Writing an Icon. Anita Jarczok
not only that Nin constructs the text and textual persona(e) but also that Nin’s own identity as a person is affected in the process of self-writing. “The writer of any life text,” Podnieks observes, “necessarily creates herself in the process of self-documentation.”4
While it is impossible to measure effectively how Nin’s identity was influenced by her self-presentations in the diary, there is some textual evidence that Nin’s diary writing had a significant impact on her life. “I really believe,” Nin observed, “that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. . . . But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman.”5 This comment provokes a fascinating question, namely, to what extent the need to experience is triggered by the need to have something interesting to describe. When one wants to write, especially a story of one’s life, as Nin did, one wants to have something interesting to write about, and a housewife’s existence usually does not provide captivating stories. Therefore, the possibility exists that writing incited Nin to experiment with her life.
What is more, bearing in mind the fact that Nin shared her diary and tried to publish it as early as the 1930s, we can speculate about how her diary writing was guided by the awareness of the audience and by the need to present herself in a particular way. Margo Culley emphasizes the importance of an audience, whether real or imagined, conscious or unconscious: “The presence of a sense of audience . . . has a crucial importance over what is said and how it is said.” And she adds that many diarists suppose some kind of audience, even if it is the diary itself, addressed often as “Dear Diary.” Nin’s audience beginning in the 1930s was real rather than imagined as she shared her diary with various people, including her relatives, friends, and prospective publishers, and this needs to be remembered while analyzing Nin’s self-presentations. In this regard Nin’s diary differs from the diaries of people who never engaged in bringing their daily inscription to public light and whose diaries either remained unpublished or were published posthumously.6
It would be neither possible nor advantageous to determine to what extent Nin the diary persona reflects Nin the real person, if only for the simple fact that Nin the “real” person is impossible to capture. As a result, the original diary contains her self-made portraits rather than reproducing Nin the person. The selves recorded by Nin did not reflect the real-life Nin but were Nin’s interpretations, or representations, of herself. These interpretations were strongly influenced by society, culture, and the times she lived in.
NIN THE DIARY PERSONA VERSUS NIN THE DIARY PERSONA
Before Nin’s Diary reached its readers, it went through a process of double construction.7 Nin first had to choose what to put in her original diary, and she frequently admitted that giving a full account of herself and her life was impossible. “I sometimes doubt that this can be considered a complete record of a life,” Nin wrote about her journal and explained, “Not because I have not written every day, but because I have not written all day, every hour, every moment. . . . The moment I catch and fix, when I can spare a few minutes and sit down to write, is only one of the thousands which go into the making of a day.”8 Once she selected what should go into the diary, she needed to decide how to “frame” it—that is, how to capture her experiences in writing—and she devoted a lot of time and energy to invent the best technique for her diary (as discussed in the previous chapter). Then the second stage of the construction process, the conscious and deliberate preparation of the diary for publication, took place. Nin had to select parts of the material, rewrite them by either elaborating or condensing them, and adorn them with photographs to make them more appealing for her potential readers.
How this process of double construction unfolded can be clearly seen in Nin’s account of her friendship with Henry Miller. In the first six volumes of the Diary, Nin presents their relationship as only friendship and literary collaboration, while the unexpurgated volume Henry and June and Nin’s biographies reveal that they were also engaged in a very passionate sexual affair. Nin therefore changed the content of her diary by either concealing certain facts or presenting them in the way she thought appropriate. Apart from manipulating the content of the Diaries, she also changed the form and style of her writing by editing her entries. A comparison of the original and published account of her first meeting with Henry Miller exposes significant differences between the two versions. Here is the passage from the original:
I’m singing, singing, and not secretly but aloud. I’ve met Henry Miller. When I first saw him stepping out of the car and walking towards the door where I stood I went blind, in my usual way. Blindly, I looked at him with a second vision. I saw a man I liked. I saw a mouth which was at once intelligent, animal, and soft, strange mixture. Then my eyes opened and I saw a man who was likeable, not overbearing, but strong, a human man, who was [intelligible word] aware of everything (In his writing he was flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent). “He is a man whom life makes drunk” I say that inwardly “He is like me.”9
And here is the corresponding entry from Diary 1:
When I saw Henry Miller walking towards the door where I stood waiting, I closed my eyes for an instant to see him by some other inner eye. He was warm, joyous, relaxed, natural.
He would have passed anonymously through a crowd. He was slender, lean, not tall. He looked like a Buddhist monk, a rosy-skinned monk, with his partly bald head aureoled by lively silver hair, his full sensuous mouth. His blue eyes are cool and observant, but his mouth is emotional and vulnerable. His laughter is contagious and his voice caressing and warm like a Negro voice.
He was so different from his brutal, violent, vital writing, his caricatures, his Rabelaisian farces, his exaggerations. The smile at the corner of his eyes is almost clownish; the mellow tones of his voice are almost like a purring content. He is a man whom life intoxicates, who has no need of wine, who is floating in a self-created euphoria.10
In this case, Nin elaborated the notes taken after the actual meeting with Henry Miller on 3 December 1931. The original entry served as a rough draft that Nin expanded and embellished. To every original sentence, Nin wrote two or three, thus making her text clearer for her audience, as in the fragment in which she explained that she tried to grasp Henry intuitively, with her “inner eye.” The original entry in which Nin wrote that she went blind might have been confusing for the readers, whereas the published version makes perfect sense. In rewriting the original, Nin also employed literary devices, such as similes and elaborate epithets, which increased the readability and attractiveness of the published Diary.
Interestingly, a very similar description of Miller appeared in a letter Nin sent to him three months after they met and shortly after they embarked on their sexual adventure. On 9 March 1932, Nin wrote,
How did I single you out? I saw you with that intense selective way—I saw a mouth that was at once intelligent, animal, soft . . . strange mixture—a human man, sensitively aware of everything—I love awareness—a man, I told you, whom life made drunk. Your laughter was not a laughter which could hurt, it was mellow and rich. I felt warm, dizzy, and I sang within myself.11
On the one hand, this repetition of words, phrases, and ideas gives us an insight into Nin’s creative process. The comparison of the original entry to the passage from a letter shows that while she was recycling similar vocabulary in making Miller’s portrait, she nonetheless made efforts to find the best descriptors and to polish her sentences in order to best capture his essence. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of all three fragments reveals how her various rewritings enriched the final shape of the Diary. Nin could draw on these different versions to create the ultimate portrait of Miller in the published version.
Yet aesthetic concerns were not all that influenced the final shape of the Diary: there were also personal and legal considerations. Nin had to consider what she wanted to and could reveal. She produced a very sanitized self-portrait in which she got rid of controversial material, such as her sexual affairs and incestuous relationship with her father, and some unflattering details, like a nose surgery that she underwent in her thirties. Portraits of others were also retouched. Miller, for instance, who contributed significantly to the revision of