“You say you’ve had enough even though we had big fun; you want another someone”
Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies is a few years old, but it’s newly translated into English, so here it is! Léonie Bischoff is the author, while it’s been translated by Jenna Allen and published by Fantagraphics. So what’s what with this?
I read this book and tomorrow’s on 19 June, and nothing particularly bad happened to me on that day or the day before, so I wasn’t in a bad mood when I read this and tomorrow’s book. 
I just wanted you to know that, because I’m extremely cynical about the next two books, even though they are both tremendous comics that I would very much recommend if anyone asked. I’ll get to why I’m cynical, you can be assured of that, I just wanted you to know that it wasn’t my mindset going in and nothing in my life happened to make me that way – I’m just naturally cynical, I guess!
Nin is famous for all the sexytimes she had and the fact that she liked to write about all the sexytimes she had, at a time when most people were not ready to hear about the sexytimes people were having and certainly not the sexytimes a woman was having. I’ve never read anything by Nin; I know her largely thanks to the very first NC-17 movie, Henry & June, which I saw in the theater when it came out in 1990. The movie, which was directed by Philip Kaufman, stars Fred Ward as Henry Miller, Uma Thurman as his wife June, and Maria de Medeiros as Anaïs (it also stars Richard E. Grant as her husband, Hugo, and Kevin Spacey as their friend Richard Osborn). The movie is pretty good, not great, but Kaufman does not shy away from the sexytimes, and while Medeiros has never done a lot of American cinema (if you haven’t seen this movie, you probably know her from Pulp Fiction, where she played Bruce Willis’s rather simpering girlfriend), she’s been working steadily for 40 years and she’s very good in this movie. 
But this isn’t about the movie! I’m just saying – I haven’t read any of Nin’s work, but I know why she’s famous. Phew.
Anyway, usually I start by writing about the writing, but I want to rant about that, so I’ll start with the art, which is staggeringly gorgeous. She uses colored pencils (or she works digitally and goes for that effect, which works), and her line work is beautiful and sensual, which is perfect given the subject matter. She switches between a precise, thin line for most of the characters and a thicker line for, for instance, Nin’s gorgeously lush hair, and she uses a bit of rough hatching to add a weighty texture to the thin lines. It’s a wonderful balancing act, and Bischoff does it well. Nin dreams often in this book, and her dreams range from beautiful idylls with bright colors to more disturbing ones, where Bischoff uses harsher lines and shades to reflect her mindset. This is set during the 1930s, and the clothing and settings are spot on, as Bischoff makes sure we’re in “real” places so when Nin has her flights of fancy, they can be contrasted nicely with the mundane real world. Her characters are slightly cartoony, but realized wonderfully, and Bischoff does marvels with a well-cocked eyebrow or a widening or narrowing of an eye. Her depiction of Nin is both awkward and gorgeous, as Nin doesn’t realize the power she has over men for a while, and she seems to shrink around them just a bit (she’s physically smaller than they, but Bischoff also draws her withdrawn), and when she begins to understand, Bischoff makes her stand a bit taller and be a bit bolder in her world. There’s a harrowing moment late in the book in which she switches to a black background with very bright, chalk-like lines, which makes the scene even more striking and disturbing. 
Nin’s fantasy world is lush with flora, and that bleeds into the “real” world as she begins to awaken, sexually. It’s not the most subtle thing in the world, of course, but Bischoff manages to keep it relatively subtle, as Nin simply likes to be in nature, and if she’s having sex there, that’s the way it is. She fully colors a few pages, and the effect is quite powerful, as it’s so infrequent. There’s a lot of sex in the book and some nudity, but it’s generally tasteful. The book is about Nin’s sexual awakening, of course, and some subjects are very dark (I’ll get to that!), but the art shows us a story of a woman taking control of her life, and it’s not going to be pornographic, and Bischoff does a good job with the nudity without overdoing it.
The story focuses on Nin in the 1930s, when she was happily married but not yet published (she was first published in 1932, at the age of 29, and that essay is mentioned often in the book). Her husband, Hugo (his real name was Hugh, but he was known as Ian Hugo, and Nin simply calls him “Hugo”), is a banker, but he has the soul of an artist (Hugo became an experimental filmmaker in the 1950s), and he and Nin have a good relationship. This tracks with what we know of their marriage, which was unconventional (for years later in life, Nin was married to Hugo and someone else, because why not?) but worked for both of them. She seems happy, if a bit sexually frustrated – Hugo loves her, and she him, but they’re unsure how to spice up their love life. She hangs out with her cousin, Eduardo, who’s seeing a therapist to “cure” him of his homosexuality, and eventually Nin goes to see the therapist, too (and she ends up having sex with Eduardo, but that’s a minor sex act in the book). She meets Henry Miller, who is enthusiastic about her writing, and they begin collaborating on work before eventually having a passionate affair. She has an intense and non-sexual relationship with Miller’s wife, June, who’s not in the book that much, and she also eventually begins having sex with her therapist (the one recommended by her cousin), René Allendy, and then a different therapist, Otto Rank (who was also recommended by her cousin – the dude had some unresolved issues!). 
Her husband is willfully blind to all of this, although it’s hard to believe he didn’t know what was going on. Nin continues to profess her love for him, and Bischoff makes the point that she is able to take something from each of her lovers that another couldn’t give her, and she worked hard to make sure her actual husband was included in her life, even though there’s a short pregnancy vignette that makes it clear he had slightly different ideas about what it meant to be a wife. Nin is exploring herself, but she’s also trying to be a good person, and it makes the narrative fascinating because she’s not callous about her lovers and what it might do to her relationship. In the darkest part of the book, she begins an affair with her father, who abandoned his family years before but returns to visit Nin, and that section of the book is naturally disturbing (it’s where Bischoff switches to the black backgrounds, mentioned above, briefly) but it also shows how Nin can move past her child self and become an adult. She narrates often that she feels crazy, but it’s clear that part of that is the times she lives in, when women were not respected as artists, and Bischoff does a good job showing how condescending even Miller is to her, so when, at the end of the book, she becomes a more fully realized person, it does feel more triumphant. Nin might have lovers, but she doesn’t need a man, and Bischoff does well to show the difference between those two poles.
I did say I was going to rant a bit, so here it is! I noted that Hugo was an artist as well, and early on, Nin chides him for being a banker, as it’s “suffocating the poet” inside him. Bischoff doesn’t push this theme too much, but it’s clear that Hugo is bankrolling both Nin and Miller, even if he does it jovially. As you might recall, I love it when artists in fiction rail against the corporatism of those who aren’t genius enough to be artists when those corporate stooges are often the ones who keep the artists in the style to which they’re accustomed. Nin wears very nice clothing (which she shows no inclination to give up), they have a maid (whom she greatly relies on, as she shows no interest in housework), and Miller can wander around banging married ladies and talking about art without worrying where his next meal is coming from, so maybe these great artists should shut the hell up. 
Bischoff, as I noted, doesn’t really push this, and it hews to real life as far as I can tell, as Hugo didn’t mind doing it, but it was still a small part of the book that bothered me and cracked me up.
The more disturbing part of the book has to do with the incest, of course, but not just the incest, but what it represents. Nin’s sexual awakening is the theme of the book, of course, and it’s one of the more intriguing stories of 20th century literature and art, as Nin was a woman who lived her life unashamedly, and Bischoff obviously wants to make sure she has agency throughout the book. However, it’s clear from reading between the lines (and even reading some of the lines) that she was the victim of either crimes or at least unbalanced power relationships, and Bischoff doesn’t really comment on that too much. Perhaps she didn’t want to take some of that agency away from Nin, or perhaps she wanted the reader to figure it out themselves (I’ve made the point that writers these days can’t leave subtext where it is, but Bischoff is European, and they seem to have a better handle on subtext). Nin was raped by her father when she was a child, and that makes her affair with him when she’s an adult even worse, if possible, than just incest, as he’s clearly manipulating her even as she claims she enthusiastically gave herself to him. In a fiercely ironic statement, she wonders why she can’t feel pleasure and says of her father, “He is so much freer and braver.” It’s horrific, and Nin eventually changes her mind about her father and that’s part of her sexual revolution, but it’s unclear if Biscoff meant it to be ironic (Nin, it appears, did not). Bischoff can’t condone Nin having sex with her father, and her detachment as storyteller is … fine, to a degree, but it’s also bothersome, as none of Nin’s relationships in the book are balanced, power-wise, until the end, when Nin finally gains the upper hand. Her marriage, obviously, is not a bad relationship, but Hugo is the bread-winner and he thinks that grants him certain rights with regard to Nin. 
Henry Miller is presented as a bohemian free spirit, but he’s condescending toward Nin (not as condescending as some of the other characters, but still), and, like so many men, he thinks of Nin as a young girl he can manipulate (he was about 11 years older than she was). She throws herself into affairs with her therapists, but it’s clear they’re also manipulating her (her first therapist was 14 years her elder, while her second was 19 years older than she). On the one hand, it’s nice that Nin is able to overcome these obstacles and become the dominant lover in these relationships. On the other hand, Bischoff doesn’t really get into how damaged she is and how mentally fragile she is, so when she does overcome them, it feels … a bit too easy? Like, having mental issues and getting raped by your father and being manipulated by men doesn’t just go away because you make up your mind to do so, and the fact that Nin had many, many lovers (which Bischoff attests to in a charming series of panels near the end of the book that normalizes her unconventional lifestyle) seems to point to a void in her life which she never quite filled. Maybe I’m reading far too much into this, and maybe I’m too conservative, sexually, to see Nin’s situation as an Absolute Good Thing (not that I condemn her for it, it just doesn’t seem as rosy as maybe we’re supposed to think). I don’t know. It’s an interesting conundrum to ponder, and Bischoff either does well to simply hint around at it so schmucks like me can speculate or she doesn’t get into it enough and we’re supposed to think Nin’s sad life is actually a Happy Life. (As an aside, you might recall that I objected to some of the same things in this book that I did last week in the comic about Leonora Carrington. I’m consistent, at least!)
A Sea of Lies is an apt title, as it happens, and this is an excellent book (although, as usual with many comic biographies, the stuff after the book ends might be as interesting as the stuff in the book) with gorgeous art. It’s thought-provoking, obviously, and it gives us a fascinating portrait of what must have been a fascinating lady. Give it a look!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
