Henry & June:The Book, the Movie, the Truth?
…I
reread [Henry’s] letter.It seemed
insincere to me.
Literature.
--
Anaïs Nin, Henry and June
Anyone
who took an interest in the first two volumes of The Diary of Anaïs
Nin as they were published in 1966 and 1967 couldn’t help wondering
what really happened between Nin and Henry Miller.Now
we know.Henry and June,
both book and movie, solve this small mystery and fill in other information
gaps Nin deliberately created in order to protect her husban, Hugh Guiler,
or Hugo.In a 1971 interview, Nin
told me that “I had to make a decision about the passages concerning my
husband.He didn’t want to be included.He
is very reticent.I also wanted
to include more erotic passages, but—.”She
paused, then added, “It will all be published some time.”That
some time is upon us.
In
1986, a year after Hugo’s death, and nine years after Nin’s Henry and
June, the book, revealed that Nin and Miller were indeed lovers and
right under the apparently blind eye of Hugo, whose heretofore shadowy
presence is restored here and in A Literate Passion:Letters
of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-53, published in 1987.
Now
we know the details of Nin’s sexual awakening with Miller, as described
in Henry and June:“The depths
I craved, the darkness, the finality, the absolution” (82).We
know now that Nin took great pains to deceive Hugo and from a mixture of
love, loyalty, and lack of funds never seriously considered leaving him:“Today,
I would follow Henry to the end of the world.What
saves me is only that we are both penniless” (225).We
know about stolen hours of sex and conversation in hotel rooms rented by
the hour, in Miller’s shabby but tidy digs in Clichy, the blue-collor Paris
district, and in Nin’s romantic old suburban home in Louveciennes, a short
train ride from the Gare Saint-Lazare.Nin’s
lucid prose and excerpts from Miller’s letters (which she copied into the
Diary) tell a tight, dramatic love story, complete, on one side,
with June, Miller’s wife, as the vibrant, tumultuous, dark, seductive force
of destruction;and on the other
side, with Hugo, the banker of Scottish descent, serious, handsome, good,
verging on the dull, in the role of near-angelic basso ostinato.
Steamy,
operatic stuff, neatly framed within 274 pages and two hours and sixteen
minutes of film.
The
time is October 1931.The place
is Paris.Innocent, fragile, aristocratic,
Continental beauty meets tought, worldly, Booklyn-bred “gangster-author,”
as Miller inscribed a photograph of himself in 1933, “virile, animal, magnificent,”
as Nin describes him (6).Soon, they
begin to exchange sex and words, torrents of both, occasionally hitting
the most difficult high notes of language—descriptions of passion.Here
is Miller in a letter to Nin:
I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realize.Life and literature combined;love, the dynamo;you, with your chameleon’s soul, giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are….Resurrection after resurrection.You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire;and the more you assert yourself the more you want me, need me.(224)
And
here is Nin, writing in her journal:
I want to be wherever you are.Lying next to you even if you are asleep.Henry, kiss my eyelashes, put your fingers on my eyelids.Bite my ear.Push back my hair.I have learned to unbotton you so swiftly.All, in my mouth, sucking.Your fingers.The hotness.The frenzy….Each blow a sting of joy.Driving in a spiral.The core touched.The womb sucks, back and forth, open, closed.Lips flicking, snake tongues flicking.Ah, the rupture—a blood cell burst with joy.Dissolution.(154)
Meanwhile,
thrown into the boiling brew are jealousy, anger, and Paris aglow and séduisant
as only Paris can be;Nin’s first
psychoanalysis;Miller’s first books
or the volcanic outpourings of words beginning to take book-like shape;and
Nin’s peculiarly powerful account of the affair, her odd ability to be
observer and participant at once, both mirror and reflection.
Then
the dénouement.In the book,
June returns to Paris and seems to bring down the curtain on the affair.In
the movie, June finds out about the Nin/Miller liason and provokes a rupture
of the delicate balance among the three.June
walks out on Henry.So does Nin.And
as she is leaving the tangled streets of Clichy, Hugo arrives, smiling
and understanding, in his big, shiny car, a knight in automotive armor,
to sweep Nin away toward home.
The
editors of the book and the filmmakers have made of all this a coherent
story with beginning, middle, and end.They
have imposed satisfying order and given classically dramatic forcefulness
and form to a wildly complex situation.They
have taken neat slices from the sprawling raw material in Nin’s Diary
and achieved what Nin failed to do, i.e., to draw from and transform the
stuff of the Diary into effective, traditionally novelistic story-telling.
Nin
didn’t accept or accede to failure in this, insisting instead that her
stories and novels represented a new form of fiction—reality instead of
realism.“All my stories are based
on reality,” she writes in “Writing Fiction,” an essay in The Novel
of the Future.“It is to reach
a greater reality (authenticity) that I abandoned realism” (45).And
she often uses the word literature as a pejorative, to stand for
the false, the contrived, the insincere.Yet
as Miller predicted stubbornly for many years, Nin’s gift for authenticity,
for seamless, formless evocation of life, was most apparent in the Diaries
and would show itself only when these were published.By
sticking so persistently to this conviction, Miller in effect concedes
that Nin’s fiction doesn’t work for precisely the same reasons her Diaries
do.In the 1971 interview, Nin told
me that in retrospect, “I think perhaps I would have done the novels better,
but the essence would be the same.One
of the people whose opinion I admire most, my husband, felt there wasn’t
enough in the novels, wanted more, the extras.Then
I was really on my own.I had to
stand alone on my beliefs….It was a struggle.”
The
curious phenomenon here is that Henry and June, book and movie,
work because they give us such a carefully sculpted story with plenty of
realism and lots of extras.One can’t
help wondering if Nin would have approved.
If
the mirror of novelistic form distorts—and it does;for
one thing, the Nin/Miller affair did not end in 1932—this same mirror also
makes the tale of work on its own terms, faithful to the broad outlines
of the real story but artistically independent.If
editorial cutting and pasting eliminate some of the “realities” of the
situation—and they do;they do not
render Nin’s deep emotional conflicts—the editors, scriptwriters, and directors
also enhance the material by imposing pace and the tight, theatrical year-long
time frame.Two distinct forms of
artistry are at work here:traditional
story-telling and narrative filmmaking.Both
are in opposition to Nin’s published ideas about her own art and to her
achievements in what might be called anti-form.It
is possible to say that Henry and June, book and movie, thus betray
Nin while they celebrate her.It
is also possible to say that they create something like the fiction Nin
perhaps would have written had she been able to do everything over.
The
film, by setting up its distant set of mirrors, particularly distorts,
if it doesn’t detract, by its clarifying lens.It
misses much of the emotional tension in both the Diary’s sanitized
account of the affair and the portions published in Henry and June,
and it rearranges and condenses events and invents things.One
welcome addition is humor, almost totally lacking in Nin’s work.For
example, Nin remarks rather drily in her journal, “The first time Henry
made love to me, I realized a terrible fact—that Hugo was sexually too
large for me” (76).In the film,
she makes this clinical observation while in bed with Miller, and we get
his memorably funny facial expression in response.The
scene in Louveciennes when Hugo nearly discovers Miller and Nin making
love is played for its comic value.
Other
additions include a scene in a lesbian bar where Anaïs and June kiss
and dance.If not real, the setting
is realistic.Miller’s seduction
of Nin backstage in a nightclub is visually vivid, a true Hollywood rendition,
but unbelievable as well as inaccurate.June’s
unhappiness is sharper, clearer in the film than in the book.She
accuses Nin of buying Henry’s love, adding cruelly that “Henry said you
just took us in because you were bored.”Such
explicitness does not appear in the published texts.Nin’s
portrait of June’s psyche is cloudier, probing deeper.“June
supplies the beautiful incandescent flesh, the fulgurant voice, the abysmal
eyes, the drugged gestures, the presence, the body, the incarnate image
of our imaginings.What are we?Only
the creators.She is” (45).
But
no matter.This is La-La Land anyway,
and the film is surprisingly faithful in many details as well as in its
broad-brush presentation, taking good advantage of many visual possibilities.Paris
is beautifully painted, neither too gauzy nor too gritty, evoking the city’s
soft light and romance as well as its seamy sensuality.The
house in Louveciennes is perfectly rendered, right down to the richly colored
décor Nin describes in the Diary:the
walls painted “Chinese red, turquoise, and peach…dark carpets….A caress
of color, warmth, a hammock of suave harmonies” (1:241).Cameo
allusions to events and people contribute visual layers:clips
from films with the poet/actor Antonin Artaud, with whom Nin entered an
intense friendship in 1933, and flashes of the famous Paris-by-night images
of the photographer Brassaï, Henry’s friend, for example.
Fred
Ward gives a relaxed portrayal of Henry Miller’s energy and insouciance.Maria
de Medeiros, as Nin, is a remarkable look-alike, and her exaggerated wide-eyed
amazement and trembling sensuality are convincing.By
contrast, Richard E. Grant as Hugo and Uma Thurman as June seem somehow
wooden in their roles, neither really illuminating nor adequately complicating
the relationship between Nin and Miller.That
may be inherent in the material.
The
central drama, the heart and interest of the story, is what happens between
Miller and Nin, one aspect of which is film amplifies to such an extent
one imagines it was the director’s self-conscious subtext:Nin’s
living out an experience straight out of D. H. Lawrence.The
film even begins with Lawrence.Nin
is talking with apublisher about
her book D. H. Lawrence:An Unprofessional
Study (which was published in a limited edition in Paris in 1932 and
in the United States by the Swallow Press in 1964).When
Miller and Nin meet in the courtyard of the house in Louveciennes, they
talk about Lawrence, she worshipfully, he disparagingly.“I
don’t care for Lawrence.He makes
a damn gospel out of sex.”(This
literary chit-chat leads to my favorite line in the movie.Miller
looks at Nin and asks in his Brooklynese, “So what do you write?Poetry
or sompthin’?”)Later, when the affair
is off and running, Miller softens to Lawrence, acknowledging his power.And
all the while, Nin is playing out a Lady Chatterly role, the sleeping beauty
awakened by a diamond-in-the-rough hero who contrasts deliciously and earthily
with her well-bred businessman husband.She
knows it at some level:“Henry has
done something to me, Henry the man.I
can only compare what I feel to Lady Chatterly’s feelings about Mellors”
(162).Philip Kaufman, the director,
plays this up for all it’s worth—until the end.Miller/Mellors
and Anaïs/Constance do not go off together.Life
supersedes art.In reality, Miller
and Nin did not find a way to sustain the affair, although they worked
at it until around 1943-44, according to the letters in A Literate Passion
and in The Durrell-Miller Letters.The
ending in Henry and June is thus artistically if not chronologically
or quite emotionally right.
Do
chronology and accuracy matter here?No
and yes.No, because the film and
the book succeed or fail by their artistry alone.Yes,
because the material is “real,” and because Anaïs Nin, in her determination
to erase the boundaries between life and art, dedicated her work to a search
for honesty and emotional accuracy.
Yet
in her attempt, she confronted time and time again the slipperiness of
truth and the strange necessity for lies and constructs.“But
lying, too, is living, lying of the kind I do,” she writes in a passage
exploring her unfaithfulness to Hugo (111).In
composing and editing the Diary, she had to impose a kind of form
on her work, and whether for this or other reasons, wrestled always with
the sense that she was missing the target of absolute truth. “It
seems to me that I follow only the most accessible thread,” she writes
of her journal writing.“Three or
four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and
if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and
duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage.I
cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals
at once.I often would have to retrace
my steps, because of my vice for embelishment” (207-8).Miller
once pointed to another irony.He
wrote to her that “the more frank and revelatory you become the more you
succeed in remaining inscrutable” (A Literate Passion 356).
So
Nin, book, and film all in their separate ways “ironize” as Nin says to
Miller at one point in the movie (inviting his not always welcomed correction
of her English) by choosing only a few of many possible threads to agitate.Book
and film embellish by bringing tidy literary structure to a story that
in reality played itself out over many years with all the messiness and
confusion of most human relations.If
you combine the threads of the first two volumes of Nin’s Diary,
Henry and June, and
A Literate Passion, this messiness is
more flowingly “real” but impossibly long.Add
the strange, surrealistic novels and stories that work over some of the
same material and you get yet another thread, another agitation.
Holding
up different mirrors (a favorite Nin image), Nin and the editors and filmmakers
show us how multifarious are the ways of art and truth.If
nothing else, we have a fascinating comparison of various paths along which
artists grope alone and uncertainly toward what June begged for near the
end of the film.She was hurt and
humiliated by Henry’s portrayal of her as Mona in Tropic of Cancer
and not much happier with Nin’s counter-portrayal (“like poetry, sorta”)
in the draft of House of Incest.June
thanks Nin for the effort but remains puzzled and dissatisfied:“I
expected something more—I don’t know—more real, more about, you know, life.”
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