Nin - Fire: the unexpurgated diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937

Copyright 1995, 1994, 1987 by Rupert Pole, as Trustee under the Last Will and Testament of Anas Nin

Copyright 1995 by Gnther Stuhlmann

Copyright 1995 by Rupert Pole

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Excerpts from The Diary of Anas Nin, 19341939. Volume II, copyright 1967 by Anas Nin, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

Some passages previously appeared in Volumes 5, 11, 12, and 13 of Anas: An International Journal.

Excerpted letters from Henry Miller to Anas Nin first appeared in their entirety in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anas Nin and Henry Miller, 19321953, edited and with an introduction by Gnther Stuhlmann, copyright 1987 by Rupert Pole, as Trustee under the Last Will and Testament of Anas Nin.

Photographs and illustrations courtesy of The Anas Nin Trust. All rights reserved.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Nin, Anas, 19031977.
[Diary of Anas Nin. 19341937. Selections]
Fire: from "A journal of love": the unexpurgated diary of Anas Nin, 19341937/with a preface by Rupert Pole and biographical notes and annotations by Gnther Stuhlmann1st. ed.
A Harvest Book.
p. cm
Includes index.
ISBN 0-15-100088-3
ISBN 0-15-600390-2 (pbk)
ISBN 978-0-15-600390-2 (pbk)
1. Nin, Anas, 19031977Diaries. 2. Women authors, American20th centuryDiaries. I. Title.
PS3527.1865Z466 1995
818'.5203dc20 94-41645

eISBN 978-0-547-53954-6
v2.1012

Fire is the third volume of the "Journal of Love" series, following Henry and June and Incest.

From 1931, when she began her first love affair with Henry Miller, Anas Nin engaged in a lifelong search for the perfect love and confided this search to her diary. (The discipline of daily writing in her diary since 1914 had given Anas the uncanny ability to describe her deepest emotions at "white heat" immediately following an event.) She continued her diaryalways written by handuntil her death in 1977. The 35,000 pages are now in the Special Collections Department of UCLA, where they are available to scholars.

In the 1920s, after John Erskine and others told Anas that her diary contained her best writing, she began to explore ways to publish the diary without hurting others. Later Henry Miller told her to publish "the whole thinglet it all hang out." Anas devised a number of plans to publish the diary: transforming the diary into fiction, doing it as a diary but with fictitious names, or making it a diary with both real and fictitious names. None of these satisfied Anas's need to protect her husband and others, however, and she turned to writing fiction.

Finally, in the mid-1950s, tired of receiving only underground recognition, she decided to publish the diary with real names and to edit out her personal life, her husband, and her lovers. The first edited diary, published in 1966, had no volume number: the cover simply said The Diary of Anas Nin, since no one, not even Anas, thought there would be a volume two. But after the overwhelming reception to "Diary One," Anas went on to edit and publish six more volumes, continuing to the very end of her life.

Much earlier, at the beginning of our relationship, Anas told me she did not want me to read the unedited diaries. I respected her wish. But in the early 1970s, when we were preparing the diaries to go to UCLA, Anas said, "It is now time for you to read the diaries. I want you to read them all."

I sat for five days and read the 35,000 pages.

"Do you judge me?" Anas asked.

"No. You had the courage to live out your dreams and to write about them. Someday this must be published."

"All right, this is your task. I want you to publish the diaries just as I wrote them."

The publication of "A Journal of Love," the unexpurgated diary of Anas Nin, began in 1986 with Henry and June. Nothing of importance has been deleted from the published volumes. The chronology follows exactly Anas's entries in her diary. The grammar and punctuation reflect Anas's "white heat" writing.

In Fire, the present volume, the setting moves back and forth between Europe and America. Anas continues her relationship with her husband, Hugh, and her love relationship with both Henry Miller and Dr. Otto Rank. The break with Rank is, however, inevitable, as is, perhaps, the search for the "man who would deliver me from all of them." And so appears Gonzalo Mor: "The tiger who dreams. A tiger without claws." Anas remains true to her philosophy of love. "I came back [to France] to live my own lifeto find my self, but that is a dismal necessity compared to that of loving ... loving comes first ... loving, losing, yielding."

Anas's reality cannot be described in facts, as Anas has herself best said: "I live in a sort of furnace of affections, loves, desires, inventions, creations, activities, and reveries. I cannot describe my life in facts because the ecstasy does not lie in the facts, in what happens or what I do, but in what is aroused in me and what is created out of all this....I mean I live a very physical and metaphysical reality together....

"It is true that because of my doubts and anxieties I only believe in fire.It is true that when I wrote the word fire on this volume I did not know what I know today, that all I have written about June, who only believed in the fire, is true about me. That this is the story of my incendiary neurosis! I only believe in fire.

"Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life. Le jeux."

As I noted in my preface to Incest, when the "Journal of Love" series of Anas Nin's unexpurgated diaries is complete, we will have an extraordinary lifetime record of the emotional growth of a creative artist, a writer with the technique to describe her deepest emotions and the courage to give this to the world.

Rupert Pole
Executor, The Anas Nin Trust

Los Angeles
January 1995

The text of Fire is taken from diary books forty-eight through fifty-two, as numbered by Anas Nin. Diary forty-eight is untitled, but titles for the other four are respectively: Rvolte, Drifting, Vive la Dynamite and Nanankepichu, and Fire.

All translations of passages in French or Spanish were made by Jean L. Sherman. Lisa Guest has offered invaluable help in the preparation of the typescript.

M Y SHIP BROKE THE SPEED RECORD SAILING TOWARD New York. It was night and not morning when I arrivedfittingly, for the night is now the beginning for me and the root of all days. The band was playing, and the skyscrapers were twinkling with a million eyes, seemingly standing on black air; and a man was whispering: "Listen, honey, I love you, listen to me, honey, I love you. Honey, you're marvelous. Isn't it grand, honey, to arrive in New York while I make love to you. I'm mad about you, honey. You won't do me wrong? You won't forget me, honey? I love your hair, honey. Listen to me..."

"The music is too loud," I said. "I can only hear the music." But I was looking for Otto Rank, for the other,