Writing an Icon. Anita Jarczok
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