Renate Druks and Ronnie Knox: an unlikely affair

Volume 8 of A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal has arrived and is ready for ordering.

We began discussing some of the articles in Volume 8 with a post on Reginald Pole, Nin’s “father-in-law,” and we continue with another, a film treatment by Tristine Rainer entitled “The Bohemian and the Football Player,” which examines the unlikely relationship between Renate Druks, a painter nearly 40 years old, and Ronnie Knox, a dashing but disturbed 24 year old athlete who had been drafted by the Chicago Bears after starring as UCLA’s quarterback.

Rainer and Druks had met through their mutual friend, Anaïs Nin, and remained friends long after Nin’s death in 1977. Rainer told Druks that her relationship with Knox seemed to be a great idea for a film. Druks responded that she was no writer, that Rainer would have to write the script. In the end, Rainer arranged for Druks to tell her story to a tape recorder and then transcribe the recording into text. After compiling a large stack of paper, Rainer edited it into the film treatment. While the film was never made, the treatment reveals in detail, and in Druks’ raconteur style, the nature of an impossible marriage between her and Knox. Knox, for starters, was afraid that his image would be ruined if he went public with his older, bohemian wife. So, he kept it secret, going as far as renting an apartment in Los Angeles, where he rarely stayed, to convince others he was single.

In spite of the odds, Renate Druks and Ronnie Knox had bursts of joy and many humorous adventures, some of which Nin incorporated into her final novel, Collages. There is truth in the following passage, in which the characters Renate and Bruce (modeled after Knox), are trying maneuver their sailboat in Holland:

They traveled for a while down the rivers and canals, admiring the soft landscape, the browns and greys so familiar from Dutch paintings. Then the motor sputtered and died. They were in the middle of a swift flowing river, becalmed.

The boat ceased to follow a straight course. Every now and then, like a waltzer, it took a complete turn in the middle of the river.

Its erratic course did not discourage the barges passing by with cargoes and racing for the locks. They traveled at full speed alongside the sailboat, not noticing that Bruce and Renate were rudderless, and that they might at any moment circle in the path of the swift sliding barges.

At one moment the sailboat skirted the shore and Bruce maneuvered it towards the right into a small canal. At this very moment the motor revived and pushed them at full speed under too low a bridge. Scraping this they continued to speed past quiet small houses on the shore. Bruce now could not stop the motor.

It had regained its youthful vigor. He stood on the bridge and remembered his western movies. He picked up a coil of rope and lassoed one of the chimneys of a passing house. This stopped the runaway sailboat but drew a crowd around them.

“Crazy Americans,” said someone in the crowd.

A policeman came towards them on a bicycle.

“You damaged a historical bridge.”

“I didn’t know it was historical,” said Bruce.

“You will have to appear in court.”

The irony of the story is that Knox wanted badly to be a bohemian writer, while Druks’ college age son wanted to be “normal,” as he perceived Knox to be. Knox gave up his football career to pursue writing, at which he failed, while Druks’ son went to college, where he was unable to fit in. The end result was tragic.

To see a web site devoted to Renate Druks’ art, click here.

To see another post on Druks, click here.

To further explore or order Volume 8, click here.

Feb. 21: Anais Nin’s Birthday

To celebrate Anais Nin’s birthday, February 21, 1903, this page gives you a chance to easily locate the related information we have posted in the past. If this is your first time here, we hope you enjoy the summaries of Nin’s birth, her family background, and her place of birth, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.

Feel free to comment if you have further information or questions.

Post 1: Anais Nin’s French and Danish ancestry

Post 2: Anais Nin’s Spanish and Cuban ancestry

Post 3: Anais Nin’s parents: Joaquin and Rosa

Post 4: Anais Nin’s birthplace: Neuilly-sur-Seine

Post 5: Anais Nin’s birth: the certificate

Post 6: Anais Nin’s 13th birthday

Celebrate Anais Nin’s birthday by purchasing one of the books (some extremely rare and out of print) from her and Rupert Pole’s personal collection at the Los Angeles house.

Or, if you are digitally inclined, visit our Anais Nin e-bookstore.

We celebrate Anais Nin’s birthday every year with a new issue of the only current Anais Nin literary journal, A Cafe in Space. To order your copy, click here.

Anais Nin’s D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study on Kindle

In the late 1920s, Anaïs Nin discovered English novelist D. H. Lawrence, whose intuitive approach to writing about sex she found astounding. She was amazed at how he, a man, was able to accurately express a woman’s feelings, and how he wrote from the entire being, including the unconscious. Lawrence, in the end, would have more to do with how Nin developed her own writing than any other, including Proust or Miller. Ironically, Nin’s love of Lawrence spurred her to declare she would “go another [way], the woman’s way” in her writing at the conclusion of an iconic discussion with Miller and Durrell in 1937 (Diary 2 231-233).

Nin wrote an essay about Lawrence in 1930 entitled “The Mystic of Sex.” At the urging of a friend, she submitted it to Canadian Forum, which accepted and published it under a pseudonym. In Early Diary 4, Nin says: “Let me think only of praise of ‘my’ Lawrence coming out in print, under a remote name, not my own yet—Melisendra. Who is Melisendra? Looking in from the outside, only at the writing, as people will, what image will they see? What new me will they create, and I, like a dutiful actress, live out?” (327). So, Anaïs Nin was finally in print for the first time, and yet she dared not share her name, perhaps due to fear of scandal (Lawrence was considered a pornographer, a pervert, by many at the time).

Nin was going through a personal turmoil during this period, having suffered a devastating unfulfilled relationship with writer John Erskine, growing discontent within her marriage, frustration with her role as hostess to her husband’s wealthy and stuffy clients, and a growing sense of sensuality that both envigorated and tortured her. Lawrence’s writing was a sort of literary fuel for the fire. She threw her passion into her study of Lawrence and began to accumulate notes on his fiction. After unsuccessfully submitting several short fiction pieces to Paris publisher Edward Titus, she blurted out to him that she was writing a book about Lawrence. He immediately expressed interest and asked her to show him her work—the problem was that she only had a scattered pile of notes. In an amazing thirteen days, she assembled and rewrote her notes and presented Titus with the manuscript of D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, a title intended to reflect the fact that Nin was no academic. This was a courageous act, perhaps a bit impulsive, for a young woman to write a book about one of the most controversial authors of the time. The finished book contained a deep understanding of Lawrence’s work, and it also revealed Nin’s own thinking about writing, the sensuality and psychology of it.

Many critics, even to this day, have declared D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study the best criticism of Lawrence ever written—indeed, Lawrence’s wife Frieda told Nin she considered it the best.

Broken up into chapters based on Lawrence’s background, philosophy, and religion; his views on women, death, and primitivism; his poetry and major titles including Women in Love and Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Nin concisely provides the reader with the essence of his writing and the intentions behind it. She reveals how he revolutionized modern writing by writing across the entire spectrum of the human being. She states:

When the realization came to the moderns of the importance of vitality and warmth, they willed the warmth with their minds. But Lawrence, with the terrible flair of the genius, sensed that a mere mental conjuring of the elemental was a perversion.

So here are his people struggling to achieve complete life and a sincere understanding of the gods in the center of our bodies.

Imprisoned in our flesh lives the body’s own genie, which Lawrence set out to liberate. He found that the body had its own dreams, and that by listening attentively to these dreams, by surrendering to them, the genie can be evoked and made apparent and potent.

In her chapter entitled “Woman,” Nin expresses what is now considered to be a feminist point of view, not only on her part, but on Lawrence’s as well. She says:

The woman for whom the phallic worship is only half of creative divinity is the builder-artist. Lawrence was not meddling with that builder-artist direction taken by women, but with the woman within the builder-artist. Woman pure and simple—or neither pure nor simple.

She quotes Lawrence as saying:

“[W]omen are not fools…they have their own logic. A woman may spend years living up to a masculine pattern. But in the end the strange and terrible logic of emotion will work out the smashing of the pattern, if it has not been emotionally satisfactory.”

She concludes with:

He confides in the intuition. He battles for the clairvoyance of it, through many chaotic pages. And this is purely a feminine battle. His moments of blind reactions strike a response in women.

Having touched the fundamental sources of woman’s attitude and impulses, the rest would naturally follow. It is not the first time that artists and poets have come closer to the woman than other men have. But it is the first time that a man has so wholly and completely expressed woman accurately.

D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study can be purchased for $3.99 on Amazon.com by clicking here.

To see digital Nin titles , visit our continually updated Anaïs Nin e-bookstore by clicking here.

New Anais Nin Literary Journal issue coming soon

Volume 8 of A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal will be released after Anaïs Nin’s 108th birthday, February 21, 2011.

This issue contains letters from Anaïs Nin, Hugh Guiler, and Rupert Pole, between 1975 and the end of 1977. Never seen before, these letters shed light on two very important considerations near and just after Nin’s death: first, the degree to which Nin’s marriage with Guiler had deteriorated; second, the amazing alliance Pole and Guiler forged after Nin’s death. Guiler’s very first letter begins:

Dear Rupert: As we are going to be communicating with each other from now on I think it is well that I do what I can to make things as easy as possible for us both, and I want to start by being quite frank with you.

And then he reveals that he had been aware of the “special relationship” that Pole and Nin had “for more than ten years.” In what could have been a bitter exchange, Guiler instead reached out to Pole, and the two men developed mutual sympathy and ultimately respect. Volume 8 contains the first two letters between Pole and Guiler and subsequent correspondence as well.

Nin’s illness and subsequent death was the backdrop for this group of letters, and her illness was something she never publicly discussed or wrote about, except in her unpublished diaries, The Book of Music and The Book of Pain. Now, one of Nin’s friends during the last two or three years of her life, Barbara Kraft, has written a memoir entitled Anaïs Nin: The Last Days, from which the preface and first chapter are included as an introduction to this difficult and mostly unknown period.

Most of us are aware of the effect Nin’s father’s abandonment had on Nin’s love life, of the psychological need to re-conquer him through other men, and finally by trysting with her father himself. But there were other ramifications as well, which Kim Krizan highlights in her article, “Anaïs Style.” Nin is known to have dressed exotically, to have created her own outfits, to always have stood out from the crowd no matter her age. Where did this fascination—and even obsession—come from? Krizan insightfully makes a connection between the scars left by Nin’s father’s abandonment—and perhaps just as importantly, his exclamation of “How ugly you are” when she was ill as a little girl—and her need to dress beautifully, to “de-uglify” herself. Using quotations from the childhood diary, Krizan makes her case that Anaïs Nin’s lifelong fascination with style was actually an act of self-healing.

Tristine Rainer, a friend of Nin’s, was also close to another Nin friend, Renate Druks, the heroine of Nin’s final novel, Collages. In a sometimes humorous and sometimes distressing film treatment, Rainer uses Druks’ own commentary to tell the saga of her torrid affair with a young and tragic sports hero, Ronnie Knox, in her “The Bohemian and the Football Player.”

Also in this issue are criticisms of Nin’s writing by Nin scholars Joel Enos and Sonya Blades; a critique of the relationship between Nin and Maya Deren by Japanese scholar Satoshi Kanazawa; an analysis of Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Henry and June for his movie of the same title by Anita Jarczok; a recollection of Rupert Pole’s father, Reginald Pole, by Harry Kiakis (followed by the editor’s research on the once-famous Shakespearian actor); the introduction to The Portable Anaïs Nin by Benjamin Franklin V; photography, art, fiction, poetry, and reviews.

A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal, Vol. 8 will be released in a limited edition, so be sure to reserve your copy now. You may order in three ways: by credit card; with PayPal; or by snail mail. Price is, as always, $15.00.

A list of available Anais Nin titles

How does one sort through hundreds of websites to find elusive Anais Nin titles? We’ve compiled a concise list to help you out.

To purchase a book that was once a part of Rupert Pole’s and Anais Nin’s personal collection at their Silver Lake house in Los Angeles, including rare and out of print titles, click here.

To find and purchase any title Swallow Press published (virtually all of Nin’s fiction and other titles as well), click here.

In the past year, several Nin titles have been made available as ebooks. To search the ever-growing list, click here.

To find the print versions of Nin’s (both original and unexpurgated) diaries, click here.

To locate Nin’s erotica, click here.

To examine or order print versions of A Cafe in Space, the only current Anais Nin literary journal, click here.

Sky Blue Press has the only print version of the original The Winter of Artifice, a facsimile of the Obelisk Press edition that was, according to Nin herself, banned in America. There are still copies of this limited printing left. To find out about the book, or to order, click here.

A complete list of all of Nin’s fictional characters is collected in Anais Nin Character Dictionary. To learn about this title, click here.

Are we missing anything? If so, leave a comment and we’ll attempt to answer all questions.

Anais Nin’s Novella Stella is on Kindle

Stella, a lesser-known work written by Anais Nin in 1945, is an examination of self-discovery and self-worth, a theme central to much of her fiction. The title character is loosely based on actress Luise Rainer, with whom Nin had a contentious friendship. Stella is faced with the contrast between her love affair with a public that adores her for her film roles and her personal inability to find human love. The men in Stella’s life include an ex-husband, a Don Juan lover, and a father who is not unlike Nin’s own.

It is ironic that Stella, like Rainer herself, is an orphan, since the novella itself is somewhat of a orphaned child. Nin experimented placing it in her 1946 Dutton edition of Ladders to Fire, and eventually in Swallow’s 1961 edition of Winter of Artifice, where remains today, as well as in Sky Blue Press’s 2010 anthology The Portable Anais Nin. Nin herself expressed the difficulty of finding Stella a home, so it only makes sense to offer it as a single title.

According to critic Oliver Evans, who compares Stella to D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, the novella “remains one of [Nin’s] most thoroughly realized performances. She has taken the timeworn theme of the possessive female and examined it through her microscopic lens from new and interesting angles.”

To see and/or purchase Stella at Amazon.com, click here. (The cover art is based on an engraving by Ian Hugo, aka Hugh Guiler, Nin’s husband.)

To see all current Anais Nin titles on Kindle, you can visit our Anais Nin ebookstore.

A Cafe in Space: The Anais Nin Literary Journal, Vol. 6 is on Kindle

Today, Vol. 6 of A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal was released on Amazon’s Kindle. Vol. 6 (2009) contains the remarkable letters between Anaïs Nin and her father, composer Joaquín Nin, during the time just before and after the first nine days of their incestuous relationship in the south of France. Also included are essays by several prominent Nin scholars, such as Tristine Rainer and Sarah Burghauser, analysis of Henry Miller’s writing, feminist literary theory, poetry, and reviews of Nin-related events.

For more information about the contents of the journal, and/or to order the print version, click here.

To order Vol. 6 of A Cafe in Space on Kindle, click here.

The Rebirth of Anais Nin’s Writing Philosophy

After Anaïs Nin self-published the revised Winter of Artifice (1942) and Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories (1944), she was faced with a formidable dilemma: to begin writing new material—the two previous publications were largely written before 1939, the year Nin fled Paris for New York because of the war, and they were both described as ethereal and dreamlike, neither of which interested the big publishers.

In New York, Nin’s life was in upheaval as she tried in vain to adjust to the indifference her work received and the arid climate in which she did not feel creative. Her personal life, too, was in tatters, and she often confessed to her unpublished diary that she was suicidal. Her relationship with Henry Miller was finished, bitterly, and Gonzalo Moré, her lover of some seven years, was weighing Nin down with his shiftlessness, his suffocating dependency, and the burden presented by his neurotic wife, Helba Huara. Because of these glaring and harsh realities, Nin, for the first time, was forced to face the true nature of her situation and those to whom she’d allied herself. She said often that she created those in her life by seeing them through the eyes of a dreamer, a mystic, which filtered out everything except what she found endearing, beautiful, miraculous.

At first, Nin’s forced awakening put her in unfamiliar territory—the real world, reality, unfiltered, undistilled, in all its ugliness and toxicity. She foundered, not able to find the footing, the philosophy, on which to create her new fiction. On a vacation at the beach house of her friend, Irina Alexander, where Nin went to recuperate from her severe bouts of depression, she was to find the symbol of her new direction:

July 23, 1943

The image which has supported, inspired me, upheld me, put me to shame, is strangely that of the woman Captain Soviet Valentina Orlikova with whom Irina had a friendship. Her photograph gave me the same shock I felt when I first saw it in a magazine cover and heard about her life. A shock of admiration, of love, of identification.

She is born February 22.

La vie frappe. Il faut y faire face, recevoir le coup, et continuer… [Life beats you down. One must face it, receive the blow, and continue…] Every day Valentina faces death, separation from her husband and child, the great tragedy of war, greater catastrophes, universal tragedies. Il y a une self-indulgence dans la souffrance. [There is self-indulgence in suffering.]

Nin became inspired to emulate this “woman of action,” and she found herself buying a coat she would call “Harper’s Bazaar elegance,” rather than her now old and somewhat tattered (but exotically unique) clothing from her Paris years.

Sept. 21, 1943

Symbolically, I fell I love with a Coat—a coat that represents the great change in me. It is not the coat of fire-fish or peacock, but of the woman captain. It is a very beautiful, masculine-material, tailored coat, fitted, with a velvet collar

and cuffs. It is expensive, aristocratic, simple, very pure, for action—and far from mirages or Byzance or the dream! I shall wear it a long time. It is enduring, of good quality. I chose it boldly, in an expensive shop. Then I hesitated because of the high price. But Hugo then insisted I should make him feel like a man of power able to get such a coat for his wife, and when I saw it was a symbol for him too then I yielded. The coat for a new life…

Armed with new inspiration came the excitement of designing an entirely new philosophy of writing, that of selflessness, like the woman captain’s. The seeds just begin to sprout in the following passage:

Sept. 14, 1943

I cannot begin a work casually. Have a concept of something big. Cannot begin—select, eliminate. Feel whatever I do will have to be all encompassing.

What happens if I leave myself out? Then everyone will be restored to his natural value, not mythical, not romantic, not enlarged—not symbolic.

With me absent and only the other characters present, I shall be in a human world, purely of feeling, which is my link with all the world. Irina [Alexander, Nin’s friend] said she always understood my emotions, not my interpretations or analysis of these emotions. Possibly if I eliminated myself as representing the legend, the vision, the far reaching and the cosmic, I might get into direct contact with the natural aspect of human beings. It is only in relation to me that they become “poetized” or translated into a dream. […] No one will see the poetic Gonzalo—only the fêtard [reveler] and the masochist, the adventurer and the masochist. It will be a diminished world. A natural world, not an intensified one. Me absent, passion and intensity will be removed, [as well as] the mirror reflecting people’s potential selves. It might be a way into the human. While I am there it will be mystical and mythical.

It might be good to begin writing about characters as unrelated to me. For example, I see […] the impossible woman, my mother, the extension of her. In a state of destructive revolution—the black anima.

If I disappeared as a character and became merely the vision—if I disappeared as an ego and used myself as the chemical which brought certain elements to light, I might accomplish the objective work of human dimensions which might relate me to the present. For the dream and the myth situate one in the past or the future but not in the present. They cause tragedy and not happiness. They destroy life in favor of the eternal.

These early thoughts laid the groundwork for Nin’s greatest volume of fiction, the novels which would make up the Cities of the Interior series, beginning with This Hunger, which would be published in 1945.

Stay tuned for other posts examining the development of Nin’s writing philosophy.

Anais Nin e-bookstore (updated)

Since there are now several titles by Anais Nin available as e-books, primarily on Kindle, we thought it would be a good idea to give you a handy guide with links to each book. The sequence of the list and associated comments are presented with two groups of readers in mind: those already familiar with Anais Nin, and those whose experience with the author is just now dawning.

We will update this list when new titles, or more details, become available (last update: December 2, 2011).

We hope this list proves useful; feel free to comment.

The Portable Anais Nin (Sky Blue Press) The best place to start. A comprehensive anthology of Nin’s most important work, rendered in their entirety, and a record of her growth as a writer. An excellent read for both newcomers (who wish to sample Nin’s writing) and the experienced (who, with this title, can witness Nin’s relationships between life, her diary, her fiction, and her philosophy). $9.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

 

NEW Anais Nin: The Last Days, a memoir by Barbara Kraft (Sky Blue Press) One of the persisting mysteries about Anais Nin is the circumstances of her death: she ended her published diaries a few years beforehand and left little information behind. Even the biographies are sketchy on this topic. Barbara Kraft, a student and friend of Nin, spent a good part of Nin’s final 2 years supporting her emotionally and has written a powerful memoir about the incredible spirit of her mentor and her refusal to surrender her life. She also records the great love and compassion of Nin’s “west coast husband,” Rupert Pole. $6.99. To order, click here.

 

Delta of Venus (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Anais Nin’s bestselling collection of erotica, which set the standard by which all erotica is measured. While Nin claimed to write this with “tongue in cheek,” there is little doubt about its liteary and poetic value. Recommended to everyone. $9.29. To order, click here.

 

 

 

Little Birds (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) The sequel to Delta of Venus that retains the high literary quality of feminine erotica. Recommended to everyone, especially those who have read Delta of Venus. $9.99. To order, click here.

 

Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories (Sky Blue Press) This collection of Anais Nin’s short stories contains some of her finest writing. Originally self-published, this book was the one that first put Nin on the literary map. Recommended for all, especially newcomers who wish to experience Nin’s concept of distilling life events into concise fiction. $4.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

 

House of Incest (Sky Blue Press) Anais Nin’s first work of fiction, often compared to surrealism in the French style, which bends and expands the English language into the mystical realm. Major scholars today conclude that House of Incest is Nin’s best book. $3.99. To order, click here.

 

 

The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 2 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt–Vol. 1 not yet available) This diary follows Nin’s life in Paris from 1934 until 1939, citing her associations with Henry Miller, Otto Rank, Gonzalo More, Antonin Artaud, and her experiences in Louveciennes, Paris, New York, and Fez. This book is recommended for new readers for its literary significance, and experienced readers because each name, place, date, etc., can be electronically searched. $14.82. To order, click here.

 

The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 3(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) When war forced Anais Nin from France, she called it “the end of our romantic life,” but it was the beginning of a torturous transition to New York and its impersonal harshness. Out of her element, Nin struggled to resume her life as an artist, and because of indifference to her work, she purchased her own printing press and painstakingly published it herself. Vol. 3 follows Nin’s relationships with Gonzalo More, Henry Miller, Richard Wright, and Luise Rainer, and how they were influenced by a new time and setting. $14.27. To order, click here.

 

The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) This diary chronicles Nin’s life in New York from 1944 to 1947. Key passages include Gore Vidal, Edmund Wilson, Maya Deren, and an array of young homosexual men with whom she associated. Recommended to newcomers because of the reflection of the terrible time Nin had adjusting to American life and the total rejection of her work. An electronically searchable text makes it valuable to all. $9.99. To order, click here.

 

The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 5 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Covering the years 1947 to 1955, this volume follows Nin’s life “on the trapeze,” alternating between New York and California. A truly tranformative time in Nin’s life as her California experiences brought her many new and fascinating personages, including Jean Varda, James Herlihy, Louis and Bebe Barron, Renate Druks, et al. Recommended to newcomers who wish to see how it was possible Nin could mask her double life, not only to her readers, but to her friends and loved ones. Searchable text is a plus for all readers. $12.57. To order, click here.

Fire: From “A Journal of Love”: The Unexpurgated Diary 1934-1937 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Culled from Anais Nin’s unedited diary, this volume contains intimate details of Nin’s relationships with her husband Hugh Guiler, Henry Miller, Gonzalo More, and Otto Rank. Recommended for anyone interested in Nin’s growing sense of womanhood during her Paris years. $9.99. To order, click here.

 

The Winter of Artifice, the original Paris edition (Sky Blue Press) This title was out of print for 70 years because of censorship laws and Nin’s subsequent decision to cut an entire story (“Djuna,” the fictionalized Henry and June tale, which was originally edited by Miller himself), and to heavily edit the remaining two. This is recommended to all for its literary value, which had been lost to readers for decades. $4.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

 

Ladders to Fire (Sky Blue Press) The first novel of the collection Nin would later entitle Cities of the Interior, Ladders to Fire introduces the reader to Nin’s key characters: Djuna, Lillian, Sabina, and Jay, all in part based on real people, including Nin, as she placed different aspects of herself within the composite female characters. A must-read for all readers, new and otherwise, because it lays the groundwork for the following titles. $4.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

 

Children of the Albatross (Sky Blue Press) Nin’s second novel in the Cities of the Interior collection, divided into two parts, the first examining Nin’s relationship with the “transparent children” described in Diary 4, one of whom is based on Rupert Pole. The second part reveals the psychological truth behind Nin’s female characters’ relationships with Jay, fashioned after Henry Miller. We suggest reading all the Cities titles in order, for that is what Nin intended. $4.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

 

The Four-Chambered Heart (Sky Blue Press) Third in the Cities collection, this novel uses the Seine and a houseboat as a symbolic stage on which three characters–Djuna, Rango, and Zora–are gripped in a life-and-death battle of jealousy, possessiveness, raging passion, and disillusion. Based on Nin’s relationship with Gonzalo More and his wife Helba. Recommended for its solid characters, incredible tension, and searing climax. $4.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

 

A Spy in the House of Love (Sky Blue Press) One of Nin’s most popular titles, this novel, 4th in the Cities series, examines Sabina, the character based on both Nin and June Miller. A fractured being, Sabina sees each shard of her character reflected in her five lovers. Recommended to all because it best characterizes Nin’s life in the 1940s, which was one of desperation and despair. $4.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

 

Seduction of the Minotaur (Sky Blue Press) The last in the Cities series, this novel concentrates on Lillian’s battle with the “minotaur,” a demonic force which has tormented her, only to find, after seeking relief from others in exotic places (in this case, a lush Mexico), that the demon lives within her. Recommended because of its authenticity, symbolism, and direct language. $4.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

 

Collages (Sky Blue Press) Nin’s last work of fiction, written shortly before the release of her diaries, Collages is a collection of interwoven short stories that are based on experiences of Nin’s friends, such as Jean Varda and Renate Druks. It is perhaps Nin’s only book in which she is not the central character. Recommended for its fairy-tale atmosphere, and especially for its humor, a characteristic for which Nin was rarely credited. $4.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

 

Stella (Sky Blue Press) A lesser-known work written by Anais Nin in 1945, is an examination of self-discovery and self-worth. The title character is loosely based on actress Luise Rainer, who is faced with the contrast between her love affair with a public that adores her for her film roles, and her personal inability to find human love. Critic Oliver Evans says Stella “remains one of [Nin’s] most thoroughly realized performances.” Recommended for anyone who does not own either The Portable Anais Nin or Swallow’s Winter of Artifice. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (Sky Blue Press). Anais Nin’s first published book is an examination of her first literary muse, the controversial English novelist, D. H. Lawrence. Assembled from notes in only 13 days, this study is regarded by critics as the best introduction to Lawrence to this day. Recommended for anyone interested in Lawrence, or in Nin’s masterful critical insights. $3.99. For more information on this title, click here. To purchase this title, click here.

 

A Cafe in Space, Vol. 7 (Sky Blue Press) This issue contains a close look at Nin’s marriage with Hugh Guiler, including a shocking letter he wrote offering her divorce; an interview with Deirdre Bair; John Ferrone’s tale of how Nin almost never published her erotica; an unpublished excerpt from Nin’s 1940s diary, and examinations of Nin’s writing by well-known Nin scholars and newcomers alike. Recommended for anyone wishing to discover details of Nin’s life and work found nowhere else. $3.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

A Cafe in Space, Vol. 6 (Sky Blue Press) The highlight of this issue is the publication of the recently found letters between Nin and her father, Joaquin Nin, at the time of their incestuous relationship. The letters reveal a crafty and relentless pursuit of the 30 year old Anais by her father. The journal is filled with articles about Nin and Henry Miller, as well as examinations of Nin’s writing by well-known Nin scholars and newcomers alike. Recommended for anyone wishing to discover details of Nin’s life and work found nowhere else. $3.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

A Cafe in Space, Vol. 1: special centennial issue (Sky Blue Press) The inaugural issue, which contains a previously unpublished excerpt from Nin’s 1940s diary, has contributions by Janet Fitch, Philip Jason, Benjamin Franklin V, Lynette Felber, Kazuko Sugisaki, Toyoko Yamamoto, Yuko Yaguchi, among others. Included is a journey to Louveciennes and Neuilly to visit Nin’s homes (with photos) and a tour of Montparnasse with Claudine Brelet, close friend of Lawrence Durrell. Recommended for all. $3.99. For more information on this title, click here. To order, click here.

A Cafe in Space, Vol. 2This issue contains a substantial excerpt from Nin’s 1943 diary which illustrates her relationship with several Haitians in New York, and one in particular, Albert Mangones, represented the sort of atmosphere and culture Nin sorely missed. The results were torrid and, in the end, heartbreaking. Articles by several noted Nin scholars and an excerpt from Maria Chekhov’s memoirs are included, as well as a tour of Henry Miller’s Paris hotels. Recommended for all. For information on the title, click here. To order, click here.

A Cafe in Space, Vol. 3 contains early correspondence (1957-61) between Anais Nin and the man who was instrumental in her ulitmate literary success, her agent Gunther Stuhlmann. The letters give the readers a look at the long, hard climb, the many failures, and the degree of frustration Nin endured on the way up. Also included are contributions from three of the leading Lawrence Durrell scholars in the world about the “3rd Musketeer” and how his literature is regarded today. Recommended for both Nin and Durrell fans. For information on the title, click here. To order, click here.

A Cafe in Space, Vol. 4. The highlight of this issue is two important series of correspondence: the first is between Rupert Pole and editor John Ferrone, which reveals the intense wrangling that was involved during the editing of Anais Nin’s first unexpurgated diary, Henry and June; the second involves Nin, agent Gunther Stuhlmann, and publisher Alan Swallow in a dramatic look at Nin’s rise to fame, culminating in the release of her Diary. Recommended for those interested in what lies behind some of Nin’s most important works. For information on the title, click here. To order, click here.

 A Cafe in Space, Vol. 5. This special issue, entitled “In Her Own Words,” focuses on a wide range of Anais Nin’s writing, much of it experimental and unpublished. Examples of her critical writing, fiction treatments, and a long lost interview from 1969 are included, as well as her correspondence with Rupert Pole during her trips to New York, where she was living with Hugh Guiler. To purchase, click here.

 

NEW  A Cafe in Space, Vol. 8.  This issue’s centerpiece is correspondence between Anais Nin and her husband Hugh Guiler during the final months she was alive. Dying in Los Angeles with her lover Rupert Pole at her side, she sought “absolution” from Guiler and emotional freedom. Even more remarkable is the early correspondence between Pole and Guiler just after Nin’s death. Also included is a look at Nin’s “father-in-law,” Reginald Pole, the Shakespearean actor and Rupert’s father.  For more information on this title, click here. To purchase, click here.

NOTE: We do NOT recommend the title White Stains because it apparently contains no work from Anais Nin, despite her name being placed on the title page.

Anais Nin Literary Journal On Kindle

Volume 7 (2010) of A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal (the only current Nin journal anywhere) has just been made available on Kindle. In this issue are some amazing articles and excerpts from Nin’s unpublished diary, not to mention an interview with Nin biographer Deirdre Bair and John Ferrone’s account of the birth of Delta of Venus. Eventually, we hope to have Vols. 1 through 6 published as e-books as well.

Our aim is to make the journal easy to obtain no matter where one is, and to make the price one that is easy on the pocketbook ($3.99). There’s nothing like the print version in one’s hands, but the quality, photographs, and extra bells and whistles, such as an interactive table of contents, are all there in the e-book. We hope you will support our efforts!

To visit the Amazon.com location for A Café in Space, Vol. 7, click here.

To see a description of the contents of Vol. 7, click here.

Our other Nin titles on Kindle are: The Portable Anais Nin, House of Incest, 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.

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