Anyone maintaining one long-term relationship knows of the effort sometimes involved, and dealing with two lovers, coast-to-coast commuting, and the logistics of elaborate deception where to write, how to phone, and so on surely required unusual stamina. Once the initial euphoria faded from the relationship with Rupert, Nin bitterly noted his controlling tendencies, his lack of intellectual sophistication, his determination to penny-pinch to save up for a house, and his expectation that she perform traditional housewifely tasks sans maid—Rupert balked at the cost.
Yet a short time back with Hugo was enough to remind her of what had driven her away: his practical incompetence, his involvement in the banking world, and above all the lack of passion, indeed the physical distaste, she had come to feel for him.
The bourgeois in him is incurable. Everything he touches takes on that inanimate quality; I struggled so he would not dress like an old man. When her next fiction, Children of the Albatross , did no better, her publisher, Dutton, dropped her; from to , A Spy in the House of Love suffered 11 rejections and only appeared in print in thanks to subsidies from Hugo and the threat of a lawsuit.
Nin surely deserves sympathy as a woman trying to make it in the macho mid-century world of American writers and publishers, and her stunning looks and exquisite style no doubt further contributed to men discounting her intellect. Any author on the bad end of a rotten review understands the temptation to dash off an abusive response; Nin not only wrote those letters, she kept them and proudly inserted them in her diaries for posterity.
When Nin started to achieve real success, in with the publication of her diaries, it was the payoff for years of hardworking self-promotion. Once Nin realized the commercial appeal of her diaries, she worked hard at publicizing them as a chronicle of the literary life of her times.
Born in a family where art was wholeheartedly appreciated, Nin began writing when she was very young. She never gained any formal education after the age of sixteen when she left school and worked as a model for an artist until her mother moved her to New York City where Nin spent most of her time writing her diaries.
Her diaries Vol. At the age of 44 she met the actor Rupert Pole and developed a passionate romantic relationship with him that ended in marriage in March This uncensored diary is particularly explosive. It will no doubt enflame the usual brigade of outraged moralists who have heaped scorn upon Nin for daring to live by her own moral code, write about her adventures, and then allow that writing to be published for all to read.
The vitriol with which she has been attacked proves her diary hits a nerve, but as H. Most of her secrets involved her sex life, an area women have fought to control on their own terms.
In the meantime, and without even a high school education, Nin forged a modern art form that will finally find its place in this century of Internet communication, full as it is of personal confession. But Nin was decades and light years ahead, trailblazing the exploration of an area of human life so mysterious, so elemental, so beyond politics and social mores, so personal, and yet so universal. This letter was never sent, but was the beginning of her diary—a letter to the world, a year-long cry from the heart.
In spite of this, the s had been an idyllic period for her and she continued her diary. At a time when it was considered shocking for her to have done so, Nin wrote a book-length analysis of D. She also wrote a long, surrealistic prose piece entitled House of Incest. In what proved to be a dramatic turning point in her life, Nin met writer Henry Miller and his wife June in Nin and Guiler also supported Miller financially and paid for the printing of his groundbreaking novel, Tropic of Cancer.
Then in , after a year separation, Nin met her father again. Daughter and father were strangers, he a notorious Don Juan and she a year-old woman. They fell into a brief, incestuous affair, which Nin unflinchingly described in her second unexpurgated diary, Incest. Shortly thereafter, Nin sought psychoanalysis from Otto Rank, a close colleague of Sigmund Freud, but he too fell in love with her and this story was revealed in the following unexpurgated diary, Fire.
Mirages is just that: a series of mirages that dance tantalizingly on the road, one after another, promising refuge and water, but then cruelly evaporate like so many hopes and dreams.
The reader who wishes to cross this particular desert with Nin must be willing to trust that an oasis will be found at the end. Finally, after meeting Rupert Pole in early , Nin will enjoy a fulfilling relationship at last, one that will end her frantic search for love, though it will not conclude her story. For Nin, beginning a diary required the construction of a heroic protagonist, an idealized version of herself.
But writing in her diary also led to the discovery of genuine aspects of her character that integrated to form a more authentic personality.
It reveals many of the dynamics of the process of retreating into constructed selves and the rediscovery of the true self.
She believed there is a unity and oneness that contains the constant transformations and aspects of the self.
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