Arts and Letters

It is only once or so each century that our sorry sublunary world is graced by the passage of a spirit as rare and courageous as was that of Anaïs Nin. In the realm of literature, I can think of few feminine figures who could hold a candle to Anaïs for artistic inventiveness and sheer personal radiance. Among these I would surely include Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Marie Corelli, Anna Akhmatova, and possibly the still-youthful Erica Jong. But few others seem to me to have possessed that special combination of toughness and magic, of power and elegance, which Anaïs and her counterparts so rarely and so perfectly embodied, both as writers and as women.

In a recent letter, Lawrence Durrell wrote that Anaïs had taught in her life and writings that women must put a high price on themselves and demand the right to be free, but that in so doing they should not lose their femininity—for, as Durrell put it, "the whole civilized world of good values upon which our children will depend for their growth and mental well-being is precisely the work of the feminine element. And a world without real women in it to guide and nourish and inform its values will fall apart."

Of the many women I have known in the course of my life, few could come close to Anaïs in beauty and feminine grace. She was both an enchantress and an aristocrat, a tireless helper of those in need and a fiercely private person. But she was also a writer of undeniable genius. And for all these reasons put together she now is the possession of the whole world, as it were.

I have repeated often before that her Diary ranks among the genuinely great and genuinely life-enhancing works of literature of all time. Now that her childhood diaries have been translated from the French and are about to be published, it will become even more obvious to her readers—the ones who have eyes and ears, bien entendu—how impressive has been the achievement of this lonely child whose only weapons, in the face of an unusually cruel fate, were pen and paper and the ink étoilique in which she very early taught herself to dip her pen.

Those who have humanly-all-too-humanly criticized the work of Anaïs Nin in recent years have tended to accuse her of dwelling too much on "private" concerns. The writer of one current article in a widely-read ladies' magazine, for example, says that "Anaïs' apolitical nature was self-indulgent and escapist; her analysis of poverty, struggle, and political realities were romantic constructs, useful to very few." Such charges have a familiar ring. They would have sounded familiar to Plotinus, Boehme, Swedenborg, William Blake, Berdiaev, the Balzac of Séraphita, the Rimbaud of A Season in Hell whom Anaïs loved so much, as well as to Sappho and Emily Dickinson.

But who would deny that these figures have done more to initiate the inevitable task of "changing life" (in Rimbaud's phrase) than all the ones with the "correct" analyses of poverty put together? Who would deny that the whole sorry lot of orthodox commentators on "political realities" have a much less vital message to offer us than these so-called otherworldly spirits? Anaïs Nin, to my mind, belongs in this "celestial" company. Like them, she continues to speak to us. Like them, she will live forever.