DELTA OF VENUS: Erotica

The unknown client who paid Anais Nin a dollar a page back in the 1940s to write erotica got his money's worth and to spare. After all, erotica is pornography with class, and Nih gives full measure of both: one feels her women who disrobe to some impetuous command were dressed in Paris, if not by Mainbocher at least in a Schiaparelli copy. Women wore garters then and men had buttons to their flies, articles now almost lost to the erotic imagination, as zippers and body stockings, too, will someday succumb to the march of progress. Nin boned up on Krafft-Ebing and the Kama Sutra to write these sensual episodes, and few rooms in the house of Eros are left unvisited, from pedophilia to sado-masochism. The truth is that she does it very well: slightly tongue-in-cheek, supremely unabashed--a woman of good family kicking up her French heels. This caviar was long denied the general public; once, no doubt, because of the puritanic temper of the times, and later because Nin feared that the words she wrote to order for a man (who proscribed poetry) would not throw any light on feminine sexuality. Luckily, she had second thoughts and released these pages before her recent death, and the only regret is that she won't be around to observe the delight they'll occasion.