Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin
Nin paid for Tropic of Cancer with six hundred dollars borrowed from her psychoanalyst, then wrote its preface. The affair is the part everyone knows. The money is the part that got the book printed.
Winter of Artifice
by Anaïs Nin
Three novellas from the Villa Seurat's last season — including the father story the diary had been rehearsing for twenty-five years.
- 1939
About Anaïs Nin
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeNin's second fiction: linked novellas circling the material the diary knew best — above all 'Winter of Artifice' itself, the account of a daughter's reunion with the enchanting, faithless father after twenty years, and the disenchantment that finally frees her. Published by Obelisk Press in 1939, weeks before the Paris that made it ceased to exist.
The story, in more detail
The book closed the Villa Seurat era in more ways than one: it appeared in Jack Kahane's Obelisk 'Villa Seurat Series' — the imprint-within-an-imprint that Nin's guarantee had underwritten — in 1939, on the very lip of the war that would scatter the circle and kill Kahane within the month. The first edition's three novellas drew directly on the diary's deepest veins: the father reunion, the double portrait of a woman between two men, and the analytic chamber of 'The Voice.'
Nin revised the book repeatedly across later editions — cutting, retitling, republishing on her own press in 1942 with engravings by her husband under his artist name Ian Hugo — so 'Winter of Artifice' names a small family of texts as much as a single book; collectors argue the variants, readers meet the core either way. The father novella remains the essential item: the diary's founding wound worked, at last, into finished art.
What's inside
The title novella is the heart: a daughter — the diary's own figure at one remove — reunites with the father who abandoned the family two decades before. He is a concert pianist, an enchanter, a mirror; the reunion begins as mutual seduction-by-admiration and proceeds, scene by scene, to the discovery of what he actually is — vanity arranged as a man — and to the quiet, surgical break that lets her leave lighter than she came.
Around it orbit the companion pieces: 'Djuna' (in the 1939 edition) with its woman held between a Miller-like writer and his absent wife, and 'The Voice,' set in the confessional of an analyst's office, where the healer proves as lost as the patients. Dream and case history run through all three — fiction pitched exactly at the border the diary lived on.
Why we recommend it
The wound, worked
The abandonment that started the diary in 1914 becomes controlled, finished art — the novella as exorcism.
The last Villa Seurat book
Published weeks before the war ended the whole world that produced it — the circle's closing document.
Analysis as theater
'The Voice' turns the analyst's office into a stage a decade before the culture caught up with the setting.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
The daughter
The woman at the center of the title novella. She has waited twenty years for the father who walked out when she was a child, and the book is the few months in which she finally gets him back. She is never named.
The father
A concert pianist who walked out on his wife and three children and comes back twenty years later to court his grown daughter's admiration. Vain, charming, terrified of germs, and unable to tell her the truth about anything.
The mother
The wife left behind in the title novella, and the parent who actually raised the children. A singer with a loud laugh who took three children to New York with no money and sang in a church for pennies. She is never named either.
Stella
A film actress who cannot recognise herself on screen and is jealous of the woman she sees there. She is in love with a married man, and she treats every small refusal from him as proof that the love has failed.
Bruno
A married man in love with Stella, who will not leave his wife and children and does not think that this diminishes anything. He wants to dream with her. She wants to live with him, and cannot forgive him for the difference.
Philip
Stella's second lover in the first novella: a handsome man who brings her joy and asks nothing, until she waits in his flat one evening and finds the rest of his life laid out on a dressing table.
Stella's father
A famous stage actor in Warsaw, white-haired and still playing the lover, whose second wife finally divorces him. He is the reason his daughter cannot believe in love, and he never once works that out.
Laura
The second wife of Stella's father, who forgave him for ten years and then stopped. Her account of the marriage is the clearest and least sentimental speech in the book.
The Voice
A psychoanalyst who sees patients in a room high up in a New York hotel. He is called the Voice because that is all his patients get: he sits behind them with his face against the light. The third novella is about what listening has done to him.
Lilith
A patient of the analyst in the third novella who arrives determined to catch him out and ends by falling in love with him. She has spent her life being leaned on and cannot let herself lean on anyone.
Djuna
The woman whose thoughts open and close the third novella. She lives in the same hotel as the analyst, absorbs everyone else's confessions through the walls, and is the only person in the book who can tell Lilith the truth.
Mischa
A cellist who comes to the analyst about a hand he can no longer use and says nothing about the leg he drags. He has spent his life offering people the smaller injury.
Lillian
A violinist who comes to the analyst convinced she is a criminal and a man, and who cannot make either claim stick. Her two sessions are the funniest and saddest pages in the book.
From the Journal
Timeline
1939
Obelisk Press publishes it in the Villa Seurat Series weeks before the war scatters the circle and kills its publisher, Jack Kahane.
1942
Nin recasts the book and hand-prints a version on her own press, with engravings by her husband under his artist name Ian Hugo.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Obelisk Press
- 1939
Paperback
- Paperback
- Swallow Press
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934
The rehearsal space: the father's return plays out in the 1933 entries first.
Read our take
Tropic of Capricorn
Obelisk's other 1939 book — the imprint's last season, split between Miller's roar and Nin's chamber music.
Read our takeWinter of Artifice: frequently asked questions
Who wrote Winter of Artifice?
Anaïs Nin. Obelisk Press published it in Paris in 1939.
What is Winter of Artifice?
Nin's second work of fiction: linked novellas circling the material the diary knew best, above all the title story of a daughter's reunion with the enchanting, faithless father she had not seen in twenty years.
What is the title novella about?
A daughter reunites with the father who abandoned the family two decades before — a concert pianist and enchanter — and moves from mutual seduction-by-admiration to the disenchantment that finally frees her.
Does it have more than one version?
Yes. Nin cut and recast it across later editions, including a 1942 version she hand-printed on her own press with engravings by her husband, so the title names a small family of texts.
Where does it sit in her Paris years?
It closed the Villa Seurat era, appearing in Obelisk's Villa Seurat Series weeks before the war scattered the circle.