What Do Women Want? (16 page)

The year after the triumph of having written
Henry & June
into her secret journal, Nin began to tell another story, the story of her discovery of love from October 1932 to November 1934. This tome was only released sixty years later, as
Incest, from “A Journal of Love.”

The love in this case is still for Henry Miller (with whom her life and loins are still entwined), her husband, Hugo, who has become more sexual, her first analyst, René Allendy (whom she once loved but now abandons), her second analyst, Otto Rank (with whom she is currently entranced), Antonin Artaud, the actor-poet, and Joaquin Nin, her father, the musician, whom she seduces in revenge for his having seduced and abandoned her in childhood. She triumphs over his Don Juanism with her far stronger impersonation of Doña Juana.

It’s a “Journal of Love” unlike any ever published before. It dares to describe the ultimate act: incest. What does she feel? What does he feel? No other writer before her dared this much. If Henry Miller wanted to write what was left out of men’s books, Anaïs Nin succeeded in writing all that has been left out of women’s books for centuries. (Only in the last few years has the incest taboo been breached in women’s writing.)

The central incident in
Incest
(at least in the present retelling of the story) is Anaïs Nin’s seduction of her father (or her father’s seduction of her).

I notice that our language contains no word for mutual seduction—but it really
was
that. After much letter-writing foreplay, many regrets about not having truly known each other as child and parent, the two come together at Valescure-Saint Raphaël, at the now defunct Coirier’s Grand Hotel, each of them temporarily fleeing another life.

They discover how alike they are in their sexual selves. Joaquin Nin y Castellanos discovers his daughter, his double. Anaïs discovers her father the myth as a mere man—a rather rigid, fussy, controlling man of almost fifty-four who suffers from lumbago and regrets.

Like any father figure, he seduces her by telling how his wife failed to understand him—but in this case his wife is her mother!

Like any daughter figure, she confesses her past, her hurts in childhood, her love affairs. She is seeking absolution—but in this case he is the
author
of her primal hurts. All the love affairs have sought in vain to assuage them, but now she has the real thing in her snare.

She confesses that all her journal-writing was for him, that her craft has always been an attempt to bring him back.

He in turn confesses that his whole life has been tainted by his abandonment of her, that he has been seeking her everywhere, in other women, but now he has “found [his] match.”

They discover that they both love to go to the same hotel room with other lovers, delighting in their own duplicity, aroused by the secret knowledge of betrayal. They discover also that they are mirrors of each other; they discover, in short, the perfect narcissistic love. They are both picaresque heroes, both afraid of intimacy, both flirts and illusionists, who flee. But they cannot flee each other.

Nin’s father teaches her own faults, exposes her own defects of character. She is both attracted and repelled by him.

He confesses: “I don’t feel toward you as if you were my daughter.”

She confesses: “I don’t feel as if you were my father.”

And with that (and a little more psychologizing), he kisses her mouth. And then comes “a wave of desire.” And then, though she is both “terrified and desirous,” she “melts,” and he “emptied all of himself in me . . . and my yielding was immense, with my whole being, with only that core of fear which arrested the supreme spasm in me.”

She holds back her own orgasm and retreats at once to her room to be alone, feeling “poisoned by this union.” She is guilty but suddenly in possession of some primal mystery. The mistral blows so hard it cracks the windows. She feels both humbled and defiled.

“The sperm was a poison,” she writes in her journal, feeling she has succumbed to “a love that was a poison.”

She longs to run away but must know the end of the mystery. So she stays on, succumbing again and again to her father’s passion, never having an orgasm yet being filled with his sperm, so “overabundant” that she walks down the hall to her room “with a handkerchief between [her] legs.”

He claims he wants to replace her other lovers, but despite his orgies of repeated penetration, he fears the loss of his
riquette,
his virility. He fears that she is young and will abandon him for younger men. He admits jealousy of Hugo, of Henry, of all the letters she receives from them daily. But for all his supposed twinship with Anaïs, he fails to have an inkling of
her
feelings—her utter confusion and bewilderment, her embodiment of the incest taboo in her failure to find orgasm, her sadness, her remorse. She is
tormented
about lying to everyone to achieve this gloomy union; he fails to understand that, too.

What is remarkable about Anaïs Nin’s telling of the tale is not only the description of physical incest but the willingness to record all her feelings about it, even before she fully understands them. The taboo is so strong that most women writers have mythicized and disguised these feelings, in fiction and poetry as well as in autobiography. I felt that I was reading a story never told before. Not only is the father dissected, but the daughter’s feelings are anatomized.

Only once have I confronted such material in my own writing and it took me wholly by surprise. In my third novel,
Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones,
I was unwittingly drawn into an incest myth. My heroine was raped by her stepfather and later learned he was her biological father. The incest was wholly unintentional, and it astounded both heroine and author. Several adapters of the book for stage and screen have been adamant about changing this one part of the book. The incest taboo is that strong.

Nin broke this primal taboo in her life and she also had the audacity to write about it. It’s true that the prose in this episode becomes filled with “unreality”—a word Nin uses often when she is confused by emotional contradictions.

Henry is real; Hugo is real; Rank is real; even the elusive Antonin Artaud is (almost) real. But her father dissolves in a poisonous mist, and when he cries and says he cannot let her go, she is all the more determined to leave. She rationalizes away his bad character, embellishes his sensitivity, tries in every way to idealize him. But he comes across as a weak and selfish man who knows neither his own heart nor his daughter’s, a man incapable of either filial or genital love.

The
“padre-amour”
section (note that Anaïs uses Spanish and French in describing it) is the shortest of the book, though it provokes the title. All Nin’s actual diaries had fevered titles, like
La Folle Lucide; Equilibre; Uranus: Schizoidie & Paranoia; The Triumph of Magic; Flagellation . . . Audace; The Definite Appearance of the Demon, or Flow—Childhood—Rebirth. Incest
is faintly commercial by comparison, and the brashness of the title may actually be a liability. Nevertheless, it is psychologically true to the book. Anaïs Nin’s multitudinous seductions were all incestuous at heart. She was forever wooing and winning her mythic father by mimicking his behavior. He was the Zeus who ruled her mental universe.

The first part of
Incest
tells of Nin’s waning ability to idealize Henry Miller (though their affair continues), of her starting to see Henry as “a perverse, irresponsible child” whose fierce honesty can be “another way of hurting.”

But
Henry & June,
for which she is seeking publication while writing
Incest
(through William Aspenwall Bradley, the agent she found for Henry), is seen by her as too soft on Miller, too idealizing. This response thwarts publication but makes Nin more determined than ever to continue writing her unsparing daily journal.

In fact, it is just the
dailiness
of the journal that makes it revolutionary.
Incest
goes on to explore Hugo’s discovery of his wife’s affair (through reading her journal) and Anaïs’s Scheherazade-like ability to talk him out of what he has read (and seen), claiming her journal to be erotic fiction based on fantasy. She swears to Hugo that there is another, still
more secret
journal, which reveals her innocence. Wanting to believe, Hugo believes and forgives. Anaïs is left with her husband’s quiet kindness and her own ravening guilt. She is both elated and depressed by her ability to be so many women at once—playing each part with utter conviction.

In
Incest,
she complains that Henry stops reading her writing, that he has thousands of faults. Yet she still sometimes dreams of “finding Hugo a woman who can make him happy” and departing for another life with Henry.

Six months after the first meeting, her father comes to her house in Louviciennes and makes love to her again. He pleads for utter fidelity between them, knowing fidelity is impossible for them both. This time she feels nothing but compassion for him (which disguises her need for revenge).

She becomes involved with Otto Rank, her second psychoanalyst, who demands that she give up her diary, her “opium,” and leave it in his hands. This ultimate surrender propels their love affair. Father commands are always aphrodisiac to Nin. Through Rank, Nin is able to dismiss her father as a lover. She finally tells him what a narcissist he is and hardens her heart to all the men in her life. She feels herself becoming a “primitive woman” who loves at least four men at once. With her new power, she persuades Jack Kahane to publish
Tropic of Cancer
after a vacillating two-year wait. She underwrites the publication with money borrowed from Rank. But still her own journals remain unpublished.

In London, she meets Rebecca West and finds herself more admired than Henry. This is a special kind of validation.

In May of 1934, she discovers herself pregnant with Miller’s child. A heroic struggle begins in her mind between Henry the child-man and little Henry, the fetus. She knows that Henry wants no rival in a child; and she knows that she cannot present Henry’s child to Hugo. She imagines a war between the child and her artist self. Over Hugo’s objections, she goes to a
sage-femme
to abort the child.

It is a life-changing sacrifice she is making, and she is well aware of the cost. She describes the labor and the stillbirth with a vividness that still makes me cringe and weep on the tenth rereading. The expelled fetus becomes an abandoned child like herself: “So full of energy my half-created child that I will thrust back into the
néant
again. Back into obscurity and unconsciousness, and the paradise of non-being. I have known you; I have lived with you. You are only the future. You are the abdication.”

Then comes the battle of birth, the futility of pushing out a dead baby. Anaïs stops pushing and the doctor rages at her and causes her deliberate pain. “The pain makes [her] howl.”

Finally the little sacrifice is pushed into the light. It is a girl baby, perfectly formed, perfectly dead.

With this act, Anaïs feels she has delivered herself as an artist. She has killed the woman in herself, committed female infanticide both on her child and on herself.

With one act, she has repudiated her mother, her father, Henry, Hugo, Rank, and all the men who want to possess her. She will never face abandonment again.

Tropic of Cancer,
that other baby, bursts into the world. Henry is launched, and accordingly she loses interest in him (though he does not in her). She sails for America with Rank, to become a psychoanalyst.

What Nin has created here is nothing less than a mirror of life. The fluctuations of moods, the flip-flops from hate to love that mark our frail humanity, are seen in
process,
as never before.

Nin was doing what Proust, Joyce, and Miller were doing, but she was proceeding from within a
woman’s
consciousness. Where Miller is often impossible to follow because of his plotlessless and stubbornly nonlinear time, Nin is always lucid. She reflects the change of mind and mood by an accretion of precise descriptions, not by the loopy repetition we often find in Miller.

Nor does she veil her story in ancient mythology and clever coinages like Joyce. But she has the same modernist urge to explode time and abolish space. The space inside the mind is all that interests her.

 

 

 

If Nin
was such a pivotal and important figure in the history of modern literature, why has she been so maligned?

The first reason is obvious: sexism. The second is also obvious: our unique cultural fear of sexuality. The third reason is equally obvious: What she has created is new (a kind of writing that hybridizes autobiography and fiction). Since we belong to a species that fears the new for no other reason than because it is not old, Nin’s creation of a new form is troubling.

But Nin has also been deeply misunderstood because of the
sequence
in which her work appeared.

For years she was the great unpublished author, whispered and gossiped about, known for her literary love affairs and vast artistic and psychoanalytic acquaintanceship. The few novels that appeared under her name were written in an obfuscating experimental style and issued from precious avant-garde publishers. Even her book on D. H. Lawrence was known only to a coterie.

In the early seventies, with the rebirth of feminism, the so-called second wave, Nin was published to a large hungering audience, but published in ways that obscured the immensity of her achievement. The books were expurgated to spare the feelings of husband Hugo and countless others who were still alive.

Nin’s reputation rose with feminism and fell with its repudiation. It rose with the movement for sexual liberation and fell when that movement retreated in the Reagan-Thatcher-Bush years.