Anaïs Nin (1903–1977)

Frank and so forthrightly feminine. At volume four of her diaries, I'm really just luxuriating in her prose. But with the intensity of her feelings, this is truly a one-volume-a-year treat for me. The amount of romance and romanticising she compacts into every aspect of her life complements her writing. In the hands of a different writer, the reality of the awfulness of these characters might puncture the dreamy veil that Nin casts over my eyes.

I was rereading bits of this last night after seeing several one- or two-star reviews of it pop up in my feed recently. And scanning through some of the other reviews here and on GoodReads, there's a lot of people objecting that it's ‘icky’ – one reviewer lists all the things that feature in Delta, things like incest, rape, paedophilia, and then just says, ‘Ew, right?’

WELL NO NOT EW ACTUALLY. I mean yes, ew, if you like, of course a lot of these things may not be very appealing show more depending on your tastes, but more fundamentally I just think this is a misunderstanding of the genre. The whole point of erotica is often not so much to turn you on as to go to places that other writing cannot – to break down taboos. Like other kinds of genre fiction, it should be mind-expanding. In the same way that, for instance, science-fiction or fantasy tries to conjure up other civilisations in order to contextualise our own, so erotica is the one genre which gets to look at social conventions one by one and imagine what would happen if they didn't exist or if they were systematically ignored. The idea is to open you up to new experiences, and it's often meant to be unsettling and challenging rather than arousing – although certainly one key motive is to prompt that unexpected jolt from the reader where an internal voice says, Whoa, why do I find that idea so hot? I thought I'd dealt with all this in therapy.

Having made the counter-intuitive case that good erotica isn't necessarily sexy – Exhibits A and B being de Sade and Bataille – I should say that Anaïs Nin is nowhere near as far along the scale as those two. Her writing is – well I won't say ‘sexy’, because that's so subjective (one man's boring theme exercise being another woman's dependable two a.m. go-to), but it is definitely rich and sensual and I think there is a lot to admire about her prose style. Here we go, let's check out some hot Pierre-on-Elena action:

He was in France without papers, risking arrest. For greater security Elena hid him at the apartment of a friend who was away. They met every day now. He liked to meet her in the darkness, so that before they could see each other's face, their hands became aware of the other's presence. Like blind people, they felt each other's body, lingering in the warmest curves, making the same trajectory each time; knowing by touch the places where the skin was softest and tenderest and where it was stronger and exposed to daylight; where, on the neck, the heartbeat was echoed; where the nerves shivered as the hand came nearer to the center, between the legs.

This is typical of her approach, which makes use of a lot of short, simple clauses, either separated into different sentences, fairytale-like, or strung together with semicolons into long, dreamy bouts of poetic description. She applies this ruthless sensuality equally to the sex and to the moments of violence or sadism that crop up in the book. I am far from the world's biggest Anaïs Nin fan, but I do think it is important that we have a woman finally writing about this kind of thing, rather than what we had for hundreds of years previously, viz. men guessing what women thought about it. I'm thinking John Cleland, Pierre Louÿs, et hundreds of al.

Nin always prompted a lot of varied reactions from other women, some thinking, Finally someone is saying it, and others being more like, Whoa there, speak for yourself, sister. Meanwhile men's excitement was split between the stuff they recognised (‘women think like us!’) and the stuff that seemed new (‘women don't think like us!’). I do think it's interesting that you can draw a line from Delta of Venus in the 1940s right through to, let's say, Nancy Friday's Women on Top in 1991, and see that most of the themes have barely changed at all.

I don't think Delta of Venus is a great book, but I do think it's an interesting and important one and I have a real soft spot for it. Of course in real life Anaïs Nin was as mad as a box of frogs, but she was the right person at the right time and I like a lot of what's in here – as the reviews show, it still has the power to challenge people today, when you might think the whole thing would have seemed rather passé.

‘Don't burn someone's genitals...it is NOT OK,’ says one reviewer earnestly. Well, yes, fair enough…it's just as well then that this isn't fucking reportage, it's a piece of creative writing. Jesus. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be in my bunk going over page 117 again. show less

“This little wound women have . . . it frightens me.”

I held off on reviewing this for obvious reasons. It's more than a little bold to tell the internet you've read an erotic novel, and even more so for a girl a few weeks out of high school. My peers, fortunately, are not flocking to Goodreads (though now is better than later to apologize to my 12th grade English teacher if she sees this, hello and sorry Ms. Leaney), and so with that weight flying off my shoulders like those pesky show more pedophilia-laced symbols of the birds, here I am.

My aunt gave me this book with trepidation a few months before I read it; when I left it beside the bed so as not to look too eager she promptly hid it in her dresser drawer to pretend the topic never came up. Well, reader, I found it—and it was a wild ride.

I was at first confronted with how shame-free the sexual exploits were. For something written in the early 1940s, pre-sexual awakening as we know it in the later decades, the affairs and acts are focused on the mental and physical pleasure rather than any internal woe for such blasé fecundity. The scenes were at times ridiculous, the acts intrepid—but beyond the unbelievable veil all pornography contains Nin sews a very human, compassionate, intelligent thread throughout the character's minds and actions. Starkly feminist, the power and sexual independence of the female leads was thrilling. Bisexuality is as normal as day, lesbianism as night, and the awakening of this and the character's broader sense of life was like a drug.

I'll never forget the beautiful lull it put me under as I began reading it on my flight into Dublin at 5 in the morning—Mahler one and a not too terrible tea by my side, the sunrise a radiant rainbow wash at the other. I don't know how to explain to you how erotica can be "intelligent", but you'll just have to believe me. Maybe it's the care of the human mind, maybe the prose that melts across your mind like velvet.

"The idea that the first man who takes a woman will have complete power over her... I think that is a superstition. It was created to help preserve women from promiscuity. It is actually untrue."

Nin, you have my vote.

Before I forget, I also read this while I was traveling with the rest of my English teachers in Scotland and Ireland, and boy was it a laugh. I'll never forget my junior year teacher Ms. Beebe's "naughty" and shoulder shimmy laugh, or my freshman English teacher Mrs. Floto asking what I was reading and flipping it over as we waited in US Customs before I could answer fully ("I mean, it's literature" "You're not wrong there"). show less

A rather uneven collection of stories whose faults lie in the fact that Nin was trying to write both for herself and for a patron (for money), one who wanted more pornography and less poetry from her.

At its best, this integrated collection of erotic encounters is evocative and it occasionally kicks off the deeper unconscious into reverie but at its worst it is risible - an orgy can be sex by numbers and dull as dishwater or as erotic as 'Eyes Wide Shut' in her hands.

The text is regarded as a show more classic but I suggest this is only because of its sociological importance as proof-positive that a woman can write well within the classic French erotic tradition and introduce a definite feminine perspective.

That is valuable in itself and so earns its status but I wish that she had written this on her own terms and not for cash. Catherine Millet and even Pauline de Reage sometimes appear more authentic and it is true that it was a secret text for many years so the claim of innovation is a little 'after the fact' when conditions permitted.

When she writes within the French erotic tradition for the patron, the material is often frankly second rate. When she is liberated to think of the sexual from a women's perspective and escapes the tradition, it is masterful (or should I say, mistressful).

However, at no time could I say honestly that I was truly sexually aroused and I hear differing reports from women friends about its effect on them. What I did feel at times (though rare) was a sense of the magical-erotic, a dream-like state beyond the brute. Part of the pleasure lay then in communing with a feminine vision as one shared.

The first story and the final four - shorter pieces - are the best. The longeurs are in the longer almost novella central items. There is a lesson in this - the erotic is more momentary than other sentiments and is best experienced in relatively short bursts.

The view of men is also quintessentially feminine - little bravado here, just men with some weakness, often fetishistic, that inspires tenderness even when it is brutal. The worship of the phallus is always under the surface. There is a definite 'Belle de Jour' moment.

I cannot recommend or not recommend the book to a woman - it will be a matter of personal aethetic - but I would recommend it to any man with a curiosity about how women, certainly women with some sexual spark about them even if hidden, may 'see' sex.

Nothing is explicitly informative in this regard but the whole feels intuitively right as the view from the other side. Paradoxically, it shows men that women can be more sexual than they may believe but just how contingent on particular conditions that sexual expression will be.

Reading the book will not provide clues to the seduction of women (if anything it should counsel private despair that any man is truly in control of his situation) but it will allow a man to enjoy what he can obtain more readily and understand a little better how it will end.

The book was written in exile after the French intellectual class either escaped to the US (as Nin was able to do) or was forced into the deadly business of complicity or resistance to occupation. The sense of loss is well expressed in two paragraphs near the end.

"Why do women never tell men this? Why do women make such a secret and mystery of it all? They think it destroys their mystery, but it is not true. And here you come out and say just what you felt. It is wonderful."

"I believe in saying it. There are enough mysteries, and these do not help our enjoyment of each other. Now the war is here and many people will die, knowing nothing because they are tongue-tied about sex. It’s ridiculous"

There is an entire philosophy of sexuality in these words which eventually make the book worthwhile. Nin rebels against an entire culture (alive today especially in Britain) of non-communication about desire but especially non-communication by women. Many Northern Europeans and Americans still find sex vaguely disturbing and creepy.

The defensive and learned feminine secret of mystery is presented as a fact perhaps but not lauded here. Though a man speaks, Nin also speaks. The male wants to hear of female desire and some women, like Nin, wish to speak of it. It is in the interests of both that they should loosen up a little and become less defensive.

The second paragraph uses war as a metaphor for death in general (and perhaps for aging which comes up as a theme more than once in the cracks of the text). To have died ignorant of sex and the erotic is to die without having lived, she seems to say. I suspect she is right. show less