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

opposition of publishers, I am happy they opposed me, for the press gave me independence and confidence. I felt in direct contact with my public, and it was enough to sustain me through the following years. My early dealings with commercial publishers ended in disaster. They were not satisfied with the immediate sales, and neither the publishers nor the bookstores were interested in long-range sales. But fortunately, I found Alan Swallow in Denver, Colorado, a self-made and independent publisher who had started with a press in his garage. He adopted what he called his “maverick writers.” He kept all my books in print, was content with simply earning a living, and our common struggles created a strong bond. He had the same problems with distribution and reviewing I had known, and we helped each other. He lived long enough to see the beginning of my popularity, the success of the diaries, to see the books he kept alive taught in universities. I am writing his story in Volume Six of the diary.
    What this story implies is that commercial publishers, being large corporate establishments, should sustain explorative and experimental writers, just as business sustains researchers, and not expect huge, immediate gains from them. They herald new attitudes, new consciousness, new evolutions in the taste and minds of people. They are the researchers who sustain the industry. Today my work is in harmony with the new values, the new search and state of mind of the young. This synchronism is one nobody could have foreseen, except by remaining open-minded to innovation and pioneering.

Novelist on Stage
     
A review of
The Complete Plays of D. H. Lawrence,
in
The New York Times Book Review,
10 April 1966.
     
    D. H. Lawrence’s complete dramaturgic output—eight full-length plays and two fragments, written at various points in his literary career, from 1909 onward—has now been published in a single volume. While the book mysteriously lacks introductory comment of any sort, and while Lawrence is not widely recognized for his stagecraft (only a few of the plays ever having been produced), the collection is interesting for the light it sheds on Lawrence’s efforts to express his ideas in a different medium.
    The plays will appeal to those who are mystified by Lawrence’s daring and unique attempt to crack the surface of naturalism in his novels, to find a way to release emotions, instincts, intuitions, to find a special language of the senses. For the dramatic form, with its severe limitations on lyric expression, would not seem suited to Lawrence’s aims.
    In his plays, which range from situation comedy to realism, Lawrence respects the need for action and dialogue—faithfulness to what is manifested on the surface and directly expressed. Absent are deep exploration of motivations and emotional ambivalences. Direct, simple, almost classical, and free of admixture, these plays remind one of the perfect rendering of the illusion of reality by the Moscow Art Theater. Lawrence does not strive for dénouements, for tension; he is content to present a lifelike portrait of instants. He makes no attempt to break with conventions of the theater, as he did with those of the novel.
    His favorite themes, similar to the themes of his novels, are reduced to extreme artlessness. At times his faithfulness to ordinary dialogue is extreme, as in
The Daughter-in-Law,
where he supplies a shorthand colloquialism for the spoken dialect which is to me almost unreadable. He records the atmosphere of poverty. He is concerned with the simple patterns of daily life which help to contain outbreaks of emotion. He endows these patterns with ritualistic meaning that conveys inner states of mind. The serving of food, the very descriptions of food itself, laundering, ironing, folding sheets, baking bread, making beds, lighting lamps or candles, are anchors and roots to prevent emotional explosions.
    His poetic moments are sensitive and unadorned. In
The Widowing of