Fire - From A Journal Of Love

Fire: From ‘A Journal of Love’ contains Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diaries for 1934–1937, “unexpurgated” being the publishing term for putting back all the lovers, lies and bedroom arrangements that had previously been removed to preserve marriages, reputations and the illusion that anybody involved had been getting enough sleep.

At the beginning, Nin is in New York attempting to construct a new life with psychoanalyst Otto Rank. This is complicated by the continuing existence of her husband Hugh Parker Guiler and lover Henry Miller, both of whom follow her across the Atlantic with the persistence of men who have noticed that Anaïs is reorganising the cast without formally cancelling their contracts.

Rank is analyst, mentor, employer and lover, an arrangement which leaves relatively few professional boundaries still available for discussion. Nin begins practising psychoanalysis herself, although her own emotional life remains magnificently resistant to diagnosis. Patients arrive with neuroses; Nin receives them while maintaining a husband, several lovers, a literary career and enough parallel realities to occupy an entire clinic.

Back in Paris, Henry Miller remains the volcanic centre of her creative life: brilliant, needy, exhilarating and approximately as useful in an emergency as a burning piano. Hugh supplies loyalty, security and money while being protected from the truth by an increasingly elaborate system of omissions. Nin loves them both, deceives them both and records the whole operation in a diary which has become the only participant receiving complete disclosure.

Then comes Gonzalo Moré, the passionate Peruvian activist and romantic revolutionary who speaks to Nin’s Spanish ancestry and provides the fire of the title. Gonzalo possesses beauty, intensity, political ideals and very little practical competence, making him almost professionally irresistible to a woman already overstocked with difficult men. Together they discuss poetry, revolution and the future while other people continue the less glamorous business of paying for it.

Nin moves between New York and Paris, husband and lovers, psychoanalysis and literature, devotion and escape. She is astonishingly frank about her capacity for deception, though frankness within a secret diary is perhaps the safest available form of honesty. Every lie protects a love; every love requires another lie; and each new emotional crisis is immediately converted into several excellent pages.

The result is not merely a record of sexual adventures, although readers requiring those will not be sent away empty-handed. Nin examines desire from inside it: jealous, ecstatic, selfish, generous and perpetually alert to its literary possibilities. She wants security and freedom, artistic independence and financial rescue, complete possession and unrestricted movement. In short, she wants everything, but expresses the difficulty rather more beautifully than most people attempting the same arrangement.

These pages were omitted from the diaries published during Nin’s lifetime because the people concerned were still alive and might have objected to discovering their private lives on sale in bookshops. Released after discretion had lost most of its surviving beneficiaries, Fire restores the names, affairs and emotional machinery, revealing just how much careful editing had been required to make Nin’s life appear manageable.

This 1996 Peter Owen edition is in Very Good condition overall. There are a few creases to the spine and some apparently accidental pen marks on the cover, but otherwise the book is exceptionally clean and appears barely read—perhaps opened briefly, recognised as Anaïs Nin operating at full temperature, and placed carefully back on the shelf. A fine copy for readers of literary diaries, unconventional lives and romantic arrangements requiring a timetable, an analyst and several international railway tickets.

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