Biography of Anais Nin

Anais Nin (ca. 1903-1977) is best known for her erotica and for her seven volumes of diaries published from 1966 to the end of her life.

Nin's other works, which include novels and short stories, are greatly influenced by Surrealism, a movement initiated in the 1920s by artists dedicated to exploring irrationality and the unconscious, and by the formal experiments of such Modernists as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, who employed expressionistic and stream-of-consciousness narration. Rather than relying on a chronological ordering of events as in conventional narratives, Nin wrote in a poetic style featuring repetition, omission, and pastiche as organizing principles. Critics favorably note her attention to physical details and the influence of sensory information on the moods, thoughts, and interactions of her characters. Nin's predominant subject is psychological, and her insights into the behavioral and thought patterns of women have been particularly praised as both astute and free of misanthropy.

Nin began her diary as an ongoing letter to her father, Spanish musician and composer Joaquin Nin, who abandoned his family when she was eleven years old. Nin kept a journal throughout her life, recording such experiences as friendships with famous artists and writers, her years in psychotherapy, and, eventually, her worldwide travels on speaking engagements. Because she edited and excerpted her original diaries for publication in seven volumes as The Diary of Anais Nin, many commentators assess them for insights they shed upon Nin's literary technique. Nin's diaries relate incidents in the present tense and feature real people who appear as carefully delineated characters in fully-realized settings. The diaries are divided according to theme and share many of the concerns expressed in Nin's fiction, including the life of the creative individual, psychoanalysis, the relation between the inner and the outer world, and the nature of sexuality. The volumes include photographs, conversations presented in dialogue form, and letters from Nin's personal correspondence, completing the impression of a thoughtfully orchestrated work of art rather than a spontaneous outpouring of emotions. Susan Stanford Friedman determined: "The Diary records Nin's attempt to create a whole identity in a culture that defines WOMAN in terms of her fragmented roles as mother, daughter, wife, and sister."

Nin's first published work, The House of Incest, is often considered a prose poem due to its intensely resonant narrative. This book achieves a dream-like quality through its emphasis on psychological states rather than on surface reality. Nin's next publication, The Winter of Artifice, contains three long short stories. The first, "Djuna," concerns a menage a trois that closely resembles the relationship Nin depicted in her diary as existing between herself, novelist Henry Miller, and Miller's second wife, June. In "Lilith," Nin portrays the disappointing reunion of a woman with her father, who abandoned her in her childhood, while "The Voice" features an unnamed psychoanalyst and his four female patients who must learn to incorporate the emotions experienced in their dreams into their conscious lives. Under a Glass Bell, another collection of Nin's short fiction, contains "Birth," one of her most celebrated pieces. In this story, a woman undergoes excruciating labor only to bear a stillborn child and discover that through this process she has been symbolically freed of her past. This Hunger ... , Nin's next collection of short fiction, extends her exploration of the female unconscious in psychoanalytic terms.

Cities of the Interior, which Nin described as a "continuous novel," is often considered her most ambitious and critically successful project. Between 1946 and 1961, Nin published the work in five parts; these installments were published as Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur. Ladders to Fire concerns Lillian, a character known for her violent temper, who is as dissatisfied with her extramarital affair as she is with her marriage. Lillian seeks the perfect lover as an antidote to the problems of her life. In Children of the Albatross, Djuna, a minor character in Ladders to Fire, is emotionally stunted due to her father's abandonment. Djuna prefers playing mother to a series of adolescent lovers rather than becoming involved in a mature relationship with a man. In The Four-Chambered Heart, Djuna gains a measure of self-awareness through her relationship with Rango, a Guatemalan musician and political activist. A Spy in the House of Love, Nin's most popular novel, features Sabina, a minor character in the earlier volumes. A woman looking for affection through sexual gratification, Sabina discovers she has never experienced love. Seduction of the Minotaur reintroduces Lillian, who realizes the preciousness of human life while travelling in Mexico and returns to her husband a more mature woman. Collages (1964), an experimental novel that relies upon pastiche unified by a single character, reworks themes from Nin's earlier novels.

Much of Nin's fame is attributable to the short erotic pieces she wrote for a patron while living in Paris during the early 1940s. Collected in Delta of Venus and Little Birds, these works have garnered much commentary regarding their status as literature. Although many feminist critics object in principle to sexually explicit literature, some have championed Nin's erotica, declaring that these stories advocate mutual respect and consent between the participants in a sexual relationship. Some critics defend Nin's graphic depiction of sexual situations as an exploration of psychological truths, while others emphasize that her artistry removes these pieces from the category of pornography.

On a ship bound for New York from Barcelona in 1914, an eleven-year-old girl named Anais Nin began writing the journal that would gradually evolve into the most acclaimed work of her literary career, a journal that Henry Miller, writing in the Criterion, predicted would someday "take its place beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Abelard, Rousseau, Proust, and others." Aboard the ship with young Anais were her two brothers, Thorvald and Joaquin, and her mother, Rosa Culmell Nin, a classical singer of Danish and French descent. Absent was Anais's father, Joaquin Nin. A respected Spanish composer and pianist, he was, Rosa told her children, on an extended concert tour; he would join them in New York City later. In fact, Joaquin had deserted his wife and three children forever. Suspecting the truth, Anais began her diary as an extended letter to her father, one intended to coax him back to his family.

For the first ten years of her life Anais had moved in some of Europe's most glittering circles. Her parents were both from aristocratic families, and their musical careers enabled them to associate with the finest artists of their day. While Anais enjoyed this cosmopolitan life, she was also shaken by her parents' private battles at home--violent arguments that stemmed from Joaquin's endless infidelities. When he finally deserted Rosa, she decided it would be best to take their children as far away from him as she possibly could. Although Anais had feared her harsh, critical father, she also idealized him and suffered keenly from his absence.

Trained only as a musician, Rosa Nin managed to support her children by taking in boarders and giving singing lessons in New York. The family led a life that was poor and drab compared to the one they had left behind them in Europe. Anais was isolated by her limited knowledge of English as well as by her deep sadness over the changes in her life. She turned to her journal for companionship and escape. "I hate New York," she confided in its pages at the age of eleven. "I find it too big, too superficial, everything goes too fast. It is just hell." Although filled with a strong desire for learning, Anais did poorly in school, preferring to educate herself by reading alphabetically through the books in the public library. When a teacher criticized her writing style as stilted, the sixteen-year-old dropped out of public school permanently. She remarked to her diary, "I leave ... with the greatest pleasure in the world, the pleasure that a prisoner feels on leaving his prison after a sentence of a thousand years." When not studying in the library, Anais helped to support her family by working as a model for artists, illustrators and fashion designers.

Nin married Hugh Guiler, a banker, when she was twenty. Not long after their marriage, Guiler was transferred to a bank in Paris. Nin had been writing regularly in her journal since beginning it in 1914, but it wasn't until her return to Paris as an adult that she began to work seriously at writing for publication. As she struggled with her early fiction, she began to feel a powerful inner conflict between "her desire to be a woman--as she saw it, one who gives, is involved in relationships--and an artist--one who takes, is unfaithful and abandons loved ones (like her concert pianist father)," noted New York Times Book Review contributor Sharon Spencer. Nin felt unable to follow her artistic inclinations while also carrying out her duties as a banker's wife. Guiler's work kept the couple in conservative circles, and Nin, who craved the company of artists, found herself stifled by long hours spent in social intercourse with bank employees. But although she was beginning to "acknowledge disappointment with her marriage to the banker ... Hugh Guiler," explained Spencer, Nin maintained a "madly romantic ideal of married love with remarkable tenacity."

In spite of her personal difficulties, Nin managed at this time to publish her first book, a commentary on D. H. Lawrence. Nin had been strongly influenced by Lawrence's style and "shared with him belief in the value of the subconscious, myth, progression, and the recognition of the physical," stated Benjamin Franklin V in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. While Nin's book D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study is still recognized as a sensitive and original discussion of the English novelist's work, its greatest importance was probably the change it helped bring about in Nin's private life. The lawyer she engaged to negotiate the contract for her book introduced her to a poor, unpublished American writer living in Paris, a man named Henry Miller, whose works Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn would later be widely banned as obscene.

Miller lived in an underground world different from any Nin had ever known. His companions were the gangsters, prostitutes and drug addicts of Paris. He and his wife, June, lived a life of extremes, and it seemed to Nin that they were fully alive in a way that she was not. Franklin pointed out their differences in his essay: "Nin was personally elegant, Miller was not; she was selective, Miller voracious; in their writings Nin was implicit, Miller explicit; she was sensual, he sexual. But despite these and other differences Nin and Miller inspired each other, and each performed as a sounding board for the other's ideas." As Nin became increasingly involved with Henry and June Miller, the tension she felt between her life as Hugh Guiler's wife and her life as Anais Nin the artist became intolerable. In 1932 she sought to resolve her conflicts through therapy with the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst, Rene Allendy, and later with Otto Rank, a brilliant though unorthodox student of Sigmund Freud.

Sharon Spencer believed that the insights Nin gained through "therapy with Otto Rank and a love affair with Henry Miller freed her to live a greatly expanded life--without sacrificing the marriage that had such great psychological and spiritual value for her." How she accomplished this is not known, for Nin heavily edited her published journals from those years and omitted all references to Hugh Guiler (at his request). It is known that he later established a secondary career as an artist and filmmaker under the pseudonym Ian Hugo. Nin appeared in some of his films, and his engravings illustrated some of her books. They remained legally married until her death, but they may have established an open relationship. During her lifetime, "Nin refused to discuss her marriage or even name her husband in interviews," revealed Rose Marie Cutting in Anais Nin: A Reference Guide. Psychoanalysis became a lifelong fascination for Nin. She studied it under Rank and eventually practiced with him in New York City. Its influence on her fiction was profound, for in all her novels she attempted to illustrate her characters' inner landscapes rather than to describe their external lives.

The first work to show evidence of Nin's liberation was a long prose poem entitled House of Incest. In a surrealistic style, the narrator recounts her nightmare of wounded souls, trapped by their unresolved inner conflicts in the dark, airless "house of incest." Only one inhabitant can find an exit from this sealed environment--a dancer who has lost her arms as punishment for clinging to all she loved in life. When she learns to accept her flaws, she is able to dance her way to the daylight outside the house. Incorporating Nin's own recurring dreams, House of Incest was symbolic of her feelings of suffocation from childhood traumas and her rebirth through psychoanalysis. "Nin's message is clear," explained Benjamin Franklin V in one of his Dictionary of Literary Biography essays. "The nature of man's existence is multiple and imperfect. Every individual has many parts, the sum of which is something less than one's ideal self. But if one ignores that multiplicity or demands perfection, that person will not be able to function in life.... Nin never expressed these basic concerns as eloquently or convincingly as she did in this first volume of her fiction, even though almost all the rest of her fiction is similar to it thematically." Franklin adds, "Such an esoteric book doubtless could not have been written or published in the United States at that time."

Indeed, Nin had trouble finding a publisher for House of Incest even in France. Eventually Nin, Miller and the other writers with whom they associated (a group sometimes called the Villa Seurat circle) established Siana Editions to publish their own works and those of other avant-garde writers. With the encouragement of the Villa Seurat writers, Nin's style continued to develop, and by the time she published Winter of Artifice in 1939, her prose showed much less of an obvious debt to surrealism. While House of Incest cautions against the danger of becoming trapped in one's dreams, Winter of Artifice stresses that "dreams have to be probed, not to the exclusion of conscious reality, but rather to nourish it," writes Franklin. The story centers on Djuna and her reunion with the father she has not seen for twenty years. Nin's narrative recreates Djuna's yearning to penetrate the many illusions with which both father and daughter have surrounded themselves. Little by little, she succeeds in exposing the true nature of their relationship.

Besides illuminating the psychological drama played out between Djuna and her father, Nin's intent in Winter of Artifice was to create prose that would provoke the immediate emotional response usually associated with music. Her success is unquestioned by Sharon Spencer, who wrote in Collage of Dreams: The Writings of Anais Nin that "Winter of Artifice is a mature work, very sophisticated technically, in which Anais Nin first fully displays her talent for adapting the structure of the non-verbal arts to fiction. It is a ballet of words in which music and movement are ... skillfully balanced and ... subtly interwoven." Bettina L. Knapp, in her critical volume entitled Anais Nin, praises the author's skillful use of "the literary devices of repetitions, omissions, ellipses, dream sequences, and stream-of-consciousness" that have the cumulative effect of "jarring the reader into a new state of awareness."

Both House of Incest and Winter of Artifice were well-received in Europe's avant-garde literary circles. But the rich cultural atmosphere that helped Nin to create those first books disintegrated as World War II drew closer. In 1939, Hugh Guiler was called back to the United States and Nin chose to accompany him. Just as she had in childhood, Nin found New York City cold and sterile in comparison to Europe. She also discovered that American publishers were unreceptive to her work, which they considered unhealthy, decadent surrealism. After a few years of consistent rejections by American publishers, Nin bought a secondhand, foot-operated printing press and began to set the type for her own books. In this way she produced limited editions of House of Incest and Winter of Artifice, as well as a volume of short stories, Under a Glass Bell, and another novel, This Hunger. In time she attracted the attention of Edmund Wilson, a highly-respected reviewer. He praised Under a Glass Bell in the New Yorker: "The pieces in this collection belong to a peculiar genre sometimes cultivated by the late Virginia Woolf. They are half short stories, half dreams, and they mix a sometimes exquisite poetry with a homely realistic observation. They take place in a special world, a world of feminine perception and fancy.... The main thing to say is that Miss Nin is a very good artist." It was through Wilson's influence that Nin was finally able to place her work with a commercial publisher in the United States.

In novels such as Ladders to Fire, The Four-Chambered Heart and A Spy in the House of Love Nin continued the exploration of the feminine psyche she had begun in House of Incest and Winter of Artifice. Her novels have a fluid quality, found Spectator contributor Emma Fisher, "because her female characters are all faces of Woman.... The characters melt and dissolve into each other," even exchanging names as they reappear from one novel to the next. William Goyen, who rated Nin "one of the most fiercely passionate practitioners of the experimental novel in America," stated in the New York Times Book Review that as Nin "follows the inner flow of her characters' drives and motivations ... she occasionally directs the flow to the surface where she freezes it into something as plain and dazzling as ice." Reviews such as these helped to bring Nin greater acceptance in the United States.

But her fiction was still misunderstood and attacked by some critics, who objected to her experimental style as "murky and precious," to quote Audrey C. Foote in Washington Post Book World. "She covers her canvas too thickly," declared Herbert Lyons in the New York Times Book Review. "It tends to look like a used palette: the resulting abstraction is murky, meaningless and too often in bad taste." Some reviewers felt that the absence of conventional plot and characters rendered Nin's books inaccessible. Others found her recurrent themes and characters tedious. For example, Blake Morrison wrote in his New Statesman review of the five-volume "continuous novel," Cities of the Interior, "Nin herself described Cities of the Interior as `an endless novel,' and for anyone wading faithfully through 589 pages of such sub-Lawrentian wisdom as `A breast touched for the first time is a breast never touched before' the description is going to sound all too appropriate."

In his Dictionary of Literary Biography essays, Benjamin Franklin V suggested that while Nin's fiction was very accomplished, it "was never popular, but understandably so: she wrote about psychological reality, not the surface reality that she called realism and that most readers desire." Franklin believed that "while her fiction may at first seem impenetrable because of its lack of surface reality, an attentive reading reveals a powerful psychological reality that is the hallmark of her writing." He concluded: "She was a great writer of psychological fiction.... Her work challenges the reader and involves him in the creative act."

When Nin finally did achieve widespread acceptance it was with the work she had never intended to publish--the diary she began on the ship to New York as an eleven-year-old girl. Writing in the journal had developed into an obsessive activity which Nin sometimes compared to a drug addiction. She eventually filled more than two hundred manuscript volumes with the record of her transatlantic crossings, relationships with artists both famous and unknown, struggles with publishers, and efforts toward artistic success and self-fulfillment. Many of those closest to her had at one time urged her to abandon her journal, including Allendy, Rank, and Miller. They felt that it was a hindrance to her career as a fiction writer, but the journal continued to grow. Eventually, Nin's supporters began to urge her to publish portions of it, believing that her finest writing was contained therein.

After long deliberation, Nin decided to go ahead with the project. Her aim in editing her personal journal was similar to her objective in fiction: to illuminate the drama of individual growth. Volume One of The Diary of Anais Nin appeared in 1966 and was received far more enthusiastically than any of the author's novels had been. Readers, particularly women and young people, identified strongly with Nin's quest for self-knowledge and personal freedom. Many critics called the Diary a far stronger literary work than anything Nin had published previously. For example, Jean Garrigue noted in the New York Times Book Review: "The best parts of this diary are written with a daylight energy and sharpness that are in marked contrast to the frangibilities and antennaed delicacy of Miss Nin's stories and novels.... This diary has the elusive fluidity of life. Its author-subject is neither moralizer nor judge but a witness, vulnerable, susceptible, subtle, critical.... It is a rich, various, and fascinating work."

Eventually seven volumes of The Diary of Anais Nin were published. Its success was summarized by Duane Schneider in the Southern Review: "The Diary stands as Miss Nin's most remarkable artistic achievement because its literary form provides the author with a more effective means to reveal her characters than her novels do. The Diary symbolizes a quest for complete self-introspection and understanding; the result of the quest is a coherent, organic, revelatory work of art." Shenandoah contributor Lynn Sukenick called Nin's diaries "books of wisdom which have elevated their author to the status of a sage and have had a healing effect on many of her readers."

The Diary of Anais Nin did receive some negative attention. Susan Manso remarked in the New Boston Review that the journal's size was "matched only by its vacuity," and Susan Heath wrote in Saturday Review: "Only the self-absorbed will be fascinated by this solipsistic quest for healing and wholeness, for they will see themselves in the mirror Miss Nin has held to her soul. And the disenchanted will recognize it as the tiresome work of a querulous bore who cultivates neurosis in hopes of achieving self-realization." But for the most part, The Diary of Anais Nin was accepted as an important document, both for Nin's insight into the development of individual personality and for her sketches of the many artists she associated with in her lifetime of world traveling.

After the publication of the Diary , Nin found herself in great demand as a lecturer. She became a controversial figure in the woman's movement, alternately praised for writing from a uniquely feminine perspective and denounced as a supporter of archaic feminine values. Asked by an interviewer for East-West Journal to explain why so many readers responded so strongly to her diary, Nin replied: "I believe that what unites us universally is our emotions, our feelings in the face of experience and not necessarily the actual experiences themselves. The facts were different, but readers felt the same way toward a father even if the father was different. So I think unwittingly I must have gone so deep inside what Ira Pogroff calls the personal well that I touched the water at a level where it connected all the wells together."

Anais Nin died of cancer in 1977 and, in accordance with her wishes, her ashes were scattered over the Pacific. After her death, the publication of two volumes of erotica she had written for a dollar a page while raising money to buy her printing press put her name on the New York Times bestseller list for the first time. Delta of Venus and Little Birds were praised by Alice Walker in Ms. as "so distinct an advance in the depiction of female sensuality that I felt, on reading it, enormous gratitude." Four volumes of journals predating those personally edited by Nin were also published after her death, completing what Prairie Schooner contributor Robert A. Zaller called "the odyssey of a great woman's life, a life which presents itself to us now as one of the most serious and important of our time."

The University of California has a large collection of Nin's papers and literary manuscripts, including her diaries. Much of Nin's published and unpublished work has also been collected at Northwestern University Library. Under the Sign of Pisces, a literary journal devoted to Anais Nin and her circle, is produced at Ohio State University. Nin's work is studied in Paris by the group Les Amis de Anais Nin.

Associated Works

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Anais Nin (1903-1977)
• At the time of Nin's birth:
• Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States
• The Wright brothers made the first completed flight in a gasoline-powered aircraft
• "Typhoid Mary" caused an outbreak of 1,300 reported cases of typhoid in New York
• United States Supreme Court upheld a clause in the Alabama constitution denying blacks the right to vote
• At the time of Nin's death:
• Gerald R. Ford was president of the United States
• After being elected president, Jimmy Carter granted pardons to almost all Vietnam era draft evaders
• The Orient Express (1883) made its last trip from Paris to Istanbul
• Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was the first Arab leader to visit Israel since its founding in 1948
• New York blackout left 9 million people without electricity for up to 25 hours causing rampant criminal activity
• The times:
• 1900-1930: Symbolist and Naturalist period of American literature
• 1914-1918: World War I
• 1914-1965: Modernist period of American literature
• 1939-1945: World War II
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1951-1955: Winston Churchill was prime minister of Britain
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• Nin's contemporaries:
• Agatha Christie (1890-1976) British mystery writer
• Earl Warren (1891-1974) Supreme Court Justice
• Max Ernst (1891-1976) French artist
• Henry Miller (1891-1980) American writer
• Mary Pickford (1893-1979) American actress
• Nikita Khrushchev (1899-1971) Secretary of the Soviet Union
• Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) British director
• George Orwell (1903-1950) British writer
• Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) British writer
• Lillian Hellman (1906-1984) American playwright
• Selected world events:
• 1905: "Bloody Sunday," a workers' demonstration in St. Petersburg, erupted into violence
• 1908: The first Model "T" was produced by Ford Motor Company
• 1909: Congress passed the United States Copyright Law to protect United States authors and publishers
• 1915: Alexander Graham Bell made the first transcontinental phone call from New York to San Francisco
• 1917: Bobbed hairstyle for women became the rage in Britain and the United States
• 1928: D.H. Lawrence published his overtly sexual novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, in a private printing after being denied publication in England
• 1933: A United States court ruling allowed Ulysses, by James Joyce, into the country after finding that the sexually explicit language was not gratuitous
• 1936: Penguin Books Ltd began a paperback revolution
• 1960: United States paperback book sales reached a rate of more than 300 million annually

Further Reading

• Newsweek, January 24, 1977.
• New York Times, January 16, 1977.
• Time, January 24, 1977.
• Washington Post, January 16, 1977.
• Anais Nin Observed: From a Film Portrait of a Woman as Artist, Swallow Press, 1976.
• Authors in the News, Gale, Volume II, 1976.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism , Gale, Volume I, 1973, Volume IV, 1975, Volume VIII, 1978, Volume XI, 1979, Volume XIV, 1980.
• Cutting, Rose Marie, Anais Nin: A Reference Guide, C. K. Hall, 1978.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography , Gale, Volume II: American Novelists since World War II, 1978, Volume IV: American Writers in Paris, 1980.
• Evans, Oliver, Anais Nin, Southern Illinois University Press, 1968.
• Franklin, Benjamin V, Anais Nin: A Bibliography, Kent State University Press, 1973.