Nothing in Nin’s work suggests that she was the artist she fancied herself, yet Bair takes Nin’s word for it. Does Nin’s prose seem “garbled,” her views “naive”? “It is usually because her knowledge of how to use language does not reflect the degree of sophistication in her thought,” explains Bair. But how do we gauge the thinking of a diarist except through her writing? Nin did so much revising and just plain inventing that even Bair–who read the original diaries-sometimes can’t tell what was made up. Still, she sympathizes with Nin’s plaint: “Why, why can’t I write a novel?” To this Bair adds, without irony, “This inability to create fiction was one of the reasons she entered psychoanalysis.” (Oh good, just the thing to shake Nin out of her self-absorption).
Why Nin? Bair anticipates the question: “I certainly agree with the view that Anais Nin will enter posterity as a minor writer but I insist … that she must be judged a major minor writer.” Alas, on the evidence here, the best that can be said for her is that she was a very, very sensitive bore.
