me as much as the self-portraits Nin made available in the published version of her Diary, I wish to emphasize that to analyze these self-portraits effectively, we must take into consideration two time horizons: when Nin wrote her original entries and when she prepared the diary for publication.33
MARKETING THE DIARY
Although Nin was not famous before 1966, her diary had acquired legendary status in literary circles long before it was published, as Edmund Wilson’s and Karl Shapiro’s reviews attest. The opening sentence in Wilson’s 1944 New Yorker review of Under a Glass Bell—twenty-two years before the first Diary appeared in print—announces, “The unpublished diary of Anaïs Nin has long been a legend of the literary world, but a project to have it published by subscription seems never to have come to anything.” Shapiro’s review of the first volume of the Diary in Book Week in 1966 begins in a strikingly similar way: “For a generation the literary world on both side of the Atlantic has lived with the rumor of an extraordinary diary.” The diary that developed into a legend, or was constructed as one, among literati became Nin’s bargaining card. The marketing function of the diary emerges most clearly from the presentation of Nin’s attempts to rewrite her work and to have it published.34
Shortly after her arrival in Paris in the winter of 1924, Nin began first reading and then copying her early journals. In January of the following year, she noted, “Still affected by the spirit of my old journals, and the Self I found in them, I walked out this morning and saw Paris in a more gentle and sympathetic way” (ED 3, 90)—a passage that merits a brief explanation because it hints at Nin’s uneasy attitude toward the City of Lights and reveals her recurrent need to revisit her diary, especially during turbulent and emotionally difficult times, and the relocation to Paris proved to affect Nin’s sense of self in a profound way. Despite the fact that France was the country of her birth and that she was looking forward to moving to Paris with anticipation, once she arrived there from New York, she had mixed feelings about the place. On some days she loved the city and on others she could not stand it, but for the most part her initial stay in the French capital was marked by distress. The displacement forced her to face new values, different customs, and earlier unacknowledged feelings. What turned out to be the most problematic for Nin was the relaxed attitude of the Parisians toward sexuality.
Gerald Kennedy notes that Nin’s “profound ambivalence towards Paris . . . mirrors an ongoing psychological conflict” and adds that Nin projected onto Paris many of her internal struggles, such as “with suppressed desires and disturbing temptations.”35 Indeed, Nin’s diary from this period abounds in comments on sensuality, and Paris, in Nin’s view, represented the physical aspect of love that repulsed her. “Paris est plain de saletés” (Paris is full of filth), she observed, “and for that I hate it” (ED 3, 149). The encounter with Paris threatened the boundaries of her identity and made her realize her own vulnerability. Rereading the diary provided her with a sense of coherent self and equipped her with the strength necessary to confront a new culture.
Regardless of whether these rereadings also helped her realize the value of her diary or whether Paris—“A ‘Magnet,’ a ‘Mecca,’ and an ‘incubator,’ a ‘hothouse’ for writers”36—augmented her literary inspirations, the fact is that in the 1920s Nin began a lifelong process of editing and preparing transcripts of the diary. Initially, she treated her diary as a mine of ideas and stories that could be of use in her fictional writings. In August 1925, she recorded that she had “copied more excerpts out of . . . journals with the hope of making a worthwhile piece of work out of them” (ED 3, 152). She also expressed her fears over her potential inability to move beyond writing in her diary. She did not want to be like Amiel, “who wrote nothing but his journal” (ED 3, 152), and she was determined to transform her daily entries into fiction. But a few years later, the diary became her “life’s real work” (ED 4, 433) and in October 1931, she observed, “A strange life I’m leading, because copying out the first part of my Journal I seem to be spinning the whole web out from the beginning while at the same time working on the end.”37 Making transcripts and rewriting the existing volumes while at the same time producing the new ones would engage Nin for the rest of her life.
Meeting Henry Miller in 1931 was a turning point in both her personal and her professional life. Miller and Nin became lovers and literary collaborators. Although it is easy to get an impression that their collaboration was imbalanced, with Nin putting more into their relationship than Miller—while they both encouraged each other’s writing, corrected, and commented on each other’s works, Nin also supported Miller financially, financed the publication of Tropic of Cancer, and even gave him her own typewriter—the period of the 1930s saw intensified writing activity on Nin’s part. Whereas during sixteen years from 1914 to 1931 she penned thirty volumes of the diary (an average of two diaries per year), in half of that time, in the years from 1931 to 1939, she produced thirty-two volumes (an average of four journals per year).
Miller was an incisive critic of Nin’s diary, in both senses of the word. On the one hand, treating her Diary as a bad habit, he discouraged her from writing it and tried to induce her to write more fiction. But when she persisted, he did his best to provide constructive criticism of her work. For instance, while commenting on the early version of Nin’s diary in one of his letters to her, dated October 1932, he stated, “What you are trying to do is a piece of art that is perfect in itself as art and yet retains the imperfection, the human fragmented, chaotic characteristics of a diary written on the spot in white heat. . . . It’s a problem. It’s like soldering two kinds of metals that refuse to be fused.”38 Yet he offered a solution—“the technical trick . . . of maintaining the illusion, for the reader, that he is perusing an intimate journal, but doing your story with infinite care, infinite pains.” In the rest of the letter, he listed techniques that could help Nin create an appealing and well-written story. He recommended her to chart out the key themes of the diary and expand them, to get rid of short and ambiguous lines, and to avoid too abstract and too dramatic phrases. Miller therefore strongly encouraged her to compose a well-constructed work that retained the spontaneous character of a journal. Reading the first six installments of the published Diary, one easily notices that she took his advice seriously.
In that same period, Nin was also determined to make her journal public. As early as 1933, she showed the diary to William Aspenwall Bradley, a literary agent, who, as Bair observes, “with his Russian wife, Jenny, formed the most famous international literary agency in France for half a century.” Though he expressed considerable enthusiasm for the diary, in the end he pronounced it, as Bair reports, “unpublishable.” Nevertheless, the acquaintance with Bradley must have been very informative for Nin, and his comments definitely influenced her future rewritings of the diary. Nin quoted their conversations regarding her journal extensively and scrupulously noted down Bradley’s observations.39
During one such discussion, Bradley read from her journal, pointing out the passages he considered effective and identifying those he believed too dramatic or too extreme. Nin wrote down one of his remarks regarding the thirty-second volume of her journal: “Henry [Miller], he says, doesn’t come off as a character—it’s overdrawn, overwritten, over-intense, exaggerated, inhuman.” Although in the beginning she resented his comments, she later observed, “Bradley’s virulence has had the effect of accentuating my awareness of the note quality of the journal. It is mostly notes which my enemies may say I present as literature. My life has been one long note taking—sum total: little writing. I owe him this realization.” As a consequence, at the beginning of the 1930s, Nin began to acquire a new awareness of the literary potential of the diary and began to regard it not only as her private companion but also as a creative endeavor that required serious work.40
When Nin began to perceive her diary as art, her writing became more conscious and deliberate. On the first page of Journal 54, which is in a big A4 format, unlike the previous journals, which are in an A5 format or smaller, Nin noted, “Not the small notebook
