I saw Durrell's eyes, eyes that know everything, eyes like those of a sea animal, both of earth, sky, and water, of seer and prophet, of child
    and old man.  What keenness in them.  He sees everything.  His soul sees, his body, his creative self, through those clear, clairvoyant eyes.
    (73)

And here is the description from Volume Two of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, published in 1967:

    What first struck me were his eyes of a Mediterranean blue, keen, sparkling, seer, child and old man.  (223)

His body, too, undergoes some changes.  In the Journal of Love version, he is "soft and feminine, healthy and humorous, fawn [sic] and swimmer" (73).  In the earlier version of the diary, he is "short and stocky, with soft contours like a Hindu, flexible like an Oriental, healthy and humorous.  He is a faun [sic], a swimmer, a sail-boat enthusiast" (223).
    Nancy gets two tries as well.  In this volume, she is "a long-waisted boy with beautiful long leopard eyes, a Greek boy" (73).  In the book of nearly thirty years earlier, she is "a long-waisted gamin with beautiful slanting eyes" (223).
    What happens when the Durrells leave the Villa Seurat is also a different story.  In the first version, Nin and Miller "spent a quiet evening" (223).  Here, "Henry took me with passion and I responded:  animal, animal, animal, animal" (73).
    And so it goes.  You pay your money and you take your choice.  As Deirdre Bair explains in her excellent biography of 1995 (Anaïs Nin, reviewed in Deus Loci ns4), it's impossible to know what the "true" diary may be.  Nin herself edited and revised it numerous times, as have others over the years and for varying reasons, some legitimate.  In any case, I can't see why many people would want to revisit the newest variation of Nin's reveries and exploits, even uncensored.  She really has had her say and is better represented elsewhere.  (At this writing, Nearer the Moon is no longer available from the publisher, which seems to confirm my opinion.)
    For Durrell scholars, however, the picture here of the young writer working on The Black Book is useful.  He comes across as a friendly listener, willing to walk and talk with Anaïs, to commiserate with her problems, especially her increasingly shaky relationship with Henry Miller.  In the early part of their friendship, Nin believed that Larry was a helpful go-between who "understands both Henry and me" (127).  He might well have.  But in spite of his "old" eyes, Durrell remained naive about the ways of Anaïs.  He didn't stand a chance.
    In doing her the honor of taking her work seriously he got his first comeuppance.  When, in January of 1939, he tried to correct the manuscript of Winter in Artifice (which he and Miller were readying for publication by the Obelisk Press in Paris and which, according to Bair, Nancy Durrell was paying for), Nin was resentful and accusatory.  His changes were "you, not me.... You cannot write my book for me," she complained in a letter to him (303).  Later, she apologized, admitting to being super-sensitive.  But one senses that right there, in Durrell's attempts to edit her work, to help her as best he could, Nin closed down on whatever lasting friendship might have developed.
    As has often been noted, Durrell was one of the rare males of Nin's acquaintance with whom she did not have sex.  For this alone, he is an unusual character in these pages, and the passages that include him reach for a higher level than most of the rest.  When the legendary Three Musqueteers, Miller, Durrell, and Nin, are together here, the topic is at least art, though not the detailed discussions I had hoped for.  The famed trio was, in truth, a fragile, short-lived band, not quite so merry as myth would have it, especially when the earnest Nin was around.  The period of carousing and wild writing in Paris lasted little more than a year.  The the group was separated by war and dispersed in more fundamental ways by diverging fortunes.  Later attempts to recapture the magic all fizzled.
    If Nin's diary (in its several versions) is a chief source of the legend, she herself was the weak link.  In her more lucid moments, she sensed this.  At one point she asks herself:  "Would I return to Henry the next day, the Durrells, the art world in which I did not altogether belong?" (132).  Throughout this volume, such insecurities, never mind her self-absorption and endless sex, inspire pity more than anything else.  Her many flaws and handicaps, well known and much rehearsed, all seem to dominate here.  We don't find much of what I still maintain is an enduring strength, her attempt to give voice to what she called "women's inarticulateness" (83).  That voice is dim in Nearer the Moon, which is forgettable except for one thing, the material about Lawrence Durrell.
    His youthful charms come through, as does a harder edge, even a hint of cruelty.  He admits (or at least Nin records) that he will "go home and hack away at Nancy with a little hatchet" (126).  Without Nin, we wouldn't have any of this, anything much at all in the way of a portrait of the then unknown writer.  But here is Anaïs Nin, scribbling away mainly about her passion for the absurd Gonzalo.  (Those who have had the misfortune to entertain a similar passion for absolutely the wrong person will be uncomfortably reminded of their folly, not much of a recommendation for any book.)  And along the way, almost inadvertently amidst all the heaving and panting, she stops long enough to give us this one vivid, prophetic still-life:

    Larry is sitting cross-legged on a chair like a soft blond Indian with a catlike suppleness and writing with a branding iron. (176)

Deus Loci 7 (1999-2000):  180-83.

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