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ANAIS NIN and Keeping a Journal

Anaïs Nin(1903-1977) first began publishing expurgated versions of The Diary of Anaïs Nin in 1966, the year I graduated from university. She was 63. The editions of her diaries that began to appear omitted many of the more intimate details of her personal and love life. In 1986 after virtually everybody mentioned in her diaries had died, including Nin herself, her widower began to publish what are now termed the unexpurgated versions of Nin's diary. These unexpurgated versions of the diaries are more sexually frank than the versions published in the 1960s and 1970s. They also provide a fuller picture of her life. The new material, for example, casts her incestuous relationship with her father and her relationship with writer Henry Miller in new light.

In volume 2 of Nin's diary, she has just arrived in New York. This volume is filled with the stories of her analytical patients. There is a shift in emphasis in this diary from volume 1 as she becomes aware of the inevitable and complex choices facing the artist in the modern world. Sensitive and frank, this volume of her diary is a dialogue between flesh and spirit, as one reviewer described it. This volume finds this madly scribbling femme fatale trying to get away from her doggedly loyal husband and from adored lover Henry Miller and to indulge her fancy for analyst Otto Rank. Nin is blithely honest about her profound dishonesty, admitting that she loves telling what she calls marvellous lies to the men who desire her. She tires of Rank just as Miller and her husband catch up with her; then, suddenly, she enters a whole new realm of potent romance with a fiery man of Inca descent, Gonzalo More. Gonzalo More, a man of conscience and lyrical intensity, inspires Nin to new poetic and mystical heights.-The Diary of Anais Nin: Volume 2 or Volume 3 of the unexpurgated edition, American Library Ass'n, 1995.

The unexpurgated volumes are of particular interest to readers of the original published versions in those 1960s and 1970s because they fill in so many puzzling omissions. They are remarkable for their audacity and prolificacy. Just one page of Nin's extraordinary diaries contains more sex, melodrama, fantasies, confessions, and observations than most novels. They also reflect much about the human psyche, a psyche we strive to repress and one we would also like to understand. See, for example, Nearer The Moon: From "A Journal of Love" The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin 1937-1939 with a preface by Rupert Pole, her widower, and with biographical notes and annotations by G. Stuhlmann, Harcourt, Brace & Company, NY, 1996.

Only Leo Tolstoy kept a diary longer than you,1
Anais.....His entries were not as erotic as yours
going for all those years of the tempest2...Your
Journal of Love written in the first years of the
Plan3 would still turn our generation on & help
the young at heart find some sense of who they
are as they helped you find out who you were--
at least that was part of the idea, eh Anais, eh??

Such a long road of experimentation, Anais...
trying to put it all together, as we all do in this
changeful life, as the tempest blows harrowing
up the souls on our planet....bewildered, often
so agonized and helpless, they watch...it seems
this great and mighty wind of God sweeping the
face of the earth-its driving power gaining in
range and momentum; its cleansing power......
however much undetected, increasing with
every passing day and humanity gripped in the
clutches of its devastating power....How did you
survive? How did you survive? Dear Anais......
how on earth did you survive those years....with so
little idea of the origin, outcome or the significance
of all that chaos & confusion decade after decade??

1 In the complete set of his works the diaries of Tolstoy occupy 13 volumes. He began them in 1847 at the age of 19 and continued making entries until the end of his life in 1910.
2 Her diaries began at the age of 10 in 1914 on the outbreak of WW1 which, in some ways, saw the beginning of the tempest in modern civilization, a tempest which is far from over.
3 The formal implementation of Abdul-Baha'is Plan in 1937 by the North American Baha'i community.

Ron Price
19 July 2010

11/29/2010 3:31:07 AM

Written by RonPrice

1. EMPLOYMENT-SOCIAL-ROLE POSITIONS: 1943-2012 ----------------------------------- 2010-2012-On an old age pension and retired 1999-2009-Writer & Poet, Publisher & Journalist, Editor & Independent Scholar. Retired from the following roles: Teacher & Lecturer, Tutor & Adult Educator, Taxi-Driver & Ice-Cream Salesman...

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THE DIARIES OF ANNE FRANK AND RON PRICE The introduction to the Diary of Anne Frank, a book published on 12 June 1952 and which has now sold more than 30 million copies, was written by the wife of the President of the United States, Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt. It reads in part: Written by a young girl—and the young are not afraid of telling the truth—it is one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read. Anne Frank’s account of the changes wrought upon eight people hiding out from the Nazis for two years during the occupation of Holland, living in constant fear and isolation, imprisoned not only by the terrible outward circumstances of war but inwardly by themselves, made me intimately and shockingly aware of war’s greatest evil—the degradation of the human spirit. At the same time, Anne’s diary makes poignantly clear the ultimate shining nobility of that spirit. I think it is well for us, who have forgotten so much of that period, to read about it now, just to remind ourselves that we never want to go through such things again if possible. Her story ended tragically. She died in the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen. This diary should teach us all the wisdom of preventing any kind of totalitarianism that could lead to oppression and suffering of this kind. June 12, 1952 was Anne Frank’s birthday. On that day the book’s editor wrote to Anne Frank’s father: “It is extremely gratifying for me to work on the book because I believe so strongly in it. Besides my great feeling for it, I believe it to be one of the very important Diaries of all time, as a psychological, historical, and a literary document.” She pointed out the several reviews the book had received in The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, and Time. Omnibook was going to serialize the Diary and would pay $1,000, of which $500 would go to Mr Frank. “All this news promises,” that editor concluded, “that ANNE FRANK will receive a wonderful reception in America!” In the years following publication, Anne Frank’s father received 30,000 letters from readers. The Diary was translated into sixty-seven languages and more than 31 million copies have been sold. It is a book that has touched many hearts; let us pay tribute to wise choices and graceful editing. --Ron Price with thanks to Kem Knapp Sawyer, “Barbara Epstein and ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’”, 21 September 2006 in The New York Review of Books. In October 1952, four months after this book’s publication, a Baha’i Holy Year began with its centenary celebrations of the birth of Baha’u’llah’s mission. I was just 8 years old, lived in a small town in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. My mother had just found-out about the new religion which would fill my life and produce my own autobiographical diary.1 Time would tell if my diary would be read by anyone! 1 My diary is, in the main, my poetry and my letters. Although, in some ways, my entire literary corpus could be seen as one long diary or journal. Ron Price 12 January 2012

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