Collages

After the continuous novel closed, Nin wrote one more work of fiction, and it surprised her readers: the interior pressure of the sequence is released, and in its place is play. Collages works the way its title art works — pieces set beside pieces, edges showing, the design emerging from arrangement rather than argument. Renate anchors it: painter, beauty, collector of impossible people, drawn from Nin's friend Renate Druks of the Malibu circle.

The cast is a gallery of originals, several from life — most visibly the collagist modeled on Jean Varda, whose real collages of rag and sail turned women into light, and whose craft gives the book its structural metaphor. Critics who had run out of patience with the sequence's solemnity warmed to this one; it remains the easiest door into late Nin, and the last fiction she published before the Diary's 1966 debut changed her life entirely.

Linked vignettes rather than a plot. The book opens in the Vienna of Renate's girlhood — statues in the garden, a father with theories — and follows her to a life of painting by the Pacific, where the chapters arrive like visitors: Bruce, the beautiful companion who communicates through invented stories and disappearances; a consul and his unraveling household; the collagist in his converted ferryboat, cutting cloth into light; Nina, who talks to no one and everyone; and finally Judith Sands, the barricaded writer who no longer publishes and may no longer write. Each portrait is a small mechanism of sympathy and comedy, and the arrangement — piece against piece — is the argument.