Text ID: She slept, she fell into trances, she was lost, she was renewed, she was blessed, pierced by joy, lulled, burned, consumed, purified, born and reborn
Interviewer: Those critics who prefer very sparse and simple prose have criticized the richness of your own “poetic prose.” Why have you chosen to employ this style?
Anaïs Nin: You know that was completely contradicted when Durrell’s “Quartet” came out and we realized that by that widely held attitude, writing had been made so poor, so one-dimensional and so shallow that it didn’t give any nourishment. They had considered writing simply a functional thing, a descriptive thing, and didn’t realize that when you use that approach you are building and describing something that’s dead. But that was the plain writing that became very highly valued and traditional in our culture. It almost killed the novel. My use of rich writing was an effort to bring all the senses with it–rhythm, color, and all the atmosphere around things. I really feel that the taboo on our senses made the drug culture; drugs became the only way to break down this flat, monotonous, one-dimensional approach.
Interviewer: In “The Novel of the Future” you protested against “the cult of direct description which has given our literature a false masculinity… some of these catatonic novels may be written by victims of Puritanism, of Calvinism; or of the English complex that all personal matters should be avoided as bad manners…”
Anaïs Nin: Yes. At one time there was so much talk about communicating by simplifying our language; any elaboration of language was considered unnecessary and a luxury. And I kept refuting that on the basis that we are all very complex beings and we function on so many levels that we need all the kinds of language that we can possibly develop. That was a terrible period of loneliness and alienation for everyone. They felt that language was irrelevant to our pattern of dynamic living.
Anaïs Nin, 1971, in “Conversations With Anaïs Nin,” free to read on Archive.org.
I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
… excuse the absence of salutation. I haven’t yet learned to call you by your first name, and Miss Nin sounds so stiff, like an invitation to tea. I should like to say simply Anaïs, but it takes time.
—Henry Miller, Letter to Anaïs Nin, Thursday February 4, 1932
whenemily dickinson wrote “spring is a happiness so beautiful, so unique, so unexpected, that i don’t know what to do with my heart” and anaïs nin “to feel the spring, to renew my love affair with the world.” and sylvia plath “cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul” and rainer maria rilke “it is spring again. the earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.” and fyodor dostoevsky “and now it’s spring, so my ideas are always so nice, sharp, inventive, and the dreams i have are tender; everything is rose-coloured”
when kafka said “all the love in the world is useless when there is total lack of understanding” and when richard siken said “if you love me, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”
When orwell said: “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
