A Spy in the House of Love by Anais Nin

I usually don't read two works by the same author back-to-back. I find it can complicate my opinions, as well as my memories, of what I've read. One summer, I read nothing but Michael Crichton books (because I was twelve), and I can't tease out the events in them at all. It just felt like reading Crichton's diary.

It's appropriate that I apply this idea to Nin, because she has written a famous erotic diary. At this point, I'm not particularly interested in reading it, mostly because of my reaction to Spy. I do know, however, that I will end up reading it, anyway.

It was a mistake to read Spy right after I was so thoroughly impressed by Birds. I can tell the book is well-written, but I would have been much more in love with it had I read it one, or even two, years ago. I used to love characters that dealt with deception and jealousy, and now I find those topics much less intriguing. Wait, that's not quite accurate. What I mean is, I demand a progressive approach to those ideas, instead of reformulating old ground.

Nin does formulate new ground here, almost fifty years after Spy was published. The protagonist is a woman who engages in promiscuity "like a man." She is deceptive to her husband and partners, but what she goes through is too complex to be contained in a traditional faithful/unfaithful framework. It is tempting to say that she is being faithful to herself, but even that is questionable, as she never maintains one attitude toward her behavior for very long.

What is certain is that engaging lovers other than her husband is compulsive, despite her love for him. She agonizes over her desire to confess her misdeeds, knowing that such a confession would elicit forgiveness from her husband. However, she knows he would only forgive her while simultaneously making her promise to remain faithful. She is incapable of keeping such a promise.

At first, I held this narrative at arm's length. For the past year, I have been in a sexually open relationship - one in which I am the partner who primarily seeks other partners. The single most important aspect of such openness is honesty, and the protagonist's inability to be honest with her husband (not as a fault of personality, but of circumstance) was both painful and irritating to read about.

What was most easy to identify with was her ability to find different kinds of love and eroticism with different people. She describes herself as an actress worried about losing track of the many parts she plays. In fact, the excuse she uses when she sees other men is that she has been given a role in a stage play being produced out of town.

At times, the descriptions became very abstract. This was charming in the small doses of Birds, but harder to stomach over an extended narrative. I felt myself wanting to see more "action," as it were, instead of treading over emotional ground I'm well-familiar with.

The part of the novel that stayed with me the most is Sabina's ruminations after spending a night with one of her other lovers. Allow me to quote:

"Without any warmth of the heart, as a man could, she had enjoyed a stranger.

And then she remembered what she had heard men say: 'Then I wanted to leave.'

She gazed at the stranger lying naked beside her and saw him as a statue she did not want to touch again. As a statue he lay far from her, strange to her, and there welled in her something resembling anger, regret, almost a desire to take this gift of herself back, to efface all traces of it, to banish it from her body. She wanted to become swiftly and cleanly detached from him, to disentangle and unmingle what had been fused for a moment, their breaths, skins, exhalations, and body's essences."

This is a wonderful passage, and the scene only improves as she goes on to describe the almost eerie experience of being able to see hairbrushes and perfume bottles, which obviously belong to some other woman, in his bathroom without feeling any jealousy.

I wonder if this is the novel that a compulsively cheating man would write if he had the emotional vocabulary of a woman. In that context, this book can help redefine what is appropriate or expected behavior for either gender. Her behavior is ostensibly the same, but the world of the novel is so rich with explanation and empathy. Also, you can explore the exciting tangent of where love and sex separate, and where they overlap. For that matter, the very nature of love itself is in danger, as Nin distinguishes between stable, domestic love, and unpredictable, anguished eroticism.

I'm sure that if you've thought less about the emotions involved with sex and the definitions involved with love than I have, you would be really moved by this book. I, as such, was moved by moments of recognition, rather than shock or confrontation.