Four more 1940s erotic stories by Anais Nin

Last week I noticed an uptick in the number of pageviews of my 2015 blog post about Anais Nin's late-1970s collection of erotic stories she composed under odd circumstances in the 1940s, Delta of Venus.  I am skeptical of the very limited web statistics I have at my disposal (it could very well be not fans of literary smut clicking on my blog post on Delta of Venus but Russian bots seeking to further demoralize our nation!) but, nevertheless, I was spurred by this phenomenon to revisit Delta of Venus.  Back in 2015 I read six of Delta of Venus's fifteen tales and, boldly taking a stand against the opinions of The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angles Times, and Cosmo, I gave them all a thumbs down.  Today we'll read four more of these stories in hopes that I will enjoy them more than their predecessors; I must ask that adults only follow me beyond the curtain and join me on these NSFW journeys of sexual awakening!

Six 1940s erotic stories by Anaïs Nin

Scan of my copy

With that Twilight sequel in the theatres it seems like everybody is talking about erotica written by women.  MPorcius Fiction Blog is not afraid to jump on this trend!  On Valentine's Day, appropriately enough, I purchased at Half Price Books a quality-sized paperback edition of Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus.  My copy is in quite good shape for a used book, which pleased me because I love the cover: I love the colors, the typeface, and the photo.  I even like the somewhat rough, matte paper they printed the cover on.

The story goes that in 1940 a wealthy weirdo approached writer Henry Miller and offered to pay Miller a dollar a page for pornographic stories for his private personal collection.  Miller suggested to Anaïs Nin that she also write some erotica for the mysterious "Collector," and over the course of a few years she did so as a means to supplement her income, particularly in times of financial hardship.  Several other struggling writers joined in.  In the 1970s Nin decided to publish some of these stories, and in 1977 Delta of Venus, which contains fifteen of them, was presented to the public by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and achieved some measure of acclaim.  I'm a fan of Miller's, and have enjoyed the Nin I have read, and so I have been curious about Delta of Venus for years.  This week I read about 50 pages from the collection, the first six of its stories.

The six stories, I was disappointed to find, are quite poor, lacking style, feeling, plot and character.  Most are so full of rape, incest, pedophilia and violence that I found them more disturbing than arousing.  (That collector must have been a real piece of work!)  It was a mistake to read so many in a row, because they get really monotonous.

I am lead to wonder about all that critical praise you can see on the back cover of the book and hear about on wikipedia.  Maybe "erotica written by women" is just not for me.  Maybe the stories in the rest of the book are better, but I am loathe to go on.  In fact, my original plan was to read half the book (Delta of Venus totals 250 pages) but I couldn't do it.

In Nin's defense, she was writing this stuff to order for a freakazoid, and said freako specifically enjoined Miller, Nin, and all the other down-and-out writers who took up his commission to "Concentrate on sex" and "Leave out the poetry."  The "Collector" complained that George Barker's submissions, which Nin herself loved, were "too surrealistic."  Nin herself fully recognized how weak these stories were; according to wikipedia she worried that they could negatively impact her reputation.  In 1941 she wrote the collector a letter, saying she and the other writers hated him and explaining to him that his mechanical monotonous view of sex was boring, that it was emotion and human relationships that made sex exciting.    

(The passages from Nin's diaries that describe the collector and include the "we hate you" letter are all reproduced in the front matter of Delta of Venus, which is far better reading than the first six tales in the body of the book.)

Three of the many Penguin editions of the collection: gotta catch 'em all!

So, if these stories are bad, and Nin recognized they were bad, why did they get published? (In two volumes--Delta of Venus was followed by Little Birds, another selection of Nin's dollar-a-page erotica.)  Nin tells us in the Preface to this volume that, "I finally decided to release the erotica for publication because it shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men."  According to Nin, for centuries erotica had only been written by men, and this makes Nin, who tried to write about sex from a woman's perspective, "using a woman's language," a pioneer.

People interested in Nin and her milieu and/or the history of women in (erotic) literature should check out Delta of Venus but I can't recommend the six stories I read as entertainment, though the  ability of some of them to shock cannot be denied.

[UPDATE, April 18, 2019:  I read four more stories from Delta of Venus and blogged about them.]

For a description of each of these six stories, read on.  Adults only, please!

A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin

Five or six years ago I read some of the diaries of Anaïs Nin, the 1931-34 volume of the expurgated diaries published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and one of the unexpurgated volumes, I can't recall if it was Incest or Fire.  I remember enjoying them, but I can recall only very little of what went on in them. The only clear image left is of Nin at the psychoanalyst's office; having lived for years in New York apartments where you could always hear the televisions, arguments, and sexual escapades of other tenants, I admired the thick curtains in the head shrinker's office, which were said to be able to block out any outside sounds.

Anyway, while dusting my wife's bookshelves last week I came upon the 1994 paperback edition of Nin's 1959 novel, A Spy in the House of Love.  If the advertisements in the back are any indication, the book was marketed exclusively to women, but, I am, you know, open-minded like, and early this week I read the 166 page novel.

Sabina lives in New York City with her loving husband, Alan.  Sabina leads Alan to believe she is an actress, that she is with a theatre company that performs in New England.  In fact, during these absences, as well as at other times, Sabina is with one or another of her lovers, in Manhattan, up in Provincetown, or over in Long Island.  These lovers include Phillip, an opera singer, Mambo, an Afro-Caribbean mathematician and drummer, and John, an RAF war veteran who suffers from survivors' guilt.

Sabina is unable to find satisfaction with one man; she is driven by a desire to experience all the world has to offer, she aches to live more than one life, be more than one Sabina.  With each of her lovers, Sabina plays a different role, leads a different life, is a different Sabina.

Sabina is fundamentally restless; she can't settle for one life, but the lies and betrayals required to pursue many lives create terrible anxieties, make her feel like a spy in an enemy country. When she is with Alan in their apartment and hears the fog horn of a ship on the Hudson she wishes she could be on the ship; when they play records the music conjures in her mind visions of Paris, Germany, Haiti, all the many places she would rather be.  But when she is away from Alan, she often wishes she was back with him, and after enjoying a tryst with one of her lovers she often feels guilt over betraying Alan, and shame over arousing in her lovers a devotion she cannot reciprocate.  Sabina believes men (her philandering father, for example) have a freedom women lack, that they can enjoy sex without love, without guilt, and she aspires to achieve this freedom herself.

A Spy in the House of Love is more of a character study than a story; there isn't much plot. I sort of expected the ending to show Sabina either achieving her freedom, abandoning guilt and learning to enjoy her promiscuity, or, giving up the life of a "spy" and learning to love the man who loved her the most sincerely and generously, Alan. Instead, the ending of the book is surreal and I didn't quite get it; Sabina gets long-winded advice from two mysterious mentor characters, then she listens to Beethoven and then, apparently, keels over.  Maybe this is just a symbolic death?

I expected the novel to include explicit sex scenes, like, say, Henry Miller's Sexus.  There are in fact no such scenes.      

The book is full of metaphors; presumably some readers will embrace them while others find them ridiculous. Here is a sample, from pages 50-51, describing the aphrodisiac qualities of what Nin calls "Debussy's Ile Joyeuse" (apparently this is an unconventional spelling):

The model notes arrived charged like a caravan of spices, gold mitres, ciboriums and chalices bearing messages of delight setting the honey flowing between the thighs, erecting sensual minarets on men's bodies as they lay flat on the sand. 

There are lots of odd, clever bits that I liked.  Sabina's guilt drives her to talk, to confess, so she sits in bars and tells exotic stories to people for hours, leaving vague whether they are tales from her own life, or from the lives of friends, or just things she read.  She so needs to unburden herself that she will telephone random numbers late at night and talk to absolute strangers.  One of Phillip's hobbies is making his own telescope, even grinding his own lenses.  He hangs an open umbrella from the ceiling of his apartment over his half-finished telescope, because the running of the children who live upstairs rains plaster dust on his delicate lenses.  Sabina suspects the source of her behavior lies in her youth, when she eschewed sunbathing and instead "moon-bathed," laying naked in bed before open windows at night, letting the rays of the moon wash over her.  It seems that some people back then thought exposure to moon beams could have strange effects on the body and mind.  Sixteen-year old Sabina believed her moon-baths gave her skin a "different glow," and her friends asked what it was that had changed about her; was she using drugs?  Mom complained she looked like a consumptive.

Nin's peers according to Pocket Books' marketing people: Jackie Collins, Judy Blume, & Joan Collins

A Spy in the House of Live is an entertaining, interesting novel if you are willing to dispense with a traditional plot.  You academic types can get some additional mileage out of it by using it as a lens to examine womens' attitudes towards and perceptions of men, and whites' view of non-whites.  On page 54 we find Sabina, having taken off her wedding ring on the way to Phillip's, is walking "with her whole foot on the ground as the latins and the negroes do."  Mambo, on pages 67 and 74, bitterly complains that white women pursue him not for himself, but because of the "sensual power" of the black race.  "He felt that she embraced in him, kissed on his lips the music, the legends, the trees, the drums of the island he came from...."

A worthwhile read.

Proscription List #2: Silverberg, Fast, Anthony

To help defray the expense of the Lafferty and Van Vogt books I recently purchased, and to make space on my book shelves, I have decided to sell eight SF paperbacks which I have read and am not in love with.  I had decent notes on the last four I blogged about, but the notes about today’s four were lost in a computer hard drive related disaster.  (Always back up your files, kids.)  Still, I think I can dredge up something from the old gray matter to say about each of them.

Lord Valentine’s Castle by Robert Silverberg

Like everybody, I like Robert Silverberg; he is one of the heroes of SF, from his fiction to his valuable work as an editor to his interesting descriptions of life as a professional writer to be found in the recent collections of his SF short stories and elsewhere.  But in his prolific career he has written many types of books and tried various different styles, and they aren’t all to my taste.

Lord Valentine’s Castle was a big seller for Silverberg and has been followed by many profitable sequels, but it didn’t move me.  It seems like an homage to Jack Vance; as in various Vance novels, a guy loses and must recover his memory, a guy has a picaresque adventure on a huge planet with many different cultures on it, a guy sparks a revolution.  Unfortunately, Silverberg (in this book at least) fails toi provide much of what makes those Vance books enjoyable: a charming writing style, an interesting point of view, some laughs, and/or a wacky or otherwise interesting character.  Also, Vance’s books are pretty economical; Lord Valentine’s Castle seems to go on forever, and there is never any kind of twist or surprise.  Silverberg also does his thing in which a character achieves an altered state of consciousness and so Silverberg can write a surreal dream-like scene; this is the characteristic of Silverberg’s writing I like least.  In The World Inside he did it at a rock concert, in Shadrach in the Furnace he did it in a drug den, and in Lord Valentine’s Castle the guy goes into an altered state of consciousness while juggling.  These scenes always make my eyes glaze over.

I know a lot of SF fans really enjoyed Lord Valentine’s Castle, and I really wanted to enjoy it myself, but I just couldn’t do it.  Borderline thumbs down.   

Conquerors From the Darkness by Robert Silverberg

This one I remember very little about.  It was not offensively bad, but mediocre; I guess I would give it a weak recommendation.  As I recall, the Earth is ruled by aliens who have raised the seas so almost all of the planet is covered with water.  The main character brings together an army of humans and dolphin people to overthrow the aliens.   

The Secrets of Synchronicity by Jonathan Fast

I bought this one because the back cover blurb claims this book is strongly reminiscent of Heinlein’s work.  I am a sucker for advertising.  This book is a satire on our Western materialist society (I think), and strongly influenced by Vedic mythology (so it says).  The protagonist starts out enslaved in a mine.  Is it just me, or do lots of people in SF get enslaved in mines?  Thank God they always seem to escape.  I enjoyed this book, and thought Fast’s writing style pretty good, but once was enough, so it’s back to Half Price Books for this one.

I have actually found a few lines of notes I penned on Secrets of Synchronicity:

This is a decent adventure story, about a guy living in a corrupt, decadent and perverse society in an interstellar empire, who escapes slavery, participates in a safari, becomes spiritually enlightened, and becomes the leader of a prophesied rebel movement.  As it goes on Fast layers on the satire thicker and thicker, and the book becomes more and more outlandish and silly.

Fast’s author bio on the last page is also interesting: he was a child prodigy, spends several hours a day practicing yoga, and longs for a cogent universe.  Sounds good.

People interested in SF work that is influenced by non-Western religions in particular will want to check out Secrets of Synchronicity, but it’s a worthwhile read for the rest of us as well.

Chaining the Lady by Piers Anthony

I read a ton of Piers Anthony in my youth, but this is one I never got to until recently, when, in my 40s, I got curious about Anthony again.  Chaining the Lady, a space opera full of stuff about the Tarot (which I admit is ridiculous) isn’t bad, but it is way too long.  Each of several different alien races gets an adventure, but these adventures parallel each other, and so get a little repetitious.  There’s a lot of shape-shifting psychic jazz going on as the main character infiltrates the various alien races’ ships and then uses aspects of their biology and culture to get them to side with the good guys in the intergalactic war, or something.  Two hundred pages of this would have been good, 340 pages is too much.  One or two fewer alien races would have been a good idea, but the number of races is probably related somehow to the Tarot, so maybe Anthony was stuck.

 

The back cover blurb suggests that the book is going to be full of kinky sex, but I don’t remember any erotic sex scenes, though there is a lot about alien reproduction.  Stick with Anais Nin for the kinky sex, people.    

I can't decide if I should give this one a borderline thumbs up or a thumbs down.  It's teetering on that edge.