Delta of Venus

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

Yep, this is happening.

So Anais Nin wrote this stuff at a dollar a page for an unknown collector who kept telling her to write less literary crap, more of the in and out. Which infuriated her, because she thought he was destroying everything interesting about sex. Which is basically the same debate people are having today about internet porn.

And she keeps punishing him for it. In one story a woman has an erotic opium experience, and it's pretty hot I guess, and then suddenly it's like "And then the guy almost slashed her vagina up because he was a psycho! The end." Which is basically just Nin saying "Ha ha, I killed your boner."

In the first story, a dashing guy who's basically The Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis show more commercials is bored by normal sex and starts seeking out increasingly perverse experiences. So the first bit, where there's this hot singer lady who goes around to the private booths after her act and blows guys, is - again - pretty hot; but by the end of the story, he's trying to shove his cock into his sleeping preteen son's mouth.

And that's also a debate that continues today: some anti-porn folks say that the ubiquity of porn encourages people to search out ever-more-extreme forms just to find something new. For what it's worth, anecdotally, this has not been my experience.

In any case, I don't know why this guy kept paying Nin. She was pretty much just fucking with him

Update: putting this aside until Jo catches up with me. show less

It's a difficult one to rate this and for a couple of reasons.

The writing is beautifully lyrical and I know some of the character portraits will stay with me (the keeper of Balzac's house, a distant mummified woman guarding a distant mummified place, deserves her own novel). But the stories were written first and foremost as titillation for an undemanding client, so the stories and characters, with the odd exception, feel nebulous and unformed – tossed off, if you'll forgive the phrase.

Reading endless descriptions of sex is also, ultimately, quite boring. No one got Playboy for the articles.

The other reason I'm finding it difficult to rate goes a bit deeper.

The book's a good reminder that sex wasn't invented in the 1960s and whatever show more you've got up to, your grandparents probably did it before you (soz). But that doesn't mean it wasn't written in a time when open discussion of sexual acts was less acceptable, and I've never better understood the saying "when nothing is permissible, everything is".

Much of the business described is more or less conventional – at least by modern standards – but there's also a great deal that is most definitely not, and most definitely not OK. Just as you're getting into the rhythm of sex-positive feminist writing, you'll suddenly be hit with descriptions of rape or child abuse or bestiality or necrophilia – all described in the same register as consenting adult sex. And that is, to say the least, off-putting.

So while much of Nin's writing is very fine, a lot of what she describes is actually pretty horrible and described in a manner apparently intended to forgive or romanticise it. And so I don't really feel I can give it any sort of rating. For the capability of the writer, the score should be very high; for the use to which she puts it, it should be less than zero. show less

i had a really hard time with this, in spite of the introduction where she says that she was directed to write things that, more or less, were intended to be this weird masculine idea of desire rather than mutual enjoyment focused, it was so over the top ick. there was so much violence and rape (and incest) masquerading as desire, and i hated that conflation. so in general, the stories were offensive, poorly written, and dangerous. i'd be interested in knowing more of what she wrote for herself, when she was able to, but this sort of thing is awful.

Wow.

I mean, I had never heard of this until recently when I had been dared to read it, and yes, I knew that I was getting into heavy erotica, but I hadn't expected it to be so damn good.

Seriously. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was almost completely unable to stand up during most of the read, and because I was using text-t0-speech, that mean being rather unpleasantly surprised as I was up and about during my day.

I wanted to scream out, "Oh, come on!" or "This isn't Fair!" at random people as I was reading.

And then, at various moments, I pondered the great mystery of why so many men don't read this kind of romance. It's very easy, my dear women. In fact's extremely hard to hide the fact. Forget about all the scoffing and the hems and show more the haws and all the condescending humor that jerky men use to explain why they don't read this stuff. It's all baloney.

This book is full of really good stuff.

Extremely good stuff: from the pure writing, the interweaving themes and characters and the way that the individual stories make up a much grander story of sexuality, right down the purely expert and sensual eroticism of the sex acts themselves. I've never read better, but I'll admit that most of what I've read has really been quite horrible.

Even so, I'm amazed at how sensual she can turn all these kinds of turns, or even the direction she takes them. So many of my own sensibilities were shocked and disturbed as I read a few particularly difficult scenes, but as a whole, the entire book was truly amazing. Perhaps all that illicit and taboo material functions fantastically as the spice that tips us in and out of our complacency and into the deeper animal parts of us that love to be shocked, allowing us to enjoy the rest of the tales like we're getting away with something even more absolutely naughty than it really might be.

Seriously, if every erotic writer or if ANY writer including a sex scene might take a page out of her book, so many of the greatest crimes against sex might be rectified.

Seriously, people, this is Literature, plain and simple, with a freedom applied to women's sensuality that is really quite brilliant. It should be studied, applauded, and copied. Alas.

I hope her writing is always remembered. :) show less

This collection is varied and erotic... (Well, duh, and it hardly needs another damn review, but I'll persist...) Many of the stories are a bit veiled and tantalizing and weird, without being directly gauche (in my opinion). I read it first years ago and have gone back a few times to dip into some stories, mainly for style. Nin's work, including this book, was a huge influence over my own sensual writing, especially my earlier novels and shorts. Nin basically dismisses the stories as lesser output done purely for money, but in doing so I think she underestimates both the powers of her own muse and her own dedication to quality.