House of Incest

The book was built from the diary's dream-sediment: nightmares and analytic material of the early thirties, worked and reworked at Louveciennes while Miller, next door in every sense, hammered at Black Spring. Its title scandal is deliberate but interior — the 'incest' is figurative, the self loving its own reflections — and its lineage runs to Rimbaud, whose Season in Hell Nin kept close while writing.

It appeared in 1936 from Siana Editions — 'Anaïs' backwards — the small Villa Seurat imprint run with Miller and friends, in an edition of a few hundred copies. The commercial world had no shelf for it; the faithful did, and its reputation has compounded quietly ever since: the source-book of Nin's imagery, the bridge between the diary and the continuous novel, and one of the era's few genuinely surrealist works in English prose.

Seven connected movements of dream-prose. The narrator is born from water and memory; encounters Sabina, the fiery double, and the sister-figure Jeanne, searching the house for her lost brother; and wanders the House of Incest itself — rooms of mirrors where love cannot escape its own reflection. The imagery repeats and transforms — water, glass, paralysis, the dance — until the final figure appears: the dancer who lost her arms and learned to dance without them, the book's single, hard-won gesture toward release.

It asks to be read the way its images move — aloud, slowly, without demanding a plot. At seventy-odd pages it is an afternoon's reading and a long residence afterward; most of Nin's later fiction unpacks material first compressed here.