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Article: Playgirl of the Western World
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- April 16, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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A Biography By Deirdre Bair Putnam. 654 pp. $39.95
"HOW FEMALE," Lawrence Durrell wrote breathlessly to Anais Nin
when he first read her Winter of Artifice, published in 1937. It was
not the novel's plot or interplay of character that had moved him to
such rapture. It was that she had bared so much of her own sexuality
in its telling: "The gift was total, unreserved, nothing withheld,"
Durrell told her, and, in seeing her pinned so nakedly to the page,
he reported that he had wept.
In truth, Anais Nin's most remarkable "gift" was not evident in
the writings she intended Durrell or anyone else to see. Her nine
novels were but pale shadows of an outrageously reckless and bizarre
life; her ...