VERSUS DIARY
No biographical note about Nin would be complete without a description of the work that contributed greatly to forming her identity, that made her famous, and that was the main source of carefully crafted self-portraits, namely, her diary. When it was published in 1966, it brought her immediate recognition, which, as she reports at the end of volume 6, “erased all the past disappointments” (396). Nin was invited to lecture, to give speeches, to appear on television, and to write blurbs, prefaces, and reviews. The release of her Diary therefore constituted a turning point in her literary career.
Anaïs Nin began her diary at the age of eleven in response to two traumatic events: her father’s abandonment of the family and the decision taken by her mother to move from Europe to the United States. Her diary, which started as a series of letters to her father in 1914, continued through her lifetime, albeit in various forms, until her death in 1977. Elizabeth Podnieks, who in addition to the customary textual analysis also provides a detailed description of the physical qualities of Nin’s original volumes, notes, “There is a gradual shift in the journal as it moved from being a letter to Nin’s father to a letter to the world, from a romantic document to a modernist text, and from a work that was written in order to be published to a work that was written because it was being published.”14
The original diaries from 1914 to 1965 were sold in 1976 to the University of California–Los Angeles for $100,000, and they are available for inspection.15 The remainder are in the possession of the executor of the Anaïs Nin estate. While going through Nin’s diaries from 1914 to 1965, one cannot help but notice a change in their format. Nin kept the diary in book form up to May 1946, and these journals were occasionally interspersed with photographs, paper clippings, and letters. The manuscript journal number 69, covering the period from November 1945 to May 1946, was the last one written in book form. From 1946 on, the diary was written on loose sheets of paper, and the closer one approaches the year 1965, the less of a diary one encounters—the diary was almost entirely replaced by Nin’s vast correspondence. So in its later stages, Nin’s diary seems more like a collection of letters to and from Nin, rather than a diary as one tends to think of it—a record of daily entries.
Nin also copied and rewrote her diary at different stages of her life. The originals together with the copies were kept in various places. Bair relates that in the 1950s Nin made use of three storage sites for her enormous oeuvre: a bank vault in Pasadena, where she stored half of the original journals; her friend’s basement, where she stored the other half; and Bekins Storage in Arcadia, “where she kept the first revised copies typed by Virginia Admiral [a young painter whom Nin commissioned to copy her journals in the early 1940s], as well as the second series of revised copies typed mostly by Lila Rosenblum [a young student and friend of Nin’s], with occasional assistance from Jim Herlihy.” The Nin archive contains therefore not only the original version of the published diary but also the rewritten versions of the original. Nin’s diary is better thought of as an enormous textual collage made up of revised and embellished copies of her diary as well as other texts, such as letters, lecture notes, and newspaper articles.16
The published diaries—seventeen volumes in total, to date, extending from 1914 to 1974—subdivide into three series. The first series to be published consists of seven volumes (cited here as Diaries 1–7) covering Nin’s life from 1931 to 1974, most of which appeared during Nin’s lifetime. These volumes were heavily edited, and the extent of this editing is investigated in chapter 2. Nin herself (with the collaboration of her agent, Gunther Stuhlmann) managed to revise six out of seven volumes. After her death, Rupert Pole and Gunther Stuhlmann took over the revision of Diary 7, which appeared in 1980. Another series, known as The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, started to be published shortly after Nin’s death; it contains four volumes presenting Nin’s early life from 1914 to 1931. Having thoroughly examined the manuscripts of the early diaries, Podnieks notes that these were published with few alterations and are a better reflection of Nin’s original than are the other two series.17 One has to bear in mind, however, that the first volume was translated from French, as Nin kept her diary in that language until 1920.
The last series, referred to as unexpurgated diaries, originally consisted of four tomes: Henry and June (1986), Incest (1992), Fire (1995), and Nearer the Moon (1996). These four installments cover the period from 1931 through 1939 and include the material that was left out of the first two Diaries of the first series. Although these diaries were advertised as unedited, the comparison between them, the first series of the Diary, and the manuscripts reveals a great extent of editorial manipulation. Recently two more volumes of the unexpurgated Diary were published—Mirages in 2013 and Trapeze in 2017. The first one covers the years between 1939 and 1947; the second narrates Nin’s life from 1947 to 1955. Both installments differ considerably from the previous unexpurgated volumes. The biggest change involves a revamping of the format. Unlike the other four unexpurgated journals, these two are divided into thematic chapters, each with its own separate title. This change in layout was a decision of a new editor. Whereas the previous unexpurgated volumes were edited by Rupert Pole, Gunther Stuhlmann, and John Ferron, the editor of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Mirages and Trapeze were edited by Paul Herron, the founder of Sky Blue Press, which releases an annual magazine, titled A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal.
The next two chapters are largely devoted to Nin’s self-marketing in and through the diary. There are two significant reasons for starting the analysis of Nin’s celebrity with the diary. First, separating Nin the public persona from Nin the Diary persona is virtually impossible, as she became the director and star of the Diary; in a sense, she became her Diary. Second, the published version of the diary was the first medium that launched a set of representations of Nin, which later would be either reinforced or contested as Nin’s visibility in the public increased. But before I concentrate on Nin’s diary, a few words of introduction to the phenomenon of literary celebrity are in order.
one
Literary Celebrity, the Modernist Marketplace, and Marketing the Diary
I was thinking of Fame, of that mysterious and sublime power which raises one man above his fellow creatures and stamps him as an individual, a personality and an extraordinary being.
—Anaïs Nin1
Writers, just like any other public figures, can achieve celebrity status. Joe Moran, the author of Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America, points to an interesting paradox around the contemporary notion of authorship: whereas academia has proclaimed the death of the author, nonacademic culture has been increasingly fascinated with its writers. Loren Glass in his study Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 provides a very effective illustration of this paradox. He notes that the very proponents of the death of the author, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, have been elevated to legendary status as authors themselves. So while academic criticism has attempted to remove the author from the text as the governor of meaning, thus allowing multiple readings and empowering the reader, popular interest in the figures of writers has skyrocketed. Writers have always held a special appeal: it has long been an established practice (dating back to at least the nineteenth century) to send them on book-signing or lecture tours and to turn their birthplaces into pilgrimage sites. One of the most recent manifestations of this fascination is turning writers’ lives, rather than their works, into cinema blockbusters.2
Glass maintains that marketable “personalities” of writers have for a long time been considered as significant as the quality of their literary production. Moran provides a characteristics checklist for literary celebrities. For him, celebrity authors are the ones who “are reviewed and discussed in the media at length, who
