Nin - Incest: from a journal of love: the unexpurgated diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934

Copyright 1992 by Rupert Pole, as Trustee under the Last Will and Testament of Anas Nin Biographical Notes copyright 1992 by Gunther Stuhlmann

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.

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Some material previously appeared in The Diary of Anas Nin, Vol. 1, 19311934, by Anas Nin, copyright 1966 by Anas Nin, Introduction copyright 1966 by Gunther Stuhlmann.

The selection by Henry Miller on was first published in its entirety in Volume 7 of Anas: An International Journal, copyright 1989 by Gunther Stuhlmann.

Excerpted letters from Henry Miller to Anas Nin (except for the selection on ) first appeared in their entirety in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anas Nin and Henry Miller, 19321953, edited and with an introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann, copyright 1987 by Rupert Pole, as Trustee under the Last Will and Testament of Anas Nin. Reprinted with the permission of The Anas Nin Trust. The letter on pages 11617 was published in its entirety in Henry Miller: Letters to Anas Nin, edited and with an introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann, copyright 1965 by Anas Nin, copyright renewed 1988 by The Anas Nin Trust. Reprinted with the permission of The Anas Nin Trust.

Some of the dream passages featured throughout this book were first published in their entirety in Volume 10 of Anas: An International Journal, copyright 1992 by Gunther Stuhlmann. Reprinted with the permission of The Anas Nin Trust.

Photographs and illustrations courtesy of The Anas Nin Trust.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Nin, Anas, 19031977.
Incest: from "a journal of love": the unexpurgated diary of Anas Nin, 19321934/with an introduction
by Rupert Pole and biographical notes by Gunther Stuhlmann1st. ed.
p. cm
Includes index.
ISBN 0-15-144366-1
ISBN 0-15-644300-7 (pbk.)
1. Nin, Anas, 19031977Diaries. 2. Authors, American20th
centuryDiaries. I. Title.
PS3527.1865Z465 1992
818'.5203dc20 92-12441

eISBN 978-0-547-54078-8
v1.1012

Incest: From "A Journal of Love" continues the story of Anas Nin that was begun in Henry and June (1986). Covering the turbulent period of Anas's life from October 1932 to November 1934, it complements the first volume (1966) of The Diary of Anas Nin, from which, for personal and legal reasons, Anas excluded so much of her love life. Now that virtually all of the people referred to in Incest have died, there is no cause to hold back on publishing the diary as Anas wished: in unexpurgated form. The material has been edited to produce a book of readable length, but nothing germane to Anas's emotional growth has been omitted.

Anas treated her diary as the ultimate confidante and wrote in it continuously from 1914 to 1977. From 1914 to 1931 she wrote without any deep emotions of love to describe. Then in Paris in 1932 she found the writer/lover she had been seeking for so long: Henry Miller. This love, the initial phases of which are described in Henry and June, produced a double awakeningAnas the woman and Anas the writer. This passionate awakening is well captured in the frequently wild writing to be found in the unexpurgated diarya prose that some readers will no doubt find startlingly different from the polished, poetic prose of the expurgated diary. Recall, however, that Anas wrote in her diary at white heat, immediately following the events she was describing.

In Incest the love affair with Henry Miller continues, but it is never to have the same intensity. Anas has wept through the painful experience of becoming a woman, and now her "eyes are open to realityto Henry's selfishness."

The crucial relationship explored in the present volume is that between Anas and her father, a famous pianist and Don luan who divorced Anas's mother and married an heiress when Anas was a young girl. In fact Anas first began her diary at age eleven as letters to her father entreating him to rejoin the family. Unlike her mother and brothers, Anas refuses to judge her father, to see him only in black and white. She determines to "find him out." The relationship is somehow tragicomic: the father feels he is crowning his Don Juan career by attempting to seduce his daughter, but Anas knows she is seducing him. Later, on the advice of her psychiatrist, Dr. Otto Rank, she leaves him as punishment for abandoning her as a child.

Like the first volume of the expurgated diaries, this volume ends with Anas's now famous birth story. But here it appears in a new contextin a new light that starkly illuminates Anas's relationship with Henry Miller and her father.

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.

R UPERT P OLE
Executor, The Anas Nin Trust

Los Angeles
February 1992

The text of Incest is taken from diary books thirty-seven through forty-six, as numbered by Anas Nin. Her titles for these ten books were "La Voile Lucide," "Equilibre," "Uranus," "Schizoidie and Paranoia," "The Triumph of MagicWhite and Black Magic," "Flagellation," "'And on the Seventh Day He Rested from His Work,' Quoted Negligently from a Book I Never Read," "Audace," "The Definite Appearance of the Demon," and "FlowChildhoodRebirth."

Though Incest was written almost entirely in English, there are a number of extended passages in French or Spanish. I wish to thank Jean Sherman for her graceful translation of these passages, which are clearly noted.

R. P.

I ALWAYS BELIEVED IT WAS THE ARTIST IN ME WHO ensorcelled. I believed it was my esoteric house, the colors, the lights, my costumes, my work. I always stood within the great active-artist shell, timorous and unconscious of my power. What has Dr. Allendy done? Discarded the artist, handled and loved the core of me, without background, without my creation. I have even been concerned over his unattachment to the artistI have been surprised to be so seized, so dpouille of artifice, of my webs, my charms, my elixirs. And tonight, alone, waiting for visitors, I look upon this newborn core, and I think of the gifts made to it by Hugh, Allendy, Henry, and June. I remember the day I gave Hugh's sister, Ethel, jewelry; and today cousin Ana Maria gives me stones for my aquarium, and a new humorously winged fish with green wings, and she says, "I want to go to London with you. I want to save you from June." And I lie back and weep with infinite gratitude.

I am leaving for London. My strength is new and I need to subdue the ever-recurring pain. I need many days to dull a little in my life, or to move within my journal, my story. I cannot fight off madness in a day. I have hours yet when I turn within my pain as in a furnace, and it happens when Henry says over the telephone, "Are you all right?" and I answer, "Yes." Or when the thumbtack falls off a corner of the photograph of "H. V. Miller, gangster-author," and I realize how far I have moved away from lesbianism, and how it is only the artist in me, the dominating energy, which expands to fecundate beautiful women on a plane which it is difficult to apprehend and which bears no relation whatsoever to ordinary sexual activity. Who will believe the breadth and height of my ambitions when I perfume Ana Maria's beauty with my knowledge, my experience, when I dominate and court her to enrich her, to create her? Who will believe I ceased loving June when I discovered she destroys instead of loving? Why was I not in bliss when June, the magnificent woman, made herself small in my arms, showed me her fears, her fears of me and of experience?