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INTRODUCTION

Anaïs Nin’s diary is a remarkable work of art. Because she believed “the topsoil of our personalities is nothing,” her diary chronicles her interior life, the “uncensored dream, the free unconscious,” and it unspools like a tickertape. It is a deeply personal document, one that not only reveals the psychological topography of one woman, but one that unveils something of the interior life of all women, all people.

This new uncensored diary is particularly explosive. It will no doubt enflame the usual brigade of outraged moralists who have heaped scorn upon Nin for daring to live by her own moral code, write about her adventures, and then allow that writing to be published for all to read. The vitriol with which she has been attacked proves her diary hits a nerve, but as H. G. Wells said, “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”

We know that in the great experiment that was her life, Anaïs Nin did things few of us would admit—or even consider. Most of her secrets involved her sex life, an area women have fought to control on their own terms. Nin had what appears to have been an incredibly full and exciting life, but she believed she suffered from “neurosis” or “sickness,” and she fought to understand its cause. In the meantime, and without even a high school education, Nin forged a modern art form that will finally find its place in this century of internet communication, full, as it is, of personal confession. But Nin was decades and light-years ahead, trailblazing the exploration of an area of human life so mysterious, so elemental, so beyond politics and social mores, so personal, and yet so universal. To Nin’s detractors one must ask, “If one’s lens is too small to fit the mysteries of one complex life, if that life must be condemned, what in the critic’s own complex psyche do they condemn and attempt to destroy?”

Nin’s story must begin with her father, Joaquín Nin, a respected Spanish composer who abused his children and then abandoned his family, leaving them nearly destitute while he married a wealthy young music student and toured in luxury throughout Europe. Nin, her mother and two brothers were forced to sail for America in 1914, and while on board the ship eleven-year-old Anaïs began writing a letter to lure her father back to the family. This letter was never sent, but was the beginning of her diary—a letter to the world, a sixty-three-year-long cry from the heart.

Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II when Nin fled Paris where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler. She had married “Hugo” in 1923, and though he loved her and she trusted him, she found the union deeply unsatisfying. In spite of this, the 1930s had been an idyllic period for her and she continued her diary. At a time when it was considered shocking for her to have done so, Nin wrote a book-length analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s fiction, including the infamous Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and had it published. She also wrote a long, surrealistic prose piece entitled House of Incest.

In what proved to be a dramatic turning point in her life, Nin met writer Henry Miller and his wife June in 1931. As is detailed in Nin’s first unexpurgated diary, Henry and June, Nin and Miller championed one another as writers and began an affair. Nin and Guiler also supported Miller financially and paid for the printing of his ground-breaking novel, Tropic of Cancer. Then in 1933, after a twenty-year separation, Nin met her father again. Daughter and father were strangers, he a notorious Don Juan and she a thirty-year-old woman. They fell into a brief, incestuous affair, which Nin unflinchingly described in her second unexpurgated diary, Incest. Shortly thereafter, Nin sought psychoanalysis from Otto Rank, a close colleague of Sigmund Freud, but he too fell in love with her and this story was revealed in the following unexpurgated diary, Fire. In Nearer the Moon, Nin told the story of her intense relationship with Left Bank Marxist Gonzalo Moré, with whom she is still deeply involved at the outset of Mirages.

Mirages begins in 1939 with Nin’s arrival in America and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as “hell,” during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering the loss of her father, little Anaïs wrote, “Close your eyes to the ugly things,” and against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world’s darkness with her own search for light.

Mirages is just that: a series of mirages that dance tantalizingly on the road, one after another, promising refuge and water, but then cruelly evaporate like so many hopes and dreams. As with all artists, Nin’s fodder was her feelings, and she created from the vantage of shattering pain originating with her father’s rejection. In this volume, Nin writes movingly of her “sickness,” puts herself through repeated self- and professional analyses, and comes what seems perilously close to annihilation. In the end, this book serves as a 20th century Persephone’s journey through the underworld.

The reader who wishes to cross this particular desert with Nin must be willing to trust that an oasis will be found at the end. Finally, after meeting Rupert Pole in early 1947, Nin will enjoy a fulfilling relationship at last, one that will end her frantic search for love, though it will not conclude her story. Instead, she will then embark on a “trapeze” life in which she swings between Rupert Pole and Hugo Guiler for years—a nearly impossible feat and one of the most gripping periods in her story.

Out of abandonment, tremendous pain and “great hunger,” Anaïs Nin created a lifelong work of art that is unparalleled, one that breaks the false barriers between fiction and non-fiction, diary and novel, conscious and unconscious, societally-sanctioned and the unsanctioned, public and private. It took courage for Nin to write about that which exists beyond words in a period of such censorship that society demanded that fictional characters be seen paying for their “sins.” She seemed to foresee what we today take for granted in the 21st century: that consciousness is a streaming tickertape of words and images spooling from us as long as we live, and something to be shared. For those who dare to ride along the precipitous twists and turns of Anaïs Nin’s fantastic story: proceed.

KIM KRIZAN

Los Angeles, California February 2013