Arrows of Longing

Pollak enters the story from an unexpected door: the rare-books room. As a librarian building a modern-literature collection, he wrote to the out-of-print novelist in 1952 about her manuscripts, and the professional inquiry became one of the durable friendships of her life — twenty-four years of letters about writing, exile (Pollak had fled Vienna in 1938), the diary's long road to publication, and the American literary weather they both watched from its margins.

The correspondence's arc is the career's: it begins with Nin unknown and Pollak one of the few institutional voices insisting she mattered, and ends with the fame accomplished and the friendship intact. Gregory H. Mason's 1998 edition presents both sides, and readers of the diaries will find here one of the few sustained exchanges where Nin is answered at her own level of seriousness about her life's central project.

Twenty-four years of two-sided correspondence, 1952–1976, edited with introduction and notes by Gregory H. Mason: the manuscript acquisitions that began it; the lean-years letters on rejection, self-publishing, and the diary question; two exiles' running conversation about Europe, America, and belonging; and the late letters from inside the fame the early ones could only argue was deserved.