Anaïs Nin (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Bair has worked with an advantage unavailable to previous biographers. This advantage is access to Nin’s original manuscript diaries as well as their several layers of revision and excision. A shrewd and patient detective, Bair has detailed the ways in which Nin manipulated the diary materials to suit her changing sense of self and of their importance as literary documents.

Bair has also provided an astoundingly rich context within which to view Nin’s complex relationships. having gained the confidence of living descendants of the Nin Culmell families, she has amassed more material on Nin’s family background than has previously seen print. To view the young Anais in the light of her mother’s sisters, for example, enriches readers’ sense of Nin forming herself against a curious spectrum of female exemplars. Readers learn more about the break-up of Nin’s parents’ marriage, more about the places of Nin’s youth, and more—at every stage of her life— about her important friendships with women. There is more information about her brothers, Joaquin and Thorvald, and more about cousin Eduardo Sanchez, her soulmate. Bair reveals more, too, about the specific role of analysis in her life and of the contributions of different analysts to Nin’s fevered search for security, wholeness, inner strength, and the always elusive decisiveness.

Nin’s simultaneous affairs with Henry Miller, Otto Rank, and her own father are recorded with remarkable detachment, as are Nin’s later years on her bicoastal “trapeze” between Hugh Guiler and Rupert Pole. Bair has managed to find the tortured human heart beneath the monstrous self-absorption beneath the many alluring masks of this intriguing and perplexing artist.

Sources for Further Study

Library Journal. CXX, February 1, 1995, p. 75.

London Review of Books. XVII, April 20, 1995, p. 22.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 21, 1995, p. 2.

New Statesman and Society. VIII, June 23, 1995, p. 43.

The New York Times Book Review. C, March 5, 1995, p. 10.

Newsweek. CXXV, March 20, 1995, p. 65.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLII, February 6, 1995, p. 71.

The Times Literary Supplement. June 30, 1995, p. 4.

The Washington Post Book World. XXV, April 16, 1995, p. 3.

Women’s Review of Books. XII, July, 1995, p. 21.