ANAIS NIN: LITERARY PERSPECTIVES Also by Suzanne Nalbantian

AESTHETIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY: FROM LIFE TO ART IN MARCEL PROUST, JAMES, JOYCE, VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ANAISNIN

SEEDS OF DECADENCE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH• CENTURY NOVEL

THE SYMBOL OF THE SOUL FROM HOLDERLIN TO YEATS Anais Nin Literary Perspectives

Edited with an introductory essay by Suzanne Nalbantian

Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-25507-8 ISBN 978-1-349-25505-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-25505-4

ANAISNIN Preface, editorial matter and Chapter I copyright © 1997 by Suzanne Nalbantian Chapters 2-18 copyright © 1997 by Macmillan Press Ltd Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 978-0-333-65087-5 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address:

St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

First published in the United States of America in 1997

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.

ISBN 978-0-312-16523-9 ISBN 978-0-312-16524-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anai's Nin : literary perspectives I edited with an introduction by Suzanne Nalbantian. p. em. Chiefly papers originally presented at a conference held at Long Island University, Southampton campus, in 1994. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-16523-9 ISBN 978-0-312-16524-6 (paper) I. Nin, Anai's, 1903-1977--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women and literature-United States-History-20th century. I. Nalbantian, Suzanne, 1950- PS3527.1865Z54 1996 818'.5509~c20 96-30849 CIP Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Notes on the Contributors viii

Preface Suzanne Nalbantian xiii

Introduction 1

1 Aesthetic Lies Suzanne Nalbantian 3

2 Anai:s Nin, My Sister, and Letters to Hugh Guiler (Hugo), from Joaquin Nin-Culmell, 26 December 1978 and 3 October 1979 Joaquin Nin-Culmell 23

Part I Dream Cities and Other Inscapes

3 Cities of Her Own Invention: Urban Iconology in Cities of the Interior Catherine Broderick 33

4 Art, the Dream, the Self Harriet Zinnes 52

5 Anai:s Nin, the Poet Anna Balakian 63

6 Renate's Illusions and Delusions in Collages Marie-Rose Logan 79

Part II Psychoanalysis in Nin's Writings

7 Beyond Therapy: The Enduring Love of Anai:s Nin for Otto Rank Sharon Spencer 97

8 Anai:s and Her Analysts, Rank and Allendy: The Creative and Destructive Aspects Valerie Harms 112

v vi Contents

9 Anai:s Nin's Journal of Love: Father-Loss and Incestuous Desire Suzette Henke 120

Part III Gender Readings of the Fiction

10 The Men in Nin's (Characters') Lives Philip K. Jason 139

11 Birth and the Linguistics of Gender: Masculine/ Feminine Lajos Elkan 151

12 Erato Throws a Curve: Anai:s Nin and the Elusive Feminine Voice in Erotica Edmund Miller 164

Part N Japanese Voices on Nin

13 Anai:s Nin's Words of Power and the Japanese Sybil Tradition Atsuko Miyake 187

14 Anai:s Nin's Femininity and the Banana Yoshimoto Phenomenon Toyoko Yamamoto 199

15 Between Two Languages: The Translation and Reception of Anai:s Nin in Japan Junko Kimura 211

Part V The Genesis and Dissemination of Nin's Works

16 Speaking with Your Skeleton: D.H. Lawrence's Influence on Anai:s Nin Lawrence Wayne Markert 223

17 Black Snow in Winter: Anai:s Nin in Paris• The Lawrence Durrell Connection Corinne Alexandre-Garner 236

18 The Selling of A Spy in the House of Love Benjamin Franklin V 254

Index 279 Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Long Island University for hosting the confer• ence I directed on Ana'is Nin at its Southampton Campus in 1994. From that three-day gathering most of the papers for this vol• ume emerged. I am also grateful for the released time granted to me by my university for compiling and editing this volume. The library at C.W. Post College has been an active and open research avenue, especially in making promptly available to me publications as I needed them. I also wish to thank, most spe• cifically, Mary Van Pala, the administrative secretary of C.W. Post College's English Department, who assisted me in running the conference and who devotedly helped prepare the manu• script for publication. Her diligence is unsurpassed. My continuous thanks go to my husband-scholar, David S. Reynolds, who is a constant source of support and encourage• ment - not to mention his technical computer assistance! I also wish to acknowledge my editor at Macmillan, Charmian Hearne, whose interest and feedback have kept this book on schedule. My utmost thanks go to the enthusiastic and cooperative con• tributors to this volume, many of whom were present at the conference and who remain closely bonded in their study of Ana'is Nin. Included in this group is Ana'is' quixotic brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell, who adds a living link and immediacy to the author in question.

vii Notes on the Contributors

Corinne Alexandre-Gamer has taught at Paris X University since 1978 where she is Associate Professor. In 1985, she published a book on Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet: Le Quatuor d' Alexandrie: fragmentation et ecriture. Etude sur I'amour, Ia femme et I'ecriture, and has participated in various collections of essays on twentieth-century writers. She is also the author of the arti• cle on Lawrence Durrell in The Encyclopaedia Universalis (1991) and has published widely in various journals in the fields of literature and psychoanalysis.

Anna Balakian is Emerita Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University and former Chair of the De• partment of Comparative Literature. As a specialist in the fields of surrealism and poetics, she has written numerous essays in literary and scholarly journals including several on Ana'is Nin. Her two latest books are The Fiction of the Poet (From Mallarme to the Symbolist Mode), 1992, and The Snowflake on the Belfry: Dogma and Disquietude in the Critical Arena, 1994.

Catherine Vreeland Broderick is Professor of English at Kobe College in Nishinomiya, Japan. She holds degrees in Compara• tive Literature from the Sorbonne and the University of North Carolina and has lectured and published widely on Ana'is Nin, Japanese diary literature, Japanese iki (chic), social semiotics and computer-assisted literary text analysis.

Lajos Elkan, educated in Budapest, Hungary, Lausanne Univer• sity, Switzerland, at the City University of New York City and Columbia University, is Professor of French and Chairman of the Foreign Languages Department at C.W. Post Campus, Long Island University, New York. His publications include a book, Les Voyages et les Proprietes d'Henri Michaux, and several articles on Paul Claudel's poetry and theatre, and on the semiotics of poetic and pictorial languages.

viii Notes on the Contributors ix

Benjamin Franklin V is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has written and edited more than fifteen books. Among his publications on Nin are the following: Anai's Nin: A Bibliography, 1973, Anais Nin: An Introduction (with Duane Schneider), 1979. The most recent among his numerous Nines• says are: 'Appearance vs. Appearance in the Diary of Anais Nin', in The New Courant, 1996, 'Noli Me Tangere: The Structure of Ana'is Nin's Under a Glass Bell' and he has edited a volume of short pieces: Recollections of Anais Nin by her Contemporaries (1996).

Valerie Harms has written a variety of books, most recently The National Audubon Society Almanac of the Environment/The Ecology of Everyday Life, 1994 and The Inner Lover, 1992. She has long been an intensive journal consultant and teacher of Jungian studies. With Adele Aldridge she founded the Magic Circle Press which published Harms' book Stars in My Sky containing a long essay about Ana'is' early manuscripts. Harms also collaborated with Ana'is when the Magic Circle Press published Ana'is' stories in a volume called Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories, which appeared in 1977, the year of Ana'is' death.

Suzette Henke is Thruston B. Morton, Sr Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Louisville. She is author of Joyce's Moraculous Sindbook: A Study of 'Ulysses', James Joyce and the Pol• itics of Desire and co-editor of Women in Joyce. Her publications in the field of modem literature include essays on Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Ana'is Nin, Doris Lessing, Linda Brent, Janet Frame, Keri Hulme, Samuel Beckett, E.M. Forster and W.B. Yeats. She has just completed a study of 'women's life-writing' in the twentieth century entitled Shattered Subjects: Women's Life-Writing and Narrative Recovery.

Philip Jason is Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. He edited an early volume of Nin's selected writings, Anai's Nin Reader, 1973. Most recently he has published Anai's Nin and her Critics, 1993 and The Critical Response to Anais Nin, a retro• spective collection of reviews and essays, 1996. He is author of numerous articles on Nin, as well as several volumes of poetry and bibliographies of nineteenth-century American poetry and literature of the Vietnam era. X Notes on the Contributors

Junko Kimura is a poet, translator and professor of English at Hokkaido Musashi Women's Junior College in Sapporo, Japan. She has translated five of Anai:s Nin's works. The series entitled The Anais Nin Collection contains her Japanese translations of D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, House of Incest, Winter of Arti• fice, Under a Glass Bell and Collages. She also published an essay on Nin, 'Finding the Inner Self' in Anais: An International Jour• nal, Vol. 3, 1985. Her translation of Nin's D.H. Lawrence: An Un• professional Study is forthcoming.

Marie-Rose Logan is a professor at Temple University. She re• ceived her PhD from Yale University. She wrote 'Ronsard and the Plei:ade', published in European Writers: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1983) as well as numerous essays on Compara• tive Renaissance and on contemporary French and American fic• tion. She is General Editor of Annals of Scholarship, An International Quarterly in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Lawrence Wayne Markert is Professor of English and Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Berry College. After completing his BA in English at the University of Baltimore and MA at the Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins Uni• versity, he completed his BPhil. and DPhil. at Oxford Univer• sity. He is the author of various articles and books on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, includ• ing Arthur Symons: Critic of the Seven Arts and The Bloomsbury Group: A Reference Guide. He also edited, with Carol Peirce, On Miracle Ground II: Second International Lawrence Durrell Conference Proceedings.

Edmund Miller is Chairman of the English Department at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, and has written extensively on British literature, mostly of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. His books include Drudgerie Divine: The Rhetoric of God and Man in George Herbert, 1979 and George Herbert's Kinships: An Ahnentafel with Annotations, 1993. He is also a widely published poet.

Atsuko Miyake is a lecturer at Ou University in Koriyama, Japan, where she teaches Anai:s Nin's fiction in twentieth-century Ameri• can literature courses. Her publications include 'Ana!s Nin's Notes on the Contributors xi

Experimental Expedition as a Modernist in Cities of the Interior', and 'Ana'is Nin's House of Incest and Surrealism'.

Suzanne Nalbantian is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. She is the author of The Symbol of the Soul from Holderlin to Yeats, Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel and Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin. A past recipient of a Na• tional Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, she specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European litera• ture. She received her BA from Barnard College and her PhD from Columbia University, and she is a permanent member of Columbia University's Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Ana'is Nin was a familiar figure to the author in her literary family circle.

Joaquin Nin-Culmell is a pianist and composer. Brother of Ana'is Nin, he was the son of the Cuban composer and pianist Joaquin Nin y Castellanos and his wife Rosa Culmell. Born in Berlin in 1908, he studied music in Barcelona, New York and at the Paris Conservatoire. He began his career as a pianist in 1931, playing works by contemporary Spanish composers. From 1940 to 1950 he taught music at Williams College, Williamstown, and from 1950 to 1954 he was Chair of the Music Department at the Uni• versity of California at Berkeley. His four volumes of Tonadas, versions of Spanish dances and songs, written between 1956 and 1961, appeared in 1993 with Marco Polo Recordings.

Sharon Spencer is a professor at Montclair State University, New Jersey where she specializes in Comparative Literature. She is the author of two critical studies: Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel, 1971 and Collage of Dreams: the Writings of Anais Nin, 1977. She has also written many literary articles, short stories and two novels. Her most recent novel is Wire Rims, 1995.

Toyoko Yamamoto is a lecturer at Tokyo Woman's Christian University where she specializes in American and English litera• ture. She has written several articles on Ana'is Nin, including 'Literary Orbits: Ana'is Nin's Diary and Fiction', for The Essays and Studies, Vol. 32, Spring 1986. She is a translator of Ana'is xii Notes on the Contributors

Nin's works into Japanese, and has most recently prepared a translation of Nin's In Favor of the Sensitive Man.

Harriet Zinnes's seventh anthology of poems, My, Haven't the Flowers Been? was published in 1995. Author of a volume of short stories Lover, translator of the poetry of Jacques Prevert (Blood and Feathers), editor of Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts and an art critic, she is Professor Emerita of English of Queens College of the City University of New York. She has reviewed or written critical articles on Ana'is Nin's fiction for Robert Zaller's Casebook on Anais Nin, The New York Times Book Review and The Nation. Her new collection of stories, The Radian Absurdity of Desire, will be published in 1997. Preface Suzanne N albantian

Ana"is Nin has been known primarily for her multi-volume, con• tinuous Diary, which, in its notoriety, has come in the way of an analytical consideration of her literary craft. This is the first book of essays on Nin which focuses on her aesthetic dimension. The first cluster of Nin critics, dating from the late 1960s and through the 1970s, offered book-length studies introducing as• pects of her literary work, particularly with reference to the no• vellas of her collection, Cities of the Interior. Methodically analysing her work, the critics Oliver Evans, Evelyn Hinz, Sharon Spencer, Bettina Knapp, Benjamin Franklin V and Duane Schneider ex• plored the facets of her literary opus, using the Diary as separ• ate material. Since Ana"is Nin's death in 1977, most of the critical commentary on her has been fragmentary, except for the collec• tion of essays edited by Evelyn Hinz for the journal Mosaic in 1978, which explored the variety of cultural approaches to Nin studies in the light of the then existing Diary. For purposes of ongoing evaluation, Philip Jason has docu• mented Nin criticism up to 1993 in his descriptive bibliography entitled Anai"s Nin and Her Critics. Moreover, a continuity in Nin criticism has been largely sustained by Nin's devoted editor and friend Gunther Stuhlmann, who, in 1983, created the international journal Anai·s. A decade after her death, with the release of the film Henry and June and the continuing publication of her 'unexpurgated' diaries, interest in Nin suddenly revived and focused primarily on her life. However, this publicity made Nina secondary liter• ary figure in the shadow of Henry Miller and minimized the staunch personality of Hugh Guiler (Ian Hugo as he was known), Nin's husband of 54 years. This renewed interest in Nin prompted the publication of three biographies in the early 1990s. It is a curious fact that none of the three biographers ever knew her, whereas the earlier critics of her literary work did. Noel Riley Fitch's The Erotic Life of Anai"s Nin offers in the present tense a litany of torrid acts. In attempting to chronicle the multiple love

xiii xiv Suzanne Nalbantian affairs in succession, this biography- unlike Richard EHmann's of Joyce, for example -fails to capture the totality of the author with respect to her life and her work. The same shortcoming is true of Deirdre Bair's biography, which creates an imbalance in centring the life on the presumed incestuous relationship of Anais and her father, the Cuban musician Joaquin Nin. Nin's German biographer, Linde Salber, in her life of Nin, Tausendundeine Frau, offers a psychoanalytic approach to Nin's personality, tracing her deceptiveness and emphasizing the fact that lies (die Luge) were Anais Nin's means to freedom. In the case of all three biographies, reference to the literary work is minimal and is not drawn upon to support the very judgemental commentary they communicate. Ironically, such portraiture of Nin's personality creates a prob• lematic reception of her work, so that she is severely ignored as a literary artist precisely because of the titillating and prurient interest in her adventurous lifestyle. But the question can be asked: would this have occurred had she been a male writer with simi• lar inclinations? Incongruously, feminist critics avoid treating her work seriously, dismissing her as a willing victim of male domi• nance and as a manipulator of femininity. They overlook her forays into the exploration of the female psyche and the erasure of male stereotypes in her illuminating essay 'In Favor of the Sensitive Man'. The focus on Nin's experimental life and array of relationships detracts from an assessment of her as an inno• vative novelist whose treatise, The Novel of the Future, was at• tempting a breakthrough in the theory of fiction. It is noteworthy, therefore, that the critics in this current vol• ume, some of whom are among the original ones who actually knew Nin, proceed beyond the early Nin scholarship. Not only do they scrutinize Nin's art in view of further life facts that have been suggested, but they offer a second stage of interpretation of her work from the point of view of its complexity and uniqueness. The source of this volume is a conference on Nin which I or• ganized at the Southampton Campus of Long Island University in May 1994. There and then, a convivial group of speakers met for three days with an active interest in proposing a serious con• sideration of Anais Nin's work. Many of those papers were adapted for this volume, and they were contributed with verve and enthusiasm. The special presence of Anais' brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell gave a vibrant and dramatic aura to this unusual Preface XV gathering. It became, therefore, most fitting to offer a part of his keynote address 'Anai:s, My Sister' as a leading piece in this book. He later offered two previously unpublished letters which fol• low his article. I find it particularly interesting that some of the essays dispel certain preconceptions that even critics in the past have had about Nin. To start with, in his keynote address, Joaquin Nin-Culmell countered the generally accepted notion that Nin's Diary orig• inated in the 1914 childhood volume as a letter to her father. Although Nin herself had claimed that this was so, in a later diary entry of March 1933, Joaquin suggests that Anai:s's mother Rosa Culmell had herself initiated the diary-writing with the in• tention of keeping the imaginative child occupied on the trip from Barcelona to New York so that it would be a diary to record her experiences of arriving in the new world. Many of the problematic elements of Nin's writing are con• sidered in this volume. Gender issues are addressed in a variety of unconventional ways, and the juxtaposition of some of the essays can stir new perspectives. For instance, Philip Jason dis• covers that the male characters are actually weak and under• developed. He refers to the men in A Spy in the House of Love, to illustrate his argument. One could add that they are not like the 'round' characters that E.M. Forster had categorized. But what an interesting observation about a woman who presumably knew men so well- inside out! On the other hand, Toyoko Yamamoto praises Nin for dealing with both genders, and not just from a female perspective, which critics like Elaine Showalter claim to be the gender orientation. Lajos Elkan, by contrast, identifies a distinctly female ecriture in Nin, stemming from her preoccupa• tion with birth. And Atsuko Miyake uses a Japanese perspective to view Nin in terms of a feminine sibyl tradition, which exists in her own culture. When it comes to the erotica, Edmund Miller examines that aspect of Nin's work, and observes that she did not conform to distinctive standards of the genre because of her unavoidable artistic tendency. A far cry, then, from the simple categorization of her as an erotic writer! As if to corroborate that fact, from a totally different perspective, Benjamin Franklin V examines the overt misrepresentations of successive jacket covers of A Spy in the House of Love, arguing that the publishers were deceiving the public by the erotic suggestiveness of a novel, which operated xvi Suzanne Nalbantian on a more psychic level than graphic pornography. Franklin gives us examples of those dust-jackets to substantiate his point. As for psychoanalytic interpretations, there is the seasoned work of Valerie Harms and Sharon Spencer, two early interpreters of Nin, who have extensively considered her relationships with Rene Allendy and Otto Rank. Spencer claims, contrary to most views, that Rank was a help rather than a hindrance to Nin's creativ• ity, even though he was the one who, in November 1933, urged her to abandon writing the diary. Spencer argues that Nin was fortified by her two analysts to pursue her own artistic goals. On the other hand, Harms follows the analytic voice of the psy• choanalysts into the fiction precisely to show the liberation from such male authority that Nin found in her own art. Going further still on the psychoanalytic trail is Suzette Henke, who takes a posthumous view of Nin through the unexpurgated text of Incest: A journal of Love. Henke juxtaposes the presumed literal truth of the diary regarding Nin's traumatic obsession with her father and the 'fictional' renditions in the Winter of Artifice technically as confession or scriptotherapy rather than as art. As if to balance the reference to exterior factors in the art, other critics in this volume examine the work intrinsically, treating the poetic dream world of the interior in the ultra-reality that Nin created. Anna Balakian continues her earlier investigation of Nin's poetics in the lineage of new forms of poetry initiated by the pathbreaking French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Catherine Broderick maps the textual structure of Nin's work through the predominant city imagery as a lexicon to the psyche. Harriet Zinnes observes a dialectic between the outer and inner worlds, viewing Nin in terms of the Jungian direction 'from the dream outward'. Marie-Rose Logan explores the relation between the personal self and the mythopoetic self in Nin's last novel, Collages. In terms of influence and reception studies, there is consider• ation of two figures, D.H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell, who had an impact on Nin from a distance. Lawrence Wayne Markert, going beyond the obvious evidence of Nin's study of Lawrence, detects intertextual rapports in the respective fictions. Corinne Alexandre-Garner chronicles the literary relationship between Nin and Durrell as a fortifying spiritual affinity in the expression of their creativity, vastly different from the personal rapports that stimulated Nin. From the point of view of reception, a Japanese translator of Nin's work, Junko Kimura, considers the logical Preface xvii structure of the English language as an inappropriate medium for Nin's fluid art and an obstacle to surmount in the transmis• sion of Nin's work to another culture. My own essay, which follows this Preface, focuses on Nin's aesthetics, wherein her tendency towards subterfuge is redirected into art. The concerted effort of the contributors to this volume is to usher Nin into the twenty-first century as a writer of inter• national breadth and complexity, who forged fresh literary path• ways into the psyche.