This work by Deirdre Bair is the second, and probably not the last, of the full-dress biographies of Anaïs Nin. The first, Noël Riley Fitch’s Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin (1993), was widely and deservedly praised for unveiling the complexities of Nin’s fragmented, duplicitous life. Reading between the lines of Nin’s own writings and gathering insights from dozens of people who had known Nin well, Fitch developed a thesis about the childhood origins of Nin’s erratic behavior and about the functions served by Nin’s diaries and fictions in maintaining her marginal stability. Nothing that Fitch hypothesized is contradicted by Bair’s investigation, though now Nin’s life and its connection to her art are more minutely revealed.
Bair has worked with an advantage unavailable to Fitch and perhaps not likely to be available on the same scale to future biographers (except for Evelyn Hinz, who for two decades has had something like proprietary rights as Nin’s “official” biographer). This advantage is access to Nin’s original manuscript diaries as well as their several layers of revision and excision. A shrewd and patient detective, Bair has detailed the ways in which Nin manipulated the diary materials to suit her changing sense of self and of their importance as literary documents.
Yet that is not all. Bair has given readers an astoundingly rich context within which to view Nin’s complex relationships. First, having gained the confidence of living descendants of the Nin and Culmell families, she has amassed more material on Nin’s family background than had previously seen print. To see the young Anaïs in the light of her mother’s sisters, for example, enriches one’s sense of Nin forming herself against a curious spectrum of female exemplars. Readers learn more about the breakup of Nin’s parents’ marriage, more about the places of Nin’s youth, and more—at every stage of her life—about her important friendships with women. They learn more about her brothers, Joaquin and Thorvald, and more about cousin Eduardo Sanchez, her soulmate. Readers learn more, too, about the specific role of analysis in her life and the contributions of different analysts to her fevered search for security, wholeness, inner strength, and the always-elusive decisiveness.
Bair treats the scandalous 1930’s, when Nin was betraying her husband not only with Henry Miller but also with her analysts—first René Allendy and then Otto Rank—and even with her father, with remarkable constraint. These men, too, readers come to know better than they had been able to do heretofore. Also, readers discover more about Nin’s relationship with Gonzalo Moré, her houseboat lover with whom she later, in New York, founded Gemor Press. Though Fitch handled this series of adul- teries with more dramatic flair, there is a place for Bair’s cooler, more distanced style.
Most important, readers come much closer than ever to knowing Nin’s lifelong silent partner, husband Hugh Guiler. Bair’s portrait still leaves some shadowy mysteries surrounding Guiler, but his own particular mix of strengths and insecurities, kindness and frustration, practicality and whimsy is rendered with vividness and compassion. Knowing him better, readers know Anaïs better. Knowing more about his world, they know more about what she found herself able to accept from it—and what she would always reject. Witnessing his transition from businessman to artist (engraver and filmmaker), readers come to respect Guiler’s capacity for growth and his constant effort to make himself into the kind of perfect husband he had aspired to be from the beginning.
Throughout this study, but particularly in dealing with the marriage of Hugh and Anaïs Nin Guiler, Bair is able to mass a mountain of verifiable facts, including financial facts, the exposure of which would have driven Nin to even further distraction than did the constant threat of exposure during her decades of subterfuge. Driven to fabricate a self, to please everyone, to defy convention in several ways, Nin made an enemy of fact. In her years of fame, Nin denigrated both the popular clamor for details about her life and the critical enterprise than would pin her down. She made a romantic virtue of being above what she would call “mere facts,” but only because she was so haunted by them, her carefully constructed image being vulnerable to the facts that would (she feared) shatter it. Though she accused her detractors, and even her fans, of being obsessed with facts, Nin herself was obsessed with the labyrinth of lies she spun to conceal those facts. As Bair makes clear, those facts were often unattractive—and Nin sought an image of alluring perfection.
Nin’s career-long argument with literary realism must be seen in the light of her life problems with fact. Her pursuit, in her fictions, of interior truths at the expense of surface detail is consistent with how she made her way in the world. A manipulator of surfaces, Nin knew how artificial that kind of fact could be. She manufactured facts constantly, just as she manufactured her appearance, her environments, her whereabouts. The truths that mattered were somewhere inside, she insisted; they were emotional truths to be probed by psychoanalysis or gleaned by intuition. Where realists failed to render the ultimate, inner reality, Nin trusted that a heightened, poetic prose unfettered by the trappings of material culture would bring her readers such illumination. On several occasions, it did.
Yet if the fictions were lies based on revised diaries, and these diaries were lies based on earlier diaries that in turn heightened, embellished, fantasized, and suppressed—then what was the life? On the one hand, that life was Nin’s supreme fiction; on the other, it is what Bair has reconstructed. Sometimes, it seems as if Anaïs Nin did not live at all: She only invented—and she wrote.
The power of Nin’s drive for recognition and acceptance as an artist is a thread of the life that Bair handles particularly well. Though Nin most often presented a façade of dignified calm regarding the need to self-publish and the resistance she met from commercial publishing houses, Bair makes it clear that Nin’s frustrations were enormous. She was alternately filled with rage directed at obtuse editors, envious of the successes of others whom she considered no more talented than herself, and insecure in her abilities. Braggadocio, disdain, and self-doubt swirl across Bair’s canvas as she paints Nin’s many failed attempts to gain publishers and readers. Bair has uncovered more evidence of the long and inconsistently pursued battle to bring the diaries into print, a battle that involved several kinds of mental repositioning and compromise before the final victory. She also gives a more detailed account of Nin’s dealings with Alan Swallow, the Denver publisher who brought her fiction back from near-oblivion in the early 1960’s. Nin’s energy rarely flagged, however, and she learned to be a shrewd promoter. What comes as a surprise is that when she made her first breakthrough with E. P. Dutton in the mid-1940’s, Nin had not yet generated a significant body of polished fiction manuscripts—this after more than a decade of complaining about neglect.
Through all the downs and ups, Hugh Guiler was always ready to front expenses, as he had from the beginning in the Paris years. Nin’s Gemor Press depended on his largess, as did the costs of several British editions of her novels. Later, the Anaïs Nin Press was supported by Guiler. Only in their last years, when Guiler had depleted his assets through several bad investments, did Nin’s royalties from the successful Diary of Anaïs Nin in its several volumes allow her to repay in part his lifetime of support. Only in those last years might he have discovered, too, that allowances that he gave to Anaïs had supported her second, though illegal, marriage.
Nin’s relationship with Rupert Pole dominated the last thirty years of her life, a span that can be conveniently called her “California life.” Bair carefully records the decades of torturous balancing that Nin practiced to sustain the illusion of monogamy with each husband, to ensure that knowledgeable friends kept confidences, and to cover her tracks in every conceivable way. On her transcontinental flights, Nin reviewed index cards filled with the lies she had established to persuade either Rupert or Hugh about the where, what, and why of her time spent on the other coast. Matters became so delicate that she had to take regular refresher courses in her own fabrications. The beautiful illusions that Nin sought and claimed to prefer over ugly realities were purchased at an enormous price. So proud of having conjured up a life from what others only dream about, she was often living a nightmare from which she could get no relief.
Fame only complicated the nightmare. The acceptance, recognition, honors, and invitations that came Nin’s way beginning with the first published Diary volume seemed like a vindication, but Nin found herself exhausted by demands on her time that she simply could not refuse. She continued to be plagued by unresolved problems surrounding her marriages—her “trapeze” life—and her health was failing. The last ten years brought her too much too late.
Eventually, she told the truth about Guiler to Pole: Not only had she continued to live with Guiler in New York, but she had never actually obtained a divorce. Pole, whose dedication to Nin in her old age echoed Guiler’s earlier unflinching support, accepted this confession and kept up Nin’s spirits as best he could during her extremely painful bout with cancer, which finally killed her.
The revelations that Fitch and Bair have made in their biographies have left reviewers to wonder whether Anaïs Nin was a personage worthy of such respectable and respectful efforts. Fitch had already triumphed with a biography of Sylvia Beach and Bair with lives of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. Why Nin? Vain, manipulative, compulsive, and deceitful, Nin seems to offer little that is instructive in a positive sense. Yet there was a magnitude to her life that was quite remarkable. The sheer force with which she registered her pains and pursued her pleasures, the nakedness of her determination to win acclaim, her appropriation of psychoanalytic theory as a method of life and art, and her daring pursuit of that elusive thing called “feminine writing” all recommend her life to others as a dynamic, heightened response to important twentieth century issues. A flawed artist, she remains, as Bair observes, a major minor figure, her experiments more notable for their very experimental flavor and fervor than for their occasional success.
As Toni Morrison remarks about her title character in Sula, Nin’s was an experimental life. It was even more experimental than her art. Always trying out another version of herself, always mixing the ingredients in new combinations, Nin took nothing on authority but constantly tested the limits. Her actions, when constrained at all, were constrained less by moral scruples than by fear, exhaustion, and nervous breakdown. Her lies were in the service of her experimental life, often invented to guard others from the pain that truth would bring. Anaïs Nin’s central experiment was toward finding the ultimate equation of selfhood. It is the experiment human beings all share and the reason that her story, as meticulously presented by Deirdre Bair’s master hand, can touch many others.