Anais Nin’s Response to a Critic
When Dutton published Anaïs Nin’s first full-length novel, Ladders to Fire, in 1946 (which then contained a section entitled “Stella”), the critics railed against Nin’s use of language in general and her distillation of characters in particular. Nin had revolted against America’s tradition of detailed and realistic descriptions in favor of symbolism, striving to describe the events occurring beneath the surface. 1940s America was not, perhaps, ready for her work, which scholars agree today was far ahead of its time, and thus began the war between Nin and her critics.
One critic in particular raised Nin’s hackles: The New York Times’ Herbert Lyons, whose review was entitled “Surrealistic Soap Opera.” In it, Lyons not only stated that Nin’s male characters were “pale, weak young men,” but also said,
Insomuch as the “avant garde” may not listen to the radio, it is perhaps worth noting that numerous daytime serials are almost exclusively devoted to less fancy variations on this same theme of woman’s struggle to understand her own nature… As in much of modern music, there is little originality. The novel contains traces of Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller, and Edmund Wilson and a large deposit of French surrealism. These days many things get by under the banner of complexity and super-sensitivity; artiness and obscurantism, as always, are sometimes disguises for second-rate talents. But Miss Nin’s novel has a certain interest as a pastiche of contemporary preciousness.—The New York Times, October 20, 1946
Nin’s response in a letter dated shortly thereafter:
Dear Mr. Lyons: When it comes to modern literature you show yourself to be almost totally illiterate. You cannot decipher the simplest facts and resort to distortions.
You see a book full of pale, weak young men when there is only one of them and he plays a minor role. The rest of the men are more than full length, ruddy, lusty characters.
Number One: Bruno. An able bodied and most satisfactory lover whose only handicap in Stella’s eyes lies in his loyalty to his wife and children which is clearly described in the book as being only a problem to Stella’s lack of confidence.
Philip: also a healthy, humorous, confident character, guilty of merely liking too many women.
Stella’s father. Equally powerful and dominant.
Lillian has a perfectly adequate husband.
Jay is big, healthy, joyous. “He sat like a workman before his drinks, he talked like a cart driver to the whores at the bar; they were all at ease with him.”
Djuna, you say, also has trouble with various men, but Djuna has no relationship to any man in the book.
No pale weak men appear at the party. Nowhere in the book can you find that Sabina represents modern woman.
The men in the book are in fact powerful and self confident. You must be one of the pale weak young men of our times to identify so exaggeratedly with one of the minor characters.
Sincerely yours,
Anaïs Nin
Gore Vidal, 1940s
Not only did Nin berate Lyons, but Gore Vidal (who was an editor for Dutton at the time, and, since he promoted Nin to his superiors, may have had self-interest in mind) lambasted him with his own diatribe:
Dear Sir:
I have just finished reading Herbert Lyons’ review of Anais Nin’s new novel LADDERS TO FIRE. I consider his attack on her work absurd, irresponsible, and an excellent example of sloppy reviewing. Since Anais Nin is a literary figure of considerable stature, I wish to come to her defense and to examine the Lyons review.
After making his case, he sums up with:
It is certainly healthy to disagree on the merits of a writer. Mr. Lyons might very well be on the right side, but he has not, certainly, proven his case. He has written an emotional and inaccurate review, bristling with antagonism and not much else. It is sad for authors to read reviews like his; one has the feeling that books can be reviewed by anyone, that reputations can stand or fall on the opinion of some near-illiterate with an axe in need of grinding.
Gore Vidal
Of course, Nin’s and Vidal’s responses fell upon deaf ears, and for most of her life, until the Diaries were published in 1966 when she was 63 years of age, she would endure the harshness of the New York literary establishment.
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Anaïs Nin’s Under a Glass Bell is now being offered in mulitple formats on Smashwords. Other Nin titles on Kindle are: Collages, The Winter of Artifice, Under a Glass Bell, Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur, and The Four-Chambered Heart, with more to follow.
Revised Anais Nin study is published
Anaïs Nin: An Understanding of Her Art, a book-length study by Rochelle Lynn Holt, was first published in 1997. Now, after thirteen years, Holt has published an updated version of the title.
Holt traces Nin’s growth as a writer while intertwining the major events in her life with the work—everything from Nin’s introduction to the work of D. H. Lawrence to Holt’s hypothesis that Nin was suffering from an undiagnosed case of bipolar disease. Holt creates a unique vision of Nin’s work informed not only by her long correspondence and friendship with Nin, but by vast knowledge of her work, as evidenced by several excerpts from the diaries and fiction selected to support her theories. The result is a text that will encourage the reader to rethink what they know about Anaïs Nin and how her writing came to be the powerful force that it was and still is.
This revised edition includes a look at what has occurred in Nin scholarship since 1997, including literary criticism, previously unpublished works by Nin, and the explosion of Nin-related internet sites, including this one.
Anaïs Nin: An Understanding of Her Art can be ordered by clicking here.
Rochelle Lynn Holt can be contacted by e-mail at this address: rochellel0317@comcast.net.
The Story Behind Anaïs Nin’s The Four-Chambered Heart
In 1948, when Anaïs Nin first began writing her novel The Four-Chambered Heart, she described it as her “last act of love” for Gonzalo Moré, the Peruvian radical and bohemian with whom she’d been locked in a torturous, doomed relationship for more than a decade. “It is the monument that he will not be able to destroy as he destroyed our life,” she says in her unpublished diary.
In the novel, the character Djuna falls in love with Rango and becomes entangled in his chaotic life. She is introduced to Zora, Rango’s wife, a former dancer who has fallen into a morass of hypochondria and self-centered manipulation. These characters, of course, are modeled after Nin, Moré, and his wife Helba Huara.
Helba Huara in costume
When Nin first met Gonzalo in Paris in 1936, she astutely recognized him as a “tiger who dreams. A tiger without claws.” Helba was “the woman whose dance without arms inspired the dancer in House of Incest” (Fire243). Henry Miller, during his first visit to Nin in Louveciennes in 1931, said he’d seen Helba dance, but that “her husband is the interesting one.” Indeed, Gonzalo knew and was the intellectual equal of literary figures such as Antonin Artaud, Pablo Neruda, and César Vallejo. In 1931, Nin had “walked out of Helba’s first small recital, disgusted with her grotesque exaggerations, and Gonzalo was on the stage as accompanist and I did not see him—five years before we met.” But years later, Nin “saw the monstrous quality of the demon in Helba and was interested—not repulsed” (unpublished diary). Indeed, for a time during the 1920s and early 1930s, Helba was acclaimed as an exotic dancer embodying Incan culture who performed all over Europe and on Broadway.
By 1936, however, Helba had become a self-created invalid, using imaginary illness to manipulate Gonzalo and anyone with whom they associated, and she and Gonzalo were impoverished, living in the squalor of a dungeon-like basement room.
Nin’s love affair with Gonzalo was unlike her concurrent affair with Henry Miller—waves of sexual fury and romance, violence followed by serenity, and above all a Latin emotional connectedness, which she lacked with Miller. The words Nin records in her diary reflect the passion she and Gonzalo shared, as he whispers to her while dancing: “Anaïs, Anaïs, you are so strong, so strong and so fragile, such strength. I fear you…the most beautiful music your father ever produced was your voice…you’re all sensitiveness…the perfume of all things, how unique you are, Anaïs.” She continues: “All this in Spanish. My blood hears Spanish…through dark subterranean channels” (Fire 247).
Acting on a dream she’d once had, Nin rented a houseboat on the Seine, which she and Gonzalo used as a setting for their explosive amorous rendezvous. The houseboat became a key symbol in Nin’s fiction, appearing in some of the stories from Under a Glass Bell, as well as The Four-Chambered Heart.
Because she truly loved Gonzalo, the revolutionary too lazy take up arms, the artist without creations, the worker without a clock, the intellectual mind dimmed by drugs and alcohol, Nin fought against impossible odds to rehabilitate him. She overlooked the obvious flaws and recognized his keen intelligence, charisma, fiery passion, and humor. However, the inertia of his personality, his uncontrolable jealousy, and Helba’s constant meddling slowly began to drag Nin into their hell.
After fleeing France for New York when the war began, Nin set up her own printing press and employed Gonzalo to work with her. She even named the business after him—Gemor Press—and felt she’d finally helped him develop a craft and a sense of self-worth. However, by the mid-1940s, she was the one doing most of the work, and anything left to Gonzalo was usually left unfinished or poorly done. Not only was she disillusioned by Gonzalo, she grew to hate Helba. In late 1943, she writes in her unpublished diary: “I meditated for two days how to kill Helba to save Gonzalo, to free him—calling it to myself a mercy killing. This is insanity.“
Gonzalo Moré
The relationship continued to wither until Nin collapsed under the ever-growing burden. By 1947, Nin asked herself “how I turned to this sick sick sick primitive for fire, and who had this useless, raging, blind, destructive fire in the center of his being…this fire leading nowhere, a wasted, destructive fire.“
Hugh Guiler, Nin’s husband, after years of knowingly (and often unknowingly) supporting Gonzalo financially, finally cut him off, but not before setting him up with Social Services, in order to give him time to find a job, which, characteristically, he never did.
Nin says in her 1948 diary: “The Gonzalo I loved is dead. The one I knew at the end, without illusion, I did not love. People create an illusion together and then it is disintegrated by reality.“
The relationship, after many cataclysms, was finished.
Nin sought to distill hundreds of diary pages into a highly concentrated document, to tell “the story of Gonzalo without its sordid, degrading end, for Gonzalo, like June [Miller], had the power to descend to the greatest vulgarities and I cannot even transcribe the slime into which our love dissolved.” What resulted is a book that truly does stand as a shrine to Anaïs Nin’s powerful love for Gonzalo Moré, and has been described by critics as comparable to the works of D.H. Lawrence and Carson McCullers. In the following passage, for example, Nin explains how an exterior force (Rango’s jealousy of Djuna’s former lover Paul) affects the interior, a familiar Lawrencian theme:
“[Rango] was driving the image of Paul into another chamber of her heart, an isolated chamber without communicating passage into the one inhabited by Rango. A place in some obscure recess, where flows eternal love, in a realm so different from the one inhabited by Rango that they would never meet or collide, in these vast cities of the interior.”
The Four-Chambered Heartwas published by Duell, Sloane and Pearce in 1950. It was later published by Swallow Press and then incorporated into Nin’s “roman fleuve,” Cities of the Interior.
Now, Sky Blue Press has published The Four-Chambered Heart on Amazon’s Kindle as an e-book for the first time. It joins several other Nin titles on Kindle: The Winter of Artifice, Under a Glass Bell, Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur, with others to follow.
Anais Nin’s Ladders to Fire on Kindle
Ladders to Fire (Dutton)
Anaïs Nin’s first full-length novel, Ladders to Fire, has undergone many incarnations and has a history that includes several key Nin titles. When the original version of The Winter of Artifice (Paris, Obelisk Press, 1939) was gutted for reasons of censorship in America, the lost story “Djuna” was reconstituted in Ladders to Fire, parts of it reappearing in radically different form throughout the text. The rewrite of “Djuna” illustrates not only the change in Nin’s writing style, but also in her attitude towards the inspiration of its central male character (Hans in Winter and Jay in )—Henry Miller. When Nin wrote The Winter of Artifice, which Miller helped her edit, she was still his lover and in need of his guidance in both personal and professional matters. By the time she rewrote “Djuna,” in the early to mid-1940s, her affair with Miller had ended with bitterness and disappointment. She felt he was weak and had lost his lust for life and writing, and this attitude is reflected in the sharp contrast of “Djuna” and its rewritten counterpart in Ladders to Fire. It makes for a fascinating comparison when one is read in conjunction with the other.
Promo shot for This Hunger
So, today’s version of Ladders to Fire consists of two parts: “This Hunger,” and “Bread and the Wafer.” “This Hunger” introduces us to one of Nin’s key characters throughout the five novels of the Cities of the Interior series, Lillian, a concert pianist, who, after going through several broken relationships, is married with two children, a family that she largely ignores in favor of self-realization. When she realizes the disconnect between her and her husband, she meets another famous Nin character, Djuna, who, as an orphan, was starved for love and affections but has developed a strong and compassionate personality. Djuna recognizes the “orphan” in Lillian and takes a strong interest in her well-being. Both women are involved with Jay, a bohemian painter. It would not be rash to say that the two female characters represent aspects of Nin that reacted to Henry Miller in very different ways.
In the second portion of the novel, “Bread and the Wafer,” Nin further explores the Jay character and introduces Sabina, who one could view as either based on June Miller or the part of Nin that had affinity with her. Sabina here is the counterpart of Johanna from “Djuna” in the original The Winter of Artifice, and the storyline is altered in one very significant way: in “Djuna,” when Johanna and Djuna (Sabina and Lillian respectively in Ladders) contemplate consummating their intense feelings for each other sexually, it is Johanna who rebels and rejects Djuna after accusing her of loving Hans; in Ladders, it is Lillian who subjects Sabina to the same treatment. This marks a very shift in approach and severely changes the balance between the characters. It also could mean that Nin had changed her feelings towards June Miller a decade after their famous blow-up (recorded in Henry and June).
“Bread and the Wafer” finishes famously with Nin’s surrealistic treatment of “The Party,” based on real events and people, many of whom are represented by the characters of Ladders to Fire.
Critics in the 1940s were largely split over the book, Edmund Wilson considering it a big step forward in Nin’s writing, and others branding her as not fit for mass consumption. Today, when seen as part of the mosaic that makes up Cities of the Interior, Ladders to Fire takes its place alongside Nin’s best prose.
The new Kindle version of Ladders to Fire correctly retains the present day version of the novel and is available from Amazon.com. It joins other Nin titles on Kindle: The Winter of Artifice, Under a Glass Bell, Children of the Albatross, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur.
Anais Nin at the Festival of Books
For the first time Anaïs Nin was represented at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which ran April 24-25, 2010 at UCLA. It was a success in terms of sales and perhaps even more so getting the word out that there is a determined organization promoting and preserving the work of Anaïs Nin, namely The Anaïs Nin Trust.
Anais Nin Trust Booth
The Trust is carrying on the work begun by the first Trustee of the Nin estate, Rupert Pole, who for more than twenty-five years after Nin’s death saw to the publication of Volume 7 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus, Little Birds, the four volume Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, the four unexpurgated diaries: Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer the Moon, not to mention the nineteen volumes of the impeccable Anaïs: An International Journal, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann.
When the Trust decided to begin emptying the personal library of Anaïs Nin and Rupert Pole at their Silver Lake house, designed by Eric Lloyd Wright, it brought both popular and rare editions of Nin titles to the Festival of Books. The booth was perhaps one of the most unique at the Festival—fashioned after a boudoir, complete with fainting couch—attracting Ninophiles of all sorts. Some had known Nin, some had read many of her works, and others were curious first-timers. It was also a sort of gathering of A Café in Space contributors, as I (Paul Herron, editor) welcomed Kim Krizan (”Hugh’s Stand”), Connie Baechler (”Overlay”), Tristine Rainer (”Les Mots Flottants”), and Sarah Burghauser (”Ouroboros and Disorientation—Profile of a Nin lover”). Naturally, spirited discussions erupted, as well plans for a future conference on Nin, and news of a play based on Nin’s life and work which will have a reading this summer in Los Angeles. The fainting couch was the favorite spot for these rendezvous, and customers were treated to information about Nin as well as sharing their own stories.
One of many fainting couch discussions
My personal favorite humorous moment was when a married couple paused to look at some of the titles on the shelves. The husband casually picked up Nin’s D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study when the wife grabbed his arm and hissed: “Now there’s a guy no one should bother analyzing!” and hauled him away. Another interesting incident was when one young man remarked about A Spy in the House of Love, “I was put off by that book—it smacks of desperation.” I responded that Nin must be an effective writer because the novel was written during the time when Nin swung wildly from man to man, desperately seeking someone who could love her the way she needed, and was often seriously considering suicide. He seemed to relax a bit and had his photo taken lying on the fainting couch.
But the Festival is not over for the Anaïs Nin Trust—the titles are being offered at the online store. Each book is embossed with a Pisces symbol and verification it comes from the Silver Lake house library…books present there during Nin’s lifetime also include a certificate. Editions long out of print are available as well as the more current ones, but they all share a unique provenance.
The proceeds from the sale will help the Trust carry on preserving Anaïs Nin’s legacy, publish new titles, and remind today’s readers of her remarkable talent and insight of the human psyche.
Anais Nin Trust book sale update
Although the LA Time Festival of Books isn’t until this weekend (Sat 4/24 and Sun 4/25; 10-6 and 10-5 respectively), sales of popular, rare, out of print, foreign, and one-of-a-kind editions from the Nin house in Silver Lake are already available and selling.
Anyone looking for that title one can no longer find (and with the special provenance of having been in Anaïs Nin’s and Rupert Pole’s personal library) can seize this chance either by attending the Festival of Books in Los Angeles or by perusing the list of titles in the new online store and beating the rush.
Nin fans, collectors, and scholars alike can benefit from this opportunity. Spread the word.
Click here for information on the Anaïs Nin Trust booth at the Festival of Books.
Click here for the Anaïs Nin Trust online store.
Anais Nin's and Rupert Pole's Silver Lake house
Vol. 7 of A Cafe in Space is Here!
A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal, Vol. 7, is a reality. Today we received shipment of the newest—and in some ways one of the best—issue of the only current Anaïs Nin publication in print. Its 150 pages contain Anaïs Nin’s previously unpublished diary excerpts, an intimate look at Hugh Guiler’s feelings about his marriage to Nin, an interview with Deirdre Bair, John Ferrone’s tale of how Delta of Venus was almost not published, and several articles and creative pieces from some of the most established and newest stars of Nin study.
We encourage you to order your copy now—we have sold more advance copies than ever before, and the supply is limited.
Table of Contents
Kim Krizan: Hugh’s Stand—Revelations of a letter from Hugh Guiler to Anaïs Nin
Paul Herron: Leaping Ahead of Reality—Hugh Guiler’s diary
Deirdre Bair: The Making of Anaïs Nin: A Biography—Paul Herron interviews Deirdre Bair
Anaïs Nin: L’Homme Fatal—From the unpublished diary
John Ferrone: The Making of Delta of Venus
Angela Meyer: Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus—Feminine identity through pleasure: a mini analysis
Dawn Kaczmar: Irigaray and Nin Through the Looking Glass—Mimetic re-appropriation of the masculine discourse
Adrian Haidu: A Masculine Perspective of Woman—(Considered as a perspective)
Joel Enos: Flow and Moments of Arrest—Anaïs Nin’s boat imagery
Cari Lynn Vaughn: A Literary Love Triangle—Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence
Tristine Rainer: Les Mots Flottants—Anaïs Nin’s Diary 2
Sarah Burghauser: Ouroboros and Disorientation—Profile of a Nin lover
Laura Marello: Anaïs Nin and Her Contemporaries—Ahead of their time
Daisy Aldan: Three poems from the end
Marc Widershien: Four poems from Maine
Sharanya Manivannan: Possession
Connie Baechler: Overlay
Reviews and other items of interest: Reviews of The Mistress Cycle, The Heretics, and Ferlinghetti: A City Light; internet links
Vol. 7 of A Café in Space: The Anais Nin Journal debuts Feb. 21
Also included is an excerpt from the unpublished diary of Anaïs Nin from 1944-5 which gives us a glimpse of the emotional upheaval she experienced since her arrival in New York in 1939—in the midst of an unraveling marriage and a surge in creativity, she continued her search for the one man who could save her from her demons, but in the end found strength and resolve within herself in an inspiring story of psychological decimation and rebirth.
CONTRIBUTIONS SOUGHT FOR A CAFE IN SPACE
A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal is looking for contributions.
Guidelines are as follows:
Articles can range from critical and analytical study of the work and lives of Anaïs Nin and those within her circle, including Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, et al. The focus can be scholarly, biographical, or creative. Theses are welcome from which excerpts can be made.
We also accept poetry and short fiction so long as the spirit of the work fits in within the context of the subject of the journal, Nin and her circle.
Word counts of 5,000 and under are acceptable.
The next issue, Volume 8, is due out Feb. 21, 2011.
Please send queries and/or abstracts to: skybluepress@skybluepress.com. We consider all contributions and guarantee feedback. Please send this link to all potential parties.