French writer who authored 60 diaries in her 74 years about her SELF (often capitalized), working on perfecting her self-absorption and sex-life. Introspective from youth, she began her diaries at 15. She published four of the diaries from 1966 to 1971. Nin fancied herself an artist, when, in fact, she was a minor writer and a very, very sensitive bore. She nonetheless became an icon for the feminist movement in the 1970s, presenting herself as having successfully defied the conventions of woman’s traditional role. She was the among the first to write of personal explorations about sex, self and psychoanalysis. Her marriages and affairs were detailed in her books, Diaries I to IV.
Her dad was the philandering Spanish composer, Joaquin Nin, who abandoned the family when she was 11 but continued to be the overshadowing figure in her life. She would write long letters to her absent dad, detailing the family’s daily life. When her dad deserted the family, her mom took the three kids to New York.
Nin worked as a fashion and artist model as well as a Spanish dancer. She both studied and practiced psychoanalysis as well. She was among the first to explore in print three of this century’s biggest preoccupations: sex, the self and psychoanalysis. Nin’s emphasis on the intimate, personal and instinctual were feminine traits she believed could be used in the reconstruction of a more sensitive world. Her first book, published when she was 27, was about D.H. Lawrence with whom she agreed that lies were essential because most people could not stomach the naked truth. She would brag about lying “bravely, ironically, dually, triply.”
Nin clung obsessively to the book that nourished her living; her diary, her “one true friend.” She kept both real and false diaries, editing and rewriting them throughout her life in a never-ending recreation of self. Some say her writing reveals a portrait of monstrous egotism and selfishness, horrifying in its callous indifference.
In Diary I she wrote about Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Otto Rank and Antonin Artaud. Aware of their celebrity, Nin traded on it to entice publication of her entire set of diaries. In her first period of “erotic madness,” which she called “a search for the father,” she pitted one man against another. In 1933 after a separation of nearly 20 years, she met and seduced her own father who was then 54.
Quixotic in her choice of lovers, Nin was pragmatic when it came to husbands. Both husbands were gullible, compliant, steadfast men who gave her unstinting support. In 1923 she married a banker, Hugh Guiler, called “Hugo.” Hugo paid for the publication of many of her books and made possible the glamorous, art-infested life she led. He turned a blind eye to her love affairs with Henry Miller and her psychoanalysts. In 1934 she became pregnant, the first of several subsequent aborted pregnancies. She aborted her six-month old, stillborn daughter and fictionalized the event in “Under a Glass Bell.” During the period of conception, she was intimate with Hugo, her father, and Miller. She insisted that Miller was the father but never told him she was pregnant. In 1955 she married Rupert Pole bigamously for she had not divorced Hugo.
She died at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on 14 January 1977, at 11:55 P.M. Her death certificate cited as causes cardiorespiratory arrest, severe malnutrition and widespread metastatic carcinoma. Nin’s illness became symptomatic in 1969: “The cancer began in the vagina.”
[Editor’s note: This is an original text written by Lois Rodden in 1993. For a more balanced and politically correct biography, please see Wikipedia, vie the link below.] Link to Wikipedia biography