What Do Women Want? (15 page)

And who profits from censorship? I maintain that those who own and control the fewer and fewer media conglomerates do. Through censorship laws, their hegemony over the airwaves, over the Internet, is protected. The Christian Coalition will at first seek to control the Internet with antiobscenity laws, but you can be sure that their definition of obscenity will
not
include rallying militia movements via optical fiber or proselytizing against gun control laws, environmental regulation, freedom of contraceptive choice, and abortion. One’s enemy’s agenda is
always
obscene. One’s own is
always
moral.

For this reason alone, I am against censorship. I prefer the chaos of uncontrollable communication of all sorts to selective banning of certain materials. I do not think human beings can be trusted to be above politics and to promote the common good. One group’s common good is another group’s evil.

We are better off punishing rapists, making our streets safe for women and children, than banning pornography. We are better off spending time
raising
our children and teaching them values than attempting to police television, magazines, the Internet.

I suspect that calls for censorship are always the lazy person’s way of influencing the minds of the young. The truth is, we teach our children by our own example and not by what we let them watch on television or plug into on the net. If we are hypocrites, they will be hypocrites, too. If we are honest about our beliefs, they will be drawn to honesty as well. Mass communications do not raise our children;
we
do. In attempting to control the airwaves, we are mimicking the dictator’s agenda. We are making our media safe for selling, delivering the next generation of customers, and abdicating our own personal responsibility. Better to turn the television off than to turn off our own discrimination, parenting, and judgment.

The calls for censorship we have lately heard are an attempt to blame mass communications for all the seemingly insoluble problems of a violent and overpopulated world where wealth has increasingly become the only measure of worth. The truth is that mass communications are only a mirror of our values. They show us who we are and what we have become. If we dislike what we see there, we should cure the diseased body politic, not merely attempt to retouch its image. That is a way of doing nothing while reassuring ourselves of our zeal for reform.

—ANAÏS NIN

 

 

 

Anaïs Nin: the very name
conjures exoticism and eroticism. There should be a specific word for this heady combination. In fact, there is: her own name, Anaïs, which has become a perfume, a vast library of books, an almost museum-size collection of photographs, and of course the archetype of the contemporary writer as a woman.

Like any archetype, she is loved and hated—with the
same
evidence being used for each canonization, each attack.

Kate Millett saw Anaïs Nin as the first self-portraitist “of the artist as a woman.” Millett suggests that “our form is autobiography,” and she dubs Nin “Mother to us all.”

Why are there so few positions in between adoration and detestation? Because Nin is seen as a representative of woman’s psychological and sexual freedom. The response to her depends on the reader’s degree of liberation. For women who seek freedom—artistically and sexually—she is the pioneer, validating our quest. For women who fear freedom, she becomes the target, evoking a furious response that may be only anger at one’s self for being unfree.

To men she is an enigma—seductive to some for her sexual and literary sorcery (which have the same roots and in fact become one), but repellent to others for her manipulativeness, her old-fashioned nineteenth-century sexual romanticism, and the queasy-making, highfalutin tone her writing sometimes takes. Since few men have a visceral understanding of the problems women writers face, they may consider Anaïs Nin’s strategies duplicitous, deceptive, seven-veiled.

What
are
the problems a woman writer faces? Let’s get this straight once and for all. Virginia Woolf described them brilliantly in
A Room of One’s Own
(1928), but half the world, apparently, hasn’t heard.

First, there is the need for privacy and silence—which a woman’s life often lacks. If she is a wife or a mother, even the caretaker of a brother, father, mother, aunt, or lover, she is assumed to
need
no private time or space. But writing cannot happen in a crowd.

Next, she lacks money to support her fulfilling herself—those few guineas a year Woolf ’s hypothetical woman writer needed. The guineas needed are inflated now, but they are usually earned by giving up the necessary time to write. Woolf ’s hypothetical woman writer had a private income—albeit small. As for husbands, they
used
to support wives, but they supported them on condition of certain services being performed—social, sexual, maternal, culinary. It is the rare husband, even today, who can free his wife from social appointments, family duties, child care, and let her mind find the spaciousness it requires. The wife who says, “I’m writing. I won’t be home for dinner,” is often the wife who is about to lose her job. Since men still have a preponderance of the world’s money and women (except for a tiny elite) are dependent on men’s attitudes, they must either change their men, tiptoe around them, lie to them, or get divorced and live alone.

These options are more than ever possible today. But a sense of family is hard to lose. Family warmth grounds the dreamer. Men who dream surely need this warmth, and their getting it is not always antithetical to their family affections. Women dreamers are still often asked to give up love.

These are only the domestic problems. What if a woman solves them somehow and goes out into the world to present her creative work? She finds that her sex is a built-in bias, that men rule the definitions of prestige, that her gender goes in and out of style every decade or so.

She also faces the whore/madonna dichotomy. Women who write about sex are presumed to be whores. (
Good
women write domestic novels, sweeping historical potboilers, romances that make no literary claims, or biographies of historical figures. Good women do not disturb the status quo.)

There is, of course, a little bit of room for rebels and renegades—especially if they are dead. Virginia Woolf is safely dead, safely modernist, safely categorizable as “Bloomsbury.” Gertrude Stein is safely dead, safely modernist, safely categorizable as “lesbian.” She doesn’t worry male critics much because she’s clearly
out
of their domestic and sexual spheres. She need not be judged by the prejudices of heterosexual love. Woolf and Stein are both sui generis at last.

But for women who live
in
the world, sleep with men, love their children, and dare to enter into the sexual debate through their books, the reception is much chillier and much contentious.

Anaïs Nin knew all these things long before my generation discovered them. She knew she had to survive, find time to write, have money to live, and somehow fulfill her sexual and literary potential. Even though she’d married very young to a man who did not particularly stir her sexually, she loved and needed him. While idealizing him recklessly, she knew that unless she was to live only half a life, she would have to perfect deceit. The same holds true for many women today.

Nin had been seduced and abandoned by her father in childhood, then brought up strictly by her all-suffering Catholic mother. She was at first so afraid of sexual love that she may have deliberately married a man who shared her fear, and her marriage to Hugh Guiler remained unconsummated for at least two years. He patiently waited for her to blossom, worshiping her as an angel-artist. She also began to write in a mélange of languages, none of which was wholly hers at first. (Spanish, French, and English warred for hegemony on her tongue.) So Nin developed various strategies essential to her as a writer/wife. To learn about sexuality without sacrificing her stabilizing marriage, she learned to deceive. It came easily to her because she was an expert at deceiving herself. She had blocked all her terrifying sexual memories from childhood.

To write her journals, she fictionalized them, even to herself. To publish her journals, she expurgated them. To be honest to history, she left manuscripts of these secret journals to literary executors who shared her vision; they saw to it that the journals were published after her death.

I am concerned here only with the first two of them:
Henry & June
and
Incest
. Nin managed to have them appear exactly as she wrote them, even though she had to wait for posthumous publication.

No married woman writer has ever succeeded as well in preserving all her work. Sylvia Plath’s journals and literary remains were partly destroyed by Ted Hughes. Laura Riding repudiated her early art and hid herself by changing her name. Virginia Woolf committed suicide in her literary prime. Jean Rhys stopped writing for decades, sunk in alcoholism. Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Wickham, Sara Teasdale, ended their own lives. Only Anaïs Nin and Colette went on writing as they ripened and left us all that they wished to leave.

But French women don’t count. Even in the eighteenth century, they were allowed to be intellectuals while the rest of us were still hiding manuscripts under the embroidery hoop. Colette had a whole French female literary tradition to draw upon. Few American and English writers could count on this. Nin presented her expurgated journals to the public in the seventies, but she left the most stirring stories for after her death. The first,
Henry & June,
appeared in 1986. It stunned with its sharpness and frankness. Decades after
Tropic of Cancer,
in an age when sex was all but discredited,
Henry & June
still seemed electrifying. It told the story of Anaïs Nin’s love affair with Henry Miller from October 1931 to October 1932—a love affair which was also a ménage à trois.

This extraordinary love triangle between the seductive guttersnipe Miller, his seductive wife, June, and the seductive Nin really becomes a quadrangle if you count Nin’s husband Hugo’s quiet, half-knowing part in it.

The bare bones of the story would be seductive, even if the principal characters were unknown.

 

 

It’s a hell of a story, and Nin tells it fiercely. Her good-girl
pudeur
stripped away, she writes with a burning pen. Her sexuality open, she seduces her husband, her analyst, her lover, her muse, her lover’s wife. The story is told with sure, searing strokes, with no flowery prologues or codas.

But
this
story, in
this
form, will go unpublished until after the author’s death, at seventy-four. She refuses to publicly humiliate her husband (and perhaps she also fears to expose herself ),
¹⁵
so the version of it that first appears has pillow talk occurring instead in cafés. No wonder something seems to be missing! No wonder the prose often seems maddenly vague and wispy.