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"I have to tell you of the great, deep beauty of your Nightwood…A woman rarely writes as a woman, as she feels, but you have"
--Anais Nin to Djuna Barnes
Unlike the women of Hayford Hall, Anais Nin's experience with incest did not happen until adulthood. Bair's portrait of Nin, reveals that much of Nin's life's work centered around the tainted relationship with her father, first his abandonment of the family when she was eleven, then the affair she had with him in her early 30's. To highlight this point, an excerpt from a Salon.com interview with Deirdre Bair, author of Anais Nin: A Biography, follows:
Question (Salon.com): "Were you the first writer to fully explore
Nin's relationship with her father?"
Answer (Deirdre Bair): "Yes. I had a feeling I was going to find incest, and I spoke to her brother Joaquin at length about it before I found it in the diaries, and again during the time I found it. "20
"I'm a member of something called the New York Institute for the Humanities, which is kind of a think tank. There's a seminar that's been going for years with eight or nine women panelists of various persuasions, from Freud to Jung to Melanie Klein, who all specialize in various kinds of abuses that women suffer. I asked them to read this passage (from Nin's diaries). I gave it to them at the seminar, because I didn't want it to get into anybody else's hands. As they read it, I was watching them, and they were gasping. They were all underlining the same parts, and when the discussion started, they said, God, this language is classic adult-onset incest. This is classic separation of parent and child at a very early age coming together as adults and having incest as an affair, rather than as an abuse. The passage that she wrote, they said, could be in any textbook. I only had her written record; I didn't have her father's. But I have letters that members of the Spanish family had written that say, "Anaïs is publishing a book with the dreadful title 'House of Incest' and her father is appalled," putting it down to Anaïs' bad manners and reversal of her upbringing. When in reality, (her father) was scared to death that she was writing about his affair with her. " 21
Nin's work, particularly her diary entries, frequently come under literary attack from feminist scholars for feigning independence, when in fact, her actual life included many duplicitous dependencies. Ironically, this self-examination of "truth" and "untruth" defines the uniqueness of Nin's work, as the strength of her writing centers around the psychological borders of a woman's imagination. When examining Modernist women writers familiar with both the exile of expatriation as well as the psychological exile of incest, one must look toward Anais Nin's work for broader insight into the world of order from familial chaos. In fact, Nin's work is a brilliant example of the modernist dictum for experimentation with literature. She was prescient enough to place herself in the direct path of that which was untested, controversial and at times, unpopular, frequently amongst fellow writers.
Nin's work was greatly influenced by surrealism. The surrealist movement in literature, as well as in art, was initiated by artists and writers who explored
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