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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 win literary prizes, whose books are studied in universities and who are employed on talk shows.” If we take into consideration the fact that Nin was described as “one of the most frequently interviewed of twentieth-century authors,” that in 1976 the Los Angeles Times proclaimed her “Woman of the Year,” and that in 2010 Esquire placed her among “The 75 Greatest Women of All Time,” along with Sappho, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, Marie Curie, Marilyn Monroe, Gloria Steinem, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and Meryl Streep, we can see that Nin definitely qualifies as a celebrity author, especially if she is situated against the American culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s.³

Although Nin may not be readily recognizable nowadays in the way that, for example, Meryl Streep is, worldwide recognition, as Jeffrey J. Williams points out in his essay “Academostars: Name Recognition,” is part and parcel of the Hollywood model of stardom, which cannot always be brought to other star systems, because doing so fails to consider the distinctiveness of various types of fame. Commenting on academic fame, Williams notes, “The celebrity draws his or her power not from culture at large but from his or her particular audience.” Therefore, in casting Nin as a celebrity author, we must take into consideration both the specificity of literary celebrity and the particular cultural and historical context that contributed to the elevation of Nin to the status of a star.⁴

According to Moran, literary celebrity differs significantly from other types of celebrity mainly because of its precarious position between literature, still frequently associated with “high” culture, and the marketplace, which has been frequently blamed for bringing this “high” culture down. He argues that a celebrity author is the one who is both commercially successful and capable of remaining a cultural authority, in other words, able to maintain a balance between being an artist and being a star. Nin, as will become evident in the course of this book, managed to maintain such an equilibrium. Her self-presentation as an extraordinary artist, as exhibited in her Diary, was later softened by Nin herself in interviews and lectures during which she presented herself as “one of us”—a ploy frequently used by stars to suggest intimacy with their audiences. Nin’s presentation of herself as an Everywoman was essential to her public persona at a time when women were searching for role models.⁵

Regarded from this perspective, Nin’s self-presentations in the Diary become a significant component of her celebrity. Arguing that literary celebrities are partly produced through their own writings and their self-marketing strategies, Moran highlights the complicity of authors in constructing their own image. A central argument of his study is that “authors actively negotiate their own celebrity rather than having it simply imposed on them.” Nin was an active agent in creating and distributing her image, and she can be regarded as a powerful formation force in the production/consumption dialectic, which, as many cultural critics (such as Richard Dyer and P. David Marshall) indicate, is typical of celebrity development.⁶

Nin’s self-constructions on the pages of her Diary are, however, just one aspect of the making of her public persona. A “star’s image,” as eminent film studies scholar Richard Dyer notes, “is also what people say or write about him or her, the way the image is used in other contexts such as advertisements, novels, pop songs, and finally the way the star can become part of the coinage of everyday life.” The coproducing role of readers/viewers in creating the celebrity image is therefore paramount. P. David Marshall, the editor of The Celebrity Culture Reader and author of many articles on media and cultural studies, explains it thus: “To make sense of celebrity culture inevitably leads us to a study of how an extended industry helps construct the celebrity as a text—what we could call the cultural economy of celebrity production—as well as how audiences transform, reform, and remake these texts and meanings.”⁷

In his seminal study, Stars, Dyer puts texts that constitute a star image into four categories: promotion, publicity, films, and criticism and commentaries. These categories can be easily adapted to discuss Nin’s celebrity. Films that feature a given star correspond in a way to Nin’s Diary because, as I have already indicated, it contains a carefully constructed character. Dyer’s “commentary and criticism” can be taken to correspond to evaluations of Nin’s works by scholars. “Promotion,” Dyer remarks, “is probably the most straightforward of all the texts which construct a star image, in that it is the most deliberate, direct, intentioned, and self-conscious.” In the case of film stars, promotion involves studio announcements, fashion pictures, ads, and public appearances. In the case of Nin, it entails blurbs, advertisements of books in the press, and book-signing tours. Publicity, as Dyer observes, is not, or at least does not appear to be, deliberate image making, and it includes interviews, gossip columns, and articles—in brief, “what the press finds out.” Focusing on literary celebrity, Moran reveals, however, that nowadays many of the marketing strategies that fall under the category of publicity (such as reviews, cover stories, and interviews) are in fact carefully managed by publishing houses, which can go as far as securing a book review or prearranging an interview with the author.⁸

Nin is not only a literary celebrity but also a female literary celebrity, and gender, as many critics point out, is an essential factor that determines how a writer is represented in the marketplace. Although academia for some time now has attempted to conceptualize gender not in terms of two opposite binaries but rather in terms of fluid and unstable identities, in popular consciousness the woman/man dichotomy is still very ingrained and was even more so back in the 1960s. The fact that Nin is a woman writer is crucial to the way she has been portrayed and received.

Charlotte Templin in her study of Erica Jong, Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jong, provides a historical overview of the response to literary works authored by women writers and demonstrates that the assessment of women’s writings in terms of their lives has been a common practice. Following Joanna Russ’s argument that women writers, especially in the nineteenth century, were judged on the basis of what is appropriate for a woman, Templin asserts, “Jong’s sin is not being a proper woman,” and she further explains, “The one period during which criticism of her softened was when she became a mother, which happened during the writing of her novel, Fanny. Not only was Fanny well-received, but journalistic articles about her at this time portrayed a new Jong: the happy mother and suburban matron.” Motherhood is a particularly crucial element in portraying and judging women writers, and Nin is no exception. The harsh criticism of her abortion, discussed in chapter 4, proves the case.⁹

Toril Moi is another critic who regards gender as a significant variable that determines the response to a writer’s works. In the part of her study Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman devoted to an analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s reception, Moi shows that Beauvoir’s status as an intellectual woman involved in politics has provoked much hostility from the reviewers. Moi claims that what a woman writer thinks, says, or writes becomes of secondary importance and that she is frequently reduced to a personality, to who she is. A similar phenomenon is apparent in the case of Nin. Although Nin and Beauvoir stand for extremely different types of femininity—while Beauvoir is frequently accused of being “unfeminine,” Nin is often regarded as the essence of femininity—they are both regularly discussed in terms of their looks, characters, and lives. Moi also points to another interesting fact, namely, that Beauvoir’s multivolume autobiography has been frequently regarded as evidence of relentless narcissism, which, Moi argues, is not the case in reviews of male autobiographies. Accusations of self-absorption have also been made against Nin and her Diaries.¹⁰

Likewise, Brenda Silver in her examination of Virginia Woolf’s iconic status makes gender one of the focal points of her analysis. She emphasizes the role of the women’s movement in the canonization of Woolf and indicates that discussions on Woolf often become a pretext to articulate “fear of feminization” or “fear of feminism.” The response to Nin and her Diaries similarly serves as a departure point for cultural debates about femininity and, to a lesser extent, feminism.¹¹

NIN AND THE MODERNIST MARKETPLACE

The position of Nin as a modernist writer is still very precarious. In her 2003 monograph, Helen Tookey points out that Nin has been largely overlooked in modernist scholarship. She demonstrates that Nin’s name appears in general outlines of the period but that Nin’s works are rarely subject to in-depth examinations.¹² Although some of the studies devoted to Nin consider her place in modernism, a review of scholarly books published after 2003 that specialize in comprehensive introductions to the modernist period confirms Tookey’s observation and indicates that Nin is still obstinately disregarded by those critics who examine modernism in general.

It might be tempting to think of Nin’s failure in the modernist marketplace in terms of some inherent qualities of her books, to regard her writing as not sufficiently modernist or, worse, not good enough, but neither is the case. As for the first potential charge, two arguments can be brought to dismiss it. First of all, Nin’s works, as many of her critics have demonstrated, are very much in line with certain modernist ideals. Second, in recent years there have been numerous attempts to broaden the traditional modernist canon. As Kevin Dettmar explains, “[M]odernism was never really just one thing, never really unified,” and as a result we tend to talk about modernisms rather than Modernism.¹³ We may refute the second charge with the commonly agreed-upon idea that (broadly understood) culture influences our tastes and establishes literary values that determine what is deemed good or bad. In other words, what is regarded as good or bad literature is culturally bound, serves specific purposes and audiences, and can change with time.

This is, however, a contemporary, postmodern view of literary value—a result of critical dismantling of traditional modes of thought, modes that, in many instances, were established by modernists themselves who insisted that certain works of literature are more important, valuable, serious, and literary than others. As Aaron Jaffe aptly illustrates in his study Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, modernist authors controlled the marketplace by promoting only certain authors and establishing a well-regulated economy of scarcity and originality—“an economy in which a sparse selection of literary names of the past becomes a means of conferring value on select modern works-of-art.” They were involved in establishing standards of what should count as literary and valuable. The creators of this promotional system—predominantly male writers—need to be held responsible, at least partially, for Nin’s failed career in the modernist marketplace. The gender bias of the modernist milieu is well illustrated by Jaffe, who, in comparing the status of men writers with the status of women authors, asserts that “the literary reputations of women modernists were poorly served by the restrictive promotional system . . . for which men like Eliot, Pound, Marsh, et al. served as gatekeepers.” Later, the process of selection and canonization of modernist works was taken over by scholars. New Critics, who exerted an incredible influence on academia from the 1940s on, played a significant role in establishing the modernist canon, from which they excluded many women writers.¹⁴

Despite the fact that it was not the culture of modernism that put Nin on the literary map, she was greatly interested in and deeply influenced by the modernist movement. When she arrived in Paris in late 1924, the spirit of modernism had already taken hold. Always an avid reader, Nin gradually immersed herself in modernist literature. Her Diary serves as an invaluable record of her changing attitude toward contemporary writers. For instance, Nin was initially unimpressed with Marcel Proust, noting in October 1926 that she hoped “not to read [his works] again.” Two years later, however, Proust constantly occupied her thoughts. In one entry she recorded, “I have so much sympathy for Proust and so much admiration. What intellectual energy, patience, and lucidity.” Apart from Proust, Nin also read and commented in her diary on Sherwood Anderson, Ford Maddox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, and Katherine Mansfield.¹⁵

She also kept up with the latest literary developments by reading the Parisian literary journal transition—which Mark S. Morrisson deemed “the most famous of all American expatriate modernist magazines.”¹⁶ Founded in 1927 by Eugene Jolas and his wife, Maria McDonald, it ran until 1938 and enabled the circulation of experimental literature and the exchange of modernist ideas. Nin devoted a few of her diary entries to transition, making note of its huge significance to her. On November 1930, she observed, “Reading the last number of transition has been tremendous for me. I read all these things after I have done my work and then find an affinity with modernism which elates me” (ED 4, 359). A month later, she described the magazine as “the island I had been steadily sailing to—dreaming of—but I was not so very certain of its existence. I thought I would have to build it up alone. No. Here is my group, my ideas, my feelings against banal forms” (ED 4, 370). Nin felt that she had much in common with modernist expression.

Many Nin critics have noted this affinity and tried to restore Nin’s place alongside modernists. The first one to do so, albeit to a limited extent and rather unintentionally, was Suzanne Nalbantian. Her Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin is admittedly interested in the analysis of the transformation of life into art rather than the exploration of the modernist movement and Nin’s place in it; nonetheless, it does link Nin with the big names of modernism.

In 1998, another study was published, this one more firmly dedicated to the exploration of Nin’s place within the modernist framework. Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self: Gender, Modernism, and Narrative Identity, by Diane Richard-Allerdyce, aims to prove that “Nin is an important Modernist writer, deserving recognition within the literary canon.” Helen Tookey’s monograph sets a similar goal: “[T]o reassert Nin’s place within the feminist-modernist nexus, to show that there are clear links between Nin’s works and that of other, now ‘canonical,’ women modernists.” Both studies succeed in achieving their aims, although each one in different way and with a different purpose. Richard-Allerdyce focuses mainly on “Nin’s affinities with a psychoanalytically informed Modernism” to examine the ways in which Nin used the creative process to work through traumatic experiences. Helen Tookey, in turn, analyzes Nin’s writings within the broader cultural context of modernism. She points out how certain social trends and cultural developments characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century influenced Nin’s aesthetics. For that reason, her study is more useful here.¹⁷

Tookey undertakes the analysis of Nin’s relationship with modernism in four case studies. In the first one, she discusses Nin’s fascination with transition and shows that the aesthetic agenda of the magazine has many parallels with Nin’s own concept of an ideal poetic language. Tookey then moves on to Nin’s preoccupation with dreams and the unconscious—realms significant for both Freud and some surrealists such as André Breton—thus indicating another point of convergence between Nin and her modernist contemporaries. In the third case study, Tookey tackles two issues: Nin’s attempts, inspired by D. H. Lawrence, to create a sensory language; and her efforts, in line with modernist experiments, to fuse different art forms. In her final case study, Tookey investigates Nin’s fascination with film by drawing parallels between Nin and other modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who also regarded this medium as offering enormous potential for a literary expression. All in all, from Tookey’s analysis Nin emerges as a writer who not only was conversant with modernist ideas but also actively shaped the discourse of modernism.

Another study that contributes greatly to resituating Nin in the modernist period is Elizabeth Podnieks’s Daily Modernism. In a chapter devoted to Nin, Podnieks, like Tookey, mentions modernist figures (Proust, Lawrence, Freud) and phenomena that influenced Nin’s views and writings. Podnieks, however, does more than that. She proposes to regard the diary as a genre as “a classic modernist text” that allowed women writers to define themselves and argues that modernism “had to mean more for women than for men, because in ‘making it new,’ women were being innovative in terms not only of how they wrote but of how they lived and conceived themselves.”¹⁸

My own interest in Nin in relation to modernism is quite specific and informed by recent studies that discuss modernism in terms of the marketplace and celebrity culture. A traditional view of modernism, as many scholars point out, understands it as resistant to economic pressures and the commodification of art. In the introduction to their collection of essays, Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt note that “critical accounts of modernism and modernist writing frequently excavate, or are theorized across, a chasm or ‘great divide’ between modernism . . . and the larger marketplace.” The “great divide” they reference here alludes to the concept developed by Andreas Huyssen in his highly influential study After the Great Divide, in which he famously declares that “modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture.”¹⁹

Dettmar and Watt, together with numerous other scholars, do not agree with this oppositional model of high versus mass culture. Instead, they show how modernist writers were implicated in popular culture and explain why modernists and their supporters endeavored to maintain the illusion of this division and their own indifference, or even antagonism, toward mass culture and the market. They claim that “modernist writers and many of their first-generation proponents in the academy wanted for us not to think too deeply about their work in light of marketing and market concerns. For such an interrogation would tend to contradict notions of the aesthetic purity of the modernist artifact.”²⁰

As could be expected, such an interrogation is carried out by contributors to Dettmar and Watt’s volume Marketing Modernisms, who, along with a steadily increasing number of scholars, examine the complexities and ambiguities of the modernist encounters with the marketplace and claim that the apparent disregard for mass culture was in fact just another marketing strategy. Dettmar and Watt provide a broad definition of marketing—one that encompasses both material and intellectual production. In an attempt to reveal marketing tactics, contributors to Dettmar and Watt’s volume identify several strategies that modernists employed to market and disseminate their writings, such as the establishment of small presses, the publication of limited-edition books, and the foundation of literary magazines. They also analyze texts that have usually been outside the area of interest in modernist studies, such as reviews, prefaces, essays, and introductions, exposing their promotional function.

Nin not only employed the same techniques of self-promotion as many of her contemporaries but also used modernism itself to create her image and further her career. Her published Diary is full of stories and anecdotes about famous modernists, and Nin presents herself as a writer who takes to heart the modernist motto “Make it new.”

THE IGNORED GENRE OF THE DIARY

Despite the fact that women kept diaries for many centuries—as Margo Culley and Harriet Blodgett make evident in their studies of, respectively, American and English women diarists—serious critical interest in their output did not emerge until the 1980s. In a way, women diarists were doubly excluded—by virtue of their gender and by virtue of the genre they practiced. Laura Marcus explains, “Not only were women autobiographers self-evidently outside the ‘Great Men’ tradition with which many autobiographical critics operated; generic definitions served to exclude forms of ‘life writing’ such as diaries, letters and journals, often adopted by women and those outside mainstream literary culture.”²¹

The omission of women and forms of daily inscription was arguably due to historical developments in autobiography criticism. Sidonie Smith, a noted life-writing scholar, divides the history of autobiography studies into three waves. She explains that the first theorists of autobiography were influenced by Georg Misch’s multivolume A History of Autobiography in Antiquity (1907), translated into English in 1951. Misch regarded important public personae—reputed leaders and famous personages—as “the ‘representative’ and appropriate subjects of what he designates as autobiography.” As a result, by the 1960s certain autobiographical texts—such as the confessions of St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography—achieved canonical status and became subjects of scholarly debates. And although Misch helped establish autobiography as a valid subject of study, his aid in shaping the canon of great autobiographical works came at a price. His focus on the representative value of autobiography and on prominent individuals meant leaving out other forms of life narratives (such as diaries, journals, and letters) and people who did not achieve the status of eminent individuals (such as women, slaves, and the colonized).²²

Misch along with other first-wave critics treated autobiographical narratives as a verifiable record that reflected the writer’s life more or less successfully, and they did not question the relationship between the author, the narrator, and the narrated I. This relationship between the life lived and the narrated one was problematized by the second-wave critics, represented by Georges Gusdorf and Francis R. Hart. They suggested that autobiographical narratives are acts of creation rather than straightforward records of past events, thus elevating autobiographies to the status of literary genre. But just like the first-wave scholars, they were mainly preoccupied with the lives of great people.²³

Early feminist critics of literary autobiography concentrated on the absence of women writers from the canon by recovering autobiographies of distinguished women. They too, however, frequently ignored other forms of life narratives. It was only the critics of the third wave of autobiography criticism, informed by postmodern and postcolonial theories, who challenged Misch’s identification of autobiography with greatness and individuality, and these critics broadened the range of autobiographical texts by including forms of writing that had been considered trivial and marginal and by focusing on stories of “common” people.²⁴

In the 1980s, studies devoted solely to diaries started to emerge. For instance, Margo Culley’s A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present was published in 1985, and it was followed three years later by Harriet Blodgett’s Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries. Diaries were also given a proper critical consideration, and theorists began demonstrating a great diversity of diary forms and structures as well as the multitude of roles that diaries serve for their authors. In their edited volume entitled Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, published in 1996, Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff thus comment on the change of status of the diary in academic circles:

Within the academy, the diary has historically been considered primarily as a document to be mined for information about the writer’s life and times or as a means of fleshing out historical accounts; now, however, the diary is recognized by scholars as a far richer lode. Its status as a research tool for historians, a therapeutic instrument for psychologists, a repository of information about social structures and relationships for sociologists, and a form of literature and composition for rhetoricians and literary scholars makes the diary a logical choice for interdisciplinary study and a prime exemplar for interrogating the future direction of academe.²⁵

Most studies devoted to the diary genre tend to assert that the diary, like any other autobiographical narrative, is not an uncomplicated record of reality but a construction of it. However, this tendency to view diaries as constructs, so prominent in academe, is not necessarily reflected in the outside world. Many readers take the veracity of diaries for granted and choose to believe that diaries are truthful reflections of a person’s daily existence and that they capture the essence of their creator. Diaries are commonly regarded as the most private and honest of autobiographical writings, written for personal purposes rather than publication. Even some scholars perpetuate this common misconception. For instance, the prominent feminist and literary critic Elaine Showalter in her book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx states that she decided to omit diaries, together with letters, journals, recipes, and wills, from her discussion because her objective was to focus on women who had written for publication.²⁶

Despite its title, The Diary of Anaïs Nin does not conform in many respects to its generic standards—for example, the entries are very elaborate and only roughly dated—which led many critics to wonder how best to characterize Nin’s endeavor. The need to define the published journal was especially pressing among its early critics, who either were denied access to the original or were allowed, like Sharon Spencer, a limited and private viewing. Subsequent critics, who had access to Nin’s archive, gave up attempts to provide Nin’s published Diary with an appropriate label. They focused instead on the complexity of her oeuvre as a whole.

In the early stages, the Diary was frequently classified as a hybrid form somewhere between autobiography and fiction. For example, in her study of Nin’s works, Collage of Dreams: The Writings of Anaïs Nin, Sharon Spencer acknowledges that parts of Nin’s Diary were rewritten and edited, and she maintains that the Diary “is neither a diary in the usual sense—a candid, uncensored record of the events of a life—nor is it a work of fiction like the frankly autobiographical ‘novels’ of writers like Leiris, Celine, or Henry Miller.” From Spencer’s account emerges a common view of the diary as a truthful and unedited record, a concept that has since been challenged by many diary critics.²⁷

Benjamin Franklin V and Duane Schneider in their Anaïs Nin: An Introduction propose to distinguish between the original diary and the published version although they never had access to the former. They encourage readers to bear in mind the three following points when reading the Diary: “(1) editorial responsibilities in creating the Diary, and the implications of these responsibilities; (2) the question of genre, that is, to what extent is the Diary ‘pure notebook or journal’ and to what extent has it been consciously structured, rearranged; and (3) the function of time, composition, and organization upon the finished product.” Consequently, they point to the contributions of Gunther Stuhlmann in the editing of it; they ponder how the thirty-year gap between the actual writing of the diary and its editing might have influenced its form and content; and they propose to regard Nin’s Diary as “a new and created work of art,” “a piece of literature.”²⁸

For another Nin critic, Nancy Scholar, Nin’s work is “part autobiography, part journal”—a view that echoes Lynn Bloom and Orlee Holder’s claim that Nin’s Diary is “a hybrid form, alternately functioning as diary, writer’s notebook, and autobiography.” This tendency to regard Nin’s Diary as a form of autobiography or a work of art, also apparent in some reviews of the Diary, might be an attempt not only to best describe Nin’s work and its internal attributes but also to put value on Nin’s writings at a time when the diary form was still highly undervalued. Laura Marcus thus explains the frequent comparison of autobiographies to novels: “[B]y establishing a rapprochement between autobiography . . . and the putatively more secure category of the novel, critics felt able to remove the troubling ambiguity of the aesthetic status of autobiography.” Perhaps Nin critics felt similarly obliged to justify their literary interest in this disregarded genre and did so by associating diary with autobiography, which at that time was slowly making its way into academia.²⁹

Nin’s Diary has triggered several debates, two of which are particularly important for this study, namely, What is the role of Nin’s diary, and How does she fashion herself in its pages? These issues tackled by Nin’s critics mirror in many ways general discussions about the diary as a genre. They demonstrate how perspectives on the diary have changed and how diaries and their roles have been conceptualized over time. Consequently, by looking at the critical writings on Nin, we gain an insight into major trends in Nin criticism while simultaneously learning how the research field of life writing has evolved.

Sharon Spencer is one of the first critics to summarize aptly the various roles the diary performed in Nin’s life: it served as a record, as a companion and confidant, as a writer’s notebook, as a fount of ideas, as a springboard for fiction writing, and as a space where the writer could practice her craft and express herself freely. Despite these multiple purposes that Spencer attributes to the diary, she construes the diary as something external to Nin. This rather straightforward explanation of the roles of Nin’s diary reflects the shortage of critical resources available for critics of life narratives at the time when Spencer was completing her study (the 1970s).³⁰

While Spencer regards the diary as external to Nin, Helen Tookey, the author of the most recent monograph on Nin, entitled Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity: Playing a Thousand Roles, conceives the Nin-diary relationship as being much closer. Her main argument is that “for Nin the diary is not simply a ‘record’ of lived experience; rather, the ‘life’ and the writing impact on each other in a process of mutual feedback, creating a life lived, as Nin puts it, ‘within stories.’” A similar treatment of the diary as a process that helps build up Nin’s identity is also offered by Elizabeth Podnieks, the author of Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart and Anaïs Nin. She too considers the diary as a space where the construction of the self takes place. The first Nin critic to point out that by creating her diary Nin created herself is Nancy Scholar. In her study, entitled simply Anaïs Nin, Scholar observes that Nin “came to know herself as she composed her own image, and that knowledge altered the person she was or would have been.” The views of these academics have undoubtedly been influenced by the developments in life-writing studies, which have increasingly emphasized a close, mutually constructive relationship between authors and their life narratives.³¹

To contribute to this discussion on the various roles of the diary, I suggest that Nin’s diary was also a powerful marketing tool. The diary, which at some point acquired a legendary status in literary circles, became Nin’s bargaining card. However, I do not reduce it solely to this function; I conceive the diary as a very complex phenomenon, and casting it in this single role would unfairly diminish the multiple roles it played throughout Nin’s lifetime. I therefore believe that the various functions noted by Nin critics are not mutually exclusive. I do question, however, some of the roles that scholars have ascribed to Nin’s diary. In chapter 4, for instance, I investigate Nin as a trauma survivor and her diary as a site that helped her in dealing with alleged sexual abuse.

Another debate regarding Nin’s Diary that I hope to revive in this and the following chapter is the construction of her self. The claim that Nin created a character in her Diary is not a new one, and several of Nin’s critics have pointed to this fact. Nin’s Diary has been frequently regarded as representing Nin not as she is but the Nin persona. This claim gained even more ground as theories of autobiography advanced and the creation of the persona started to be perceived as an inherent characteristic of any life narrative. As a result, critics began to comment on Nin’s persona not only in the published Diary but also in the original one.

Focusing mainly on the published Diary, Nin’s early critics, Franklin and Schneider, regard each volume as a journal-novel, with Nin as the main character surrounded by other minor characters. They wonder whether the success of the first diary influenced the editing of subsequent volumes. They ask whether Nin consciously or unconsciously portrayed herself in a certain way in the first volume and then changed the portrayal in subsequent volumes. Nancy Scholar also points to Nin’s conscious intentions to present herself to the public in a specific manner. She remarks that “the reader must consider the legend Nin wished to create in these pages of a courageous, independent woman struggling to forge her own identity and art.”³²

While the early critics emphasized Nin’s self-presentation in the published Diary, later critics, influenced by expanding autobiography criticism, began to regard the creation of the self as an inherent element of any self-writing project. “Narrative,” as Paul John Eakin argues, “plays a central, structuring role in the formation and maintenance of our sense of identity.” He also notes that in forming our sense of self we rely on models of identity that are supplied by the culture we live in. Influenced by the latest theories of autobiography, Podnieks analyzes Nin’s diaries from the interdependent perspective, “which would admit that the self is always in part invented by and perpetuated through its linguistic and textual configurations but also by its social, cultural, and historical contexts.” Tookey echoes this view and argues that Nin “creates narratives and self-representations which are neither entirely fictional nor entirely historical.” According to them, Nin’s self-constructions are partly invented and partly influenced by the times she lived in. And although the forms of self-representation available to women at a given historical time do not interest 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 I could hide. A larger, honest, expansive book given to me by Henry, on which I spread out beyond the diary. . . . It lies on my desk like a real manuscript. It is a larger canvas. No marginal writing done delicately, unobtrusively, but work, assertion.”⁴¹ She therefore began to regard her diary writing as a piece of work, a creation.

The process of revising the diary went on for most of the 1930s but intensified, particularly in 1936 and 1937. Journals covering these years are full of entries referring to her work on the diary. In a letter to her cousin Eduardo Sanchez, Nin explained her occupation in the following way:

I took volume 45 of the first trip to New York and I made it bloom like a hot house camellia, I Proustanize, only dynamically. For example, [take the] page [where I describe when] Miriam came to be analyzed. She is my favorite patient. Her confession touched me. “What confession?” Suddenly I sat down and I wrote the whole confession, naturally and diary-like, but full and complete, like a geyser. Inserted it. By the time I was through there were no more “notes,” but a full smooth book, a book, not a notebook. I wrote up Rank that way, filled out, enriched.⁴²

Nin expanded stories, remade portraits, and filled her rewritten copies with details she did not record before, in order to shape her diary into a coherent book. She worked on it as if it were a novel, yet at the same time she tried to preserve its journal-like, spontaneous quality.

She also began to present her diary as an artistic undertaking to others. For example, in a 1937 letter to Jean Paulhan, a French writer, critic, and publisher who expressed an interest in the diary, Nin highlighted the novel-like quality of her journal. She explained, “Each volume contains, in a sense, a novel, an incident, a drama.” The diary was therefore described as an intentional piece of writing that went beyond what one would expect of a diary, namely, a collection of private notes. In the same letter she also listed experiences that were described in the diary:

Separation from father and trip to New York; A year as a painter’s model to support mother and brothers; A year as mannequin; Trip to Havana with wealthy aunt and presentation to society. Society life, luxury; Marriage in Havana and first novel on artists and models; Trip to Paris; Spanish dancing studied. Appearance on stage; Book on D. H. Lawrence and new worlds entered through it; Seeing father again, reconciliation; Love affairs—about fifteen of them; Two psychoanalysis fully described, in which I seduce my analysts; Birth and death of a child; Playing at being analyst myself in New York, with hundreds of confessions, and incidents, a bursting of full life; Book of House of Incest.⁴³

At that particular time, Nin was quite willing to share the most intimate details of her life (note, however, the absence of a love affair with her father). A glimpse at the above list offers a good indication of the events she regarded as marketable and interesting for her future audience. Nin portrayed herself as an independent woman who tried by various, usually artistic, means (as a model for painters, as a writer, as a dancer, as an analyst) to earn her living, as well as a worldly figure who traveled extensively and moved between various societies. Being a good advertiser, she also created the atmosphere of mystery and sensation, saying that her diary contained fifteen love affairs, the seduction of her psychoanalysts, and her patients’ personal revelations.

Jean Paulhan was one of several people in the mid-1930s interested in the possibility of making the diary public. Another was Denise Clairouin, the literary agent, who initially wanted “all the diaries to be published” (Diary 2, 107) but quickly changed her mind and started to doubt the possibility of the diary ever appearing in print: “People can’t bear such nakedness. . . . The childbirth story will immediately be censored” (Diary 2, 167). Clairouin nonetheless sent the diary to the British publishing house Faber and Faber, which rejected it “with a great deal of reluctance” (Diary 2, 206). Maxwell Perkins of Scribner was another person to whom Clairouin showed Nin’s work. At his request Nin prepared an abridged copy of six hundred pages, and although, as Nin noted, Perkins was “thunderstruck” by what he read, in the end, he too declined to publish the diary (Diary 2, 268).

In 1937 another attempt and, needless to say, another failure to publish the diary took place. This time Henry Miller got involved and set out to publish Nin’s childhood diary, which he greatly admired. Miller was convinced that the publication should begin with the very first volume. (It is worth mentioning that throughout her life Nin’s efforts concentrated alternatively on her childhood diaries and the ones dating back to the 1930s, and Nin even secured the preface to the planned childhood journal from Otto Rank.)⁴⁴ In November 1937, Nin and Miller sent out a circular saying that Henry Miller was going to publish Anaïs Nin’s diary Mon Journal in the original French in a limited number of 250 copies. The book was supposed to be printed by the Imprimerie Ste-Catherine in Bruges, Belgium. The front endpaper of Nin’s fifty-fifth journal, covering the period from September to November 1937, contains a list of the subscribers to this intended publication. So few people were interested, however, that the project eventually failed. That was possibly the last attempt to publish the diary in Europe, as Nin moved back to the United States in 1939, at the outbreak of World War II.

Between 1940 and 1941, Nin was represented by John Slocum, Henry Miller’s agent, who, as Bair reports, showed the diary to every publishing company in New York.⁴⁵ Around the same time, Nin also sent the diaries to the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin. She must have sent the diaries including her sexual adventures, for the commentator who evaluated the diary noted, “When the author does prepare it for publication my advice would be cut out the redundancy rather than sex.” And then he or she elaborated: “In fact, I’d trim lightly here and with an eye merely on the law. The erotic element is part of its uniqueness.” Sex and scandal were, therefore, considered marketable. However, at the same time, the publisher did not like the self-reflexive nature of Nin’s journal and remarked that “such morbid preoccupation with one’s inner life will seem trivial. My guess is that it is a book to see light about five or ten years after the war is over.”⁴⁶ Nin’s explorations of her personal life seemed petty in the light of World War II.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States entered the war, which had already been ravaging Europe for over two years. The war dominated every facet of life in the first half of the 1940s, while its reverberations were felt far beyond the war years. “Popular culture in the 1940s,” as Robert Sickles observes, “was fueled and shaped by the war and one can’t look at many aspects of the decade without seeing them as in some way connected to or resulting from the war effort.”⁴⁷ The cultural climate of the early 1940s was unfavorable for intimate revelations of a woman who was preoccupied with personal rather than national struggles.

Nin continued to work on the diary in the 1940s, revising and copying her earlier volumes. She indexed some of her journals, and the index to her diary covering the period from December 1940 to July 1941 is full of entries that mention her work on the diaries. Bair provides a detailed description of how Nin approached the rewriting process:

First, with the original diaries beside her, Anaïs rewrote by hand all those parts that she thought were publishable. This included almost everything but the incest with her father and most of the entries about her brother Thorvald. Then she gave the rewritten volumes to Virginia Admiral, who typed them onto “easily transportable” rice paper. Each separate diary volume was then inserted into its own cardboard folder, secured by brass tacks. The diaries she rewrote by hand were locked away with the originals, and the typed copies were made available to selected readers. And so, when Anaïs offered to let someone read the “original” diaries, she was really showing those she had hand-copied from the true originals. Mostly, however, she showed the typed copies, all the while insisting each was transcribed word for word from the originals.⁴⁸

Nin also devoted a lot of time to reading her diaries and pondering on their nature, trying to find a suitable technique for recomposing them. She recorded her observations on the rewriting process, undoubtedly to make her revisions more effective in the future. As a consequence, the manuscripts are full of reflections on the process of diary editing. In February 1940, for example, she attempted to regroup her diaries and to analyze their content. She tried to see them as a coherent opus. She thus commented on her own journals:

Journals 32–33–34—They recreate a state like opium smoking where one little incident, one caress, one scene produced enormous diffusions—The writing is all about feelings produced, enormous expansion in sensation, removed from reality. . . . 35 to 45—later diaries are focused on human drama—movement—the writing is lighter. 45–50—The focusing gains in intensity. In the last 50 to 60 there is fulfilled climax and fusion of the dream, the mirage and human life. They flow together.⁴⁹

Or, to give another example, the MS Journal 65 (November 1941–October 1942) contains Nin’s suggestions for drawing coherent portraits of people mentioned in the diary. It is a seven-page entry in which Nin cites examples from her previous diaries and writes about the need to discover and capture each person’s “hidden demon,” gestures, and aura.⁵⁰ The work on the diary became, therefore, more and more self-conscious, and her reflections definitely facilitated the final construction of her self-portrait, as well as the portraits of others in the published version of the diary.

In the 1940s, Nin also started to produce an expurgated version of her journal by deliberately excising the scandalous material. In October 1940, she recorded, “Henry is reading the ‘abridged’ diary from which all the love affairs are extracted—nothing left but the outer relationships with Allendy, Rank, Artaud etc.”⁵¹ So the journal that the public read in 1966 started to take shape in the early 1940s.

Between 1942 and 1945, Nin was more occupied with printing her fiction on the press she established with Gonzalo Moré than with revising the diary. With her husband’s financial assistance, she bought an old treadle press in 1942, installed it in a studio at 144 McDougal Street, and named it Gemor Press. She was supposed to be responsible for setting the type, while Gonzalo Moré, her lover and collaborator, was to be in charge of operating the press. She managed to print her two collections of short stories (Winter of Artifice and Under a Glass Bell) and her novel This Hunger, yet, as Philip K. Jason suggests, “the Gemor undertaking was, from the beginning, more than a scheme to advance Nin’s career.” He explains, “Numerous Gemor titles were issued besides Nin’s own, and other, non-Gemor printing jobs were sought.” Nin devoted a lot of her time and energy to work on the press, but after the initial enthusiasm, she found the venture neither financially nor emotionally gratifying. In a letter to Caresse Crosby dated in the fall of 1944, she complained, “We never made a profit though we worked two of us 6 and 7 hours a day—and I found the work detrimental to my health—I’ve lost all the good of the summer.”⁵²

Henry Miller tried to persuade Nin to print the childhood journal on the press and even offered to send her one hundred dollars each month to make the publication possible.⁵³ Despite his encouragement and the promised financial assistance, the project never came to fruition. Miller soon withdrew his generous offer because the patron who had provided him with the money had stopped his pecuniary support. Besides, printing the voluminous diary on a hand press was not feasible; the collections of short stories proved challenging enough.

Although Nin eventually lost the press through debts, her engagement with it indicates a strong self-promotional zeal and marketing acumen. The following provides insight into how Nin went about her business: “Of 500 Winters [Winter of Artifice] I gave away 100, sold 250 and 150 are left. I’m only printing 300 of Under a Glass Bell. Most of the subscriptions were obtained by my writing pressing letters, telephoning etc.” Nin was therefore the driving force behind her marketing campaigns. However, the continuous lack of success wore her down, and in the same entry she recorded, “The support has been infinitely small, not sufficient to sustain me either spiritually or materially. I am going to surrender.”⁵⁴

Apart from Under a Glass Bell, which was praised by Edmund Wilson, her other works got mainly unfavorable reviews. This must have contributed to the depression that plagued her in the early 1940s. Journal 66, covering the year from October 1942 to October 1943, contains an index with as many entries about working on the press as ones saying “early to bed,” “terrible depression,” or simply “depression.” After the release of This Hunger, Nin noted, “I fell into a suicidal depression. Had to face criticism of my book.”⁵⁵ She came back to the diary, but this time mainly to find the solace in it: “Diary is obviously the diary of neurosis, the labyrinth, and I am in it again, drawn inward.”⁵⁶

The novels published by commercial publishers did not fare any better. In 1946, Gore Vidal, whom Nin had met the year before, secured the contract with E. P. Dutton—the publishing house he worked for at the time—for her two novels. Dutton published Ladders to Fire (1946) and Children of the Albatross (1947) and even reprinted the extended version of Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories (1948), but the majority of the reviews were rather negative. Nin’s works were frequently criticized, as Jason notes, for the rejection of social conventions of realism, self-centered and unconvincing characters, flaws in the structure, and a style that was too abstract or too elaborate.⁵⁷

The political climate after World War II was not favorable for the type of writing represented by Nin. As Lawrence Schwartz explains, American art and literature became at that time part of the ideological battle with the Soviet Union and communism. In the postwar period, the United States emerged as an economic world leader and soon began setting the cultural trends. During the initial years of the Cold War, American literature became a platform for erecting a homogenous American identity and a cultural weapon, although prominent literary critics of the era propagated an aesthetic method that “seemed to be apolitical but,” as Schwartz points out, “was not.”⁵⁸

With her autobiographical and experimental writing, Nin could not have fared worse. What was considered publishable in the United States in the late 1940s did not correspond with what she had on offer at that time. But despite the fact that her novels were released during unfavorable times, she did not give up and was determined to be noticed. Bair comments that many people who knew her at that time described her as “a steel hummingbird . . . determined to be famous.” Bair adds, “Her efforts to promote her novels attest to this fact. She wrote to every college and university that had previously hosted her, asking for invitations to speak again, and also to universities where she knew no one, frequently sending her photographs and books.” Despite Nin’s active involvement in the promotion of her works, however, her fiction sold poorly, and Nin once more turned her attention to the diary and “began another round of rewriting.”⁵⁹

As early as 1953, Nin also became determined to sell manuscripts of the diary because of her worsening financial situation. Bair estimates that the income of Nin and Guiler for the year 1954 was $522, while their expenses amounted to as much as $25,000. As a result, Nin “vowed to pursue the ‘fantasy’ of selling the diaries until it became a ‘concrete fact.’ Each time she wrote to a college or university to request a lecture engagement, she also sent a list of the diary’s contents and the names of some of the persons who figured in it, hoping to entice a library to buy it.”⁶⁰ In 1955 she decided to “devote the rest of [her] time to preparing diaries for publication, no more novels.”⁶¹

In 1957, Nin met Gunther Stuhlmann, who would become her lifelong agent, editor, and friend. When her initial collaboration with Stuhlmann did not result in any immediate ventures, she wrote in 1961 to Alan Swallow, the owner of a small independent press in Denver. She explained her situation and asked him whether there was a possibility of cooperation between them. She suggested a few undertakings that might be beneficial for both of them: either to reprint The Winter of Artifice, “which has been out of print for a long time and which I get orders for,” as she noted, or to print her unpublished manuscript Seduction of the Minotaur (she guaranteed to sell one thousand copies) or to do a collection of her novel Cities of the Interior. The diary served as the bargaining card, for she wrote, “There is one added factor, that I have always said whatever publisher puts out my novels I will give an option on the diaries (for the future).”⁶²

Alan Swallow reprinted most of her fiction in the 1960s, none of which had any significant success. Both he and Gunther Stuhlmann kept looking for a publisher for the diary. As Bair notes, “James Silberman, of Random House, was the most interested among the many to whom Gunther offered the diaries.”⁶³ However, Silberman wanted to condense the material so that the first volume covered a much larger span of time than Nin had planned. He tried to convince her that “[t]he very least that should be encompassed in a single volume is the entire thirties.”⁶⁴ (The thirties were eventually covered in two published volumes, not one, as Silberman wanted.)

Silberman also thought it was necessary to produce a book that would strongly affect the audience, would live up to the expectations that had been built up around the diary for so long, and would be of a comparable caliber to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir. To accomplish these aims, Silberman wanted to cut down some personal and reflexive material and have more sketches of people instead. “In other words,” as Stuhlmann related in a letter to Anaïs Nin, “he is looking perhaps for more ‘portraits,’ more ‘action’ and he seems to feel that ‘condensation’ will ‘speed up,’ make the book more ‘solid.’” Nin reacted quite strongly to Silberman’s suggestions, and in a reply to Stuhlmann’s letter, she wrote indignantly, “A diary is not an action film. . . . What greed, too, and entre nous, there is more in my diary than in the diary of Simone de Beauvoir. . . . [Hers] is deadly dull.” She also added that she wanted to preserve the integrity of her diary and did not agree to shorten her manuscript. Eventually, the project was dropped.⁶⁵

Peter Israel of Putnam was another editor who saw the manuscript of the diary. Putnam had earlier published Miller’s letters to Nin, which Nin had edited and to which she held copyright, but in the end Putnam too declined the diary. In a letter to Nin, which she quoted in a letter to her husband Hugh Guiler, Israel lavished a lot of praise on her writing, admiring her self-revelation and the skillfully drawn portraits in her diary; however, at the same time, he expressed some doubt as to “whether these pages are commercial or not.” His main concern was the fact that Nin was relatively unknown in the literary marketplace, and he worried whether the confessions of an obscure individual would appeal to readers. He mentioned that he decided to show the diaries to his wife to get another opinion. In the letter to Hugh, Nin expressed her annoyance:

As you can see, with the prise [sic—praise] there is still the commercial reservation. He will now try it on his wife, on the salesman, on the doorman, the elevator man, the night watchman, the cleaning woman, the delivery boys, the telephone girl, and then he will ask me to make it sound like candy, and like Simone de Beauvoir, and like Mary Mac Carthy [sic—McCarthy] and yet keep it clean for the Ladies Home Journal, and perhaps rewrite it in the third person, make Allendy a negro physician, my father a taxi driver, for human interest, and instead of a dead child, write about nine children . . . and throw in a few more famous names, but be sure and do not do name dropping as Charlie Chaplin did.⁶⁶

Despite her frustration, Nin was perfectly aware that the publishers wanted a best seller. They tried their best to forecast what the public might like, and they made writers adjust their material accordingly so that it reached the largest number of people. By then, Nin also knew that the power of her diary was not in her self-revelations but in the characters who were portrayed in it, since both Silberman and Israel emphasized the importance of her eminent acquaintances. That is why whenever the manuscript of the journal was sent to publishers, it was accompanied with a register of the famous people included in the diary. Later such a list would be sent to reviewers, and at some point Nin would even suggest using the list of characters, which she considered “a good publicity attraction,” “as a map within the Diary, or end paper,” for she believed “it would sell books.”⁶⁷

Alan Swallow, who tried to find a copublisher for the diary, showed it, among others, to William Morrow. When Nin was rejected by Morrow, she wrote in a letter to Swallow that she wished he were rich enough to print her diary on his own, adding immediately, “But you know, it is not the money, as I will get money from every country in Europe, it is the fact that we will get no reviews, as with the other books.” If this remark is read together with the New York Times critic Nona Balakian’s observation on the situation in American publishing that she had shared with Nin a year earlier, a clearer picture of the functioning of the publishing industry emerges: “[T]here is a terrible snobbism in this country about publishing with the ‘right’ publisher. What I mean is, unless a writer is published by the leading publishing houses (Knopf, Random, Harpers, Harcourt etc.), he [sic] is either completely neglected or treated in a light way—unless of course he has something sensational or fashionable to say.” Nin knew perfectly well that unless her diary was published by one of the leading publishers, it would probably be doomed to obscurity and that being published with a prestigious firm would guarantee, if not success, then at least reviews and publicity.⁶⁸

In the meantime, Nin kept editing the manuscript, working closely with her brother Joaquín, who contributed greatly to the accuracy of their family story, and with Henry Miller, who offered advice, corrected some details, and demanded a few changes. She finalized the editing of the diary on 18 May 1965, announcing in a letter to a friend, “The diary is now completely edited, retyped, ready to go. It has been accepted everywhere but the U.S.”⁶⁹ A few months later that year, Hiram Haydn of Harcourt Brace offered her a contract, and thus the first volume of the long-marketed Diary was published in 1966.⁷⁰ But before it was finally released, Nin in a manner characteristic to herself had been scrupulously supervising the production of her Diary. “I have to watch Harcourt Brace like a hawk,” she wrote in a letter to her husband Hugh Guiler on 8 December 1965, and she further clarified, “They had [the] date of Diary as big as my name, which as a friendly bookshop suggested, will drive away the young. For the sake of truth it has to be there, but not in marquee size letters on the black background. These people really don’t know their business.”⁷¹ She therefore played an active part in every stage of the marketing process.

The story of Nin’s publishing effort is interesting in several respects. First of all, until the 1960s there was no room in the American literary market for the type of writing represented by Nin’s diary; Nin’s revelations were considered too intimate and self-absorbed. Even at the beginning of the 1960s, the publishers considered the portrayal of the famous people, and not Nin’s inward journey, as the main asset of the diary, which in itself is thought-provoking, as confessional poetry had been popular by then and autobiographical novels were on the rise. Perhaps an autobiographical streak was acceptable in more-established genres, such as novels and poetry, but the diary, which by default is personal and confessional, had to demonstrate some other qualities. The history of Nin’s publishing attempts also goes against the common assumption that diaries are written for private purposes. Nin’s diary was deliberately and consciously created and also shaped by the comments of many people, such as Henry Miller, William Bradley, and the editors of big publishing houses. Nin frequently revised it, treating it as art and trying to find the best methods to shape it, which concurs with Lynn Z. Bloom’s conclusion that diaries of professional writers are always public documents.