's responsibility or lack...
Born in Paris, Anais Nin is a diarist and minor novelist. Her father was a Spanish composer; her mother, of French and Danish extraction, was a singer. They were separated and Anais and her two brothers moved to Manhattan where they were brought up by their mother. Anais Nin's first diary (1931-34), written in her early twenties when she lived in a suburb of Paris, deals with her friendships with Lawrence Durrell, Dr. Otto Rank, Henry Miller and his wife, June. Of all the diaries, this one is the most interesting. Her second diary...
...pattern of the diary is a series of affairs strung together with little philosophies about love and art, interspersed with humorous anecdotes, the humor of which Anais Nin seems curiously unaware of. The pattern is vampirish. Anais Nin takes in men and women, makes love to them sexually, emotionally, aesthetically; they respond, adoringly, confessionally. She drains them of their passion, distills them in her diary; they stay or leave; fangs out, she hunts for more. What is particularly insidious about this pattern is that she uses the diary to bitch in. Where in the course of a relationship...
This cycle is particularly offensive as it works itself out on Edmund Wilson. She came into his life when Mary McCarthy had just moved herself and her furniture out of their apartment. Very vulnerable, he was taken with Anais Nin. All the while that she was scribbling her disgust for him in her diary, she seems to have been egging him on. Her distaste seems to have been rooted in her allying him with her father, with authority, discipline, and history, all of the powers which fill her with terror. "Father, man, critic, enemy of the artist," she says...