Realism and Reality

The occasion was practical: This Hunger and the Dutton debut had brought the widest reviewing of her career, and with it the recurring complaint that the books lacked the sociology of the realistic novel — addresses, occupations, explanations. Realism and Reality is her counter-argument, issued by the Alicat Book Shop in Yonkers as one of its little chapbooks: the psychological novelist, she argues, works as the dream works, selecting and distorting toward emotional truth, and asking such a book for documentary texture is asking music for a floor plan.

The pamphlet matters beyond its few pages because Nin kept its argument for the rest of her life — expanded in On Writing the following year and at full length in The Novel of the Future two decades later. Collectors know it as one of the rarest Nin items; readers meet its text today in her collected essays.

A single sustained argument: the difference between realism (the outward inventory) and reality (the interior event), with her own fiction as the test case. Nin defends compression, symbol, and the dream's logic as instruments of precision rather than vagueness, and answers the reviewers' standard complaints in turn — an artist's-statement in pamphlet form, written with the launch of the continuous novel at stake.