This Hunger

By 1944 Nin had stopped waiting for publishers. With Gonzalo Moré she ran a hand press in Greenwich Village — the Gemor Press — and printed her own books, setting type page by page. Under a Glass Bell had come off the press the year before and caught Edmund Wilson's attention; This Hunger followed in 1945, the press's most ambitious project, illustrated with engravings by Ian Hugo, the name her husband Hugh Guiler used as an artist.

The portraits were not an end in themselves. Nin was assembling the cast of what she would come to call the continuous novel: Lillian, Djuna, and Stella all carry forward into the novels that began appearing with Ladders to Fire in 1946, which absorbed most of this book's text. This Hunger is the seam between Nin the private printer and Nin the published novelist.

Three character studies of women. Hejda, a painter out of the Middle East, sheds one confinement — the veil — for subtler ones inside a marriage to another artist. Stella, a film actress, watches her screen self grow confident while the woman offscreen shrinks from the love offered her. Lillian, a pianist whose force masks anxiety, is set against Djuna, the observer who understands more than she can use. The prose works the way Nin's diary works: interior weather first, events second.