Delta of Venus is a collection of erotic stories, written by Nin for a collector of erotic literature. Although the writing of these stories began as a purely financial necessity, it has become – arguably – Nin’s most enduring literary legacy – her erotica. There is a second volume of erotic stories available, called Little Birds.
What separates a work such as Delta of Venus from common-or-garden smut (which certainly has its place) is that it succeeds on a level far beyond “does it turn you on?” The true power of Nin’s work, in the final analysis, is not that it is erotic, or that it is aesthetically beautiful and superbly written (although it is undoubtedly all of those things) but that it is transformative. What we experience when we read Anaïs Nin is an account of how to transform human experience into total aesthetic awareness, how to elevate our own lives and synthesise it with art – connecting the prose and the passion, to paraphrase E. M. Forster.
In the Preface to Delta of Venus, Nin describes how she wrote an angry letter to the anonymous recipient of her erotica, who had been requesting “less poetry, less analysis” and more sex. She chastises him for not grasping the uniqueness of every sexual experience and the whole world of emotions, sensations and pleasures that comes from recognising this context. And indeed, she conjures up a cavalcade of sexual encounters in Delta of Venus, whose short stories contain tenderness, romance, brutality, cruelty, voyeurism, exhibitionism, anonymity, love, and whose characters include artists, artisans, models, whores, adventurers and aristocrats. The grace of Nin’s prose renders even the most callous and base encounters beautiful, and the detail she pays to each and every detail of the characters and their contexts only serves to heighten the eroticism; this is part of Nin’s burgeoning, nascent mission to create a female erotica, to tear the definition of the Erotic out of the hands (and the pens) of men and develop a sense of written female sensuality, a language of the female experience of sex. Every detail – perfume, a man’s hands or smile, the windows in a room, rouge and mascara – and every emotional state form part of this tapestry of sensuality, and contribute to this aesthetic experience. It is in this respect that Nin’s prose is transformative, and this is the most valuable aspect of the superb eroticism of Delta of Venus.
