Anais Nin Interview

Anaïs Nin: An Interview
Author(s): William McBrien and Anaïs Nin

Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 277-290
Published by: Duke University Press
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Anais Nin: An Interview
by WILLIAM MCBRIEN
When we talked over the telephone I mentioned to you that Twentieth Century
Literature was founded by Alan Swallow.
Yes, did you know him?
No. But his press has, of course, published your books. Did you know him?
I met him only once. But when other publishers dropped me I went to him and
said that I was having great trouble distributing my books and would he take
them over? And he answered immediately, yes, and we began a real friendship
and collaboration. He turned up once in Los Angeles with other publishers
to talk about books and he was the only one who didn't talk about money. The
others talked about how much Mailer got, for instance. He was the only one
who talked about the love of publishing books. He was really the last of that
kind. All he wanted was just enough to live. And he did publish a lot of
good writers. And then he died prematurely, too, which was tragic. He died
just after the first diary came out. I had his name in the first diary although he
couldn't take it on. It was too big. But he got Hiram Haydn to share the
publication.
In The Novel of the Future you mention that it was not writers but film
makers who opened the way to the language of images. Can you say something
about the impact of film on your writing, indications of a technical kind that
film has given you? And has painting been an influence?
When I was writing the novels I wasn't aware of the influence of films but
when I realized that I had done jump cutting, that I didn't have the continuity
that they're used to in novels and that all the bridges were not there, then I
became aware that I really was using film technique: the jump cutting, the
impressionistic moments, the flashbacks; I probably feel that I've been influenced
by film, because we saw a lot of the early surrealist films, the early underground
films. And I loved that freedom that films had and the images. I must have
been influenced by them. Painting must have played a role, too; I saw a lot of
it. But more so films, because of the movement, and the impressionism of the
scenes, and also the sparse dialogue. I have very little dialogue. So that there
are affinities.
This interview was conducted in New York City, June 1974.
277
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE
How conscious are you of links with the demeublM novel some twentieth-cent
French writers have done? (You use the amusing term "passport informatio
to indicate material that is never of interest to you in art.) Novel of the Fut
seems to share attitudes that Robbe-Grillet reveals in For a New Novel abou
the disappearance of plot, for instance.
Yes, the only thing that alienated me from them, except Duras, was that the
was an intellectual experiment and not an emotional one. And that made m
feel not a part of it. It was a scenario that's true: Robbe-Grillet's novel was
scenario but it didn't have the other dimension I wanted, which was th
emotional. So that I never had a great love for him. I do love Marguerite Dur
but the others I felt were purely intellectual.
What led you to write The Novel of the Future?
Well, that came out of the students' questions. They kept asking these questi
and driving me to explanations. "Why did you do this and why did you
that?" Finally I put all these notes together.
What I found in re-reading some of the novels is the extent to which, des
the absence of plot, one becomes involved in the inner lives of your characte
in some cases even gripped by them, and wondering what is going to happ
to them.
The strange thing, of course, is that when you try to pursue the inner life
leave out a lot of externals, because you can't put everything in. So if
start trying to find out how a person feels, really exploring underground, y
leave out externals. I don't know whether I would leave out quite as m
today. But I still feel that it was only by leaving all that out that I could f
on the non-rational and emotional levels, and on free association. I don't th
you can do both.
You've mentioned Virginia Woolf as the writer "who sought to restore to t
novel not the familiar character structure but the visionary insight of the p
and elsewhere you speak of the necessity of seeing character from within.
the same time it seems that most of your fiction avoids stream of conscious
as a technique. Can you say something about the narrative method you cho
as the best way of presenting your story?
That was a problem because I use stream of consciousness in the diary: in o
words there I follow my own voice. But in the novels what I did was to co
the interior of persons, their having a different tone.
Actually then it's a narrator's voice which changes as it describes diffe

characters in an effort to catch tones.
Yes.
And in some place it seems to me you say something about that. That you w
striving for that. That you were more or less uninterested in colloquialism
278
ANAIS NIN: AN INTERVIEW
Yes, because I felt that we had used distinctions of speech to say that th
person belongs to this or that class, and we make these separations. Or we sa
he has a foreign accent. And I felt that these things prevented me from seein
the person. We began to think of the person in terms of where he belon
socially, where he belongs culturally, and I, probably because I came from an
other culture, thought that those facts are used to estrange us. They are not
used to make us understand each other. We stress (I remember it in Dreiser)
the rent, where one lives, but those things aren't you: they could be accidenta
Culture is accidental. My being put here is accidental. So it's not me. And
you type the person, and people do that, you make serious errors.
There's a passage in The Novel of the Future where you describe the wa
a novel begins for you, with an image that by association produces anoth
image, and so on. What you say resembles very much a statement that Dylan
Thomas once made about how a poem began for him with the surfacing of a
symbol that in turn gave rise to another. Can you describe a bit more th
process of images emerging?
I imagine that for me it might be the same as for someone writing a poem.
haven't gone as deeply into poetry but I'm sure that that's the way the poem
originates.
You said that when you edit the diary you're the novelist.
The novelist was a great help to me in editing because you can flounder around
with repetitions and trivialities in the diary or unfinished portraits. The old
story that Gide came to dinner and then that's all you say. They influenced
each other, I'm sure they influenced each other.
And would you then search the diaries really with an eye to finishing these
portraits in novels?
Some of the characters are not in the diary, though they appear in the fiction.
Some are in both. The roots of some are there. Some are a composite. I
change them.
But you don't use the diaries as a way to jog your inspiration?
No. I have never had that trouble [laughs]. My trouble is a profusion of things.
Seeing too much. Remember I wrote that in House of Incest: I see too much.
So I'm always amazed by writers who fear sterility. Because I feel that all I
need is more time.
Your rich dream life has always been a source of images for you.
Everything. Everything opens it up. Music. Not poetry so much. I like the
poetic novel. That took me away from poetry, really; I don't read much poetry.
But a book like Nightwood of Djuna Barnes was an inspiration.
279
When I came upon your own character Djuna I wondered whether you
tended to allude to Djuna Barnes. Or was it that you just loved the name?
No, I wasn't aware of her in the novel until I wrote Collages. There I had h
in mind. But in the novels I didn't. The name appealed to me because I foun
it in an anthology of Welsh names. And she had said that the name was ma
up by her father for her and actually she reproached me for using it, sayin
was her name. I said that I was so sorry but I had really found it. ... A
it is used in Sherlock Holmes! So that it was not an uncommon name. But it
was a man's name. Do you remember Djuna the mysterious servant? The name
always struck me. Maybe because of Djin. Collages, incidentally, is one of my
favorite works and one that the students seem especially to like.
Do you enjoy the very great enthusiasm now among students for your work?
Yes, we seem to have hit a synchronicity which very rarely happens. It seems
that all my work became synchronized at one moment with what they believe.
So we have this extraordinary rapport. ...
Don't you think that it's a bit of a coincidence. That the time became right for
this more feminine vision.
Yes. Because the books were there but until the diaries came out even the
students were not aware of the fiction.
But it is the novels, too. They know your novels closely.

Yes.
People writing about symbolism in the twentieth century always speak of the
special meanings modern writers, unlike let's say the medieval writers, attach
to their symbols. I wonder, for instance, about your use of the ship? Does it
have associations other than those that such a symbol has always had? When
I encounter it I can't help but think of the ship which carried you away from
your father as a young child and brought you to America. That seemed to have
been such a gripping and central experience for you. Does it help if your
readers know your recollections of this experience in the diary?
Probably. I will confess to what I think of as my lack of knowledge of mythology,
and my excessive knowledge of psychology which made me try to draw on the
personal symbol. Because you know how in therapy you have a dream and they
ask what is your association with the unicorn. Not what is the unicorn in
mythology. And usually a person comes through with a very personal concept
of the unicorn, whereas we know there is a general one. And then Jung made
that so clear for me: the collective symbol and the individual symbol. But since
I didn't know much about the collective-I really lacked that knowledge--but
I had a very great knowledge of how people use symbols for their own lives,
280
I stressed the personal image and its significance. And you're quite right, th
ship had a great significance in my life, and became a symbol. Then I began
to read, of course, about the Egyptians, and then the knowledge became coll
tive or mythological. But my first knowledge was always personal.
So you think it helps readers of your novels to know the diaries and read abou
your personal experiences, that it enhances their perception of the novel?
That's a question I hadn't before now asked myself. I think it would help
this way: symbolism is a language we have to learn-I mean we have to lea
it to live. We have to understand our symbolic acts, our symbolic behavi
So once a student asked me why doesn't a writer simply state these thin
straightforwardly. And I said no, because if you do that you'll never learn t
language. We do have to learn the language. What does it mean if you bring
me flowers? What does it mean if you have a similar dream about a ship
think it would be wonderful for students to learn that there are two symbo
the mythological one, which I really didn't use very much, which Joyce use
for instance, when he had to give a framework to Ulysses. But I was always
looking for the personal one because it was the key to the person. And even
the use of words: you know how some of us will use a word much more ofte
than the other; that word then becomes part of the character. I imagine
students really took an interest. . . . You remember there was a time wh
they wouldn't study D.H. Lawrence: they really were interested in the litera
writers. They didn't like Lawrence. And they didn't like symbolism in my wo
either. But that's changed. The new generation is conscious of symbolism.
In a critical book on your work which I've been looking at again-actually I've
been avoiding most criticism of your work until after we talked...
Yes, you want to have your own reactions. And you don't need academ
criticism. I find it sterile much of the time. I find women now are mak
criticism that I like better, it's not quite so academic. But even they are stil
too much in the academic framework.
... this critic made the point that you envision the novel in an Arnoldia
way as functioning partly to replace religion in our age.
Because of my consciousness of spiritual values?
I don't recall her saying that but generally your readers seem to speak of yo
as a writer who can help them to live their lives. In a talk that Erica Jo
recently gave she referred to you as "that great truthsayer," for instance.
Well, when I was young I was very much affected by what I called transcen
dentalism and I gave that a special meaning, it suggested a spiritual world. It
wasn't religious. I took it from my reading of Emerson. Then I went to Eur
in the '30s. I came back in 1940 and I said, where are the transcendentalists?
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Everything here was just the opposite. The novel was a very political, na
istic, absolutely un-spiritual one. Not religion, that's not what I mean b
scendentalism, but consciousness of people's psychic life. It's a different t
You speak a lot about modern American novelists. I wonder if you place
self ... I know you're against categories-but I just wonder if you see
self in a particular tradition or line of writers.
Well, the strange thing is that until now I've said that I'm an intern
writer. But at the same time I identify very strongly with the changes th
place in America. I really am identified with that. And so, therefore
people ask me are you going back to Europe, I say, no, I'm not going
feel that I've been in some way responsible for this change. And I'm int
in it. And it was in America also that I grew up. I don't know if it was
there and hidden. There's now a whole new consciousness. And that, in a
has made me an American because here is where change is taking pla
period of naturalism in the '40s, though, I didn't like. But I did like very
the novel of Djuna Barnes. And Marguerite Young.
Have you liked Doris Lessing?
No, I can't get interested in her. I'm in an embarrassing situation becaus
students always put us together. And the difference is, well, one student
this way, she tells things as they are, and I tell things as they might b
feel that she is a realist, but to me it's depressing. I don't find her nove
spiring. I can respect them but not love them....
You mentioned Dreiser before. Can we come back to that? You've writte
"my main theme was that one could only find reality by discarding reali
you see yourself writing a "poetic novel." Elsewhere you complain about
literalness of American literature and say that "the external story is wh
consider unreal." I'm curious to know whether in your rejection of natu
you fail altogether to find anything in the work of a novelist like Dreise
Yes. Because I feel that in him we only feel the external, he didn't g
enough. And you can't very well do both. Those men, Dreiser and al
very concerned with narrative, action, and culture. The culture explains
extroversion; the introvert has something radically wrong with him, pe
believed. There seems to be in America that tough school. But there are
Goyen was a sensitive writer but he seems to have lost something.
You mentioned Kerouac.
Yes. I liked him because of the rhythm except that he didn't flower or have a
chance to do more. He did find this very living rhythm.
And Gore Vidal?
He's the one person I'm ashamed to have befriended. Yes, I knew him as an
282
adolescent. When he's objective and political he's good. But when he is critici
ing writers he is ruthless. He tried his best to destroy the diary. When he sign
his release, we met in Paris. And I was appalled by his talk. He signed th
release. But then he attacked the diaries in the Los Angeles Times. And lied.
And told interesting lies. His mother married several wealthy men and h
attributed that to me. Then he described himself as my lover and that h
never happened. That was a fantasy. Isn't it amazing? Of course it didn't wor
But he tried. It's the misuse of a good mind.
Did you ever know Julien Green?
I met him once. Very, very charming. I haven't read it but I understand that
diary has been coming out and that every year somebody dies and he adds to i
I was just wondering if there are other diaries that interest you?
Diaries always interested me. From my very early youth. . . . George Sand's,
Amiel's, Kafka's, Paul Klee's, Katherine Mansfield's.
Incidentally, I've only recently learned of the Anais Nin Newsletter publishe
out of Ohio State. Are there some good things in it?
There are some nice things in it. It's supposed to be purely informative f
people doing research and for libraries. But every now and then a little artic
slips in which is interesting. You know Durrell wanted to write there agains
Rudolph Binion's distorted biography of Lou Andreas-Salome and I said I didn
want to do it because it seemed like a feminist taking sides but he hated it a
loves the H.L. Peters biography which is now reprinted by Norton. It's really
Circle, really a friendly circle. Once we published a very acid critic and I ask
him not to write anymore. We have enough of that in the world: We do
want that in the Newsletter.
Something else called Les Amis d'Anais Nin was to appear in Paris, wasn't it?
That didn't bear fruit. It was started by a journalist I met. He worked terrib
hard at it and put it together. There were essays and comments and all that bu
it was never published. I hope you didn't subscribe.
Returning to the question of the novel in the twentieth century, may I quot
to you your saying that "the novelist today works parallel to the psychologi
recognizes the duality and multiplicity of the human personality," and a
your description of symbolism as "the most important form of expression of t
unconscious." Do you see the modern novelist's function as somehow a ve
special one today, linked to the psychologist's function? Is it your view that th
novel can give us back our unconscious, to some degree?
Yes, it can put us in touch with it. That's the thing that I really discover
only when I published the diaries: that by being in touch with my own, som
how I made other people contact their unconscious. They would say: "It's not
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your diary, it's my diary." Someone thanked me the other day for explor
said, himself in me. So because I maintained that, the other people feel i
suddenly realize all that life that was there, even inarticulate in some case
it suddenly comes to life. I think that is why the diary has such an irra
effect because it's not an intellectual thing, it's not a literary thing, very
stress on the literary in the diary. It's more a sort of ritualistic writing w
brings us back to the way we feel about things. In it I was always stressin
I feel this way about something and I feel this way about the person: I d
pretend to be objective. In it you have to be true. I love that D.H. Law
saying, "the secret is how we are going to transfer a living experience w
its wilting on the way," or something like that. That said a lot to
wondered how are we going to do that.
You use with special poetry the Lawrencian term "flow" and describ
interest you've always had in the forces within a person which keep that
from maturing. Like many writers in the twentieth century, Joyce and
especially, you seem struck by the extent of paralysis in modern life. I w
if Joyce and Eliot meant much to you?
No. They didn't. It's a very subjective attitude which I can't defend very
It's just that I either fall in love with a writer or I don't, and if the
nourish me or make me feel like working-for instance I read Proust
begin to work; or I read other writers who will have that effect on me.
didn't get that even from Joyce because the consciousness was so schola
so clever that it was undecipherable for me and I didn't want to stud
terms of scholarship, just as language or mythology.
Nonetheless, along with Joyce, you are preoccupied with paralysis. Yozu
to see the cause as neurosis, don't you?
Yes. Because I really do feel that the natural thing is for us to be like chi
paint, dance, talk, make up stories. As you know children just bubble up,
irrepressible. Then something happens that represses them. They stop pai
they stop singing, dancing. ...
Yes. You describe that in places in the novels.
And then we become something else. Then we create a persona to surviv
the world. We're not going to show vulnerability. We're not going t
how we feel. I think that those writers who did that were cut off from an
extraordinary source. Of course Joyce was never cut off, he was never sterile.
But he created a whole subconscious of his own. I don't know as much about
Eliot and what happened to him.
Critics have called attention to the prominence of the garden image in your
work. That reminds me to say how delighted I've always been by much of the
284
exoticism in your work, the sense of how gorgeous you find the world. In
that respect I connect you with Colette.
I'm glad of that. I've felt that her perceptions, her feelings about food,
gardens, the sea are beautiful. She was a peasant-that was her saving grace.
And yet so elegant in her style. But I love the peasant in her, the one who
delights in smells and tastes. I never tasted a cup of chocolate like her chocolate.
And her matchless subtlety. Do you remember the episode, I think it's so
funny, when they were going to bring her into the Acad6mie Franqaise and
they said, oh yes, she's a beautiful writer, a wonderful stylist, but she doesn't
write about important things, only about love. She's only writing about love.
She meant a lot to me.
Do you feel that you have used the garden as an image of where you wan
to be?
In nature yes. My struggle was with nature against neurosis. I felt it
was neurosis that kept us from being at one with nature. Either we live as
reflections or else we live paralyzed or else we're not one with nature. I'm
always surprised that the simple definition of Zen is "oneness with human
beings and oneness with nature." I thought that's not so difficult to reach.
That's what they call sartori. But I thought it was something much more
complex.
A word that occurs to one in trying to describe some of your stories is "fable."
Is that a word that offends you? Some critics writing about Hawthorne, for
instance, distinguish work of his that is fable from work that is plainly
novelistic. One seems always to be struggling for a word more descriptive
of form in your work. And this is a word, utterly apart from the label,
"dreamlike," that you've disliked so when it's applied to your work. Is it
possible to see more clearly what you're doing by thinking of certain
narrations, the Collage stories, for instance, as fables?
Yes, I know what you mean. It's not that they're true. But in telling of them
they become tales. It's the art of story telling.
Some stories are very different from that.
Yes. I was always wondering why they spoke of my "dreamlike and unreal
tales." They meant they weren't close to reality. But I knew they were based
on reality. That the houseboat did exist. The mouse did exist. Do you think
it was the poetic way of telling the tale that makes it sound dreamed rather
than lived?
Yes. But as we know from great fables they can be closer to reality than
realistic stories.
As we tell a tale something may happen even in an anecdote to make it
different. If you're a poet you transform it even more.
285
Obviously you are a very disciplined artist ..

And I enjoy my work. I cannot understand those who talk about agony
suffering in writing. I really love it. That's why I think I started so yo
and so automatically.
Do you write with pen or on the typewriter?

Only the diary is handwritten. I have a superstition that it's authentic
write it by pen.
But you do use the typewriter?

Everything else I do on the typewriter.
Do you hate all those questions about when you write, how many hou
-questions that seem de rigueur in interviews?
I don't mind. And I've learned that somehow the questions really mean
would like to know how to write. What's the secret?
You do in fact write in the diary every day?

Not every day. That's what Rank wanted to cure, you know. The compulsion
The feeling of guilt if you didn't write. I used to apologize in the diary and
say sorry that I didn't write yesterday. And he wanted me to be free, which I
now. So that if something really important happens I write, but not every da
You knew English from your young years?

No, I had to learn English when I got here. I fell in love with English. I real
have a great love of English. A foreigner will fall in love with a new langua
It's an adventure, an exploration, it's new and they're more excited by
They don't take it for granted.
But I would have thought that in the diary you'd write in your first langua
Well I did from the age of eleven, I wrote in French. But you see in Eur
my father was giving concerts all the time, and we were always touring. So
we never went to school.
You travel still a great deal. I wonder if that comes from your childhood
traveling. One might have expected the opposite. Let me ask you the kind of
question students like to ask: Do you think of your day as having a structure?
Yes. When I'm working I'm really very disciplined. I find I do my best
writing in the morning. So I sacrifice parties, late nights. I'm very, very
disciplined. Then I have periods when I stop working, see my friends. But
I can't do both. When I lecture that's different.
How long would you say each period lasts?

Well, the lectures have been a very serious interruption in the last two
years, and I have to make a decision on those. I like the contact with the young
286
people. But I may have to learn to do less lecturing. It's nice to go

It's a contact with the world. But I can't do as much of that. I'm n
enough editing.
What of all these legends about how many pages of diary there are?
It's hard for me to tell you exactly, because I lost count. I used to
them. And I numbered 149 volumes up to 1966. I literally lost cou
I know from what I'm editing now that you can say half of it is p
Would you say what you cut out is chiefly repetition?

No, it has to do with ethics, things that can't be published. I don
people to lose their trust. Some did trust me with their secrets.
Are you destroying the material you're suppressing?

No, I'm not destroying it. If I live long enough I thought I'd edit thos
and let it be published when the reasons for my suppressing it are no
there. Like Story of a Marriage: You read that?
Yes. How did you like that?

I found that very interesting. And I had just finished the biography of
Woolf. So the whole thing began to interlock.
Virginia Woolf is a writer you mentioned before.

Yes. I never met her. I tried. I wrote to Virginia Woolf, but she didn't
I wrote to Djuna Barnes and she didn't answer. So I answer every letter
Because I don't want that. . . you know I missed having had those frien
Do you know the writer Erica Jong?

I don't like her work.
I don't want to make you feel guilty but she seems to like your writing
very well.
What I don't like is that under the humor there is so much destructiveness. I
appreciated her comic sense but I felt horror at the destructiveness.
She said she was partly inspired to do what she did because she had some-
where read that because of your being a woman you found it necessary to
suppress in your writing at that time descriptions of sexual experience.
And she felt inclined to come out and do what you had not been able to do.
It really wasn't that at all. My reticence is due to the fact that I don't want
to involve any other people. She could do it as fiction. I can't do that with
others' lives. And I've explained that the reticence is not my own. I can share
my life.. . but I can't involve other people. I don't believe in that.
So there never was a question of publishers suppressing things?

No, no... I don't think the world is ready yet for women's sexual revelations
287
anyway. I think they've been done in the same vein as Henry Miller. Th
being done in such a vulgar way that it makes me feel I don't want to m
the subject. But wouldn't you say it might perhaps not be necessary to de
everything in order to evoke it? It isn't. I feel, I don't know how yo
that people do read between the lines. And the more the women exp
the more I react against it. And if I were totally free to do it . . . s
everybody mentioned died, I still don't think that I'd do it. I wouldn't w
it that way.
What about Henry Miller? Do you think of him as an artist with

parallel concerns?
You see, the friendship with Miller was based on opposites. You kno
were as opposite as we could be. And that was our interest for each
... the challenge. Because I had never encountered him and he had
encountered me. So that's the otherness there. It wasn't what I call frien
You know, it was not based on similarity, but on extreme opposit
not aware of it, though those are things that others can sometimes
Later I looked for more affinities with people. But you know, in France
writer is in danger of being a writer who stays in the house and ne
the streets. And of course Miller was a person whose world was a compl
exotic world. A man of the people, and a man of Brooklyn; and
fascinated by that. And he was fascinated by the European world, w
treated him very gently and allowed him to work. There was a great dis
... which increased in time. Now we don't like the same movies, we
like the same people.
Can I quote Erica Jong on another subject? She speaks of the fact
writer can't just report conversation because it's too unreal. The wri
to make it real.
I'm afraid I did the opposite. I remember meeting Renate, who comes into
Collages, and what attracted me to her was that she talked like my heroine,
and she confirmed that people really did talk that way. And so I said, well
Renate, you really confirm to me that people do talk as I describe it. Because
I was trying not to write in a folkloric way. Someone said to a great writer,
people don't talk that way. And he said, "But they should." So they should.
But then I find people who do talk that way. And Renate does talk in metaphor,
in imagery, and she's a painter.
I wonder if I can ask you something about male characters? Everyone writing
about your fiction tends to praise you for allowing people to feel how life is
perceived by women. But I think that, first of all, you allow us to experience
your characters as human persons. I, as a man, can certainly find some deep
identification with your women characters.
288
I hope so, I'm glad you said that. Incidentally, I don't think that m
missing from my novels, I think that what happened was that my
was on women, on explaining women. Women, you know, were not in C
they were out of a great many novels. The other day the tables were t
against me by a friend of mine who wrote a brilliant essay on a
Bertolucci. I can't bear Last Tango in Paris. Against my objections
I'm surprised at your bringing up how humiliated and defenceless the w
in Tango was because in your novels you were preoccupied with exp
the woman, you focused on the woman. And Bertolucci is not inter
the woman. He's focusing on the man. But I felt that the strong m
been very well done in novels. And that women had not:, that w
contribution. That was the only thing I knew.
But I don't think yours is a fiction without men. Critics seem to overloo
male characters.
I agree. They were so accustomed to have novels where the men were ce
and this time the men were less so. It's true that Sabina lacks persp
she looks only on the romantic side of the man, and I say that. Bu
Sabina. Lillian is very different. And Djuna is very different. I don't kno
they can say that. Some men in the novels are very strong characte
then men are certainly present in the Diary, aren't they?
I noticed in reading interviews that a lot of people ask writers wh

ideal reader is. Have you had fantasies about that?
I don't think I can answer that. I don't know who is reading me. Is
young? Or mature people? I have the feeling that the young read m
let's say, more empathy and that they are at one with the books. M
people read me with more critical appraisal and detachment from the em
experience.
Incidentally, I think that your own writing about adolescence is very sensitive.
Not enough has been said by critics about it.
The French did a lot of good writing about adolescence. Almost all their
writers described adolescence. Why is it that they don't do that so much here?
Do you think it's because of the demand for invulnerability? Because that's
the vulnerable age. I have had friends, artist friends, say to me, I can't read
you all the time because I feel I'm becoming too vulnerable, I have to take
it in small doses. Well that I understand. If they've been used to functioning
most of the time through a persona. . ... That's why I think I sometimes get
a rush of criticism that's not really criticism, it's just anger. Where does that
come from? What is it Tennessee says: you touch a nerve and then they
want to destroy you? Because otherwise I can't explain it. I can explain
289
someone going through and saying it's a badly done book but I can't explain
somebody having a tantrum.
Are you writing fiction at all?

I don't think I will again. I think I have just time enough to do two m
diaries. And then the women want to know about the time when my l
did not open. The difficult things that came before. Because they look a
now already historically. So I may have to go back to arrange another editio
What one says at sixteen . . . I'm a little embarrassed. It may be historic
true, but it's embarrassing. I don't think it has much interest. But they loo
at it historically . . . how you go from the narrow life to the expansive. So
may have to do that.
Did fiction just come to interest you less? Or is it that you decided som
time ago to give your attention to editing?
I don't know frankly what happened. I don't know whether it was the l
of response to my fiction which made me feel I was being alienated or that
knew at a certain point that it would be the diary which would reach peopl
I'm interested because for a number of people I know fiction seems a

certain age no longer to attract them. At a certan point they just stop read
novels , ..
You know that happened to me. I don't read novels now. I read biography.
Any biography. But not the fiction writers.
I hope you change your mind and do some more fiction. There are probably
people whom you can't publish about in the diary but whom you could
write about in a fictional way. And you do it so well.
Well I'll bear that in mind. We need the myth and we need the dose-up.
We need the diary but you can't make a myth out of it. When I write the
story I can make the myth. I think we need both, don't you?
290

Anais Nin Interview

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Anais Nin Interview

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Anaïs Nin: An Interview

Author(s): William McBrien and Anaïs Nin

This interview was conducted in New York City, June 1974.

Actually then it's a narrator's voice which changes as it describes diffe

But it is the novels, too. They know your novels closely.

Obviously you are a very disciplined artist ..

Do you write with pen or on the typewriter?

But you do use the typewriter?

You do in fact write in the diary every day?

You knew English from your young years?

How long would you say each period lasts?

people. But I may have to learn to do less lecturing. It's nice to go

Would you say what you cut out is chiefly repetition?

Are you destroying the material you're suppressing?

Yes. How did you like that?

Virginia Woolf is a writer you mentioned before.

Do you know the writer Erica Jong?

So there never was a question of publishers suppressing things?

What about Henry Miller? Do you think of him as an artist with

I noticed in reading interviews that a lot of people ask writers wh

Are you writing fiction at all?

I'm interested because for a number of people I know fiction seems a

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