by Anaïs Nin
The letters behind the diary's hardest chapter: father and daughter writing to each other after the 1933 reunion.
The documentary companion to the most difficult material in the Nin archive: the letters exchanged between Anaïs Nin and her father, the composer Joaquín Nin, from their 1933 reunion — the episode Incest records — to the 1940 rupture of the war. Edited by Paul Herron and published by Sky Blue Press in 2020, the correspondence shows what the unexpurgated diary shows from one side only: the seduction, performance, and slow disenchantment of the era's strangest father-daughter relationship, in both hands. (Letters — the diary's own volumes carry the full account.)
The reunion of 1933 — the abandoning father returning to court his grown daughter's admiration — generated a correspondence as elaborate as the relationship, and the archive kept it. Herron's edition publishes the exchange: Joaquín Nin's letters in their polished, performing charm, and Anaïs's answers moving across the same years the unexpurgated diary documents, from enchantment through the affair the diary records to the long cooling that followed.
Its value is the second voice. The diary gives Nin's interior account; the letters give the relationship's exterior — what was actually said between them, performed for each other rather than for the page — and the gap between the two records is itself instructive. The volume closes where the war closes everything, in 1940, with father and daughter on separate continents and the correspondence effectively at its end. He died in Cuba in 1949; they did not meet again.
The two-sided correspondence of 1933–1940, edited with apparatus by Paul Herron: the reunion letters with their courtship register; the exchanges surrounding the events the unexpurgated Incest records from Nin's side; the professional and family news of two performing lives; and the thinning of the correspondence through the late thirties to the war's separation. Readers seeking the full account of the relationship should read it beside the diary volumes; the letters are the evidence, not the confession.
The gap between what the diary says and what the letters performed is the volume's real lesson.
Joaquín Nin's own voice — charming, performing, evasive — rather than the diary's portrait of it.
With this volume the reunion years hold three records: the published diary, the unexpurgated diary, and the letters.
Depicts · 1933–1940
Half the book is his. Sky Blue Press published both sides of the correspondence between Joaquín Nin and his daughter in 2020, edited by Paul Herron: the letters run from the 1933 reunion to the 1940 separation and are the only substantial record of the relationship in his own hand.
1933
The reunion at Valescure begins the correspondence — the years Incest records from the diary's side.
1933–1940
The exchange runs from enchantment through disenchantment to the war's separation.
2020
Sky Blue Press publishes the two-sided correspondence, edited by Paul Herron.
The unexpurgated diary of the same years — the interior account these letters accompany.
Read our take
The 1966 telling, where the reunion appears as a refused enchantment.
Read our take
Where the father's absence started everything — the diary begun as a letter to him.
Read our takeThe published correspondence between Anaïs Nin and her father, the composer Joaquín Nin, from their 1933 reunion to 1940 — edited by Paul Herron for Sky Blue Press in 2020.
Yes — the volume prints the father's letters and the daughter's, the relationship's exterior record in both hands.
It covers the same years. Incest is Nin's unexpurgated diary of the relationship, including the affair; Reunited is the correspondence the two conducted — the evidence beside the confession.
With the war. The 1940 separation left father and daughter on different continents, and they never met again; Joaquín Nin died in Cuba in 1949.
Nin started her diary at eleven as an unsent letter to him after he abandoned the family — the correspondence published here is, in a sense, the letter finally answered, decades too late and in the strangest possible key.
