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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
What did Anais Nin ever do to Deidre Bair?, 2 Jan 2000
My intial reaction when starting reading Deidre Bair's biography of Anais Nin was to wonder what Anais Nin ever did to harm the book's bitter author. Bair's tone is exceedingly condescending and her narrative judgemental rather than analytical. What could have been the most in-depth, accurate biography of Anais Nin ever to be written reads instead like a moralistic warning by a betrayed wife.For what Bair writes is well-researched. She had access to most of what Nin ever wrote, including her diaries stored under lock and key at UCLA, letters to her family and friends, and journals left in the care of Rupert Pole. Still, Bair cannot seem to help interpreting Nins actions instead of simply accepting whatever motives she had for betraying her first husband, Hugh Guiler, rewriting a novel or even working as a psycholanalyst. If we are to believe Bair, Anais Nin was a compulsive liar without any real talent as a writer, and a nymphomaniac to boot. The most infuriating thsesis of Bair's is that a diary is no longer to be regarded as "truthful" if edited by its author several times. True to what, one might ask? I must argue that if I write something in my own diary and add to, or alter, my account of an event or emotional state at a later time, it is still my diary. As my diary, it is my perrogative to change its contents at my own will. What I write there need neither be objective nor entirely realistic. If Bair expected the God given truth and objective, historical accounts of events of the twentieth century in Anais Nin's diaries, she was obviously doomed to be disappointed from the start. As for her complaints of Nin's "egoism" and "self absorbtion" in the diary, I must once again wonder what she expected. My diary contains my opinions and stories about my own life and things that effect me. If that makes a person egoistic, then I suppose most people who keep diaries are guilty of that sin. The most interesting part of Bair's biography is her account of how Nin managed to keep a husband on each coast of the United States for twenty years. Although much of the narrative should be taken with a pinch of salt, it is interesting to read how such a situation was at all possible. Also, Bair's detailed account of the cancer that led to Nin's death is frightening, but more sympathetic and factual than the rest of the book. If only Bair could accept her subject matter as complex and let it speak for itself as such, her book would be at the top of my list of must-reads for Anais Nin fans. Given the spitefulness with which the book was written, however, I would suggest that the serious scholar read the available early diaries as well as diaries 1-7, the unexpurgated diaries and a few of Nin's novels, thus forming their own opinions before reading Bair's work.
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by Anais Nin
by Anais Nin
by Anais Nin
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