Under a Glass Bell

By 1944 Nin had given up on American publishing and become her own: with borrowed money and a second-hand press in a Greenwich Village loft — the Gemor Press — she and a friend hand-set the stories, three hundred copies, engravings by Ian Hugo. It is one of the era's great acts of literary self-reliance, and it worked: Edmund Wilson reviewed the little book warmly in The New Yorker, doors opened, and the American career the Paris years had never yielded finally began.

The stories themselves are the Paris decade in miniature: the houseboat moored in the Seine (her own), the ragpickers of the fortifications, the fierce portrait of a mad poet drawn from Artaud, and the title story's aristocratic family preserved under glass, breathing yesterday's air. They stand with the diary's best pages — the same eye, disciplined into forms the length of a held breath.

Thirteen stories, most under ten pages. The anchors: 'Houseboat,' the drifting Seine world Nin lived on in the late thirties; 'Under a Glass Bell,' the sealed family in its museum-house; 'Je Suis le Plus Malade des Surréalistes,' the Artaud portrait; 'Ragtime,' the city's scavengers transfiguring its debris; and 'Birth,' the unflinching account carried over from the diary's most famous passage. Dream logic throughout, but disciplined — each piece a single image held to the light until it gives up its story.

Read it as the hinge of her career: Paris material, American printing, and the compression that made even skeptics — Wilson first among them — concede the prose was the real thing.