A Word about Editing Nin’s Unexpurgated Diaries

Paul Herron, Editor, Sky Blue Press

January 26, 2025 

WHEN, AND COMPLETELY BY SURPRISE, Kazuko Sugisaki of the Anaïs Nin Trust handed me a neat cardboard box filled with the typescript of Nin’s 1939-1943 unexpurgated diary, I was faced with a true dilemma, one that my predecessors John Ferrone, Rupert Pole and Gunther Stuhlmann faced: How to edit this raw material in a way that allows Nin’s story to be told clearly, interestingly, and in a way that doesn’t replicate the original expurgated text ad nauseum or desecrate the holiness of the original writing, which Pole insisted should be touched only slightly, if at all.

After Nin’s husband, Hugh (Hugo) Guiler, died in 1985, some eight years after Nin herself, there was no longer the major impediment to revealing the totality of Nin’s intimate writings in the diary, since, it was reasoned by Pole, Nin’s literary executor, and John Ferrone, the master editor of Delta of Venus and Little Birds, bestselling versions of the erotica Nin wrote for a dollar a page in the 1940s, the one person Nin sought to protect from the truth was gone.

Ferrone, a longtime editor at Harcourt, was tapped to edit the first unexpurgated volume, Henry and June (1931-1932). While Ferrone was accustomed to Nin’s permission to “edit as you see fit, I trust you,” he was not prepared to deal with Pole’s constant insistence that the original writing should be barely touched by any editor’s hand because to him each passage Nin wrote was sacred and not to be tampered with. Ferrone, who eventually went on to make Alice Walker a literary star as he did with Nin and the erotica, had other ideas: to produce a best seller, an editor must operate freely, boldly, without fear, without impediment. Ferrone’s and Pole’s polar-opposite editorial philosophies, of course, led to a series of conflicts between these two passionate men, both of whom loved Anaïs Nin, and both of whom wanted desperately to present her in the best possible format. As a collection of letters between them reveals (see “The Making of Henry and June” in A Café in Space), Ferrone’s severe—radical, even—editing won out, and the book was not only a commercial and critical success, it also inspired the first NC-17 film in history by the same name in 1990. But this success came at a cost—Ferrone vowed to never work with Pole again, citing his constant struggle to suppress Ferrone’s editing. I, for one, don’t blame him, although I see the merits of Pole’s position. The conflict was between bestsellerdom and literary veracity; neither could find a compromise, which is a shame, especially to scholars who are interested in what Nin wrote, how she wrote it, and when. Ferrone’s rearranging life events for the sake of flow, removal of significant passages in the name of plot development, or entire characters key to Nin’s life because they are irrelevant to the story are blockades to the truths they seek in the diaries.

So, when it was time for the next unexpurgated volume, Incest (1932-1934), the heavy lifting of editing was left to Nin’s agent and co-editor Gunther Stuhlmann, under the strict supervision of Pole. While Stuhlmann was no John Ferrone, he did seek to produce a readable text that readers would find engaging, informative, and interesting. Stuhlmann soon realized that Pole’s demands for textual preservation were sometimes counterproductive and presented a major roadblock to the editing process, but unlike Ferrone, he capitulated for the sake of getting the job done and preserving a good working relationship with Pole. The results are clear: Incest contains little of the literary and dramatic flow of Henry and June; indeed, perhaps the book contains too much—incest and late-term abortion, both considered taboo subjects by many readers and critics. In the end, Incest inspired a mighty backlash, moral outrage and crucifixion by the critics. It, along with the publication of Deirdre Bair’s unflattering if not hostile biography of Nin a few years later, sparked a sudden and steep decline of Nin’s reputation, legacy, and popularity. Harcourt published two more volumes edited by Stuhlmann/Pole, Fire and Nearer the Moon, and refused any further submissions by Pole. For seventeen years, no new Nin diaries were published, and there was mostly silence surrounding Nin studies and readership.

So, when Kazuko blessed me with one of the manuscripts that Harcourt rejected many years before, I was faced with my own challenge: how to proceed. Rupert had suffered a stroke and could not get involved; Gunther had passed the year prior; but John Ferrone would reach out and guide me in certain ways: “Be brave! Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. We are here to help Anaïs tell her story. Sometimes we have to save her from herself!” John sent me xeroxes of his handwritten markups in the working Henry and June manuscript; there seemed to be no paragraph, no sentence, no word untouched. Cross-outs, arrows in every direction, sections interchanged sometimes from different months or years, insertions of revised text, a sea of red ink bloodying the pages. No one could argue with the outcome: a critical and commercial success and a movie. But when I compared John’s edited pages with the originals, I suddenly could see (and almost hear) Rupert’s point—while the finished product was a compelling delight to read, it wasn’t what Nin actually wrote. It was as severely edited as the original Diary of Anaïs Nin, which was devoid of Nin’s intimate life; now we had the intimate life, but where was the rest? The context was lost, as were personages who, in some cases, were ultimately important to Nin’s life. No, I had to go my own way with editing the diaries.

I naturally sought the thread of the essential story Nin was telling in the early 1940s, after having been torn from her beloved Paris by war and supplanted in a land hostile to her kind of writing, her kind of lifestyle, a land where she felt disconnected, isolated, criticized, rejected, one in which she sought ways to recapture the magic of Paris, her plunge into impossible romantic adventures with younger men and sometimes women, her escape from the realities of war-era New York City, its robot-like, soulless society, its crass capitalism, its narrow literary views, its consumerism, its mindlessness. She was a woman navigating a strange land, going from one mirage to another, failed efforts to be published, hopeless love affairs, her aching search for the “One” who could be everything to her, who could love her as she loved others. Thus, the title of the book revealed itself: Mirages. And the ending came not in 1943, but in 1947 when Nin meets Rupert Pole. Since there was such a distinct cast of characters occupying Nin’s life for long stretches of time, the book naturally took the form of chapters, one for each major event, each notable lover, mini-diaries within the major one. I chose to retain mention of what some may regard as “minor” or “insignificant” characters to give readers a concept of the immensity of Nin’s social and professional circle; I also chose to include Nin’s dreams and musings that may have been cut for the sake of streamlining in favor of revealing the inner workings of her mind, the flavors she carried with her throughout her daily life. In other words, I was neither John Ferrone nor Rupert Pole, if they may be considered the infra- and ultra- ends of the spectrum; I was somewhere in between. I also didn’t hesitate to change the format of the subsequent three volumes—Trapeze was divided into years because the events were too; The Diary of Others consists of two books because her life and diary writing were divided too; and A Joyous Transformation needed no such divisions because all the pieces of her life and written accounts were interwoven on more than one level. They are what they are, not what I am, or what my vision is.

So the era of unexpurgated Anaïs Nin diaries has concluded, the end of a third series of diaries—the original Diary, the early diaries, and the unexpurgated ones. It seems only logical to me that the entire diary collection from 1931 to 1977 be published, as Rupert put it, “just as she wrote it.” Readers deserve to see it—there is no longer any reason for them not to.