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The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin #4
The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1927-1931
A bridge between the early life of Nin and the first volume of her Diary. In pages more candid than in the preceding diaries, Nin tells how she exorcised the obsession that threatened her marriage and nearly drove her to suicide. Editor's Note by Rupert Pole; Preface by Joaquin Nin-Culmell; Index; photographs.
528 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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About the author
Anaïs Nin
355 books8,948 followersWriter and diarist, born in Paris to a Catalan father and a Danish mother, Anaïs Nin spent many of her early years with Cuban relatives. Later a naturalized American citizen, she lived and worked in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Author of avant-garde novels in the French surrealistic style and collections of erotica, she is best known for her life and times in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volumes I-VII (1966-1980).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana%C3%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana%C3%...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 28, 2011
I went through a real Nin kick about fifteen years ago. But, I got a bit miffed when I learned the versions I was reading were so hacked up--they read nice, but major topics omitted. When I learned she was married, I almost threw the book across the room! (Actually I was on a plane and sighed loudly instead.) It changed so much! Also, she was a train wreck in her drama, it got annoying. Affairs with her gay cousin, affairs with her shrink, affair with girls, and so on. The more I read about her ridiculous behavior, the more unacceptable I found her writing. Her fiction was gibberish to me. Her book on D.H. Lawrence was good, but more of a good start than any great lit crit.
Fortunately, most of the characters have died off, so this version is more complete. I can't really figure all her diaries and their publishing history out. She wrote a ton of diaries, to the point it seems to detract from her other creative output. She is known, I think, for all the sexy stuff in later years--including an affair with her father, possibly fabricated. (She was not overly attached to facts and reality.)
This diary covers 1927 to 1931, she is mostly in Paris, is in her mid twenties. Once I hit forty, I became very forgiving of what people do in their younger years, so I am not so critical of her overall, and this slice of life is pretty tame.
Nin lives with her banker husband who is supporting her mother and younger brother as well. At one point, they loose a ton of money in the stock market crash and they have to give up their fancy digs for something cheaper outside the city. These folks are poor in "down to just two or three servants" poor, not really poor, so it is not tragic.
As far as her love affairs, she adores Hugh, her husband, but resents him being such a working drudge. On the other hand, she loves the money, and stuggles with this. She had some stupid affair with a writer dude I will look up (John Erskine), is pining over that at times, then focuses on her gay cousin. She is also, at times a shameless flirt and explores her issues in her diary, trying to figure it all out. This is right before she meets Henry Miller, her next big love affair.
The other topic she struggles with is being an artist. She reminds me of god damn Kerouac with the struggle to get published. At this time, she is writing many stories and articles. She spends many years of her life trying to reconcile the diary with her writing, and eventually decides the diary is her work. I wish she had gotten it all figured out.
I am not sure if I will continue with the next chunk, it is frustrating to witness some one frittering away their talents becuase it is more exciting to be desired. But this volume was great, I really enjoyed it and found if thought provoking. I intermittenly keep a paper diary, and this was a good prompt to continue with it.
One other thing, her handwriting is unbelievably neat and consistent. No cross outs, just beautiful cursive, page after page.
Fortunately, most of the characters have died off, so this version is more complete. I can't really figure all her diaries and their publishing history out. She wrote a ton of diaries, to the point it seems to detract from her other creative output. She is known, I think, for all the sexy stuff in later years--including an affair with her father, possibly fabricated. (She was not overly attached to facts and reality.)
This diary covers 1927 to 1931, she is mostly in Paris, is in her mid twenties. Once I hit forty, I became very forgiving of what people do in their younger years, so I am not so critical of her overall, and this slice of life is pretty tame.
Nin lives with her banker husband who is supporting her mother and younger brother as well. At one point, they loose a ton of money in the stock market crash and they have to give up their fancy digs for something cheaper outside the city. These folks are poor in "down to just two or three servants" poor, not really poor, so it is not tragic.
As far as her love affairs, she adores Hugh, her husband, but resents him being such a working drudge. On the other hand, she loves the money, and stuggles with this. She had some stupid affair with a writer dude I will look up (John Erskine), is pining over that at times, then focuses on her gay cousin. She is also, at times a shameless flirt and explores her issues in her diary, trying to figure it all out. This is right before she meets Henry Miller, her next big love affair.
The other topic she struggles with is being an artist. She reminds me of god damn Kerouac with the struggle to get published. At this time, she is writing many stories and articles. She spends many years of her life trying to reconcile the diary with her writing, and eventually decides the diary is her work. I wish she had gotten it all figured out.
I am not sure if I will continue with the next chunk, it is frustrating to witness some one frittering away their talents becuase it is more exciting to be desired. But this volume was great, I really enjoyed it and found if thought provoking. I intermittenly keep a paper diary, and this was a good prompt to continue with it.
One other thing, her handwriting is unbelievably neat and consistent. No cross outs, just beautiful cursive, page after page.
December 17, 2006
Vol 4:
The early work of this author fascinates me. These are early diaries of Nin--before she met Henry Miller. She's a young woman, recently married to an investment banker in Paris (Hugh), and the daughter of a famous concert pianist. Although her diaries are dated from 1927 to 1931, one would never guess. The issues that she writes about are timeless. Nin takes Spanish dancing lessons with a brooding teacher, gets painted by Russian countesses, and generally lives a visceral lifestyle. Her quest for more and more stimulation tends to trap her....which doesn't bode well for the later years. And she writes beautifully; I think better than many great American male authors such as Hemmingway...seriously.
The early work of this author fascinates me. These are early diaries of Nin--before she met Henry Miller. She's a young woman, recently married to an investment banker in Paris (Hugh), and the daughter of a famous concert pianist. Although her diaries are dated from 1927 to 1931, one would never guess. The issues that she writes about are timeless. Nin takes Spanish dancing lessons with a brooding teacher, gets painted by Russian countesses, and generally lives a visceral lifestyle. Her quest for more and more stimulation tends to trap her....which doesn't bode well for the later years. And she writes beautifully; I think better than many great American male authors such as Hemmingway...seriously.
February 24, 2008
A. This excellent journal of Anais Nin shows her life BEFORE she meets Miller, and includes lusty details of her relationship with Hugh (isn't it wonderful to be so madly in love?). She journals extensively at an incident that almost rips her and Hugh apart, but their love is stronger. Her writing is SO lovely. The latter part of the journal is more fascinating, due to the incident I refer to earlier.
September 1, 2015
"Something or other has been developing the worst in me. I must have been a false ascetic before, because now spirituality is leaving me, I live with my body, I am led by many sensations I never felt before, and I am full of warmth and leapings and languors." (p.1)
"Some women manage to can fruit and keep their bodies beautiful and their minds awake, but as most of them can’t, they ought to give up the canning." (p.10)
"I seek to understand character, to develop it; but when that is done, I am bored. It takes me such a short time to discover everything and then I long to run away again, home, to my thoughts and occupations." (p.11)
"I can’t live in artificiality. In the eyes of people like the countesses, I see thoughts other than those they speak about, dimmed by a long habit of reserve, sometimes effaced completely. There remains nothing but a watchful guard set upon the thoughts of others, which they cannot tolerate." (p.18)
"That is all that social life means, the careful setting of a web. We feel that we are living because we feel the web pulling and feel we are important merely because our absence tears the web. This web, to most people, is a justification of their lives, and it is responsible for their illusions." (p.21)
"I am tired of writing just for myself. It is like talking to a wall, like smoking in the dark. I know I could make others cry and make them infinitely, desperately, divinely alive. I know I say what they wish to say and cannot say. And some, if my writing reached them, this writing I have done walking alone, would know that there are several of us walking alone, and that it is good to know it." (p.25)
"I am beginning to understand that everybody is a mixture, that I am the worst one myself, that there is nothing to do about it… But I know now that since I live more, I understand more." (p.37)
"I feel the petty cruelties of people in the shops, the petty lies, the petty tyranny. I am no more philosophical about suffering than before, no more hardened, no more stoical." (p.39)
"Perhaps I do not live enough now with my head. I have lost it-and I feel happy without it!" (p.62)
"I will always be too soft, and too impulsive, and too thoughtful, and too analytical. Like Proust, I don’t look at people; “Je les radiographie” (I X-ray them)." (p.80)
"The real world goes to pieces and I am another woman, dissolved by passion, conquered by a love that belongs to no one, and to anyone, outside of myself, and yet possessing all of me." (p.109)
"Living itself takes too much energy, too much thought, too much of one’s preciously gathered wisdom. There is nothing left but a bad taste in one’s mouth and the strong desire to forget." (p.116)
"I have lived with books, bathed in ink, worshipped the inward life blindly; I have renounced half the beauty in the world (when I slapped the faces of the men who desired me). I have been the most chaste woman, the most desperate dreamer, the most innocent child, the most self-effacing sister, the most obedient daughter, the most virtuous of housewives. I feared to hurt, to disturb, to take up too much room; I left defiance, rebellion to noisier, bigger people. I had enough with being loved.
Today I am a woman. I defy the hate, the criticism, the envy, the scandalized faces around me….I have my dream. I’ll follow it alone, always, against the world." (p.132)
"I really don’t work- I create. And that’s all." (p.142)
"Feeling is stronger in me than thought." (p.142)
"I suppose that although I spend so much time explaining myself, others will interpret me in their own way." (p.150)
"The purity of biographies is going to turn me away from novels." (p.151)
"No use giving the details of what a woman can do when she hates you. Women have a genius for petty cruelty." (p.161)
"…the best inheritance parents can leave their children is having been great and wonderful themselves, rather than the usual collection of ‘sacrifices’ and ‘renunciations,’ to be eternally mentioned afterward as a reproach." (p.173)
"My secret does not poison me! I feel glorious and strong and right. I bow today before the facts of my strange self- a woman who was not contented with one life but embraced several- as others do within a longer space of time. But I have no sense of time. There are no barriers for me. I am going through several incarnations now, all in one." (p.196)
"I will never give myself entirely to anything. I will never escape from myself, neither by love, by maternity, by art." (p.199)
"What reality lacks, a lie will give- a beautiful lie." (p.214)
"What happens when you don’t live out physically and humanly an idea in your head, a dream, a desire? (p.215)
I work for working’s sake and without proof of the value of what I do." (p.216)
"I love knowing everything real, ugly, ferocious. I eat up life whole, don’t pick the choice and dainty morsels." (p.238)
"I saw the madness, the wise madness, in her. She saw the wise madness in me. We were discovered." (p.297)
"There is no doubt I am an artist, which makes a fine woman out of me; not a stone, not a housekeeper, not a nurse- a free, pliable, busy being, who weighs on nobody- carrying a world, not demanding one." (p.330)
"It is only in the dull moments that I lie and invent, when I feel the necessity of stimulating people by a fantastic statement or of stimulating my own life, which is in danger of dying in their presence. And so I lie, for the wonder of it." (p.338)
"No man now who wants to play the idiotic man-and-woman game with me- you yield, I tyrannize; you tyrannize and I am subjugated; you run away, I hunt; you hunt and I run away- will ever get any affection from me." (p. 355)
"To have a poetical temperament is to have inside of you a kind of perpetual singing. Whether sad or gay the response is a song, a humming, a rhythm, a sweeping and rolling and rushing force." (p.356)
"Today I decided to bear the dissatisfaction, too, the self-criticism and the self-condemnation- not through tolerance, but because I have ceased to care about myself. Not worth bothering about. Let it wriggle- and work. The wriggling is good for the work. I don’t even try to give myself a harmonizing philosophy, or seek to satisfy my desires. Need friends? Need passion? Need brilliance? What of it? Go to work. In that, you are good, and in that alone. In that, you can redeem your sophistry, your fallacious impulses, your emotional inflammability, your little spiteful, sharp, jealous sensibilities." (p.358)
"I am an island on which nobody can land. Nobody will ever again be allowed to crunch the soft sand, to leave imprints of big confident feet, to write on the sand other women’s names with their tip of a wand, to leave the mold of a body where the body has lain." (p.363)
"(A kiss can destroy a philosophy.)" (p.365)
"The perpetual pain of craving is the source of the artist’s work." (p.374)
"…I go off on solitary journeys to find my own divine integrity again." (p.378)
"If I had not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s." (p.427)
"Pity will always save me from inhumanity." (p.466)
"I knew that by going so deeply into life I had gone of my own will into hell." (p.468)
"Some women manage to can fruit and keep their bodies beautiful and their minds awake, but as most of them can’t, they ought to give up the canning." (p.10)
"I seek to understand character, to develop it; but when that is done, I am bored. It takes me such a short time to discover everything and then I long to run away again, home, to my thoughts and occupations." (p.11)
"I can’t live in artificiality. In the eyes of people like the countesses, I see thoughts other than those they speak about, dimmed by a long habit of reserve, sometimes effaced completely. There remains nothing but a watchful guard set upon the thoughts of others, which they cannot tolerate." (p.18)
"That is all that social life means, the careful setting of a web. We feel that we are living because we feel the web pulling and feel we are important merely because our absence tears the web. This web, to most people, is a justification of their lives, and it is responsible for their illusions." (p.21)
"I am tired of writing just for myself. It is like talking to a wall, like smoking in the dark. I know I could make others cry and make them infinitely, desperately, divinely alive. I know I say what they wish to say and cannot say. And some, if my writing reached them, this writing I have done walking alone, would know that there are several of us walking alone, and that it is good to know it." (p.25)
"I am beginning to understand that everybody is a mixture, that I am the worst one myself, that there is nothing to do about it… But I know now that since I live more, I understand more." (p.37)
"I feel the petty cruelties of people in the shops, the petty lies, the petty tyranny. I am no more philosophical about suffering than before, no more hardened, no more stoical." (p.39)
"Perhaps I do not live enough now with my head. I have lost it-and I feel happy without it!" (p.62)
"I will always be too soft, and too impulsive, and too thoughtful, and too analytical. Like Proust, I don’t look at people; “Je les radiographie” (I X-ray them)." (p.80)
"The real world goes to pieces and I am another woman, dissolved by passion, conquered by a love that belongs to no one, and to anyone, outside of myself, and yet possessing all of me." (p.109)
"Living itself takes too much energy, too much thought, too much of one’s preciously gathered wisdom. There is nothing left but a bad taste in one’s mouth and the strong desire to forget." (p.116)
"I have lived with books, bathed in ink, worshipped the inward life blindly; I have renounced half the beauty in the world (when I slapped the faces of the men who desired me). I have been the most chaste woman, the most desperate dreamer, the most innocent child, the most self-effacing sister, the most obedient daughter, the most virtuous of housewives. I feared to hurt, to disturb, to take up too much room; I left defiance, rebellion to noisier, bigger people. I had enough with being loved.
Today I am a woman. I defy the hate, the criticism, the envy, the scandalized faces around me….I have my dream. I’ll follow it alone, always, against the world." (p.132)
"I really don’t work- I create. And that’s all." (p.142)
"Feeling is stronger in me than thought." (p.142)
"I suppose that although I spend so much time explaining myself, others will interpret me in their own way." (p.150)
"The purity of biographies is going to turn me away from novels." (p.151)
"No use giving the details of what a woman can do when she hates you. Women have a genius for petty cruelty." (p.161)
"…the best inheritance parents can leave their children is having been great and wonderful themselves, rather than the usual collection of ‘sacrifices’ and ‘renunciations,’ to be eternally mentioned afterward as a reproach." (p.173)
"My secret does not poison me! I feel glorious and strong and right. I bow today before the facts of my strange self- a woman who was not contented with one life but embraced several- as others do within a longer space of time. But I have no sense of time. There are no barriers for me. I am going through several incarnations now, all in one." (p.196)
"I will never give myself entirely to anything. I will never escape from myself, neither by love, by maternity, by art." (p.199)
"What reality lacks, a lie will give- a beautiful lie." (p.214)
"What happens when you don’t live out physically and humanly an idea in your head, a dream, a desire? (p.215)
I work for working’s sake and without proof of the value of what I do." (p.216)
"I love knowing everything real, ugly, ferocious. I eat up life whole, don’t pick the choice and dainty morsels." (p.238)
"I saw the madness, the wise madness, in her. She saw the wise madness in me. We were discovered." (p.297)
"There is no doubt I am an artist, which makes a fine woman out of me; not a stone, not a housekeeper, not a nurse- a free, pliable, busy being, who weighs on nobody- carrying a world, not demanding one." (p.330)
"It is only in the dull moments that I lie and invent, when I feel the necessity of stimulating people by a fantastic statement or of stimulating my own life, which is in danger of dying in their presence. And so I lie, for the wonder of it." (p.338)
"No man now who wants to play the idiotic man-and-woman game with me- you yield, I tyrannize; you tyrannize and I am subjugated; you run away, I hunt; you hunt and I run away- will ever get any affection from me." (p. 355)
"To have a poetical temperament is to have inside of you a kind of perpetual singing. Whether sad or gay the response is a song, a humming, a rhythm, a sweeping and rolling and rushing force." (p.356)
"Today I decided to bear the dissatisfaction, too, the self-criticism and the self-condemnation- not through tolerance, but because I have ceased to care about myself. Not worth bothering about. Let it wriggle- and work. The wriggling is good for the work. I don’t even try to give myself a harmonizing philosophy, or seek to satisfy my desires. Need friends? Need passion? Need brilliance? What of it? Go to work. In that, you are good, and in that alone. In that, you can redeem your sophistry, your fallacious impulses, your emotional inflammability, your little spiteful, sharp, jealous sensibilities." (p.358)
"I am an island on which nobody can land. Nobody will ever again be allowed to crunch the soft sand, to leave imprints of big confident feet, to write on the sand other women’s names with their tip of a wand, to leave the mold of a body where the body has lain." (p.363)
"(A kiss can destroy a philosophy.)" (p.365)
"The perpetual pain of craving is the source of the artist’s work." (p.374)
"…I go off on solitary journeys to find my own divine integrity again." (p.378)
"If I had not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s." (p.427)
"Pity will always save me from inhumanity." (p.466)
"I knew that by going so deeply into life I had gone of my own will into hell." (p.468)
January 1, 2024
Oh, what a magnificent thing it is to get so deeply entranced by someone and begin to see them flower into the fully formed person they will become. Though I do believe we are ever changing beings until the day we die, it is still captivating to see Anaïs come into her own and start to slowly transform into the figure we know her as today.
I do feel like I say this after every volume of a journal I have finished, but this one is so instantly a favorite. Not only do you get to see her navigate the world of publication and the very beginnings of her literary work, but also get an even deeper dive into her psyche and that of her husband, Hugh’s. I think some of the best parts of this is Anaïs opening herself up to psychology and finding the roots of her consciousness and subconscious. The opening of her true realness with Hugh (and his with her), her need to fully be herself and her wanderings into the arms of others.
Ahhhh…It is all just so bewitching!! Having already read Henry and June, this volume gave me an even deeper understanding of the implications of it. Anaïs Nin really is one of the most interesting figures to ever live and her thoughts and feelings about life are astounding and reassuring. To be all that she was so early in history, you begin to find it even more astounding that she always stayed true to herself, that ever changing duality of being human.
“That is what the woman must learn above all else—that after all, we have made a cult of man’s love and should not have; that we do not realize the importance of work so as to be less vulnerable to transitions in love.”
I do feel like I say this after every volume of a journal I have finished, but this one is so instantly a favorite. Not only do you get to see her navigate the world of publication and the very beginnings of her literary work, but also get an even deeper dive into her psyche and that of her husband, Hugh’s. I think some of the best parts of this is Anaïs opening herself up to psychology and finding the roots of her consciousness and subconscious. The opening of her true realness with Hugh (and his with her), her need to fully be herself and her wanderings into the arms of others.
Ahhhh…It is all just so bewitching!! Having already read Henry and June, this volume gave me an even deeper understanding of the implications of it. Anaïs Nin really is one of the most interesting figures to ever live and her thoughts and feelings about life are astounding and reassuring. To be all that she was so early in history, you begin to find it even more astounding that she always stayed true to herself, that ever changing duality of being human.
“That is what the woman must learn above all else—that after all, we have made a cult of man’s love and should not have; that we do not realize the importance of work so as to be less vulnerable to transitions in love.”
January 9, 2014
If you enjoy delving into another person's mind and watching their lives unfold, then reading Anaïs Nin's diaries is much more pleasant and enlightening than watching someone's drama unfold on television. Her ability to describe in words her emotions, her life activities, and her thoughts about things is pleasant to read. This volume shows her coming into her own as a person and not striving to be everything for everyone else. It also shows her obsession with intellectual stimulation coming to the fore and driving her choices as she learns to take control of her own life.
February 9, 2023
What an awesome mind, what a deeply sensitive and creative person. But also, what an exhausting person she must have been to have known!!
February 7, 2023
Anais Nin's diaries are fueled by her deceit and promiscuity. The first volumes of the "Early Diaries" held some interest because of the curiosity factor - what did her first entries look like? How did her style evolve? Years later she would disavow her childish puritanism, but at least she wasn't cheating on anybody.
The first half of this volume is tedious in the extreme, as she desperately tries to convince herself that she's not miserable in her marriage. Things start to pick up when she has a brief affair with author John Erskine, 20-years her senior. I always wondered, "Was she always cavalier about her infidelity?" Now I know the answer: "Yep." It's not that the brief encounter had no effect on her - she stews about it for well over a year, wondering if he still thinks about her, wondering why he doesn't write, or if he does write, wondering why his letters are so cold. But there's little in the way of remorse.
I should be accustomed to Nin's self-absorption, but I was truly taken aback when she whines that her husband, a banker, is too distracted by the stock market crash of 1929 to fully give her the attention she craves. Later she says that her husband, contrary to her advice, sunk more of their money into the stock market after the crash, to disastrous results. Regardless of whose fault it was, they have to scale back their posh lifestyle and retrench to the outer suburb of Louveciennes. Here a switch is flipped, and her writing takes off. I've always been skeptical of writers who say that the place they write is important, but, by golly, it's hard to argue with the results here.
Anais and her husband become enchanted with psychoanalysis, and the last pages are dense with revelations about her husband's repressed upbringing, which, Nin asserts, led to their marriage not being successfully consummated until many months after their wedding. This is a running trait in many of Nin's lovers. Her encounter with Erskine wasn't consummated either. It's safe to say that, intentional or not, she had a soft spot for guys who couldn't get it up.
The initial bowdlerized version of her diary starts where this one stops. The unexpurgated version also starts in the same location. It might have been better had they started halfway through this volume. But little is lost not knowing the Erskine backstory, which is fleetingly referenced in the first volume of the unexpurgated diaries, which star Henry Miller and his wife June. It's easy enough to circle back to the early diaries if you get hooked.
The first half of this volume is tedious in the extreme, as she desperately tries to convince herself that she's not miserable in her marriage. Things start to pick up when she has a brief affair with author John Erskine, 20-years her senior. I always wondered, "Was she always cavalier about her infidelity?" Now I know the answer: "Yep." It's not that the brief encounter had no effect on her - she stews about it for well over a year, wondering if he still thinks about her, wondering why he doesn't write, or if he does write, wondering why his letters are so cold. But there's little in the way of remorse.
I should be accustomed to Nin's self-absorption, but I was truly taken aback when she whines that her husband, a banker, is too distracted by the stock market crash of 1929 to fully give her the attention she craves. Later she says that her husband, contrary to her advice, sunk more of their money into the stock market after the crash, to disastrous results. Regardless of whose fault it was, they have to scale back their posh lifestyle and retrench to the outer suburb of Louveciennes. Here a switch is flipped, and her writing takes off. I've always been skeptical of writers who say that the place they write is important, but, by golly, it's hard to argue with the results here.
Anais and her husband become enchanted with psychoanalysis, and the last pages are dense with revelations about her husband's repressed upbringing, which, Nin asserts, led to their marriage not being successfully consummated until many months after their wedding. This is a running trait in many of Nin's lovers. Her encounter with Erskine wasn't consummated either. It's safe to say that, intentional or not, she had a soft spot for guys who couldn't get it up.
The initial bowdlerized version of her diary starts where this one stops. The unexpurgated version also starts in the same location. It might have been better had they started halfway through this volume. But little is lost not knowing the Erskine backstory, which is fleetingly referenced in the first volume of the unexpurgated diaries, which star Henry Miller and his wife June. It's easy enough to circle back to the early diaries if you get hooked.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews