Then my eyes opened and I saw a man who was likeable, not overbearing, but strong, a human man, who was [intelligible word] aware of everything (In his writing he was flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent). “He is a man whom life makes drunk” I say that inwardly “He is like me.”9
And here is the corresponding entry from Diary 1:
When I saw Henry Miller walking towards the door where I stood waiting, I closed my eyes for an instant to see him by some other inner eye. He was warm, joyous, relaxed, natural.
He would have passed anonymously through a crowd. He was slender, lean, not tall. He looked like a Buddhist monk, a rosy-skinned monk, with his partly bald head aureoled by lively silver hair, his full sensuous mouth. His blue eyes are cool and observant, but his mouth is emotional and vulnerable. His laughter is contagious and his voice caressing and warm like a Negro voice.
He was so different from his brutal, violent, vital writing, his caricatures, his Rabelaisian farces, his exaggerations. The smile at the corner of his eyes is almost clownish; the mellow tones of his voice are almost like a purring content. He is a man whom life intoxicates, who has no need of wine, who is floating in a self-created euphoria.10
In this case, Nin elaborated the notes taken after the actual meeting with Henry Miller on 3 December 1931. The original entry served as a rough draft that Nin expanded and embellished. To every original sentence, Nin wrote two or three, thus making her text clearer for her audience, as in the fragment in which she explained that she tried to grasp Henry intuitively, with her “inner eye.” The original entry in which Nin wrote that she went blind might have been confusing for the readers, whereas the published version makes perfect sense. In rewriting the original, Nin also employed literary devices, such as similes and elaborate epithets, which increased the readability and attractiveness of the published Diary.
Interestingly, a very similar description of Miller appeared in a letter Nin sent to him three months after they met and shortly after they embarked on their sexual adventure. On 9 March 1932, Nin wrote,
How did I single you out? I saw you with that intense selective way—I saw a mouth that was at once intelligent, animal, soft . . . strange mixture—a human man, sensitively aware of everything—I love awareness—a man, I told you, whom life made drunk. Your laughter was not a laughter which could hurt, it was mellow and rich. I felt warm, dizzy, and I sang within myself.11
On the one hand, this repetition of words, phrases, and ideas gives us an insight into Nin’s creative process. The comparison of the original entry to the passage from a letter shows that while she was recycling similar vocabulary in making Miller’s portrait, she nonetheless made efforts to find the best descriptors and to polish her sentences in order to best capture his essence. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of all three fragments reveals how her various rewritings enriched the final shape of the Diary. Nin could draw on these different versions to create the ultimate portrait of Miller in the published version.
Yet aesthetic concerns were not all that influenced the final shape of the Diary: there were also personal and legal considerations. Nin had to consider what she wanted to and could reveal. She produced a very sanitized self-portrait in which she got rid of controversial material, such as her sexual affairs and incestuous relationship with her father, and some unflattering details, like a nose surgery that she underwent in her thirties. Portraits of others were also retouched. Miller, for instance, who contributed significantly to the revision of the final draft, corrected his own description and advised Nin on how to construct portraits of other personages so as not to anger them, because he was perfectly aware that Nin would have to obtain releases from people whom she wanted to include in her Diary if they were still alive.
The following excerpt from the letter to Hiram Haydn not only describes how Nin procured necessary permissions but also gives an insight into revisions that were made to volume 1:
The minor characters are all done flatteringly and will not question anything. Zadkine is a historic figure, Duchamp, Allendy and Rank are dead, we took out Rebecca West who is very difficult, others do not appear under their real name, Fred [Alfred Perlès] was written up by Henry [Miller], and by himself and as he wrote such a distorted story about me he will lie quiet . . . Fred lives in Greece, and it would take months to get a release and he is not badly portrayed as Henry asked me to take out what could bother him.12
As is evident from the above passage, some people did not agree to be portrayed in the Diary. Apart from Rebecca West, Nin’s close cousin Eduardo, her brother Thorvald, and her husband Hugh Guiler refused to appear in Nin’s published journal. Nin dealt with this difficulty in various ways: she removed such troublesome individuals, as she did in the case of Rebecca West, excluding her from volume 1; she portrayed them in a more complimentary light (for instance, she brought back Rebecca West for the second volume, mentioning her briefly and describing her only in superlatives); she invented fictional characters based on real-life people, as she did with her cousin Eduardo, whom she replaced with Marguerite, describing her in Diary 1 as “a dark haired girl” whom Nin “met . . . at the home of my neighbor” (74); she used other Diary characters, attributing to them words and actions that were originally spoken and done by somebody else (for example, many events that she experienced with her husband, such as the visit to the brothel described in Diary 1, were portrayed as if she had lived through them with Henry Miller). All these amendments had a great impact on the form and content of the final text.
There was also a question of audience, which must have played a crucial part in determining the material selected for publication. Margo Culley stresses the importance of an audience to the diary writing. By my arrangement of levels of self-construction, she refers to the first level: writing in the original diary. In the second level of self-construction, that is, in the process of final editing, the audience comes to the forefront. Because readers’ reactions (in the form of letters and reviews) to the consecutively published Diaries were available to Nin, she must have taken them into consideration while arranging the material, elaborating or consolidating it, and making it coherent, readable, and contemporary. The Diary is, therefore, multilayered, consisting of Nin’s version of her life as she saw it at the moment of writing, rewritten at various stages, and finally “cropped” to suit the audience and legal requirements.
As a result, six volumes of the Diary that appeared during Nin’s lifetime launched highly manipulated representations of Nin, easily available to anyone who was willing to read her narrative. Although the volumes promised to be the most private documents, they were in fact the most public façade of Nin. In revising them for publication, Nin carefully crafted her portrayal, and as a result, while reading the six installments of her Diary one can discern the best defined and most distinctive self-portraits.
NIN THE DIARY PERSONA VERSUS NIN THE PUBLIC PERSONA
P. David Marshall’s division of star performance into two dimensions—the textual and the extratextual—may help us understand the connection between Nin’s Diary and Nin the public persona. For Marshall, the “textual” refers to the star’s performance in the domain s/he represents. Thus, for an actor it would be acting in a film, for an athlete it would be playing a sport, for a musician it would be singing at a concert, and in the case of Nin, the “textual” would be writing. Then there is the “extratextual,” which stands for the performance of everyday life of public personality. According to Marshall, these two dimensions produce public personality, or celebrity. Consequently, he posits that to make sense of the star involves not merely the analysis of the primary text (for example, film performance, or, in the case of Nin, her Diary) but, first and foremost, the study of magazine profiles, television interviews, and fans’ involvement in the celebrity reception.13 For these reasons, this chapter deals with Nin’s self-presentation in the Diary, whereas the next one examines Nin’s
