Sample pages from Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1939-1947 http://tinyurl.com/or6epqc

1. Sk y Blu e Pre s s
San Antonio, Texas
M I R A G E S
The Unexpurgated Diary
of Anaïs Nin
1939-1947
Preface by Paul Herron
Introduction by Kim Krizan
Edited by Paul Herron
•

2. T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Preface by Paul Herron ............................................................................................ix
Introduction by Kim Krizan................................................................................xi
Again Towards America - Will I ever reach joy?............................................1
John - I believe I have defended myself against suffering........................................14
Nanankepichu Ii - We saved the dream.............................................................31
The Collector - I suggested we feed him the diary...........................................41
Intermezzo - Please lead me into the world of pleasure.......................................58
I Remembered This - My first erotic feeling.......................................................86
The Press - I don’t want to think—I want to do some typesetting.......................98
No Puedo Mas - I do not want you back...........................................................104
A Dream of Haiti - My desire surges towards him.........................................150
Woman of Action - I feel ready for this...........................................................185
Under a Glass Bell - My own soul has reached into other souls.................215
L’homme Fatal - My difficulty with the feminine man.....................................236
The Transparent Child - He is my son, my lover.......................................250
The Problem of the Diary - My own voice is here...................................281
This Great Hunger - Now you must find reality...........................................292
Gore - If I could have loved a woman, it would be you........................................309
Awakening - Oh, the drug of my marvelous dreams..........................................349
Endings - The hell grew larger as the illusions broke...........................................376
Renunciation - There was a stranger in my bed...............................................386
Life! - Touch, oh, touch this man of fire.................................................................398
Index..........................................................................................................................407

3. P R E F A C E •
ix
Mirages is the untold story of Anaïs Nin’s personal struggle to keep alive what she
valued most in life—the dream—in the face of the harsh, puritanical climate of 1940s
New York. It is a record of a journey across what Nin called the “desert before me” and
witness to her painful rebirth as a woman and writer. It is the story missing from The
Diary of Anaïs Nin, particularly volumes 3 and 4, which also cover 1939 through 1947.
This book finally answers what readers have been asking for decades: What led to
the demise of Nin’s love affair with Henry Miller? Just how troubled was her marriage
to Hugh Guiler? What is the story behind Nin’s “children,” the effeminate young men
she seemed to collect at will? How was it that Nin wrote so prolifically during such
a tumultuous time? What is the truth about her mysterious relationship with Gore
Vidal? And what was it about Rupert Pole that seemed to assuage all the pain Nin had
endured?
In 1939, shortly after fleeing wartime Paris for New York, Nin wrote: “Over and
over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me,
across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety
in the street one sees from a window. Will I ever reach joy?” By 1946, her search had
devolved into agony: “The greatest suffering does not come from living in mirages,
but from awakening. There is no greater pain than awakening from a dream, the deep
crying over the dying selves…”
As World War II spread across the world, Nin waged her own war against a reality
she found so horrifying that she repeatedly contemplated suicide and sought temporary
salvation in numerous doomed love affairs with an assortment of men, ranging from
the staid critic Edmund Wilson to seventeen-year-old Bill Pinckard, searching for the
“One” who could respond to her, not only sensually, but completely. When none of
preface
•

4. M I R A G E S•
x
her many lovers could live up to her ideal, she exclaimed to the diary: “Oh, someone,
someone love me as I have loved.” It was only after abandoning her quixotic quest that
Nin met Rupert Pole, the ardent lover who seemed to answer her needs—and who
would eventually prompt her to swing back and forth across the continent between
him and her husband for the rest of her life.
Nin wrote in 1943, “I feel like rewriting the entire diary in two columns: the actual
diary as it is and its completion à la Proust—filling, rounding, objectifying, encircling,
encompassing all.”
While Nin never actually put her diary into two columns, this aspiration was
achieved, to an extent, in her publication history. She published the “objectified”
version in the form of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, but with one major omission: because
her husband and some of her lovers were still alive at the time, she was forced to excise
an entire side of her character—the erotic—from the text. While Mirages could have
been a simple accumulation of what was left out of the Diaries, the higher aim was to
assemble the most meaningful material from the missing “column” and reconstruct
Nin’s story, and what a story it is.
Here, the hazy, almost imagined images and the vague angst of the Diary snap into
eye-searing focus, cast in a strong, sharp, defining light, laid bare for the reader. It is
sometimes shocking, sometimes beautiful, sometimes agonizing, with little left to the
imagination. The personages of the Diary become real people with real flaws and real
problems; the transformation Nin undergoes is made brutally clear.
Mirages is a document of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage and deep
mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution and redemption.
Paul Herron, Editor
San Antonio, Texas
March 2013

5. •
1
Aboard the seaplane Clipper, December 7, 1939
I carried you above the clouds in a little blue cloth bag—you and the volumes not
yet copied. So fast we fly over the distance I no longer feel the pain of separation. So
fast we fly, it is a dream and not reality, and in the dream pain is short-lived and soon
dissolved. Again towards America, as during the other war. From high above the life in
Paris seems so small and dark, and I ask myself why I wept so much.
I am still baffled by the mystery of how man has an independent life from woman,
whereas I die when separated from my lover. While all these threads of desire and
tenderness stifled me, I climbed into a giant bird and swooped toward space. Up here
I do not suffer. Distance is magically covered. It is a dream. It is an inhuman bird that
carries me to a new destiny. I rise. At last, like Henry, I know detachment, enter a non-
human world. For this voyage I threw out a great deal of weight, to permit myself to
rise. Constantly I am throwing out ballast. I never keep bags or old papers or objects
I no longer love. It is not masochism. A spiritual nature is aware of its faults and seeks
to perfect itself, and can only achieve this by suffering and accepting. I needed to be
humanized. I keep nothing that is dead, only what I wear, love, what is my living décor,
my living symbols.
About a week ago I awakened with strange fears. Gonzalo had delayed his trip. I
said, “I am afraid now it is I who will leave first.” Two days later Hugo telephoned from
A gain T o wards A merica
Will I ever reach joy?

6. •
31
September 12, 1940, Holly Chambers Hotel, N.Y.C.
I spent all afternoon walking the streets of the Village looking for a place for
Gonzalo and me, for a dream, a room that would not be just a room, a studio that
would not be just a studio, a house that would not be just a house. I was standing at the
corner of my hotel, worn out and discouraged, about to go back in, to surrender. At that
moment I felt so vividly the kind of place I dreamed of that I continued to walk, as if I
were walking towards it. I walked to an agent, and he took me to three places. The third
place was the Place—an old red brick house in front of the Provincetown Playhouse.
Top floor—a studio which is an echo of Nanankepichu—part of it low-ceilinged,
uneven, with small square windows, the other half skylight, high and wonderful for
drawing and writing. Old but clean, floor painted black, a fireplace—an air of not being
in New York. A big bed and a big desk. Beautiful. My heart was pounding. I took it
immediately. The next morning, while waiting for Gonzalo, I took over the bed cover
from Paris, the same pair of sheets we had in rue Cassini, the seashell lamp. I bought
two bottles of Chianti, two big candles, a bottle opener—and there it was!
When Gonzalo came, he was thunderstruck. He said: “It’s the barge!” He was
enchanted. The only beautiful place in New York, with charm and strangeness and
uniqueness! He threw wine on the floor for luck.
Finding the place made me happy. It seems to me we can find again the dream which
New York has destroyed. I was dancing with joy. Gonzalo said: “Me voy muy contento.”
nanan k epichu I I
We saved the dream

7. •
47
T he C ollector
While all this happened, I stood in the room staring at Robert, and perhaps
through my eyes he saw his disguise, the eyes of my strength calling to him to stand
erect and cease these gestures. I am filled with the tears of Eduardo: “I know I risked
losing Robert when I took him as a woman…” The tearless, smileless life of Robert
flows into his diary because we all talk to each other through diaries. Robert lays the
diary open on my knees. He says: “At first with you and me it was the myth. But now
I feel it is human.”
I felt guilty whenIrememberedRoberthadreadinmydiariesaboutmyexperience
with Eduardo in Paris when we tried to make our love actual. I asked myself: did
Robert act out this pattern of outgoing and then withdrawing, like the magic dictation
I received from June, the June in me pushing me to abandon Henry and then return to
him? Patterns, repetitions. “Your only weakness,” said Henry to me many years ago, “is
your incapacity to destroy.”
It only came to me this year—I revolted against being a saint, a martyr. Today
Patchen telephoned me: would I send him ten dollars. This request came three days
after I had already given him ten dollars. Hugo and I eat for a week on ten dollars. And
just a few minutes before I had telegraphed Henry all I had! The injustice riled me. I
wrote Patchen a long, stormy letter. I told him we all knew the world has never taken
care of the artist, and no one counted on it. He is like an angry beast demanding to be
fed, and one knows as soon as one stops feeding him he will be full of hatred again. I
do not forgive hatred.
Three people have aroused my hatred: Helba, John, and Patchen. Perhaps it was
necessary that I should learn hatred too. I feared it so. I always strove so desperately for
harmony. I could not bear hatred, but it is a force. In Patchen I rebel against what Helba
and Gonzalo made me suffer, and I refuse to pass through this state again. I have no
pity for Patchen, because his hatred is stronger than his love, and his self-love greater
than all, and above all, his stupidity, his denseness… I now have the courage for anger,
of being hated. Before I had to win all the loves, even the ones I did not feel, but I no
longer can pretend.
January 25, 1941
My letter to Patchen was mad. My madness now is: why do people want to use
me, my strength, my courage, my devotion? Why? Is it my weakness they immediately
exploit?
The moonstorm makes me insane, but my insanity is nothing but revolt, the revolt
I never expressed or lived out. I no longer want to be the victim of the criminals. I want
to be the criminal, and this has come simultaneously with the birth of the artist. I want
to be the artist now. I have begun to create. I am sad, humanly I am sad. The saint in
me was killed by excess. I had to know hatred.

8. •
57
T he C ollector
but the experienced girl at Elizabeth Arden said: “Apart from the lines around your
eyes, all is well. The muscles are firm.” I can deceive anyone, even a doctor. I pass for
thirty easily. My walk is easy and free, my steps are light—but the feeling, the agedness
given to me by the American life, its immaturity! Everywhere there are unformed
beings, awkward ages. That has aged me in my awareness. Fatigue. The passage into
human life, detachment from the dream. Once, Luise Rainer and I ran away together
when visiting Dorothy Norman, to talk. We slipped out of the house, and she drove
us to see the ocean which faces Europe. We stood on the edge of the beach, yearning
for Europe together. Laughingly, sadly, I said to myself: for this romantic escapade in
an open car, hair flying in the damp night, I will pay dearly. The next days were filled
with pains and overwhelming fatigue. I left the weekend defeated, shattered. While
walking today, I thought I would write a book on aging, le déjà vécu. The tragic motif
comes from my not being physically and spiritually in harmony. I await the moment
of retreat, and each one seems to be a victory over pain. What pain? The pain that lies
in everything. I…once so prodigal… The book of age is the book of caution. I seek
tranquility and the absence of pain. The Monster lies all around me, gigantic in the
world today. The outer image is too horrible for human awareness. Contemplate the
news—the war of Germany and Russia—and you go mad.
I have created the isolation in which I find myself. Life shrinks in proportion to
one’s courage.
Letter to Henry:
Do you want a divorce, Henry, so you can live out west, quietly? Are you ready
to live alone in your Shangri-La? I have felt at times that you were approaching that
Tibetan cycle. Should I free you of me? Are you ready for the ascension? Should I be
Seraphita now and vanish, is this the moment?
Robert escaped from the army, came back, seeking a place to nestle in. He slept
two nights curled up in a parked car, and then went back to Marjorie, who has room
for him in her apartment. He is thoroughly dehumanized now.

9. •
98
New York, January 8, 1942
Hugo has given me $100 for the press. Press $75, type $30, miscellaneous $20. We
shall begin reprinting Winter of Artifice (the “Father” and the “Voice” sections only).
I have been copying volume 62, arranging carbons and pages for Virginia and
Janet (when they are finished I will have a double of the whole diary except for the first
ten volumes in French), binding the work already done in black folders, clipping the
rice paper copies for the boxes to be deposited at Thurema’s (in case of air raid). Work
has integrated me. I am content. I have no time for obsessions.
I had to console Henry for his one failure: the American book. His worst book. I
hope it is the deadly effect of America on him and not the disintegration I have seen
take place now in every artist around me who has abandoned himself to his every
whim, lack of discipline, fancy, dadaism, instinct, negativism, that falling apart of
the self-indulgent, the liberated unconscious, the loss of contact with human reality.
I am concerned over Henry. In freeing him, protecting him, I have nurtured both
his dream and his weakness. He has a cult of his own naturalness; he has defended
his defects. Whatever influence I had on his writing was indirect—it was an effect
on his being—but when I judged a fragment directly, Henry never yielded. A very
lurid piece of writing which I fought to keep out of Black Spring he had printed in the
Wisdom of the Heart.
T he P ress
I don’t want to think—I want to do some typesetting

10. Anaïs Nin, 1940s
Henry Miller at Hampton Manor

11. Anaïs Nin and Gore Vidal
Rupert Pole

12. •
407
I N D E X
Abramson, Ben 109, 215
Admiral, Virginia 6, 38, 41, 60, 68, 74, 77, 84,
96, 98, 133
Air-Conditioned Nightmare, The (Miller) 42,
73-74, 78, 81, 84, 98, 99
Aleksander, Irina 111-12, 151, 158, 173, 184,
185-86, 189, 190, 192, 194, 194, 195, 217, 221,
224, 359
as fictional character 195-96
Alemany, José 73
Allendy, René 28, 80, 283
Amangansett, NY 229, 233
American book (see Air-Conditioned
Nightmare, The)
American Quarterly 267
Anatole (see Anatole Broyard)
Argus Book Shop 109
Artaud, Antonin 32, 33, 48, 80, 176, 184
Arthur 392
Astor (bar) 369
Attaway, Bill 359
Azar, Lucienne 177
Azores 2
Baldwin, Lanny 236-51, 253, 255, 257, 258, 262,
263, 268, 274, 279, 280, 289, 294, 313
A.N.’s break with 246, 247, 248-49
as feminine man 244-45
relationship with 238-49
Banks, Nancy 361-62, 369, 372
Barer, Marshall 252, 288-89, 297, 299, 300, 303,
305, 310, 312, 320, 321, 329-30, 333
A.N.’s lovemaking with 320
Barker, George 81, 85, 99, 158
Barnes, Djuna 101
Beamish, Rae 10, 32, 84, 95
Beauty and the Beast (de Beaumont) 301
Bermuda 3
“Birth” (story) 4, 6, 37, 137, 193, 225
Black Spring (Miller) 98
Blackwood, Algernon 102
Blue Angel (nightclub) 160, 346, 404
Bogner, Inge 377, 391
I N D E X
Bolero (Ravel) 287
Boyle, Kay 23, 81, 84, 110, 217
“Bread and the Wafer” (book section) 290
Breit, Harvey 81, 82, 110
Breton, André 20, 23, 34, 217
Brièrre, Jean 156, 159, 161-62, 165-66, 171, 177
Brooke, Rupert 400
Brown, Frances 119-20, 143, 146, 158, 171-73,
182, 183, 186, 187, 189, 192, 217, 221, 232,
243, 246, 247, 252, 255-58, 261-71, 274-79,
282, 285, 286, 292, 294, 296, 303, 306, 321, 342
as fictional character 195-96, 282, 286, 293
Brown, Tom 119, 172, 183, 196, 252, 261, 262,
265, 278, 282
Broyard, Anatole 392
Burford, William (Bill) 378, 382, 384, 389, 391,
393, 396, 402, 403, 404
homosexuality of 378, 382, 389, 390
letter to 388-89
Burlin, Helen 221
Cage, John 116
Cassini, rue (Paris) 2, 31, 50, 76
Cateret, Jean 2, 30, 44, 48, 77, 93, 146, 246, 267,
269, 290
Catherine 157-58
Caviar Restaurant 370
Cendrars, Blaise 23
Chareau, Dolly 224
Charles (restaurant) 321, 334, 339, 372
“Child Born Out of the Fog, The” (story) 369
Children of the Albatross 396, 400
Chinchilita (see Anaïs Nin)
Chinchilito (see Edward Graeffe)
Chisholm, Brigitte 7
Chisholm, Hugh 7, 103, 110
Christiani, Rita 351, 372
Cinderella (Barrie) 75, 169
Circle Magazine 246
Cities of the Interior 382, 393, 394, 396
City and the Pillar, The (Vidal) 386
Claude 305
Claudia 279

13. M I R A G E S•
414
Stroup, Jon 225, 232, 239
Suchet, Boulevard (Paris) 74
Sweeney, James Johnson 142
Sykes, Gerald 17, 171, 179
Tana 394
Tanguy, Yves 5, 34, 217
This Hunger 245, 280, 282, 286, 292, 303, 304,
308, 359
Three Deuces (nightclub) 289
Tibetan Book of the Dead 359
Tieko 279
Time Magazine 110, 113
Town and Country 53, 74, 225-26, 243
Trauma of Birth, The (Rank) 137
Trilling, Diana 377
Tristan and Iseult (Wagner) 63, 68, 246
Tropic of Cancer (Miller) xii, 145, 227, 391
Tropic of Capricorn (Miller) 80
Twice a Year (publication) 4, 43, 81
Tyler, Parker 303
Under a Glass Bell 205, 215, 223, 225, 231, 232,
234, 250, 290, 292, 295, 309, 405
Vallin, Ninon 69
Vanderbilt, Cornelia 316, 323, 327, 332, 335,
336, 354
Varda, Jean 222, 226, 246
Varèse, Edgar 81
ver Duft, Lee 232
Vidal, Gore ix, 309-57, 349-60, 361-66, 368-79,
381, 384-89, 391, 403-404
A.N.’s attraction to 310, 313, 315, 316-17,
328, 349
homosexuality of 312, 315, 319, 321, 324, 327,
333, 339, 341-45, 347, 350-51, 357, 369,
372-73, 404
relationship with 313, 324, 337, 339, 346, 366-
67, 370-72, 375
writing of 309, 314, 316, 318, 341, 344, 359,
363, 386-87
Villa Seurat (Paris) 82
Village (NYC) 31, 55, 73, 216, 234, 335, 361
Village Vanguard (nightclub) 388
Vincent 392-93, 400, 401
“Rue Dolent” (story) 11, 12, 26
Russia 4, 15, 57, 81, 97, 99, 106, 113, 141, 158,
184, 188
Russia, A.N.’s dream of (see Anaïs Nin)
Sabina (character) 284, 288, 358
Sánchez, Anaïs Culmell (Tia Anaïs)
Sánchez, Eduardo 13-16, 18, 19, 32, 51-54, 73,
74, 76, 79, 81, 84, 85, 94-96, 99-103, 142, 163,
167, 173, 189, 205, 234, 237, 240, 244, 245,
250, 251, 256, 277, 279, 288, 303, 314, 317,
318, 333, 339, 357, 370, 376
and Robert Duncan 38, 44-47, 85
A.N.’s relationship with 94
Sasha (see Alexander Hammid)
Saturday Evening Post 82
Saturday Review of Literature 81
Scenario (Miller) 231
Schnellock, Emil 21, 125
Scott, Walter 17
Seligman, Kurt 217
Sexus (Miller) 20
Sheri (see Sheri Martinelli)
Siegfried (see Edward Graeffe)
Siegfried (Wagner) 61
Slocum, John 33, 37, 50, 51, 73
Slonim, Marc 113
Sokol, Thurema 4, 6, 51, 95, 119, 169, 176, 177,
182, 183, 186, 187, 189, 192, 194, 197, 201,
220, 221, 224, 232, 237, 241, 268, 271
as fictional character 195-96, 203, 233, 310
Sonata for Violin and Piano (Debussy) 392, 393
St. Tropez 50, 59, 61
St. Regis (bar) 321
Staff, Clement 294-301, 303-308, 310-14, 317,
319-20, 325, 327-30, 334, 336-39, 343, 345-59,
362, 370, 372, 376-78, 381, 385-88, 391, 401
Stalin, Josef 96, 139
Stalingrad (USSR) 189
Stella (character) 237, 243, 267, 282, 284,
288, 358
Steloff, Frances 4, 73, 84, 225, 226, 295
Sterne, James 113, 149
Stieglitz, Alfred 4, 81
Stork Club (NYC) 321
Stricker 220

14. Wo r k s b y a n d a b o u t A n a ï s N i n
Published by Sky Blue Press
The Portable Anaïs Nin - Anthology
The Winter of Artifice - Original 1939 Paris Edition
A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal
Anaïs Nin's Lost World: Paris in Words and Pictures, 1924-1939 (U.S. Edition)
Anaïs Nin: The Last Days - A Memoir
Anaïs Nin Character Dictionary and Index to Diary Excerpts
Anaïs Nin: A Book of Mirrors
Coming soon: ANAÏS: An International Journal in e-book format
Published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press
D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study
House of Incest
Winter of Artifice
Under a Glass Bell
Ladders to Fire
Children of the Albatross
The Four-Chambered Heart
A Spy in the House of Love
Seduction of the Minotaur
Collages
Cities of the Interior
A Woman Speaks
The Novel of the Future
Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories
Selected titles available as e-books for purchase from major e-bookstores.
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Blog: http://anaisninblog.skybluepress.com