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