The Emotional Algebra of Anais Nin

One of the privileges of the teaching life is the paid vacation. The torrential rains in Bombay add great value to life only if you do not have to go out into the ‘mean streets’.

Among other things, today I was browsing through some of Anais Nin’s writings and as always, I am endlessly fascinated with her, perhaps more as a bewitching woman than a writer. Her biographer gives her the epithet of being “a major minor writer”. I am not so worried about her position in literature but some of her insights into life cut like knife. I would like to share some of these.

Anais Nin became well-known particularly after Philip Kaufman’s film Henry and June, on her simultaneous bisexual affair with Henry Miller and his wife June Miller. Those who have seen the film have been captivated by the film’s erotic power (one of the most hauntingly sensuous films ever made) often without any awareness of her writing. Philip Kaufman did a workshop at my film school with this film when I was a student and so I have a special kind of relationship with the film.

To mention Anais Nin as the finest writer of female erotica is to trivialize her work. Besides, I have a problem with the word ‘female’ as applied to her work. For a quick overview, Anais Nin (1903-1977) was a French writer born of Cuban parents both of whom were classical musicians. Her great-grandfather ran away from Paris to Havana at the time of the French Revolution and she, in her lifetime, ran away from Paris to NYC during WWII. In the prime of her youth, not only was her libido the most active, she was also the toast of the entire Parisian art world. Nin was the lover of many leading literary/art figures including Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, James Agee and Lawrence Durrell, Otto Rank (psychoanalyst, Freud’s famous student), Gonzalo More (a firebrand Peruvian communist revolutionary) among others (C.G. Jung?). [The beautiful, expert ‘Madame’ in Buñuel’s Belle de jour is called Madame Anaís as an allusion to Nin.] Henry Miller took entire pages out of her diaries and incorporated them en toto into his novel Tropic of Capricorn. She let him do it out of sheer love. As she wrote somewhere: “…(I am) capable of every audacity in life but vulnerable in love.”

Her nine novels are actually pale shadows of an outrageously reckless and bizarre life (except Winter of Artifice, 1939, and the lesbian novel The Voice, which are my personal favourites). Her legacy to literature was her 69(hmm!)-volume diaries which explore every goose bump and furrow of one woman’s sexual consciousness. She spoke of her diaries as her shadow, her double. “I will only marry my double”, she wrote in one of her autobiographical novels.

And yet, as I mentioned earlier, I have some issues with the notion of ‘female’ erotica à la Nin. One French philosopher recently said that the male gaze was deeply planted within her notion of the ‘female’. Consider this, her most titillating triumphant declaration:

“… My recipe for perfect happiness – mix well the sperm of four men in one day … I walk joyously away, debtless, independent, uncaptured…”

Elsewhere in her Diaries, she writes:

“…I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding."

Even as you try to pass judgment on her moral ambivalence, she would reply with this:

“… We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences and very painful ones sometimes - the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it's what we want to do. …”


Since this is far from being an academic blogpost, I just wanted to make a few casual comments on re-reading Anais Nin but I want to leave the reader here with some flashes of her insights into life. I adore the passion with which she lived her life and the beautiful poetry inherent in them. They really sound like “quotable quotes” one could memorise and use on the right occasion or inscribe it inside a card for a friend who is lost in life’s dark alleys (like most of us):

o Living never tires one out as much as the effort not to live. And if one lived deeply, one also rested deeply. …People living deeply have no fear of death.
o I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
o Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
o Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
o We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
o We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
o We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
o There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
o I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
o Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
o I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.
o Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her.
o Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
o Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
o Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
o If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
o There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
o The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
o The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
o Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.