ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I had never read anything by Anaïs Nin but have known of her writing for a long time, perhaps from my reading during my discovery of feminism phase in the 1970s and 1980s.  I read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (and they changed my life); The Second Sex and Memoirs of a Difficult Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir, three or four novels by Marilyn French, and almost everything by Nina Bawden, Elizabeth Jolley, Alison Lurie, Faye Weldon and Mary Wesley who were my favourite authors for a long time.   Indeed, as attested by my paperback shelves, during this period most of what I read was by feminist authors.   I had left university and was floundering a bit, not sure what to read or how to discover new authors, and I was rather Blytonesque in my reading.  But for some reason I never got round to reading Anaïs Nin…

A Spy in the House of Love is only a very short novella of 124 pages but Sabina is a fascinating character and she must have startled the respectable readers of 1954 when A Spy in the House of Love was first published.  John Cleland’s Fanny Hill was not legally available in the US till 1963, and anyway Sabina is a different character altogether from Fanny and her carefree attitude to sexual pleasure.  Sabina is no Madame Bovary either, she is deliberately behaving like a man, organising her life and managing her marriage so that she can take pleasure when and how she wants it.  She is driven simply by sensual desire and rejects the sentimentality of love.

We say of adolescent love that boys play at love to get sex and girls play at sex to get love, but Sabina isn’t interested in love.  She has designed an elaborate persona as an actor so that she can absent herself from her loving husband Alan. (Such a prosaic name! We can just imagine his beige cardigans, eh?)  When the story opens with a late night phone call that she makes to a random number in hope of a pick-up, the man who answers is named by the narrator as The Lie Detector, and he traces her to a bar where she is not behaving like a respectable married woman at all.  The identity of this man, the Lie Detector is not revealed until the end of the story.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

She has had her latest fling,  so she returns to Alan with stories of her performance in the play.  The irony is that Sabina the fake actor is actually a superb actor, apparently convincing Alan of all she has to say, even though the very first thing she must always do is to have a shower…

Because she wants to be able to have sex without any romantic attachments, she is actually pleased when she learns that the future wife of Philip – the opera singer who picked her up on the beach when she was sunbathing naked – is not beautiful.  This means that she is the ‘steadfastly loved one’ and so Sabina can continue to be ‘the whim, the caprice, the drug, the fever’. (p. 37)

Each man is associated with music: Philip strides over the sand dunes singing the theme from Tristan and Isolde, its use of harmonic suspension often associated with frustrated desire.

The song ascended, swelled, gathered together all the turmoil of the sea, the rutilant [1]  gold carnival of the sun, rivalled the wind and flung its highest notes into space like the bridge span of a flamboyant rainbow.  And then the incantation broke. 
He had seen Sabina. (p. 27)

Debussy’s Ile Joyeuse is associated with her intense restlessness:

The image of the ship’s cracking, restless bones arrived on the waves of Debussy’s Ile Joyeuse which wove around her all the mists and dissolutions of remote islands.  The model notes arrived charged like a caravan of spices, gold mitres, ciboriums and chalices bearing messages of delight setting the honey flowing between the thighs, erecting sensual minarets on men’s bodies as they lay on the sand.  Debris of stained glass wafted up by the seas, splintered by the radium shafts of the sun and the waves and tides of sensuality covered their bodies, desires folding in every lapping wave like an accordion of aurora boralis [sic] in the blood.  She saw an unreachable dance, at which men and women were dressed in rutilant colours, she saw their gaiety, their relations to each other as unparalleled in splendour. (p. 40-41)

Minarets, eh?  I wonder how the censors missed that?

Clair de Lune makes Sabina want to be in Paris, but it’s the  African drums that convey a transgression that would have shocked America before the Civil Rights movement.  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1987) was a controversial film yet to be made and interracial marriage (and presumably anything else) was still illegal even as late as then. Sabine’s relationship with Mambo is across the colour bar – yet also not.  This is because – as Nin is careful to explain – although he is African, his skin is white due to a grandmother from France or Spain.

Each note was the brush of his mouth upon her.  His singing grew exalted and the drumming deeper and sharper and it showered upon her heart and her body.  Drum – drum – drum – drum – drum – upon her heart, she was the drum, her skin was taut under his hands, and the drumming vibrated through the rest of her body.  Wherever he rested his eyes, she felt the drumming of his fingers upon her stomach, her breasts, her hips.  His eyes rested on her naked feet in sandals and they beat an answering rhythm. (p. 51)

He tells her it cannot be, but before long she is coming out of his house at dawn, anxious about the Lie Detector keeping watch on her movements.

The title refers to Sabine’s habits being like the habits of a spy, ready always for a quick getaway, leaving no traces of her presence anywhere.  Her ingenuity enables her to

‘defeat life’s limitations’ but ‘the morass of dangers’ and ‘the smothering swamps of guilt’ await ‘her hour of punishment after living like a spy in the house of many loves, for avoiding exposure, for defeating the sentinels watching definite boundaries, for passing without passports and permits from one love to another. And she knows that ‘every spy’s life ended in ignominious death’. (p.64)

It is John, the grounded aviator still grieving for mates lost in the war who – in telling her that she is not a bad woman – disarms her entirely and ‘injected into her own body his own venomous guilt for living and desiring’ (p.77).  With Donald she meets his need for a Stravinsky firebird and a mother.  But it is Jay, an artist whose paintings are fragmented to symbolise the splitting of the atom, who made me realise that Sabina is a woman of many fragmented selves.

With her one female friend Djuna she finds an outlet for her guilt, because guilt is the one burden human beings cannot bear alone’ (p.114) and so we see that in some ways this is a very conventional novel.  Djuna tells her that she should not feel guilty for seeking wholeness, and that none of the men she slept with were ‘whole’.   She has been seeking crusaders and judges, and she has been acting like a child, trying to love, but loving only illusions.  (Philip for example, had to be Siegfried, always singing in tune).   Sabrina protests that only Alan’s love is  ‘infinite, tireless, all-forgiving’ but, says Djuna, that’s not a man’s love, that’s an idealised fantasy father figure invented by a needy child.

The Lie Detector tells her that it was she who invited him to follow her and to judge her, ‘a flirtation with justice’. Her distrust of love meant that she has not considered the other aspects Alan might offer.

‘You haven’t loved yet, ‘ he said. ‘You’ve only been trying to love, beginning to love.  Trust alone is not love, desire alone is not love.  All these paths [were] leading out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other.  You were only on the way.  Could you go out now and find the other faces of Alan, which you never struggled to see, or accept? ‘ (p. 121)

One of Beethoven’s Quartets drowns out the sound of Mambo’s drumming as Sabina sinks to the floor, ‘her wide skirt floating for one instant like an expiring parachute; and then deflated completely and died in the dust. (p.123)

PS (19/5/13) I am curious about when this book became available in Australia and whether it can be said to have had any influence on Australian women’s writing then or later.  If anyone knows anything about that, please share what you know in comments, thanks.

[1] rutilant – glowing or glittering with ruddy or golden light

©Lisa Hill

Author: Anaïs Nin
Title: A Spy in the House of Love
Publisher: Pink Popular Penguins, 2013, supporting Breast Cancer Awareness*, see below.  First published 1954.
ISBN: 9780734306913
Source: Review copy courtesy of Penguin Australia

Availability

Fishpond: A Spy in the House of Love (Pink Popular Penguin)
Or direct from Penguin Australia

* From the Penguin Australia website:

Co-founded by Jane and Glenn McGrath, the McGrath Foundation raises money to place McGrath Breast Care Nurses in communities right across Australia and to increase breast awareness in young women.

The McGrath Foundation believes 150 of these specially trained nurses are needed to ensure that every family experiencing breast cancer has access to a breast care nurse, no matter where they live or their financial situation.  McGrath Breast Care Nurses offer a unique service to families who can self-refer to this free support.

Penguin is proud to donate $1 from the original sale of each Pink Popular Penguin to help the McGrath Foundation realise their goal.  To find out how you can make a difference visit www.mcgrathfoundation.com.au