Chapter 34
Chapter 34 Synchronicity has directed my life. I’ve spent so much time in bookstores that I’ve known all the managers and sales people. One day in 1972, a girl who worked at Waldens came in for cigarettes. She had a paperback, A Spy In The House of Love. “I think you’d like this,” she said, handing me the thin book with the black and white surreal cover. I took her word for it and bought it. I read it in one sitting. That was my introduction to Anais Nin. The book was so poetic, so off beat, so graceful and incomprehensible, that I fell in love with it, and with the woman with the name so exotic it was beyond proper pronunciation. I ordered more books by her. Nin was just coming into her own with the Diaries. I bought the first three that were published and read them straight through. Here was a woman who lived amongst the Bohemians, who lived for art, lived with artists, slept with artists, discovered, supported (and slept with) Henry Miller. It was Nin who introduced me to Miller. I had heard of him in college through Joe David Bellamy, a struggling writer who was patient and kind and listened to my college boy struggles. He invited me to his house for a party and wasn’t ashamed of having Tropic of Cancer on his bookshelf, an incredibly radical thing at the time. I read the Diaries and slowly came to realize that Miller was the innovator, the iconoclast, the free-thinking rebel who opened the doors for the Beat Generation. But more on him later. Nin introduced me to women’s inner selves, a feminine side that wasn’t ashamed to be feminine. In fact she gloried in, studied, and made a strength of it. She understood Jung’s animas and anima theory through psychologist Otto Rank (who, I found out later, she slept with). It was the height of the women’s movement and Nin was helping lead the charge with the female literati. I loved her. And, being young, naïve and idealistic, I wrote to her. I’ll tell you what came of it next time.
(Commercial: If you haven't bought The Perfect Song yet, I do have PayPal. Go to the store and check it out. All profits from the book will be used to create a scholarship for future writers).
Skip to a specific chapter below:
Click here to return home
|
|---|
