Preface: This posting comes from my longtime friend Dave Dintenfass who lives in Seattle. Our friendship dates back to 1979 while I was training to be a board operator at public radio station WILL in Champaign-Urbana Illinois. Dave was a student who was assigned to train me on the night and weekend shifts. (One advantage of those late hours is that I was paid to read while listening to classical music.)
Dave has influenced my writing, my taste in books and my passion for book shopping throughout the decades. He offered to share his recent thoughts on revisiting Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. It reminds me of the kind of conversations we have had about books. Dave writes:
I finished Anaïs Nin: A Biography by Diedre Bair (Penguin Books, 1995). This was a borrow from one of the ubiquitous Free Little Library kiosks here in Seattle.
A bit of a slog given its length but very well written and comprehensive in the way that most biographies are not. Of course, there was the benefit of access to the famous diaries so documenting the life of perhaps one of the most outrageously narcissistic literary figures wasn't quite the challenge that you might assume. Or perhaps the challenge here was not for lack of research material but rather for an overwhelmingly generous supply of it. Accordingly, a comprehensive biography like this is not small. Did I mention the book is nearly 700 pages?
I felt Ms. Bair really tried to remain neutral about her subject despite meticulous evidence of just how unpleasant Anaïs Nin was. We are examining the life here of a spoiled, manipulative, monumentally self-absorbed woman—a pathological liar and completely ungenerous person who was clearly morally untethered in just about every regard. Anaïs Nin was clearly her own worst enemy but to her credit, she was not afraid to detail it all in her infamous diaries.
Like most of us, I only knew of her work by association with Henry Miller (which actually was only a very brief time in the Paris of the early 1930s) and some of the works only available posthumously (including The Delta of Venus). I did check out some of her short fiction published during her lifetime (from archive.org) and I have to say, while these short pieces were beautifully written, they lack any sort of compelling story, and they seem actually rather shallow and utterly bereft of any humanity. But then I feel the same way about Lawrence Durrell's fiction—it remains a mystery to me why it is so highly praised; I find it incomprehensible. But Your Mileage May Vary.
All this encouraged me to re-read Tropic of Cancer as it's been many years since I read any Henry Miller. I could say this 1934 novel hasn't held up but after reading it again 45 years later, it's clear to me it didn't hold up the first time I read it. Notwithstanding the long interval between readings, I vividly recall that my youthful impression was the same as now. Despite occasional flashes of dark humor and playful narrative, the book is much too long (over 300 pages in the Castle Books reprint of the famous 1961 Grove edition) and even more rambling and unfocused than The Great White Whale of my literary interest, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. (I'm not suggesting here any other equivalence between these two works, just that the Bellow book captivated my interest for years until I had the misfortune to finally read the thing from end-to-end with great disappointment.)
If Miller had boiled it down to 30 or 40 of the best pages, it might be viewed today as a compelling (though youthfully immature) riff on impoverished bohemian aimlessness in depression-era Paris. Curiously, it's when the narrator leaves Paris near the end of the novel (to teach English at a parochial school in Dijon) that some of the most focused and insightful writing emerges. In fact, I would suggest the last 50 pages of the book are probably its best.
I might revisit Miller’s other infamous early work, Tropic of Capricorn, written a few years after Cancer. When I last read it 45 years ago, I recalled it was a much better book. I’m not so sure now but it’s worth a go.
Thanks, Dave, for thinking of the blog and recommending to me which books to read and avoid.
