The Art Monster at the End of This Book

Writer and diarist Anais Nin took the same liberties as her male peers — all of them, including the horrendous ones.

I first read Anais Nin when I was eighteen years old. It was 2000, and I had just started blogging, though no-one called it that back then — I kept a public “diary,” on a LiveJournal knockoff called OpenDiary.com, and had to learn hex codes and basic HTML to make it look the way I wanted, which was (I assure you) very ugly.

Anyway: I wanted my diary to be riveting for all five of my followers, so when I found a book about famous diaries in the dollar bin of a used bookstore, I picked it up. That book was no great shakes, and I can no longer recall its author or title, but somewhere — as an example of a particularly bad diary, in fact — the author reviewed the fourth volume of Nin’s seven-volume series The Diary of Anais Nin. The review included a capsule biography (underground writer, became a feminist icon in the ’70s, knew a lot of artists, dreamy and “poetic” and self-absorbed to a fault) which sparked my interest. I wanted to become an interesting person. Nin already was one, and she seemed to share my ideas about what an interesting person should be.

Of course, Nin was forty-something years old when she had those ideas, and I was a teenager. The dreaminess and self-absorption that were inevitable at my age were worrisome at hers, though this didn’t occur to me at the time — I saw nothing wrong with a grown woman acting like a teenager, since teenagers don’t believe any adults can possibly be more mature or insightful than they are.

But, like all capsule biographies of Nin — and most full biographies — that book’s description of her was misleading. Nin wasn’t revered by the feminist movement in the year 2000, nor was her writing held in high esteem or regarded as particularly “avant-garde” by the literary establishment. Most people knew her, not as a diarist, but as a pornographer; her erotica collection, Delta of Venus, had been published against her wishes shortly after her death in 1977, and promptly eclipsed the rest of her work.

Moreover, the diaries published during Nin’s lifetime — the ones I first read, and based my fandom on — had been heavily edited and wholly fabricated in some places. She omitted nearly all mentions of her love life, leading readers to assume that she was either a lesbian with a discreetly hidden female partner — her quasi-affair with Henry Miller’s wife, June, was published in relatively graphic detail in the first Diary, as was her account of watching two women fuck in a brothel — or that she was a single woman of means. In her relationships with artists, she presented herself as an ethereal muse and confidante, someone sought out by the famous men of her time for her insights into the female psyche.

This may have been true, but if a male writer or artist is mentioned in Anais Nin’s Diary, you can be pretty sure that she was trying to fuck him. She usually succeeded. She carried on a ten-year-long relationship with Miller. She had plentiful sex with both women and men. She did this while married, first to one man (Hugh “Hugo” Guiler, a banker whose high salary supported her largely self-published writing) and then two: In the mid-50s, she married the California-based actor Rupert Pole, after which she split her time between New York and Los Angeles, with a husband on each coast. Rupert thought she had divorced Hugo, and Hugo didn’t know Rupert existed — at least, not at first.

These revelations began in 1986, with the publication of her “unexpurgated” diary Henry and June, and they soon made Nin a bad candidate for feminist sainthood. Her second-wave critics claimed to object to the money — she’d presented herself as an independent woman while relying on a husband, thus failing at Strong Woman 101 — but one got the sense that they also objected to what the money stood for: The sex, the lies, the selfishness. Feminism was about women claiming their authentic selves, or (if you believed the essentialists) about transcending male wickedness with their superior feminine compassion, and Nin had done neither thing. She had, in fact, behaved exactly like everyone’s worst idea of a man, enacting a faithful-to-the-point-of-parody performance of demure, “feminine” behavior in public while secretly pursuing her own selfish gratification with a grandiose appetite that would make Norman Mailer blush.

All that, and she made enemies among book critics. (She tended to throw a shit fit if a review contained anything other than wall-to-wall glowing praise.) Her reputation was in shambles by the time I found her.

It’s in the shambles, however, that one finds the fun. I still read Nin sometimes, albeit with a colder eye than I used to, and it seems to me now that it is her sheer messiness, her inability to conform to any socially determined narrative about what a woman or a feminist ought to be, that is the great appeal of her work.

It’s almost impossible for a reader in 2023 to comprehend what a crazy endeavor Anais Nin’s diary was. She wrote in it from the age of eleven until death, and intended on publication for most of that time. She not only kept the original bound volumes, but had it typed up at regular intervals to prevent deterioration of the manuscript — and, as she typed, she edited, punching up scenes or even inserting them to make for a better story.

“You don’t make the separation of life and art,” wrote her friend, James Leo Herlihy; he found it “exciting, this growth and its record, the privilege of witnessing an act of creation… and the creation, of course, is you!” It is impossible to “separate art from artist,” where Nin is concerned, because Nin was her art — she was creating the character “Anais Nin,” as well as writing the text in which that character appeared, purposefully staging her own life to be as dramatic as possible in the retelling.

To her peers, Nin’s commitment to living for some projected future audience would have seemed bizarrely narcissistic. It doesn’t seem that way now, because it’s how everybody lives. In the post-LiveJournal, post-Wordpress, post-Facebook world, we are all creating and curating personae and narratives for posterity. Confessional diaries, even diaries by women, were not unknown before Nin — Mary MacLane’s was infamous, and even more self-consciously transgressive — but it is Nin, through her insistence on glamour and image and personal branding, who seems like the truest harbinger of our times.

Nin was a lifelong believer in psychoanalysis, or at least her own idiosyncratic version of it. As she understood it, psychoanalysis was about de-repressing one’s forbidden desires. By “living from the dream outward” — uncovering, embracing, and trying to fulfill every desire, no matter how taboo — she thought she could become a perfectly realized human being. Moreover, she thought that all human evil was caused by “neurosis” and repression, and so, if every human being committed to doing exactly what they wanted, without regard for traditional morality or the social contract, injustice would cease to exist.

This worldview lent itself to amorality, to say the least, and she did hurt people. But, precisely because Nin prided herself on not following social norms, she often wound up far ahead of her time.

This stands out in the sixth volume of her “unexpurgated” diaries, which covers the years 1955 through 1966, when her double marriage was in full swing. For starters: Despite all the tears and ink biographers have spilled over poor cuckolded Hugh Guiler, by the mid-1950s, he and Nin were in what we’d call a polyamorous relationship. He was sleeping with other women. She was sleeping with Rupert. They were no longer sleeping together; they’d never had much chemistry there. There were fights along the way to establishing their understanding — Nin believed they should be able to speak freely about what they were both doing, whereas Guiler preferred to keep his illusions intact — but, once the bonds of monogamy had loosened, they seem to have been very good friends.

Nin had abundant chemistry with her second husband, but though Nin loved Rupert Pole, she did not always like him. Hugo was worldly, sophisticated, took Anais to Paris whenever she pleased, made art films, exhibited his etchings in galleries; Rupert was handsome, and that was about it. He was not bright. He did not read. He refused to visit Europe or even leave his home state of California. His career as an actor fell through and he wound up teaching high school. He was stingy and provincial and ordinary and nagged at Anais constantly to do more housework, which (since she’d spent her adult life being tended by Hugo’s staff) she had no interest in doing, and he would not let her hire a maid, since it cost money, and real wives cleaned house for their husbands. But Rupert was handsome, and the sex was good, and that made up for many defects, at least as far as Anais Nin was concerned.

Both husbands were necessary to her. Both husbands were husbands, with all the love and frustration that word entails. Rupert astonished her with his beauty, fucked her within an inch of her life, and wouldn’t stop bitching about his lost work shirt; Hugo worshiped her, gave her the life of her dreams, and was so physically uncoordinated that he fell through the bedside table trying to cuddle. Reading Nin’s diary will cure you pretty quickly of the idea that non-monogamy can solve all your problems — when she’s with Hugo, she’s irritated with him for not being Rupert, and when she’s with Rupert, she wishes he were more like Hugo — but it will not scandalize you unless you live a very sheltered life.

As a queer person in 2023, most of my friends are non-monogamous or polyamorous. Even those who are monogamous don’t believe that arrangement is morally superior; it might just be more convenient, or more to our taste. There is an understanding, at least among queer people, that compulsory monogamy is like compulsory heterosexuality or binary gender — a restrictive social norm that simply will not work for everyone.

For all the condemnation poured on Nin, she might just not have been monogamous. She needed to be with multiple partners, as many people do, and her unethical or cruel way of pursuing that freedom was at least partly the result of living in a time and place where there were no real models for non-monogamous partnerships.

Or, rather, there were models, but they were male. Men of Nin’s era were never expected to be faithful. It was understood that people married young, often for economic reasons rather than personal ones, and that as he got older, a man would take mistresses in order to have the sexual and romantic experiences that were not part of his marriage. This is precisely what Nin did, with the genders reversed, and many serious people have spent decades hating her for it. Her reputation has been ruined over behavior that, if she were a man — if she were Hemingway, Sartre, Kerouac, Updike, if she were goddamn Picasso — would simply be part of the legend.

Nin knew how differently her work would be received if she were a man. Even as she languished in obscurity, the name of her partner and collaborator, Henry Miller, floated ever before her eyes. She followed the obscenity trials for Tropic of Cancer — a work she’d paid to publish, and personally smuggled across the border into the United States — with tart contempt.

“A woman spoke up and read whole passages,” she wrote to a friend. “It was said that a because a woman accepted it they won! Tout le même. And a woman caused it to be printed — myself. And a woman prefaced it — myself! It is all senseless… why should not women accept the same writing men do?”

What Nin generously did not say was that a woman had also written some of Miller’s work — from Tropic of Capricorn on, Miller had cadged bits of Nin’s writing and incorporated them into his own manuscripts without giving her credit. Nin not only suspected that her work would be taken more seriously with a man’s name on the cover, she could see it happening. Miller became an icon of the sexual revolution. Nin had her novel A Spy in the House of Love optioned for film, but the film was never made because nobody was willing to depict its supremely taboo central subject — a woman who liked to have sex.

“They were all judging her; they were all fundamentally unsympathetic to her behavior, even hostile,” wrote Nin, of her meetings with screenwriters. “They denigrated her according to the old morality rules!” She sensed “open contempt in their characterization,” and she was not wrong. It was the same open contempt many people have for Anais Nin today.

This is the third-wave recuperation of Anais Nin — a woman in a man’s world, a queer in a straight world, an early victim of slut-shaming, etc. It won’t wash. There were dark corners to Nin’s personality, people she treated badly, things she did that were beyond even the most “liberated” person’s idea of freedom.

Much of Nin’s troubling behavior stemmed from her physical and sexual abuse by her father, Joaquin Nin, which started when she was a toddler. This includes the supposedly “consensual” affair she had with her father when he reappeared in her life in the 1930s. This episode, described in gory detail in the “unexpurgated” diary Incest (try keeping that on your bookshelf without getting some weird looks) was what really ruined Nin’s legacy and turned readers off her work. Her narration of the incest is eerie, detached from reality — she really doesn’t seem to think there’s anything bad about it, and in fact, uses it to confirm her Ubermenschen status. Freud said that everyone wanted to fuck their parents, but only Anais Nin did it! Etc.

I do not think we should infantilize Nin, or view adult women as incapable of taking moral responsibility for their own behavior, but I also do not think anyone is truly an “adult” where their parents are concerned. This is particularly true for survivors of early childhood sexual abuse. Nin claimed to be unbothered by the incest, but shortly after it ended, she cut her father entirely out of her life, and never saw him again; it’s easy to read her supposedly “happy” narration as a lingering trauma response, an abused child trying to keep her parent in her life by doing the only thing that ever made him stop beating her.

Less forgivable is Nin’s willingness to visit her trauma on others. Beginning in the 1940s, Nin had hit middle age, and her years were weighing on her; she decided to remedy this by dating teenagers, mostly young men who were just out of high school. Her lascivious descriptions of the “adolescents” and how preferable they were to men her own age are deeply creepy — I would find a man who did this pathetic, if not predatory, and I see nothing prudish or hypocritical about judging Anais Nin in the same way. Nin claimed the freedoms that men of her generation took for granted, but she claimed all of those freedoms, including the really horrendous ones. Unless you’re willing to reckon with that, you can’t reckon with her work.

There are lesser sins one can accuse Nin of — egotism, pettiness, being rude to book critics, even bad writing at times. The very nature of a document as huge and all-encompassing as the diary means that it contains both her weakest stretches of prose — points where she was maudlin, over-dramatic, precious, pretentious, comically un-self-aware — as well as passages of astonishing beauty, like her description of taking LSD: “[On the door] there were two columns of rippling and undulating Persian designs in green, violet and blue. The designs were formal, symmetrical, and exquisitely perfect, but drawn in jeweled, illumined colors like melted precious stones. They formed patterns that dissolved swiftly to be replaced by other patterns in scintillating transparencies, like filaments of amethyst and emeralds in settings of silver filigrees.”

Memoir is the most dangerous genre because, if you get it wrong, people will wind up hating the author. They won’t realize they’re reacting to bad writing; the slightest warp in the lens, the least little wobble or bad word choice, makes you, the writer, look vain or cruel or stupid. Memoir is also a deeply unethical genre because, if you get it right, people will believe they know and love you, when the truth is that they only know a character you created. Many good memoirists — Anais Nin included — have taken advantage of our baseless love.

My own mental image of Anais Nin is significantly less idealized than it was in my teens, but it is no longer strictly condemnatory, either. She gets more complicated the more I think about her, more and less understandable in new ways as I get older and time moves on. She wrote no fewer than eighteen published memoirs, each one describing her own life in intimate and excruciating detail, and she remains unknowable. It is the invitation to witness a human being in all her complexity — to witness a female human being that way, with the epic scope and moral ambiguity that has traditionally only been afforded to men — that keeps drawing me back to her work.

I can already hear the feminist objections to this, the accusations of aesthetic girlbossing: Am I really advocating for women to behave more like terrible men? Shouldn’t I be advocating for those terrible men to behave better? Yet no-one has ever been able to make human beings behave any better than they want to; there have always been bad men and bad women and bad people. It’s only the men that we can view outside of their bad parts, as full human beings, or as artists. Critics have operated, for centuries, with the understanding that a Picasso or a David Foster Wallace can be a genius and an idiot, an angel and a monster, all in one lifetime and sometimes all in the same afternoon.

We still expect women to be good people. We still expect women to be nice. We still expect women to be “feminist” in a very specific way that equates to “good person” or “nice person,” even if feminism, as the project of reclaiming full humanity for women, must necessarily reclaim women’s ability to be jerks and fuckups.

“My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead,” wrote Jenny Offill, in a much-quoted passage. “Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.”

Claire Dederer, citing Offill, writes that “the female writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in off-hand, ha-ha-ha ways: ‘I wish I had a wife.’” These aspiring monsters “wish to abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist,” as men have always done. But, upon reflection, Dederer cannot actually cite any female art monsters, any wanton philanderers or rule-breaking narcissists; the best she can do are child abandoners, bad mothers, who break the unwritten female rule that family comes first.

Well: Anais Nin never had children. She had several abortions, because being someone’s mother would have gotten in the way of doing whatever she liked. Nin was an art monster in the classic mode, someone who placed her art — the art of becoming and documenting herself — before any human considerations. She rode roughshod over the social contract in order to do her work and get her way. Not everyone can do this; not everyone wants to do this; probably no-one should do this. But, thanks to Nin, the Hall of 20th-Century Art Monsters has a female presence. It is the monster in her — the sweet, delicate, fairy-princess persona and the ravenous, sometimes dangerous beast underneath — that makes her life and work a source of enduring fascination.

Nin did not, as she intended, give the world “one perfect life.” Nin gave us a resoundingly imperfect life, an imperfect person, and challenged us to deal with it. In this, as in other things, Nin was ahead of us. We are still catching up.