The Intimacies of the Modernist Diary

This chapter considers the intimate contents and functions of the diaries kept by a group of modern writers in the 1930s, including David Gascoyne, Antonia White and Anaïs Nin. Gascoyne and Nin not only published fragments from their diaries in the 1930s but also exchanged their diary-writing between themselves, a practice that raises central questions about the diary as a private or public document. For Nin, the diary was something secret and hidden, as well as the repository of secrets, but it also had a public face for her: here the ‘intimacy of the diary’ (in Nin’s phrase) is rendered as an ‘extimacy’. Gascoyne was also closely connected to Antonia White in this period: her diary-writing, like Gascoyne’s and Nin’s, became a way of sustaining writing when fiction writing became blocked. Moreover, as with Gascoyne and Nin, her diary-writing became bound up with her psychoanalysis. Situating this archive in relation to the charged historical conditions of the 1930s, with their pressure on the writer’s capacity to separate interiority and exteriority, public and private, this chapter looks at the relationships between the dailiness of diary-keeping and of full psychoanalysis, and at the journal as a mode of writing and as self-analysis.