It's Worse the Second Time

"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.

The 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:

Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession... You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

It 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.

BUT LITTLE BIRDS is a million times worse. One cannot help but feel that the editors at Harcourt Brace, having culled the best stories for the successful Delta of Venus, have now published the dross. Where Delta of Venus is sometimes cloying, Little Birds is actually offensive. While I was somewhat uneasy at the characterizations of huge, lusty men and women who were "genuine whores" in Delta, Nin really comes out of the closet in Little Birds. If there are sadists, they are men. If there are masochists, they are women. The twin gods of Freud and D.H. Lawrence's are worshipped more fervently than ever.

In "Two Sisters," we are treated to a choice piece of cant as Nin tells of a father who "made a ceremony of burning D.H. Lawrence's books, which betrays how far behind the times this family was in the development of the sensual life." The worship of Lawrence is also felt in the language of these stories. It imitates without flattering. The result is not even very sexy. "She lived open and sensitized to his presence" and "all other women were cancelled by her voice" are not much of a substitute for the real thing. The frustration of the "Collector" becomes real for us all: the stories too often titillate with the promise of raunchier things to come, and then (so to speak) leave the reader unsatisfied. When Nin does become graphic, the language gets awkward, as if the description of the sexual act really does embarass her.

Nin gives us a story about a frigid wife ("The Maja") who is finally awakened by watching her artist husband make love to a nude painting of her. But all we are told is "Maria's ... controlled sensuality flared up, free for the first time." And then what did she do?

BY FAR THE MOST appalling story in this volume is entitled "Hilda and Rango." Hilda is a young woman in Paris who is attracted to a Hemingway-esque American writer. When she gets into bed with him, she finds that he is really rather retiring and prefers her to be the aggressor. They become lovers and she assumes the role of leader to please him. But she is not fulfilled. "She had always dreamed of having a man who would force her will, rule her sexually, lead."

Then she meets Rango--an artist who lives in a gypsy cart and is big and hairy. He takes her to his wagon, where she commits the grave faux pas of reaching for his pants, which makes him angry. She questions him and he says, "You make the gesture of a whore." He caresses her for days but refuses to make love to her. "Hilda felt that the female in her was being taught to submit to the male, to obey his wishes. She felt that he was still punishing her for the gesture she had made..." Finally one day she breaks the heel of her shoe and he has to carry her. Apparently excited by her vulnerability, he holds out no longer. She becomes "... the woman whose submission he first demanded, submission to his desire, his hour."

Are we to be told again, by the alleged "creator of the female language for sexuality" that the sexually aggressive woman is a whore and that to be truly female is to be a masochist? For the time being, God help us, we're better off with Playgirl.