Analysis gives vision into the potential self. At times it also gives false hopes, because the potential self cannot always develop. We have loyalties to the past, commitments, promises made, human responsibilities.
Early in life, before becoming a struggling writer, Nin was an analyst trained by a cohort of Sigmund Freud. Here she is talking about the literal act of attending analysis. But she could just as easily be discussing the processes of her diary writing. While offering a broad-based historical account of the events of her life, the primary purpose for Nin seems to be an act of therapy. The diary becomes the analyst and the diarist the patient.
I read over my old diaries. I sit by the fire of my life in Paris and wonder when this life here will start to burn brightly. So far it looks like those electric logs in artificial fireplaces, burning with moderate glow and without sparkle or warmth.
Already by this point in the diary, Nin has written of knowing the famous, extensive traveling and exciting encounters. For any reasonable person, the diaries have been describing a life that is anything but a barely glowing fire. Sparkle and warmth permeate throughout her life story. This entry offers a glimpse into a recurring motif; the writer is often tortured by fear, paralyzed with self-doubt and responding to a life-long series of career rejections through withdrawal that eventually must explode outward through a loss of inhibition and flirtation with self-destruction.
The entire mystery of pleasure in a woman’s body lies in the intensity of the pulsation just before the orgasm.
Of course, the diary entries of Anais Nin have for the most part been mostly famous because of the explicit descriptions of sex. Anais Nin is forever and inextricably linked with sex. A film based on her life, Henry and June, was the very first movie to receive the newly created film rating of NC-17 which was designed to replace the old X rating. What one may be surprised to discover when they delve into the published entirety of the diary is just how little of it is actually devoted to sexuality. Which is not to say that it doesn’t get quite steamy, just that it may not be as steamy quite as often as legend would indicate.
Gore telephones me. He fought for me at Dutton. And won. They wanted to wait two years to publish Children of the Albatross. They will publish Children of the Albatross now!
The “Gore” on the other end of the telephone is Gore Vidal, whom Nin met as a twenty-year-old lieutenant who had yet to publish his first novel. Who also just happened to be the youngest editor working at the E.P. Dutton publishing company. Who also just happened to be a huge fan of the frustrated novelist. Nin’s excitement is, however, misplaced. Children of the Albatross would be published and almost instantly forgotten, leaving the irony that this entry in her diary expressing the fervent hope that the publishing of the novel will make her famous has been read by more people than the novel itself.
