It’s always been my hope and dream to truly nurture and develop my creativity, to spend as much time as possible writing and recording the things of my life, the things myself and those around me experience. I love to shape the world around me through writing. My heroine as a young woman was Anais Nin. I read all of the diaries of Anais Nin cover to cover just before and during my first few years of college.
When I was in college I took many courses in women’s literature and women’s autobiography, focusing on the way in which female writers choose to express the ‘self’ in writing.
My obsession with Nin was such an intensely private experience, that it never occurred to me that I could make her the subject of my college thesis. If only I could do things over again, I wouldn’t make the same mistake.
Nin herself was a tiny, wisp of a woman. She was of Cuban-French and Catalan descent with an exotic, fragile beauty. She had large, dark, expressive Spanish eyes; elegant hands with small artistic fingers. She charmed every man (and many women) that she met.
Anais recorded her life almost obsessively in at least eight or nine published diary volumes. She also wrote fiction including erotica, but most people would agree that her personal journals contained her most immediate and vivid writing. She lived on the famous West Bank of Paris during the 1920’s and was both lover and muse to Henry Miller for many years. She was an acquaintance, friend and inspiration to many of the literary and artistic expatriates who contributed so much to the art and culture of their time, including Antonin Artaud, Gore Vidal, James Agee and Lawrence Durrell.
Reading Anais' diaries in my formative years enabled me to live a free, artistic life on the Paris’ West Bank vicariously. I learned the historical, social and intellectual atmosphere of the times through her writing. It opened my eyes to possibilities available to me both as a woman and an artist that I would have never otherwise dreamed of. Anais lived her entire life wide open, ready to absorb every experience through her skin, and into her bloodstream. She was an artist in the sense of her desire and ability to transform the ordinary, even the ugly into something beautiful. She wrote once that she loved the ‘trans’ words … transform, transmute, transgress. She considered transcendence of the mundane through creativity to be every artist’s duty.
Not everyone may agree about the function of the artist in society. It’s tempting to say that the artist is not valued much in American society. Those who strive to create art often struggle terribly to make a living, to be accepted when their work doesn’t find a place the mainstream.
Anais herself was no angel. She lived in a dubious gray area where she valued personal experience for the sake of art above the conventional morays of her time … and even our own. I know that my life is richer for the work she did though, and because of her, I believe in the power of reflective writing to enrich our lives. It helps us to examine our choices and to re-shape even the most painful memories of the past into something meaningful, maybe even beautiful as Anais always did with such eloquent grace.
