PARTISAN REVIEW
woman leads her not to the rocks, but high up in the stratosphere, so
high the mind cannot follow her curious flight.
Another bedeviling aspect of Anais Nin's work is the problem of the
fabulous diary. This diary, unpublished so far as I know, is said to be
at present in its sixty-fifth volume. At least Henry Miller has read it and
his opinion goes, "When given to the world it will take its place beside
the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Rousseau, Proust, and others."
I would not mention this private, buried work if its contents were not
so often necessary to the understanding of Miss Nin's fiction. One story
begins, "I was eleven years old when I walked into the labyrinth of my
diary," and another ends, "The little donkey-my diary burdened with
my past-with small faltering steps is walking to the market...." We
are told nothing about the diary, but asked to feel, by some mysterious
projection, its significance and power as a dominating theme. And then,
in a really extraordinary way, the undivulged contents of the diary seem
to contain the meaning of a long novelette, "Winter of Artifice," re–
printed in this new collection. The tone of this story is heavy, urgent,
and ominous; there is not a moment of humor, not a word of relief
from its underwater agony. In it you learn vaguely that a girl has loved
her father too well, though in just what way is ambiguous, but she has
loved him so terribly she must be psychoanalyzed. "Her father's jealousy
began with the reading of her diary." No doubt the diary fully explains
the relationship and gives adequate motivation for the anguish echoed
here. As it is, however, "Winter of Artifice" can only be read as a Greek
chorus chanting about the most miserable of women and apparently
unaware that the tragedy has been withheld from the audience.
Vladimir Nabokov stands awkwardly in this review and I cannot
think of a convenient link to the two previously discussed writers. These
excellent stories of his are a literary curiosity: they are postwar with
regard to both war one and war two, and at the same time. Nabokov
writes with the style, vitality, and audacity of the experimental writers
of the twenties and yet his enemy is a current monster, the totalitarian
mind. "The Assistant Producer," "Double Talk," and "That in Aleppo
Once" are superior examples of the way in which political treachery,
the confusion of the liberal mind, and political exile may be treated
without the usual documentary thud of most fiction in any way con–
cerned with politics. Nabokov's chief virtue in these stories is his gaiety,
a quality not much admired by American book buyers unless it is found
in gags. At his best he is unique and inspired and certainly should
be
more widely read. True, the
New Yorker
has been printing him, but
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