You are about to see hear the life of a lady whose whole career started when her father left her. She is a famous writer and her name is Anaïs Nin.
Anaïs Nin is a writer. She was born in 1920 in Neuilly near Paris. When she was eleven her father left her. He was a Spanish pianist. Her mother, a Spanish dancer, lived with her and her brother. When her father left her she started writing a diary. It was really a letter to her father to try to get him to come back to her.
The family was living in Richmond Hill in Queens and her father went to Paris to become a famous pianist. She had even actually sent him a letter, only her mother didn't mail it and said it had gotten lost in the mail. When she was about 24 years old she wrote some very beautiful poems and stories but since she was a woman (and there weren't many women writers) no one would publish her works. But Anaïs Nin thought that they were good enough to be published; so she set up a printing press and she published all her works herself. Since then they have be come very famous.
Anaïs Nin's career started very late and, still today, she is writing some of her best novels and stories.
Anaïs Nin is unlike most people. When she dreams she wants these dreams to come true. She says that dreams won't come to you. You have to make them come true. Once she dreamed about a nice big houseboat. Then she saw an ad for a houseboat on the Seine in the newspaper.
She bought the houseboat and moved into it with all her friends. They were very happy living out her dream together.
Anaïs Nin has written many books. Her
Diaries, of which there are now six published volumes, and
And, many others. She is a great writer.
When Anaïs Nin's father left her she wanted him to come back so much that she became a Spanish dancer. (Since he was a Spanish pianist she figured he could play and she could dance.) She performed in Paris under the name Anita Aguilera and even though she was a writer and was doing it for her father, she was a very good dancer.
Anaïs Nin has been interviewed in many magazines like Ms. and The Feminist Art Journal and many more. She is very famous.
Anaïs Nin has a policy about answering her mail. When she was young she wrote to Djuna Barnes and she never received an answer, so she decided to answer all her mail if she ever became famous. Even though she gets many letters each day sooner or later no matter what else may stand in the way, she will always answer them.
Anaïs Nin, whose diaries have made her famous, is a great writer thanks to her father.
A friend once told me about a feminist workshop in which each woman was asked to acknowledge her matrilineal ancestry by repeating the phrase: "I am the daughter of ..." and then naming her mother. To everyone's amazement, many of the women in that small, randomly selected group spontaneously responded: "I am the daughter of Anaïs Nin."
A major theme of the women's movement has been that biology is not destiny. Therefore a doctor's words to the youthful Anaïs are ironic: "You were not built for maternity." Instead of becoming a biological mother, Anaïs Nin was the spiritual mother to an entire generation of women writers. As a biological mother and a feminist, I can think of no greater gift to my own children than a spiritual parent. It was with this in mind that in 1974 I suggested that my ten-year-old, Claudia, contact Anaïs Nin.
One of Anaïs' recurring motifs has been the transcendence of loss through artistic creation. I wanted to share this motif with my daughter. My husband and I had recently separated. I was teaching a college course on Anaïs Nin's Diaries. I began to realize how very much like my own children Anaïs had felt when her father left her at approximately the same age. Claudia's English class project was to write the biography of a famous person. She had chosen Shakespeare, but was making little progress. It occurred to me that the painful after-effects of her parents' separation might be connected to this "writing block." But I found myself in the position of being unable to help her at the time she needed me precisely because I was her mother. The person my children missed most in the world was the person against whom I harbored extremely bitter sentiments. I felt torn between my own anger and my children's need for me to understand that they still loved their father. I knew instinctively that Anaïs Nin, through the Diaries, could do the spiritual mothering I found impossible, that reading about how she had used her own pain as a source óf creative energy might give Claudia confidence that childhood wounds could be overcome.
When I spoke to Claudia about Anaïs, she perked up and instantly switched her topic from Shakespeare to Nin. Then she wrote to Anaïs, telling her about the project and asking if there were any possibility of obtaining the childhood journal, written, as Anaïs tells us "as a diary of a journey to record everything for my father. It was written for him and I had really intended to send it to him. It was really a letter so he could follow us into a strange land, know about us." Claudia included some of her own poetry with her letter and soon received an enthusiastic response.
If Anaïs Nin's Diaries can speak personally to a child of ten, it is because Nin herself has never lost sight of the child she was. It is this intermingling of past, present and future that gives the Diaries their universal and timeless ap peal for the young and old alike. She says in the fourth Diary: "We live back and forth in the past or in the present or in the future. With the young one lives in the future. I prefer that. Changes occur constantly according to the vision, image or myth that possesses one..... We never discard our childhood. We never escape it completely ... The young's attraction for the old is the protection of their future. The need of faith and the elder's vision into the future." If, as Anaïs states, "changes occur according to the myth we are possessed by," it is no wonder that those who read the Diaries and become possessed by the myth of transcendence through creation undergo the therapeutic effects of a transpersonal healing. It was precisely this faith in the future and the elder's vision that I wanted to pass on to my daughter and that caused just such a psychic healing to take place.
I think Claudia was helped most in handling that difficult period in her life by the knowledge she gained from Anaïs that reality need not only be composed of what you live, but more importantly of what you dream, and that the creation of the Marvelous in life is no denied those who experience loss or pain, as long as the creative will prevails and transforms that suffering. Of all the papers I have reac on Anaïs Nin, none has moved me more than the very simple project written by my own daughter.
Claudia Danielle Orenstein is a seventh grader at the Fleming School in New York City. She has acted in several Off-Broadway plays.
Gloria Feman Orenstein is an assistant professor and acting chairperson of Women's Studies at Douglass College.