a result of the correlation between these two dimensions, Nin becomes in a sense the living embodiment of the persona that she created in the Diary. On the one hand, Nin created herself in the Diary, and thanks to its success she managed to promote herself through it. On the other hand, by publishing the heavily edited Diary and launching certain images of herself for the public, Nin was forced to live up to the expectations of the audience, thus building her public persona on her Diary character and also on the public reception of this character.
With the publication of each volume, Nin released self-presentations of herself that she had to maintain once she appeared in front of her fans. By publishing the Diary and insisting that it contains a genuine self and her real life story, Nin had to enact the persona she created in the Diary. This phenomenon has been noticed by Elyse Lamm Pineau in her thought-provoking essay “A Mirror of Her Own: Anaïs Nin’s Autobiographical Performances.” Analyzing unpublished audiotapes of Nin’s lectures, interviews, and discussions, Pineau identifies “continuity between her autobiographical and performance personae” and regards Nin as the embodiment of her Diary. Pineau also notes, “Performance marked the culmination of Nin’s autobiographical project, for it provided an ongoing, public, and collective enactment of her Diary persona on college campuses nationwide.” This ability to re-create her Diary identity contributed significantly to Nin’s popular success after 1966.14
NIN’S SELF-PORTRAITS IN THE DIARY
The release of Nin’s Diaries in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the rise of the women’s movement. Several of Nin’s critics, such as Philip Jason, Diane Richard-Allerdyce, and Helen Tookey, have pointed out the importance of feminism to the success of her Diary. Tookey, for instance, has remarked that the “context of second-wave feminism enabled . . . [Nin] to situate herself as a woman artist who had struggled for emancipation, for recognition, for her own identity.” Nin’s Diaries, however, must have struck a chord not only with the women’s movement but also with other elements characteristic of the era—identified by Arthur Marwick in his 1998 study The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974—such as the importance of the young, the emergence of the “underground” and the “counterculture,” idealism, and frankness in books and behavior. My argument is that while Nin’s ideas about femininity were frequently at odds with the position taken by feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, her portrayal of herself as a supporter of the young and a participant of Bohemia must have appealed to the young generation and the hippies, who, as Elizabeth Wilson points out, were the new bohemians. Nin’s text, although originally written a few decades earlier, reflected many concerns and fascinations of the 1960s generation.15
Although Nin started the diary as an eleven-year-old in 1914 and although at different stages of her career she made plans to publish her childhood journal, the first volume that was eventually released, in 1966, covered the period from 1931 to 1934 (the years she spent in Paris). She likely would not have achieved the same recognition had she released the story of her early days. Despite the fact that Nin’s early journal is a valuable record of her teenage years, marked by struggles in a foreign country, it probably would not have had the hold over her audience that the Paris years had. After all, at the time of the publication of the first Diary, Nin was not an established figure in the literary marketplace, and reading about the adolescence of a little-known personality would not have been as appealing as reading about Nin’s acquaintance with Henry Miller, which constitutes a great part of volume 1. In choosing the opening date, Nin did not opt for her early days in Paris, either. She arrived in the French capital in 1924, and her arrival might have served as another logical opening point for her published journal. Instead, she decided to begin her Diary when her personal and professional life accelerated: in 1931 she published her study of D. H. Lawrence and met Henry Miller, along with other well-known personages. The choice of the opening date was therefore a well-thought-out and strategic decision.
The first installment of the series, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934 (hereafter Diary 1), gives an intimate picture of a bohemian coterie in France, features Henry Miller together with his eccentric wife, June, and describes Nin’s commencing adventure with psychoanalysis. Writing and psychoanalysis are therefore two leading themes of Diary 1, and they frame Nin’s self-presentations. Because of the simple fact of being the first in the series, and therefore probably the most frequently read one, Diary 1 was incredibly influential in shaping Nin’s further career. First of all, because it sold, it made the publication of further volumes possible. Second, it launched the first set of representations of Nin. The story of Nin’s life in Paris between 1931 and 1934 contained in the first Diary and later elaborated in two unexpurgated volumes, Henry and June and Incest, has been frequently exploited in popular culture. The Miller-Nin-June trio captured the imaginations of readers especially powerfully, and as a consequence, Nin’s relationship with Henry Miller became one of her most recognizable “characteristics.” For these reasons, the present analysis centers on Nin’s self-portraits in Diary 1, while later volumes are brought into consideration only when an indication of how these portraits developed or changed is necessary.
The second installment of Nin’s journal, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934–1939, published a year after the first one, in 1967, continues the story of Nin’s life in Paris. With the third volume, the setting moves across the Atlantic, and volumes 3–6 cover the years Nin spent in the United States. Diary 3 begins in 1939 after the outbreak of World War II with Nin’s departure from France and her arrival in New York. Diary 6 ends with Nin’s announcement of the publication of the first volume in 1966. Volumes 3–6 are far less coherent than the first two installments. While Diary 1 and Diary 2 are well constructed and read more like a novel or an autobiography than a diary, with the third part this semblance of coherence begins to dissipate: Nin inserts many articles and reviews and frequently quotes her correspondence. In Diary 3 and Diary 4, Henry Miller’s letters prevail. In his letters, which are usually full of praise toward the addressee, Miller mentions how much Nin’s help means to him, lists other enthusiasts of Nin’s writings, and encourages her not to give up her literary work. In Diary 5, the role of Nin’s admirer and supporter is taken over by another writer, James Herlihy.
Nin’s Diary always bridges at least two cultural perspectives: the times when the Diary took its first shape (for example, the 1930s, in the case of the first installment) and the times when it was revised, published, and read by the public (thus, “the sixties,” understood here broadly as the period stretching beyond an actual decade and encompassing the years 1958 to 1974). Consequently, while analyzing Nin’s Diary and her self-portraits included in it, we must take into account both discourses that accompanied the production of her text and cultural contexts that enabled its successful consumption, because “to ‘read’ a text or a work of art,” as Lisa Rado argues, is to “eavesdrop upon, to hear snatches of a much larger cultural interchange.” In the rest of this chapter I trace how the culture of modernism, psychoanalytic discourse, the myth of the bohemian artist, and interwar perspectives on femininity and creativity shaped Nin’s self in the diary. I also try to explain why Nin’s Diary, rejected for three decades, found its audience in the sixties.16
Naturally, Nin’s self-portraits, just like the cultural discourses that shaped Nin’s journal and influenced its success, are not limited to the ones discussed below. It would be extremely difficult, verging on the impossible, to present all self-portraits and to disentangle all cultural exchanges that contributed to the creation of Nin’s self and to point out how these corresponded with the culture of the sixties, so only the most prominent portraits and the most obvious cultural references are examined.
Nin the Writer
The first volume of the Diary can be divided into four parts according to the people who prevail in them. Thus, the first part features Henry Miller and his wife, June; the second introduces the psychoanalyst
