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Only about halfway through at this point, but enjoying it mightily. Nin's diaries are perfect for when you only have ten minutes here or twenty minutes there to read them, as the entries are short. This particular volume seems to encompass the period of the greatest unhappiness in her life, but then again this is Anais Nin, so she squeezes in some terrific hot sex into her general ennui. And, as always, Nin provides a feast of language. I've just been reading some letters passed back and forth with Henry Miller toward the end of their relationship. She manages the difficult feat of making him look like a reasonable person. She can only be described as distraught during this period, and manages to find insult in Miller's most conciliatory passages. But I still love the diaries. Taken altogether this is your best chance to really know a person through a lifetime of their most intimate thoughts.
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Having read all of Anaïs Nin's books, starting when they were first published, years before she died, and then the unexpurgated volumes became available, I had to read this one. This book, those pages left out in between the other events of her life, is mostly about her sex life. Yes, there is an interesting string of letters between Nin and Henry Miller that illuminates her break with Miller, but the other pages are about all the many liaisons Anaïs had with younger men after she left Paris and is living in New York. Sometimes she has sex with three people in one day. One lover was only 17 at the time. Perhaps in today's world she would be arrested for child molestation.
I found Nin's long section on her relationship with the young twenty year old, Gore Vidal when she was in her forties, interesting. They did not consummate the relationship with sex because he was gay but the relationship was intimate and full of love between them and ends badly. I know there then became an angry bitter feud between Vidal and Nin but this book only hints at that. I will have to read more about Gore Vidal's personal life to learn more about what happened.
I'm struck by reading about all these sex activities that if we were reading about the same thing in the life of a man people would not find it shocking or make judgements. It has been considered manly to have notches in one's belt, and slutty for a woman to have many sexual encounters - especially with all relationships going on at the same time.
Mirages ends with Anaïs meeting Rupert Pole, the man she was living with when she died. Pole was her second husband while she was also married Hugo. How she managed all these relationships is mind boggling to think about.Read more ›
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This wonderfully-weighty slice of an almost eight-year period in Anais Nin's life is fascinating. It begins when she returns to America, depressed to leave Europe at the dawn of World War II, and in a state of confused dissatisfaction over her love life. She's in her mid-thirties and has been married for many years, but has not been satisfied in her marriage. She has been strongly influenced by European ideas and has taken lovers, most notably Henry Miller, but she finds herself feeling intensely lonely in America. For one, she misses the intense artistic camaraderie she enjoyed in Paris. Her loneliness sends her on a quest: to find one love who will satisfy her longing for emotional connection. The forms this quest takes can be pretty shocking: Nin has affairs with many men, all the while analyzing herself and trying to find the reasons for her "hunger," and the many resulting affairs constitute the "mirages" referred to in the title. At one point Nin even called herself a "nymphomaniac." Finally, at the end of this particular journey, Nin meets a man who loves her the way she wants to be loved -- both emotionally and physically. Kudos to the editor, Paul Herron, who searched through Nin's original diaries, found these passages that had not been previously published, and saw to it that this story was brought out in the light of day! It's a wonderful tale of human desire and fulfillment!
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I think that this might be my favorite of the "unexpurgated diaries," because it's not quite so self-aggrandizing as other ones. The editors balanced praise with thoughtful introspection and more looks outside of Nin's own head.
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This book is amazing as a historical document with incredible insight into American culture (then and perhaps now). There really is nothing else quite like Nin's diary as a piece of literature or as a historical record. Nin becomes a full-grown monster, and, really, predator over the course of the book, but that just makes it all the more fascinating. She was a beautiful monster, that wrote like an angel.
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Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin 1939-1947 edited by Paul Herron with an introduction by Kim Krizan Published by Swallow Press/OhioUniversity Press in association with Sky Blue Press 2013 ISBN-13 978-0-8040-1146-4
Review essay by Nancy Shiffrin nshiffrin@earthlink.net
"I am the woman of tomorrow... a highly developed instrument seeking not to be rendered deaf by machine guns, to be able to carry on its vibrations, its extraordinary wave perceptions." She is Anais Nin. Her favorite word is transcend. The violence she refers to is World War II. Mirages covers 1939-1937, the period of the third and fourth edited Diaries, when world consciousness was dominated by the demons Hitler and Stalin. Nin's life, by contrast, included lovers Henry Miller and Gonzalo More, husband, Hugh Guillier, and such literary luminaries Gore Vidal and Edmund Wilson who were also lovers. It was a period in which communism still seemed to offer hope for human advancement. Nin was influenced by More's activism and would have wished she could do more, for communism, for the negro, as she put it; however, the task she was born for, was to preserve her own musicality against the crude socialist realism which seemed to her to be taking over American letters, as well as to document her own artistic development. She referred to herself as a musician manque and wanted to preserve the subtlety of French, to recreate it in English. What might seem like selfindulgence, is Nin's way of fighting the war and its terrible aftermath.Read more ›
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This item: Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 19391947
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