I began editing Volume II.

  I received an invitation to visit Japan.

  I reviewed the plays of D. H. Lawrence for The New York Times. The editor, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, wanted to rewrite it because it was "feminine writing." I said I would withdraw it if it was rewritten. His idea of altering the femininity was to use a passé expression like "kitchen sink realism" à propos of Lawrence.

  Private showing of Genet's film, Un Chant d'Amour, at U.C.L.A. I was so moved I wrote a review for our underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press:

  Jean Genet's film Un Chant d'Amour proves that true morality lies in aesthetics, not in the nature of the experience. The beauty and power of this film of homosexual love captures the very essence of love through its sincerity and absence of vulgarity. Genêt is a poet of the erotic and has created a canto to love with so much pride and style that it expresses ultimately the beauty of all desire. The only morality is that of the great artist who can arouse pride in sensual expression. He never offends the senses as many other films have done by their repellent weakness or humiliating ugliness. Genet's film is a film of virility. That is the important theme. The prisoners could be any men—and the prison the cells which society erects between men to the detriment of their love. The men in prison are vital, filled with love; and ironically the guard is the only perverted figure: he does not love or desire, he is the voyeur—jealous, envious, impotent. He can only punish what he does not possess. This is the most unrestrained film I have ever seen, but Genet's vigor, naturalness, and great sense of beauty give it a ritualistic, classical nobility. It converts experience into a symbolic action. By the choice of men of quality, vitality, intensity, he is saying we imprison what is alive because it is dangerous to those who are not.

  There is poetry and sensitiveness in the exchange of symbolic acts: pushing a straw through the prison wall, breathing the smoke of a cigarette as a carrier of the breath of desire, swinging flowers from window to window just beyond the reach of thirsty hands. What casts a shadow of ugliness in other films results from the attitude and vision of the film maker. Puritanism paints in ugly colors. Here the Negro's priapic dance in his cell untainted by hypocrisy assumes the stature of a pagan ritual. The contrast between the destructive, sadistic impulses of the guard and the primitive, lyrical outbursts of the prisoners indicates that fine shading between impotence and virility, life and disease. When stated by a poet who accepts the full expression of desire as an act of life, it becomes as naked as nature—and as innocent. If all experience could pass through the censorship of art, it would achieve what the law has been unable to do. It would assert the need of beauty. It would teach that the only vice is ugliness, and it would automatically rid us of the caricatures of sex which have been passing for eroticism and restore to sensuality its nobility, which lies in the quality and refinement of its expression, the refinement of wholeness.

  The cells become a tragic enclosure, separating man from life, from joy. At the film's most sadistic moment, a prisoner being whipped by a guard dreams of woodlands, sunlight, and pagan fulfillment. It is the guard who, unable to attain this, can only wield a gun as a symbol of virility, can only destroy because he is incapable of desire.

  Volume I of the Diary is published!

  April, May and June were months which erased all the past disappointments. I received wonderful reviews from Karl Shapiro, Jean Garrigue in The New York Times, Harry Moore, Marion Simon in the National Observer, Deena Metzger in The Free Press, and others.

  I gave a talk at Barnard College to an overflowing room.

  I appeared on Camera Three with lifesize sets of Louveciennes, reading from the diary.

  I had a book-signing party at the Gotham Book Mart. The crowd was so big that many people stayed on the stairs, in the bookshop downstairs, and even on the sidewalk.

  My mail was described by one of my correspondents not as fan mail but as love letters. Suddenly there was joy, celebration, praise, invitations to lecture, flowers, interviews, In Berkeley at Cody's Book Shop, Ferlinghetti, one of my favorite poets, threw rose petals over my head.

  The deepest and most understanding review came from Robert Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times:

  "A sorrow made me create a protective cave, the journal. And now I am preparing to abandon this sorrow, this cave," Anaïs Nin wrote in November, 1933, at a time when she was in analysis with Dr. Otto Rank. He saw in it a "last defense against analysis. It is like a traffic island you want to stand on ... I do not want you to analyze the analysis."

  Fortunately for literature, Anaïs Nin returned after the analysis to that diary, one of the most remarkable in the history of letters. A portion of it now appears in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934 (Swallow Press-Harcourt, Brace & World: $6.95; illustrated) edited with an introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann.

  Dr. Rank had said that she was "being kept" by the diary, that it was the "compulsion" of the diary he fought. But the artist within Anaïs Nin sensed that the diary, begun for personal reasons as a child, had evolved as a work in itself, differing in degree and even in style from her novels and stories, satisfying another need in herself, reflecting a special set of truths about herself: "A great passion for accuracy because I know what is lost by the perspective or objectivity of art. My desire to be true to the immediate moment, the immediate mood."

  It is a theme which occurs over and over again. "If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation," Miss Nin writes.

  "I think I have an immediate awareness in living which is far more terrible and more painful. There is no time lapse, no distance between me and the present. Instantaneous awareness."

  Others talked about the diary, noted the striking difference in style, in intensity, in language. One of those who saw the difference was her good and close friend Henry Miller. "Elaborate! That is the only way out of these watertight abstractions of yours. Break through them, divest them of their mystery and allow them to flow ... I think that one of the reasons you have lodged yourself so firmly in the diary is because you fear to test your tangible self with the world. You are producing gems."

  Again, Anaïs Nin followed her own intuition. "I think Henry is right about elaborating. But I think he does not understand that it is because I have a natural flow in the diary: what I produce outside in a distillation, the myth, the poem."

  No one, not even Miller himself, has produced as discerning and living a portrait of Miller, of Antonin Artaud, of Miller's strangely troubled second wife, June, of dozens of other characters of that period in Paris. "Kill the diary, they say; write novels; but when they look at their portrait, they say: 'That is wonderful.' "

  And these portraits are uncompromising; perhaps most uncompromising is the self-portrait. Weakness and strength equally are recorded in a prose so poetic and supple that all comes alive in terror, awe and beauty. After her second analysis (the first with Dr. René Allendy turned into an analysis of the analyst), Miss Nin considered becoming an analyst herself. She rejected it. "Just when I have learned not to clutch at the perfume of flowers, not to touch the breath of the dew, not to tear the curtains off, not to extract essences from petals, to let exaltation and dew rise, sweep by, vanish. The perfume of hours distilled only in silence, the heavy perfume of mysteries untouched by human fingers ... To formulate without destroying with the mind, without tampering, without killing, without withering. That is what I have learned, that delicacy and awe of the senses, that respect for the perfume. It will become my law in writing."

  The diary in this portion becomes an odyssey, more powerful than a novel, though possessed of the same elements, beginnings, a middle, a climax, but not an end for we can expect that the remaining volumes will be published. This volume stands on its own. When the rest come along, if they possess the same qualities of insight and perception, the whole will certainly be one of the enduring works of the diary form.

  It has been said that each life if traced through its labyrinth of experience contains the elements of a revelation. But, as we see here, there are other elements involved. There must be one who sees in detail, who penetrates below the surface, who connects individual experience to universal truths. "...Living is the constant motion toward unraveling, a dynamic movement from mystery to mystery."

  There is the mystery of femininity and the mystery of identity, the mystery of poetry and the mystery of reality, the mystery of things, places and events. "I want to be the writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension."

  The ultimate test of this diary as a literary accomplishment is this: subtract the well-known names and you will still be interested in the characters and events which remain. For a long time, publication of these diaries has been anticipated. Miss Nin lived through the years which produced a great spasm of creativity. She knew writers, painters, musicians, dancers and actors. She was herself one of the central talents of this period. But unlike other memoirs—those of Sylvia Beach, for example—the interest in this volume does not depend on incidents and anecdotes. It is self-sufficient as a chronicle of a life lived with extraordinary intensity and sensitivity, recorded with great empathy and luminous understanding.

  She began to write this diary as a child, to record for her father, the Spanish musician Joaquin Nin, who had deserted his family, their journey to America. She sought through this to win him back. (Some of the most touching scenes in the book deal with her relationship with her father in the years covered.) The journal became an island, a refuge. If it remained solely that, it would be of less interest than it is.

  But it began to change. As she emerged into life, attempting to find herself, it gradually became something more than a protection against the world. In it she was able to discern in retrospect the thousand fragmented selves which make up a deep and sensitive person. Her face for the world to see was that of a beautiful woman, one of the most beautiful of her time. In these pages we see her despair, her shyness, her uncertainty, her enslavement to a past. But as the diary goes on, the identities become fused, meaningful and accepting of truths. Yet, even at the end of 1934, as she is about to leave for America, after three crucial and exciting years, mysteries still remain. We live with her through relationships and friendships, analysis and the desperate experience of losing her prematurely born infant.

  Of special interest is what she has to say to women. Few women diarists since the 18th century have so eloquently expressed the core of femininity. "We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out," she writes near the end. She brings out in others not merely an extension of herself but, through a kind of catalysis, illumination. Even the tortured Artaud, haunted, driven by a sense of persecution, expresses this: "With most people you can only talk about ideas, not the channel through which these ideas pass, the atmosphere in which they bathe, the subtle essence which escapes as one clothes them."

  All this is done without the loss of femininity no more than the lens loses its substance when the light passes through it. With this initial publication, Miss Nin, already assured of a place in contemporary literature, makes this doubly secure.

  Robert Kirsch confirmed my belief that if one goes deeply enough into the personal, one transcends it and reaches beyond the personal.

  I will no longer be vulnerable to the old cliché that I am only interested in the personal.

  At the end of this diary I feel I have accomplished what I hoped to accomplish: to reveal how personal errors influence the whole of history and that our real objective is to create a human being who will not go to war.

  I am not indifferent to the greater dramas hanging over us, but drama is everywhere the same, microcosm or macrocosm. It is not my destiny to live the drama of Spain, war, death, agony, hunger. It is my destiny to live the drama of feeling and imagination, reality and unreality, the drama underlying the others, a drama without guns, dynamite, explosions. But it is the same one, it is from this one that the other is born: conflict, cruelty, revenge, jealousy, envy. In me it all happens in another world, in myself, and myself as an artist who remembers each day more what each day of my life touches in the past. I do not live beyond war, the drama that hastens death, accelerates the end. I live the personal drama responsible for the larger one, seeking a cure. Perhaps it is a greater agony to live this life in which my awareness makes a thousand revolutions while others make only one. My span may seem smaller but it is really larger because it covers all the obscure routes of the soul and body seeking truth, seeking the antiserum against hate and war, never receiving medals for its courage. It is my thousand years of womanhood I am recording, a thousand women. It would be simpler, shorter, swifter not to seek this deepening perspective to my life and lose myself in the simple world of war, hunger, death.

  Index

  Acapulco (Mexico), [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Ackerman, Forrest, [>]

  Act of Love, An, [>]

  Agadir (Morocco): earthquake at, [>]

  Agee, James, [>]

  Albee, Edward, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Albicocco, [>], [>], [>], [>]; meeting with, [>]

  Aldan, Daisy, [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]; letter to, [>]

  Aldington, Richard, [>], [>]

  Alexandria (Egypt), [>]

  Algeria, [>], [>]

  Algren, Nelson, [>]

  All Fall Down, [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Allen, Don, [>]

  Allendy, Dr. René, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]; house of, [>]–[>]

  Alpert, Richard, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Amagansett (N.Y.), [>]–[>]

  America, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]; anger against, [>]; atmosphere of, [>]; blocking imagination, [>]; collective life in, [>]; ego in, [>]–[>]; movie gangster in, [>]; poetic imagination of, [>]

  American Dream, The (play), [>]

  Amherst College (Mass.), [>]

  Anderson, Sherwood, [>]

  Angel in the Forest, [>]

  Anger, Kenneth, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Antonioni, Michelangelo, [>], [>], [>]

  anxiety, [>]; as a girl, [>]; creating illness, [>]–[>]; life without, [>]

  Archera, Laura (Mrs. Aldous Huxley), [>], [>], [>]; evening with, [>]

  Art (magazine), [>], [>]

  Art and Artist, [>], [>], [>]

  Art of Surrealism, The, [>]

  Artaud, Antonin, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]; interviewed by Claude Nerguy, [>]–[>]

  Asphalt Jungle, The (film), [>]

  Asylum in the Snow, [>]

  Asylum Pieces, [>], [>]

  Atkinson, Brooks, [>]; quoted, [>]

  Atomium (at Brussels Fair), [>]

  Auerbach, Norbert, [>]

  Aventura, L' (film), [>]

  Avon Books (publisher), [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Bachardy, Don, [>]

  Balakian, Anna, [>]

  Balcony, The (play), [>]

  Baldock, Robert, [>]

  Ballet Mécanique, [>]

  Balthazar, [>], [>]

  Balzac, Honoré de, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Bankhead, Tallulah, [>]

  Barcelona (Spain): memories of, [>]

  Bardot, Brigitte, [>]

  Barker, William, [>], [>]

  Barker, Zina, [>], [>]

  Barnard College (N.Y.), [>]

  Barnes, Djuna, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Baro, Gene, [>]

  Barrault, Jean-Louis, [>]

  Barron, Adam, [>]

  Barron, Bebe, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]; article on, quoted, [>]–[>]; shower for, [>]–[>]

  Barron, Louis, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]; article on, quoted, [>]–[>]

  Bartók, Bela, [>]

  Baudelaire, Charles, [>]

  Baxter, Annette, [>]

  Baxter, Dr. James, [>]

  Bay, André, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Beach, Sylvia, [>], [>]

  Beats (American writers), [>], [>]; explained, [>]–[>]

  Beaux Arts (Paris), [>]

  Beck, Julian, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Beckett, Samuel, [>], [>]

  Belle Aurore, La (houseboat), [>], [>]

  Bells of Atlantis (film), [>]

  Berenson, Sara, [>]

  Bergman, Ingmar, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Berlin Festival (Germany), [>]

  Bethlehem Steel Corp., [>]

  Betty, [>]–[>], [>], [>]

  Bewitched, The (composition), [>]

  Beyond Psychology, [>]

  Bezem, M., [>]

  Bick, Jerry, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Biederman et les Incendieres, [>]

  Big Sur (Calif.), [>]

  "Birth" (story), [>], [>]

  Birth of the Hero, [>]

  Bitter Lemons, [>], [>], [>]

  Black Book, The, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]

  Black Spring, [>], [>]

  Blacks, The (play), [>]

  Blanch, Lesley, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]; letter to, [>]

  Blin, Roger, [>]

  Blondel, Joan, [>]

  Bloom, Roger, [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]; letter about, [>], [>]–[>]; letter from, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>]; letter to, [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>]–[>]

  Blue Denim (play), [>], [>]

  Bogner, Dr. Inge, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>