Delta of Venus: Erotica
18 November 2008
by: Anaïs Nin
This book I bought in Maarssen, The Netherlands, when my journey first begun. I had been to Maarssen many times before when I was young, but the narrow bookshop so near to where my family lives was a revelation to me. Through the narrow shelves that reached the ceiling stuffed with bindings in English, I ran my eyes like a drug fiend, always on the search for brilliant names. I crouched and I stood on my tip-toes as the rain came down as it does in Northern countries, taking the sky. I gasped when I found it; I gasped when I found Plexus. I hurried through the rain to warmth and the crisped yellow pages.
In Amsterdam, not two days before, I found journals I and III of Anaïs Nin. So began an obsession that came back to me in the opening pages of Erotica. Anaïs Nin sparks mystery and an unquenchable curiosity as a writer and as a woman. Actually, I stopped Anaïs Nin a few years back when in the rains of Oakland I read Diedre Blair’s biography. It was as if through the unwinding of fact her life lost the sparks of fiction and halfway through Incest and Fire in the waiting, I quit, cold-turkey. Is it that Anaïs Nin’s life just makes better sense in the veil-waving, tale-weaving realms of fiction? Her life has something in it that fact can’t handle.
Delta of Venus was written in New York City after Anaïs fled Paris and the war. The erotica was written for a dollar a page paid for by an anonymous “collector.” Henry Miller first tried his hand at it then passed the money making scheme onto Anaïs Nin. What was eventually published, much later, was Delta of Venus and another similiar, Little Birds; was pages of sex through the female’s perspective and not any female but the woman who was constantly assessing her own sexual limits.
I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented.
Perhaps, opening Pandora’s box was what Anaïs did in her journals. Of which, when I began to pour over them was dually surprised at how much sex was left out, though I got a firm impression of her casual, intimate prose. Then I discovered the unexpurgated in Henry and June. If anything, those journals were certainly what the others, poetic and cautious, were not. The unexpurgated rocked me with their sensual poetics, compressed and saturated sex. Anaïs Nin’s fiction always seemed weak and airy in comparison with the journals. In Delta of Venus I hear that strong feminine voice, always acutely aware. Even at the end were her and Henry Miller as Hans. “Hans’s penis never softens, so he takes his time, with a sureness about it. He installs himself inside of the present moment, to enjoy calmly, completely to the last drop.”
The prose of Anaïs Nin was made for sex, as her body at times in the unexpurgated journals, drips with it. There’s that one scene that will always stand out, after she’s broken the most taboo of sexual rules, walking out of her father’s bedroom, after sleeping with him. Her delta dripped sperm and she had to walk with a rag between her legs to stifle the flow. She can surely shock. Some stories in the Delta of Venus were slightly strange, but I never got uncomfortable, it was more like watching unusual behavior, refined by poetry, in a closed setting like a zoo.
Most stories were full of sensuality that rose up from my core depth within me in a dull blaze. I especially liked Elena’s. It was longer than most and I’m a sucker for expansion of character. Elena, in the beginning, was a woman of latent sexual curiosity who wondered dreamily about men on a railway car while reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover. At the end Elena was a woman of unrestrained sexual curiosity, a woman on the plateau of her own pleasure. “…the presence of Leila’s hand in the taxi had plunged Elena into a state that was unlike anything Pierre had ever aroused in her. Instead of reaching right to the center of her body, Leila’s voice and touch had enveloped her in a voluptuous mantle of new sensations, something in suspense that did not seek fulfillment but prolongation.”
The shorter story, Artists and Models, I also found especially alluring. Then there is the woman Bijou, a street walker. She fell into the clutches of the Basque, who never failed to bring her up to the peak of sexual climax but failed to take her over it, he left her dangling with her want unfulfilled. In fact, most of the women in Delta of Venus were endowed before or during the length of a story, with the realization of their bursting sexualities, which they never left dangling. These women were full of sexual action, usually accompanied by a fonder emotion, such as love.
To think of female sexuality is to imagine worlds of sexual possibility beyond the bounds of the usual dichotomy, as seen in what we are made to believe. I believe female sexuality is not what is seen in trite pornography and advertisements and nude celebrities, those are caricatures meant to abhor. Men are scared. Women are scared. Rare is the woman who can claim her own sexuality. It takes a consciousness, I think. Some getting inside and erasing all the damage that has been done through sex itself, through words, through the constant flood of signals all pulling in a myriad of different ways.
Anaïs Nin is far from being a perfect sexual role model. Her lies were so intricate at times the web they wove was impossible to get out of. I don’t like that. BUT, and that but’s big, she created a language for female sexuality, a language of poetic fluidity, a language around love and the small sensual prolongations that make women’s experience of sex so different from men’s. This intimate knowing of Anaïs Nin goes deep and touches in me all that makes up my own sexuality and it does so truly, more completely then any man’s version, any media’s version, any new-age feminists, anti-porn, pro-porn version, because it is my own and it is poetic and it is sensual.
I believe that we have lost so much by being afraid of what females store so deep. Pandora’s box can be opened further and further still but we have to know about it and want it and be able to spread it, to create ample safe ground for it, so that every woman, if not fulfilled, will know why they are not fulfilled. Then we will have a SEXUAL REVOLUTION (Brenda) for it has not happened yet. If Anaïs Nin only knew a few things—but she knew more—they were journal writing and sex. Delta of Venus is sex, erotic sex, woman’s sex, love sex, sex sex, Anaïs Nin sex. Come and get your sex if its hot and subtle and enjoys a little poetry and European charms.
When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.
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