Writing an Icon. Anita Jarczok
so as not to anger them, because he was perfectly aware that Nin would have to obtain releases from people whom she wanted to include in her Diary if they were still alive.
The following excerpt from the letter to Hiram Haydn not only describes how Nin procured necessary permissions but also gives an insight into revisions that were made to volume 1:
The minor characters are all done flatteringly and will not question anything. Zadkine is a historic figure, Duchamp, Allendy and Rank are dead, we took out Rebecca West who is very difficult, others do not appear under their real name, Fred [Alfred Perlès] was written up by Henry [Miller], and by himself and as he wrote such a distorted story about me he will lie quiet . . . Fred lives in Greece, and it would take months to get a release and he is not badly portrayed as Henry asked me to take out what could bother him.12
As is evident from the above passage, some people did not agree to be portrayed in the Diary. Apart from Rebecca West, Nin’s close cousin Eduardo, her brother Thorvald, and her husband Hugh Guiler refused to appear in Nin’s published journal. Nin dealt with this difficulty in various ways: she removed such troublesome individuals, as she did in the case of Rebecca West, excluding her from volume 1; she portrayed them in a more complimentary light (for instance, she brought back Rebecca West for the second volume, mentioning her briefly and describing her only in superlatives); she invented fictional characters based on real-life people, as she did with her cousin Eduardo, whom she replaced with Marguerite, describing her in Diary 1 as “a dark haired girl” whom Nin “met . . . at the home of my neighbor” (74); she used other Diary characters, attributing to them words and actions that were originally spoken and done by somebody else (for example, many events that she experienced with her husband, such as the visit to the brothel described in Diary 1, were portrayed as if she had lived through them with Henry Miller). All these amendments had a great impact on the form and content of the final text.
There was also a question of audience, which must have played a crucial part in determining the material selected for publication. Margo Culley stresses the importance of an audience to the diary writing. By my arrangement of levels of self-construction, she refers to the first level: writing in the original diary. In the second level of self-construction, that is, in the process of final editing, the audience comes to the forefront. Because readers’ reactions (in the form of letters and reviews) to the consecutively published Diaries were available to Nin, she must have taken them into consideration while arranging the material, elaborating or consolidating it, and making it coherent, readable, and contemporary. The Diary is, therefore, multilayered, consisting of Nin’s version of her life as she saw it at the moment of writing, rewritten at various stages, and finally “cropped” to suit the audience and legal requirements.
As a result, six volumes of the Diary that appeared during Nin’s lifetime launched highly manipulated representations of Nin, easily available to anyone who was willing to read her narrative. Although the volumes promised to be the most private documents, they were in fact the most public façade of Nin. In revising them for publication, Nin carefully crafted her portrayal, and as a result, while reading the six installments of her Diary one can discern the best defined and most distinctive self-portraits.
NIN THE DIARY PERSONA VERSUS NIN THE PUBLIC PERSONA
P. David Marshall’s division of star performance into two dimensions—the textual and the extratextual—may help us understand the connection between Nin’s Diary and Nin the public persona. For Marshall, the “textual” refers to the star’s performance in the domain s/he represents. Thus, for an actor it would be acting in a film, for an athlete it would be playing a sport, for a musician it would be singing at a concert, and in the case of Nin, the “textual” would be writing. Then there is the “extratextual,” which stands for the performance of everyday life of public personality. According to Marshall, these two dimensions produce public personality, or celebrity. Consequently, he posits that to make sense of the star involves not merely the analysis of the primary text (for example, film performance, or, in the case of Nin, her Diary) but, first and foremost, the study of magazine profiles, television interviews, and fans’ involvement in the celebrity reception.13 For these reasons, this chapter deals with Nin’s self-presentation in the Diary, whereas the next one examines Nin’s participation in public life and her reception by various media.
As a result of the correlation between these two dimensions, Nin becomes in a sense the living embodiment of the persona that she created in the Diary. On the one hand, Nin created herself in the Diary, and thanks to its success she managed to promote herself through it. On the other hand, by publishing the heavily edited Diary and launching certain images of herself for the public, Nin was forced to live up to the expectations of the audience, thus building her public persona on her Diary character and also on the public reception of this character.
With the publication of each volume, Nin released self-presentations of herself that she had to maintain once she appeared in front of her fans. By publishing the Diary and insisting that it contains a genuine self and her real life story, Nin had to enact the persona she created in the Diary. This phenomenon has been noticed by Elyse Lamm Pineau in her thought-provoking essay “A Mirror of Her Own: Anaïs Nin’s Autobiographical Performances.” Analyzing unpublished audiotapes of Nin’s lectures, interviews, and discussions, Pineau identifies “continuity between her autobiographical and performance personae” and regards Nin as the embodiment of her Diary. Pineau also notes, “Performance marked the culmination of Nin’s autobiographical project, for it provided an ongoing, public, and collective enactment of her Diary persona on college campuses nationwide.” This ability to re-create her Diary identity contributed significantly to Nin’s popular success after 1966.14
NIN’S SELF-PORTRAITS IN THE DIARY
The release of Nin’s Diaries in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the rise of the women’s movement. Several of Nin’s critics, such as Philip Jason, Diane Richard-Allerdyce, and Helen Tookey, have pointed out the importance of feminism to the success of her Diary. Tookey, for instance, has remarked that the “context of second-wave feminism enabled . . . [Nin] to situate herself as a woman artist who had struggled for emancipation, for recognition, for her own identity.” Nin’s Diaries, however, must have struck a chord not only with the women’s movement but also with other elements characteristic of the era—identified by Arthur Marwick in his 1998 study The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974—such as the importance of the young, the emergence of the “underground” and the “counterculture,” idealism, and frankness in books and behavior. My argument is that while Nin’s ideas about femininity were frequently at odds with the position taken by feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, her portrayal of herself as a supporter of the young and a participant of Bohemia must have appealed to the young generation and the hippies, who, as Elizabeth Wilson points out, were the new bohemians. Nin’s text, although originally written a few decades earlier, reflected many concerns and fascinations of the 1960s generation.15
Although Nin started the diary as an eleven-year-old in 1914 and although at different stages of her career she made plans to publish her childhood journal, the first volume that was eventually released, in 1966, covered the period from 1931 to 1934 (the years she spent in Paris). She likely would not have achieved the same recognition had she released the story of her early days. Despite the fact that Nin’s early journal is a valuable record of her teenage years, marked by struggles in a foreign country, it probably would not have had the hold over her audience that the Paris years had. After all, at the time of the publication of the first Diary, Nin was not an established figure in the literary marketplace, and reading about the adolescence of a little-known personality would not have been as appealing as reading about Nin’s acquaintance with Henry Miller, which constitutes a great part of volume 1. In choosing the opening date, Nin did not opt for her early days in Paris, either. She arrived in the French capital in 1924, and her arrival might have served as another logical opening point for her published journal. Instead, she decided to begin her Diary when her personal and professional life accelerated: in 1931 she published her study of