Writing an Icon. Anita Jarczok
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