NONFICTION - Dec. 26, 1993

ANAIS: The Erotic Life of Anais Nin by Noel Riley Fitch (Little, Brown: $24.95; 525 pp.). Anais Nin, in pop-psych caricature, is an exploitative nymphomaniac whose life was foreordained by incestuous abuse by her father. The reality is much more complicated: Noel Riley Fitch makes clear in this fascinating biography that Nin, novelist and diarist, was in fact self-aware as a person and self-created as a writer, always “courting the world” (as Nin would put it in her 50s) because seduction was both her metier and her strength. When she participated, at the age of 30, in a final, mutual seduction of father Joaquin Nin, Fitch shows us the parallels between them: “years of unfaithfulness, almost flaunting one’s affairs to court discovery; a ‘collector’s need’ of charm, conquest, and power; seduction under the pretense of altruism.” Nin would no doubt be irritated to find she is less read today than talked about--as Henry Miller’s long-time lover and as an early feminist, a woman who didn’t shrink from her calling or her sexuality--but it’s impossible to put down Nin without thinking that her life was more artistic than her writing. In Paris in the 1930s, Nin somehow managed to preserve simultaneous sexual relationships with Miller, her husband Hugo, her cousin Eduardo and her analyst Otto Rank; later in New York, through Rank, she managed to become an analyst in her own right, sometimes referring patients to Miller, again her lover; in 1947 she married Rupert Pole, commencing 25 years of bi-coastal bigamy (when Nin died in 1977, the New York Times listed Hugo as her husband, the Los Angeles Times Rupert).