Delta of Venus

Book Overview

Delta of Venus is not really a book that Anaïs Nin wrote. It is a book she agreed to generate. In 1940, Henry Miller’s landlord-era poverty dragged him into a strange commission — a book collector in New York offering a dollar a page for erotic stories written to the specifications of an anonymous wealthy client. When Henry tired of the work, he handed it to Nin. She, in turn, handed pieces of it to Robert Duncan, George Barker, Caresse Crosby, Harvey Breit, a whole broke poetic circle in Greenwich Village who needed rent. The client’s one editorial note, relayed by telephone through a go-between, became a refrain the whole group grew to hate: “Leave out the poetry. Concentrate on sex.”

What you have in your hand is fifteen stories plus a preface — the output of that assignment, sitting in a drawer for thirty-six years until Nin, dying, let it be published in 1977. It became her bestseller, which she would have found funny and slightly galling. She had always assumed the pages were hackwork. Rereading them in Los Angeles in 1976, she noticed something she hadn’t seen while writing: a woman’s voice had been smuggling itself in under the male pornographer’s brief, page by page, one dollar at a time. The Postscript she added is the book’s real argument — that while she was writing to a man’s order, “in numerous passages I was intuitively using a woman’s language, seeing sexual experience from a woman’s point of view.”

The collection is violently uneven, and that unevenness is the point. Some of it is near-parody — the Hungarian adventurer and his inventory of advantages. Some of it reads like notebook scraps (the vignettes about boarding schools, rings, fishermen). And then, in the middle of the book, Nin forgets the collector and writes Elena — a hundred-page near-novella that shakes free of the whole commercial frame and becomes something she clearly cared about. The Basque and Bijou is its grittier counterweight; Linda and Marcel close the collection in a quieter, more reflective register.

This summary is a deep chapter-by-chapter walk-through with generous excerpts. The point is to let you hear Nin’s actual prose — the sentences she built, the passages that catch fire — rather than have them reported second-hand. Each chapter’s summary reads as curated anthology with connective commentary. Elena and Marcel get the most room, because that is where Nin is most alive; the small vignettes stay small for the same reason.

A content note. The book includes material that reads very badly today — incest, assault of minors, coercive scenes, a scene in which a drowned woman’s body is used. This summary does not sanitize those passages, and it does not leer at them. Where Nin describes difficult material plainly, the summary describes it plainly. The reader who wants only the lyric passages should know that the lyric passages sit next to the other kind, and that Nin herself mostly refuses to pretend otherwise.

Chapter 1: Preface

The book opens not with a story but with a confession about how the stories came to exist. Nin frames it as a diary — five time-stamped entries between April 1940 and December 1941, then a short Postscript written thirty-five years later in Los Angeles. It reads like the origin story of an accident, which is what it is.

April 1940 — Henry takes the gig

A book collector approaches Henry Miller with an offer: a hundred dollars a month to write erotic stories for an anonymous, wealthy client. Nin registers the arrangement with a kind of deadpan horror.

A book collector offered Henry Miller a hundred dollars a month to write erotic stories. It seemed like a Dantesque punishment to condemn Henry to write erotica at a dollar a page. He rebelled because his mood of the moment was the opposite of Rabelaisian, because writing to order was a castrating occupation, because to be writing with a voyeur at the keyhole took all the spontaneity and pleasure out of his fanciful adventures.

Writing with a voyeur at the keyhole. That phrase does a lot of work — it describes the entire project before the project has properly begun.

December 1940 — The old man who may not exist

Henry, broke but game, starts gaily. He invents wild stories; he and Nin laugh over them. Then it palls. He doesn’t want to burn through material meant for his real work, so he ends up forcing the inventions. The patron never acknowledges a page. Which raises a question Henry and Nin keep circling:

Henry began to tease the collector. Did this patron really exist? Were these pages for the collector himself, to heighten his own melancholy life? Were they one and the same person? Henry and I discussed this at length, puzzled and amused.

The collector makes a show of realism — airmail receipts, travel plans, small costly details — to keep the fiction of the client alive. Then comes the Black Spring episode, which is the closest the Preface comes to a punchline. The collector asks Henry to inscribe a copy “to a good friend.” Weeks later, Henry goes looking for a spare copy of his own book, walks into the collector’s office, pulls one off the shelf — and it’s the one he just signed. Confronted, the collector improvises smoothly: he’d sent his own copy to the impatient old man and was waiting to swap them. Henry tells Nin, “I’m more baffled than ever.”

And then the refrain arrives. It will arrive again and again. When Henry asks what the patron thinks of the writing, the collector relays only this:

“Oh, he likes everything. It is all wonderful. But he likes it better when it is a narrative, just storytelling, no analysis, no philosophy.”

Nin is eventually drafted in when Henry needs travel money. She agrees to invent, stitching together overheard tales and fabrications, passing them off as a woman’s diary. She never meets the collector. She hears his voice only through the telephone. And one day that voice delivers the line that sets the key for the entire book:

“It is fine. But leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex. Concentrate on sex.”

She tries caricature. She exaggerates until she thinks he’ll catch on. He doesn’t. She spends days in the library with the Kama Sutra. She collects her friends’ most extreme adventures. The voice calls back:

“Less poetry,” said the voice over the telephone. “Be specific.”

And Nin, alone with her typewriter, asks the question the old man will never be equipped to answer:

But did anyone ever experience pleasure from reading a clinical description? Didn’t the old man know how words carry colors and sounds into the flesh?

The epidemic of erotic journals

The assignment spreads through Greenwich Village like a shared rash. Everyone is broke. Everyone starts writing erotica. Robert Duncan, George Barker, Caresse Crosby, Virginia Admiral, Harvey Breit — a whole poetic circle pooling their sexual inventions, real and invented, researched out of Krafft-Ebing when imagination flagged.

This started an epidemic of erotic “journals.” Everyone was writing up their sexual experiences. Invented, overheard, researched from Krafft-Ebing and medical books. We had comical conversations. We told a story and the rest of us had to decide whether it was true or false. Or plausible. Was this plausible? Robert Duncan would offer to experiment, to test our inventions, to confirm or negate our fantasies. All of us needed money, so we pooled our stories.

Nin becomes, by her own affectionate joke to George Barker, the madam of a snobbish literary house of prostitution — supplying paper and carbons, delivering manuscripts anonymously, shielding everyone’s names. The writers are under an odd constraint: forbidden from love, emotion, atmosphere, they turn sensuality into sport.

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

The typologies are delicious and quick: “The homosexuals wrote as if they were women. The timid ones wrote about orgies. The frigid ones about frenzied fulfillments. The most poetic ones indulged in pure bestiality and the purest ones in perversions.” They sit around imagining the old man, hating him, because he will not let them fuse sexuality and feeling.

December 1941 — The letter

George Barker writes eighty-five pages that the collector rejects as too surrealistic. “Love between trapezes.” George drinks away his money. Nin, watching all this, sits down and writes a letter directly to the unseen client. It is the thesis statement of Delta of Venus — the book’s own argument about itself.

“Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. 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.

“You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.

“If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

“How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry Cut the poetry. No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gesture; for a lover, when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore.”

The letter doesn’t go anywhere a letter usually goes. The old man presumably keeps paying by the page. But now the reader has been handed the key: every story to come was written under a ban, and every story is in some sense a smuggling operation against that ban.

Tucked into February 1941, before the letter, is the line that quietly reframes everything:

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. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.

Nin doesn’t linger on it. She moves on to unpaid telephone bills and Gonzalo’s dentist. But the sentence sits there, waiting.

1976 — The Postscript

Thirty-five years later, in Los Angeles, Nin looks back at the pages she’d put in a drawer and mostly forgotten. She had assumed, at the time, that her style was borrowed — that she had been writing like a man, because men were the only models available to her. That conviction had kept the manuscripts out of print for decades.

Rereading them, she finds something she hadn’t noticed while writing:

Here in the erotica I was writing to entertain, under pressure from a client who wanted me to “leave out the poetry.” I believed that my style was derived from a reading of men’s works. For this reason I long felt that I had compromised my feminine self. I put the erotica aside. Rereading it these many years later, I see that my own voice was not completely suppressed. In numerous passages I was intuitively using a woman’s language, seeing sexual experience from a woman’s point of view. I finally decided to release the erotica for publication because it shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men.

The Postscript closes the frame. The young Nin, typing under a voyeur at the keyhole, had been doing something she didn’t realize she was doing — writing against the brief, against the century, against the one available model, in a language that had not yet been invented. The old man thought he was commissioning clinical descriptions. What he got — what we got — was the first draft of a woman’s voice figuring itself out, one dollar-a-page story at a time.

Anaïs Nin Los Angeles September, 1976

Chapter 2: The Hungarian Adventurer

The book opens not with a woman but with a man — and the man Nin writes into existence here is almost a parody of the figure the collector had asked her to draw. He is the confection: a Baron who is not a Baron, a Hungarian who is more or less at home in any country, a seducer whose toolkit is so complete it could be read off an inventory sheet. Nin hands him every possible advantage in the opening sentence, with the tone of a woman sliding a cake across a counter.

There was a Hungarian adventurer who had astonishing beauty, infallible charm, grace, the powers of a trained actor, culture, knowledge of many tongues, aristocratic manners. Beneath all this was a genius for intrigue, for slipping out of difficulties, for moving smoothly in and out of countries.

This cascade is almost word-for-word the list Nin mentions in her preface when she describes caving to the collector’s demand for “less poetry.” She is giving him exactly what he wants — a man built entirely of advantages — and then quietly showing what happens to such a man when you follow him long enough.

The method

He travels with fifteen trunks and two great Danes. He appears at watering places and horse races and knows every city “as though he had lived there all his life.” When funds run low, he marries money and leaves. The departures are managed with a grace the abandoned wives mostly admire.

When he needed money he married a rich woman, plundered her and left for another country. Most of the time the women did not rebel or complain to the police. The few weeks or months they had enjoyed him as a husband left a sensation that was stronger than the shock of losing their money. For a moment they had known what it was to live with strong wings, to fly above the heads of mediocrity.

The tone here is half travel brochure, half theatrical billing. The Baron is less a person than a function — Nin writes him the way an 18th century picaresque would, and the prose keeps its distance, amused.

Anita

He nearly trips in Peru. Anita is a Brazilian dancer whose eyes “did not close as other women’s eyes did, but like the eyes of tigers, pumas and leopards.” Her job runs in two acts: onstage she is a song-and-dance girl, and after the show she works the theatre’s half-curtained boxes. The description of her backstage ritual is one of the moments where Nin turns up the heat and holds it there:

Her sex was like a giant hothouse flower, larger than any the Baron had seen, and the hair around it abundant and curled, glossy black. It was these lips that she rouged as if they were a mouth, very elaborately so that they became like blood-red camellias, opened by force, showing the closed interior bud, a paler, fine-skinned core of the flower.

Anita bears him two daughters. He stays longer than with any other woman. Then he leaves, because “the habit was too strong; the habit of freedom and change.” Nin doesn’t dwell. The Baron is a frictionless surface; people stick to him briefly and then slide off.

The two little girls in Rome

At the Grand Hotel in Rome he charms a Spanish ambassador, his wife, and their two daughters — ages ten and twelve — who come into his room in the mornings to climb on his bed. Nin writes this episode with a specificity that is hard to stomach. The Baron lets his condition become the game, turns his body into a bucking horse, teaches them hide-and-seek with the quilt. None of it is named; all of it is staged under the logic of play. It is the first moment the picaresque register cracks, and the reader is left doing the accounting the Baron will not.

So heated were the games, so great were the confusion of the battle and the abandon of the little girls at play, that very often his hand went everywhere he wanted it to go.

This is the hinge the rest of the story turns on. Up to here, the Baron has been a scoundrel in the charming mode. After Rome, Nin quietly stops calling him charming.

The daughters arrive

Years later, Anita dies of an opium overdose in Brazil. Their two daughters, now fifteen and sixteen, write to the Baron and ask him to take them in. He is in New York by then, with a third wife and a son. He sends for them. The reunion is warm; he is moved. Then — and Nin gives no more warning than this — he takes them to bed the first night.

Holding them in a fatherly way, with their heads on his chest, caressing them protectively, he let them fall asleep, one on each side of him. Their young bodies, with their small breasts barely formed, affected him so that he did not sleep. He fondled one and then the other, with catlike movements, so as not to disturb them, but after a moment his desire was so violent that he awakened one and began to force himself on her. The other did not escape either. They resisted and wept a little, but they had seen so much of this during their life with their mother that they did not rebel.

It should be said plainly: the story’s climax is incest and rape, described in flat registration. Nin does not cushion it. She makes a single dry observation — “But this was not to be an ordinary case of incest” — and lets the sentence carry the weight of its own absurdity.

The collapse

After this, the Baron decomposes. The elegant con-man who could slip out of any country is suddenly a man who cannot leave his own apartment. He imprisons his daughters. His wife leaves. He teaches the girls to perform for him. Then, on a night when he has worn them out and cannot sleep, he walks into his fourteen-year-old son’s bedroom.

The son awakened choking and struck at him. The girls also awakened.

The son swings. The daughters finally revolt. The Baron is abandoned. Nin’s last line on him is almost curt:

Their rebellion against their father’s folly mounted, and they abandoned the now frenzied, aging Baron.

What the story does

Read as a shape, “The Hungarian Adventurer” is the Preface’s argument in dramatic form. The collector asked Nin to leave out the poetry and give him the sex alone. Nin hands him a man with no poetry in him — a man composed entirely of advantages, appetite, and technique — and then shows where that man ends up. He is not punished by a moral universe; he is punished by his own obsession. The seducer who once had “great eagle sweeps” becomes a shuffling prisoner of his own penis.

The trick of the story is that the first two-thirds read like comic picaresque — hotels, disguises, a dancer rouging her sex backstage, a man leaping from one golden branch to another. Then the Rome scene plants the dread, and the daughters arc delivers it. By the end, the amused narrator has stopped being amused, and the reader realizes she never quite was.

Chapter 3: Mathilde

Mathilde is the Baron’s flower on the far side of the ocean. She is twenty, a Parisian hatmaker, and her two-week affair with him ends before the story begins — but she absorbs enough of him in that fortnight to catch the virus of his worldview. After he leaves, she decides she too can move through life as a series of roles, “by saying to herself in the morning while brushing her blond hair, ‘Today I want to become this or that person,’ and then proceeding to be that person.” The story is the picaresque flipped: a woman taking the seducer’s formula and using it to sail to Peru.

Paris, and the problem with words

Mathilde has a specific complaint about the men who approach her. She wants to be courted. She wants to be flown out to theatres and handed flowers that shine in the dark. The complaint has its origin in a scene from when she was sixteen — a celebrated Paris writer drifted into her shop asking for phosphorescent flowers for a woman whose skin glowed in the dark. Mathilde, hearing this, went to the mirror and wanted to be that woman. The writer came back.

Mathilde’s heart beat so swiftly that she felt as if this were the moment she had expected for years. She almost stood up on her toes to hear the rest of his words. She felt as if she were the luminous woman sitting back in the dark box receiving the unusual flowers. But what the polished gray-haired writer said in his aristocratic voice was, “As soon as I saw you, I was stiff in my pants.”

She slaps him. The scene repeats, with variations, all over Paris — men are speechless around her, or rather speechless except for one sentence, and it is never the sentence she wants. This is the wound she carries onto the boat.

Aboard ship to Lima she is courted by a Spaniard named Dalvedo, who plays the part beautifully until the moment he has her alone in his cabin, at which point he reverts to the national script: “You have the most seductive little mole on your chin” — followed by the unbuttoning of his trousers and the one-word command “Kneel.” She strikes him. She leaves with her evening cape covering her dress.

Lima

Everything she wanted in Paris, she finds in Lima.

As soon as Mathilde arrived in Lima, however, she attained her dream. Men approached her with flowery words, disguising their intent with great charm and adornments. This prelude to the sexual act satisfied her. She liked a little incense. In Lima she received much of it, it was a part of the ritual. She was raised on a pedestal of poetry so that her falling into the final embrace might seem more of a miracle. She sold many more of her nights than hats.

The hat shop drifts into something else almost by hydraulic action. The men who come to see her want to stay. They begin to bring friends. Chaise longues appear, and lace, and satin, and curtains, and pillows. A Peruvian aristocrat named Martinez introduces her to opium. Lima at the time — Nin notes — has a large Chinese population and a thriving trade in drugs; bands of young rich men rove from bordello to bordello or rent bare rooms in the prostitute quarters to smoke in groups. Mathilde’s shop becomes one of their stations.

Whatever Mathilde had come to Peru to find — Martinez, maybe, or the writer from her shop, or simply a country where men use the right words — she finds it here, in a form that is not love but a kind of pooled, atmospheric voluptuousness.

The opium scenes

The central set-piece of the story is a long, slow, un-urgent opium afternoon with Martinez and his friends. This is where Nin writes some of her best prose in the whole collection — the sensory logic of the drug rendered in single long sentences that open and open and don’t close.

Mathilde would lie naked on the floor. All the movements were slow. The three or four young men lay back among the pillows. Lazily one finger would seek her sex, enter it, lie there between the lips of the vulva, not moving. Another hand would seek it out too, content itself with circles around the sex, seek another orifice.

Martinez, meanwhile, is having a vision. The passage is one of the strangest in the book — an image of a woman’s body un-mooring from itself under opium, becoming rubbery, distended, stretched toward him from every angle at once.

Martinez saw the body of a woman, distended, headless, a woman with the breasts of a Balinese woman, the belly of an African woman, the high buttocks of a Negress; all this confounded itself into an image of a mobile flesh, a flesh that seemed to be made of elastic. The taut breasts would swell towards his mouth, and his hand would extend towards them, but then other parts of the body would stretch, become prominent, hang over his own body. The legs would part in an inhuman, impossible way, as if they were severed from the woman, to leave the sex exposed, open, as if one had taken a tulip in the hand and opened it completely by force.

The irony Nin nests inside this — and it is what makes the story more than just drug writing — is that Mathilde, surrounded by so many hands, almost never comes. Her own pleasure gets dispersed into the crowd. She only notices after they leave.

The mirror

Alone the next day, Mathilde does something the book keeps returning to — she examines herself in a mirror. She drags one to the window, sits on the rug, opens her legs to look. She dyes her pubic hair to match her blond head. She tries to reproduce Martinez’s touches on her own skin, first from the front, then turning on her side to see the same sex from behind. She finds it, at the end of a long, patient experiment, and orgasms watching her own reflection.

The approach of the orgasm excited her, she went into convulsive gestures, as if to pull away the ultimate fruit from a branch, pulling, pulling at the branch to bring down everything into a wild orgasm, which came while she watched herself in the mirror, seeing the hands move, the honey shining, the whole sex and ass shining wet between the legs.

This is Nin’s quiet rebuttal to the opium scene. Pleasure dispersed across a roomful of men produced nothing; pleasure carefully cultivated by Mathilde alone, with patience and a mirror, produced the thing the men had missed.

The instruction in money

Woven through all of this is a sentence that functions almost as Nin’s note-to-self about the project of Delta of Venus:

Mathilde felt exactly like this rubber woman when she took opium. How pleasurable was the feeling of utter abandon! Her only occupation was to count the money that her friends left her.

A rubber woman — the reference is to a story a sailor once told her, about sailors on long voyages who build themselves a beautiful rubber woman to share. She is tireless, yielding, non-jealous, silent. “The rubber woman was very much loved. But in spite of her innocence, her pliant good nature, her generosity, her silence, in spite of her faithfulness to her sailors, she gave them all syphilis.”

Nin lets this pass as a joke. It isn’t entirely a joke. Mathilde is being paid, quietly and steadily, by the men she loves. She is a Parisian hatmaker who sells more nights than hats. And Nin — writing erotica for a dollar a page for a collector who wanted her to leave out the poetry — is the hatmaker behind Mathilde, taking the money and dispensing the fantasy with the same placid competence. The story is her meta-comment on the whole arrangement.

The painter

Antonio is a prizefighter with a cat’s walk who visits Mathilde straight from his own mistress — a woman whose breasts, placed unusually high, he cannot stop making love to at the expense of the rest of her body. He walks in one morning and finds Mathilde on her hands and knees in front of the mirror, looking between her legs. This is the scene the story has been organizing itself toward.

He said, “Don’t move, Mathilde. That’s a pose I love.” He crouched over her like a giant cat, and his penis went into her. He gave Mathilde what he would not give his mistress. His weight finally made her sink down and sprawl on the rug. He raised her ass with his two hands and fell on her again and again.

For the first time in the story, Mathilde is fully met. He drags her out of opium languor into ordinary, weight-bearing, specific sex.

The cocaine room

Afterward, he takes her to his own den in Chinatown, a room with no furniture and a dying man lying on a mat. The man is a cocaine thief, too poor for a needle; he has been making incisions in his arm with a penknife and forcing the drug in with the stem of a fountain pen. The scene turns fast. Antonio gives Mathilde a cocaine injection. She floats.

There began a nightmarish dream. Far away there was the figure of the prostrate man, lying back on the mat, then the figure of Antonio, very large and black. Antonio took the penknife and bent over Mathilde. She felt his penis inside of her, and it was soft and pleasurable, she moved in a slow, relaxed, wavering gesture. The penis was taken out. She felt it swinging out over the silky moisture between her legs, but she had not been satisfied and she was making a gesture as if to retrieve it. Next in the nightmare Antonio held the penknife open and he bent over her parted legs, and he touched her with the tip of it, pushed it slightly in.

The police break the door at the right moment, looking for the thief. Mathilde is saved. Nin reveals, coolly, in the last paragraph, that Antonio has a history of slashing the sex of the women he sleeps with — and that the reason he made love so obsessively to his mistress’s breasts was so that he would be spared the temptation of going after “woman’s little wound,” which he was so violently drawn to enlarge.

What the story does

The story ends not with punishment, not with a moral, and not with Mathilde wiser or sadder — just with Mathilde, intact, still in Lima. She does not return to Paris. She does not denounce the trade she has fallen into. The story closes with the reader aware, for the first time, of how close the knife has been all along, and how easily the scene of luxurious pleasure has been resting on top of it.

If the Hungarian showed a seducer undone by his own appetite, Mathilde shows the opposite — a woman who absorbs the seducer’s formula, applies it in a softer key, and survives. She keeps her shop. She keeps her money. She keeps her mirror. What she loses is harder to name: some notion she carried from Paris that romance could be pried apart from transaction. In Peru she has found the romance. She has also found the rate.

Chapter 4: The Boarding School

A Jesuit boys’ school deep in rural Brazil, where the Middle Ages had not quite ended. Wooden beds, dawn mass on an empty stomach, daily confession, constant surveillance. Into this scaffolding of enforced purity Nin drops a predator in a brown robe — a dark-skinned priest with “the face of a satyr, large ears glued to his head, piercing eyes, a loose-lipped mouth that was always watering.” He shows one favored boy — blond, feminine-featured, the only such face in the school — reproductions of Inca pottery in which men penetrate men. He weaponizes confession.

“Have you ever had sensual fantasies? Have you thought about women? Have you tried to imagine a woman naked? How do you behave at night in bed? Have you ever touched yourself?… Have you ever tried to look at other boys while they dress? Or at the bath?”

The questions teach more than they excavate. The ignorant boy learns what he is supposed to feel; the knowing boy supplies it. Penance is invented on the fly — a masturbator is marched to the chapel at night to dip his penis in holy water. The priest makes his rounds and lifts the covers of a Moorish-looking boy who sleeps naked in defiance of the nightgown rule, lingering when the boy does not wake.

The whole arrangement is an incubator. Nin closes it by letting the thing the school has been cultivating step outside the walls. On a botanical excursion, ten boys — the blond one among them — lose their way in a forest. What has been simmering under surveillance ignites without it.

“How it began, no one knew, but after a while the blond boy was thrown on the grass, undressed, turned on his stomach and the other nine boys all passed over him, taking him as they would a prostitute, brutally.”

That is the ending. A gang rape of a child by nine other children, flatly narrated, no lesson appended. Nin lets the Jesuit institution stand quietly behind it — a system that spent years teaching boys what to want and then left them alone in a clearing. The flatness is the point. She does not moralize; she closes the door and walks away.

Chapter 5: The Ring

A mood piece set in Peru, where betrothal rings are heirlooms, sometimes shaped like chains. A handsome Indian man loves a Spanish-descended Peruvian woman; her family forbids it — Indians, they say, produce weak, unstable children. The engagement happens anyway, at a small party. The girl’s father storms in and swears that if he ever sees the Indian wearing his daughter’s ring, he will tear it off, finger and all.

So the Indian hides the ring. Not in a pocket. Not on a chain around his neck.

“I am wearing it, but not where it can be seen. I am wearing it where no one can see it, but where it will prevent me from taking you or any other woman until we are married.”

He places her hand between his legs. She finds the ring at the base of his penis. At her touch he hardens and cries out — the ring bites, the pain is “excruciating.” A chastity device improvised from love and spite. The image lodges itself in her and does the opposite of what he intended: she goes warm, sexually alert, imagining the bound thing. A doctor eventually has to file the ring away.

They elope. He works at an hacienda; she hides in a room; a young night watchman chats with her at the window, tells her stories — including one about a former local beauty turned killer who mutilated a little girl with a skinning knife. The lover returns, sees them at the window, and the ring’s wound in his body becomes a wound in his mind. His penis has never healed; lovemaking hurts; he is sure she is betraying him. He strings her up by the wrists in the wine cellar until she faints.

Then the mood’s final turn — he takes her down, caresses her, and finds her wet.

“It was the best night they ever had together, lying there on the cold cellar floor in the darkness.”

The whole piece is suffused with a Latin, Catholic heat — heirloom metal, paternal violence, self-mutilating vows, jealousy that needs a body to land on. Plot is almost incidental. What the story is really describing is the texture of a love built on pain and proof.

Chapter 6: Mallorca

Nin drops into first person — a summer narrator on Mallorca, in Deya, near the monastery where Sand and Chopin stayed. Mornings on donkeys down red-earth paths through silver olives to a transparent cove. The locals are stern Catholics; the women swim, if at all, in long skirts and black stockings. European tourists scandalize them by sunbathing naked. Into this sun-bleached Catholic village drifts a story the fishermen tell.

A local girl, Maria — eighteen, fisherman’s daughter, green-eyed, “beautifully formed, with high breasts, long legs, a stylized body” — walks along the rocks one moonlit night and hears a voice calling to her from the water. A swimmer says her name. The voice is light, accented, foreign. It introduces itself as Evelyn and invites her in.

Maria strips to her chemise and swims out. They play in the water, wrestle, touch. The chemise floats off. Evelyn dives between her legs, surfaces behind her, embraces her from behind. Maria registers something — no breasts under the bathing cap — but files it under what she thinks she knows about flat-chested American girls.

“Suddenly what she felt between her legs was not a hand but something else, something so unexpected, so disturbing that she screamed. This was no Evelyn but a young man, Evelyn’s younger brother, and he had slipped his erect penis between her legs.”

The scream, Nin notes, is reflex — something Maria had been “trained to expect of herself.” What her body actually feels is warm, lulling, conspiratorial with the sea. He takes her on the sand. The waves wash away the virgin blood. From then on they meet only there, in the water, standing on a rock, coming while the sea moves under them.

That is the twist the assignment flagged — and it is handled without fanfare. The “American girl who swims naked” whom the fisherman has been obsessed with watching, the one whose bathing parties scandalize the locals — she is the sister of the boy who deflowered Maria. The foreign shamelessness the village condemns and the local girl’s sexual awakening are woven by a single family. The stern Catholic village and the naked European tourists are not two worlds; they are touching each other in the water at midnight.

“When I went down to the beach at night, I often felt as though I could see them, swimming together, making love.”

The narrator closes the vignette the way summer closes — warm, a little haunted, the sea taking everything back.

Chapter 7: Artists and Models

She is young, newly arrived, broke, and has begun standing naked in strangers’ studios for a living. What follows is less a plot than a gallery — each studio a new frame, each artist a new way of looking at her. The narrator walks through it the way someone walks through Montparnasse gossip: attentive, a touch ironic, never shocked, always watching what the looking does.

Millard the Sculptor, and the Belt of Louise

The first studio belongs to Millard, a sculptor in Greenwich Village who has a half-finished statuette in a clinging dress and needs a living body to finish it. He asks her to strip. She does. What’s striking is how he manages to make this feel ordinary.

He seemed so absorbed by the statuette and looked at me so absently that I was able to undress and take the pose without hesitation. Although I was quite innocent at that time, he made me feel as if my body were no different than my face, as if I were the same as the statuette.

While he works, he fills the air with Montparnasse stories — as if the stories are part of the same sculpting. The first one is about Louise, the nymphomaniac wife of a painter, tubercular, chalk-white, green-lidded, who wore an enormous Greek silver belt like a slave’s collar around her waist. The belt becomes the whole story.

Around her waist she wore a huge Greek silver belt, about six inches wide, studded with stones. This belt was fascinating. It was like the belt of a slave. One felt that deep down she was a slave—to her sexual hunger. One felt that all one had to do was to grip the belt and open it for her to fall into one’s arms.

Her husband, weary of losing her to strangers, eventually begs his own friends to take her — better a friend than one of the South Americans or Cubans he fears. She ends up with Antonio anyway: a tall, unhurried Cuban fresco painter who takes women to hotel rooms for three days at a stretch and walks out smiling. With Louise he keeps the belt on. He tears her dress off around it, slowly, as if the dress were made of paper.

Her sexual hunger was rising like madness to her head, blinding her. It was so urgent that she could not wait. She could not even wait until he undressed. But Antonio ignored her movements of impatience.

What Antonio does to Louise across the next hours is a slow, deliberate breaking. He refuses her rhythm. He refuses her mouth when she lingers there. He turns her over, kneels behind her, makes her crawl the floor on her hands and knees with her blond hair falling around her and the silver belt dragging her down. By the time he finally lets her come, she sobs hysterically — a hatred and a joy mixed into one thing. They fall asleep.

This is Millard’s first offering to his new model: a parable about who rules whom when hunger is the currency.

Mafouka, the Hermaphrodite of Montparnasse

The next day Millard tells her about Mafouka — short-haired, flat-chested, billiards-at-the-bar, foot on the rail, obscene stories told like a man. Mafouka lived with two girls in a studio and nobody knew what any of them were to each other.

The men did not know quite how to treat her. Sometimes they slapped her on the back with fraternal feelings.

Millard, drunk, drops in one afternoon and hears the two girls making love upstairs. Mafouka lets him watch from a crouch on the stairs — the two girls rubbing against each other on a bed, calling for Mafouka to join them, Mafouka refusing. Downstairs afterward, Millard asks what he has been wanting to ask everyone in Montparnasse. Mafouka takes off her shirt: a boy’s torso, nipples like a boy’s. Then her slacks: a woman’s panties, a woman’s thighs, women’s stockings and garters, red-lacquered toes.

Then she slipped down her panties. And I saw below the delicate curled pubic hair, shaped like a woman’s, that she carried a small atrophied penis, like a child’s. She let me look at her—or at him, as I felt I now should say.

Then Mafouka lies back and shows him something else — a vulva, rosy, behind the penis. Millard’s desire stirs at the impossible thought of taking both at once. Mafouka slips away from his touch. She is a virgin, she explains. She desires women, but her penis will not harden, and women who take her as a lesbian leave her unsatisfied; meanwhile the model she loves has left her for a real lesbian. She does not much like the company of women — they are petty, full of secrets — but she does not want men either.

“Yes, when I was born they did not know how to name me. I was born in a small village in Russia. They thought I was a monster and should perhaps be destroyed, for my own sake. When I came to Paris I suffered less. I found I was a good artist.”

The narrator listens to these stories afterward in a coffee shop and wonders whether any of it is happening around her in Greenwich Village too. She has begun to want to find out.

Brown’s Party: The Underwear Man and Other Small Confessions

She rents an evening dress from the Art Model Club and goes with two other models — red-haired Mollie, statuesque Ethel — to a party at a painter named Brown’s. The studio is poorer than she expected, bare couches, chipped cups, a ladder leading to a balcony of paintings. Two canvases up front do most of the talking: a woman convulsing between two men, and a sagging middle-aged man feeding candy to a little girl sat on his bare knees. Everyone else has seen them a hundred times. She hasn’t.

What I felt after seeing these two paintings was what one feels when drinking, a sudden dizziness of the head, a warmth through the body, a confusion of the senses. Something awakens in the body, foggy and dim, a new sensation, a new kind of hunger and restlessness.

Around the room the evening becomes a kind of confessional. A model tells the story of an underwear job — she’d answered an ad to pose in lingerie, expecting the usual crowd of secretaries and errand boys, and walked into an empty office where one man sat alone at a drawing board. She cycled through a pile of satin things while he sketched. Eventually she noticed he wasn’t drawing anymore.

After a while I did not hear the pencil working any longer and I turned slightly towards him, not wanting to lose the pose. He was sitting there behind his drawing board staring at me. Then I realized that he had his penis out and that he was in a kind of trance.

He had offered her five extra dollars to put on a particular piece — black lace, a spider web really, the panties slit front and back, the brassiere cut to leave the nipples bare through triangles. He told her not to worry. He did not like women. He liked underwear. If he tried to touch her he would go impotent. She took the money, posed the fifteen minutes, and left feeling certain he was waiting for the door to shut to masturbate.

“I have known men like this, who steal a shoe from someone, from an attractive woman, so they can hold it and masturbate while looking at it.”

The confessions keep rolling. Brown remembers hiding as a boy in his mother’s closet to smell her clothes — still cannot resist a woman in a veil. The narrator silently remembers doing the same thing in a young man’s closet at thirteen, and how at night she would puncture a can of condensed milk and suck at the hole in the dark, a pleasure she only understood later when she tasted sperm. Mollie chewed ginger and sniffed camphor balls to drug herself. Ethel, turning to her suddenly, warns her never to marry a man she doesn’t want sexually — she loves her husband in every way except that one, and the night before, while half asleep, she had dug her nails into his shoulder and whispered I hate you while he took her slowly, mistaking her rage for pleasure.

Then the record goes on and everyone begins to dance. The woman illustrator peels down to her slip. People start kissing against the walls. The narrator chooses the most timid painter in the room as her partner, recognizing him instantly as another person pretending to belong.

“If we stay here we will soon have to lie on the floor and make love. Do you want to leave.”

They go. He talks the whole way home instead of touching her — he wants to paint her as an undersea woman, green and watery except for a red mouth and a red flower in her hair. He apologizes for not being brutal. She says she picked him precisely because he wouldn’t be. Alone afterward, she grows sad in a way she doesn’t quite understand.

I felt that nothing would happen to me. I felt desperate with desire to be a woman, to plunge into living. Why was I enslaved by this need of being in love first? Where would my life begin? I would enter each studio expecting a miracle which did not take place. It seemed to me that a great current was passing all around me and that I was left out.

The Sculptor’s Wife, and a String of Ordinary Days

Millard’s wife keeps turning up at the studio unannounced. He is frightened of her — not, it becomes clear, because she suspects wrongly, but because she suspects correctly, about every model who poses for him. She invites the narrator to spend two weeks at their country house. As soon as she leaves the room Millard begs the narrator not to come. The days thicken: runs between studios, lunches skipped, her face on magazine covers and in subway advertisements. She wonders if strangers recognize her.

Millard, meanwhile, sabotages his own statuette. He lets it go wrong, then cheerfully starts over — anything to keep her on the stand a little longer.

John, and the Power of a Voice

She meets John at the theatre. He is a producer; his wife is a playwright; his voice is the kind of instrument she has never heard before.

It rolled over me like the tones of a pipe organ, making me vibrate. When he repeated my name and mispronounced it, it sounded to me like a caress. It was the deepest, richest voice I had ever heard.

She doesn’t hear what he is saying. She hears the voice. By the time he hails a taxi and says he has “stolen” her, she feels she has already been touched for hours. In his apartment he kisses her once, lifts her skirt, unrolls her garters, and finds her a virgin — something he had not quite prepared for. He stops to look at her face, then pushes on through the tear and the blood.

“Do you want me as I want you?”

She does. She goes to wash the blood off her leg and comes back uncertain, feeling she has not yet been taken, that this was only the first breaking-through. John sleeps with one arm thrown out where her head had been. She slips back in beside him.

What begins is an affair conducted entirely in rooms. He cannot be seen with her anywhere — both he and his wife are too well-known. He sets her up in a beautiful apartment and tells her to stop posing; she belongs to him now. For a while she obeys. She fills her waiting hours with elaborate rituals — baths, rouged nipples, polished nails, perfumed hair, negligees chosen for the light — and every one of the rituals curdles when he arrives two hours late.

The waiting wore out my feelings. I would rebel. Once I would not answer when he rang the doorbell. Then he knocked gently, humbly, and that touched me, so I opened the door.

He learns quickly that her anger arouses him. He starts arriving later on purpose. When she finally closes her legs against him he slips in from behind anyway and finds her wet. He tells her he likes it when he has to force his way in — likes feeling that she loves him too much to resist properly.

“When you are angry,” he said, “I feel that I am raping you. I feel then that you love me so much you cannot resist me, I see that you are wet, and I like your resistance and your defeat too.”

The first time she comes with him she weeps, sure it cannot happen again. It does. And the waiting hours, with nothing to do in them, drive her slowly back to the studios.

Millard Again: Marijuana, the Martinique Servant, and a Secret Technique

Millard is delighted to have her back — and deliberately botches the statuette one more time to keep her there. He tells her about a marijuana night where a woman turned into a dog. She crawled on her hands and knees, offered her breasts like a nursing bitch, wanted the men to take her from behind like dogs would. Millard did, and was terrified by how badly he wanted to bite her.

“I bit into her shoulder harder than I have ever bitten anyone. The woman did not get frightened. I did. It sobered me. I stood up and then I saw that a friend of mine was following her on his hands and knees, not caressing her or taking her, but merely smelling exactly as a dog would do.”

This reminded him of his first sexual memory — a big Martinique servant girl who would hide him under her enormous skirts during hide-and-seek, where he sat half-suffocated between her legs breathing in the smell of her.

While he talks he comes over with his measuring instrument and finds himself caressing her legs instead of measuring them. He kisses her feet. He lifts her down from the stand.

He touched me as he touched the statuette, so caressingly, all over.

He lays her face-down on the couch, takes her from behind, pushes so hard the wet makes clicking sounds that delight her. Then a knock. He scrambles up the ladder to the balcony with his clothes; she slides behind the screen. His wife walks in, finds the studio empty, and leaves. The spell is broken and she cannot bear the unfinished ache of it — she presses her own hands against herself while imagining his, and comes standing up, shaking from head to foot.

They find another place, a friend’s apartment with mirrors over a bed in a deep alcove. Millard wants the lights off this time — he has already seen her body, now he wants to know it by touch. And he wants to teach her something.

“I want to teach you something,” said Millard. “Do you want to let me do it?”

He inserted his finger inside my sex. “Now, I want you to contract around my finger. There is a muscle there that can be made to contract and expand around the penis. Try.”

She tries. Weakly at first, then stronger — a little mouth inside, opening and closing. He slides his penis in and tells her to keep moving while he stays still. He doesn’t last long. Neither does she. It is, she notes, the deepest orgasm she has had.

Then, almost sadly, he asks what John has taught her. She says: this — you kneel over me and push. Millard obeys. He is too spent to keep up, but she reaches down with two hands to help.

“I must not be so demanding,” he said in a strange tone.

“You will be tired out for John.”

They lie back and smoke. Millard keeps asking — did John have you today, did he take you more than once, how did he take you — and teaches her new things she can then go try on John, who soon notices that his virgin has developed a suspicious range. The chapter closes with her caught between the two men and, for the moment, content to be.

The two secret relationships became difficult for me, but I enjoyed the danger and the intensity.

Chapter 8: Lilith

Lilith is sexually cold, and her husband Billy knows it, even as she performs otherwise. They are the kind of couple where the heat runs only on one side of the bed. She storms; he watches with “unwavering good humor.” She wants the fight, the primitive arena; he refuses to step into it.

Possibly this was a symbol of the tension which did not take place between them sexually. He refused all her primitive, violent challenges and hostilities, he refused to enter this emotional arena with her and respond to her need of jealousies, of fears, of battles.

Nin is careful here. The problem is not a missing chemical. The problem is that Lilith is a jungle animal in a house full of weather reports. She wants someone to meet her voltage. Billy retreats behind bland observation, and she ends up alone in a desert of her own electricity.

If he, like an equally primitive animal, had appeared at the other end of this desert, facing her with the same electric tension of hair, skin, and eyes, if he had appeared with the same jungle body, treading heavily and wanting some pretext to leap out, embrace in fury, feel the warmth and strength of his opponent, then they might have rolled down together and the bitings might have become of another sort.

The prank

Lilith uses sugar-substitute pills. One night Billy brings her a new vial, she drops two into her coffee, and after dinner he casually announces that the pills were not sugar — they were Spanish fly, an aphrodisiac. He claims he wanted to see what it would do.

She is thrown. She has promised to take her friend Mabel to the movies and cannot back out. So she goes, carrying a body she now believes is about to betray her. And the story’s real mechanism begins: Lilith reading herself through the expectation, not through any drug.

As she sat in the darkened cinema, she could not watch the screen. Her head was in chaos. She sat taut on the edge of her seat, trying to sense the effects of the drug. She pulled herself up with a start when she noticed first of all that she had sat with her legs far apart, her skirt up on her knees.

The body as witness

Every small signal becomes evidence. Her legs fall open and she reads it as obscene invitation. She remembers that she bought lacy panties and coral garters that very day and decides she must have foreseen this night. She thinks about Mabel beside her in the dark — Mabel’s round breasts, her laughing mouth — and wonders if a woman’s hand could slip under her skirt here in the cinema the way she once heard a friend describe.

The imagination does all the work. Lilith has never caressed a woman, but she has caressed her own breasts pretending they belonged to one. She has daydreamed, for hours alone in her house, about a man who would enter and undress her slowly, button by button, whose hands would worship her until every small nerve gave up and dissolved.

On the drive home, the headlights catch a couple in a parked car mid-climax — the woman riding the man, him straining up into her, too far gone to stop for the light. Mabel laughs at the sight. Lilith is struck hollow: Mabel knows the climax she herself has never known.

Was the Spanish fly affecting her? No, she was languid, with her fantasy beginning again, over and over again—but that was all. Yet, the sight of the couple in the automobile, their state of ecstasy, was something she wanted to know.

The disappointment

Back home she strips in front of Billy — something she never does, because she has never liked being desired. She moves around naked to prove to him that the drug has taken hold. Inside, she is collapsing. She believes she is a monster — a woman so cold that even an aphrodisiac that once kept an eighteenth-century nobleman at it for three days and nights cannot reach her. She worries Billy will eventually leave her for someone who can feel.

She slips into bed. Billy yawns and says, well, it doesn’t seem to have worked; wake me up if. She lies there waiting to go wild. After an hour she gets up, takes the vial into the bathroom, and swallows about ten pills at once — this will do it. Still nothing. When Billy climbs into her bed during the night, she is so tight and dry that she has to wet his penis with saliva for him to enter.

The reveal

She wakes up weeping. She tells him the truth. And he laughs.

“But Lilith, it was a prank I played on you. That was not Spanish fly at all. I just played a prank on you.”

There is no drug. There never was. The sugar substitute was sugar substitute. Everything she felt — the parted legs, the fantasies in the dark, the Mabel-thoughts, the hunger for the couple in the car — was hers. She built it herself, from nothing, on the rumor of a pill.

And yet Lilith, instead of being freed by this news, is only more haunted. If it can be done with a fake, maybe it can be done with a real one. She starts hunting: big cups of chocolate heavy with vanilla, raw onions, alcohol (which never works on her because she watches it too carefully to let go). She hears about small soft rubber balls used as aphrodisiacs in the East Indies, molded to the shape of a woman inside her, moving with her muscles. She would like one of those. She would like to keep it inside herself day and night.

Why this story matters

Nin writes the story almost as a thesis statement for the whole book. Desire is not a chemistry problem. It is an imaginative act. The drug does nothing because the drug is not there — and everything Lilith feels is produced by belief. The tragedy is that after the reveal, she does not understand her own demonstration. She concludes she needs a stronger pill, not that she just proved she is capable of feeling without one. The woman who spent an evening drenched in her own fantasy goes looking for another chemical.

The Lilith of this chapter is not frigid. She is starved of the one thing her husband won’t offer — friction, weather, a body that meets hers in the arena. Billy’s prank is accidentally the most sensual thing he has ever done for her. And then he laughs it off.

Chapter 9: Marianne

The Anaïs-narrator takes over here directly. She calls herself “the madam of a house of literary prostitution” — the one who hands out assignments to the group of hungry writers producing erotica for the collector. Marianne is her typist. Young, golden-haired, blue-eyed, full-breasted, hiding her body under loose bohemian jackets and schoolgirl skirts. She has read Proust and Krafft-Ebing and Marx and Freud. She has slept with men. And yet:

But it was all external. Actually her body had been numb, unformed, not yet matured. Nothing had touched her very deeply. She was still a virgin. I could feel this when she entered the room.

The narrator watches Marianne type other people’s sex scenes night after night, curious what it is doing to her.

Marianne’s secret manuscript

One day Marianne is late delivering pages. The narrator goes to her studio, lets herself in, and finds at the typewriter not her own text but Marianne’s — a confession Marianne has started writing in the middle of her typing work. The rest of the story is this confession, framed by the narrator who read it first.

Marianne begins by saying most of what has happened to her was “clinical, anatomical” — sexes touching without sparks. She wants something else entirely.

“How can I begin to ‘feel’—to ‘feel?’ I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt between the legs.”

Then she describes Fred. A handsome, shy young man knocks on her studio door, sent by a friend. He wants a portrait. Not quite an ordinary portrait — he holds up her drawing of a muscular nude athlete and asks, blushing, if she would make him one of those. She agrees. She is trained; nudity at art school does not alarm her. What does faintly unsettle her is that he wants to undress in the room, not behind the screen.

“He was undressing with amazing deliberateness as if it were a choice occupation, a ritual. Once he looked at me fully in the eyes and smiled, showing his fine even teeth, and his skin was so delicate it caught the light that poured in through the big window and held it like a satin fabric.”

When the trousers come down he is already fully erect. Marianne is alarmed for a moment — if she protests, she loses the fee — but he does not move toward her. He just stands there, transfixed and content to be looked at.

The recognition

This is the moment the story pivots on, and it is quiet. Marianne draws. She finds that if she sticks to his head, neck, arms, nothing happens. The moment her eyes travel lower, his sex quivers under her gaze. He is not responding to her body; he is responding to her looking.

“I was the only one disturbed, and I did not know why.”

When it is over he dresses, shakes her hand politely, asks if he can come back tomorrow at the same time. And Marianne — who has spent the session trying not to be affected — is left undone all day. She adds to one of her drawings, turning it into the scene that actually happened. She walks around her studio tormented.

This is the story’s secret: Nin gives Marianne the voyeur’s role, which erotica almost always hands to men. A woman watching a naked man grow hard under her eyes, and discovering that the watching itself is an act of sex. The gaze is not a side dish. The gaze is the meal.

“But a man like that, he is only interested in my looking at him.”

The obsession

Fred returns, day after day. Each session is the same: he undresses slowly, she draws, his body quivers under her attention, he dresses, he leaves. He says nothing, acknowledges nothing, wants nothing back. Marianne, now back in the narrator’s third-person, is growing thin with unfulfilled desire.

She likes violence, the narrator notes. She fantasizes about forcing his will — catching him asleep and taking him half-conscious, letting him walk in on her dressing so that her body might pull some reaction out of him. She leaves the door ajar one day when she knows he is coming. He glances in, looks away, picks up a book.

“He was impossible to arouse except by gazing on him. And Marianne was by now in a frenzy of desire for him.”

Finally the drawings are nearly finished. She cannot bear it anymore. She sets down her charcoal and kneels in front of his erect sex without touching it.

“She did not touch it, but merely looked and murmured, ‘How beautiful it is.’ At this he was visibly affected. His whole sex became more rigid with pleasure.”

She kisses it, licks it, takes the tip of it into her mouth. He does not move away; he does not encourage her either. He is simply content. She stops before he comes, afraid to trespass further, and returns to her easel in private turmoil.

The next day she repeats the ritual, more confidently — kneels, praises, licks, takes him into her mouth — and a drop of salty fluid dissolves on her tongue, the first sign she has truly reached him. Even then, when she senses he is near, she stops, hoping deprivation will push him toward her. His hand moves toward his own sex to finish the job himself. Marianne panics, pushes his hand away, takes him back into her mouth until he comes.

“He leaned over with gratitude, tenderness, and murmured, ‘You are the first woman, the first woman, the first woman…’”

What Fred wrote

Fred moves in, but nothing shifts. He lets her caress him, opens her with his hand like a flower, finds the pistil, brings her to contractions with his fingers. He will not enter her. She craves being possessed, penetrated, met, and is left stuck at the threshold of it.

She asks him to write, thinking confession might unlock something. At first he resists. Then secretly, with a stub of a pencil, he begins, hiding the pages. When he runs out of money, he pawns his typewriter, his coat, his watch, and finally sells the manuscript to the same collector Marianne works for. The collector, unable to read his handwriting, hands it to Marianne to type.

She reads it before her fingers touch the keys. It is the story of himself at fifteen, in a Paris apartment with balconies, walking naked in his room, noticing a woman across the way sitting on her balcony and watching him, openly. He pretends not to see her so she won’t leave. They repeat the scene for a week. On the third day he gets an erection. He begins to touch himself for her. Eventually he comes while she watches.

“We did not try to meet in the street, though we were neighbors. All I remember was the pleasure I derived from this, which no other pleasure ever equaled. At the mere recollection of these episodes, I get excited. Marianne gives me somewhat the same pleasure. I like the hungry way she looks at me, admiring, worshiping me.”

Marianne weeps. She understands now that she will never overcome this. His deepest pleasure is fixed on a balcony in his adolescence, and she is only the latest version of the woman across the street.

The end

The story finishes with Fred, possessed by the idea of being looked at by many eyes, wanting to work as a life model at Marianne’s painting class. She rebels. She refuses to attend the day he poses and weeps at home “like a jealous woman who knows her lover is with another woman.” She tears up her drawings of him, trying to strip his golden body from her eyes.

“This incident began to separate them. It seemed as if the more pleasure she gave him, the more he succumbed to his vice, and sought it unceasingly.”

They drift apart. Marianne returns to her typewriter, to the night shift of copying other people’s adventures.

Nin gives this story two frames at once: an artist who discovers her own gaze is an erotic instrument, and a woman who learns that gazing is not enough, that she also wants to be gazed at back. Fred can only flower under attention. Marianne needs attention returned. Their geometries don’t close. The story’s ache is not that he is passive but that his pleasure has no room in it for a second person.

Chapter 10: The Veiled Woman

George is in a Swedish bar he likes, nursing the kind of evening where nothing needs to happen. At the next table there’s a handsome couple — a suave, neatly dressed man and a woman in black with a veil over her glowing face and bright jewelry. They do not speak to each other. They speak, in smiles, to George. Something is already in motion and he has not been told.

When the woman slips away after a whispered exchange with her companion, George’s evening deflates. He has only a few dollars on him; he cannot buy the stranger a drink and work his way to the woman. Then the stranger leans over and offers to buy George one.

The offer

The conversation drifts from hotels in the south of France to the fact that George is broke. The stranger responds that money is extremely easy to come by, and draws George into bragging about his exploits — George has a weakness for telling his own stories when the mood is right. The stranger listens, smiles, and when George is finished, sets the hook.

“That is what I expected of you the moment I saw you. You are the fellow I am looking for. I am confronted with an immensely delicate problem. Something absolutely unique. I don’t know if you have had many dealings with difficult, neurotic women— No? I can see that from your stories. Well, I have. Perhaps I attract them.”

There is, the stranger says, a woman — wealthy, flawless, adored by anyone she chooses — who suffers from one perverse accident of nature. She is interested only in the unknown. A man she has never seen before and will never see again. For such a man she will do anything.

George burns to ask if it’s the veiled woman from the table. He doesn’t dare. The stranger says he has devoted his life to watching over this woman’s happiness, to satisfying her caprices. Then he proposes: if George would like to, he could solve his money problems for the week and perhaps his appetite for adventure at the same time.

George flushes. They leave the bar together.

The blindfold

In the taxi the stranger hands over fifty dollars and explains George must be blindfolded; he is not to know the house, the street, or be able to come back. The blindfold comes off just before George steps out, but the glare of the entrance lights blinds him anyway — a clever touch. He sees only brilliance and mirrors.

He was ushered into one of the most sumptuous interiors he had ever seen—all white and mirrored, with exotic plants, exquisite furniture covered in damask and such a soft rug that their footsteps were not heard. He was led through one room after another, each in different shades, all mirrored, so that he lost all sense of perspective.

The last room is a canopied bed on a dais, furs on the floor, vaporous white curtains, more mirrors. George catches himself — thousands of versions of himself — in all of them, and is grateful the man in the glass is handsome enough to bear the repetition.

The woman from the bar enters. The stranger, without a word, vanishes.

The night

She has changed into a satin gown held at the shoulders by a ruffle, and George senses it would fall from her with one gesture. She is beautiful in a way that makes him shy. He has one night. He will never see her again. He wonders how many men have been brought to this room before him.

He decides against haste. Every gesture is thought through, artful. He begins at her bare shoulders, inhaling the faint odor of her body, letting himself linger. He slides to his knees, kisses the line of her, slips off her slippers, kisses her feet. His hands follow her legs up under the dress and discover she is naked beneath it.

And yet.

She seemed amazingly cool, obedient but without feeling. Never a ripple on her skin, and though her mouth was parted for kissing, it was not responsive.

She is yielding without being present. He begins to suspect the mystery of the woman is that she cannot be aroused at all. It doesn’t make sense — her skin is too sensitive for that, her mouth too full. He caresses her continuously, unhurried, waiting for the flame.

When he leans over at last to look at the beauty of her sex, she quivers for the first time. George nearly cries out. She murmurs, “Take your clothes off.”

Naked, George is in his element — an athlete, a swimmer, a climber, a walker. He knows his body. When she kisses and fondles him, he turns her so they can work on each other at once. The room shifts. Both of them are hungry now.

As he bit into her flesh with such a delicious sensation, he felt again in her a quiver of pleasure. Now he forced her away from his sex, for fear she might experience all her pleasure merely kissing him and that he would be cheated of feeling himself inside of her womb. It was as if they both had become ravenously hungry for the taste of flesh.

She is finally fired. Her eyes shine, her mouth will not leave him. He enters her, and for a moment they both stay still, feeling it without moving. Then she points to the mirror and laughs — in the glass it looks as if she is only sitting on his knees, innocent, while in fact he is buried inside her and already quivering.

“Ah, I can’t bear it any longer, this pretending I have nothing inside. It’s burning me up. Move now, move.”

She throws herself over him and rides him into a pleasure that makes her cry out. A lightning flash of it tears through George at the same moment.

The walk home

And then, a clean wound: she does not ask his name. She does not ask him to come back. A light kiss on his almost painful lips, and she sends him away.

For months afterward George carries her. He cannot repeat the experience with any other woman. He has had the best night of his life and been told never to want a second one. He obeys, not by choice but because nothing else lands after it.

The reveal

Months later he runs into a friend who has just been paid well for some articles and is in a mood to spend. Over drinks the friend tells George about a spectacular thing he witnessed. In a bar, a distinguished stranger had approached him and offered a pleasant pastime — observing a love scene — and the friend, being a confirmed voyeur, agreed. He was taken to a mysterious house, a sumptuous apartment, hidden in a dark room, and from there watched a nymphomaniac make love to an especially gifted and potent man.

George’s heart stood still. “Describe her,” he said.

The friend describes the satin dress, the canopied bed, the mirrors, everything — and reveals that he paid a hundred dollars for the spectacle, which lasted hours and was entirely worth it.

The whole night re-reads itself in George’s head. He was not the buyer of the experience. He was the product. The veiled woman’s caprice was not strangers for her own pleasure — it was strangers for the pleasure of an audience. The stranger at the bar was not her guardian; he was her impresario. The mirrors that flattered George all night were angles. The dark room somewhere beyond them held paying men. The fifty dollars he received was a small operating cost.

Poor George. For months he was wary of women. He could not believe such perfidy, and such playacting. He became obsessed with the idea that the women who invited him to their apartments were all hiding some spectator behind a curtain.

The small perfect twist

This is the most plotted of Nin’s stories, and the architecture is almost cruel. The man who thought he was gazed at by a single woman was gazed at by a room. The woman who seemed inexplicably unresponsive at first was waiting, one suspects, for her audience to settle in. The mirrors were not decor; they were stagecraft. And George, who had preened at his own thousand reflections in the canopied room, was already on stage the whole time and never knew it.

What Nin leaves suspended is whether the night was, despite all this, real. The veiled woman’s quiver when he knelt — was that part of the show, or the moment she forgot there was a show? George will never know. He just walks around for months, suspicious of curtains.

Chapter 11: Elena

Something shifts when Nin starts this story. The other pieces in the collection move like sketches; this one sets itself down as if she meant to live in it. The sentences lengthen, the images get more patient, the interior weather becomes as important as the bodies. Elena is the longest piece in Delta of Venus — close to a novella — and it reads like the book Nin might have written if the collector had gone away and left her alone with the page.

The train, the book, the mountain

Elena is introduced on a station platform, waiting for the train to Montreux, scanning the crowd with a hunger she cannot quite name. Nin puts the tone down in the opening paragraph and never really leaves it.

Every trip aroused in her the same curiosity and hope one feels before the curtain is raised at the theatre, the same stirring anxiety and expectation.

She was expecting someone — every time a door opened, every time she went to a party, to any gathering of people, every time she entered a café, a theatre.

The book she carries onto the train is Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the trip up the mountain becomes the first turning point of her life. She arrives at Caux changed — angry, actually, at what has been kept from her. Nin writes the transformation as discovery and indictment at once.

Afterwards Elena remembered nothing of this trip except a sensation of tremendous bodily warmth, as if she had drunk a whole bottle of the very choicest Burgundy, and a feeling of great anger at the discovery of a secret which it seemed to her was criminally withheld from all people.

It was the submerged woman of Lawrence’s book that lay coiled within her, at last exposed, sensitized, prepared as if by a multitude of caresses for the arrival of someone.

She takes a room at Casutza, a fairy-tale chalet run by a witch-like Romanian woman named Madame Kazimir. She sunbathes, she walks, she caresses herself, she waits — not knowing she is waiting. Then, on the mountain road, Pierre appears, shirtless, with the eyes of an animal tamer and the innocent smile of a boy. He is traveling with a rented wife and child, using someone else’s passport, running from the French police. He calls Madame Kazimir “the Great Pétrifier” and accuses Elena of turning back from her own life. She has been caught.

Pierre — the first opening

Pierre is the axis of the whole story. The first lovemaking takes place in a borrowed chalet with a pianola playing in the distance, on a heavily carved bed — and what Nin does in these pages is unlike anything in the collection so far. She lets the act last. She lets it breathe. The man who has walked in with swagger turns timid at the door.

“You must know, of course, that you are the first real woman I have ever known — a woman I could love. I have forced you here. I want to be sure that you want to be here.”

Then the whole slow discovery.

His caresses had a strange quality, at times soft and melting, at other times fierce, like the caresses she had expected when his eyes fixed on her, the caresses of a wild animal. There was something animallike about his hands, which he kept spread over each part of her body, and which took her sex and hair together as if he would tear them away from the body, as if he grasped earth and grass together.

She experienced the sensation that within her womb some new cells awakened, new fingers, new mouths, that they responded to his entrance and joined in the rhythmic motion, that this suction was becoming gradually more and more pleasurable; as if the friction had aroused new layers of enjoyment.

The idyll lasts ten days. Then a violet-eyed Russian woman arrives — Pierre has orders, he is being moved to Geneva, his political work demands it. He does not ask Elena to come. What he says instead will sit inside her for the rest of the story.

“I am not in love with any woman. I never have been. I am in love with my work. With you I was in great danger. Because we could talk together, because we were so near each other in so many ways, I stayed with you too long. I forgot my work.”

Elena leaves Casutza first, in shock. She discovers that she cannot do what she did as a girl — cannot retreat into fantasy, cannot make the world go deaf around her. Something has been opened that does not close on command. She falls into a lethargy so complete that her body feels dead again on the train back to Paris. What Nin has been writing about up to this point is sexual awakening; what she begins writing about now is the cost of it.

Miguel — the old wound

Before Pierre can return, Miguel walks back into her life. He is her first love, her cousin, the man she adored as a girl and could never make want her. Nin uses him to go backward. We see the dance where fifteen-year-old Elena first felt her body ignite under Miguel’s hand, and we see why it went nowhere: Miguel wants boys, has always wanted boys, and confused his own sexuality with a verdict on hers.

“If only you were very passive, very obedient, very very inert, I might desire you. But I always feel in you a volcano about to explode, a volcano of passion, and that frightens me.”

Nin’s detour through Miguel’s psyche is remarkable — she goes into his childhood and finds the big-breasted mother and the whores’ “huge, wet, hungry mouth” between the legs that frightened him away from women and toward boys whose desires could be satisfied without danger. Elena had lived for years believing his rejection was a verdict. Meeting him again in Paris, with his past finally speakable, she feels the burden of that verdict lift. He introduces her to his lover Donald — beautiful, feminine-in-his-presence, masculine alone — and the three form a triangle that Nin clearly loves writing. Elena watches Donald become a woman when Miguel enters the room and straighten back into a man when he leaves. She recognizes him as a twin.

“Talking together is a form of intercourse. You and I exist together in all the delirious countries of the sexual world. You draw me into the marvelous. Your smile keeps a mesmeric flow.”

There is an extraordinary scene where Miguel, knowing Elena has come to his apartment, keeps her in the bathroom while he finishes making love to Donald in the adjoining room. She listens. Something in her shares it — not as voyeur but as participant, as the woman inside Donald’s body being taken by Miguel. And in the middle of this, a letter falls out of her bag. Pierre is in Paris. He has come back for her.

Pierre, again — the long bond

She runs. Pierre is waiting for her in a dark hotel room, and the second phase of their love begins in the dark, literally — he wants to know her by hands first, the way blind people do.

Like blind people, they felt each other’s body, lingering in the warmest curves, making the same trajectory each time; knowing by touch the places where the skin was softest and tenderest and where it was stronger and exposed to daylight; where, on the neck, the heartbeat was echoed; where the nerves shivered as the hand came nearer to the center, between the legs.

This section is the longest single stretch of lovemaking writing in the book, and the most unhurried. Nin names the little mole between Elena’s legs. She describes the pubic hairs mingling and Pierre’s being found afterward in Elena’s bathwater. She writes the pleasure as a religion.

A dazzling little death that no drug or alcohol could give, that nothing else could give but two bodies in love with each other, in love deep within their beings, with every atom and cell and nerve, and thought.

But the old wound is not gone. A worn belt Pierre has carried for ten years sits her down with jealousy of all the women who came before. A word, a cloud, a worry about his political work — and her body closes. Nin writes about the frigidity not as failure but as a kind of sovereignty, and this is where the story starts moving into more difficult territory.

From then on the struggle of their love was to defeat this coldness which lay dormant in her and which a word, a small wound, a doubt, could bring out to destroy their possession of each other. Pierre became obsessed with it. He was more intent on watching her moods and predispositions than his own. Even as he enjoyed her, his eyes searched her for a sign of that future clouding, always hanging over them.

The citadel — the impregnable virgin woman: The conqueror in Pierre, who had never burst forth to carry out a real revolution, gave itself to this conquest.

He turns their room into an erotic den, reads pornography with her, tries to build up such a sexual fever in her that she can never be cold again. She learns to pretend. Then he changes tactics — abandons the pursuit of orgasm and goes after her other selves instead, the little girl she once was, the dreamy adolescent, the masculine Elena buried beneath. Nin writes this courtship of the inner selves as tenderly as anything she ever wrote: Pierre asking what stockings she wore to school, what petticoats, what color ink made the tattoo-mark below her knee. Then his own childhood comes out in return — a coquette mother who kept him in her bed past boyhood, who watched him grow into a replica of her lovers, who taught him that love was the only feast. He has been a Don Juan. He has loved dirty women in dirty places, taken opium, sold women. He recognizes in Elena what terrifies him.

“I feel that you are capable of many loves, that I will be the first one, that from now on nothing will stop you from expanding. You’re sensual, so sensual.”

He is right. The story is now about to prove him right.

Leila — the woman, the equal

Kay, Elena’s friend, brings her to meet Leila — a nightclub singer, a lesbian, a queen of the half-world. She is in bed when Elena first sees her, a languid body in a scented room, and the voice that comes out of her is a man’s voice. Nin writes Leila as the one genuinely sovereign figure in the book. She dresses in men’s clothes, rides horseback in men’s clothes, ignores the police, magnetizes the women society has condemned, and refuses to let them be small. This is not a peripheral episode. Nin gives Leila paragraphs as rich as anything she gave Pierre.

She was a magnetic center for the world of women who considered themselves condemned by their vice. She whipped them into being proud of their deviations, not succumbing to bourgeois morality.

She was so elegant, so suave, so aristocratic, that people who did not know her bowed to her, almost unconsciously. She made other women hold up their heads.

The two go together to an opium den — veiled lamps, glass globes of iridescent fish, exotic silks, the sound of someone’s orgasm rising through the smoke. This passage has the atmosphere of a dream, and Nin knows it.

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.

Leila’s hand finds Elena’s thigh under her dress and does not leave. They kiss, they whisper a meeting, and then morning comes and Elena runs to Miguel in a panic: why is Pierre’s love not enough to keep her from this? Miguel smiles at her, tells her she is only seeking herself in another woman. She goes to Pierre, hides in his arms, postpones the meeting with Leila.

But Kay, meanwhile, has fallen into Leila’s bed, and every day comes to Elena with new details of Leila’s lovemaking, which torture her with jealousy — and also with pity, because Leila again has chosen a woman who will disappoint her. Nin offers one of her most precise aphorisms about gendered cruelty here:

Women were not as tolerant as men towards women who made themselves small and weak by calculation, thinking to inspire an active love. Leila must suffer more than a man, because of her lucidity about women, her incapacity to be deceived.

And this:

Leila had acquired a new sex by growing beyond man and woman.

When Elena and Leila do eventually meet again — in the back of Leila’s black limousine, hats falling off, Leila telling the chauffeur to change direction, “This is an abduction” — Nin gives the scene all the space it needs. The lovemaking that follows is the longest lesbian scene in Nin’s published work, and the writing in it is the writing of someone who has been waiting to write it.

Silk again, silk under the fingers, silk between the legs, silky shoulders, neck, hair. Lips of silk trembling under the fingers. It was like the night at the opium den; the caresses lengthened, the suspense was preciously sustained.

Instead of having one sexual core, Elena’s body seemed to have a million sexual openings, equally sensitized, every cell of the skin magnified with the sensibility of a mouth. The very flesh of her arm suddenly opened and contracted with the passage of Leila’s tongue or fingers.

This is the Postscript’s claim made good — Nin writing, as she put it, in a woman’s language. The pleasure here is not a penetration but a diffusion, not a destination but a dilation.

Bijou — the sensualists’ triangle

Kay has also let slip that Leila said Pierre was once the lover of the prostitute Bijou. Elena starts haunting the café where Bijou works, wanting to see her enemy. What she finds when the three women finally meet — driven by rain into the same café — is that she is not Bijou’s enemy at all. She is spellbound. Bijou is everything Elena is not: a bed of flesh, a “sex organ walking undisguised,” a body built like Pierre’s mother, an ambulant womb.

Nin writes one of the best paragraphs in the book about the envy between women who have been sorted into opposite categories by men.

Bijou, who was the whore of whores, would have liked to exchange places with Elena. Whores always envy women who have the faculty of arousing desire and illusion as well as hunger. Bijou, the sex organ walking undisguised, would have liked to have the appearance of Elena. And Elena was thinking how she would have liked to change places with Bijou, for the many times when men grew tired of courting and wanted sex without it, bestial and direct. Elena pined to be raped anew each day, without regard for her feelings; Bijou pined to be idealized. Leila alone was satisfied to be born free of man’s tyranny, to be free of man. But she did not realize that imitating man was not being free of him.

The three go to Leila’s apartment, which is lit only by illuminated globes of water and iridescent fish — an undersea room, the kind of set dressing Nin clearly delighted in. What follows is an extended three-way scene, written with more generosity than Nin gives any other group scene in the collection. It is also the only one in the book where the three participants are all women, and the writing registers the difference.

They ceased to be three bodies. They became all mouths and fingers and tongues and senses. Their mouths sought another mouth, a nipple, a clitoris. They lay entangled, moving very slowly. They kissed until the kissing became a torture and the body grew restless.

When the orgasms finally come, they come staggered, one after another, and the scene ends not with exhaustion but with a kind of new knowledge.

Elena now understood why some Spanish husbands refused to initiate their wives to all the possibilities of lovemaking — to avoid the risk awakening in them an insatiable passion. Instead of being contented, calmed by Pierre’s love, she had become more vulnerable. The more she desired Pierre, the greater her hunger for other loves.

(Bijou will be the subject of the next story, so we leave her here.)

Jean — the punishment

The affair with the sculptor Jean is brief, almost a footnote, but Nin uses him carefully. Jean is pure desire, pure longing, and Elena finally takes him in his studio in the shadow of his massive statue of two lovers welded together. The sex is silent, mostly vertical, mostly a pressing of bodies against stone.

In the shadow of this statue, they moved towards each other, without a word, without a smile. Even their hands did not move. As they met, Jean pressed Elena against the statue. They did not kiss or touch each other with their hands. Only their torsos met, repeating in warm human flesh the welding of the bodies of the statue above them.

She knows as she leaves that she will not go back. She thinks with a superstitious dread that Pierre will sense the betrayal and punish her. This is the pattern the story has settled into: the more she is opened, the more she fears closing.

Donald — the tender failure

Later, in an old summer house in the country, Elena paints the attic with Miguel while Donald wanders the garden. Miguel jokes about his “collection of asses” and watches Elena on a ladder. He asks to look at her. Then he asks to take her. Nin writes the scene tenderly — an experiment he has to try once, an act of curiosity rather than desire. Miguel finds the opening, slips in, and cannot finish.

Was he becoming more and more aware that he was inside of a woman and not a boy? Slowly he withdrew, left her thus half-taken, hid his face away from her so that she would not see his disillusion.

She kisses him to tell him it is all right. It is probably the gentlest scene in the book. It also closes the ancient wound — the verdict of her girlhood, the question of whether Miguel could ever have wanted her — and closes it kindly.

Resolution

The story does not end, exactly. It settles. Elena keeps going back to Pierre, and Pierre keeps being Pierre — late, unruly, sleeping naked, throwing cigarettes on the floor, washing in ice-cold water, making love for hours. She quarrels with him about time, locks him out, regrets it, lets him in. She holds her body closed against him to punish him, then opens to him again. The final pages show her finally arriving at some new temperature of love — not the dazzled surrender of Caux, but something steadier, knowing, a fire she has learned to walk on.

Could love become a fire that did not burn, like the fire of the Hindu religious men; was she learning to walk magically over hot coals?

That question, unanswered, is where Nin lets her go. Elena is not resolved because she is still becoming. Pierre has domesticated somewhat; she has expanded. The “submerged woman” who was lying coiled inside her at the start of the story has surfaced and kept surfacing — through Pierre, through Leila, through Bijou, through Jean, through Donald, and most of all through herself. Nin has written something very close to a full novel compressed into a hundred pages: a portrait of a woman discovering that her hunger is larger than any one lover, and that the cost of the discovery is the permanent impossibility of peace.

This is Nin writing not for the collector but for herself — and you can feel it on every page.

Chapter 12: The Basque and Bijou

Nin changes registers here. Elena was a single-character arc, all lyric and suspended longing; this is a panorama. The camera pans across a Paris brothel, a houseful of working women, their madam, their regulars, their specialty acts — then follows two of them, the sailor called the Basque and the woman called Bijou, out into a world of artists’ studios, cafés, clairvoyants, picnics, and horseback rides. The voice is closer to Maupassant than to the earlier stories: the house is a going concern with an economy and a clientele, and Nin describes both with a kind of flat, appraising attentiveness. The bodies are inventoried. The sex is labor.

The house and its madam

The story opens at a rainy street and the little red lights that, in this part of Paris, mean something for sale. The Basque — a painter who copies postcards and has just been paid thirty francs for one — is looking for a door. The door is opened by Maman, who runs the place and who is the first character Nin establishes in detail.

Maman is not drawn as a tender figure. She is drawn as a specialist. Faces do not interest her. What interests her is the bulge in a man’s trousers, and her entire professional life, and much of her mental life outside it, is organized around appraising that bulge.

“A maternal woman opened the door, but a maternal woman whose cold eyes traveled almost immediately to the man’s shoes, for she judged from them how much he could afford to pay for his pleasure. Then for her own satisfaction, her eyes rested for a while on the trouser buttons. Faces did not interest her. Her life was spent exclusively in dealings with this region of man’s anatomy. Her big eyes, still bright, had a piercing way of looking into the trousers as if they could gauge the size and weight of the man’s possessions. It was a professional look. She liked to pair people off with more acumen than other mothers of prostitution.”

The sentence that follows is Nin in reportorial mode — matter-of-fact about a trade that she is treating as a trade.

“She was as expert as a glove fitter. Even through the trousers, she could measure the client, and set about getting him the perfect glove, a neat fit. It gave no pleasure if there was too much room, and no pleasure if the glove was too tight. Maman thought people today did not know enough about the importance of a fit.”

Maman’s obsession is not only professional. She is a voyeur in public: at urinals, on boulevards, in subways, her eyes travel below the waist. She daydreams about the parade of the Scots — men trained to walk so their kilts swing, men who wear nothing underneath — and imagines herself a kind of erotic Catherine the Great reviewing an army. Nin gives her a whole page of this fantasy. It is played partly for comedy and partly as a thesis statement: in this house, desire is not romantic. It is an appetite, catalogued and managed.

The house itself is introduced through Maman’s eye for her girls. She does not look at their faces either. She looks at their figures from the waist down, makes them turn before her, tests the firmness of the flesh with a little slap. The women are a roster of specialties: Melie, who wraps around a man like a ribbon and can make him feel several women are on him at once; the lazy one who pretends to sleep and lets timid men explore her without risk; the slender, fiery one who attacks her clients so that guilty husbands can tell themselves afterward that they were the victims.

“She knew the slender, fiery one who attacked men and made them feel victims of circumstance. She was a great favorite among the guilty men. They permitted themselves to be raped. Their conscience was at ease. They could have said to their wives: She threw herself on me and forced herself on me, and the like.”

It reads like a catalog because that is what it is. Every woman is an offering. Maman is the curator.

The Basque

The Basque is the regular the story is named for. Nin describes him as handsome but makes clear that his status in the house is not based on his face. It is based on his anatomy. Maman likes him not for his profile or his swagger but for what the book calls his “royal pendentif” — the size and temperament of his penis, which the narration treats as a kind of celebrity.

“It was for his royal pendentif, the noble bulk of it, the sensitive and untiring responsiveness of it, its friendliness, its cordiality, its expansiveness. She had never seen such a one. He would lay it on the table sometimes as if he were depositing a bag of money, rap with it as if calling for attention. He took it out naturally, as other men take off their coats when they are warm. He gave the impression that it was not at ease shut in, confined, that it was to be aired, to be admired.”

He is, in other words, the house legend. He is also a connoisseur. He doesn’t want just any woman — he has a “capricious member,” Nin writes, and rejects the wrong fit on both ends of the range. Maman, who shares his taxonomy, handles him personally sometimes. The narrative dwells, half-playfully, on the idea that she produces better lubrication than her girls — “a truly delectable juice for the feasts of love, which most of the women had to manufacture artificially.” Even the madam is a listed item on the menu.

Viviane, and the Basque’s technique

Before Bijou arrives, the Basque’s regular is a dark-skinned woman from the south of France named Viviane. Nin spends several pages on her and uses the time to show the Basque’s particular skill: patience.

Viviane is introduced at the bidet. Nin makes a set piece of this — the ceremony of washing, the swollen lips of a woman who has had too many clients that day, the Basque watching and understanding that the irritation itself will be useful to him. She also has two modes: a lethargic indifference and, once penetrated, a violent python-like thrashing that exhausts her partners. Most men can’t get anywhere with her from the first mode. The Basque can.

His method is to enter her by increments, asking each time whether it hurts, offering each time to withdraw. The passage is a long one, and the pleasure of it, for Nin, is in making a reader wait with Viviane.

“So the tip slipped in an inch or so, then rested. This gave Viviane plenty of time in which to feel its presence, time that other men did not give her. Between each tiny advance into her, she had leisure to feel how pleasant its presence was between the soft walls of flesh, how well it fitted, neither too tight nor too loose. Again he waited, then advanced a little more. Viviane had time to feel how good it was to be filled, how well suited the female crevice was to hold and to keep.”

It is the slowest seduction in the book so far. It is also the one scene in this chapter that is unambiguously tender. After Viviane, the register hardens.

Bijou appears — through a spy-hole

Bijou does not arrive by the front door. The Basque meets her through a partition.

The brothel has a feature that Nin describes without commentary: every room has a secret aperture, and “amateurs” — paying voyeurs — can watch. One afternoon the Basque, finding Viviane busy, asks to look, and Maman hides him behind a curtain. The scene on the other side is a commissioned lesbian performance for a well-dressed foreign couple. Viviane is on the bed; above her, strapped with a rubber penis, is a new woman.

“On her hands and knees over her was a magnificent woman with ivory-colored skin, green eyes and long, thick, curly hair. Her breasts pointed high, her waist tapered to extreme slenderness and spread again for a rich display of hips. She was shaped as if she had been molded in a corset. Her body had a firm, marble smoothness. There was nothing flabby or loose in her, but a hidden strength, like the strength of a puma, an extravagance and vehemence in her gestures as in those of Spanish women. This was Bijou.”

What follows is the chapter’s first extended set piece: a theatrical orgy, staged for money. Bijou, wearing the rubber penis, teases Viviane with it before using it — taps her belly, her clitoris, her mouth. The foreign woman leans in to see. The Basque, behind his curtain, admires the performance technically, the way a colleague would. Then he breaks the fourth wall, steps out, throws off his clothes, announces himself, and joins in. The scene becomes a five-body tangle, the foreigners still dressed and rubbing against Viviane, the Basque between the two women, Bijou — rubber penis still strapped on — finding a use for it on the Basque himself once he enters her.

“When he raised himself to thump into her again, she pushed the rubber penis inside of his buttocks. He leaped like a wild animal and attacked her only more furiously. Each time he raised himself, he found himself attacked from behind. He felt the breasts of the woman crushed beneath him, rolling under his chest, her ivory-skinned belly heaving under his, her hips against his, her moist vagina engulfing him; and each time she plunged the penis into him, he felt not only his turmoil but hers as well.”

The foreigners, overwhelmed, bow and leave. The Basque tells Bijou to get dressed: he’s paying Maman whatever she wants and taking Bijou home.

Model, mistress, exhibit

The next stretch of the chapter describes Bijou’s life after the brothel. She has swapped one set of exposures for another. The Basque keeps her as his model and his companion, but continues to treat her as a show. She cooks dinners for his painter friends; afterwards she has to lie on the bed while the Basque, talking, absently fondles her — opening her dress to show a breast, lifting her skirt to show a garter, running his hand inside her clothes while his friends try to keep their faces composed.

“On nights like this she knew the Basque was not intent on giving her pleasure but on torturing her. He would not be satisfied until the faces of his friends were altered, decomposed. He would pull the zipper on the side of her dress and slip in his hand. ‘You are not wearing panties today, Bijou.’ They could see his hand under the dress, caressing the belly and descending towards the legs.”

The exhibition escalates. Someone mentions a woman painter whose giant floral canvases are not really flowers — they are vulvas. The Basque gets an idea, calls for a razor and shaving brush, and shaves Bijou in front of his three friends while they hold her down. Nin narrates the shaving in clinical detail, and then the Basque continues with the brush on the now-bare skin until Bijou, whose legs have been forced apart, can no longer contract her body. He stops before she comes — “not wanting to give her pleasure, reserving that for himself later.”

This is who the Basque is, off-duty. The charm that he brought to Viviane’s bed is not what he brings to this one. He keeps Bijou “in a highly eroticized condition” and does not always trouble to satisfy her. She, in response, starts collecting lovers of her own.

The infidelities — models’ café, the clairvoyant

Bijou poses at the Grande Chaumière. The undressing ritual becomes its own performance — black dress, black garters, the long shake of her freed hair — and on posing days she chooses a student from the class. They meet afterward at a café with an empty upstairs room known to lovers, and he buries his head under her skirt under the table. The Basque picks her up at closing time; she is calm again by then.

The more striking infidelity is with the clairvoyant — a large West African man who sees all the women of the quarter. Nin writes it as a seduction disguised as a hypnosis. He tells Bijou to close her eyes; she decides to pretend to be asleep to see what he’ll do. He does a great deal. He kneels at the foot of the couch, lifts her skirt to look, touches her ankles and her knees with slow fingers, finds no underwear. He kisses her under her own dress. Then he undresses and continues without ever asking her consent, because he thinks she’s under.

“Not to move, not to move, so as to permit him to do all he wanted. What would a man do with a hypnotized woman whom he did not need to fear or please in any way?”

The passage is uncomfortable — she has consented by pretending not to, and that is the trick she is enjoying — but Nin is clear-eyed about it. Bijou’s pleasure is in the stealing; her whole desire is “bent on feeling it again, that strange pleasure of a stolen orgasm, as he was feeling the pleasure of these stolen caresses.” When she finally breaks and opens her eyes and mouth, he drops the pretense and takes her straight through.

She brings friends back to him later — Leila and Elena (this is Elena from the previous story, making her cameo as Bijou’s friend, and Nin is deliberately keeping the Elena arc at the edge of the frame rather than rerunning it). The clairvoyant performs a dance from his country, with a fake penis strapped next to his real one, and the three women — Bijou in particular, Elena watching and then joining, Leila trying to kiss everyone — pile onto him. Bijou takes both penises at once, one in each opening, and finishes first. Elena, more careful, waits while he recovers. Leila, who has never wanted a man before, asks for the fake penis from behind.

The fetishist — Bijou’s clothes

The clairvoyant has another habit. He wants Bijou to stop bathing so much, because he loves the smell of her body and soap destroys it. Then he wants her underwear. She brings him a nightgown. What he does with it is one of the chapter’s most unsettling images, not because of any violence but because Bijou is so utterly not the point.

“Now he took the nightgown, all crumpled and frothy, laid it on the bed, and threw himself over it full length, burying his sex into it, and began to move up and down against it, as if it were Bijou lying there.”

He does the same with her panties, with her stockings, with her black silk dress — wrapping, burying, inhaling, ignoring the naked woman next to him. Bijou tries to touch his penis with her mouth. He will not let her. He masturbates against her clothes until he finishes. “She lay naked and hungry at his side, watching his pleasure. It was tantalizing and cruel.” Later, after too much kissing has stretched her vulva, he becomes fixated on the idea of piercing her labia and hanging a gold ring on each, “as we do in Africa.” When he goes to fetch a needle, Bijou flees, and the clairvoyant is finished.

The stranger at the quay

The infidelities continue. Nin compresses them into short vignettes. The sharpest is the shortest. Bijou, walking the quays alone one night, leans over a low stone wall to look at the water, and hears a voice behind her:

“I beg you not to move. I will not hurt you. But stay where you are.”

The man is well-dressed and charming. He tells her that when he was fourteen he saw two dogs in the street — a female eating a bone, a male approaching her from behind — and since then the only thing that arouses him is a woman bending over. He does not enter Bijou. He presses against her from behind, holds her head down against the wall, finishes on her back, and runs. The whole encounter takes about a page. Nin does not editorialize. It happens, and it is over.

Leila, the whip, and a horse

A calmer interlude, and still inside the same register. Bijou and Leila go riding in the Bois de Boulogne. The saddle warms Bijou between the legs; she tells Leila afterward that her buttocks are burning. Leila, who has been watching her ride, asks to see. What begins as an examination becomes a scene with Leila’s riding whip. Bijou is laid over Leila’s knees and struck, first gently, then harder.

“‘I want you to burn down there,’ said Leila, ‘until you cannot burn any more, cannot bear any more. Then I’ll kiss it.’”

Bijou returns the whipping afterwards. Then both women, naked, mount one of the horses together and ride a little way with the saddle rubbing them. Then they put their clothes back on, and Leila whips Bijou again, more carefully this time, striking the sensitive opening between the buttocks until Bijou is convulsed. Nin writes it as a transaction of equals, which — compared to almost everything else in the chapter — it is.

The picnic

The cast assembles for a daytime outing. Elena and her lover Pierre, Bijou and the Basque, Leila and the African (the clairvoyant). Nin uses the picnic to run several scenes in parallel. Elena climbs a tree; the African, too heavy to climb after her, stands at the bottom looking up her skirt and asking what gift she’ll throw down. Bijou, jealous, announces that something has crawled into her clothes, and her men oblige by searching her, undressing her on the grass. Elena watches from her branch, warm and tingling.

The scene then turns, suddenly, into something darker. A stray dog wanders up to Bijou, who is lying naked on the grass, and the Basque holds her down and lets the dog go to work.

“Then the Basque, a cruel expression in his eyes, made a signal to Elena’s lover. Pierre understood. They held Bijou’s arms and legs still and let the dog sniff his way to the place he wanted to smell. He began to lick the satin chemise with delight, in the very place a man would have liked to lick it. The Basque unfastened her underwear and let the dog continue to lick her carefully and neatly. His tongue was rough, much rougher than a man’s, and long and strong. He licked and licked with much vigor, and the three men were watching now.”

Bijou struggles, then tires. The sun comes out on her pubic hair. “Her sex was glistening wet, but no one knew whether it was from the dog’s tongue or her pleasure.” When her resistance dies down, the Basque gets jealous and kicks the dog off her. That is how the scene ends. Nin does not moralize; she does not redeem the Basque; she lets it sit.

The Basque’s origin

After the picnic, the story begins to wind down. The Basque tires of Bijou and leaves her. Bijou, so used to his games and his bindings, can’t enjoy her freedom — can’t pose, can’t take other lovers, can’t take women. She wanders the streets.

Nin then turns to the Basque, and, unusually for this chapter, gives him an interior — a memory. When he was seventeen, his family hired a French governess for his younger sister. She was small and plump and wore patent leather boots; she had a mole at the corner of her mouth.

She told him, once, “I have another where you would never imagine one to be, and where you will never see it.” The line took hold of him.

The governess could not risk her job, so instead she began to give him things. A handkerchief first — her day’s perspiration on it. Then underwear. Then a brassiere. Then, in a parcel disguised as books, a black corset with lace edges. The Basque, alone in his room, wore the corset, buried his face in the panties, kept her clothes in his bed at night.

“At night he concealed all her clothes in his bed with him, and fell asleep on them, burying his sex in them as if it were into her body. He dreamed of her. The tip of his penis was constantly wet. In the morning there were rings under his eyes.”

Then she was called home, and he never saw her again. He bundled up everything she had given him and took the package to a brothel. He found a woman who resembled her and had her dress in the governess’s clothes — corset, brassiere, panties, stockings, boots — and stretched himself at her feet and asked her to touch him with the boot. The encounter goes well enough until he tries to enter her:

“He kissed the underclothing and tried to possess the girl, but as soon as she opened her legs to him, his desire died, for where was the little mole?”

The chapter ends there, mid-man, mid-obsession, without tidying up. Bijou is gone. The Basque is back where he started — a client in a house of prostitution, looking for a woman who can stand in for another woman — and the next story, the one about Pierre, is already beginning on the other side of the page.

The closing note is worth registering. After forty pages of panorama — the house, the madam, the roster, the set pieces, the cruelties, the picnic — Nin reveals that the Basque is not, structurally, an appetite at all. He is a wound. The endlessness of his pursuit has a specific shape and a missing mole at the center of it. Whether this retroactively excuses any of what he has done to Bijou is a question Nin does not bother to ask. She just lets the information sit next to everything else, and lets us decide what to do with it.

Chapter 13: Pierre

Pierre is the book’s longest portrait and its hardest. Everyone else in Delta of Venus is sketched; Pierre is drawn in full, and the drawing gets darker as it goes. He is the collection’s Don Juan, but Nin is not interested in celebrating him. She is interested in what a man like this carries, and in what he eventually does with it. The story begins with a corpse and ends, essentially, with incest. Between those two points, Pierre never manages to make a woman stay — or rather, never manages to stay inside whatever contact he makes. The whole story is a man who cannot arrive.

The body by the river

The first scene sets a tone the rest of the story never fully leaves. Pierre, still a youth, helps a bargeman pull a drowned woman out of the Seine. The bargeman runs off to fetch the police. Pierre is alone with the body.

He watched her with fascination. The sun was drying her. He touched her. She was still warm and must have died but a short while before. He felt for her heart. It was not beating. Her breast seemed to cling to his hand.

What happens next is one of the book’s most confrontational passages. Nin does not flinch from it, and she writes it in the same pastoral register she uses for any of her lovers — dew, wet flowers, morning grass. That dissonance is deliberate.

She lay stretched out, with her legs slightly parted, her arms straight along her sides. The sun was turning her skin to gold, and her wet hair looked like seaweed.

How he loved the way her body lay, exposed and defenseless. How he loved her closed eyes and slightly opened mouth. Her body had the taste of dew, of wet flowers, of wet leaves, of early morning grass.

He struggles to climax. When he finally does, it is under the threat of being caught — shouts coming from the quay. He runs. The woman haunts him for days, and the haunting takes a specific shape: he cannot hear rain without remembering her. This is the template for everything Pierre does afterward. Desire attached to a body that cannot respond. Pleasure that arrives only under pressure, only too late.

The crack in the wall

He flees the city and rents a studio in a fishing village, a cheap row with shared walls. Through a crack in the boards he watches a fifteen-year-old boy fumbling at the water closet, failing to climax. Later that night, through the same crack, he watches a woman of about fifty — heavy, gluttonous, “with a heavy face and gluttonous mouth and eyes” — draw the boy into the toilet stall and finish what he could not finish himself.

Nin writes this scene with an almost naturalist eye. It is squalid, but she does not label it squalid. The boy leaves wearing a tired smile. Pierre watches it all. It functions in the story the way the drowned woman does — as an image filed away, a piece of the scaffolding that will support what comes later. Pierre is a collector of scenes he should not be in.

Mary Ann

The memory that surfaces next is older. Pierre at seventeen, a friend of his mother’s named Mary Ann, a rainy afternoon, his mother sick in the next room. Mary Ann undresses behind a screen so her clothes can dry by the fire. She throws him petticoats, stockings. She lets him see her over the screen. He pulls the screen down.

She was unaffected by the fall of the screen. She said, “Now look what I have done taking my stockings off. Hand me the kimono.” He approached, staring at her — the first naked woman he had seen, so much like paintings he had studied in the museum.

She draws his head to her sex. His mother calls. Nothing is finished. Later his mother tells him what he did not know: Mary Ann was raped by Prussian soldiers in Alsace-Lorraine and has not let a man near her since. Pierre writes to her. She invites him over. In a dimly lit room she lets him touch her — hands only — but when he tries to enter she pushes him away, angrily.

She said, “I will make you come this way. Enjoy yourself.” He lay back quietly enjoying the caresses. But as soon as he closed his eyes he saw the soldiers bending over her naked body, he saw her legs forced apart, the opening dripping from the attacks, and what he felt resembled the furious panting desire of the soldiers.

She senses it, and she never sees him again. This is the other template. Every woman Pierre is drawn to is either unreachable — drowned, violated, forbidden — or he makes her unreachable by the way he desires her. His imagination is always crowding the room.

The house at forty

Time jumps. Pierre is forty, known locally as a seducer, with a long-broken liaison with Elena behind him (Elena being the heroine of an earlier story — Nin cross-wires her book this way). He has married Sylvia, a delicate woman whose health fails after two years. A doctor forbids her any sex. Pierre is stranded again.

They adopt two sixteen-year-olds from the village orphanage — John, a fair, cold, studious boy; Martha, a dark, strong, vivid girl. The two were inseparable in the orphanage. In the big house they continue to wrestle, to roam the grounds. Pierre watches.

Nin is careful here. She lets us see what Pierre sees, in the order he sees it: Martha’s femininity forming, John’s priggish refusal of it, Martha’s confusion. Pierre steps into the opening John leaves.

“What a stupid boy,” said Pierre, “that is absolutely untrue. He says that because he is too much of a girl and can’t appreciate your type of healthy and vigorous beauty. He is a sissy, really, and you are wonderfully strong and beautiful in a way he cannot understand.”

From there it is compliments, gifts, car rides, his hand briefly on her arm. Pierre does not push. He waits for the summer to do the work.

Nature was working in favor of Pierre’s humanness. The summer made Martha languid, the summer undressed her. Wearing fewer clothes, she was becoming more and more aware of her own body. The breeze seemed to touch her skin like a hand. At night she tossed in bed with a restlessness she could not understand.

The abandoned farmhouse

He takes her out to an old farmhouse on the edge of the property, ostensibly to check repairs for John’s future wedding. Inside, in a bedroom ruined but intact, he begins.

Pierre drew her body towards him and stretched her on the bed. She kept her eyes closed. This seemed merely like the continuation of a dream. Lying alone for many summer nights, she had been expecting this hand, and it was doing all that she had expected.

Martha realizes, with her eyes open, that the hand is Pierre’s and not John’s, and pulls back. She is disappointed. But the next day the body has the memory of the hand, and the memory wins. She drives out with him again, and this time it is she who lies down on the bed, she who says your hands, oh, your hands, Pierre. The only thing that breaks the spell is a kiss near the face — then the image of John returns.

She tries one more time with John. She bathes, wraps herself in a kimono, walks into his room at night with loose hair. She tells him she is leaving for Paris. He realizes, too late, that she is offering herself — and recoils.

“Martha! Oh, Martha!” he said. “What an animal you are, you are truly the daughter of a whore. Yes, in the orphanage everybody said it, that you were the daughter of a whore.”

She answers: “And you, you are impotent, a monk, you’re like a woman, you’re not a man. Your father is a man.”

That settles it. That night she goes to Pierre.

The incest, named

Nin does not pretend not to see what this is. Pierre is the adoptive father. Martha is sixteen, seventeen. She was raised in his house. The word for what happens is what the word for it is. Nin writes it anyway, and she writes it as the most alive passage in the entire story. This is the voice-transplant moment — after pages of Pierre’s frustrated searching, the prose lifts.

What joy to feel the soft youthful body sliding against his body. Summer nights he slept naked. Martha had dropped her kimono and was naked too. Immediately his desire sprang up and she felt the hardness of it against her belly.

Her diffuse feelings were now concentrated in only one part of her body. She found herself making gestures she had never learned, found her hand surrounding his penis, found herself gluing her body to his, found her mouth yielding to the many kinds of kisses Pierre could give. She gave herself in a frenzy, and Pierre was aroused to his greatest feats.

The house acquires secret geographies. A dark closet of winter coats by the front door becomes their animal den.

Pierre had been without sexual life for years, and Martha was meant for this and only came to life at these moments. She received him always with her mouth open and already wet between the legs. His desire rose in him before he saw her, at the mere idea of her waiting in this dark closet. They acted like animals in a struggle, about to devour each other.

And then the passage that explains why Nin writes the sex scenes at all — a sentence that says what the book is doing:

They became so saturated with love-making that if Pierre kissed Martha’s eyelids she could feel it between her legs.

That is the whole erotic theory of Delta of Venus in a single line. The skin becomes an organ that receives and transmits everywhere. The book works when that sentence is true.

John returns, and a third arrangement

John, cycling aimlessly, comes upon the abandoned farmhouse and sees them through an open door. He sees Martha “not only kissing Pierre’s sex, but crouching over his mouth, and then throwing herself against his body and rubbing her breasts against his.” He runs. He decides to enlist in the army — less to escape the war than to escape the scene. Martha, who wants both men, follows him to his room. What follows is the story’s strangest movement: she offers to come to his bed every night and sleep with him chastely, as children.

“I will not only break with Pierre, but I will come every night to you and stay with you and we will sleep like children, together, and I will prove to you how chaste I can be, how free of desire.”

She does not break with Pierre. She lies to Pierre. John, who is afraid of his own impotence more than anything else, accepts the arrangement. Night after night Martha arrives in a white nightgown and lies still beside him, pretending to sleep. He begins, hesitantly, to touch her in the dark.

She did not awaken. This gave him courage. He did nothing more than stroke her, softly feeling the curves of her body with care, every line of it, until he knew just where the skin grew softer, where the fullest flesh lay, where the valleys were, where the pubic hair began.

What he did not know was that Martha was half awake and enjoying his caresses, but never moving for fear of frightening him.

The story ends in two lines that land like a verdict.

He did not go into the army. And Martha kept her two lovers satisfied, Pierre during the day and John at night.

What the story is doing

Pierre begins with a body in a river and ends with a household running on a quiet lie. The arc is not from innocence to corruption — Pierre was never innocent in the story. It is from an empty compulsion to a functioning arrangement that looks, from the outside, like a family. The dissonance is the point.

Nin gives Pierre none of the romantic halo usually attached to the Don Juan figure. He is generous, attentive, patient; he is also the adoptive father of a teenage girl he grooms across a summer and sleeps with nightly in the bedroom next to his invalid wife’s. Both sentences are true. The story does not ask you to pick one.

What sits at the center of Pierre is a man who cannot reach anyone. The drowned woman could not be reached because she was dead. Mary Ann could not be reached because soldiers had already reached her. His wife cannot be reached because her heart will not bear it. Martha, finally, is a person he can reach — because she is in his house, because she is young, because there is nowhere else for her to go. The ease of that last reaching is what the story quietly indicts.

Chapter 14: Manuel

The shortest piece in the book. A page, maybe two. After Pierre it reads almost as comic relief — a notebook sketch of a man with a single, unshakable fixation. Manuel is an exhibitionist, but a strangely gentle one, more performance artist than menace, and Nin treats him with an amused, detached eye.

Sooner or later Manuel had to open his pants and exhibit his rather formidable member.

Everything else about him is charming. Astrologer, cook, café companion. The dissonance between the face — “ascetic,” “dreamy and poetic eyes,” “lean monklike body” — and the act is the whole joke. He is not a lecher. He is a monk with a compulsion.

The routine

He works parties. He models for women’s studios until the male students throw him out. He stands in dark streets under an overcoat and opens it at passing women, which is the one version of the act that gets him in trouble with the police. His preferred setting is a train compartment: half-drunk, half-asleep, penis visible through an unbuttoned fly, waiting to see who walks in. Mothers with schoolgirls are his paradise. If anyone stays and looks, he tips into trance.

If they turned away from him, he had no pleasure. If they looked at him for anytime at all, then he would fall into a trance, his face would become ecstatic, and soon he would be rolling on the floor in a crisis of orgasm.

The literary agent’s wife

He finds a workable arrangement with the exhausted wife of a starving literary agent. He does her housework — dishes, errands, sweeping — in exchange for one thing at the end.

This woman developed the art of satisfying him completely. She would become absorbed in the penis, saying, “It’s a beautiful penis you have there, the biggest I have seen in Montparnasse. It’s so smooth and hard. It’s beautiful.”

This is the piece’s comic register — a transaction so fair, so companionable, so absurdly specific, it tips into tenderness. He does the dishes; she admires the penis; everybody wins.

The twin

The story ends with a small miracle. Manuel, in his usual train compartment pose, finds his reflection across the aisle — a middle-aged prostitute who turns out to share exactly his kink. Neither of them wants contact. They want to be looked at while looking.

They sat in front of each other, staring. Manuel was afraid the woman would move and try to get hold of his penis, which was not what he wanted at all. But no, she was addicted to the same passive pleasure.

Manuel married this woman, who never tried to possess him in the way of other women.

That is the ending, a single deadpan sentence. Nin gives Manuel the only truly happy resolution in the entire back half of the book — a marriage built on not touching. After Pierre, it reads almost as a rest. A character who knows exactly what he wants and finds someone who wants the same thing, and no one gets hurt.

Chapter 15: Linda

A wife past thirty, still loved, slowly losing herself

Linda opens the story in front of a mirror. She is past thirty, still beautiful, still loved by her husband, still admired by young men. Nothing outside her body has changed. But something in her own eyes has: she sees, or thinks she sees, the first loss of firmness, the first fading of the “marble smoothness.” The whole chapter begins in that quiet, almost private panic — a woman afraid of her own diminishment, measured only in her own mirror.

Her husband André is still the lover of their wedding night. Nin describes him as the kind of husband who refuses to treat his wife as a wife. He takes her out, dresses her, feeds her, seduces her over and over, always elsewhere — never on the marital bed.

He would escort her to the opera and to the theatres famed for their dark boxes, and make love to her while they watched a spectacle. He would make love to her in taxis, in a barge anchored in front of Notre Dame that rented cabins to lovers. Everywhere but at home, on the marital bed.

Nin lingers on his obsession with her mouth — he has trained her sensuality so carefully that Linda knows, with a sinking certainty, that she is already on the far slope of her own erotic life. Her husband is spending his last fire on her. Hers is only beginning.

These practices had aroused her sensuality to such a degree that she was frightened. She was afraid of the day when André would cease to be sufficient for her. Her sensuality was, she knew, vigorous; his was the last burst of a man who had spent himself on a life of excess and now gave her the flower of it.

This is the seed of the whole story. Linda is a sheltered, adored, perfected woman who has begun to suspect that she has been trained for an appetite her own husband will eventually be too tired to feed.

The masked orgy in the Bois, and the workman who steals her

When André leaves on a ten-day trip, Linda lets a friend talk her into one of the fashionable masked parties in the Bois de Boulogne — society people in evening clothes, chauffeured to a mossy clearing, set loose under a mask. Linda dyes her hair blue-black and changes the shape of her face. This is the first thing she does in the whole story that is hers alone, not given to her by her husband.

At the clearing the masks, as Nin puts it, turn “the most refined ones into hungry animals.” Two men find Linda; one of them wins her. He is stronger, more brutal than anything André has ever shown her. When he has had her once, he offers himself back for her use:

He incited her to unleash her most violent appetite on him. She was hardly aware of biting into his flesh. He panted in her ears, “Go on, go on, I know you women, you never really let yourself take a man as you want to.”

She passes out. She wakes in a shabby hotel room beside him and learns he is not one of the guests at all — he is a workman who bicycles home past the Bois and has twice now slipped undetected into these orgies. He has stolen her out of the clearing because he could not bear to lose her.

Linda goes back to him. For a year the workman is the place where she feels most alive. Nin says it in one flat sentence: “It was the place where she felt most alive.” Then he leaves her for a woman who will cook for him and wait for him at home. Linda has been spoiled for her own class — no refined man can touch what the workman touched.

Michel, the hairdresser, and a theory of the female body

The next encounter is not erotic at all, which is part of the story’s patience. Nin gives a long, almost anthropological pause to Michel, Linda’s hairdresser, the priest of what Nin calls the Parisian cult of perfection. Hairdressers hear everything. Michel hears Linda.

Michel’s philosophy is laid out plainly: every woman should at least once be a whore. Jealousy is a form of miserliness. The best women are the ones who do not withhold. When Linda is grieving for the workman, Michel tells her to go, under an alias, to a discreet house on the Avenue du Bois, the kind that takes women “de bonne famille.” Not for money. To find out what she is still worth, and to be treated with the brutality no one in her own world will give her.

The story slows down here. Linda does not want a lightning bolt. Linda wants to test what is still alive in her.

The man with the handkerchief

The first client she is given at the house is almost comical, and almost sad. A grotesque, child-faced man, too soft for his age. He has no interest in possessing her. All he wants is the handkerchief between her legs.

“I have no intention of taking you as you expect me to. I am not interested in possessing you as other men do. All I ask of you is that you pass this handkerchief between your legs and then give it to me, that is all.”

He takes the handkerchief to the bed, wraps his penis in it, and finishes alone. Linda leaves. The madame is baffled — she had given Linda one of the gentlest, most harmless clients in the house. But the point of the scene is that Linda has learned nothing about herself. The brothel has failed in the way the Bois did not. This is part of Nin’s patience: not every door opens.

The Arab who is not an Arab, and the spell of perfume

The story’s most atmospheric encounter comes months later. Linda is sitting in the Bois on a Sunday morning when she catches a perfume she recognizes from a trip to Fez. It is coming from the hair of a Frenchman beside her. He is elegant, dark, smiling, with two crooked baby teeth. They talk about perfume, Arabs, patchouli, the docks where spices are stored. They walk. He takes her up to his apartment for an apéritif on his terrace.

What happens next is one of the purest things in the book — an erotic encounter carried not by the man but by a scent:

As he kissed her Linda was carried back to Fez, to the garden of the tall Arab. She remembered her sensations of that day, the desire to be enfolded in the white cape of the Arab, the desire for his potent voice and his burning eyes. The smile of the stranger was brilliant, like the smile of the Arab. The stranger was the Arab, the Arab with thick black hair, perfumed like the city of Fez. Two men were making love to her.

For two months Linda keeps returning. The perfume reaches her at all hours. On the street, about to cross, she remembers the smell and her knees give. Then, one day, she arrives and feels nothing. The Frenchman is suddenly only a Frenchman.

“Your perfume, you have no perfume on!”

“It’s finished,” said the Arab Frenchman. “And I cannot get any like it.”

She tries to imagine herself back into Fez. She cannot. The incense is not there. She never goes back. Linda has discovered, gently, that her desire is a fragile machine — that it lives by small triggers, a scent, a costume, a context, and that when those triggers are removed, a handsome man becomes only a handsome man.

The memory of the priest and the tassel

The story’s final movement is a memory that steps far back into Linda’s childhood. Restless again, afraid her body is dying, she thinks back to how she was first sexually awakened. Tight little-girl panties that made her scratch herself at night; fingers that found, accidentally, a place that hardened under them.

Soon after, she is sent to confession. A Dominican priest, warm-voiced, leans over her in his robe. From his belt hangs the long cord with a tassel. When Linda kneels against his knees, the tassel falls just where her fingers had found her that week.

The hard tassel that she felt just at the sensitive place between her legs affected her like her fingers’ caresses of the nights before. She tried to move closer to it. She wanted to hear the voice of the priest, warm and suggestive, asking about the impure dreams.

The priest coaxes her toward a confession of self-touching. Linda, who has realized the tassel is already doing the work, keeps him talking, pressing herself against it with each prompt, inventing sins to hold his attention.

Every word she said increased her excitement, and with a pretense of guilt and shame she threw herself against the priest’s knees and bowed her head as if she would cry, but it was because the touch of the tassel had brought on the orgasm and she was shaking. The priest, thinking it was guilt and shame, took her in his arms, raised her from her kneeling position and comforted her.

That is where Linda ends — not with a breakthrough, not with a new lover, but with a memory. The story loops her back to the moment she first used a man’s body (and a man’s voice, and a man’s unsuspecting ignorance) as the instrument of her own pleasure. The awakening was always hers. She simply spent a marriage, an orgy, a workman, a brothel, a perfume, and a priest’s tassel, all to find her way back to the fact.

The story’s pacing is the point. Linda does not convert. She accumulates. Each encounter adds one small reading to an instrument she has been carrying all along. Nin lets the story take the same slow, unhurried time that Linda’s body needed — no rush, no revelation, only the quiet, patient discovery that a woman’s sensuality is not something given to her by a husband or stolen by a workman. It is already there, answering to whatever happens to pass close enough to wake it.

Chapter 16: Marcel

A body before a man

Marcel arrives at the houseboat with blue eyes “full of surprise and wonder, full of reflections like the river.” The narrator — Nin herself, or something very close to her — does not introduce him by what he does or who he is. She introduces him by how he looks when he is not yet talking, when his malady is not yet showing.

I liked his pregnable self, sensitive and porous, just before he talked, when he seemed a very soft animal, or a very sensual one, when his malady was not perceptible. He seemed then without wounds, walking about with a heavy bag full of discoveries, notes, programs, new books, new talismans, new perfumes, photographs. He seemed then to be floating like the houseboat without moorings.

Marcel’s malady is analysis. He cannot touch, want, enjoy, without immediately turning it over, examining it, grasping at it. He consults astrology before making any move. He dresses differently every time he appears — bohemian tie, apache cap, monk’s coat, pimp’s scarf, peasant corduroy, sometimes bearded as Christ, sometimes clean-shaven as a Hungarian fiddler. He is the identity of changing, of being anything. Nin is not in love with Marcel. She is fascinated by his body and permissive with his mind.

Paris at five o’clock

Their early scenes drift. Rain on the roof of the houseboat. Marcel lies on the bed and says the river is a drug. Nin notices that Paris at five o’clock has “a current of eroticism in the air” — the hour when married women are free, the five-to-seven of all French novels. When Marcel leaves, his beard brushes her cheek as he kisses her goodnight, and the brotherly kiss is loaded with everything he is holding back.

She takes him dancing at the Bal Nègre and he freezes. He is afraid of the music, afraid of touching her, afraid of his own past. He tells her: “I feel as if I can inhale but not exhale.” Nin lets him off. She dances with someone else. On the walk home she does not lecture him — she simply thinks, I know the free Marcel. I want Marcel free.

Jealousy is what finally moves him. When he sees other men in her houseboat, his blue eyes darken. He pulls her outside onto the dark quays and kisses her fully for the first time, “his full, big mouth drinking mine.”

The red room

The day she visits him, Marcel has dressed in a Lapland costume to surprise her — fur hat, high black felt boots nearly to his hips. His room is like a traveler’s den. Red rugs on the walls, a bed of animal furs, objects from every continent, an air like the rooms of an opium dream. It is, Nin says, violently erotic before anyone has moved.

The furs, the deepred walls, the objects, like the fetishes of an African priest — everything was violently erotic. I wanted to lie naked on the furs, to be taken there lying on this animal smell, caressed by the fur.

His jealousy has melted his timidity. He is hungry, bestial, thorough. He wants to see everything. He is untiring. He postpones his own orgasm until she begs him to come. Afterward they lie in half-dark surrounded by sleighs, boots, crystals, seashells, a piece of lava from Krakatoa, a bottle of sand from the Dead Sea — and Marcel says, almost sweetly:

“You have the right rhythm for me. Women are usually too quick for me. I get into a panic about it. … They take their pleasure and then I am afraid to go on. … But you are slow. You are like me.”

This is the note Nin holds through the whole story. Marcel is not a great lover. He is an anxious one. Nin is drawn less to his prowess than to the way his anxieties take shape in his body — the way the penis of a timid, restless man moves differently from the penis of a relaxed one. She writes, almost clinically: “It is strange how the character of a person is reflected in the sexual act.”

Fantasies traded in the dark

Later, lying together on his couch, Marcel confesses his erotic fantasies — the oldest one being to lie under a woman in many petticoats and look up, which he traced back to his first nurse. Nin does the most generous thing a lover can do. She says: let’s do all of them. All night.

She puts on his Greek and Spanish peasant skirts, one on top of another. He lies on the floor. She dances, slowly, over his face, like the Arab women, hips shaking. Then she comes back naked in his black felt boots. He asks her to be cruel. She orders him to go out and bring back a handsome man to take her while he watches. He pales, but obeys — and returns with a Russian neighbor. She enjoys the Russian fully, deliberately, while Marcel sits with his penis out and wet eyes.

Marcel fell at my feet. “That was cruel. You know that I love you. That was very cruel.”

“But it made you passionate, didn’t it, it made you passionate.”

Then her fantasy: to be taken from behind at a window, in full view of the street, but in a posture that looks perfectly innocent. He takes her while she stands there, nobody on the other side of the glass any the wiser, the two of them coming like the couples that come in doorways and under bridges all over Paris.

The subway hand

Resting afterward, talking in the dark, she tells him about something that happened to her just hours before — a subway at rush hour, a tall man in front of her, a hand that touched her dress as if by accident and then did not stop being by accident.

The fingers became firmer, following the shape of the lips deftly, lightly. I felt a wave of pleasure. As a lurch of the subway pushed us together I pressed against the whole hand, and he made a bolder gesture, gripping the lips of the sex. Now I was frenzied with pleasure, I felt the orgasm approaching, I rubbed against the hand, imperceptibly. The hand seemed to feel what I felt and continued its caress until I came. The orgasm shook my body. The subway stopped and a river of people pushed out. The man disappeared.

The whole Marcel section is built like this — small vignettes, other lovers, other afternoons, the war beginning, a black-out in Paris, a night at an Arabian restaurant where a dancer picks up a ten-franc piece with her vulva and a young Arab flute player follows Nin into a cubbyhole and takes her among the coats while drunk soldiers walk past. The erotic world is thickening around Marcel, around her, around everyone. Paris is going dark. The dancers are drunk. The soldiers are drunk. The bar windows are painted over with blue.

War, and the last summer

The story’s second half begins with a single flat sentence: “War is declared. Women are weeping in the streets.” Nin walks through the first black-out in Paris — the little blue and green and red watch lights like Russian icon lamps, the café windows covered in dark cloth. Everyone is driven indoors, into each other. Everyone wants company.

Then Marcel and Nin, walking through the black-out, pulling aside heavy curtains to enter cafés “as if going into some underworld,” begin to remember out loud.

Marcel tells her the long, strange story of a young whore he once followed home to a fifth-floor room with no window — a room like a tomb, a cell. He had stayed two days and two nights.

It was wonderful to be shut in so securely with a young woman. It was almost as wonderful as being already inside of her cunt. It was the most marvelous room I ever made love in, so completely shut out of the world, so tight and cozy, and when I got inside of her I felt that the whole rest of the world could vanish for all I cared. There I was, in the best place of all in the world, a womb, warm and soft and shutting me in from everything else, protecting me, hiding me.

It is a perfect Marcel moment — a man who wants the whole world to be a room with no window, a man who wants the womb back. The war pressing in on Paris is the exact opposite weather. And then, as if stepping out of the black-out altogether, Marcel says the line that turns the whole book toward its ending:

“I am remembering St. Tropez. The most wonderful summer we have ever had…”

St. Tropez

Nin sees it as he says it. The yachts anchored in the harbour. The artists’ colony. Society people mingled with young postmen, young policemen, young fishermen — “young and dark men of the south.” Beach costumes. Laxity. Everyone fraternizing. The whole French coast in its last unbothered summer before the war.

On a patio under the sky, a jazz band from Martinique is playing hotter than the night. A voice announces that the lights will go out — first for five minutes, then ten, then fifteen, in the middle of each dance. The quart d’heure de passion.

A man called out, “Choose your partners carefully for the quart d’heure de passion. Choose your partners carefully.”

When the lights go out the first time, there is a scream, an outraged man, a voice calling for the lights. When they come back on everyone looks disturbed. Hair tousled. Shorts wrinkled. Faces flushed or pale. A woman’s shell jewellery cracks on the dance floor. Some people leave. Some wait like people waiting for a storm.

The second dance, ten minutes of darkness. The third, fifteen. The dance floor fills with “bodies in heat.” Marcel says he may be the one who breaks first. Shells crushed underfoot. Hairy chests under net shirts. The distinctions between whores and society women and town girls dissolving in the sultry Tahitian beauty of sunburnt skin and flowers.

Marcel’s head fell on my shoulders and he began to bite my shoulder, hard. We pressed against each other and moved against each other. I closed my eyes. I was reeling with pleasure. I was carried by a wave of desire, which came from all the other dancers, from the night, from the music. I thought I would have the orgasm then. Marcel continued to bite me, and I was afraid we would fall on the floor. But then drunkenness saved us, the drunkenness kept us suspended over the act, enjoying all that lay behind the act.

When the lights come back on for the last time, everyone is drunk “with nervous excitement.” Marcel can’t stand any more. He wants the beach.

The last taste

These are the book’s final paragraphs. They should be read slowly. Nin’s last gift to her reader is a scene that is almost weightless — no cruelty, no brothel, no jealousy, no analysis. Just the sound of jazz heard from a distance, like a heart, like a penis thumping inside a woman, and two people rolling in the sand while the sea comes in.

At the beach the coolness quieted us. We lay on the sand, still hearing the rhythm of the jazz from afar, like a heart thumping, like a penis thumping inside of a woman, and while the waves rolled at our feet, the waves inside of us rolled us over and over each other until we came together, rolling in the sand, to the same thumping of the jazz beats.

Marcel was remembering this, too. He said, “What a marvelous summer. I think everybody knew it would be the last drop of pleasure.”

That is where the book ends. A remembered summer, already past. A war already declared. Two lovers rolling in the sand to the beat of a jazz band on a patio they will not stand on again. The last drop of pleasure — said out loud, by a man who knows it is the last drop, in a city that has gone dark.

Nin leaves the reader with that phrase in the mouth. Not an orgasm, not a seduction, not a scandal — a remembered summer, and the quiet recognition that everybody knew, even while it was happening, that this was the final taste.

Claude’s Take

The book’s reputation rests on a legend — Anaïs Nin, broke in 1940s Greenwich Village, writing dollar-a-page pornography for an anonymous old man. The legend is better than most of the stories. What you actually have in hand is a collection that Nin herself treated as drawer-material for thirty-six years, and only released when she was dying. She was not wrong about most of it.

What works is very good. Elena is the real book inside the book — a hundred pages where Nin forgets the client, forgets the brief, and writes prose she cares about. The Leila and Bijou sections in particular are where her 1976 Postscript claim most obviously cashes out: pleasure described as diffusion rather than destination, bodies registered as fields rather than targets, “a million sexual openings” instead of one. Linda has some of the same patience — the hairdresser’s theory of the female body, the perfume that stops working when the bottle runs out, the Dominican priest’s tassel doing the work of the priest himself. Marcel ends the collection with a St. Tropez beach scene written almost against the grain of the rest of the book — no cruelty, no transaction, just two drunks rolling in the sand under the first blackouts of World War II. And the Preface’s letter to the collector (“Dear Collector: We hate you…”) is one of the best defenses of eroticism-against-pornography ever written, and worth the price of the book on its own.

What creaks, creaks audibly. The vignettes — The Boarding School, The Ring, Mallorca — read like notebook entries Nin would have deleted if she’d been writing for herself. The Hungarian Adventurer tips from picaresque into child rape on a single page; Nin never quite reckons with the register shift. Parts of The Basque and Bijou are brothel reportage with the bored efficiency of someone hitting a page count. The material that reads genuinely badly today — the Jay/Arnaud scene in Pierre, the picnic scene in Basque and Bijou, the Mallorca twist, the two little girls in Rome — is not decorative. It is a real part of what Nin was writing and what the client was buying. Pretending otherwise would falsify the book.

Does the collection support Nin’s later claim that she was smuggling a woman’s language into men’s territory? Partially. When she is writing Elena or Lilith or Marianne or Linda, yes — these are stories about women discovering that desire lives in imagination, in gaze, in smell, in anticipation, in context, and almost never in anatomy alone. The women in those stories are subjects. When she is writing the shorter picaresque pieces, no — the women are interchangeable flowers, their bodies inventoried the way the client presumably wanted them inventoried. She had to eat. She took the money. The distinction between these two modes, running through the same book, is what makes Delta of Venus an interesting historical document rather than the great feminist erotic text it is sometimes marketed as.

The book is for readers of Nin’s Diary who want to see what she was doing while she was being a diarist; for anyone studying the history of women writing about sex, where this collection is a real landmark simply by existing; and for anyone who wants to read Elena, which should probably have been published on its own. Readers who come for the erotica alone will find that Nin was right — the client was wrong. Sex without the poetry is boring. She proved it fifteen times in a row and then, somewhere around the middle of the book, proved the opposite.

claude_score: 7/10. A sharp Elena and a beautiful Marcel close, nested inside a collection that is uneven by design and by circumstance. Historical significance (first draft of a woman writing erotic literature in English) adds about half a point. The material that reads genuinely badly today subtracts about the same. Net, the score is slightly generous but defensible. If Nin had lived another ten years and let an editor cut the weakest three or four stories and publish only the strong middle as a slim volume, it would be an 8.5. As it stands — as Nin left it, drawer-shaped and uneven — 7 is where it lands.