I am reading Anaïs Nin’s diaries for the first time. I’m on page eighty-one of Volume I, 1931-1934. Anaïs meets Henry Miller on page seven, and his wife June shortly after. Henry is trying to figure out June and recruits the help Anaïs. He’s trying to get to the bottom of June. His love for June is more like a hatred of June, a deep mistrust. I started reading The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell a decade ago—a gift from a dear friend, a woman. I stopped on page 158. On the surface, the character of Justine is emancipated, a complex woman, but somehow Justine makes me queasy, upset. I type into the search bar: “Lawrence Durrell’s women,” and find a book titled The Stronger Sex: The Fictional Women of Lawrence Durrell, which declares, “Lawrence Durrell envisioned a new woman, self-confident, free of male domination.” The book is, of course, written by a man. I try again, searching “Lawrence Durrell feminist critique.” It isn’t until I search “Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller,” that I find a piece written by Vivian Gornick in 1988 for The New York Times regarding the published letters of Miller and Durrell. Her review is titled “Masters of Self-Congratulation.” She writes, “Women without number troop through these pages. Not one of them achieves a particle of the reality the men extend each other in the slightest of their notes.” She quotes Durrell, who at age sixty-five, after numerous wives, writes to Miller: “Women have become such a bore, wailing about their freedom and their alimony in the same breath. Never again this stupid adventure. I am however in good heart—the Egyptian trip did me real good, and I ran into a new Justine in Alexandria who set my poor old heartstrings twangling.”
-Morgan English