Contributors to A Café in Space

Excerpts from A Café in Space

True to Character

by Aeryn Seto

Like you, I was fourteen years old.

The lesbian in second period said:

“Henry and June. You’ve never read it?”

On the cover a man, a woman, a Parisian bridge, dawn, 

He knelt before her. Her leg slung over his shoulder.

Be ready to quit every country

To exhaust every thing you come to possess

Except this:

She writes, “I am in bliss. This is the life, the talk, these are the emotions which belong to me. I breathe freely now. I am at home. I am myself” (88).

It was everything I wanted out of life,

You are free to make it yours

“Unexpurgated?” I breathed.

“You can borrow it.”

I saw the stories I would make my own.

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No Women Writers

by Janet Fitch

I met Anaïs Nin in 1969. Not in the flesh, but on the page, the way most of us encountered her. I was in junior high, fourteen years old. One day, our English teacher was out, and we got a substitute teacher instead, a man who maintained that there were no important women writers. He challenged our class to think of a single one.

I can still remember the frustration I felt that day—I knew there had to be some, but it was a tribute to the educational system I grew up in that I could not think of a single one. At the time, I had not heard of Virginia Woolf, nor Edith Wharton, not Colette or George Sand, not even Willa Cather. I had read the Brontës, but they didn’t occur to me at that frustrating and humiliating moment—of which there had been so many in early life, so many “women can’t” or “women don’t”... I just wanted to cry, because I was so inadequate, and knew so little, and was so unable to defend my sex.

And then a girl in the front row raised her hand, I can still see her, her frizzy ash-blonde hair, her plump arm, waving, and she asked, What about Anaïs Nin?

  [  Website - Janet Fitch ]   [  Website - Janet Fitch Favorite Books ]

[  Website - Amazon.com ]

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A Heated Correspondence—Anaïs Nin and Rebecca West on writers’ community

by Lynette Felber

The publication of the first volume of Anaïs Nin’s Diary in 1966 was long-anticipated—the Diary itself was legendary and so were its insider portraits of celebrated writers and bohemian avant-garde artists. The legal quagmire entailed in acquiring permission to publish the verbal “portraits” of Nin’s numerous acquaintances and friends, however, was one of several logistical problems that delayed its publication for over thirty years. Although many writers were happy to have their portraits published, Rebecca West refused her permission to be featured in the Diary. The heated correspondence that followed foregrounds issues of interest to writers in general. An exchange of their letters housed in West’s papers at the University of Tulsa highlights the two women’s contrasting perceptions of writers’ community. In their interchange, the two writers explore questions about what a writer owes fellow writers in terms of encouragement, promotion, and support, both personally and professionally. The writers reveal a variety of emotions elicited by this issue, including betrayal, anger, criticism, and disappointment over lack of support.

[  Website - Lynette Felber ] Buy Literary Liaisons

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Translating Anaïs Nin’s Incest into Japanese—Inciting the eye of a Yin woman

by Kazuko Sugisaki

I shall begin with a story.

One fine day you are invited to a castle on the top of a mountain, and given a tour of the place. It is a beautiful castle built of marble, colorful tiles, and glass. It has several towers, countless rooms, windows and doors. Mirrors are everywhere. Fires are burning in fireplaces. One staircase leads you underground. There you find intricate labyrinths in which you are almost trapped. You are told that a woman has built this castle, all alone, devoting all her life to it. You are awed by its splendor.

“I wonder if you could build another castle just like this, an exact replica, in a foreign land,” a voice asks you. “I’ll give you one hundred dollars for the work.” Of course, you could say, “No,” and flatly decline the ridiculously unrealistic offer. But, there was something irresistible about the tone of the voice, and besides, you are so fascinated by the castle. You think and hesitate, but finally decide that maybe you have the ability to do it. So you say, “Yes, I’ll try my best.”

Now, it turns out that in the foreign land where the new castle is to be constructed none of the material used for the original can be obtained. So you have to use some ordinary stone instead of marble, paper instead of glass. You have a lot of other things to use—rocks, pebbles, wood, bamboo, sea-plants, flower petals. You work desperately hard and since you are a good craftsperson, one day the castle is complete. It looks just like the original and is just as intricate and beautiful. The only problem is that you know it is not the exact replica of the original.

This is precisely what I am going through translating Anaïs Nin’s Incest into Japanese.

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Flight

by Daisy Aldan

I have lost the visitations of angels

                across my heart. You have joined the ring

                on the other side of the mist where

                stark and angular phantoms hover.

There is sand in the flower pot—and a dry stalk.

[ Collected Poems of Daisy Aldan ]

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An Afternoon with Joaquín Nin-Culmell

The composer’s life today

by Paul Herron

I look to the left and see the piano room—white, elegant, airy, its centerpiece the grand piano set before windows adorned by fine blinds, through which the bright mid-afternoon light enters. To the right, just around the corner, we get a glimpse of Joaquín… He turns around to look at us. He wears large glasses, not thick, an informal knit shirt. His face is angelic. His fine features are highlighted by his swept-back white hair, and his smile is infectious. For a man of ninety-four, he looks marvelous. His skin is smooth and soft-looking, and his voice is that of a much younger man.

[ Picture - Joaquín Nin-Culmell ]   [ Picture - Joaquín's Piano ]

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A Problem to Be Solved: Deleuzian becoming and Anaïs Nin’s dream of “what ought to be.”

by Benjamin Joplin

I invoke Gilles Deleuze because I think it’s time we revisit his philosophy in terms of the linkages it might make with Anaïs Nin’s work. Far from blandly “applying” Deleuze to Nin and then culling a laundry list of “Deleuzian” passages from her work, space is better served here by outlining some of Deleuze’s difficult literary theory, which we might then bear in mind for future Nin reading. Space is limited; the outline is broad. But it is broad enough to build Deleuze-Nin “assemblages” in some of our minds, at least temporarily. This essay is not meant to prove or disprove an existing relationship between them, but to make one.

[ Website - Benjamin Joplin ] [  Website - Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari ] 

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Anaïs Remembered

February 22 1977

by Karen Finell

Your day, yesterday, it rained.

A tender kind of rain.

Had you been placed within the earth

the sky would desire to caress you.

Had you been placed within a grave

I'd bring you flowers, still

proteas, cymbidium, exotic blossoms.

But now the sea holds you

after the purifying flame, Fire—

then water.

[ Picture - Karen Finell ]

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Keeping the Diary—The art of reflection in a solipsistic age

by Thomas March

Typical objections to the diary as a literary form—that it is too fantastical, all whimsy and solipsism, a dull and self-absorbed catalog of events in shorthand that make up only the most banal touchstones of a life—are not entirely unfounded. Some accuse diaries of functioning as distractions from life, from full experience. Only the solipsistic diary cannot answer these charges. The solipsist endows each experience with a significance that arises only from the fact that it has happened to him. He is interested only in the existence of his impressions of the world and does not test them or seek to understand them. He gives them only expression, with no sense that a dialogue has just begun, one in which he refuses to participate.

The reflective diary, on the other hand, promises more than a history of private enthusiasms or grievances. Beyond titillation, beyond our voyeuristic impulses (of which Nin was masterfully aware), we come to a diary on a search for insight into a particular life and, when we find it, into the patterns and penchants of our own lives. For readers and writers, it is the same. The diary may begin with a visceral appeal to our need for a repository of secrets or silliness, or as a tool for spiritual dialysis—the cleansing power of confession for the writer, and for the reader the cathartic or reinforcing power of having received such a confession.

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Mirage—from the unpublished diary

By Anaïs Nin

At the beginning of World War Two, Anaïs Nin and her husband Hugh Guiler were forced to flee France and return to New York City just as she felt herself coming into her own as a writer in Paris. She was soon followed by her lovers, Henry Miller and Gonzalo Moré. Her reunion with them, along with her “exile” in a country with which she had little affinity, left her feeling disillusioned and lost. She subsequently thrust herself into what could be considered escapist love affairs, one of which is documented here.

 [ Photograph - John Dudley ]

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Examining Anaïs Nin no Shôjo Jidai—Sumiko Yagawa’s Anaïs Nin as a Young Girl

by Toyoko Yamamoto

Tracing the genealogy of Anaïs Nin scholarship in Japan, a study such as Anaïs Nin no Shôjo Jidai (Anaïs Nin as a Young Girl) is rare. Sumiko Yagawa, known chiefly as a translator of foreign literature for children and as an essayist, wrote the book to help Japanese readers become familiar with Anaïs Nin. Anaïs Nin as a Young Girl was printed by a major Japanese publisher and was displayed by the most prestigious bookstores in Japan. The connection between Nin and Yagawa was rather unexpected for those who have read the works of one or the other, or for those in Japan who are familiar with the works of both. This essay will introduce Anaïs Nin as a Young Girl in terms of synthesizing Yagawa’s exposition on the profiles of Nin’s girlhood, and will highlight one aspect of contemporary trends of Nin study in Japan.

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Villa Seurat and Parc Montsouris—Fragments of a rich past

by Claudine Brelet

Villa Seurat faces rue Tombe-Issoire, which borders the Montsouris Reservoir. Illuminated at night, the glass houses atop the reservoir take on fairytale-like forms, adding a permanent festive atmosphere to this quiet and peaceful neighborhood, sometimes brightened by the laughter of bands of students returning to the Latin Quarter from the Cité Internationale Universitaire. One imagines that their laughter, fusing with summer nights along avenue Reille, resounds in the echoes of that of Miller and Durrell, who may have been returning from an escapade at the Coupole. One imagines the two of them stopping off at Villa Seurat, perhaps, and then proceeding on their way to Durrell’s lodgings in a small three-story building, skirting Parc Montsouris and passing over the tracks of the train that took commuters back and forth between Paris and the suburbs.

[ Photograph - Montsouris View 1 ]  [ Photograph - Montsouris View 2 ]   [ Photograph - Montsouris View 3 ]   [ Photograph - Montsouris View 4 ]   [ Photograph - Montsouris View 5 ]   [ Photograph - Montsouris View 6 ]   [ Photograph - Montsouris View 7 ]  

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Photograph—For Sharon Spencer

by Diane Allerdyce

Today I have been thinking a lot of disappointment

of honor and friendship,

of silk scarves and your own soft eyes.

In the photograph above my computer

on the desk that recently came back to me when John

moved into a furnished apartment and gave me everything

that used to be mine before we divorced,

you and I smile outward.

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Twittering Machine of Paradise—Glimpses of two of Anaïs Nin’s Japanese daughters

by Yuko Yaguchi

On May 29, 2002, a well-known Japanese woman of letters, Sumiko Yagawa, committed suicide at the age of seventy-one. The next day, on May 30, her new book entitled Anaïs Nin as a Young Girl, in which she introduces excerpts of Linotte in excellent translation and offers her unique view on “being a girl,” was published, seemingly her last will and testament.

It was also in the spring seven years before, on April 21, 1995, that another Japanese woman writer who played an inerasable role in Nin’s reception in Japan passed away from a ruptured artery at the age of fifty-six. Masako Meio was then studying at the Steiner College in Fair Oaks, California. Though her death was natural, it was so sudden and shocking that some felt it was almost like a suicide.

… Since Yagawa often mentions that Anaïs was born in the same year as her mother, and Meio once wrote an essay titled “The Daughters of Anaïs Nin, they may be rightfully considered two of Nin’s Japanese daughters. How did Anaïs Nin influence and inspire these two daughters from the Far East who were to die such tragic deaths?

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Adventures in the Nin Trade—A look back at a career in Nin scholarship

by Philip Jason

Some ten or so years ago, at about the same time that I was preparing Anaïs Nin and Her Critics for Camden House, I proposed a book that would collect my own essays on Nin and weave a career narrative—the story of my own “Nin Career”—around and through them. The book would thus be the illustrated story of one scholar’s engagement with an author’s work over a period of three decades. Now it’s a story of over four decades, which I will present here in abbreviated form. It is a story told by a just-retired college professor who met Nin’s work as an undergraduate student and, more or less, fell in love.

[ Website - Philip Jason ] 

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Passing the Torch—The need for bibliographical updating of Anaïs Nin’s work

by Benjamin Franklin V

The writing itself first attracted me to Anaïs Nin. I had just read House of Incest when the initial volume of the Diary was published in 1966. These works so appealed to me that I wanted to read everything she had written, which, in time, I did, thanks largely to Alan Swallow, who had recently published her books that had originally appeared in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The more I read, the more captivated I became, not only by the literature but also by the Diary persona named Anaïs Nin. It was the person/persona of Nin that initiated my life-long scholarly interest in Nin. In trying to locate information, I was stymied; almost nothing existed about her, other than brief mention in an occasional reference book, and the sources sometimes offered conflicting “facts.” When was she born? Was she married? What, precisely, had she written? There were no easy answers.

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thinking homes

by Shyamal Bagchee

trying to touch you

with you gone so far away

i have turned the soil in your

strawberry patch, watered

the houseplants & monitored

filtered light on the african violet

washed all your cardigans

in the kitchen sink

and not pulled out a

single strand of  long hair

tangled into each one of them

[ Website - Shyamal Bagchee ]  [ Website - T.S. Eliot Society ] 

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Appreciating Gunther Stuhlmann—A man of letters

by Dudley Levenson

Gunther Stuhlmann passed away April 1, 2002, at his home in Becket, Massachusetts with his wife, Barbara, at his side. He designed and built his home, where he grew and nurtured a garden in the same careful manner that he cultivated a community of artists and writers in the Berkshires and abroad.

At 6’6” with a white moustache, mirthful eyes, and a questioning German intellect, he was a prominent observer of culture and a distinguished voice among artful minds in New York, the Berkshires, and internationally. Although he devoted long hours to research and reading manuscripts in the book-lined sanctuary of his home office, he delighted in visiting local art galleries, museums, and dance performances. He was involved with local cultural organizations, as well as representing various authors and publishing a literary journal, ANAÏS: An International Journal.

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Travels and excursions

Revisiting Anaïs Nin’s France—Neuilly-sur-Seine and Louveciennes

by Paul Herron

Anaïs Nin’s birthplace 100 years later

“Anaïs Nin was born February 21, 1903 in Neuilly, France.” I have lost track of how many times I have read this passage without giving it much thought. Paris, Louveciennes, New York, and Los Angeles have always been at the top of any list of primary Nin locations, subject to scrutiny and research, but never have I seen much about Neuilly-sur-Seine, which some described at the turn of the 20^th Century as “Paris’s most fashionable suburb.” On a recent visit to France, I decided to see if there remained anything palpable that could be affixed to what has become a mere footnote in Nin lore.

[ Photograph - Neuilly View 1 ]  [ Photograph - Neuilly View 2 ]  [ Photograph - Neuilly View 3 ]  [ Photograph - Neuilly View 4 ]

[ Website - Neuilly-sur-Seine ]

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Louveciennes: New life at 2 bis rue de Montbuisson

We were then led to the parlor, which is on the second floor. We climbed the narrow, steep, circular staircase, walked to the south side of the house, and entered the large room, the centerpiece of which was a very old fireplace, one that was surely there when Anaïs was. The sunlight entering the windows transformed each of the guests into highly contrasted, timeless silhouettes. I looked at the entranceway and imagined Anaïs in a flowing gown pausing before entering the room.

[ Photograph - 3rd Lvl Window ]   [ Photograph - Front of House ]  [ Photograph - The "Prison Gate" ]  [ Photograph - 1st Lvl View ]  [ Photograph - Across Entranceway ]  [ Photograph - Turquoise Paint ]  [ Photograph - Space behind "the window that does not exist" ] 

[ Website - Louveciennes ]

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