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.
two
Public Promotion of the Private Self
Anaïs Nin’s Self-Constructions in the Diary
The very process of the diary resembles that of a painter making a series of sketches each day in preparation for a final portrait.
—Anaïs Nin1
Nin and her diary are so closely intertwined that the analysis of her public persona would be incomplete without the examination of the self-projections included in the published Diary. The Diary introduced Nin to a larger audience, brought her recognition, and launched her image into the sphere of media and society. The published version of the diary made available certain representations of Nin that would later be either reinforced or contested as Nin’s visibility in the public increased. Taking a closer look at the intricate relationship between Nin the person, Nin the diary (the manuscript version) persona, Nin the Diary (the published version) persona, and Nin the public persona is therefore worthwhile.
NIN THE PERSON VERSUS NIN THE DIARY PERSONA
Although Anaïs Nin left us with 35,000 pages of the manuscript of the diary and seventeen published volumes easily available to anyone, getting to know the “real” Anaïs Nin is impossible, for at least two reasons. First of all, there was no one “real” Anaïs Nin. Taking the postmodern view of identity as fluid, unstable, and impossible to fix, I assume that no one has an essence, a true and coherent core that is there to be discovered. People and their identities are multifaceted and changeable and thus impossible to pin down. The second reason is related to the nature of language and the writing process. Language was the medium in which Nin chose to capture and convey her-selves. And as she observed in the following passage, she became aware that expressing her-selves effectively and completely in writing was impossible:
It seems to me now that when I write I only write consciously or at least I follow the most accessible thread. Three or four threads may be agitated like telegraph wires at the same instant, and I disregard them. If I were to capture them all I would be really . . . revealing innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculations, fear and courage. The whole truth. I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four pages to the present one. I would have to write always backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and the overtones because of the vice of embellishment, the alchemy of idealism which distorts the truth every moment.2
Nin therefore recognized the complexity of human experience and the impossibility of capturing it in words. She knew that writing embellished and distorted the reality and that any attempt to communicate the “truth” was doomed to fail because the “truth” was complicated and multidimensional. She grappled, therefore, with the question tackled by the theorists of autobiography, who consider the relation between the reality and the record of it, between the real-life person and the text persona.
In her study of American women’s diaries, Margo Culley urges us to remember that “diaries and journals are texts, that is[,] verbal constructs” and that “all diarists are involved in a process, even if largely unconscious, of selecting details to create a persona.” In a similar vein, Felicity A. Nussbaum notes, “The diarist pretends simply to transcribe the details of experience, but clearly some events are more important to the narrative ‘I’ than others.” Lynn Z. Bloom believes that the process of recording daily life is even more complex in the case of professional writers. She argues that “for a professional writer there are no private writings,” and she demonstrates that writers shape even their most intimate writings, such as diaries, with an audience in mind, thus creating public documents. This observation particularly resonates with Nin’s diary practice because Nin consciously worked on her diary long before it was published. Nin’s diary therefore contains not the “real” Anaïs Nin but the Nin persona.3
There is also another interesting dimension of the relationship between the real person and the diary persona. Writing about American women diarists, Culley observes, “Some evidence exists that the persona in the pages of the diary shapes the life lived as well as the reverse.” Similar observations