Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.latimes.misc From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: FICTION Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 07:02:32 EST Message-ID: HEADLINE: FICTION Publication Date: Sunday November 8, 1992 BYLINE: MICHAEL HARRIS INCEST by Anais Nin ( Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $24.95; 341 pp.) Some of the steamier parts were left out, apparently, when Anais Nin's diaries were published in the 1960s. This edition restores the cuts. "Incest" corresponds to the first volume of the original series, covering the period from October, 1932, through November, 1934, when Nin, married to publisher Hugh Guiler, was romantically involved with novelist Henry Miller; Miller's wife, June; playwright Antonin Artaud; her psychiatrists, Rene Allendy and Otto Rank--and, it is now revealed, her own father. Diaries usually are diffuse, as literary forms go. In place of plot, we get the unpredictable movement of real life--heightened, in Nin's case, by Parisian cultural ambience, famous names and her own gutsy personality. Here, though, there is plot. Breaking the ultimate taboo shook her. It put to the test her lifelong effort to forge her own ethic, to plumb the psychology of love, to balance the demands of kindness with her fierce drive to compete with men as an equal in the arenas of sex and art. It made her seek absolution, which she received in the form of a mystical vision after she aborted Miller's baby (the most harrowing scene in the book). Reading Nin is a litmus test. She wrote in the heyday of Freudianism; she became a cult author in another era that equated sexual exploration with courage and creativity. In our time, when sex once more represents sin, pathology and death, we would expect Nin to lead a recovery group for Adult Children of Childish Adults; her distinguished analyst-lovers would be drummed out of their profession. But our time is stranger than hers; and Nin, on the pogo stick of literature, continues to vault over our judgments. This article is copyright 1992 The Los Angeles Times Home Edition. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM