Word: nin
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...THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ago, Anais Nin created the female language for sexuality." So says the blurb on the back of Delta of Venus, the first posthumous volume of Anais Nin's erotic writing. The paperback edition has gone through four printings, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, knowing a good thing when they see it, have recently brought out a second volume, beautifully printed as the first and likewise bound in real cloth--quite a tribute these days, especially for stories originally written for an anonymous dirty old man at a dollar a page...
...preface of Delta of Venus tells the rueful tale of the cold voice over the telephone with its directive, "Leave out the poetry. Concentrate on sex." The impoverished writers who, along with Nin, wrote for the old man to pay their bills, resented this commandment greatly. At one point Nin wrote him a letter which said in part...
...Brace, having culled the best stories for the successful Delta of Venus, have now published the dross. Where Delta of Venus is sometimes cloying, Little Birds is actually offensive. While I was somewhat uneasy at the characterizations of huge, lusty men and women who were "genuine whores" in Delta, Nin really comes out of the closet in Little Birds. If there are sadists, they are men. If there are masochists, they are women. The twin gods of Freud and D.H. Lawrence's are worshipped more fervently than ever...
...Sisters," we are treated to a choice piece of cant as Nin tells of a father who "made a ceremony of burning D.H. Lawrence's books, which betrays how far behind the times this family was in the development of the sensual life." The worship of Lawrence is also felt in the language of these stories. It imitates without flattering. The result is not even very sexy. "She lived open and sensitized to his presence" and "all other women were cancelled by her voice" are not much of a substitute for the real thing. The frustration of the "Collector" becomes...
Successive Supreme Court decisions have left the issue of pornography hopelessly muddled, but it is difficult to imagine a community whose standards would be offended by Nin's tales. Read in the supposedly liberated '70s, these pictures from a stricter age take on a quaint charm. They are reminders that there was a time of garters and romantic assignations, an age when sex delighted not because it was healthy but because it was naughty...