on her own journals:
Journals 32–33–34—They recreate a state like opium smoking where one little incident, one caress, one scene produced enormous diffusions—The writing is all about feelings produced, enormous expansion in sensation, removed from reality. . . . 35 to 45—later diaries are focused on human drama—movement—the writing is lighter. 45–50—The focusing gains in intensity. In the last 50 to 60 there is fulfilled climax and fusion of the dream, the mirage and human life. They flow together.49
Or, to give another example, the MS Journal 65 (November 1941–October 1942) contains Nin’s suggestions for drawing coherent portraits of people mentioned in the diary. It is a seven-page entry in which Nin cites examples from her previous diaries and writes about the need to discover and capture each person’s “hidden demon,” gestures, and aura.50 The work on the diary became, therefore, more and more self-conscious, and her reflections definitely facilitated the final construction of her self-portrait, as well as the portraits of others in the published version of the diary.
In the 1940s, Nin also started to produce an expurgated version of her journal by deliberately excising the scandalous material. In October 1940, she recorded, “Henry is reading the ‘abridged’ diary from which all the love affairs are extracted—nothing left but the outer relationships with Allendy, Rank, Artaud etc.”51 So the journal that the public read in 1966 started to take shape in the early 1940s.
Between 1942 and 1945, Nin was more occupied with printing her fiction on the press she established with Gonzalo Moré than with revising the diary. With her husband’s financial assistance, she bought an old treadle press in 1942, installed it in a studio at 144 McDougal Street, and named it Gemor Press. She was supposed to be responsible for setting the type, while Gonzalo Moré, her lover and collaborator, was to be in charge of operating the press. She managed to print her two collections of short stories (Winter of Artifice and Under a Glass Bell) and her novel This Hunger, yet, as Philip K. Jason suggests, “the Gemor undertaking was, from the beginning, more than a scheme to advance Nin’s career.” He explains, “Numerous Gemor titles were issued besides Nin’s own, and other, non-Gemor printing jobs were sought.” Nin devoted a lot of her time and energy to work on the press, but after the initial enthusiasm, she found the venture neither financially nor emotionally gratifying. In a letter to Caresse Crosby dated in the fall of 1944, she complained, “We never made a profit though we worked two of us 6 and 7 hours a day—and I found the work detrimental to my health—I’ve lost all the good of the summer.”52
Henry Miller tried to persuade Nin to print the childhood journal on the press and even offered to send her one hundred dollars each month to make the publication possible.53 Despite his encouragement and the promised financial assistance, the project never came to fruition. Miller soon withdrew his generous offer because the patron who had provided him with the money had stopped his pecuniary support. Besides, printing the voluminous diary on a hand press was not feasible; the collections of short stories proved challenging enough.
Although Nin eventually lost the press through debts, her engagement with it indicates a strong self-promotional zeal and marketing acumen. The following provides insight into how Nin went about her business: “Of 500 Winters [Winter of Artifice] I gave away 100, sold 250 and 150 are left. I’m only printing 300 of Under a Glass Bell. Most of the subscriptions were obtained by my writing pressing letters, telephoning etc.” Nin was therefore the driving force behind her marketing campaigns. However, the continuous lack of success wore her down, and in the same entry she recorded, “The support has been infinitely small, not sufficient to sustain me either spiritually or materially. I am going to surrender.”54
Apart from Under a Glass Bell, which was praised by Edmund Wilson, her other works got mainly unfavorable reviews. This must have contributed to the depression that plagued her in the early 1940s. Journal 66, covering the year from October 1942 to October 1943, contains an index with as many entries about working on the press as ones saying “early to bed,” “terrible depression,” or simply “depression.” After the release of This Hunger, Nin noted, “I fell into a suicidal depression. Had to face criticism of my book.”55 She came back to the diary, but this time mainly to find the solace in it: “Diary is obviously the diary of neurosis, the labyrinth, and I am in it again, drawn inward.”56
The novels published by commercial publishers did not fare any better. In 1946, Gore Vidal, whom Nin had met the year before, secured the contract with E. P. Dutton—the publishing house he worked for at the time—for her two novels. Dutton published Ladders to Fire (1946) and Children of the Albatross (1947) and even reprinted the extended version of Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories (1948), but the majority of the reviews were rather negative. Nin’s works were frequently criticized, as Jason notes, for the rejection of social conventions of realism, self-centered and unconvincing characters, flaws in the structure, and a style that was too abstract or too elaborate.57
The political climate after World War II was not favorable for the type of writing represented by Nin. As Lawrence Schwartz explains, American art and literature became at that time part of the ideological battle with the Soviet Union and communism. In the postwar period, the United States emerged as an economic world leader and soon began setting the cultural trends. During the initial years of the Cold War, American literature became a platform for erecting a homogenous American identity and a cultural weapon, although prominent literary critics of the era propagated an aesthetic method that “seemed to be apolitical but,” as Schwartz points out, “was not.”58
With her autobiographical and experimental writing, Nin could not have fared worse. What was considered publishable in the United States in the late 1940s did not correspond with what she had on offer at that time. But despite the fact that her novels were released during unfavorable times, she did not give up and was determined to be noticed. Bair comments that many people who knew her at that time described her as “a steel hummingbird . . . determined to be famous.” Bair adds, “Her efforts to promote her novels attest to this fact. She wrote to every college and university that had previously hosted her, asking for invitations to speak again, and also to universities where she knew no one, frequently sending her photographs and books.” Despite Nin’s active involvement in the promotion of her works, however, her fiction sold poorly, and Nin once more turned her attention to the diary and “began another round of rewriting.”59
As early as 1953, Nin also became determined to sell manuscripts of the diary because of her worsening financial situation. Bair estimates that the income of Nin and Guiler for the year 1954 was $522, while their expenses amounted to as much as $25,000. As a result, Nin “vowed to pursue the ‘fantasy’ of selling the diaries until it became a ‘concrete fact.’ Each time she wrote to a college or university to request a lecture engagement, she also sent a list of the diary’s contents and the names of some of the persons who figured in it, hoping to entice a library to buy it.”60 In 1955 she decided to “devote the rest of [her] time to preparing diaries for publication, no more novels.”61
In 1957, Nin met Gunther Stuhlmann, who would become her lifelong agent, editor, and friend. When her initial collaboration with Stuhlmann did not result in any immediate ventures, she wrote in 1961 to Alan Swallow, the owner of a small independent press in Denver. She explained her situation and asked him whether there was a possibility of cooperation between them. She suggested a few undertakings that might be beneficial for both of them: either to reprint The Winter of Artifice, “which has been out of print for a long time and which I get orders for,” as she noted, or to print her unpublished manuscript Seduction of the Minotaur (she guaranteed to sell one thousand copies) or to do a collection of her novel Cities of the Interior. The diary served as the bargaining card, for she wrote, “There is one added factor, that I have always said whatever publisher puts out my novels I will give an option on the diaries (for the future).”62
