Stella

Stella's textual wanderings tell a story about Nin's whole method. The portrait first appeared in This Hunger, the 1945 book from her own Gemor Press; Dutton's Ladders to Fire opened with it in 1946; and when Nin reorganized the continuous novel for the Swallow editions, she moved Stella out — the sequence belonged to Lillian, Djuna, and Sabina — and gave her the lead position in the Winter of Artifice collection of novelettes, where readers find her today. A character too complete to cut, too separate to keep: the books kept adjusting around her.

The material is drawn, as always, from the life around the diary — the figure of the actress split from her image owes much to Nin's friendship with the film world's exiles and aspirants in the New York years. The novella distills the theme the novels kept elaborating: the public self as a performance that pays the bills and starves the performer.

A portrait in Nin's interior mode. Stella, a small dark actress with an enormous screen presence, watches her celluloid double grow confident and beloved while she herself retreats — double-locking doors, testing lovers, unable to believe the adoration aimed at the image includes the woman. Two men anchor the study: the possessive, married Bruno, and the polished Philip, each in love with a different fraction of her. The novella works through the divisions — child and star, image and woman, the deserted daughter still inside the famous face — toward Nin's characteristic destination: not an event, but a recognition.