beyond the diary. . . . It lies on my desk like a real manuscript. It is a larger canvas. No marginal writing done delicately, unobtrusively, but work, assertion.”41 She therefore began to regard her diary writing as a piece of work, a creation.
The process of revising the diary went on for most of the 1930s but intensified, particularly in 1936 and 1937. Journals covering these years are full of entries referring to her work on the diary. In a letter to her cousin Eduardo Sanchez, Nin explained her occupation in the following way:
I took volume 45 of the first trip to New York and I made it bloom like a hot house camellia, I Proustanize, only dynamically. For example, [take the] page [where I describe when] Miriam came to be analyzed. She is my favorite patient. Her confession touched me. “What confession?” Suddenly I sat down and I wrote the whole confession, naturally and diary-like, but full and complete, like a geyser. Inserted it. By the time I was through there were no more “notes,” but a full smooth book, a book, not a notebook. I wrote up Rank that way, filled out, enriched.42
Nin expanded stories, remade portraits, and filled her rewritten copies with details she did not record before, in order to shape her diary into a coherent book. She worked on it as if it were a novel, yet at the same time she tried to preserve its journal-like, spontaneous quality.
She also began to present her diary as an artistic undertaking to others. For example, in a 1937 letter to Jean Paulhan, a French writer, critic, and publisher who expressed an interest in the diary, Nin highlighted the novel-like quality of her journal. She explained, “Each volume contains, in a sense, a novel, an incident, a drama.” The diary was therefore described as an intentional piece of writing that went beyond what one would expect of a diary, namely, a collection of private notes. In the same letter she also listed experiences that were described in the diary:
Separation from father and trip to New York; A year as a painter’s model to support mother and brothers; A year as mannequin; Trip to Havana with wealthy aunt and presentation to society. Society life, luxury; Marriage in Havana and first novel on artists and models; Trip to Paris; Spanish dancing studied. Appearance on stage; Book on D. H. Lawrence and new worlds entered through it; Seeing father again, reconciliation; Love affairs—about fifteen of them; Two psychoanalysis fully described, in which I seduce my analysts; Birth and death of a child; Playing at being analyst myself in New York, with hundreds of confessions, and incidents, a bursting of full life; Book of House of Incest.43
At that particular time, Nin was quite willing to share the most intimate details of her life (note, however, the absence of a love affair with her father). A glimpse at the above list offers a good indication of the events she regarded as marketable and interesting for her future audience. Nin portrayed herself as an independent woman who tried by various, usually artistic, means (as a model for painters, as a writer, as a dancer, as an analyst) to earn her living, as well as a worldly figure who traveled extensively and moved between various societies. Being a good advertiser, she also created the atmosphere of mystery and sensation, saying that her diary contained fifteen love affairs, the seduction of her psychoanalysts, and her patients’ personal revelations.
Jean Paulhan was one of several people in the mid-1930s interested in the possibility of making the diary public. Another was Denise Clairouin, the literary agent, who initially wanted “all the diaries to be published” (Diary 2, 107) but quickly changed her mind and started to doubt the possibility of the diary ever appearing in print: “People can’t bear such nakedness. . . . The childbirth story will immediately be censored” (Diary 2, 167). Clairouin nonetheless sent the diary to the British publishing house Faber and Faber, which rejected it “with a great deal of reluctance” (Diary 2, 206). Maxwell Perkins of Scribner was another person to whom Clairouin showed Nin’s work. At his request Nin prepared an abridged copy of six hundred pages, and although, as Nin noted, Perkins was “thunderstruck” by what he read, in the end, he too declined to publish the diary (Diary 2, 268).
In 1937 another attempt and, needless to say, another failure to publish the diary took place. This time Henry Miller got involved and set out to publish Nin’s childhood diary, which he greatly admired. Miller was convinced that the publication should begin with the very first volume. (It is worth mentioning that throughout her life Nin’s efforts concentrated alternatively on her childhood diaries and the ones dating back to the 1930s, and Nin even secured the preface to the planned childhood journal from Otto Rank.)44 In November 1937, Nin and Miller sent out a circular saying that Henry Miller was going to publish Anaïs Nin’s diary Mon Journal in the original French in a limited number of 250 copies. The book was supposed to be printed by the Imprimerie Ste-Catherine in Bruges, Belgium. The front endpaper of Nin’s fifty-fifth journal, covering the period from September to November 1937, contains a list of the subscribers to this intended publication. So few people were interested, however, that the project eventually failed. That was possibly the last attempt to publish the diary in Europe, as Nin moved back to the United States in 1939, at the outbreak of World War II.
Between 1940 and 1941, Nin was represented by John Slocum, Henry Miller’s agent, who, as Bair reports, showed the diary to every publishing company in New York.45 Around the same time, Nin also sent the diaries to the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin. She must have sent the diaries including her sexual adventures, for the commentator who evaluated the diary noted, “When the author does prepare it for publication my advice would be cut out the redundancy rather than sex.” And then he or she elaborated: “In fact, I’d trim lightly here and with an eye merely on the law. The erotic element is part of its uniqueness.” Sex and scandal were, therefore, considered marketable. However, at the same time, the publisher did not like the self-reflexive nature of Nin’s journal and remarked that “such morbid preoccupation with one’s inner life will seem trivial. My guess is that it is a book to see light about five or ten years after the war is over.”46 Nin’s explorations of her personal life seemed petty in the light of World War II.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States entered the war, which had already been ravaging Europe for over two years. The war dominated every facet of life in the first half of the 1940s, while its reverberations were felt far beyond the war years. “Popular culture in the 1940s,” as Robert Sickles observes, “was fueled and shaped by the war and one can’t look at many aspects of the decade without seeing them as in some way connected to or resulting from the war effort.”47 The cultural climate of the early 1940s was unfavorable for intimate revelations of a woman who was preoccupied with personal rather than national struggles.
Nin continued to work on the diary in the 1940s, revising and copying her earlier volumes. She indexed some of her journals, and the index to her diary covering the period from December 1940 to July 1941 is full of entries that mention her work on the diaries. Bair provides a detailed description of how Nin approached the rewriting process:
First, with the original diaries beside her, Anaïs rewrote by hand all those parts that she thought were publishable. This included almost everything but the incest with her father and most of the entries about her brother Thorvald. Then she gave the rewritten volumes to Virginia Admiral, who typed them onto “easily transportable” rice paper. Each separate diary volume was then inserted into its own cardboard folder, secured by brass tacks. The diaries she rewrote by hand were locked away with the originals, and the typed copies were made available to selected readers. And so, when Anaïs offered to let someone read the “original” diaries, she was really showing those she had hand-copied from the true originals. Mostly, however, she showed the typed copies, all the while insisting each was transcribed word for word from the originals.48
Nin also devoted a lot of time to reading her diaries and pondering on their nature, trying to find a suitable technique for recomposing them. She recorded her observations on the rewriting process, undoubtedly to make her revisions more effective in the future. As a consequence, the manuscripts are full of reflections on the process of diary editing. In February
