FICTION CHRONICLE
followed during the day. This spider web was broken by a foghorn, and
by the chiming of the hours.... I sank into a labyrinth of silence. My
feet were covered with fur, my hand with leather, my legs wrapped in
accordion-pleated cotton, tied with silken whips. Reindeer fur on my
breast."
A few of the short pieces in
Un.der a Glass Bell
are quite effective,
but in all of them there is too much straining for the exotic and a patho–
logical appetite for mystification. Miss Nin likes abstractions ("The
unveiling of a woman is a delicate matter. It will not happen overnight.
We are all afraid of what we shall find.") and falls without warning
into an ecstasy which reminds me of nothing so much as those small–
town spiritualists who spoil their productions by undramatic impatience
and go into a trance before they have taken off their hats.
The subject matter of these stories is usually the eternal feminine.
On the surface there is the hint that great secrets are being revealed
for the first time and yet, as the atmosphere of revelation thickens, the
language becomes increasingly indirect and unsuggestive. It seems to be
characteristic of women writers to "unveil" by pulling out every old
veil in the trunk. The more they know about themselves and their sex
the more they are, unconsciously I believe, determined to keep the
faith. They set out grimly to make a speech, weaken, and end by doing
a pantomime with gestures, moods, and rhythms, a sort of modern
dance, which gives the illusion of having opened the bedroom door with–
out involving the performer in a recognizable scandal.
It
is not the
discretion that is out of place, but the implication that an innocent tea
party has really been a brawl. As Jung observed, men worship Circe,
a clear and realistic figure, while the women set out grandly after the
Flying Dutchman. This hapless journey through space soon becomes
dull, in spite of the quick, nervous energy women writers put into it.
Facts, drama, and temptation are replaced by the rhetoric of enormous
emotion; the scenery of passion, the garden of love, are wonderfully
rendered in the elaborate, elusive style for which women are famous.
It is only in the end, after the clever spell is broken, that we realize
Adam and Eve have been omitted. Or were they present in disguise,
perhaps speaking to us as a tree and a brook?
All of these hesitations in the woman writer's treatment of love and
sexual emotion are particularly important in Anais Nin's work, because
sex is the true object of her considerable literary devotions. And she
is thoroughly feminine in that this subject, certain to assure a man's
income for life, has not only made her work commercially unprofitable,
but almost unreadable. The contemplation of passion and the soul of a
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