In fiction [Anais Nin] tried to do something new, and she saw it as intricately linked with the fact that she was a woman; she was anti-intellectual, relying on feeling, and she was one of those people who believe that 'It is man's separateness, his so-called objectivity, which has made him lose contact…. Woman was born to be the connecting link between man and his human self.'… She wanted also to be a great artist; what is there in her books for people who do not find psychological guidance in the Diaries, and are not converted to her beliefs about men and women?

She was fond of using music, also painting and dance, as metaphors for writing. She wanted to communicate directly, to make words serve her intuitions that went beyond words. Rather than show you, she tells you, in fantastic, bright, rich images, woven together like a dazzling carpet. She often writes in the imperfect, less often in the past—describing the inner evolution of feelings over a span of time, rather than surface events moment by moment. Repetition is an essential part of the musical effect she wants. Her concern is always to see, to understand clearly the meaning of events for each character…. Because her female characters are all faces of Woman, it sometimes does not seem to matter which woman one is reading about; the characters melt and dissolve into each other, and indeed want to become each other.

By now it must be clear that I don't like her novels very much. She succeeds in making one feel immensely guilty about saying anything against her, because of her courage, goodness and persistence. She has an answer to most criticisms; if you say she was too self-absorbed, she will answer that it is only by concentrating on the personal, by sorting out one's own experience, that one can approach truth. But this is not what I have against the novels. 'I am not interested in fiction. I want faithfulness,' she said in an early volume of the Diary. She attacks Proust for his 'generalisation', adding: 'If only Proust had spoken for himself.'… [In her novels she herself] both generalises and says 'I, Anais', and the two do not fuse. The novels do not transcend their didactic origins: 'I would like to convert the diary into a long novel … I do want to dramatise the conflicts of woman. Conflict between maternal love and creation. Between romanticism and realism. Between expansion and sacrifice.' And yet, as well as being most of the characters in the novels, Nin is the air they breathe, the world they inhabit, and the way they think is the way she thinks. In fact she, the sensitive and brilliant writer, is too obviously doing their feeling and thinking for them.

Of course her method is not entirely unsuccessful. In The Four-Chambered Heart, the middle book of the five making up Cities of the Interior, the repetition, the revolving of the same situation as it gets worse and worse, is particularly suitable for the subject—the three-cornered relationship between Djuna, the fictional personality closest to herself, her lover Rango and his wife Zora…. This is a straight life from Nin's own life and she tells it movingly. But I am moved in spite of her rolling, relentless style, with its many appositions and restatements. She speaks like a seer. The art of understatement is foreign to her. The states of mind she describes are real and powerful, but they produce in me the desire to escape, to flatten their reality and get out of the book, instead of a desire to believe and (to put it bluntly) to read on.

Her book of essays, In Favour of the Sensitive Man, is characteristic. As usual, she bravely plunges in with unsupported generalities about men and women, art and music, and the volume ends with travel pieces…. Her susceptibility to beauty makes her travel writing almost unreally beautiful; can Bali really be the Paradise she describes? Her optimism … is part of this desire for the best; admirable but not entirely convincing. (pp. 21-2)