Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1932) [Paperback]

Anais Nin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 29, 1990

This bestseller covers a single momentous year during Nin’s life in Paris, when she met Henry Miller and his wife, June. “Closer to what many sexually adventuresome women experience than almost anything I’ve ever read....I found it a very erotic book and profoundly liberating” (Alice Walker). The source of a major motion picture from Universal. Preface by Rupert Pole; Index.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ana-s Nin (1903-1977) was born in Paris and aspired at an early age to be a writer. An influential artist and thinker, she was the author of several novels, short stories, critical studies, a collection of essays, two volumes of erotica, and nine published volumes of her Diary.

Product Details

• Paperback: 281 pages
• Publisher: Harvest Books; Reissue edition (October 29, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 015640057X
• ISBN-13: 978-0156400572
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #28,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) was born in Paris and aspired at an early age to be a writer. An influential artist and thinker, she wrote primarily fiction until 1964, when her last novel, Collages, was published. She wrote The House of Incest, a prose-poem (1936), three novellas collected in The Winter of Artifice (1939), short stories collected in Under a Glass Bell (1944), and a five-volume continuous novel consisting of Ladders to Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954), and Seduction of the Minotaur (1961). These novels were collected as Cities of the Interior (1974). She gained commercial and critical success with the publication of the first volume of her diary (1966); to date, fifteen diary volumes have been published. Her most commercially successful books were her erotica published as Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979). Today, her books are appearing digitally, most notably The Portable Anaïs Nin (2011).

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 52 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The sexual awakening of Anais Nin March 14, 2004

By Andrew Parodi TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Anais Nin is the author of over a dozen novels and a very famous diary that is now available in "expurgated" and "unexpurgated" form. All of her works concern one primary theme: women attempting to understand themselves and to make themselves complete human beings after having been psychologically and emotionally stunted in early life. An understanding of Anais Nin's life reveals why this theme preoccupied her: she had a very painful childhood. Her mother married a younger man of lower social pedigree, the parents were in constant conflict (" ... in the house there was always war: great explosions of anger, hatred, revolt. War." - WINTER OF ARTIFICE), her father frequently beat the children and allegedly molested Anais Nin, and her parents eventually separated. The mother took 11-year-old Anais and her two brothers, and the four moved from France to New York. It was on the ship that carried them to their new country that Anais began her diary.

Anais Nin did not keep a diary in the conventional sense, jotting down things that happened to her on a particular day and then offering a few reflections and interpretations. Rather, she portrayed her life in her diary as an unfolding story, positioning herself as the main character of course. The diary became not a mere reflection of her life, but an intense focus of her life. It was as if things had not really happened until she had written them down and read them back to herself. Nin explained that viewing her life as a story made bearable occurrences that would otherwise devastate her. The diary therefore gave her a sense of control over her life (remember, this was the 1930s when women had far less control over their lives than they do now). And as with the fiction, the search for self-understanding and completeness dominated the story she told the diary.

HENRY AND JUNE, based on the diaries 32 through 36, finds Anais Nin in her late 20s and early 30s living outside of Paris with her husband, banker Hugo Guiler. Anais is bored with life and feels unfulfilled, for while Hugo's substantial paycheck can afford a glamorous home, what she longs for is excitement and to be a part of the literary world, not an ornamental and silent companion to social functions. Luckily, she soon meets an unknown writer named Henry Miller. He is opposite to her husband in just about every way: he's older, penniless, irresponsible, and like Anais he is interested in literature, as well as that other Nin preoccupation: sex. (A perhaps revealing detail is that Hugo, though well endowed, occasionally struggled with impotence.) In fact, Miller has been working on a manuscript for about a year. The rest, as they say, is history ... a history revealed in HENRY AND JUNE that I do not want to spoil for the prospective reader. You'll have to get the book. But I must suggest that while reading HENRY AND JUNE it may be beneficial to view the story in the context of Anais Nin's prime preoccupation: the search for completion after having been emotionally stunted in early life. Indeed, on the very first page of the book, Anais tells her cousin, "I need an older man, a father...."

91 of 100 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A journal of self-obssession and self-deceit June 9, 2001

By Diane Schirf

Format:Paperback

Henry and June (from The Journal of Love) by Anaďs Nin. Recommended.

Henry and June (from The Journal of Love) by Anaďs Nin is a portion of the writer's famous journal from October 1931 until October 1932—the year in which she met Henry and June Miller and fell for Henry's sensuality and June's mystery, a year of writing, lies, deceit, sexual awakening, introspection, psychoanalysis, and "love."

Nin is an evocative, poetic writer, if not a particularly substantive one. Henry and June, edited from her journal to focus on Miller and his wife, is beautifully written but, in the end, is devoid of meaning to anyone other than the participants. She obscures the truth of how much she writes. If the journal is accurate, then Nin had mastered deception—she lies to her husband, to June, to Henry, to her psychoanalyst, to her lover/cousin Eduardo, to virtually everyone she knows, all seemingly in an attempt to hide herself from them, and perhaps from herself. She writes frequently of costumes, makeup, jewelry, nail polish and how one can put them on to create a new self. It quickly becomes clear that, despite the introspection of the journal, despite the psychoanalysis, despite her complete focus on herself and how she relates to those people in her life, Nin is no more self-aware by the end of the year than she was when she met Miller, and the reader can't be too sure, either, of where Nin ends and where the self-deception begins. When the obvious is pointed out to her—that she is still trying to find the "love" that she didn't get from her father—Nin accepts it at first, but denies it as she talks more and more to herself. And while she may grasp that her father's abandonment was harmful to her, she finds it easy to mistreat her husband, whom she portrays as psychologically simple and refers to as a "child" without relating how he might feel to how she felt about her father. She seems incapable of grasping the importance of another person's feelings, no matter who that other person might be.

Nin writes of spending entire days and nights with Miller, of going from him to Hugo, her banker husband, with no suspicion on Hugo's part. Hugo is jealous of Miller, although she repeatedly tells her journal she doesn't know why he would be. She writes of not wanting to hurt the soft, weak, emotional Eduardo, but continues her sexual relationship with him until he is bound to be crushed by her sudden decision to end it. She tells Eduardo about Henry, Henry about Hugo, and her psychoanalyst about all of them. She writes of having sex with three men in one day, ending with "What does that make me?" She does not want to know the potential answer to that question. She wants "experience" at any cost. She does not want to be hurt, but she hurts others freely. She believes she has deep insight into others, but does not understand at more than a superficial level what their thoughts and feelings may be. Much of what she attributes to the elusive, mysterious June are the shifting sands of her own personality.

Not having read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, the book he was writing during the year of his relationship with Nin, it's difficult for me to say how accurate Nin's portrayal of him is. At times, she feels pity for him, for his weak eyes, for the mind-numbing work he does to support himself. At others, she describes him as "monstrous." The sketch of Miller is less one of the man himself than of Nin's infatuation with her own perceptions. At one moment he is the ultimate sensualist; the next, he becomes a gentle romantic. She also enjoys him largely for his worship of her as a writer and as a lover. The relationship is less about the dynamics of their interactions than about her ego and her relationship with herself. Miller is never much more than a two-dimensional, ever-changing character—Henry Miller according to Anaďs Nin. While Nin's journal is certainly more thoughtful than those of most people, ultimately, it lacks the insight and depth that another writer could have brought to such an intense relationship. At the end, Nin and Miller are still strangers to the reader who has spent hours over dinner and in bedrooms with them. Perhaps it is Nin's amorality that gets in the way of any true intimacy.

Nin has somehow become a model of a woman's sexual awakening and awareness, perhaps because of the perceived candor of her journal and her desires for the depths and heights of sexual experience. It is as though such desires for such experiences are what should define a woman—a notion that may work for some women, but certainly not all who are sexually awakened in their own ways.

Henry and June is self-indulgent and even occasionally adolescent in its focus, obssessions, and attitudes. Perhaps because I find so little to relate to in Nin, I found her cold, uninteresting, and annoying—perhaps because I don't like to be deceived. On the other hand, this will be a fascinating read for anyone who is deeply interested in Nin or Miller or anyone, like me, who would like to free themselves to speak freely in their own journals.

Diane L. Schirf....

39 of 44 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Nin and Miller wild and untamed May 5, 2000

By David J. Loftus

Format:Paperback

I read a lot of Anais Nin's fiction when I was in high school, because my girlfriend did. I didn't get it. I tried to read her famous diary, but couldn't finish even the first volume. There was an intelligent and interesting woman there, but I didn't feel I was really getting to her. The diary entries I read were too cool, too discursive for my taste.

Then _Henry and June_ came out in 1986. It covered the exact same period (Paris, 1931) as "Volume I" of Nin's diaries -- first published, but in highly edited form one could now see, in 1969. Here she begins to cheat on her husband Hugo with the young Henry Miller, meets and flirts with his flighty wife June, and opens to life and eventually other men in an explosive fashion. HERE was the flesh-and-blood woman I had sensed behind the original published diaries. She panted, she sweated, she lied, she used filthy language as well as high poetry, and she adored love and sex. I thought she was a wonder. Nin and Miller collide like titans; sparks fly when they talk and when they make love.

Unfortunately, I have read several of the subsequent, increasingly-appalling unexpurgated diaries, as well as the biographies by Noel Riley Fitch and Deirdre Bair. The bloom is definitely off the rose. Ms. Nin turns out to have been a consummate deceiver (though of herself as much as anyone else), an artist manque who thought herself -- wished herself -- far more talented than she turned out to be. She works better in fantasy than reality; I still might have liked to meet her in her prime, but it would have been dicey to get involved with her.

It is in this book that she shows to her best as a character (never mind whether it's all true or another kind of fiction). Here one sees a woman's passion in all its riotous fire and self-contradiction. Just read this one and leave all the rest (save, perhaps for the curious erotica and a decent collection of essays entitled "In Favor of the Sensitive Man"), unless you have a penchant for the odd and pretentious.