Jay: Hedonistic painter and unfaithful to husband of Lillian; considers all women sexually hungry. Based on Henry Miller (see Henry & June).

Sabina: Secretive woman who courts danger, cannot find love, and wants to consume Jay. Composite character based on June Miller and the aspect of Nin that sought to emulate her (see Henry & June).

Uncle Philip: Gloved, genteel, and lonely man who witnesses many events, though he is not remembered.

Descriptions in part from Anaïs Nin Character Dictionary by Benjamin Franklin V

PUBLISHING HISTORY

1940s New York was, to Anaïs Nin, a hostile environment in which to be a writer. Nin’s poetic, symbolic fiction was the polar opposite of the conventional realism publishers sought, and she was forced to self-publish her work for years. Her fortunes changed when she befriended the young writer Gore Vidal, who at the time worked for the big publishing firm of E. P. Dutton. It was he who convinced Dutton to offer a contract to Nin for her next several books, the first of which was Ladders to Fire (1946). Dutton, dissatisfied with the sales of Ladders, planned on waiting two years before publishing Children of the Albatross. Vidal fought to get the book printed immediately, and in mid-1947, it was. Both novels were later collected into Cities of the Interior (Anaïs Nin Press, 1959; Swallow Press, 1974).

—Paul Herron, Editor

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

In Children of the Albatross, Djuna, a mature woman, seeks to contact her own adolescent self through a young man of seventeen. She is returning to adolescence, unconsciously, to discover what impedes her forward movement into experience. In Paul she sees her own fears, contractions, reticences, evasions.

The genesis of Children of the Albatross was based on a real character, a young man of seventeen who became for me a representation of adolescent fear. He was inarticulate. I used the wordless language of the ballet to be able to render his timidities, his swift exits, his evasions, his pirouettes. The ballet served as an image of adolescent timorousness, light-footedness, disappearances. “Paul” had tremendous fears, of life, love, art, everything. It made him oscillate, be ambivalent, elusive. Starting from the ballet, I followed many images which seemed to express adolescence, or at least Paul’s. The luminosity of youth, the phosphorescence one sees in children and young people, suggested the albatross. I had been reading about the albatross in a scientific journal. The sailors hesitated to kill them and only did so when utterly starving. The albatross followed ships. The legend of their metaphysical quality may have sprung from the fact that the sailors, after killing them, found their entrails phosphorescent. Phosphorescence and flight. All this grew into equivalents for Paul, means of describing a most elusive state of mind. I had observed that children seemed to lose this luminousness. In Paul it was quite striking. He had a glow and a tendency to take flight in the face of life, of emotion, and of his own dreams.