Book Review : Anais Nin Trapped in a Web of Love

Henry and June: From the Expurgated Diary of Anais Nin (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $14.95).

Once, at a Hollywood party in the ‘60s, I heard a memorable phrase describing an acquaintance of ours: “Jack has great respect for his genital area.” No respect for the flag, or democracy, or success, or failure, or family, or the Great Depression, or the threat of the bomb, or even the workings of his own brain, but for his genital area. Jack was a faithful, fervent member of an ongoing fraternity of men whose five-star general in those days--and in the days before and after--was Henry Miller, one half of the team of Henry and June.

Henry Miller! God love him. Miller, like Sherwood Anderson, may be more important to American literature for his story than for his books. Yes, it’s true that Henry Miller was America’s first great pornographer--that he brought four-letter words, writhing and panting, into the mainstream of our American language. It’s true that because of the landmark court trials of “Tropic of Cancer” and “Tropic of Capricorn,” we see and hear sexual expletives and sexual scenes in books and in movies today that would have been “unthinkable” 50 years ago.

But Miller was a god to a couple of generations for a far more important and touching reason. Like Anderson, when Miller became trapped in a meaningless American life, larded with commercialism and despair, he found the courage to chuck it all; to begin an entirely new life in another place, with another set of aesthetic values. Anderson would write “Winesburg, Ohio,” but Miller knew that Paris was his place, and sex his metier . Henry crossed the Atlantic, lived in a series of squalid rooms, set up his own form of bachelor housekeeping in Clichy. He began to chronicle the ongoing life of his genital area, and the genital areas of an increasingly wide circle of his friends, acquaintances and Parisian passers-by. He wrote it all down, all his goofy adventures and misadventures, and in that sense became a true pioneer: He dared to write what no American man had dared to write before.

Those who have read “Tropic of Cancer” remember that life in Paris for Henry--despite his constant sexual and intellectual fevers--was curiously constrained. He woke up, had breakfast, walked to the American Express, checked to see if there was a letter from his wife, June. Of course, there wasn’t. He walked home, scrounged dinner, found a woman, slept. To Henry, June was “all,” the ineffable, the hopelessly desired, the ever-strange. On a mundane level, June knew enough to make herself scarce. Her policy with Henry was to blow into Paris, stay for a very short time, then retreat, promise to send a check, and finally postpone that act indefinitely. For this reason, perhaps, Henry tended to define June as a destroyer; as demonic, his savior, his killer.

Where did Anais Nin fit into all this? Well, she was living in Paris with her husband, Hugo Guiler, a very successful banker. She was a pretty woman, and never one to underestimate her own physical appeal. Here, quoting June complimenting her, Anais jots in her diary: “I thought your eyes were blue. They are strange and beautiful, gray and gold, with those long black lashes. You are the most graceful woman I have ever seen. You glide when you walk.” Alas, Anais (who, with Hugo, Henry and June, was out that night on a double date of sorts) does not return quite the same degree of admiration. Appraising June, Anais muses, “In the cafe I see ashes under the skin of her face. Disintegration. . . . I feel her receding into death . . . she is dying before my eyes. Her tantalizing, sombre beauty is dying. Her strange, manlike strength.”

Lively Interest in Sex

So, there it was. Anais wanted to be a writer and had a lively interest in sexual matters. Her novels never met the stamina of her journals. (An un-fan might feel that Nin was far more interested in herself and her sensations than she could ever be in anything so prosaic and external as a plot, or characters.) Anais met Henry, who lived what she yearned for. And, in the traditions of the day, he was poor as a mouse and therefore had integrity, not like her banker-husband, that poor lunk.

So in between his visits from June, Anais slept with, and talked to, Henry Miller. She also slept with and talked to quite a few other fellows, until (as the jacket blurb reminds us), “burdened by her multiple loves, Anais eventually sought help from the eminent psychoanalyst Dr. Rene Allendy. As he unraveled her sexual neuroses--and tried to part her from Henry--he himself became her suitor.”

‘A Devastating Tornado’

The key word here is solemnity. Miller’s own sexual works are often hilariously funny, anguished, wacko, desperate, while Anais, when she writes of things physical, could be Bronson Alcott. Arguing with Henry about whether he should go back to his wife, Anais intones: “I will accept June as a devastating tornado while our love remains deeply rooted.” And later speaking of her cousin (troubled by impotence), she writes: “Cruelty to Eduardo. When he has elaborated a plan of intellectual domination of his pain, I sit very near him on the couch and make him read Henry’s writing, which he hates. He says I am breeding a little giant. I see him looking at my more aggressive breasts. I see him turn pale and rush away on an earlier train.” But lest you think Anais is really not a nice girl, she manages to reject poor Hugo, her own husband, like any other respectable spouse of the time: “Half asleep, I pushed him away, without feeling. I found excuses for it afterwards.” (All this after poor Hugo has blurted his devotion to her in the words: “Not even golf is pleasure for me, because I prefer to be with you.”)

Words fail the reviewer on this one. There’s nothing to say of it that Anais hasn’t said herself. But should there ever be a “Saturday Night Live” for intellectuals, the material is right here, waiting.