Not cool

Jennifer's Pick:

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June:

From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (Penguin, 2001).

January 10 @ Au Petit Chavignol (Hastings St., Vancouver)

Wow. With the possible exception of Leanne (who couldn't attend the "meeting"), we were unanimous in our infuriation with this book, which comprises one famous year of Anaïs Nin's voluble, long-running "diary." (This is the year when she met Henry and June Miller, had affairs with both, and apparently discovered herself sexually.) So I'm going to have a good time here and really tear this apart.

Allow me, right away, to quash any knee-jerk explanations for our antipathy: (1) No, we are not frigid old bats scandalized by the sexy parts. I personally enjoyed the occasional depictions of her shenanigans with the Millers. Nin wrote her share of erotica in her lifetime, and I can see why. She's good at it. They were the best parts. (2) We did not sanctimoniously object to Nin's moral choices, e.g., her taking of a lover (or two or three) and concealing them all from each other. Fiction and non-fiction, obviously, have provided far worse for the interested reader. And outright amorality (which Nin does not exhibit here) often provides the raw material for a fascinating read. (3) We are not stodgy conformists suspicious of those who throw off the shackles of societal expectation to experiment with alternative life choices.

So where does that leave us? It is pretty clear that, on a nonliterary level, we didn't like Nin. Her self-absorption is incredible, and she had an uncanny ability to recognize her frequent unkindnesses and deceptions while preserving an untarnished self-image as a pure and generous soul. Her refusal to leave her seemingly decent husband is, in her diary, the testament of her selfless goodness. Hmm... you want to run around on your husband? Fine. But don't make out like you're doing him a favour. This issue here is not with her infidelity but with her self-delusion.

This irritation may seem unfair. A friend of mine once said that he didn't like the idea of book clubs because people in book clubs were preoccupied with their personal connection to the story, the way it resonated with them, instead of evaluating it on its own merits. But in this case, I would argue that Nin's self-characterization is so conspicuous and aggravating precisely because there is so little else of enduring significance to actually glean from her musings, however eloquent.

Let's see: Do we get insights into the nature of human relationships? Not really. Nin's incessant praise of (Henry) Miller serves primarily to reflect her own stature (i.e., this brilliant, creative genius is awed by my talent, beauty, incisiveness, and ferocity). I am not exaggerating; Nin spends many a paragraph transcribing his praise for her. Her relationship with her husband, on the other hand, becomes predictably claustrophobic, and, as I've already suggested, empathy is not exactly Nin's strong point.

Does the diary deliver unaffected authenticity? A resounding no, from the whole book club. Although it is copious and was clearly a labour of love, Nin's notebooks were not vessels of private recollection; she frequently mentions how they were read by others, especially Miller, who was no doubt gratified by what he read. This is not to say that Nin falsified her accounts, but that she was catering, at this time, to a specific audience of one. And it shows. It is all too obvious from her entries, for example, that she was not about to let her husband give them a perusal.

Finally, do we get a refreshing glimpse of women's sexual emancipation at a time when, so the story goes, very few women investigated, let alone wrote about, their own sexuality? Well, okay. Maybe. But these disclosures were just glints on a deep dark pool of self-congratulation and Freudian mumbo-jumbo. The masturbating woman on the cover of the Penguin edition (above) is appropos; but please take note that Nin's brand of self-pleasuring is only incidentally sexual.