In the diary's first volume, Freud's one-time disciple, Otto Rank, analyzes Anais. By the fifth volume, her digressions on neurosis come as a matter of course. With the conviction that personality has ceased to be an enigma, she resolves to deflate her anxieties with keen insight, pretty much like the prick of a needle eliminates balloons. To this end, she doggedly pries apart relationships and scrutinizes the pieces for wear. It turns out that the traits she rebels against in friends often lurk unacknowledged in herself, so that an end to friendships ends external friction, while the sparks smolder inside her. When a printer named Gonzalo friendships ends external friction, while the sparks smolder inside her. When a printer named Gonzalo no longer intimidates her with his violence Nin sees it in herself. She resists the "physical and mental promiscuity" in Henry Miller while they are together in Paris, and later traces the same gleeful audacity in hereself back to childhood, when she solicited strangers on the street by inviting them in for tea.
THIS HEIGHTENED awareness of private neurosis alerts her to the general taint and prompts an interesting argument. In a review of Tennessee Williams's play, The Rose Tatoo, Maxwell Geismar--a Marxist critic--deplores Williams's detachment from the mainstream of American literature. Convinced that literature should be a function of politics, any preoccupation with sheer emotion irks him. The "people," he contends, aren't infected. Nin perceives an undercurrent in American life that sucks in more than a peripheral minority--making neurotics less than special. Williams, she responds, has prophesied a cultural illness.
Although introspective, Nin doesn't thrive on solitude. She focuses her curiosity on the outside world and delights in its confusion. She doesn't hesitate to draw attention to herself: she once performed Spanish dances; she modeled for artists in New York. She remembers a painter's astonishment when she arrived at his studio early in the morning wearing a red velvet dress; it was a cast-off sent by relatives in Cuba where women didn't stifle themselves. During an experiment with LSD, she blurts: "I want to explain to you why women weep. IT IS THE QUICKEST WAY TO REJOIN THE OCEAN." The ocean mimes this woman's fluidity, color and sensuality.
The diary expresses an avid interest in other people. Anais portrays individuals according to their idiosyncracies--Dr. Max Jacobson, Martha Graham, and a waif named Nina, attracted by "Nin" as to an echo, among them--and societies according to the idiosyncracies of their individuals.
Mexico's flamboyance--including tombs painted laundry blue, pink, and red, or churches topped with neon crosses--captivates her. She craves people and chases experience, repelled by the "crustacean" life of gradual withdrawal from the world as passing years reveal its threatening aspects. Her unembarrassed receptivity to the emotional and physical aspects of human beings is evoked in an impression of Sierra Madre:
...I hear the train whistle at night and the coyotes in a pack with their thin wailing cries answering the train, mistaking it for the cry of another animal in the night. The first night I thought it was a woman in labor pains.
In its published form, Anais Nin's diary spans 24 years. The last volume depicts a mature woman, a writer gravitating within the American artistic community and a more introspective, retrospective person than the author of the first three books seemed to be. The younger Anais was constantly evolving; now her world fluctuates, but her attitudes keep stable. The feverish pace to her life and record has gentled; still, its intrigue remains intact. The whole picture puts an ironic twist on the retort of an indignant reporter when Anais hauled her diaries out of a fire: "Hey, lady, next time could you bring out something more important than all those old papers? Carry some clothes on the next trip. We gotta have some human interest in these pictures!"