SOURCE: "A Dialogue with Anaïs Nin," in Chicago Review, Vol. 24, No. 2, 1972, pp. 29-35.

[In the following interview, Nin and Freeman discuss the nature of diary writing, in particular the lack of integrity of individual personality over a lifetime and differences between life as lived and as written, as well as criticism of one's own writing and that of others.]

Although her works survived in relative isolation for many years. Anais Nin has now become a resonant voice for many readers, especially women, primarily through her published Diaries. The collage of her life in Louvouciennes and Paris (with Henry Miller, Artaud, and Lawrence Durrell among others), of her work as a lay analyst with Otto Rank in New York, and the world of writers and artists in America is the rich substrate for her novels.

The Chicago Review first took notice of Anais Nin in 1949 in Violet Lang's review of her short stories and Winter of Artifice. She spoke for the Review that year at the University of Chicago. She published her story "Sabina" in 1962 (CR, vol. 15, no. 3). This year, Miss Nin comes to Chicago again in November under the auspices of the Chicago Review Speaker Series.

Miss Freeman interviewed Anais Nin during her recent visit to the University of California, Berkeley.

[Barbara Freeman:] Talking to you right now seems at the same time to be completely natural and yet … who am I talking to? There is a difference between a book and a person in the flesh …

[Anais Nin:] There isn't very much with me, because I've always tried to match the work and the life. The thing that may be difficult for you, knowing the diaries as certain periods, is which period are we getting into? That's difficult for me, too. For instance, if you ask me about the childhood, or if you ask me about the period in France, if you ask me about the period in America, those are very distinct periods when I was a different self too. A different person. So I have difficulty, not you, and I sometimes ask, "which period are we in?" Are we in the French part of the life, are we in the period in America, or are we in the present? The present activities, or Volume Four, which is closer? That's my own thing, because in each period you do feel that it's a different self. I don't think the same way as I did when I was twenty … That's why I think the diary is so faithful. Because it's written at the moment. When I used to read it back I would say, "You mean, I really thought that at twenty?" I don't always approve, I didn't always agree with myself at thirty. That's why I'm sure that biography and memory are not faithful, because we rearrange those things. I look at myself with my eyes today at the eleven year old girl and I see it quite differently. But it wasn't that way at all and I have a proof of it in the diary where I say this and this and that. It's a very strange thing. It makes you think that memory is not to be relied on. Because it's my memory today, and you rearrange it. You don't mean to, but you reinterpret it, so I see myself at twenty quite differently, and then I read the diary and I said, "Oh, no, at twenty I had that feeling, I had rebellions and I had melancholia."

So it must be that when you edit the diaries, it must be almost like editing the diary of another person …

… Somebody else, and I must be very careful not to cheat. I mustn't cheat because that would ruin it completely. That's why there are things in the First Diary that embarrass me, that I would rather have changed. The narcissism when you're concerned with relationships. They're things I wish I could improve on. But that would have ruined the diary, which is evolution. So I'm enough of a scientist to think that I want to see the growth of it as it happened, with the mistakes, with the errors, and the stumblings and the fumblings.

When you were beginning to write, when you wrote House of Incest and the two novels before it, did you show the novels to many friends, ask for criticism?

Yes. Oh yes. I showed them to close friends. The first one was very bad, very bad. It was a D. H. Lawrence imitation. I left it to the students of Evanston because I wanted them to see that a writer can write a bad novel so they won't feel so awful about their first novels. Because usually they read you, when you have already become a good craftsman, and when they don't imagine that you could write a poor novel. But I did write a very, very bad novel. In the first place, I learned my English from the library; some of it was Victorian, some of it was modern, it was a jumble of English. And secondly, I was under the influence of D. H. Lawrence, so it sounded like a bad imitation of him.

Have you read any imitations of your novels … yet?

No. I don't think I'm easy to imitate. No, I can't say I have. It always used to worry me, in one way I was worried, in another way I was glad, that I didn't have any disciples in that sense. And I used to think, well, I didn't really influence my friends because my friends write very differently from me. So I can't say I have anybody who writes as if they had been trained by me. Or felt very close to my style. I don't know why that is, whether it's a good or a bad thing.

How do you want to touch your readers? If you had an "ideal reader" what would the response be?

Well, there are two answers to that. There's one reader who reads the diary, which is a direct and a human experience, and responds to that. But the response to the novels was a great disappointment to me, when they came out before the diaries. Because in the novels there was a myth, and I wanted that myth to raise the standard of our life a little bit, just above the ground, just a little bit above the daily facts and the things that oppress us and the heavy, daily contingencies. The novels were, in that sense, a little bit abstract. They're like poetry. And that people didn't read well. Now they do. But they didn't then—certainly not in the forties or the thirties. So there are two kinds of responses I would like … one, a response as to poetry or music; and the other a human one.

Except your novels are so human too …

Well, they didn't seem to be to critics so far.

Really? Still?

Yes, there is certainly a much stronger reaction to the diaries. And then when they have read the diaries, they're willing to go back, and then they find some completions in the novels, some interlocking.

It seems to me that in the continuous novels, Lillian's development is traced more completely.

Yes.

The others are left in process, not yet resolved …

These things are sometimes very unconscious and mysterious. The fact that Lillian was taken from a real person. In the novels, usually all my characters are taken from reality, they are all someone. And it happened that this one person had been associated with Mexico. And how do you know how those things happen? I went and got to know Mexico very well … But why I didn't pick Sabina, I know the reason. In Sabina, there wasn't really anything to develop … no. Now Djuna could have been developed into something else but I didn't do that. I really dropped the novels. In a sense they're not finished.

Well, when you were working on novels … when you started, how much of a definite story line, structure …

None whatever.

None …

None whatever, no. That's what I said in The Novel of the Future, following free association. That's why I can't answer you why I followed Lillian, and not the others. When you follow free association like that and it does come from some subconscious source, you don't, you can't plan ahead. I couldn't plan ahead, I didn't know what was going to happen to them. It happened as I lived, in a way. It would happen as I lived and saw something new, or discovered some other aspect of them or understood them with a different kind of vision. They would change with me. So there was really a happening in that sense.

You created these three women and then you followed their lives …

Yes. Well, I created them in part and took them in part from reality. And then I knew their lives, and I saw their lives differently as my vision changed. Time changed them too. So there was a constant change, which is keeping up with life … Because our lives make a pattern. You don't know it but it does …

That's why I made the comment earlier about faith … (laugh) … backtracking with you, because it takes a great deal of trust in life to know that what happens to you makes a pattern.

Yes. There's a trust in your own understanding of life. In other words, things do happen and they seem accidental and they seem incidental but they're really not and the minute we have an understanding of them we say, "Of course that goes well, that would happen to this person and there is a pattern." It's not the usual pattern that people want. And this is what men find hard to read, believe me, men's objections …

They're brought up more to believe that they should control.

I've seen friends of mine design their whole plot, their whole story … Do you remember Zola making horoscopes of his characters? He would give them a birthday and then have their horoscope made, and that would be those characters. But that's sort of fun. That's one thing Miller and I had in common, that we both believed in writing without plan or structure.

When you're writing a novel, where are you? What is the balance between the dreamer and the critic who says, "I didn't describe this well enough"?

Well, let's put it this way. The critic is not involved at all in the writing. The writing is trusting, it's subconscious. The critic only comes afterwards, when I'm all through, when I begin to look over what I've done and see if it's right. Sometimes if you are following an association there are times when the writing is foggy and not very well focused. And so the critic comes in and says, "This part must come out." Usually, it ends up in my taking it out. It's like a poem almost. What doesn't come out right, there's something wrong with, basically, that can't be fixed, I think.

Do you feel there's any distinction between your life and your art?

No. No, they only feed each other. For instance, to put it in a humorous way, if my life isn't interesting, I worry that the Diary won't be interesting. They tyrannize over each other in a nice way, in a gentle way. There's a standard that I've set, that I want to live and work and write everything as closely together as possible. And so it works … You know, the only time I ever took LSD, once during the Huxley period, it worked into a synthesis of music, painting, words. It really made a complete, absolute unity, which shows that that was my aim, and I work at that, it's not a conscious wish. It's something I need, to be in harmony, and the friends and the things you choose, everything to correspond to the meaning.

I think of that …

You agree with that?

Yes … for me, I think of that union of life and art, that marriage, as Lillian going home in Seduction of the Minotaur … there are certain things, people, places, climates all through your life that attract you, architecture, styles, words … Often the books that I love most use certain words, words that all through my life I've pursued, followed and I've made lists of them.

Yes. Do you have key words, too? I have key words. Remember I told you, they're all in the dictionary under "trans"?

Also, "intimacy" …

Yes … And the "trans" words I love very much. I just fall in love with those words—transform, transfigure, translucent, transpose. Transparent. Transparent. (Said together) (laughter)

I wonder why you more than other writers have been made into a myth, a legend to be worshipped. You seem to lend yourself to that …

It's very simple—I give others the desire to write and paint and do things, so they think there's something magical about me. And I think there's nothing more magical about it than the fact that I wish it. I wish others to write. I think them to be painting, to be doing music. The wish is there, and when I was sixteen, when I was being a model for the painters, they all used to send for me because they said they painted better. But they painted better because I was nothing more than that. It was that kind of magic. And that makes it seem like magic and a legendary thing, but it isn't … Most models just sit there, waiting for the time to pass, looking at the clock—and the painter feels it. But I was learning about colors and I was very interested and I think I knew if that one was going to be good and it really showed, that probably does something to other people.

You've said that you aren't writing the diary as such any more, that it is more now a record of your correspondence.

Yes, letters going back and forth. I'm not worried about it because I think that's another phase of the diary. It's a corresponding with the world, and that's what I must have wanted because I started it to connect with my father. So this is another kind of fulfillment. Now the diary volumes are really letters from everywhere. And I find that also very interesting.

I remember in The Novel of the Future, you say, "the truest objectivity of all is to see what others see, to feel what others feel." Is that it?

Not quite, no. I was thinking more of the completion of a character. I was thinking of the people in my diary as characters. And people used to tease me about it. Daniel Sterne said, "You're talking as if you're writing fiction, you're talking about characters." I think of them as completions. Does that add to them, does this complete them, is this necessary to their portrait and is it necessary also to my own? I'm doing two things—I'm portraying you and I'm portraying myself, so the choice lies much more in that.

When I write portraits, or when I write anything for that matter, it's weeks, months before I can go back and even ask those questions.

Yes, but that's very good. The best critic is time. The best critic is waiting. I often wait with articles. I really do. A week or two and then I re-read it, and that's the critic. (laugh) Why do you shake your head?

Oh, I'm always afraid to re-read my stuff.

But I think you are your best critic. You are the only one who knows what you intend to do. Nobody else really does that. And you're the only one who can ask: did I do what I intended to do. And you can answer that with time, because time makes you more objective.

It's always very hard for me to know … the tension between communication and self-expression … I always feel that I've expressed what I've wanted to express, but don't know if I've communicated it to anyone beside myself.

Yes, but then that's the confirmation … But then think of the writer … Well, I had to spend twenty years with complete silence about the novels, and still believe in them. Without confirmation from the critics or the world. I did have confirmation from close friends but sometimes you don't trust your friends because you think they are always in your favor.

We're getting back to some of the critical standards we were talking about in the kitchen before … I can feel that I have articulated something important to me, expressed some emotional truth, some essence, some view of a moment, but do you believe that if I've done that, that other people will find it of value, of meaning?

Yes. But you have to be ready for not having the right person at that moment say, "Yes, you have done it, you have said it, and I understand it." You have to be ready not to find it instantly, which is what the writer dreams about. He writes and it comes out of the oven, it's warm, he goes to the stage and reads it and he knows, right away, whether he's good or not …

What more can you say about books then? "Does the author do what he sets out to do?" Is that all you can say, as a critic?

I think you can be honest, First of all, there are some writers who have done what they have done well. Even though you may not like it. The writers you respect but do not love.

Yes, like Virginia Woolf, say.

All right. Then you can put her in that group. But you can pay homage to that: it's beautifully written and visionary and she is a poet … Of course, you know, we don't get a very true picture of Virginia Woolf from her Writer's Notebook because it was so heavily edited by her husband to conceal her periods of disturbance and turbulence.

I don't want to judge destructively, because I have suffered so much from that. I don't want to say, "Burroughs is worth absolutely nothing," just because I don't don't enjoy his book. I will never say that. But I will say that it is not the book I want to read and keep by my bedside. And I think the best thing of all is how someone put it—"What I cannot love I leave alone." I just won't say anything about it.

The problem for me is getting to the deepest level where personal and universal merge. Because they do, and your work has shown that they do, but it can be damn hard to get there.

I know. It's hard. I think at this point it would be more important for you to write as an individual, than as a critic. Until you can reach that clear plateau where you can distinguish between what you love and what you don't love.

Unless criticism can be an articulation of why you love what you love and what you don't love, on the assumption that if it's real enough to you, it will connect with other's feelings too.

Well, there's still different kinds of connections. There are people who feel as William Burroughs does, and there are people who respond to that very cold sort of skeleton, the French school, that whole group with Grillet "le roman nouveau," the new novel, there are things for every taste. I didn't really care for that either, except Duras. Because the other is destructive. It's what so many critics do. If they don't understand you, they destroy you. And that's such a terrible thing. They've done that with Marguerite Young—the book was too big, they didn't understand it so they damn it and—you wouldn't do that? Just because a book didn't reach you?

Yes, being personal is not enough. The reviewer who gets into a tantrum because he does not understand the book is the wrong kind of personal reaction. You also have to learn to go beyond your prejudices or your limitations. The personal I mean is defined as one who feels and responds to the writer and can therefore penetrate his meaning more deeply.