in the previous chapter), and the following comment made by Nin about the revision of the first installment may serve as another proof that she diligently planned her journal: “The balance is what is difficult to achieve. For instance, there may have been too much of Allendy, yet later it turns out the contrast was necessary to bring out the larger vision of Rank.”17 It must therefore be emphasized once again that Nin took great pains over the revisions of her journal.
The first Nin encountered in Diary 1 is Nin the writer—a portrait that would be strongly developed in the following five volumes of the expurgated series released during Nin’s life. Diary 1 opens with a description of the French village, Louveciennes, where Nin lives, and Nin’s house. Like a skillful novelist, Nin sets the scene for the events that will take place. The first few pages are abundant in literary allusions and comparisons. Nin compares Louveciennes to the village where Madame Bovary died, describes a village character as “one of Balzac’s misers,” mentions Maupassant’s fondness for Louveciennes, and likens people commuting to Paris on old-fashioned trains to Proustian personages (Diary 1, 3). The literary ambience is therefore perceptible from the very beginning.
After reading these opening pages, we can clearly see that Nin’s Diary is not what its label may suggest—a collection of spontaneously penned daily entries—but a well-structured and beautifully written work of literature. Nin’s self-presentation as a writer therefore takes place on two levels: first, through the text and texture of the Diary, which serves as the best evidence that what readers hold in their hands is the work of a fine writer; and second, through her direct self-portrait of herself as a writer.
As far as the latter is concerned, Nin introduces herself as an aspiring writer. One of the first things she relates is that she has finished her book D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study and that she is not interested in an ordinary life of mending socks, canning fruit, and polishing furniture. She seeks moments of exaltation, and they occur while she is writing (Diary 1, 5). Moreover, anyone familiar with the plot of Madame Bovary knows that the heroine of this novel is unhappy within the confinement of her marriage. Nin, therefore, implicitly hints at her domestic imprisonment—implicitly because, apart from the preface, her husband does not appear in Diary 1 (he does appear in later volumes but always under the pseudonym Ian Hugo, never as Nin’s husband). However, she also states that unlike Madame Bovary she is not going to commit suicide. Writing prevents her from this tragic step. She presents her writing as the only means to escape “a beautiful prison” of her existence, to bring a state of hibernation to an end, and to start living more fully (Diary 1, 7).
Throughout Diary 1, Nin talks at length about her attempts at writing. She describes her experiences of composing her prose poem House of Incest, the collection of novelettes The Winter of Artifice, and the preface to Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.18 She also devotes a lot of space to discussions of a writer’s nature. She endows writers and artists with a special role and portrays them as special, chosen, and unique. She states that whenever she writes she is in “a state of grace” and experiences “illuminations and fevers” (Diary 1, 5). Her creative sensibility brings on “states of ecstasy” that others can only achieve through drugs (37). And although at some point Nin compares writing to pains of childbearing—“No joy. Just pain, sweat, exhaustion”—in general, she presents writing as a very gratifying experience (315).
Providing such idealistic descriptions, Nin contributes to the construction and maintenance of the tradition that has regarded writers as creative geniuses, superior to other people. Nin’s idea of an author is grounded in the romantic, and in effect modernist, notion of an artist as a lonely, insightful, misunderstood, and frequently underrated genius, who sets him/herself (although when Nin talks about the artist in general she always uses a male pronoun) against society. And Nin promotes this notion throughout the whole series of her Diaries.19
In the first volume, Nin also tries to establish the origins of herself as a writer as if to authenticate her occupation. She traces her interest in writing back to her teenage years, quoting, for instance, an entry from her early journal, written at the age of thirteen, which reads, “I should rewrite my arrival in New York,” and then she comments, “Even then, I had literary preoccupations” (243). Similarly, while recalling her arrival to America, she recounts that as their luggage was being unloaded, she held on obstinately to her brother’s violin case, since she “wanted people to know [she] was an artist” (218 [original emphasis]). She also mentions that from a very early age she invented stories to amuse her brothers and that she wrote for a school magazine (219). Such self-presentation creates an illusion that Nin’s writing was not a career but a vocation, which again gives her the air of a chosen one, of someone special.
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