Nin and out of Love

W hat is it that fascinates us about the lives of writers? All they do is sit in their rooms all day. Yet biographies and autobiographies, volumes of letters, and journals proliferate; publishers' catalogues swell with literary memorabilia. Henry and June (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), provocatively subtitled From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anai's Nin, chronicles the passionate adulterous affair Nin carried on with Henry Miller in Paris during the early 1930s—an affair scarcely intimated in Nin's other published journals. It's fairly steamy stuff. Miller's love letters are just what you'd expect ("Anais, I am going to open your very groins...") from the author of Sexus. (Groins?) What's shocking is to find the normally ethereal Nin as untrammeled in her sexual appetites—I mean as homy—as the priapic Miller. She sleeps with three men in one day, drags her husband to lesbian sex shows, even tries to seduce her psychiatrist. And she doesn't spare the details. Nin, it seems, wanted it as much as Miller did.

The trouble is, she was really in love with Miller's wife, June —or so she claimed. June is a shadowy figure in this triangle; most of the time she's off in New York while Nin and Miller are busily engaged in "deft, acute core-reaching fucking." It was more the idea of June she loved. "There are two ways to reach me," she confided in her journal, "by way of kisses or by way of the imagination"—and June employed the latter. But the person who really turned Nin on was herself—her own pliant, yearning sensibility. Lovers were there to supply adoration. As she put it, "Writers make love to whatever they need."

JAMES ATLAS