A JOYOUS TRANSFORMATION

A new volume of Nin’s prolific diaries reveals the last obsession of her life: her public image.

Despite dying nearly 47 years ago, the erotic writer and archetypal diarist Anaïs Nin still has more to say. Her seminal diaries were not published until 1966, a decade before her death from cervical cancer, and started from 1931, so readers have always come to her story in media res. This final volume, edited by Herron, recounts her life post-diaries publication, transformed by both fame and illness. “No later than the 1930s Nin believed that the record of her life as presented in the journal merited publication,” writes Franklin in the book’s introduction, but “these texts raise questions they do not answer.” Here Herron provides, if not answers, some scaffolding upon which to hang an assessment of an interiority tailored and revised for public consumption. These are not the ribald chronicles of her earlier works; rather, readers see Nin contending with how the wider world receives her work, and thus her. The text includes letters between Nin and her agent, Gunther Stuhlmann, over payments and scheduling and tender exchanges with her first husband, Hugh Guiler, as well as missives from various literary admirers from across the globe. June and Henry Miller make appearances, but the most engrossing sections deal with Nin’s conception of herself as both public figure and product: “Everyone wants to see me…they need to know I am real—that I am my work. When I tell them it is all in the work they do not quite accept that; I think I am withdrawing from public life because it focuses entirely on an idealized Anaïs.” Nin obscures her worsening health—her cancer, glibly announced with “Kaiser gives diagnosis of cancer,” was detected in 1970 but remains largely unaddressed until the final years of her life. Nin’s greatest fear was to be parted from all the love she had accumulated—if only readers of today, decades removed, could reassure her that, to them, she remains very much alive.

A shrewd examination of fame, fortune, and love by a literary giant.