Word: venus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...sounds good, and when I read this in the foreword to Delta of Venus I agreed wholeheartedly. Then I read the book, a strange combination of genuinely sexy and often beautiful writing, affected prose and naive Freudianism. Exotic Chinese and Africans are used as backdrops. Sensual women can be picked out from a crowd by their copies of Lady Chatterly's Lover. A man feels "blocked" and his lover suggests psychoanalysis. I ended up sympathizing somewhat with the poor lonely old codger just trying to get his rocks off and being fed Freudian morality...
...Winds on Venus: Was Bob Dylan Right?-- Charles Counselman, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, MIT, Rm. 100 F. Pierce Hall...
Such success prompts repetition. No one should be surprised, therefore, to learn that there are still more sexual stories where Delta of Venus came from and that 13 of them are now being released as Little Birds. Although shorter and weaker than their predecessors, these newly uncovered tales radiate the same musty, hothouse sensuality, and their appeal as literary curiosities seems equally strong. For in tackling explicitly sexual subjects, Nin was poaching on an established male preserve. Pornography in all its guises had al most always been written by men and for men. Not only was Fanny Hill no lady...