Who is Anaïs Nin

Her first publication in France was a defense of D.H. Lawrence. "D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study" is the first book written about Lawrence by a woman.

In 1934 she prefaced Henry Miller's book, "Tropic of Cancer", when no one else would dare.

If you remember, Henry's first three books were banned in the United states for obscenity. These days, the books of this famous group are considered sensual, not pornographic.

Anaïs's third book, "The Winter of Artiface", was published in 1939 at the same time that Lawrence Durell's 'Black Book' and Henry Miller's 'Black Spring' were published.

During the war, she was unable to get any of her books published, as no publisher would touch her ~ too risque and not befitting of a woman! Oh, my!

She refused to let the short sightedness of men stop her. She bought a second hand, foot operated printing press and handset and printed her own works.

"Cities of the Interior", the title of Anais Nin's "continuous novel," contained six books of which I sadly, only have  two of these original printings.

They contained:

* The Ladders To Fire
* Children of the Albatross
* The Four-Chambered Heart
* A Spy in the House of Love
* Solar Barque (which became a part of the later
'Seduction of the Minotaur')

If any one is lucky enough to have the whole collection, they are fortunate, indeed.

Anaïs Nin was one of the first women, if not the first, to completely expose herself as nakedly as she did, and reveal what so many women were taught not to feel, let alone act upon. And yes, if we did think, let alone act on those feelings, we were looked upon with contempt not only by men, but also by our own sisterhood of women.

Anaïs' words proved inspirational to me as they affirmed my own inner feelings that women have intelligent thoughts and don't have to "go with the flow" and are not any less of a woman because of it. This is not because of some essentialist biological difference from men but, rather, because there are many ways in which our socialization and experiences differ.

What woman of her time, or since then, had ever radiated such bravado. She had the courage, not only to live life, but to expose it, and not only in her dairies.

When I began reading her diaries, in 1966, I was completely taken with the fact that I shared the same thoughts and feelings as the woman had displayed thirty years prior. She had done this at a time when women were so debased by men and society in general, that having revealed such thoughts would never have been considered, let alone spoken out loud.

She left us a record of a woman who struggled against the repression of the so called "female condition," as it was so inappropriately label by society at the time, and the onslaught of "the feminist movement," as it was labeled during my time of the 60's "women's feminist" movement. She accomplished this on her own, in the way she lived her life and the privacy of her journals. She alone had that courage to live her life as she deemed right and didn't care if others thought ill of her because of it, or in spite of it.

She gave women the courage to "wear purple" before they got old.

"The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say."
- Anaïs Nin

For the artists and expatriates, the aristocrats and arrivistes, Paris in the 1930s lost none of its magical allure, as this lavishly illustrated chronicle of a fascinating decade in the city's cultural history shows. This book is a social history of the decade that took Paris, its avant-garde artists, & celebrated expatriates to the brink of the Second World War, despite the stock market crash of 1929. At salons, galleries, palaces, and cafes, Henry Miller, Helena Rubinstein, Anais Nin, Coco Chanel, Salvador Dali, and Katherine Anne Porter joined illustrious exiles of the twenties like Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Pablo Picasso, Janet Flanner, and Man Ray.

Jazz orchestrated the city nights, surrealism flourished, haute couture reinvented itself. James Joyce redefined modern literature with Finnegans Wake and at her Chez, Josephine Baker redefined the derriere. In a lively narrative, which is accompanied by a superb selection of period photographs, the award-winning author William Wiser follows Elsa Schiaparelli, T. S. Eliot, Peggy Guggenheim, the Windsors, Collette, Jean Cocteau, and a host of other colorful celebrities and literary luminaries through the ten years that continued to foster the creative revolution of the expatriate era in Paris--an era that began extravagantly with Elsa Maxwell's famous masquerade ball and ended with perhaps the grimmest event in modern French history: the fall of Paris and the Nazi occupation in 1940.

These were the people that were the friends and companions of Anais at the time.

The Twilight Years: Paris in the 1930s

It was during this time that Henry and Anais lived in a house next door to Salvador Dali.