1960s, none of which had any significant success. Both he and Gunther Stuhlmann kept looking for a publisher for the diary. As Bair notes, “James Silberman, of Random House, was the most interested among the many to whom Gunther offered the diaries.”63 However, Silberman wanted to condense the material so that the first volume covered a much larger span of time than Nin had planned. He tried to convince her that “[t]he very least that should be encompassed in a single volume is the entire thirties.”64 (The thirties were eventually covered in two published volumes, not one, as Silberman wanted.)
Silberman also thought it was necessary to produce a book that would strongly affect the audience, would live up to the expectations that had been built up around the diary for so long, and would be of a comparable caliber to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir. To accomplish these aims, Silberman wanted to cut down some personal and reflexive material and have more sketches of people instead. “In other words,” as Stuhlmann related in a letter to Anaïs Nin, “he is looking perhaps for more ‘portraits,’ more ‘action’ and he seems to feel that ‘condensation’ will ‘speed up,’ make the book more ‘solid.’” Nin reacted quite strongly to Silberman’s suggestions, and in a reply to Stuhlmann’s letter, she wrote indignantly, “A diary is not an action film. . . . What greed, too, and entre nous, there is more in my diary than in the diary of Simone de Beauvoir. . . . [Hers] is deadly dull.” She also added that she wanted to preserve the integrity of her diary and did not agree to shorten her manuscript. Eventually, the project was dropped.65
Peter Israel of Putnam was another editor who saw the manuscript of the diary. Putnam had earlier published Miller’s letters to Nin, which Nin had edited and to which she held copyright, but in the end Putnam too declined the diary. In a letter to Nin, which she quoted in a letter to her husband Hugh Guiler, Israel lavished a lot of praise on her writing, admiring her self-revelation and the skillfully drawn portraits in her diary; however, at the same time, he expressed some doubt as to “whether these pages are commercial or not.” His main concern was the fact that Nin was relatively unknown in the literary marketplace, and he worried whether the confessions of an obscure individual would appeal to readers. He mentioned that he decided to show the diaries to his wife to get another opinion. In the letter to Hugh, Nin expressed her annoyance:
As you can see, with the prise [sic—praise] there is still the commercial reservation. He will now try it on his wife, on the salesman, on the doorman, the elevator man, the night watchman, the cleaning woman, the delivery boys, the telephone girl, and then he will ask me to make it sound like candy, and like Simone de Beauvoir, and like Mary Mac Carthy [sic—McCarthy] and yet keep it clean for the Ladies Home Journal, and perhaps rewrite it in the third person, make Allendy a negro physician, my father a taxi driver, for human interest, and instead of a dead child, write about nine children . . . and throw in a few more famous names, but be sure and do not do name dropping as Charlie Chaplin did.66
Despite her frustration, Nin was perfectly aware that the publishers wanted a best seller. They tried their best to forecast what the public might like, and they made writers adjust their material accordingly so that it reached the largest number of people. By then, Nin also knew that the power of her diary was not in her self-revelations but in the characters who were portrayed in it, since both Silberman and Israel emphasized the importance of her eminent acquaintances. That is why whenever the manuscript of the journal was sent to publishers, it was accompanied with a register of the famous people included in the diary. Later such a list would be sent to reviewers, and at some point Nin would even suggest using the list of characters, which she considered “a good publicity attraction,” “as a map within the Diary, or end paper,” for she believed “it would sell books.”67
Alan Swallow, who tried to find a copublisher for the diary, showed it, among others, to William Morrow. When Nin was rejected by Morrow, she wrote in a letter to Swallow that she wished he were rich enough to print her diary on his own, adding immediately, “But you know, it is not the money, as I will get money from every country in Europe, it is the fact that we will get no reviews, as with the other books.” If this remark is read together with the New York Times critic Nona Balakian’s observation on the situation in American publishing that she had shared with Nin a year earlier, a clearer picture of the functioning of the publishing industry emerges: “[T]here is a terrible snobbism in this country about publishing with the ‘right’ publisher. What I mean is, unless a writer is published by the leading publishing houses (Knopf, Random, Harpers, Harcourt etc.), he [sic] is either completely neglected or treated in a light way—unless of course he has something sensational or fashionable to say.” Nin knew perfectly well that unless her diary was published by one of the leading publishers, it would probably be doomed to obscurity and that being published with a prestigious firm would guarantee, if not success, then at least reviews and publicity.68
In the meantime, Nin kept editing the manuscript, working closely with her brother Joaquín, who contributed greatly to the accuracy of their family story, and with Henry Miller, who offered advice, corrected some details, and demanded a few changes. She finalized the editing of the diary on 18 May 1965, announcing in a letter to a friend, “The diary is now completely edited, retyped, ready to go. It has been accepted everywhere but the U.S.”69 A few months later that year, Hiram Haydn of Harcourt Brace offered her a contract, and thus the first volume of the long-marketed Diary was published in 1966.70 But before it was finally released, Nin in a manner characteristic to herself had been scrupulously supervising the production of her Diary. “I have to watch Harcourt Brace like a hawk,” she wrote in a letter to her husband Hugh Guiler on 8 December 1965, and she further clarified, “They had [the] date of Diary as big as my name, which as a friendly bookshop suggested, will drive away the young. For the sake of truth it has to be there, but not in marquee size letters on the black background. These people really don’t know their business.”71 She therefore played an active part in every stage of the marketing process.
The story of Nin’s publishing effort is interesting in several respects. First of all, until the 1960s there was no room in the American literary market for the type of writing represented by Nin’s diary; Nin’s revelations were considered too intimate and self-absorbed. Even at the beginning of the 1960s, the publishers considered the portrayal of the famous people, and not Nin’s inward journey, as the main asset of the diary, which in itself is thought-provoking, as confessional poetry had been popular by then and autobiographical novels were on the rise. Perhaps an autobiographical streak was acceptable in more-established genres, such as novels and poetry, but the diary, which by default is personal and confessional, had to demonstrate some other qualities. The history of Nin’s publishing attempts also goes against the common assumption that diaries are written for private purposes. Nin’s diary was deliberately and consciously created and also shaped by the comments of many people, such as Henry Miller, William Bradley, and the editors of big publishing houses. Nin frequently revised it, treating it as art and trying to find the best methods to shape it, which concurs with Lynn Z. Bloom’s conclusion that diaries of professional writers are always public documents.
two
Public Promotion of the Private Self
Anaïs Nin’s Self-Constructions in the Diary
The very process of the diary resembles that of a painter making a series of sketches each day in preparation for a final portrait.
—Anaïs Nin1
Nin and her diary are so closely intertwined that the analysis of her public persona would be incomplete without the examination of the self-projections included in the published Diary. The Diary introduced Nin to a larger audience, brought her recognition, and launched her image into the sphere of media and society. The published version of the diary made available certain representations of Nin that would later be either reinforced or contested as Nin’s visibility
