Free In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) by Anaïs Nin

will, which was Rank’s great contribution to the psychology of woman.
     
    QUESTIONER : What do you think the group can do for us?
    ANAÏS NIN : If you have a clear idea of what the problem is, the group may help in the solution of it, but we do not always have a clear idea of what is disturbing us. I think the group can make women feel less lonely, and they can become aware that many problems are similar. The strength it gives is the same as that given by solid friendships, but I do not think the group can give self-awareness or strength in any permanent form.
    Q: Would you comment briefly on the current women writers. I can only think of two of them, Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath. I have read reviews of their books and once I read the reviews I was reluctant to read what they wrote.
    AN: It is possible you felt as I do, that writers who write only about despair, hopelessness, destructiveness, do not attract you. I am not speaking in terms of literature. That is why I was not attracted to the book by Simone de Beauvoir on aging. I felt that she had accepted chronological age whereas there is no generalization about age. Age is psychic too. Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.
    Q: Would you comment further on the lifesaving force and the revitalization process within the ivory tower?
    AN: One answer lies in Otto Rank’s
Truth and Reality.
That is the process by which we create ourselves. The other lies in therapy. Therapy is not only a healing of neurosis. It is a lesson on how to grow, how to overcome the obstacles to our growth. Experiences tend to alienate us. We close up defensively. To protect ourselves from pain, we dull our responses. Psychology removes the scars, the fears, the rigidities which prevent us from expanding. It is a revivifying process.

The Story of My Printing Press
     
From the
Publish-It-Yourself Handbook,
Pushcart, 1973.
     
    In the 1940s, two of my books,
Winter of Artifice
and
Under a Glass Bell,
were rejected by American publishers.
Winter of Artifice
had been published in France, in English, and had been praised by Rebecca West, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Kay Boyle, and Stuart Gilbert. Both books were considered uncommercial. I want writers to know where they stand in relation to such verdicts from commercial publishers, and to offer a solution which is still effective today. I am thinking of writers who are the equivalent of researchers in science, whose appeal does not elicit immediate gain.
    I did not accept the verdict and decided to print my own books. For seventy-five dollars I bought a second-hand press. It was foot-powered like the old sewing machines, and one had to press the treadle very hard to develop sufficient power to turn the wheel.
    Frances Steloff, who owned the Gotham Book Mart in New York, loaned me one hundred dollars for the enterprise, and Thurema Sokol loaned me another hundred. I bought type for a hundred dollars, used orange crates for shelves, and bought paper remnants, which is like buying remnants of materials to make a dress. Some of this paper was quite beautiful, left over from deluxe editions. A friend, Gonzalo More, helped me. He had a gift for designing books. I learned to set type, and he ran the machine. We learned printing from library books, which gave rise to comical accidents. For example, the book said, “oil the rollers,” so we oiled the entire rollers including the rubber part, and wondered why we could not print for a week.
    James Cooney, of
Phoenix
magazine, gave us helpful technical advice. Our lack of knowledge of printed English also led to such errors as my own (now-famous) word separation in
Winter of Artifice:
“lo-ve.” But more important than anything else, setting each letter by hand taught me economy of style. After living with a page for a whole day, I could detect the superfluous words. At the end of each line I thought, is this word, is this phrase, absolutely necessary?
    It was