SOURCE: "'The Barbaric Friendship with Robert': A Biographical Palimpsest," in Mosaic, Vol. 11, No. 2, Winter 1978, pp. 141-52.

In the following essay, Jaas discusses Nin's influence on the poetic and personal explorations of the poet Robert Duncan, particularly in light of their respective diary-writing.

His portrait in the Photographic Supplement to The Diary of Anaïs Nin,¹ Robert Duncan remarked, shows him "posed with [his] eyes cast down in a revery with heavy eyelids and [his] mouth closed in some secret thought or dream."² There is an almost identical pose in an Anaïs Nin portrait from the same period—her eyes, again in Duncan's words, "cast down in a revery, her eyelids heavy as if in dream … her mouth at once sweet and reserved" (Caesar's Gate, p. xxx). The similarity between the two poses, however, is as striking as the contrast between the photograph of Duncan in question and...