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Anaïs Nin

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Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love : The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1937-1939 Hardcover – January 1, 1996

by Anais Nin (Author), Gunther Stuhlmann (Author), Vicki Aus (Editor)

4.9 12 ratings

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In an uncensored journal, named her "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.

Print length

396 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harcourt
Publication date

January 1, 1996
Dimensions

6.25 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0151000891
ISBN-13

978-0151000890
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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.

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.

From Booklist

In the fourth volume of her galvanizing unexpurgated diaries, Nin, now in her mid-thirties, achieves a deeper understanding of herself, her need to keep her infamous diaries, and her complex and demanding relationships with Hugo, her loyal husband; Henry Miller, the cosmic force in her fervent universe; and Gonzalo More, her most sensual and passionate lover. As Nin tirelessly and eloquently analyzes each man and what he means to her, she shares luminous and provocative thoughts on the perversity of jealousy, the mystery of eroticism, the unruliness of love, and the gnawing need to write, to at least make sense, if not art, out of experience. As Nin matures and her journal deepens, the magnificence of her literary achievement emerges. Nin is the Proust of diary-keepers, and the creator of a revolutionary psychological documentary of a truly remarkable and unsettling personality. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews

More verbal onanism in the fourth and last installment of A Journal of Love, which demonstrates that even an unexpurgated diary can be boring (especially sans the high prurience quotient of the scandalous couplings in the earlier volumes Incest and Henry and June). This time the players are Henry (Miller, still) and Gonzalo Mor, a passionate Peruvian, in a ddoublement on which Nin positively mainlines, intoxicated by the audacity and the risk of keeping them both (and keeping them apart from each other . . . and the others). Keep them she does, on a seemingly endless shoestring provided by cipher-husband Hugh Guiler, and also by their various consorts (mostly Art in Miller's case, Communism and Helba [platonic by now] in Gonzalo's). ``I nurture their egotism,'' Nin interprets grandly, though she doesn't shrink from cataloguing her outlay of francs-per-month-per-man for food and rent. Her vague dream-picaresque purveys little actual narrative; Nin writes to evade the demons of solitude, in swirls of preoccupation with herself in all of her sacrificial, sensual, and poetic wonder (``I know I have as great an ear for nuances as Proust . . .''). Jealousy--of her lovers' lovers, past and prospective--is the ``disease'' she admits to, however, as she communes with her diary. Breathlessly: ``I feel a malaise until I write certain things down. . . . Deliverance!'' Therapy, then, conducted by a virtuoso solipsist in an airless crucible of amour-propre. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harcourt; First Edition (January 1, 1996)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 396 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0151000891
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0151000890
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.72 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,415,855 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,841 in Author Biographies
- #13,882 in Women's Biographies

Customer Reviews:
4.9 12 ratings

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Anaïs Nin

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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 with the anthology The Portable Anais Nin (2011).

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David R. Ingham

The Love LIfe and Career of an Early 20th Century Woman

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2011

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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.

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4 people found this helpful

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Jim Morris

More of the Greatest Diary Ever

Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2011

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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.

14 people found this helpful

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Nydia

nice :)

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2021

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came in perfect condition with a protective covering over the book. seller shipped the next day and it came in less then a week. i’m so excited to start reading as this is my first time reading anything from anais nin even though i’ve seen beautiful quotes from this diary series for years.

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Bishop

pitch perfect melodrama

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2014

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As I grow older, I realize it's nearly impossible to maintain both emotional intensity and bold openness to the world. Because Anaïs did both, because Anaïs shows romantics like myself how to remain romantics, I am awed and grateful for this literature. For those intrigued by the specifically French genre of "intimate journals," read Nin's series! I've literally carried her words with me all around the world, learning from this author how to be present, involved, passionate during more of my moments and personal interactions. Speaking pure logistics - the hardcover arrived extremely quickly, way ahead of date, and was in mint condition. Wonderful seller!

4 people found this helpful

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Nadia555

A slower burn than ‘Fire’

Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2018

‘Nearer the Moon’ was a slower burn than ‘Fire’ (the unexpurgated diary before this one) but no less incendiary. It’s a revelation. Beautifully written, honest, and poetic. Some of the most beautiful, timeless phrases are in this book. Anais and Henry’s romance is changing by this point, some 8 years in; her focus is on Gonzalo More who claims pages and pages here. Much of this reminded me of ‘The Four-Chambered Heart’ which is absolutely an ode to Gonzalo. Anais surprises the reader by embracing communism, if not for herself (she is saved by the poetic realm) then for the rest of humankind. The unexpurgated diaries are so much better than the edited versions; I couldnt finish Vol 1 of the edited diaries but I LOVED this. I am now looking forward to reading ‘Mirages’, which is the next in the unexpurgated series.

One person found this helpful

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adrienne duncan

beautiful and inspiring

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2000

nearer the moon is a book whic has affected my life in so many good ways. I have become a better lyricist, and a more insightful poet because of her ability to be so bold, honest, and real while being one of the greatist poets and writers of our time. Anais Nin's writting not only stands asa representation of how beautiful life is, but also stands as a bench mark in history. We can look into our past and see when her writing was rejected from culture and society, and see how far we've come. Through Anais Nin we can actully see Americas liberation process.

10 people found this helpful

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Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love : The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1937-1939 Hardcover – January 1, 1996

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