Book Review: In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays

Title: In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays

Author: Anaïs Nin

Date: 1976

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

ISBN: 0-15-644445-3

Length: 169 pages

Quote: “Guarded by universal grandchildren, Turkish grandmothers always travel safely.”

Anaïs Nin, famous in her day for lavishly detailed sex scenes in fiction and even more lavish attention to the naughty thoughts of her childhood in memoirs, never was my kind of writer. I was not always an aunt, and back when I had un-auntly tastes I thought stories about a lot of Bright Young Things fondling each other indiscriminately in somebody’s back garden might be fun to read—but they weren’t. Not because polyamory is frowned on by most churches; these characters didn’t seem to belong to a church—but because the group sex seemed to be the only kind of fun the poor slobs had at all.

Few things seem drearier, more mundane and uncreative, to me than the incompletely human sort of mind that, since it “knows neither God, Hunger, Thought, nor Battle, must of course hold disproportioned views on lust.” 

Ironically, because as a porn writer Nin was cast in opposition to censorious anti-sex attitudes, she could blather with the best about “the creative will, which could resist brainwashing,” and apparently people didn’t laugh. Maybe in those longer novels of hers that weren’t in libraries she wrote something about a character with any kind of will.

But I usually like everyone’s nonfiction better than their fiction, even when I like their fiction. So here was a book of Nin’s nonfiction. Maybe I’d like that, I thought hopefully. The twenty essays collected here are nothing aunts or even parents would mind the children finding. They're interviews, reviews, and travel stories that appeared in women's magazines in the 1960 and 1970s.

I’ve read this book five or six times, trying to get into it. Does not happen. Nin could write normal nonfiction with no mention of body parts in it, but somehow...In the final essay, quoted above, Nin claimed as “My Turkish Grandmother” an old lady she and some friends met on a plane, where the old lady, who did not speak French or English, was carrying a letter in French asking people to look after the writer’s grandmother who was coming to France. Nin read the letter and translated it for her English-speaking friends, and they did their best to look after the grandmother. It’s a nice story, but...always travel safely? Do they really? During ISIS attacks?

So I’m not a great fan of Anaïs Nin’s. You, however, might be. She had hordes of fans. In addition to the old lady on the plane she wrote about her psychoanalysis with Otto Rank,her trips to Japan and Morocco and the South Pacific, the music of Edgar Varese, the movies of Ingmar Bergman, a particularly sadistic and probably racist film by Jean Genet, her elderwoman’s view of 1970s feminism, her friendship with Henry Miller (the two were once hired to write his/her pornography together), Ira Progoff’s “journal workshops,” and more. She liked the journal workshops. If she were alive today I’m sure Nin would have a blog.

And maybe, if she’d at least tried to spare an encouraging word for Joan Didion (who got by just fine without one) or Sylvia Plath (who no longer needed one), I’d be able to think of an encouraging word to say about Nin. I’m not. In any case Nin has passed beyond caring whether anyone still admires her books or not. But her books might be due for a revival, in which case you might want to invest in them. If so, buy it here: $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment; you could fit seven more books of this size into a $5 package, and some of them could be books by living authors.