and pierced water tanks.” In “The Mohican” a European astrologer is terrified by the very system on which he depends to endow life with meaning: the planets, especially the recently discovered Pluto. The Mohican takes refuge in the stacks of the Bibliothèque Nationale, but his sanctuary is invaded by the German military; he is then arrested as a “celestial saboteur.” This image, which swiftly penetrates and exposes the tragic absurdity of Nazi paranoia, is a good example of Nin’s magical fusion of the marvelous with the mundane. In “Je suis le plus malade des Surrealistes” Nin drew a compassionate portrait of her friend Antonin Artaud. This brilliant man’s prison was madness, exacerbated by drugs. By letting him speak in the imagery of sharp contrast, Nin captures the terror of his exile from reason. When asked why he “has many enemies,” Pierre (Artaud) replies: “Because when one is white like the white phoenix and the others are black one has enemies.”

Both “The Labyrinth” and “Through the Streets of My Own Labyrinth” are explorations of Nin’s ambivalent feelings about her diary, the massive work that she started as a child to persuade her father to rejoin the family by traveling to New York. The diary was a spiritual and emotional haven in which she could live in safety; yet at times her obsessive need for it threatened to bar Nin from entering life as she yearned to do. This particular prison, which might be thought of as a soothing fantasy or subjective creation, is actually an articulated dream, as well as a mirror in which one sees a usually inflated and even perfected image of the self. The snapshots of lonely, frightened men in “The All-Seeing” and “The Eye’s Journey” are further additions to the portrait album of self-imprisoned dreamers.

“Ragtime”

The dream is central, as well, to “Ragtime,” but in this whimsical fantasy a more positive view emerges, as Nin elaborates a modern-day allegory of the process of transformation. “Ragtime” suggests comparison to the forbidden art of alchemy, through which base and worthless metals were transformed into the most valuable of all substances, gold. The story begins by creating a nightscape in which the ragpicker, who represents the artist, wanders through a garbage dump selecting irresistible debris to pack in his swelling bag. The dreamer herself enters this mysterious landscape as a passenger on the hump of a camel that is itself only the ragpicker’s shadow. These images stress the power of imagination. Later, as she strolls through the wreckage of shacks, gypsy wagons, and trash, the dreamer grows depressed. Fearing that she herself may come apart and disintegrate into worthless fragments, she begins to clutch various parts of her body. She now stumbles upon discarded parts of herself. First appears an old dress, once a favorite; but the dreamer has grown; she can no longer “stay inside of it” (note, again, the imagery of the imprisoning enclosure and the need to expand beyond its confines). Next she finds castoff parts of her body: a wisdom tooth, her shorn long hair. Naturally, the dreamer is disturbed by the reappearance of these parts of her former self. Do they mean that it is impossible to get rid of the old self, to shed one’s skin? “Can’t one throw anything away forever?” The rag-picker answers this wistful question by leading his colony of vagabonds in the “serpentine song”:

Nothing is lost but it changesinto the new string old stringin the new bag old bagin the new pan old tinin the new shoe old leatherin the new silk old hairin the new hat old strawin the new man the childand the new not newthe new not newthe new not new

With this reassuring lullaby in her ears, the dreamer falls asleep again (in her own dream), only to be picked up along with other odds and ends of scrap and stashed away inside the ragpicker’s bag.

“Birth”

The seductive nature of enclosure and retention is more directly and more powerfully presented in “Birth” than in the other pieces collected in Under a Glass Bell, and Other Stories. This story, whose “real life” version can be read in the concluding pages of Nin’s diary covering the years 1931 to 1934, has often been reprinted, perhaps because it is closer to realism than Nin’s other stories. Against a background of routine medical indifference, the narrator attempts to expel from her body a stillborn six-month infant. “Birth” begins with the doctor’s statement that “The child is dead.” During the narrator’s excruciating struggle to push out the baby, one of the nurses comments: “Mine passed through like an envelope through a letter box.” Angry at his patient, the doctor threatens her with scalpels and hypodermic needles. Finally, it is the woman’s retaliatory anger, her instinctual return to a primitive self-reliance that saves her. She has come to experience the dead child inside as “a demon strangling her.” This dead thing within cannot be allowed to kill her. With a formidable act of will the woman wrests control of the birth process away from the doctor. She demands that he and the nurses leave her alone. Then, very gradually, by drumming on her abdomen with the tips of her fingers, she succeeds in inducing a trancelike state of relaxation. After a terrifying final exertion the baby passes through the birth canal, expelled at last.

“Birth” closes Under a Glass Bell, and Other Stories. In spite of its rage, its anguish, and its prevailing note of physical suffering, this story offers an image of consoling growth that counters the sadness with which the houseboat goes to its graveyard in the book’s opening selection. In a way that becomes characteristic of her later work, Nin interprets the expulsion of the dead baby as a release for the mother, almost as an exorcism. Most of the stories in Under a Glass Bell, and Other Stories explore the stultifying effects of remaining at the safe childish stages of life, of remaining inside one’s cocoon or womb. In “Birth” the new life is not that of the baby, obviously, but that of the woman who has succeeded in expelling the infantile version of herself, so that she can aspire to a more mature level of existence. Under a Glass Bell, and Other Stories ends with an image of consolation, for the “Birth” tale confirms the terrible reality of suffering, but it also portrays the transformative power of the act of creation.