Fire

The unexpurgated project's third volume is the one where the double-entry bookkeeping of Nin's life becomes the explicit subject. The published Diary showed the New York analysis experiment and the return to the Villa Seurat; the journal shows what the editing removed — Rank as lover as well as mentor, the crossings and recrossings of the Atlantic driven by entanglements as much as work, and the habit, now fully formed, of maintaining separate emotional worlds that must never meet.

It is also, like the whole series, a portrait of the era with the varnish off: Miller at work on the books that would make him famous, the Villa Seurat circle in full production, the political weather darkening toward Spain, and Nin financing, managing, and recording all of it while conducting the private life the title names. The volume's fire is literal appetite and the cost of it; the diary counts both.

1934–1937, uncut: New York with Rank, the analyst's chair and the hotel rooms the published version omitted; the decision that the couch was consuming the writer and the return to France; the Villa Seurat years with Miller at their center and the little imprints publishing what commerce would not; new attachments — among them the Peruvian Gonzalo Moré, entering the diary's life — and the beginnings of the houseboat era; and the ledger of it all, kept nightly by a diarist watching herself sustain more lives than one person's hours should hold.