The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1955–1966

I think that what I am discovering is that the great things are not those we plan on but those which simply happen; and so I feel, at times like this, that my life is arranged too rigidly, as if I were living according to some subconscious and partly conscious plan that ruled out certain realms of wonder and magnificence.

Our desire to live everything out will always meet with the obstacle of guilt.

No reviews in Los Angeles Times. No review of Miller Letters in Time magazine, which makes it a practice to assassinate Henry and to ignore me.

After the negative letters from Random House, Putnam, and Morrow, Alan Swallow spoke to Hiram Haydn of Harcourt Brace. I was in New York, and Gunther gave a cocktail party. It. was at this party that Peter Israel definitely turned down the diary and Hiram Haydn said to me: “I love it. I will do it.” How I loved his directness and conviction. We talked. We had met before. He had me talk to his students at the New School. He has a daughter and he said something about the father-daughter relationship moving him deeply in the diary.

Already, I had had to suffer from the concept that all diaries are narcissistic, that introspection is neurotic, when I knew that I overflowed with love of others and that introspection was the only way to accomplish the inner journey of self-creation.

No. I would not publish it.

But another force, far stronger, was pushing me on—I had faith in the diary. I had put my most natural, most truthful writing in it. I was weary of secrecy, of showing only a small portion of my work. I felt the strongest and best of my work was there. I felt a maturity in the editing. I felt able to solve the problems. There was plenty of material so that what I could not publish would not be missed. I could avoid the blank spaces.

Another fear. As most critics had treated my novels so maliciously, what would they do with the diary?

Bogner pointed out that most of my fears were related to past experiences.

There was also the old guilt about sensual experiences. This taboo was my own.

Meanwhile, as if to confirm the old fears, several publishers wrote negative letters.

ut you can’t have surrealism, and then suddenly analyze the plots of the novels by standards of conventional novels. You started by considering the novels as poems. You first approached me as a poet. You cannot apply standards of conventional structure to someone who never worked by those standards. I know what the basic difficulty is: that my roots and influences are not familiar to you, you judge by American literature, native influences. Then you also make personal judgments. You decide that I repudiated my father’s salon world because I did not want to share him, but both in the novel and in the diary I made it absolutely clear that the conflict was between bourgeois and bohemian life. I think from now on I should not read chapter by chapter and leave you free to pursue your own interpretations.

. I think you did marvelous things with silences, with images, some almost like a film, the physical world and its taste. I can see why you understood the perception of the senses so well. You have a respect for the image, for sensation, for a receptivity and awareness which seeks to develop other ways of experiencing. The story is strong. At times almost exaggerated as experience is when lived through emotion. You make no pretense at objectivity and detachment, as so many novelists do. In that sense you work as a poet. There is much poetry in the writing. The sea, the animals, the trees, all play a role. They are not backdrops. I like the way it is all woven together, one organically affecting the other, words, people, sounds, images, places . . .

Three novelists had a determining influence on my novel writing (aside from Proust and D. H. Lawrence). They were Jean Giraudoux, Pierre Jean Jouve and Djuna Barnes.

The English edition, published by Peter Owen Ltd., also gathered good reviews, very unusual in England, where my work is not understood. If the diary is ever published, I worry about its reception there because of the English horror and hypocrisy about the personal. It is from England that America inherited its taboo on the personal. To be interested in self-development, in self-growth, in self-education and improvement is inevitably a symptom of neurosis, narcissism, egocentricity.