Books: Love on a Barge

THE FOUR-CHAMBERED HEART (187 pp.) —Ana’is Nin—Due//, Sloan & Pearce ($2.75).

“Rango, when you kiss me the barge rocks.”

Footloose Dancer Djuna was not the only one who was enthralled by Rango the Guatemalan Indian. Paris nightclub patrons who heard his songs “drank from his voice and his guitar.” But it was Djuna who rented a barge on the Seine for him. There, while Djuna cried, “You are the God of Fire,” and Rango kissed her feet, they “gave each other their many selves, avoiding only the more recent ones . . .”

The Four-Chambered Heart is just about as silly as this sounds. It piles a mountainous icing of surrealist imagery and rubbery aphorisms on a little cake of plot no bigger than a thumb. The plot: Range’s psychopathic wife fakes illness to keep her weak-willed husband away from Djuna’s barge; eventually she brings both of them under her spell and has them waiting on her hand & foot. Despairing Djuna decides to sink herself, lover, barge and all. At the last minute she changes her mind and dives into a dot-studded, six-page stream of consciousness.

Even before Author Anaïs Nin (rhymes with bean) had found a commercial publisher for her work, her name was a password among the avantgarde. Novelist Henry (Tropic of Cancer) Miller proclaimed her unpublished diary worthy to “take its place beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Rousseau, Proust and others.” By 1944 Paris-born Author Nin had arrived in Greenwich Village, privately published three books, and decided to “convert and transpose the diary of 65 volumes into a full, long novel . . .” Like her other two published novels Ladders to Fire (1946) and Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart reads more like a diary than a novel—but a diary in which nothing actually happens.