The Diary of Anaïs Nin by Anaïs Nin

First published: 1966

Type of work: Diary

The Work:

From the age of eleven until her death at the age of seventy-four, Anaïs Nin kept a series of diaries. Her father, a well-known composer and musician, had abandoned her, her mother, and her two brothers, forcing the family to move from France, where Nin was born, to New York City. Nin began her diary on the long journey to the United States.

The main diary, dating from the early 1930’s, grew to seven published volumes. After Nin’s death, another four volumes were published as The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin (1982, 1983, 1985). Rupert Pole, her second husband and the executor of her estate, published another four volumes beginning in 1986 that are based on her original diary, which became known as the unexpurgated diary to distinguish it from the original. These unexpurgated versions are known individually as Henry and June (1986), Incest (1992), Fire (1995), and Nearer the Moon (1996). The original Diary of Anaïs Nin is the earliest volume of those published in 1966. The first volume, which covers 1931 to 1934, is widely considered the best and most important of the original works.

Although a novelist, poet, and literary critic of considerable talent and reputation, Nin is best remembered as a diarist and for her considerable influence on other artists, including her lover Henry Miller. His Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1938), two novels steeped in sex and violence, were banned in the United States until the 1960’s. Nin wrote the preface to Tropic of Cancer and financed its initial printing.

Although she quit school at the age of sixteen, Nin was attracted to avant-garde writers, artists, and musicians and developed her personal style and her writing style while sitting in the cafés of Paris, listening and observing and then capturing it all in her diary. For a time, Nin worked as an artist’s model and also studied Spanish dance. While in Cuba in 1923, she married Hugh Parker Guiler, a banker, and later a filmmaker known as Ian Hugo. He also was an illustrator of Nin’s books. After Guiler was transferred to a bank in Paris, he and Nin lived in Louveciennes, in the western suburbs of Paris. Nin and Guiler agreed that he would never be mentioned in her diaries. In fact, Nin was reluctant to admit that she was married and never discussed her marriage during interviews. By any measure, their marriage was open. Nin had several affairs during her years married to Guiler, including with Miller, psychoanalyst Otto Rank, and playwright-poet Antonin Artaud.

In contrast to Miller’s work, The Diary of Anaïs Nin is sexually implicit. Nin keeps sex in the background, obscured by opaque references and cloying allusions. The diary is often unilluminating in its descriptions of events and its depictions of persons. Indeed, the diary makes for an unreliable witness to history. However, Nin’s prose is lyrical and flowing, a lovely stream of phrases sacrificed to the author’s unquenchable thirst for introspection and self-knowledge.

In her first diary volume, Nin submits her psyche to the examination of two psychoanalysts, Rank and René Allendy. As one might suspect from an addicted diarist, comparing her need to document her life to a drug addict’s need for a fix, Nin is keen for analysis, to have a professional explore the depths of her mind much as she has done her entire life. Nin later becomes a practicing psychoanalyst for some time with Rank, who was at one time a devoted follower of Sigmund Freud, but later was ostracized from Freud’s circle for calling into question some of his mentor’s work.

Volume one of The Diary of Anaïs Nin opens with the publication of Nin’s first book, the nonfiction work D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932). The attorney Nin had hired to represent her to the publisher of her book introduced Nin to an American writer living in Paris, Miller. Over the course of their years spent together in Paris, Miller and Nin read and critiqued each other’s works, edited each other’s manuscripts, and spent many hours talking about Miller’s second wife, June. June is Miller’s literary muse, the inspiration and central character in his most important novels. June profoundly affected Nin as well, and June became the inspiration for a portion of Nin’s second novel, Winter of Artifice (1939).

Nin’s first novel, House of Incest (1936), worried her family because of its title. As is made abundantly clear in the second unexpurgated volume of her diary, Incest, Nin had an incestuous relationship with her father. What began as child sexual abuse became a consensual sexual affair in the 1930’s and was reportedly precipitated by psychoanalysis, in which it was suggested that Nin undertake the affair and then abandon her father, as he had abandoned her and her mother and brothers. Her family need not have worried; House of Incest is not an account of Nin’s personal experience, at least not in any recognizable fashion. The work is a prose poem, presented in metaphorical terms—incest here refers more to self-seeking, an understanding of one’s own psychological motivations. In volume one of the diary, Nin’s father appears and seeks a nonsexual relationship with his daughter, one befitting an aging man who has ostensibly given up sexual conquests for a more chaste familial relationship. Nin refers to him as The Double in volume one, perhaps alluding to his role as both father and lover.

In Henry and June, Nin thought she saw people who were more alive than she. Married and struggling to write poetry and literary criticism, Nin turned to her diary to find herself, not always her true self but the self she wished she were. The diary is a distorted reflection of its author, a mirror that is more flattering than critical. When volume one opens, Nin is transitioning. She changes her clothes, her friends, her interests. She is a work in progress, a laboratory experiment in metamorphosis; her diary is her lab book. She records her progress, triumphs, and losses in a way that shows the influence of surrealism on her life. She is her own palette.

Nin’s lasting reputation is a salacious one. Much of her reputation comes from the popularity of two small books: Delta of Venus: Erotica (1977) and Little Birds: Erotica (1979). As with everything else she learned, Nin was self-taught when it came to sex. She gained her education through French books of erotica that she found hidden in the back of a closet in a house her family had rented. According to Nin, she was an innocent when she had found the books; after reading them, there was nothing she did not know about sex. While struggling as writers in Paris, she and Miller, to make money, wrote erotica for a private collector who paid them one dollar per page. It was this work that paved the way for the two small volumes of erotica, which were published posthumously.

A citizen of the United States, Nin lived much of her life in New York and on the West Coast. Although she never divorced Hugh Guiler, she moved back to the United States with him, and they lived independently of each other. Their independence was such that Nin married Rupert Pole, a man nearly twenty years younger, whom she had met in New York in 1947. The couple married in Arizona in 1955, making Nin a bigamist. For eleven years, Nin balanced two marriages, flying from coast to coast to be with Pole and with Guiler, who learned of Nin’s second marriage only after her death. Nin had her marriage to Pole annulled in 1966.

Bibliography

Bair, Deirdre. Anaïs Nin: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1995. A massive biography by a scholar steeped in the literature of the period and the author of biographies of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir.

Bloshteyn, Maria R. The Making of a Counter-culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Describes how Fyodor Dostoevski was a model for Nin, Henry Miller, and Lawrence Durrell, all of whom strove to emulate the Russian writer’s psychological characterizations and narrative style in their own work.

Bobbitt, Joan. “Truth and Artistry in The Diary of Anaïs Nin.” Journal of Modern Literature 9, no. 2 (May, 1982): 267-276. This is an examination of the style, literary quality, and artistic truthfulness of The Diary of Anaïs Nin.

Felber, Lynette. “The Three Faces of June: Anaïs Nin’s Appropriation of Feminine Writing.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14, no. 2 (Autumn, 1995): 309-324. This article explores feminism in Nin’s writings and her efforts to capture the essence of June Miller, Henry Miller’s wife, as a way to introduce feminine discourse.

Fitch, Noel Riley. Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. This book makes use of interviews, archives, and unpublished works to explore the woman behind the diary and the life experiences that influenced Nin’s direction as an artist.

Franklin, Benjamin, V. Anaïs Nin Character Dictionary and Index to Diary Excerpts. Troy, Mich.: Sky Blue Press, 2009. A detailed resource that features an index of all persons, places, and works from Nin’s unpublished diary excerpts. Also includes descriptions of every character in her published fiction.

Knapp, Bettina L. Anaïs Nin. New York: Ungar, 1979. This work examines surrealism and its impact on Nin’s fiction, especially House of Incest.

Pierpont, Claudia Roth. Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Evocative interpretive essays on the life paths and works of twelve women, including Nin, connecting the circumstances of their lives with the shapes, styles, subjects, and situations of their art.

Tookey, Helen. Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity: Playing a Thousand Roles. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Examines Nin’s work within historical and cultural contexts, focusing on her representations of identity and femininity and her concept of self-creation through various kinds of narratives and performances.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “I Am the Other Face of You: Anaïs Nin, Fantasies, and Femininity.” Women: A Cultural Review 12, no. 3 (Winter, 2001): 306-324. Explores Nin’s duality, the reality her critics accuse her of omitting, and the artistic, fully alive woman Nin wishes to portray.