Australian playwright Wendy Beckett directs her play Anaïs Nin: One of her Lives at New York City's Samuel Beckett Theater in a limited engagement this month. Like her distant relative for whom the theater was named, and like most artists, the prolific Beckett aims to be known through her work. There are others who, though perhaps intending to become artists, actually achieve fame because of how they live their lives.
It is the rare artist, however, whose life truly becomes her art. Such was Anaïs Nin, a gifted writer of avant-garde and erotic fiction whose most substantial contribution to literature turned out to be her diaries, which run to 11 volumes and cover her life from 1914, when she was 11, until just a few years before her death in 1977.
Photo by Richard Termine
If the examined life is worth living, Nin's must be valued as considerably more than her weight in gold. The erotic content of her writing (and of the life upon which so much of it was based) can tend to obscure her artistic accomplishment, but in the end it was her life itself that became her greatest work, making her story ripe for telling and retelling. From Deidre Bair's scholarly and popular biography to Philip Kaufman's exploitative film Henry and June, Nin's life story, particularly her time in Paris in the 1930s with Henry and June Miller, has become part of popular culture.
Beckett evokes Nin's own language - perfumed as it was with both flowers and pheromones - in the literate, emotional dialogue she gives to the triumvirate in this stylized but passionate and sexy staging. A little over an hour and a half suffices to relate, primarily from Nin's (Angela Christian) and secondarily from Henry Miller's (David Bishins) points of view, the story of their encounter, the famous menage-a-trois, and its breakdown. Interspersed are scenes of Nin's visits to the psychoanalyst Otto Rank (Rocco Sisto), which at first seem a little gimmicky, but which culminate in a powerful scene in which patient and therapist switch positions. Rank's personal confessions throw added light on our heroine's struggle to create work that matters while constructing a life worth living.
Article comments
1 - E. James Lieberman
Good review of timely production.
For more on Otto Rank, Nin and Miller visit www.ottorank.com or look at the biography "Acts of Will:The Life and Work of Otto Rank."
2 - Howard Dratch
The play sounds fine in your effective review. I wish I could see it.
The erotic content of her writing (and of the life upon which so much of it was based) can tend to obscure her artistic accomplishment, but in the end it was her life itself that became her greatest work, making her story ripe for telling and retelling.Years ago, when we lived in upstate New York and often went to our alma mater, Bard, for lectures, concerts and films, Anais Nin came to speak. A favorite writer of my wife and something of an idol to me from her works and Henry Miller's, we anticipated a good talk.
We got a glimpse of an astoundingly beautiful woman (then in her early 70s, I think) with a presence that dominated the old gym with its empty spaces. As you wrote,
True. She was one of those people who, at any age, left her mark on all around her. After all, it is about 30 years later and I still remember her beauty and presence vividly (if not what she said).
3 - Mark Saleski
nice review jon. i loved nin's diaries about as much as her erotica...though it's difficult to compare one to the other since they're completely different animals.