ultimate confidante,"" the author of Henry and June and Incest reveals her private self, her doubts and weaknesses, and the intimate details of her physical relationships.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A preface by Rupert Pole, surviving widower of the bigamous diarist, who already had a legal husband when they married, contends that she wrote impulsively, at "white heat." The evidence is that she often paused to improve upon life, which in the two years, spent mostly in Paris, covered in this volume, consisted largely of cadging from her complaisant banker husband, Hugh Guiler, to support her lovers. One was the gaunt, bald sexual athlete and expatriate novelist, Henry Miller, who by then had parted from his wife, June. Another was the swarthy Communist activist Gonzalo More, whose appetite for sex overwhelmed his passion for politics, and whose slovenly wife encouraged his income-producing infidelity. Nin betrayed all three men, even on days (and nights) when she bedded them all. In her middle 30s, her erotomania left her little time for much else, but she managed to write pornographic (and then censorable) short fiction and reams of what later skeptics called a "liary." She was "a true Catholic," More told her. "You love the sin and absolution and regrets and sinning again." Yet she had few regrets but the unpublishability of her diaries. Her love seems entirely narcissistic in the manuscript volumes she filled over 52 years. But even so, her literary talent and the sensual intensity of her emotional life sets some of the pages in her diaries on fire. The first extracts, published in 1966 at age 63, established her (although she edited out some sensitive matter) as a cult figure. Since her death, Pole has been releasing the original diaries, Nearer the Moon, encompassing volumes 53 through 60. "I dream, I kiss, I have orgasms, I get exalted, I leave the world, I float, I cook, I sew, I have nightmares, I follow a gigantic creative plan," she claims. Her self-description says it all. One would hardly know that Nin was living in a France on the brink of war. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The origin of Nin's literary acclaim is arguably her Diary, "Journal of Love" series, which has received more attention from the reading public than any of her other writing efforts. This fourth volume of that diary following Fire (1996), Incest (1993), and Henry and June (1990; all Harcourt) covers the years 1937 to 1939. Her crucial relationship with Henry Miller continues during these years, while she lives out a love affair with Gonzalo More, a Peruvian revolutionary and musician. It is through Gonzalo, a proponent of Marxist ideology, that the apolitical Nin confronts political thinking, without committing herself to a particular trend. Meanwhile, she maintains her relationship with her husband, Hugh Guiler. At the outbreak of World War II she leaves for America. She will never live in Paris again. This episode of the diary reveals a more mature Nin. As a necessary sequel to the other volumes, this title is recommended for academic and comprehensive public libraries with strong women's studies collections.?Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
So Near And Yet So Far,
By Ruth Edlund "dark goddess of replevin" (King County, Washington:) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love : The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1937-1939 (Vol 4) (Hardcover)
This unexpurgated volume of Anais Nin's diary contains entries from March 4, 1937 to October 23, 1939. The preface by Rupert Pole (her Los Angeles widower, as opposed to the late Hugh Guiler, her New York widower) notes, "Toward the end of her life Anais and I discussed the original diaries, and she asked me to publish all her diaries just as she wrote them." Having now read four volumes of the unexpurgated diary, it is my educated opinion that this was _not_ a good idea. It is unfortunate that Pole has dutifully released this volume of material in this form. It's like he published the first draft of a book--there is so much dross among the gold that I often felt that I was not so much reading as doing penance. It is apparent now that not all the material cut from the expurgated volumes was eliminated because of its scandalousness. If we have learned anything after the sexual revolution, surely it is that even the salacious can be dull. And yet. And yet. Amidst Nin's whiny posturing, her mechanical proclamations of audacity and innocence, nestle passages of such power and beauty (especially starting in 1938) that this volume intermittently becomes riveting. There are also a number of entries where Nin drops her self-glorifying posturing and looks at her own behavior with clear and unflinching eyes. For the first time, for example, I began to understand what she saw in Gonzalo, something that was a mystery to me even from the previous unexpurgated volumes. She becomes enormously likeable when she appears to be displaying some candor. I regard it as truly unfortunate that this book is unlikely to have many readers owing to its lack of editorial discipline. Be patient with it, but be prepared to skim, and don't read it as an introduction to Nin's work.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More of the Greatest Diary Ever,
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This review is from: Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love : The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1937-1939 (Vol 4) (Hardcover)
Some of the readers who have reviewed this book have criticized it as not being up to the level of its predecessors. I think they mean it's not as steamy. Face it, the woman was getting a bit older, calmer, and more mature. She was losing the feverish intensity of her youth. But the beauty of the Anais Diaries, other than the view they give of this brilliant, underappreciated author is that they offer an in-depth look at an entire life, starting when she was a by turns dreamy and extremely practical 11-year old girl, longing for her father and being a good girl, through her twenties and thirties when she had the courage to try everything and the sense to lie about it brilliantly.
I wish the editors had gone on and done the "personal" versions of her later diaries, as I'm just prurient enough that I'd like to have known what her love life was like in middle and early old age. But the later diaries show a woman who had achieved her ambitions and peace with herself. I'll be honest here. I love Anais Nin. I'll be more honest; I am IN love with Anais Nin. Reading all of these diaries is my greatest literary adventure since discovering Carlos Castaneda in 1975. An in depth reading of the diaries is one of the most profound learning experiences a reader can find. If you want to go on with it you can read Henry Miller, and Proust and all the books that influenced her. You could make a life out of it. I think though it would be better to live one. That is her lesson; live your own life, not the canned life the society wants to sell you.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Love LIfe and Career of an Early 20th Century Woman,
By
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This review is from: Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love : The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1937-1939 (Vol 4) (Hardcover)
This is the last, so far published, of the Anaïs Nin's Unexpurgated diaries, edited by her second (bigamous) husband Rupert Pole, after her death and that of nearly everyone else discussed. The intensity of her love life continues. Her style continues to evolve to more emotion, sensation and thought brought up from the subconscious, and less external facts. This was partly due to the influence of psychoanalysis and Surrealism.
She, ahead of most women, was involved in the change of role from helping men to working independently. This was aggravated by her fear of abandonment, left from the early loss of her father. She was in conflict between her own ambition and the fear of losing her men if she competed successfully with them. She was starting to succeed with her own fiction at this time, but her greatest literary success was still her contribution, in every possible way, to Henry Miller's work. This book itself is among her best works and probably of more lasting value than Henry's work, but not in a form that could be published during her life time. Her conflicts and neuroses contribute to the unique value of these books. The emotional scars left by her father contribute to the complexity of her love life and to her difficult but intense and semi-promiscuous sex life. Her partially liberated role and her dependence on the diary for emotional support made it difficult for her to convert from diary writing to fiction, resulting in writing more real and candid than possible when writing for publication. She was in contact with other leading artists of her time, sometimes physically as well as intellectually, and was completely devoted to her relationships and her writing, but most of her writing was so personal that she showed only small sections of it even to her lovers. Her first works to become popular were her erotic stories, written a few years later. These are unusual and perhaps unique as the first serious erotic literature in English and as the first erotica written by a woman. They therefore revealed aspects of sexuality and particularly of female sexuality that were not previously available in writing. Most of that material, as well as her other fiction, was taken directly from these diaries, where it appears more realistically (or surrealistically), in more detail and in its real context. More can be found at: [...]
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