The fourth volume of “one of the most remarkable diaries in the history of letters” (Los Angeles Times). The renowned diarist continues her record of her personal, professional, and artistic life, recounting her experiences in Greenwich Village for several years in the late 1940s, where she defends young writers against the Establishment—and her trip across the country in an old Ford to California and Mexico. “[Nin is] one of the most extraordinary and unconventional writers of [the twentieth] century.” —The New York Times Book Review Edited and with a preface by Gunther Stuhlmann
The sixth volume of the diary of “one of the most extraordinary and unconventional writers of [the twentieth] century” (The New York Times Book Review). Anaïs Nin continues “one of the most remarkable diaries in the history of letters” with this volume covering more than a decade of her midcentury life (Los Angeles Times). She debates the use of drugs versus the artist’s imagination; portrays many famous people in the arts; and recounts her visits to Sweden, the Brussels World’s Fair, Paris, and Venice. “[Nin] looks at life, love, and art with a blend of gentility and acuity that is rare in contemporary writing.” —John Barkham Reviews Edited and with a preface by Gunther Stuhlmann
Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as “hell,” during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anaïs wrote, “Close your eyes to the ugly things,” and, against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world’s darkness with her own search for light. Mirages collects, for the first time, the story that was cut from all of Nin’s other published diaries, particularly volumes 3 and 4 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, which cover the same time period. It is the long-awaited successor to the previous unexpurgated diaries Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer the Moon. Mirages answers the questions Nin 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? Mirages is a deeply personal story of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage, and deep mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution, and redemption that reaches beyond the personal to the universal.
The renowned diarist continues the story begun in Henry and June and Incest. Drawing from the author’s original, uncensored journals, Fire follows Anaïs Nin’s journey as she attempts to liberate herself sexually, artistically, and emotionally. While referring to her relationships with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and author Henry Miller, as well as a new lover, the Peruvian Gonzalo Moré, she also reveals that her most passionate and enduring affair is with writing itself.
"Anaïs Nin, in 1955, was for all practical purposes a failed writer. She could interest no publisher in her introspective and feminine fiction, nor could she keep her past titles in print. But at the same time, she was keeping a diary begun when she was eleven years old. In The Diary of Others, Nin begins to realize that the diary itself was her most valuable writing, but she wonders how she could ever publish such a document, filled with love affairs and deceptions as well as incest and bigamy, without harming those she held most dear-her brother, her lover, and especially her husband of more than thirty years. When The Diary of Others opens, Nin has recently (and bigamously) married Rupert Pole, her young lover in California; she then struggles to keep a bicoastal double marriage alive, and she vainly seeks a publisher for her novels. She later begins a collaboration with two men who would change her fortunes-literary agent Gunther Stuhlmann and publisher Alan Swallow. And she is aided both financially and commercially by her long-estranged lover and colleague Henry Miller, whose rise to fame after the famous obscenity trials has given him the financial freedom to offer Nin the proceeds from the publication of his letters to her during the 1930s and '40s. After much deliberation, Nin comes up with a formula that allows her to publish her long-anticipated Paris diaries in such a way that she can describe her personal growth and relationships with fascinating characters such as Miller, Otto Rank and Antonin Artaud without disclosing the intimate details of her life. The Diary of Others documents Anaïs Nin's ascension from obscurity and commercial failure to sudden vindication, validation and fame"--
She remains torn between three men: Henry Miller, whose detached self-immersion and artistic "impersonality" both attract and repel her; Gonzalo More, a sensitive and attentive but jealous lover who drives her to distraction; and Hugh Guiler, her faithful husband, who provides a calm center for Nin. In addition, a wide circle of family, friends, and admirers makes demands on Nin's time and emotional energy.
The trailblazing memoirist and author of Henry & June recounts her relationships with Henry Miller and others—including her own father. Anaïs Nin wrote in her uncensored diaries like they were a broad-minded confidante with whom she shared the liberating psychosexual dramas of her life. In this continuation of her notorious Henry & June, she recounts a particularly turbulent period between 1932 and 1934, and the men who dominated it: her protective husband, her therapist, and the poet Antonin Artaud. However, most consuming of all is novelist Henry Miller—a man whose genius, said Anaïs, was so demonic it could drive people insane. Here too, recounted in extraordinary detail, is the sexual affair she had with her father. At once loving, exciting, and vengeful, it was the ultimate social transgression for which Anaïs would eventually seek absolution from her analysts. “Before Lena Dunham there was Anaïs Nin. Like Dunham, she’s been accused of narcissism, sociopathy, and sexual perversion time and again. Yet even that comparison undercuts the strangeness and bravery of her work, for Nin was the first of her kind. And, like all truly unique talents, she was worshipped by some, hated by many, and misunderstood by most . . . A woman who’d spent decades on the bleeding edge of American intellectual life, a woman who had been a respected colleague of male writers who pushed the boundaries of acceptable sex writing. Like many great . . . experimentalists, she wrote for a world that did not yet exist, and so helped to bring it into being.” —The Guardian Includes an introduction by Rupert Pole
