—for Monsterrat and for Ronnie
I WAS NINETEEN YEARS OLD and an avid reader of Anaïs Nin when she finally won the success and fame that she had dreamed of all her life. Born in 1903, Nin had worked in the midst of male writers who had achieved renown long before she did. In her fiction and journals she faithfully wrote her observations and experiences from her feminine, if not feminist, perspective. Nin had loved passionately; in everything she did, she remained devoted to her art and lived to tell all about it.
Far away from the white feminist movement on the West Coast that had discovered an appetite for her diaries, I was living in Chicago with Mexican parents who said, you cannot leave this house until you’re married. You must work and help out in the household. Lofty goals like college, art, writing were useless to my factory-employed mother and father. But I, like many women, simply as a stepping stone to freedom, married—the inimitable actress Maria Felix comes to mind. My young husband was no Hugo Guilar. Although he was nice enough, and, as I look back, sincerely adored me, he was mostly unemployed and unambitious, and I couldn’t get divorced fast enough. In the seventies, living my new independent life free of parents and husband, I was surrounded by mostly male artists, the writers of my own Latino community. I continued to read everything that was published by and about Anaïs Nin. Her conversations with Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller rang true for me in my own search for literary meaning. I must say, however, that mine were never quite as interesting or held as much depth as those of Nin and her male intellectual acquaintances—Antonin Artaud, Gore Vidal, her therapists Otto Rank and René Allendy, to name a few. I was hungry for similar discussion and in her works I felt a little less alone. I was hungry too, like many women, for validation of my right to write. Since there were no established U.S. Latina writers twenty years ago, I chose to read books by women from various cultures and countries who told their stories in a world that hadn’t yet heard them, and had not wanted to hear them. Other women who kept me company by the time I was twenty-four years old—burned out from community organizing, looking for a paying job, disillusioned with my Latina activism—were the wondrous Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston, who warned me that it would take twenty years to be heard, and Toni Morrison, who said that African-Americans, like Mexicans in the United States, believed in ghosts too. I even strained a potent line from The Female Eunuch by which to make a plan for myself. Germaine Greer let me know that the most important thing I had to attain as a woman was happiness. It’s a lot harder to come by than you might think—if you are determined to rock the testosterone-filled boat of the new world order.
But it was Anaïs Nin to whom I kept returning over the years, not because I identified so much with her life. I didn’t. And maybe partly because I didn’t. Like the romance-novel junkie, after I did laundry, tended to the beans on the stove and put the baby down for his nap, I would return to Nin’s writing—whatever was available; I couldn’t get enough of that woman’s fanciful life.
I didn’t even like her experimental fiction writing style—although I read everything. But through Nin’s lush use of language, she indulged, indulged, indulged her relentless exploration of her inner life. Her external life too, was ardently portrayed, rich with fascinating characters, surroundings, travels—Paris in the thirties, post-World War II New York, Fez, Mexico—and always, her tenacious commitment to writing as art.
Recently, an extensive biography by Deirdre Bair was published that seemed to fill in the blanks for many of us who had wondered about certain details regarding Nin’s life. Who paid, for example, for Nin to have that magical lifestyle she led all her adult life? Who was the father of the stillbirth in her diary account of “birth story”? How did she resolve her issues with her father’s abandonment for which she underwent psychoanalysis for years? To say that Bair was less than sympathetic in her treatment of these questions is an understatement. The paradigm she seemed to fix on with regards to Anaïs Nin, the “major minor writer,” as she refers to Nin in the introduction, was that of woman centered vs. self-centered. But as I see it, although the blanks were filled in, Bair may have made some prejudiced assumptions. As in all stories, as listeners we must keep in mind that it is not only important what is being told to us but what is being left out and why. Certainly Anaïs Nin knew this very well. She rewrote incidents and apparently enraged more than one person portrayed in her diaries. She, of course, omitted a lot. So, too, did her biographer with her determination, I feel, to judge Anaïs Nin’s life. She referred to Nin’s first abortion, for example, as monstrous, when Nin not only did not want to have children, she wasn’t even sure who had gotten her pregnant. In fact, there was a strong possibility that the man involved was not Nin’s husband, maybe not even the cad Henry Miller, and just possibly it might have been her own father, as they were having an affair at the time.
“After you’ve f----- your father, all the rest is origami,” a writer friend of mine told me recently when I asked her about Anaïs Nin. My friend knew Nin during her last decade.
Very soon after the white feminists of her day embraced Anaïs Nin for her woman’s perspective as an artist, she came under suspicion. How could a true feminist, for example, be financially dependent on a man all her life, they queried, not to mention her ongoing emotional dependence on men—including her father. So maybe Anaïs Nin did not go out and get a job—a lie she told her second husband when she got money from the first to contribute to her second household. (Nin, as it turns out, was also a bigamist.)
But half a century ago she believed she could stand her ground intellectually with men. Long before feminists were discovering the joys of the orgasm through the Hite Report and Masters and Johnson, Nin was entrenched in her own personal research. Despite the fact that abortion is legal at the end of the twentieth century in this young country, many women who label themselves feminists find the subject morally troubling. Yet six decades ago Anaïs Nin took control of her body and determined that she would not become a mother, did not have to, not for her husband’s sake and not for society’s sake. She thought of herself as beautiful and sensual and surrounded herself with beauty and sensuality. And though some may judge her now as a simple narcissist, I admire her because unlike so many women—especially those who consider themselves above superficial social consciousness, unfettered by pressures of fashion—she considered herself downright lovely!
Unlike the work of other women writers who taught me how to write, I must say that Nin’s creative writing efforts did not influence me much. But her determination to claim the right to her own body, her soul and mind—at a time when there was no movement to support her—did. Even now, nearly a century after her birth, women—at least those from the Catholic culture she and I share—can’t do that without paying a hefty price.
“The problem with Anaïs,” my friend who knew her said, “is that she lived too long.” The feminist community had found Nin outdated—what a critic today might feel an impulse to call a border-feminist. Someone else might say that perhaps she had been born too soon. Nin herself told a new audience that she had wanted to live the dream. For her, that meant finding true erotic and psychic fulfillment as a woman. Because she chose to document her journey and her quest, other women were also able to believe in such a possibility—a woman like myself—who at forty-three years of age is still pursuing the dream. Ever without guilt.