Customer Reviews

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

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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...."

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

Henry and June (from The Journal of Love) by Anaïs 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 Anaïs 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....

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.

This is from Anais Nin's diary. It is the most detailed introspective work I have ever read; Anais lays her soul bare with no reservations. She is shameless, and at the same time magnificently dignified. However, her confessions do not titillate, for they are heart-wrenching cries for help. She is 29 and married. Her husband is a banker--very stable and secure and devoted--but she yearns for excitement and danger. She is infatuated with her cousin, Eduardo, and frequently fantasizes about making love with him. And then she meets Henry Miller, and his wife, June. She thinks Henry is crude and unfeeling, but she finds June utterly fascinating; she thinks June is the epitome of feminine beauty and allure, and gentleness and understanding. The friendship escalates, and she experiences her first lesbian lovemaking with June. But as she penetrates June's psyche deeper, she intuits that June is manipulative and shallow. Then June leaves for New York. And there is only Henry. After much hand-wringing, Anais makes love with Henry. And there begins her downward spiral. A classic addictive relationship, Anais shouts out how wonderful Henry is, how she would gladly be his slave, and then a few pages later she vows to break it off with him, that he is not what she had thought. A few more pages, and she again rejoices over their lovemaking. She enrolls herself into psychotherapy, in the hopes of sorting out her riotous feelings. She becomes attracted to her therapist, and schemes to seduce him. She fans the flames of her attraction to her cousin. She makes love to her husband with renewed vigor, based on what she's learned in bed from Henry. And then she's off to Henry's apartment, where they raise the roof with their countless climaxes. This book contains several very insightful observations about human nature, but its chronicle of emotional demise is what lingers in the reader's memory. This book is arguably an even graver portrayal of the minefield of adultery than is Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Lastly, on a practical note, this book can be exhaustingly repetitive--Henry, Henry, Henry--and the sex is not nearly as good as in Delta of Venus.

I have never read a book quite like this one. After I read "Henry and June", I read "Fire" and I plan to read many more of Anais' books. This is a must read for any young woman -- Anais is not afraid of her sexuality -- this diary describes her promiscuous behavior that is traditionally only acceptable for men. It is a truly liberating book. She emphasizes the importance of experience, and living life fully in terms of sexuality, creation and emotion. She was a woman ahead of her time. I highly recommend this book -- I could not put it down -- it describes emotions and desires all women have, but try to repress because of society's rules. If anyone lived their life to it's limits, it was Anais Nin.

This diary is a true, well written account about a fascinating time in the life of Anais Nin. If you've never read Anais before, this is a great book to start with, especially for anyone who's a fan of Henry Miller, the decade of the thirties, and anything Paris. Her day-to-day accounts of her thoughts are an enlightening look at a life most of us only can only dream of living.

I'll say this up front--this is the best selection of all the works taken from Anais Nin's diaries and other writings.

It is a marvel to consider that Nin both had the time to do everything she did--or claimed--and produce the volume of words that she did. She was moreover a much more interesting writer as a diarist than a writer of fiction.

Research that her various, and occasionally vilified, biographers have done documents conclusively that much of Nin's writing was fictive. Nin herself always claimed that she was seeking a deeper truth, not historical accuracy.

The debate on this subject will doubtless rage on for decades. Suffice it to say that this volume brings to life an era, and an obsessive love quadrangle (Henry-June; June-Anais; Anais-Henry; Anais-Hugo), that has something for anyone with a pulse. You don't have to like Anais Nin at all to enjoy reading this book.

Here are the feverish and impossibly romantic convulsions of a schoolgirl mind - but I mean that in a good way. Nin is unlikeable yet enchanting - she is some dreamy, exotic species of narcissist, and her constant fawning over herself has the perverse affect of making YOU enthralled by her, too. Nin's reality hovers exquisitely above the pedestrian, grimy one the rest of us inhabit, and if you give yourself over to her absurdly beautiful view of things, she will transport you. You end up feeling like a kind of sighing, envious voyeur as you read through these pages and wish you, too, were an eccentric beauty drifting amid some bygone literary demi-monde.
Lie on your bed and swoon...This is a fantasy/romance novel for those with vague intellectual pretensions...

I was only 20 when I first saw Philip Kaufman's exquisite film "Henry and June," mostly attracted by the ominous, decadent aura of Paris in the early thirties. The following year I bought the book precisely in the City of Lights without suspecting how meaningful it was to become in the near future. Following on Anaïs Nin's tack, I launched on a life-long habit of keeping a diary and I'll never forget how on the first page of that first diary I pined away at the dreariness of my life back then. As if those words had been some kind of "Open Sesame" to unsuspected forces, that proved to be the most eventful year in my life. Very much like Anaïs, I was torn between two loves: a Hugo who offered faith and security, and a Henry who supplied fireworks and imagination. There was no June, though. Looking back, I now see how Anaïs Nin's book was instrumental in making sense out of the maelstrom of ambiguity that threatened to shatter my mental balance into smithereens. It also helped me find my sea-legs in the world of womanhood, accept the different aspects that make up my whole, and respect my most human traits. This book is pertinent to anyone interested in the relationships between man and woman, woman and woman and artist with his own self, but I personally think that at one point in her life, every woman should read "Henry and June." I also highly recommend the DVD and the soundtrack.

Before Henry and June, I had never read a book by Anais Nin. In fact, the only knowledge of her writing I had was from a poem I had to read in junior English a couple of years ago. Oddly enough I went to a bookstore that was going out of business and decided to pick up this book because it was offered for 5 bucks. I started reading the book and was instantly swept away by it. Her writing is so intense and blunt, she holds nothing back from the reader. I have learned so much about myself just from this one book alone. I agree strongly with her views on men and women. With this one book she had become my favorite writer. Even above D.H Lawrence (who ironically is mentioned many times throughout the novel!) As soon as I get paid I am going to make it a point of myself to read as many of her books as possible.