version) persona, Nin the Diary (the published version) persona, and Nin the public persona is therefore worthwhile.
NIN THE PERSON VERSUS NIN THE DIARY PERSONA
Although Anaïs Nin left us with 35,000 pages of the manuscript of the diary and seventeen published volumes easily available to anyone, getting to know the “real” Anaïs Nin is impossible, for at least two reasons. First of all, there was no one “real” Anaïs Nin. Taking the postmodern view of identity as fluid, unstable, and impossible to fix, I assume that no one has an essence, a true and coherent core that is there to be discovered. People and their identities are multifaceted and changeable and thus impossible to pin down. The second reason is related to the nature of language and the writing process. Language was the medium in which Nin chose to capture and convey her-selves. And as she observed in the following passage, she became aware that expressing her-selves effectively and completely in writing was impossible:
It seems to me now that when I write I only write consciously or at least I follow the most accessible thread. Three or four threads may be agitated like telegraph wires at the same instant, and I disregard them. If I were to capture them all I would be really . . . revealing innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculations, fear and courage. The whole truth. I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four pages to the present one. I would have to write always backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and the overtones because of the vice of embellishment, the alchemy of idealism which distorts the truth every moment.2
Nin therefore recognized the complexity of human experience and the impossibility of capturing it in words. She knew that writing embellished and distorted the reality and that any attempt to communicate the “truth” was doomed to fail because the “truth” was complicated and multidimensional. She grappled, therefore, with the question tackled by the theorists of autobiography, who consider the relation between the reality and the record of it, between the real-life person and the text persona.
In her study of American women’s diaries, Margo Culley urges us to remember that “diaries and journals are texts, that is[,] verbal constructs” and that “all diarists are involved in a process, even if largely unconscious, of selecting details to create a persona.” In a similar vein, Felicity A. Nussbaum notes, “The diarist pretends simply to transcribe the details of experience, but clearly some events are more important to the narrative ‘I’ than others.” Lynn Z. Bloom believes that the process of recording daily life is even more complex in the case of professional writers. She argues that “for a professional writer there are no private writings,” and she demonstrates that writers shape even their most intimate writings, such as diaries, with an audience in mind, thus creating public documents. This observation particularly resonates with Nin’s diary practice because Nin consciously worked on her diary long before it was published. Nin’s diary therefore contains not the “real” Anaïs Nin but the Nin persona.3
There is also another interesting dimension of the relationship between the real person and the diary persona. Writing about American women diarists, Culley observes, “Some evidence exists that the persona in the pages of the diary shapes the life lived as well as the reverse.” Similar observations emerge from discussions of Nin’s diary by both Elizabeth Podnieks and Helen Tookey, who claim not only that Nin constructs the text and textual persona(e) but also that Nin’s own identity as a person is affected in the process of self-writing. “The writer of any life text,” Podnieks observes, “necessarily creates herself in the process of self-documentation.”4
While it is impossible to measure effectively how Nin’s identity was influenced by her self-presentations in the diary, there is some textual evidence that Nin’s diary writing had a significant impact on her life. “I really believe,” Nin observed, “that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. . . . But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman.”5 This comment provokes a fascinating question, namely, to what extent the need to experience is triggered by the need to have something interesting to describe. When one wants to write, especially a story of one’s life, as Nin did, one wants to have something interesting to write about, and a housewife’s existence usually does not provide captivating stories. Therefore, the possibility exists that writing incited Nin to experiment with her life.
What is more, bearing in mind the fact that Nin shared her diary and tried to publish it as early as the 1930s, we can speculate about how her diary writing was guided by the awareness of the audience and by the need to present herself in a particular way. Margo Culley emphasizes the importance of an audience, whether real or imagined, conscious or unconscious: “The presence of a sense of audience . . . has a crucial importance over what is said and how it is said.” And she adds that many diarists suppose some kind of audience, even if it is the diary itself, addressed often as “Dear Diary.” Nin’s audience beginning in the 1930s was real rather than imagined as she shared her diary with various people, including her relatives, friends, and prospective publishers, and this needs to be remembered while analyzing Nin’s self-presentations. In this regard Nin’s diary differs from the diaries of people who never engaged in bringing their daily inscription to public light and whose diaries either remained unpublished or were published posthumously.6
It would be neither possible nor advantageous to determine to what extent Nin the diary persona reflects Nin the real person, if only for the simple fact that Nin the “real” person is impossible to capture. As a result, the original diary contains her self-made portraits rather than reproducing Nin the person. The selves recorded by Nin did not reflect the real-life Nin but were Nin’s interpretations, or representations, of herself. These interpretations were strongly influenced by society, culture, and the times she lived in.
NIN THE DIARY PERSONA VERSUS NIN THE DIARY PERSONA
Before Nin’s Diary reached its readers, it went through a process of double construction.7 Nin first had to choose what to put in her original diary, and she frequently admitted that giving a full account of herself and her life was impossible. “I sometimes doubt that this can be considered a complete record of a life,” Nin wrote about her journal and explained, “Not because I have not written every day, but because I have not written all day, every hour, every moment. . . . The moment I catch and fix, when I can spare a few minutes and sit down to write, is only one of the thousands which go into the making of a day.”8 Once she selected what should go into the diary, she needed to decide how to “frame” it—that is, how to capture her experiences in writing—and she devoted a lot of time and energy to invent the best technique for her diary (as discussed in the previous chapter). Then the second stage of the construction process, the conscious and deliberate preparation of the diary for publication, took place. Nin had to select parts of the material, rewrite them by either elaborating or condensing them, and adorn them with photographs to make them more appealing for her potential readers.
How this process of double construction unfolded can be clearly seen in Nin’s account of her friendship with Henry Miller. In the first six volumes of the Diary, Nin presents their relationship as only friendship and literary collaboration, while the unexpurgated volume Henry and June and Nin’s biographies reveal that they were also engaged in a very passionate sexual affair. Nin therefore changed the content of her diary by either concealing certain facts or presenting them in the way she thought appropriate. Apart from manipulating the content of the Diaries, she also changed the form and style of her writing by editing her entries. A comparison of the original and published account of her first meeting with Henry Miller exposes significant differences between the two versions. Here is the passage from the original:
I’m singing, singing, and not secretly but aloud. I’ve met Henry Miller. When I first saw him stepping out of the car and walking towards the door where I stood I went blind, in my usual way. Blindly, I looked at him with a second vision. I saw a man I liked.
