Incest

Anaïs Nin

Description

The trailblazing memoirist and author of Henry & June recounts her relationships with Henry Miller and others—including her own father.
 
Writing with uncensored white heat, Anaïs Nin’s diaries were like a broad-minded confidante with whom she shared the liberating psychosexual dramas of her life. In this continuation of her notorious Henry & June, she recounts a particularly turbulent period between 1932 and 1934, and the men who dominated it: her protective husband, her therapist, the poet Antonin Artaud, and most consuming of all, novelist Henry Miller, a man whose genius was so demonic, said Anaïs, it could drive people insane. Here too, recounted in extraordinary detail, is the sexual affair she had with her father. At once loving, exciting, and vengeful, it was the ultimate social transgression for which Anaïs would eventually seek absolution from her analysts.
 
“Before Lena Dunham there was Anaïs Nin. Like Dunham, she’s been accused of narcissism, sociopathy and sexual perversion time and again. Yet even that comparison undercuts the strangeness and bravery of her work, for Nin was the first of her kind. And, like all truly unique talents, she was worshipped by some, hated by many, and misunderstood by most . . . a woman who’d spent decades on the bleeding edge of American intellectual life, a woman who had been a respected colleague of male writers who pushed the boundaries of acceptable sex writing. Like many great . . . experimentalists, she wrote for a world that did not yet exist, and so helped to bring it into being.” —The Guardian (UK)
 
Includes an introduction by Rupert Pole

Sujets

• Pâris
• Child
• Jealousy
• Guilt
• Incest
• Pianist
• Psychoanalysis
• List of books banned by governments
• Memoir
• Sexual fantasy
• Diaries
• Narcissism
• Abandoned
• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 16 septembre 1993
• Nombre de lectures: 30
• EAN13: 9780547540788
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Introduction
Note
October 23, 1932
October 30, 1932
November 9, 1932
November 10, 1932
November 12, 1932
November 16, 1932
November 26, 1932
November 27, 1932
December 7, 1932
December 13, 1932
December 18, 1932
December 21, 1932
December 26, 1932
January 1, 1933
January 5, 1933
January 6, 1933
January 17, 1933
January 19, 1933
February 4, 1933
February 14, 1933
February 18, 1933
February 21, 1933
February 25, 1933
March 9, 1933
March 12, 1933
March 16, 1933
March 18, 1933
March 20, 1933
March 25, 1933
April 11, 1933
April 19, 1933
May 1, 1933
May 5, 1933
May 10, 1933
May 14, 1933
May 16, 1933
May 18, 1933
May 21, 1933
May 27, 1933
May 29, 1933
May 31, 1933
June 1, 1933
June 2, 1933
June 3, 1933
June 8, 1933
June 12, 1933
June 13, 1933
June 18, 1933
June 19, 1933
June 20, 1933
June 21, 1933
June 22, 1933
June 23, 1933
PHOTOS
July 2, 1933
July 11, 1933
July 16, 1933
July 21, 1933
August 2, 1933
August 5, 1933
August 7, 1933
August 8, 1933
August 18, 1933
August 25, 1933
August 30, 1933
August 31, 1933
September 4, 1933
September 9, 1933
September 10, 1933
September 14, 1933
September 17, 1933
September 19, 1933
September 21, 1933
Sunday evening
September 25, 1933
September 30, 1933
October 2, 1933
October 6, 1933
October 13, 1933
October 16, 1933
October 19, 1933
October 27, 1933
October 28, 1933
October 30, 1933
October 31, 1933
November 1, 1933
November 3, 1933
November 7, 1933
January 14, 1934
January 20, 1934
February 1, 1934
February 4, 1934
February 5, 1934
February 6, 1934
February 14, 1934
March 4, 1934
March 6, 1934
March 8, 1934
March 11, 1934
March 12, 1934
March 16, 1934
March 27, 1934
March 28, 1934
April 15, 1934
April 22, 1934
April 25, 1934
April 27, 1934
May 4, 1934
May 14, 1934
May 18, 1934
May 19, 1934
May 25, 1934
May 26, 1934
May 27, 1934
May 30, 1934
June 1, 1934
June 4, 1934
June 6, 1934
June 10, 1934
June 11, 1934
June 12, 1934
June 14, 1934
June 18, 1934
June 20, 1934
June 21, 1934
June 30, 1934
July 4, 1934
July 7, 1934
July 13, 1934
July 16, 1934
July 21, 1934
July 23, 1934
August 1, 1934
August 2, 1934
August 4, 1934
August 7, 1934
August 10, 1934
August 11, 1934
August 14, 1934
August 15, 1934
August 21, 1934
August 22, 1934
August 27, 1934
August 29, 1934
September 17, 1934
September 19, 1934
September 21, 1934
September 23, 1934
September 27, 1934
October 6, 1934
October 5, 1934
October 7, 1934
October 21, 1934
October 24, 1934
November 2, 1934
November 7, 1934
November 8, 1934
November 10, 1934
Biographical Notes
Index
About the Author
Footnotes
Copyright © 1992 by Rupert Pole, as Trustee under the Last Will and Testament of Anaïs Nin Biographical Notes copyright © 1992 by Gunther Stuhlmann

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

Some material previously appeared in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1, 1931–1934, by Anaïs Nin, copyright © 1966 by Anaïs Nin, Introduction copyright © 1966 by Gunther Stuhlmann.

The selection by Henry Miller on pages 80–85 was first published in its entirety in Volume 7 of Anaïs: An International Journal , copyright © 1989 by Gunther Stuhlmann.

Excerpted letters from Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin (except for the selection on pages 80 – 85 ) first appeared in their entirety in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932–1953, edited and with an introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann, copyright © 1987 by Rupert Pole, as Trustee under the Last Will and Testament of Anaïs Nin. Reprinted with the permission of The Anaïs Nin Trust. The letter on pages 116–17 was published in its entirety in Henry Miller: Letters to Anaïs Nin, edited and with an introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann, copyright © 1965 by Anaïs Nin, copyright renewed 1988 by The Anaïs Nin Trust. Reprinted with the permission of The Anaïs Nin Trust.

Some of the dream passages featured throughout this book were first published in their entirety in Volume 10 of Anaïs: An International Journal, copyright © 1992 by Gunther Stuhlmann. Reprinted with the permission of The Anaïs Nin Trust.

Photographs and illustrations courtesy of The Anaïs Nin Trust.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Nin, Anaïs, 1903–1977. Incest: from “a journal of love”: the unexpurgated diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932–1934/with an introduction by Rupert Pole and biographical notes by Gunther Stuhlmann—1st. ed. p. cm Includes index. ISBN 0-15-144366-1 ISBN 0-15-644300-7 (pbk.) 1. Nin, Anaïs, 1903–1977—Diaries. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Diaries. I. Title. PS3527.1865Z465 1992 818’.5203—dc20 92-12441

eISBN 978-0-547-54078-8 v2.0717
Introduction
Incest: From “A Journal of Love ” continues the story of Anaïs Nin that was begun in Henry and June (1986). Covering the turbulent period of Anaïs’s life from October 1932 to November 1934, it complements the first volume (1966) of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, from which, for personal and legal reasons, Anaïs excluded so much of her love life. Now that virtually all of the people referred to in Incest have died, there is no cause to hold back on publishing the diary as Anaïs wished: in unexpurgated form. The material has been edited to produce a book of readable length, but nothing germane to Anaïs’s emotional growth has been omitted.
Anaïs treated her diary as the ultimate confidante and wrote in it continuously from 1914 to 1977. From 1914 to 1931 she wrote without any deep emotions of love to describe. Then in Paris in 1932 she found the writer/lover she had been seeking for so long: Henry Miller. This love, the initial phases of which are described in Henry and June, produced a double awakening—Anaïs the woman and Anaïs the writer. This passionate awakening is well captured in the frequently wild writing to be found in the unexpurgated diary—a prose that some readers will no doubt find startlingly different from the polished, poetic prose of the expurgated diary. Recall, however, that Anaïs wrote in her diary at white heat, immediately following the events she was describing.
In Incest the love affair with Henry Miller continues, but it is never to have the same intensity. Anaïs has wept through the painful experience of becoming a woman, and now her “eyes are open to reality—to Henry’s selfishness.”
The crucial relationship explored in the present volume is that between Anaïs and her father, a famous pianist and Don luan who divorced Anaïs’s mother and married an heiress when Anaïs was a young girl. In fact Anaïs first began her diary at age eleven as letters to her father entreating him to rejoin the family. Unlike her mother and brothers, Anaïs refuses to judge her father, to see him only in black and white. She determines to “find him out.” The relationship is somehow tragicomic: the father feels he is crowning his Don Juan career by attempting to seduce his daughter, but Anaïs knows she is seducing him. Later, on the advice of her psychiatrist, Dr. Otto Rank, she leaves him as punishment for abandoning her as a child.
Like the first volume of the expurgated diaries, this volume ends with Anaïs’s now famous birth story. But here it appears in a new context—in a new light that starkly illuminates Anaïs’s relationship with Henry Miller and her father.
When the “Journal of Love” series of Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diaries is complete, we will have an extraordinary lifetime record of the emotional growth of a creative artist, a writer with the technique to describe her deepest emotions and the courage to give this to the world.

—R UPERT P OLE Executor, The Anaïs Nin Trust

Los Angeles February 1992
Note
The text of Incest is taken from diary books thirty-seven through forty-six, as numbered by Anaïs Nin. Her titles for these ten books were “