Letters to Lawrence Durrell, 1937–1977

The Villa Seurat's last act had three principals. Durrell came to Paris in 1937 drawn by Tropic of Cancer, and the trio — Miller, Nin, Durrell — became the engine of the circle's final projects: the Booster and Delta magazines, the Villa Seurat Series that published Nin's Winter of Artifice, and the running three-way argument about writing that all three carried on for decades. Nin's letters begin there, in the collaborative blaze before the war scattered everyone.

The correspondence's long middle tracks two careers moving apart — Durrell toward the Alexandria Quartet's fame in the fifties while Nin's fiction waited, then the reversal as the Diary made her famous in the decade his star settled — with the friendship surviving the asymmetries in both directions. The letters run to 1977, the year of her death, and close one of the last open files of the Paris circle's correspondence.

Forty years of Nin's letters to Durrell: the 1937–1939 Villa Seurat collaborations — the magazines, the Series, The Black Book's launch; wartime and postwar letters across continents; the decades of diverging fame, with candid literary argument in both directions; and the late correspondence of two survivors of the same vanished Paris, running to the final year of her life.