Realism and Reality.
[Nin, Anaïs]. Realism and Reality. Yonkers, New York: Oscar Baradinsky/Alicat Book Shop, 1946.
8vo.; purple photographic wrappers, stapled.
First edition, first state with a photograph of Nin dressed as a man on the front cover; number 6 in the “Outcast” series of irregularly issued chapbooks; 750 copies, the entire edition. Franklin A8, noting that in the cover photograph Nin is portraying the character “Lillian” from her novel This Hunger (A6). “She had authorized the use of the head only, and when the three-quarter photograph of her in men’s clothing appeared there were distasteful repercussions. Miss Nin asked to have the photograph replaced, and a new white cover was issued bearing a different picture of her.” The biographical sketch which prefaces Nin’s early attempt to discuss her writing was anonymously written by the young Texan William Burford, whom Nin had met through his Amherst College roommate, poet James Merrill, and reprinted from Current Biography (February 1944).
Oscar Baradinksy (Oscar Baron) began the Alicat Series in the early 1940s when he published Henry Miller’s essay “Obscenity and the Law of Reflection” for his wife as a Christmas offering. “Within a year,” Deidre Bair writes, “Miller’s influence on the chapbooks was apparent, as works appeared by Michael Fraenkel, Anaïs Nin, and Ian Hugo…
Not content to elucidate her credo, [Nin] wanted someone else to comment favorably on her work as an introduction within the pamphlet itself. [William]Burford was her first choice because she thought he was malleable and would write a paean to her brilliance and talent. He accepted the assignment and wrote a thoughtful essay that examined her work for what it was, rather than, as her harshest critics were then doing, for what it was not. Although his essay was generally positive, he was temperate in his judgments and less than effusive in his compliments. Almost fifty years later, he remained the soul of discretion and will say only that he was “surprised” when he read the published essay, for “many parts” were not what he originally wrote. Anaïs Nin’s revisions to his text hastened the end of their friendship, for Burford no longer trusted her: “If she had been honest enough to explain why she was dissatisfied, I would have re-written pretty extensively to satisfy her, but she never did, she just changed it.” (Anïs Nin, by Bair, NY: Putnam’s, 1995, p. 316)
In her essay Nin analogizes her writing to modern painting, explaining that “a column can signify more than a whole house, and that one eye can convey more than two at times...I never include the concrete object or fact unless it has a symbolical role to play…” (pp. 13-14, 17). She goes on to make a case for the novelist’s responsibility to “uncover” the meaning behind experiential reality:
…dramas of the unconscious to gain a form and validity of their own must temporarily displace the over-obtrusive, dense, deceptive settings of our outer world which usually serve as concealment, so that we may become as familiar with its inner properties and developments as we are with the working of our conscious, external worlds…Whatever anxiety my writing may create can only be the anxiety people feel in the presence of an incomplete but highly significant dream…The pattern of the new novel will be one in which everything will be produced only as it is discovered by the emotions: by associations and repetitions, by associative memory as in Proust, by repetitious experiences out of which the meaning finally becomes clear as it does in life, alone making it possible to seize the inner pattern and not the false exterior ones. The pattern of the deeper life covered and disguised will be uncovered and demasked by the writer’s process of interpretation of the symbolical meaning of people’s acts, not a mere reporting of them or of their words…this uncovering power…must become an integral part of [the] novelist’s equipment…Reportage, the other extreme from
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