In Nin’s world we enter the world of the Bohemian artist in Paris, where everyone and everything can be a subject. This is a flawed woman who recognizes her imperfections but does not apologize for them. This is a woman who really lived, who really experienced life, who aimed to fully understand human relationships, both edifying and destructive ones. Each diary entry is so candid and shows her deeply introspective and artistic nature.įor the most part I’d say nothing truly remarkable happens in the diary yet Nin is the kind of person who could turn a normal, everyday event into something magical and profound. The physical aspect in poetry has to be transfused with meaning.What a diary! Definitely nothing like any diary I’ve ever read or written. Poetry is the myth created out of human elements. She displays a firm grip on the elements of writing in a letter to a poet friend where she makes a clear and persuasive argument that distinguishes poetry from prose, saying that poetry involves a "transmutation" of the physical and concrete into metaphor, imagery, the metaphysical. She seems more comfortable in the role of a nurturing, supportive maternal role to other writers, mostly men, and unsure of her own work work and importance although the diaries reveal an original and inventive mind. Perhaps her limitations as a writer could be defined as results of low self-esteem, certainly not shocking among women of her generation. The reader is carried along with Nin as she experiences-perhaps in what might today be called codependency-the dramatic ups and downs of her friends and acquaintances. Her diaries capture the essence of people long dead who come to life in her prose. She seems primarily a transitional figure in the evolution of women's consciousness from George Elliot to Susan Sonntag, but worthy of respect because of her facility with language as well as her premonitory abilities to see into the future. Her diaries are themselves vivid portraits of the expatriate Parisian literary life in the early- and mid-20th Century, and she demonstrates the empathy, insight and descriptive powers that could have made her a great novelist. For a good part of her life, she supported herself by writing erotica, which receives only passing notice in her diaries.
She is capable of describing a world where women would be treated fairly, paid fairly, and respected as individuals in their own right while depriving herself of the necessities of life to advance money to Henry Miller and other male literary friends. Anais Nin, although clearly not one of the thought leaders of the 20th Century, prefigures in her diaries the advent of modern feminism while at the same time remaining very much a part of the traditional patriarchal paradigm.
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