Sex and Lies Before Videotape : Writing and rewriting women’s lives : ANAIS NIN: A Biography, <i> By Deirdre Bair (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $39.95; 654 pp.)</i>

Journals have long been regarded as the most intimate and therefore honest forms of writing. But as Deirdre Bair shows in this definitive, eminently readable biography, they can also be masterful tools of deception. Anais Nin kept both real and false diaries, editing and rewriting them throughout her life in a prodigious, never-ending recreation of self. The image of Nin that emerges in Bair’s biography is that of persona without anima in the Jungian sense--mask without soul.

When Nin died in 1977 at age 74, she was at the apex of her long-desired literary success. The artistic renown that she relentlessly pursued throughout her life with, as Bair puts it, “constant calculation and lack of pride,” came in her last decade with the publication of Diaries I-VI. Diary I saw print primarily because of Nin’s portraits of Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Otto Rank and Antonin Artaud. Acutely aware of their celebrity, Nin traded on it, extracting and rewriting these sketches to entice publication of her diaries in their entirety.

The women’s movement did the rest of the job, catapulting the fey, charismatic, ironically feminine Nin into something akin to the status of icon. She was thought by her followers to possess an authentic feminine voice, free of male influence. Her emphasis on the intimate, personal and instinctual--feminine traits she believed could be used in the reconstruction of a more sensitive world--was received like manna by ardent young feminists. At the same time, Nin presented herself as having successfully defied the conventions of woman’s traditional role, emerging unscathed to tell the tale. It was an unbeatable combination in those idealistic days.

The very underpinning of the Nin legend is founded on her romanticization of the diary begun as a letter to her father, the philandering Spanish composer Joaquin Nin, who abandoned the family when she was 11 and thereafter became the overshadowing figure in her life. Bair, however, finds no substantiation for this epistolary conceit; indeed, Nin wrote long letters to her absent father detailing the family’s daily life and received letters from him in return. Rupert Pole, the executor of the Anais Nin trust and the man Nin married bigamously in 1955 (she was already married to Hugh Guiler or “Hugo”), alone adheres to the Nin version. While harmless in itself, Nin’s biographical tinkering was a precursor to the treacherous deceptions that would be the cornerstone of her “creative livingness,” a philosophy that held stability to be the enemy.

Nin found support for this and similar ideas in the work of D.H. Lawrence, who was the subject of her first book, published when she was only 27. The Lawrencean canon appropriated by Nin included the notion that lies were essential, for most people could not stomach naked truth. To defend her lies, Nin coined the (grammatically incorrect) phrase “ mensonges vital , the lies that give life”; she bragged about lying “bravely, ironically, dually, triply.”

Quixotic in her choice of lovers, Nin was pragmatic when it came to husbands, neither of whom is acknowledged in the diaries she edited and published. Both husbands were gullible, compliant, steadfast men who gave her unstinting support. To Hugo, the banker she married in 1923 and never divorced, Nin was the keeper of the sacred, immortal flame, not merely an artist but the very definition of art and therefore beyond error.

As Bair shows, it was Hugo’s money she used so generously to support Miller, Gonzalo More and the rest of her “children.” Hugo also paid for the publication of many of her books and made possible the glamorous, art-infested life she led. He turned a blind eye to her love affairs with Miller, her psychoanalysts Rene Allendy and Rank, More and her own father, whom she met and seduced in 1933 after a separation of nearly 20 years. She was 30; “HIM,” her “ Roi Soleil ,” 54. In this first period of “erotic madness,” which Nin called “a search for the father,” she pitted one man against the other, traveling “from one’s bites to the other’s sperm.” Her “recipe for happiness” was to “mix well the sperm of four men in one day.”

Through all the mess that was her life, Nin clung obsessively to the book that her living nourished. She was aware that the diary--her “one true friend”--and by extension her diary-based fiction were a neurotic solution to the problem of her living. As she wrote in the 1940s: “I am giving the vision of the neurotic directly.” Hellbent on fame at any cost, Nin achieved it. In this, as in much of her behavior, she anticipated the dubious values of present-day society. The consciousness of this “steel hummingbird” was unremittingly self-serving, devoid of even the most elemental moral or ethical considerations.

In 1934 Nin became pregnant, the first of several subsequent aborted pregnancies. (This despite her statement in “A Woman Speaks” that a childhood surgery left her incapable of bearing children.) She aborted her 6-month old, stillborn daughter and fictionalized the event in “Under a Glass Bell.” During the period of conception, she was on intimate terms with Hugo, her father and Miller. She insisted that Miller, who dubbed her Un Etre Etoilique (a starlike being), was the father, but she never told him she was pregnant. All of this material comes from the unedited diaries, which Bair says reveal “a portrait of monstrous egotism and selfishness, horrifying in its callous indifference.”

It is no accident, I think, that Nin found her place in the chaotic ‘60s, a decade marked by inordinate preoccupation with the self and enthusiastic solutions to the eternally hard problems of existence. And yet, while Nin was a creature of artifice, she was not superficial. As Edmund Wilson observed, she was both a “practical little Franco-Spanish housewife” and a “lovely little nymph who was not quite a human being.”

For me, as someone who was close to her in the ‘70s, Nin was the embodiment of poetic lyricism. In her presence, one felt transported into the realm of the possibility of things becoming. This gift for inspiration, which echoes in the diaries, was God-given and one that even she could not totally destroy.

Bair, the author of previous biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Samuel Beckett, insists that Nin will enter the annals of literature a “major/minor writer,” for she was among the first to explore in print three of this century’s biggest preoccupations: sex, the self and psychoanalysis. However, she arguably goes too far in pardoning Nin’s dishonesty. Why should truth be the principal criterion for evaluating diaries and literature?, she asks. What does truth mean anyway in the postmodern age?

This is the voice of academia speaking. Fundamental truth is the essence of any book worth reading in any age. Bair is too quick to dismiss what William Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, called “the old verities,” the universal truths of love, honor, pity, pride, compassion and sacrifice without which, he believed, a story was ephemeral and doomed.