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.I have more affinities with those adolescents with no surplus of flesh around their soul, with their eclipses.Edmund Wilson's reality holds terror for me, nameless dangers.But Wilson clings.He has a book for me.He has a review of This Hunger.Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker:There is not much expert craftsmanship in This Hunger by Anai's Nin but it is a more important book than either Marquand or Isherwood because it explores a new realm of material.Even Isherwood can do little more than add to an already long series another lucid and well-turned irony of the bourgeois world on the eve of war.But Anai's Nin is one of those women writers who have lately been trying to put into words a new feminine point of view, who deal with the conflicts created for women by living half in a man-controlled world against which they cannot help rebelling, half in a world which they have made for themselves but which they cannot find completely satisfactory.This Hunger is the first installment of what is evidently to be a long novel.It deals particularly, says the author in her foreword, "with the aspect of destruction in woman.Man appears only partially in this first volume, because for the woman at war with herself, he can only appear thus, not as an entity."This volume is, therefore, quite different from the author's last book, Under a Glass Bell, which was a collection of prose poems and poetic character sketches, each of which limited itself to presenting an image or a mood.The episodes of This Hunger are somewhat less satisfactory as writing than the pieces in Under a Glass Bell, but Anais Nin is attempting something more original and more complex.The new book consists of three sections, each of which presents a woman in her closest emotional relationship with men and with other women.These three groups have as yet no interconnections, and it is impossible to judge the author's project on the basis of this beginning.It is probable that when the various sets of characters shall have been made to react on one another, a larger design will appear and give these earlier chapters new value.In the meantime, it does seem, however, as if Anais Nin, not yet expert in fiction, has not fully been able to exploit her material, which is constantly suggesting possibilities for dramatic contrast and surprise that the author has done little to realize—though the first section, the simplest and shortest, does complete a dramatic cycle.There is, for example, a movie actress, a masochistic and tied-up girl, who becomes envious and resentful of her screen personality because it represents a woman who is free, and always loved and in love.It is impossible to say that someone else would have handled this theme more effectively, because it is probably the kind of thing only Anais Nin would have thought of, but one feels that it is a brilliant idea which ought to have had a more striking presentation.The narrative, too, a little lacks movement.The influence of D.H.Lawrence, about whom Anais Nin wrote her first book, has perhaps been impeding her here.Like Sherwood Anderson, she seems to have caught from Lawrence a repetitious and a solemn hieratic tone which though a natural enough contagion for Anderson, should not be inevitable in the case of Anai's Nin.She has, at her best, a very personal and human voice, and is instinctively, I do believe, the kind of writer who does not rely upon the impact of verbiage but cares about the right word, and who has no business blurring, as she sometimes does, the climaxes of her paragraphs.The surface of This Hunger is thus a little uneven.There are passages where the psychological insights find their appropriate expression in clear language and vivid images, as in the pages that describe the self-doubt that is always compelling the movie actress to make more and more exacting demands of her lovers; and there are moments when little set pieces, as fragile and strange as those in Under a Glass Bell partly emerge from the background of psychological exposition—such as the golden salon with crystal lamps from which one of the heroines walks out into a garden where a light rain has washed the faces of the leaves and where she finds herself confronted by three full-length mirrors placed as casually as in a boudoir.But these pieces are not planted or prepared for so that they function in a general theme.They stand out with special life and color from a background where the outline of the characters seems rather dim, and where the description of relationships—when it falls into the Lawrence formula—seems sometimes a little abstract.Yet behind the whole thing is a vision of the vicissitudes of passion and friendship in a world in which men and women have become semi-independent of one another that makes This Hunger always a revelatory document.Once one has used such words as "passion" and "friendship," one realizes how far Anai's Nin has gone in breaking up these clichés that we use for the dynamics of emotion.Though she owes something to Freud, as she does to Lawrence, she has worked out her own system of dynamics, and gives us a picture, quite distinct from that of any other writer, of the confusions that result to our emotions from the uncertainty of our capacity to identify the kind of love that we tend to imagine with our actual sexual contacts, and of the ambivalent attractions and repulsions that are so hard on contemporary nerves.Interesting though This Hunger is and charming though Under a Glass Bell was, I feel sure that Ana'is Nin has still hardly begun to get out of her intelligence and talent the writing that they ought to produce.This new book, like the one before it, has been published by Anai's Nin herself.Anai's Nin is at present a special cult, when she ought to have a general public.Diana Trilling in The Nation:
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