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PREFACE

Trapeze was transcribed from the handwritten diary of Anaïs Nin, which was no longer kept in bound journals, but mostly on loose paper. When Nin left New York with Rupert Pole in 1947, she reported that she had put her diary “into the vault.” During her long trip to California, she kept no diary, no notes . . . the account of the voyage found in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4, 1944-1947 is based on recollection long after the fact. Trapeze contains only original material.

Because the paper was loose, oftentimes it became out of sequence. Once the entire collection was transcribed, a significant amount of detective work had to be done to put it back in order—and one extremely valuable aid in this endeavor was a massive calendar Nin kept that was found in her Silver Lake house recently. It not only assisted in sequencing, it also filled in some of the long and mysterious gaps in the diary. Nin’s diary-keeping had become erratic and intermittent due to her “bi-coastal” life, the constant swinging between a husband in New York and a lover in California. A habit she developed was the use of her eight-hour flights to record the events of the previous month or two, and these passages were often very long and detailed. But sometimes she went for months without writing anything at all, and that’s where the calendar became critical . . . in Trapeze, entries from the calendar are used to identify where Nin was or what she was doing during those gaps. Even so, there are events found neither in the diary nor in the calendar, such as Nin’s visit to Gore Vidal in Antigua, Nicaragua, in 1947, and they therefore do not appear in this volume.

Once everything was in sequence, then the true editing could begin, the elimination of repetitions, irrelevant correspondence, etc., but Nin’s prose remains intact except in cases of misspellings or serious grammatical errors; sometimes translations of obscure phrases or terms in foreign languages are provided. The transcription of some 4,500 handwritten pages of the original diary yielded nearly 1,400 typewritten pages, from which this volume has been edited.

What Trapeze boils down to is the previously unknown account of one of the most fascinating periods of Nin’s life—the incredible feat of secretly maintaining two men, two houses, and two lives, not to mention the enormous strain this put on her both physically and psychologically. Here, we find out exactly how Anaïs Nin was able to perform this seemingly impossible juggling act.

PAUL HERRON, EDITOR

San Antonio, Texas

May 2016