Winter of Artifice

Book excerpt: The two "Father" sections, "Stella" and "Winter of Artifice" show how her own father, though successful as a musician, was "a failure as a human being" and the source of much of the chaos in Anaïs's life. She resented critics calling it autobiographical, but changing the names hardly helped. One has only one father. Most of it is taken from the Incest and Fire sections of her diaries and polished. Stella's exterior resembles the description of Anaïs's friend Louise Rainer in the Published Diaries. The plot is that because she had lost trust in love when her father left her family and because echoes of her love for her father clung to her, she avoided pain by choosing a superficial relationship with a Don Juan like her father. The events of Stella's love life are not from the Diaries, but most of the father's effects on Stella's personality are. The third section, 2The Voice3, is written in the form of a Surrealistic caricature of a Psychoanalytic practice in New York City. Anaïs had been in psychoanalysis two or three times, had briefly studied and practiced psychoanalysis and had love affairs with two of her psychoanalysts, at the time this was published.