Louveciennes, the Paris home
of Anais Nin
|
Thank you for your efforts to help preserve Louveciennes, the Paris home of Anais Nin |
Anais Nin was born almost a hundred years ago. She is best known for her lifelong diary in which she wrote her real and imaginary adventures. She was also a patron of the arts, a friend of Henry Miller, and an author of lyrical, surreal fiction. You may have seen Maria de Medeiros' wonderful portrayal of her in the movie Henry and June. In this picture, you also see what her home at Louveciennes, just outside Paris, was like.
With the recent publication of the parts of the Diary that were expurgated when it was originally published in the 1970s, the public has come to realize that Anais Nin was also a victim of childhood abuse. She had a highly critical and incestuous father, who took hundreds of nude photos of her in seductive poses as a toddler, meanwhile telling her how ugly she was. The only time he touched her was to beat her, and these beatings had an erotic aspect to them, such that Anais in later years wondered if he had actually raped her at one time. Much of Anais' psychology as an adult reflects her obsession with pleasing her father, who finally abandoned the family when Anais was ten, and her ambivalent feelings about what he had done to her.
Anais' fiction relates her experiences with her father, as well as the childhoods of her husband and friends, many of whom had suffered some kind of emotional or physical abuse. It appears that Anais preceded Dr. Alice Miller by implying that the word "artist" really means a person who is aware of their own feelings, who was abused as a child, and who survived through creativity and introspection.
Her writing also reflects her belief that artistic idealism, which she called "the dream," is necessary to the survival of the human spirit. She fought against the trend towards "realism" in fiction, which in many cases she saw as simply ugliness for the sake of ugliness, and not realistic at all.
While Anais is often criticized as having abandoned reality altogether, her writing is filled with examples of cruelty and sexual violence towards children, proving that she was more of a realist than many writers of her generation. She also wrote of the gift of dissociation, which preserves the soul in a heavenly rapture, even as the body experiences filth and degradation.
The house in which Anais lived with her husband at Louveciennes near Paris was the place where she began to perfect her writing. Sometimes she loved the house, sometimes she hated it, but at all times it was her "laboratory of the soul."
04/18/2002: This word from Sky Blue Press: The house was bought and converted to apartments several years ago. However, the exterior was left as-is, except for a new paint job. The plaque with Anais' name on it is still there. There are no plans to destroy the house. You may still make Anais pilgrimages there, and look at it from outside.
 |
Astraea's |
 Delta of Venus |
 Little Birds | More soon! |
Click here for a cassette of Anais reading excerpts from her own diary
Click here to buy "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome", an experimental film by Kenneth Anger. Filled with Crowleyan imagery and starring, among many others, Anais Nin in her "Come as your madness" costume.
Find books by and about Anais! Do an amazon.com keyword search from here.
Email | Guestbook | Astraea home | Multiplicity | Religion | Politics | Anti-Psych | Anti-FMSF | Silly Pages
