A Short Flirt With Nin and Lawrence

After finishing Larsson's book, I picked up Anais Nin's "D.H.Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study". This is a book I bought quite some time ago, but haven't gotten around to read it.  A reprinting of this interesting analysis of Lawrence's writing, a dissection of his characters and the style of writing itself, that says so much of our dear Anais Nin. From the book the Introduction by Harry T. Moore stands like a stain to the work, as Mr. Moore seems more concerned with promoting his own books on Lawrence and showing off his knowledge of the late author than actually giving honest word about the book he should be presenting. Isn't some sort of editor out there stopping this atrocities from happening?

The book itself is quite short, with a distinctive touch of Nin, who takes this objetc of study and by delving into it, giving us an interpretation of it, showcases her own amazing style, her human, biting, pumping style, swelling with feelings, growing out of desires, nurturing on passion. The very style we shall exterience later on in her magnificent diaries, which I adore and hope to collect all.

There is something about Nin, something about her writing, the very intimate way in which she expresses herself, that makes you want to have her diaries at hand and search in the recorded days and months during her writing of the book, those feelings, thoughts and emotions that fueled her words, later put out in a more public way.

For me, House of Incest would have been a completely different book if I hadn't read before the journal, and so with Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.

In "D.H. Lawrence" Nin sings her praises to Lawrence, but also takes her time to point out her vision, her interpretation hopping from topic to topic fending off tabu with almost scientific precision. Like with her diaries, after her Unprofessional Study, far less pretentious and bile driven than others more professional, one gets the distinct feeling of standing before a milestone. There is a reading of Lawrence before Nin and after Nin.

It is almost as if her surrealist prism could break the world into glass tiles, and by looking at it again, through her caleidoscopic eye, the world would rearrange into more exotic, shifting meanings, all of the marvelous and artistic. Chaos finds a system in her, with the "system of mobility", and weakness becomes "layered emotional experience". There were others see failure she sees the amazing avant garde vision that speaks to many senses at the same time. Language gets deconstructed from the meaning to leave it up to the primal blocks: just the sounds. It speaks not to the mind, but to the gut, convinces not the brain, but the plexus.

Apology of Lawrence or not, in the end what bewitches us is her writing, her mind and the fabulous word she fingerpaints for us with Lawrence's themes and words.