Writing an Icon. Anita Jarczok
but also to put value on Nin’s writings at a time when the diary form was still highly undervalued. Laura Marcus thus explains the frequent comparison of autobiographies to novels: “[B]y establishing a rapprochement between autobiography . . . and the putatively more secure category of the novel, critics felt able to remove the troubling ambiguity of the aesthetic status of autobiography.” Perhaps Nin critics felt similarly obliged to justify their literary interest in this disregarded genre and did so by associating diary with autobiography, which at that time was slowly making its way into academia.29
Nin’s Diary has triggered several debates, two of which are particularly important for this study, namely, What is the role of Nin’s diary, and How does she fashion herself in its pages? These issues tackled by Nin’s critics mirror in many ways general discussions about the diary as a genre. They demonstrate how perspectives on the diary have changed and how diaries and their roles have been conceptualized over time. Consequently, by looking at the critical writings on Nin, we gain an insight into major trends in Nin criticism while simultaneously learning how the research field of life writing has evolved.
Sharon Spencer is one of the first critics to summarize aptly the various roles the diary performed in Nin’s life: it served as a record, as a companion and confidant, as a writer’s notebook, as a fount of ideas, as a springboard for fiction writing, and as a space where the writer could practice her craft and express herself freely. Despite these multiple purposes that Spencer attributes to the diary, she construes the diary as something external to Nin. This rather straightforward explanation of the roles of Nin’s diary reflects the shortage of critical resources available for critics of life narratives at the time when Spencer was completing her study (the 1970s).30
While Spencer regards the diary as external to Nin, Helen Tookey, the author of the most recent monograph on Nin, entitled Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity: Playing a Thousand Roles, conceives the Nin-diary relationship as being much closer. Her main argument is that “for Nin the diary is not simply a ‘record’ of lived experience; rather, the ‘life’ and the writing impact on each other in a process of mutual feedback, creating a life lived, as Nin puts it, ‘within stories.’” A similar treatment of the diary as a process that helps build up Nin’s identity is also offered by Elizabeth Podnieks, the author of Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart and Anaïs Nin. She too considers the diary as a space where the construction of the self takes place. The first Nin critic to point out that by creating her diary Nin created herself is Nancy Scholar. In her study, entitled simply Anaïs Nin, Scholar observes that Nin “came to know herself as she composed her own image, and that knowledge altered the person she was or would have been.” The views of these academics have undoubtedly been influenced by the developments in life-writing studies, which have increasingly emphasized a close, mutually constructive relationship between authors and their life narratives.31
To contribute to this discussion on the various roles of the diary, I suggest that Nin’s diary was also a powerful marketing tool. The diary, which at some point acquired a legendary status in literary circles, became Nin’s bargaining card. However, I do not reduce it solely to this function; I conceive the diary as a very complex phenomenon, and casting it in this single role would unfairly diminish the multiple roles it played throughout Nin’s lifetime. I therefore believe that the various functions noted by Nin critics are not mutually exclusive. I do question, however, some of the roles that scholars have ascribed to Nin’s diary. In chapter 4, for instance, I investigate Nin as a trauma survivor and her diary as a site that helped her in dealing with alleged sexual abuse.
Another debate regarding Nin’s Diary that I hope to revive in this and the following chapter is the construction of her self. The claim that Nin created a character in her Diary is not a new one, and several of Nin’s critics have pointed to this fact. Nin’s Diary has been frequently regarded as representing Nin not as she is but the Nin persona. This claim gained even more ground as theories of autobiography advanced and the creation of the persona started to be perceived as an inherent characteristic of any life narrative. As a result, critics began to comment on Nin’s persona not only in the published Diary but also in the original one.
Focusing mainly on the published Diary, Nin’s early critics, Franklin and Schneider, regard each volume as a journal-novel, with Nin as the main character surrounded by other minor characters. They wonder whether the success of the first diary influenced the editing of subsequent volumes. They ask whether Nin consciously or unconsciously portrayed herself in a certain way in the first volume and then changed the portrayal in subsequent volumes. Nancy Scholar also points to Nin’s conscious intentions to present herself to the public in a specific manner. She remarks that “the reader must consider the legend Nin wished to create in these pages of a courageous, independent woman struggling to forge her own identity and art.”32
While the early critics emphasized Nin’s self-presentation in the published Diary, later critics, influenced by expanding autobiography criticism, began to regard the creation of the self as an inherent element of any self-writing project. “Narrative,” as Paul John Eakin argues, “plays a central, structuring role in the formation and maintenance of our sense of identity.” He also notes that in forming our sense of self we rely on models of identity that are supplied by the culture we live in. Influenced by the latest theories of autobiography, Podnieks analyzes Nin’s diaries from the interdependent perspective, “which would admit that the self is always in part invented by and perpetuated through its linguistic and textual configurations but also by its social, cultural, and historical contexts.” Tookey echoes this view and argues that Nin “creates narratives and self-representations which are neither entirely fictional nor entirely historical.” According to them, Nin’s self-constructions are partly invented and partly influenced by the times she lived in. And although the forms of self-representation available to women at a given historical time do not interest me as much as the self-portraits Nin made available in the published version of her Diary, I wish to emphasize that to analyze these self-portraits effectively, we must take into consideration two time horizons: when Nin wrote her original entries and when she prepared the diary for publication.33
MARKETING THE DIARY
Although Nin was not famous before 1966, her diary had acquired legendary status in literary circles long before it was published, as Edmund Wilson’s and Karl Shapiro’s reviews attest. The opening sentence in Wilson’s 1944 New Yorker review of Under a Glass Bell—twenty-two years before the first Diary appeared in print—announces, “The unpublished diary of Anaïs Nin has long been a legend of the literary world, but a project to have it published by subscription seems never to have come to anything.” Shapiro’s review of the first volume of the Diary in Book Week in 1966 begins in a strikingly similar way: “For a generation the literary world on both side of the Atlantic has lived with the rumor of an extraordinary diary.” The diary that developed into a legend, or was constructed as one, among literati became Nin’s bargaining card. The marketing function of the diary emerges most clearly from the presentation of Nin’s attempts to rewrite her work and to have it published.34
Shortly after her arrival in Paris in the winter of 1924, Nin began first reading and then copying her early journals. In January of the following year, she noted, “Still affected by the spirit of my old journals, and the Self I found in them, I walked out this morning and saw Paris in a more gentle and sympathetic way” (ED 3, 90)—a passage that merits a brief explanation because it hints at Nin’s uneasy attitude toward the City of Lights and reveals her recurrent need to revisit her diary, especially during turbulent and emotionally difficult times, and the relocation to Paris proved to affect Nin’s sense of self in a profound way. Despite the fact that France was the country of her birth and that she was looking forward to moving to Paris with anticipation, once she arrived there from New York, she had mixed feelings about the place. On some days she loved the city and on others she could not stand it, but for the most part her initial stay in the French capital was marked by distress. The displacement forced her to face new values, different customs, and earlier unacknowledged feelings. What turned