The Queen of Literary Porn

Anais Nin’s two collections of erotica – The Delta of Venus and Little Birds – were published after her death in 1977. She’d been commissioned to write them when she moved to the US in the 1940s by an anonymous client and kept them secret throughout the rest of her turbulent life. A surprising decision considering how explicit much of her personal writing was. For me, these slim volumes of erotic short stories, which might never have been published, are timeless in a way that her more avant-garde journals and novels simply aren’t.

It’s impossible to separate Anais Nin’s life from her writing, particularly as her eventual fame came late, from the publication of her journals in 1966 – eight volumes by the time of her death. Born in 1903 in France, of Cuban descent, she married a wealthy French banker, Hugh Parker Guiler, at the age of twenty. She sought out artists in Paris, supporting some financially, and self-published her first book in defence of DH Lawrence in the 1930s. She was sexually free and had relationships with, amongst others, her psychoanalyst, Otto Rank. She wrote a novel about her affair with Henry Miller, whom she supported for ten years, in Henry and June. At the outbreak of war in Europe, she and her husband moved to New York, where she continued to write novellas, published at her own expense, and journals. By the time of her death, she was lauded for her contribution to literature in the US and she lectured widely. Yet, the revelation after her death that she was a bigamist tainted her reputation more than the diary – Incest – that outlined her pursuit and seduction of her estranged father, the composer, Joaquin Nin. Her literary reputation was always in dispute, some dismissed her as narcissistic and self-obsessed while others saw her as a writer of unique and psychological insight. 

Little Birds is a short book. It contains just 13 stories about desire – mainly from a female perspective. They are set in bohemian circles in Europe and the US around the Second World War; most of the protagonists move amongst artists. Some are written like a conversation. ‘Sirrocco’ is overtly confessional, the restless Viking woman in Deya explains her life to the anonymous narrator, “with her eyes lowered, trying not to see the face of the priest, and seeking to be truthful and remember everything.” She describes her painful journey as a young, newly-wed living in China with a husband who couldn’t love her physically – his lust was focused on the native women who served them – to the lover she took in revenge. Others are reminiscences in the first person, as in ‘Model’ which might be based on Anais Nin’s own life, leaving school and working as an artist’s model in New York; her sexual awakening. Some have a fable-like quality. ‘Two Sisters’ starts, “There were two young sisters. One was stocky, dark-haired, vivid. The other was graceful, delicate. Dorothy had strength. Edna had a beautiful voice that haunted people, and she wanted to be an actress.” 

On the whole, the stories are dream-like, timeless and hard to place, still remarkably fresh and occasionally surreal after 70 years. ‘The Woman of the Dunes’ describes how a young man, Louis, can’t sleep and gets up to walk along the beach. He passes a lit cottage and sees a naked couple, the woman “undulating and deriving such pleasure from whatever she was doing with her head between his legs that her ass would shake tremulously.” He arrives at the beach and follows a naked girl into the sea and they then spend the rest of the night making love amongst the sand dunes. ‘The Chanchiquito’ starts with Laura’s uncle describing a Brazilian animal “like a very small pig with an overdeveloped snout… [that] had a passion for running up the skirts of women and inserting his snout between their legs.” Only in the title story, ‘Little Birds’, is there a scene that might struggle to get published today. The artist, Manuel, tempts a group of 12-year-old school girls into his apartment with the exotic birds on his balcony and then steps out of the bathroom with his dressing gown gaping open to reveal his enormous erection. He’s a man who takes pleasure in revealing himself.

For me, the most interesting and sensual thing about this collection is how Nin captures the sheer, magnificent variation of desire and pleasure. It is an uninhibited and brief celebration of the complexities of lust and the emotions that are connected to it, so different to the monochrome versions we see in much modern erotica – crude pornography or romantic cliche. The women take their pleasure from women or men, but not simply: Lina, in the story ‘Lina’ wants to have a penis so she to make love to her female friend, and it is only with the involvement of a man that she finally brings herself to take pleasure in her friend. In ‘Two Sisters’, Dorothy’s body can no longer respond to Robert once they are married in Paris because of the overwhelming guilt she feels after stealing him from her sister, Edna. The painter, Novalis, in ‘The Maja’ marries a beautiful Spanish woman, Maria, who looks like his favourite painting, Goya’s La Maja Desnuda. But she’s inhibited and won’t often let him paint her naked, or use other models, and he resorts to lifting the covers off her when she sleeps and painting her at night. He stops lusting after her when she’s awake and eventually she comes home unexpectedly to find him in a frenzy of pleasure with the paintings he made of her. 

Anais Nin was an extraordinary woman; unconventional, self-aggrandising and shocking. Yet, it is due to her character defects or strengths, depending on your opinion of her, and her powerful sense of her own sensuality, that she created some of the best literary erotica of the 20th century. The stories in Little Birds are opaque, beautiful and liberated, and remain some of the best erotic writing I’ve ever read.  

 

Anais Nin – Little Birds (Penguin, 2002) £8.99