=An Alphabet of My Creative Icons=

Anais Nin was born in France on February 21, 1903. Her father was a Cuban pianist and composer. He was also an adulterer. He was also one of Anais’s many lovers.

Nin’s mother, a classically trained singer, was of French and Danish descent. She was something of a pain in the ass.

Nin’s official full name was Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell. Quite a mouthful. You can see why she shortened it to the more manageable, euphonic and ultimately iconic Anais Nin. She first came to New York as a young girl after her parents split up.

Early on, Nin married a well-off banker which enabled her to immerse herself in the arts without having to trouble herself with financial concerns. She and her hubby moved back to Paris. She used her husband’s money to help out the then poor and unknown Henry Miller, for one thing. She also used her body to help him out, too.

She would go on to have affairs with lots of other men, including her psychiatrist, Otto Rank.

In 1939, when the Nazi writing was on the wall, she left Paris for New York City. She would live in America for most of the rest of her life.

She wrote a critical study of D.H. Lawrence, which earned a fair amount of respect.

She was an artist’s model and appeared in several movies. Later, she became the subject of movies.

Of course, she wrote her diaries, which would eventually make her famous.

She wrote short stories and novels, too, but they never fared as well, despite the fact that she assigned them a much higher literary value than she did the diaries. She was alone in this estimation, however. It was Henry Miller who constantly tried to convince Nin that the diaries were The Thing. Eventually, she concurred. The problem was trying to find anyone to publish them.

When I say her short stories never fared as well, I’m talking about her “serious” literary fiction and not about her erotica, which has since became famous and fares extremely well to this day.

For ten years of her life Nin was officially a bi-coastal polygamist, marrying a second man in California while still married to her banker husband.

Eventually, Nin’s banker husband decided to become an artist, too. He called himself Ian Hugo and made experimental films. He forgave Nin the affairs, the second marriage, everything. Some people see him as a dupe, others as a saint, others, still, as a man who loves another person the only way you should: totally and for who and what they are.

She was largely self-published for most of her life. She bought a second-hand press, learned how to typeset, and published her own books when no one else would.

The feminist movement of the 60s revived Nin’s all-but-otherwise-forgotten career. In the last decade of her life, she became an extremely popular university lecturer. Her diaries were elevated to near sacred texts, venerated as a record of the archetypal struggle of a woman to define herself as sexual being and artist in a male-dominated society.

Eventually critics began picking the diaries apart to reveal inconsistencies, omissions, distortions, and self-aggrandizing changes, showing how they aren’t so much “diaries” at all, but literary creations. That is to say, not a strictly honest recounting of Nin’s life compared to the measure of established facts. But established by what? By whom? Consensus? Whose consensus?

Nin believed in the individual’s right to create her own life however she chooses, and that included the free play of illusion and fantasy. Call it lying if you lack the courage to follow you own vision, as opposed to the determined reality you are handed by others.

Whether the diaries are truth or fantasy or some unavoidable alloy of the two, irony wins again. Nin’s diaries prove her to be more than a mere diarist, but, in fact, the great writer of literary fiction that she strove to be her entire life.

Anais Nin died on January 14, 1977 three years after cancer began a ravaging and obscene attack on her body. She was 74.  What remained of Nin was cremated and the ashes scattered at Mermaid Cove on the Santa Monica Bay. Her “California husband” was her primary caretaker as she died and he became her literary executor. Her original unexpurgated diaries remained in his custody until his death in 2006. Now they’re in the UCLA library. They still haven’t been published in their entirety.