Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1937-1939

A preface by Rupert Pole, surviving widower of the bigamous diarist, who already had a legal husband when they married, contends that she wrote impulsively, at ""white heat."" The evidence is that she often paused to improve upon life, which in the two years, spent mostly in Paris, covered in this volume, consisted largely of cadging from her complaisant banker husband, Hugh Guiler, to support her lovers. One was the gaunt, bald sexual athlete and expatriate novelist, Henry Miller, who by then had parted from his wife, June. Another was the swarthy Communist activist Gonzalo More, whose appetite for sex overwhelmed his passion for politics, and whose slovenly wife encouraged his income-producing infidelity. Nin betrayed all three men, even on days (and nights) when she bedded them all. In her middle 30s, her erotomania left her little time for much else, but she managed to write pornographic (and then censorable) short fiction and reams of what later skeptics called a ""liary."" She was ""a true Catholic,"" More told her. ""You love the sin and absolution and regrets and sinning again."" Yet she had few regrets but the unpublishability of her diaries. Her love seems entirely narcissistic in the manuscript volumes she filled over 52 years. But even so, her literary talent and the sensual intensity of her emotional life sets some of the pages in her diaries on fire. The first extracts, published in 1966 at age 63, established her (although she edited out some sensitive matter) as a cult figure. Since her death, Pole has been releasing the original diaries, Nearer the Moon, encompassing volumes 53 through 60. ""I dream, I kiss, I have orgasms, I get exalted, I leave the world, I float, I cook, I sew, I have nightmares, I follow a gigantic creative plan,"" she claims. Her self-description says it all. One would hardly know that Nin was living in a France on the brink of war. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)