Henry And June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1932) [Paperback]

Then _Henry and June_ came out in 1986. It covered the exact same period (Paris, 1931) as "Volume I" of Nin's diaries -- first published, but in highly edited form one could now see, in 1969. Here she begins to cheat on her husband Hugo with the young Henry Miller, meets and flirts with his flighty wife June, and opens to life and eventually other men in an explosive fashion. HERE was the flesh-and-blood woman I had sensed behind the original published diaries. She panted, she sweated, she lied, she used filthy language as well as high poetry, and she adored love and sex. I thought she was a wonder. Nin and Miller collide like titans; sparks fly when they talk and when they make love.

Unfortunately, I have read several of the subsequent, increasingly-appalling unexpurgated diaries, as well as the biographies by Noel Riley Fitch and Deirdre Bair. The bloom is definitely off the rose. Ms. Nin turns out to have been a consummate deceiver (though of herself as much as anyone else), an artist manque who thought herself -- wished herself -- far more talented than she turned out to be. She works better in fantasy than reality; I still might have liked to meet her in her prime, but it would have been dicey to get involved with her.

It is in this book that she shows to her best as a character (never mind whether it's all true or another kind of fiction). Here one sees a woman's passion in all its riotous fire and self-contradiction. Just read this one and leave all the rest (save, perhaps for the curious erotica and a decent collection of essays entitled "In Favor of the Sensitive Man"), unless you have a penchant for the odd and pretentious.

Anais Nin did not keep a diary in the conventional sense, jotting down things that happened to her on a particular day and then offering a few reflections and interpretations. Rather, she portrayed her life in her diary as an unfolding story, positioning herself as the main character of course. The diary became not a mere reflection of her life, but an intense focus of her life. It was as if things had not really happened until she had written them down and read them back to herself. Nin explained that viewing her life as a story made bearable occurrences that would otherwise devastate her. The diary therefore gave her a sense of control over her life (remember, this was the 1930s when women had far less control over their lives than they do now). And as with the fiction, the search for self-understanding and completeness dominated the story she told the diary.

HENRY AND JUNE, based on the diaries 32 through 36, finds Anais Nin in her late 20s and early 30s living outside of Paris with her husband, banker Hugo Guiler. Anais is bored with life and feels unfulfilled, for while Hugo's substantial paycheck can afford a glamorous home, what she longs for is excitement and to be a part of the literary world, not an ornamental and silent companion to social functions. Luckily, she soon meets an unknown writer named Henry Miller. He is opposite to her husband in just about every way: he's older, penniless, irresponsible, and like Anais he is interested in literature, as well as that other Nin preoccupation: sex. (A perhaps revealing detail is that Hugo, though well endowed, occasionally struggled with impotence.) In fact, Miller has been working on a manuscript for about a year. The rest, as they say, is history ... a history revealed in HENRY AND JUNE that I do not want to spoil for the prospective reader. You'll have to get the book. But I must suggest that while reading HENRY AND JUNE it may be beneficial to view the story in the context of Anais Nin's prime preoccupation: the search for completion after having been emotionally stunted in early life. Indeed, on the very first page of the book, Anais tells her cousin, "I need an older man, a father...."

Andrew Parodi