“O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!”—former revolutionary Marie-Jeanne ‘Manon’ Roland de la Platière, as she was led to the scaffold

The Ancien Régime imprisoned people. The First Republic imprisoned other, different people. The Napoleonic Empire imprisoned still different people. Marquis de Sade achieved the singular feat of being imprisoned by all three.

The ancient alchemists theorized in the existence of ignis gehennae, or universal solvent. Sade was a universal convict. Anathema to all creeds, curse on all lips, breach of all laws written and unwritten; he increasingly seems made-up: a boogeyman for thought experiments.

“Oh, you think your hypothetical utopian society is hot shit? Well, suppose Sade comes along…”

His books are grotesque nightmares, and his real life frequently matched them. Even by the low standards of the 18th century French gentry, Sade was a depraved human being, wretched down to his bones. There are probably no good answers to “why did you torture that prostitute?” but “Which of several prostitutes are you referring to?” seems like a particularly bad one.

At least he had amibtion. I watched a TV documentary on Jared Fogle, and found it a dismaying exercise in Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. He was dull and drab and spiritually small. A pallid white lump, his face perforated by a horrible toothy little smile, existing like a smear of phlegm that I couldn’t wipe off my screen. He seemed bled dry of anything hale and human; a monster made of skim milk and tofu. Can’t the twentyworst century produce better bad guys than fucking Fogle?

The Marquis dreamed big dreams. His crimes (both fictional and otherwise) have a bloody, artistic grandeur. He was a Matisse of Misery, a Picasso of Pain. I’d prefer it if neither Sade nor Fogle existed, but if I had to choose one or the other, hail Sade.

Juliette (1797) is a sister book (literally) of his earlier Justine (1987). They describe the adventures of two destitute young women who seek their fortunes in Paris, taking different paths, and experiencing different outcomes.

Justine is saintly and pure and devoted to virtue. She is repaid with beatings, rapes, and degradations. Nature abhors goodness, a subtext made crystal-clear in the book’s final scene. Justine is finally rescued from a life of torture by her sister…and then a bolt of lightning strikes her down.

Juliette, meanwhile, is a sociopathic harlot who sins her way upward into the highest echelons of society. What’s interesting is how her character changed with time. In Justine (which Sade wrote inside the Bastille), she’s an opportunistic chancer who commits crimes out of necessity, rather than choice. She might still be able to redeem herself, and at the book’s end she appears to do so by (humorously) becoming a nun.

Madame de Lorsange [Juliette’s title – ed] left the house at once, ordered a carriage to be made ready, took some small provision of her money with her, leaving the rest for Monsieur de Corville to whom she gave directions concerning pious bequests to be made, and drove in haste to Paris where she entered the Carmelite Convent there. Within the space of a few years, she had become its model and example, known not only for her deep piety but also for the serenity of her spirit and the unimpeachable propriety of her morals

But in Juliette (written when Sade was free), she’s portrayed as comically evil and disgusting. She murders a lot of people, participates in a plot to cause a famine in France, and has sex with about five to ten thousand men, including the pope. She’s Messalina, Lucrezia Borgia, and Jeffrey Dahmer rolled into one—a character so ridiculous that she’s kind of funny.

The Justine/Juliette diptych mixes styles and affects. First, it’s porn. Second, it’s parody, mainly of romance “manners” fiction and books like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie. Third, it is an exposition of Sade’s worldview and philosophy: good is stupid, morality is stupid, and the purpose of life is to drench your hippocampus in pleasure, no matter who suffers for it.

“Before you were born, you were nothing more than an indistinguishable lump of unformed matter. After death, you simply will return to that nebulous state. You are going to become the raw material out of which new beings will be fashioned. Will there be pain in this natural process? No! Pleasure? No! Now, is there anything frightening in this? Certainly not! And yet, people sacrifice pleasure on earth in the hope that pain will be avoided in an after-life. The fools don’t realize that, after death, pain and pleasure cannot exist: there is only the sensationless state of cosmic anonymity: therefore, the rule of life should be … to enjoy oneself!”

Sade viewed pleasure like rays of sunlight gathered by a lens. The more rays are focused by the lens, the more it burns and destroys the ground beneath. If you want to know pleasure, you have to be prepared to know (and inflict) pain. Sade was a living Pyreliophorus, a colossal burning glass that incinerated everything it touched. Nobody (except maybe Ayn Rand) was ever such a dark, living embodiment of their own philosophy.

Juliette is a better book than Justine. The main character controls her fate, instead of being a punching bag. Sade has a troubled relationship with feminists (in the sense that fire has a troubled relationshp with TNT), so it’d be ironic if he created possibly the most agentic female character in all of 18th century literature. As surrealist writer Guillame Apollionaire once said:

“The Marquis de Sade, that freest of spirits to have lived so far, had ideas of his own on the subject of woman: he wanted her to be as free as man. Out of these ideas—they will come through some day—grew a dual novel, Justine and Juliette. It was not by accident the Marquis chose heroines and not heroes. Justine is woman as she has been hitherto, enslaved, miserable and less than human; her opposite, Juliette represents the woman whose advent he anticipated, a figure of whom minds have as yet no conception, who is arising out of mankind, who shall have wings, and who shall renew the world.”

And if you want nastiness, Justine‘s horrors are limited by the fact that the heroine must survive her abuses (although it’s still implausible that she doesn’t die at certain points), but because Juliette is the perpetuator, not the victim, and the gloves can come further off.

Juliette also shares many of Justine’s flaws. For one thing, it’s incredibly long—my English Austryn Wainhouse translation is about 450,000 words. There’s just too much book in this book.

For another, Juliette’s conflicting goals—satire, versus philosophical treatise—weaken each other. Often it’s not clear how serious he is. Are Sade’s endless rants (delivered through the mouth of some character or another) meant to be funny, or not?

“Before going farther, let us here observe that nothing is commoner than to make the grave mistake of identifying the real existence of bodies that are external to us with the objective existence of the perceptions that are inside our minds. Our very perceptions themselves are distinct from ourselves, and are also distinct from one another, if it be upon present objects they bear and upon their relations and the relations of these relations. They are thoughts when it is of absent things they afford us images; when they afford us images of objects which are within us, they are ideas. However, all these things are but our being’s modalities and ways of existing; and all these things are no more distinct from one another, or from ourselves, than the extension, mass, shape, color, and motion of a body are from that body. Subsequently, they necessarily…” [blah blah blah for another thousand words]

These ludicrous speeches are inserted in inappropriate places, frequently run for multiple pages, and stop the novel in its tracks like a bolt-gun to a calf’s brain. Eventually you just stop reading them—you see an ominous mass of text hanging on the page like a stormcloud, and skip it. They are pointless.

Is he convincing anyone? He could have written “feels good bro” and then found a more stimulating use for his wrist. The longer and louder you have to argue for something the less persuasive it seems. If libertinism is truly natural and right, he shouldn’t need to justify himself so much. He sounds like a lawyer bolstering a weak case. What would a psychiatrist make of Sade’s psyche? Did he know, deep down, that there was something pathological about him? In other words, who’s this justification for—us, or himself? “I’m normal! I’m normal!” is the battle cry of the person who’s absolutely not normal, and Sade’s appeals to universal human nature fall flat. His inhumanity was deeply unnatural.

(Incidentally, my favorite piece of Sade trivia is that they performed phrenology on him after he died. His skull was the perfect shape for a priest.)

Digressions aside, Juliette is an endless list of sins and outrages, mostly involving sex and blasphemy. It reminds me of those 90s porn videos series, where they go on and on, until you have Barnyard Sex Adventures #45 or something. It’s a long series of repetitive fantasies, unvarying in tone and content, delivered with the obsessive rhythm of an autistic child’s stimming.

Juliette’s endless escapades eventually provoke boredom, and then a coma. The book basically starts at self-parody and goes on from there. “Juliette gets buggered by a million trillion men while spitting on a cross while stepping on orphaned puppies”…much of the book is simply a permutation on that.

Yet Sade can actually write affectingly (and disturbingly) when he wants to. I enjoyed the moments where he transcends himself, and offers up something incalescently disgusting.

A dim, a lugubrious lamp hung in the middle of the room whose vaults were likewise covered with dismal appurtenances; various instruments of torture were scattered here and there, among other objects one saw a most unusual wheel. It revolved inside a drum, the inner surface of which was studded with steel spikes; the victim, bent in an arc upon the circumference of the wheel, would, as it turned, be rent everywhere by the fixed spikes; by means of a spring device the drum could be tightened, so that, as the spikes grated flesh away, they could be brought closer and contact with the diminished mass maintained. This torture was the more horrible in as much as it was exceedingly gradual, and the victim might well endure ten hours of slow and appalling agony before giving up the ghost. To accelerate or slow the procedure one had but to decrease or widen the distance between the wheel and the compassing drum

Sade had a gift for devising tortures. It’s lucky his relative poverty forced him to keep most of them on the page.

There’s also some parts where he anticipates the decadents, too, particularly a passage that will stay with me for a long time. It’s where Sade basically abandons any attempt at “manners” literature, and starts writing pure fantasy.

Juliette and a few consorts have journeyed deep into Russia. It’s portrayed as a blackened land of volcanoes that spit blue-white fire. Juliette throws a match onto a field. It erupts into flame.

In this improbable landscape, they encounter a literal fairytale giant. “Seven feet and three inches tall, with, behind huge moustaches, a face both swarthy and awful.”

This is Minski, a Russian lord who has established a fiefdom in this harsh land, mostly because it’s a place where the law does not exist.

The giant stoops and lifts a great stone slab no one else would have been able to budge; thus does he uncover a stairway; we precede him down the steps, he replaces the stone; at the farther end of that underground passage we ascend another stairway, guarded by another such stone as I have just spoken of, and emerge from dank darkness into a lowceilinged hall. It was decorated, littered with skeletons; there were benches fashioned of human bones and wherever one trod it was upon skulls; we fancied we heard moans coming from remote cellars; and we were shortly informed that the dungeons containing this monster’s victims were situated in the vaults underneath this hall.

Minski devours the dead bodies of children at his table, which is made from naked girls arranged and twisted together (the chairs and candelabra of his dining hall are likewise made of living nymphets.) Sade really delivers some perverted weirdness here. His descriptions of the giant’s appetites and behaviors are gruesomely earthy. It’s no less unrealistic than anything else in the book—just pure limbic system horror that engages the senses rather than the intellect.

Minski takes a shine to Juliette, and allows her to live and witness his lifestyle (most of her companions are…less fortunate). She soon participates in his barbaric sex-murders. Yet she senses that the giant’s favor will prove a fleeting thing, so she incapacitates him with a near-lethal dose of stramonium, and escapes. She doesn’t kill him, though. A man as evil as Minski doesn’t come along every day, and it’d be a shame to lose him.

So that’s Sade: he’s endless, repetitive, as sadistic to his readers as he is to his characters, and occasionally offers up brilliant visions. So what do we make of him?

A criminal, as I’ve said. Even death didn’t clear his name. His books were banned in France for over a hundred and sixty years. People were prosecuted for selling them in the nineteen-fifties. They were mass-burned in America. For a while, you could acquire yellowcake uranium more easily than one Sade’s books.

His extreme fantasies were clearly and disturbingly connected with real things. There is his real-life crimes to consider. Libertinism was no joke for Sade, no ironic pose. He tried to practice what he preached. Most “edgy” writers are smoke without fire. Marquis de Sade wasn’t just fire, he was thermonuclear plasma.

But even his writing, viewed in isolation, seems to hit a cultural nerve. Inside every priest is a hypocrite, and in every king a tyrant. Thrones are edifices raised atop conspiracy and filicide. “Self-made” men become rich by exploiting those under them. Goodness is a mask for sociopaths too clever to get caught. And the concept of virtue is worse than false: it is a psychosexual weapon wielded to make others (particularly women) easy to control. You should take pleasure wherever you find them. The only law is that there is none. And so on.

All of of this formed the bedrock of the Sadean worldview. Some find it true. Others find it revolting. Still others find it both things. Nobody finds it ignorable or trivial.

Sade’s words leave a shadow in the mind. His bizarre pornographic fantasies are littered with allusions to Hobbes, and Malthus. He presages Darwin, Haeckel, Lamarcke, Hitler. He was an atheist, yet revered nature’s impulses with fanatical zeal. Indeed, he thought they were the only real thing, and human institutions were just thin froth riding atop a dark and deep ocean.

Maybe we hated him because he told the truth? Sade was born in a palace and died in an insane asylum. Perhaps his main observation was that the two places are very much alike.

“Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.”

Eight hundred years. You sense their weight; feel them wrapped around each word like chainmail. I thought it would be easy and fun to read Georgia’s foremost national poem, but I was mistaken. Nobody can read The Knight in the Panther’s Skin at all.

Or you can read it, but from a great distance. It’s like staring through a telescope at a distant pulsar – you know the faint glow beating raggedly against the lens is not how the pulsar would look in reality, but that doesn’t bring you any closer to its light, and so it goes for old stories. The text sits in your hand, yet somehow isn’t there at all. It belongs somewhere (and to someone) else.

Jonathan Swift’s books from 300 years ago still hit hard, and so do Shakespeare’s plays. Maybe eight hundred years might be too far for a time capsule to travel. Empires have risen and fallen in that time, and so have literary movements. Everything is different – too different. The Knight in the Panther’s Skin is ultimately a book for interpretation and guesswork, not raw, sensual experience. That’s sad.

It tells the story of the knight Avt’handil, who is on a quest for the great knight Tariel, who is on a quest for the maid Nestan-Daredjan, who has (etc). Rustaveli’s tale unpacks itself like a sequence of matryoshka dolls, and there’s a cyclical element to the narratives within narratives.

Rustaveli’s eternal wayfarers encounter friends, enemies, visions. They fight battles, and discurse on philosophy. They hunt deer. Comparisons to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur are easy, but there’s little sense of fate or destiny or divine providence. Instead, Rustaveli seems more interested in painting the emotional world of the characters.

It can be unexpectedly modern, even a little existential. Everybody, man or woman, is essentially their own person, doing things because they want to. There’s little sense of dry ecclesiasticism – it’s a warm and emotional work. There’s even some passages that now read imply things very at odds with what Rustaveli might have imagined (but who knows?)

Tariel met him. They were both fit to be ranked as suns, or as the moon in heaven, cloudless, spreading her rays on the plain beneath. Compared with them the aloe-tree was of no worth; they were like the seven planets; to what else shall I liken them?

They kissed each other, they were not bashful at being strangers; they opened the rose, from their lips their white teeth shone transparent. They embraced each other’s neck, together they wept; their jacinth, which was worth rubies, they turned into amber.

Quatrains 275 and 276

The plot is complicated, and the nested perspectives make it hard to keep track of who’s saying and doing what. But there are simple repetitive motifs that reoccur at every level. It’s less a story than an algorithm, like Conway’s Game of Life: it’s hard to understand by staring at the replicating cells, instead it’s better to learn the rules and let the details sort themselves out. Everyone’s questing, everyone’s unfulfilled, the roads wind on forever, etc.

I can only read things in English, and must use a translation. But The Knight in the Panther’s Skin was originally poetry: 1,600 quatrains (or four-line stanzas) in stylized Georgian verse. My 1912 English translation by Marjory Wardrop drops the poetic meter, turning it into a prose narrative. There’s a newer translation that preserves the rhymes, but I’m sure the text was further corrupted to make that happen. Even if I could read the original Georgian, I’d still be reading it with modern eyes and modern sensibilities. There’s a gap from here to the past that can’t really be crossed. And the book’s fey, dreamlike narrative may have been so idiosyncratic that only Rustaveli truly understood what he was saying.

The Knight in the Panther’s Skin is now regarded as a national epic, but Rustaveli’s vision extends far beyond Georgia’s borders. He has his characters exploring the entirety of the known world. We visit fictional versions Cathay, and India. It’s even theorized that the merchant city of Gulansharo that Avt’handil visits in quatrain 1309 might be Venice.

I don’t know if Rustaveli ever went to these places in real life. Certainly, his descriptions don’t seem particularly vivid. India (Tariel’s homeland) is described as a land with seven kingdoms, with one king holding sway over six. There’s no language barrier: Avt’handil and Tariel freely converse. It’s likely that Rustaveli treated India and China the way H. Rider Haggard treated inner Africa – an exotic locale for his heroes to have their adventures.

A sense of oneiric wonder prevails. The characters are like wind-sculpted smoke, endlessly changing to suit the story – in the opening quatrains, the king describes himself as aged, and at death’s door.

“My day is done; old age, most grievous of all ills, weighs on me; if not to-day, then to-morrow I die–this is the way of the world. What light is that on which darkness attends? Let us instate as sovereign my daughter, of whom the sun is not worthy.”

Quatrain 36

But soon after, he’s healthy enough to undertake a monumental hunting trip with Avt’handil.

The king commanded the twelve slaves: “Come, accompany us, bring us the swift bows, prepare the arrows, compare what is struck and keep count of the shots.” Game began to come in from every corner of the plain.

Herds of game, innumerable, flocked in: stags, goats, wild-asses, high-leaping chamois. Lord and vassal pursued them; what sight could be fairer! Behold the bow, the arrow, and the untiring arm!

The dust from their horses’ tracks cut off the sun’s rays. They slew, their arrows sped, blood flowed through the field; as the shafts were shot away the slaves brought more of them. The beasts wounded by them could not take another step.

They ran through that field; they drove the herd before them. They slew and exterminated, they made wroth the God of the heavens, the fields were dyed crimson with the blood they shed from the beasts. Those who watched Avt’handil said: “He is like an aloe-tree planted, in Eden.”

Quatrains 74-77

Was the king lying about his infirmity? Or did Rustaveli merely want to include a hunting scene and didn’t feel like revising what he’d written before? Answering that requires nothing less than a time machine back to medieval Georgia and a syringe of sodium pentothal.

Everything about the text exists on the same of shifting quicksand: you never know how you’re supposed to take anything. Even the title is unclear. Is it really a “panther”? Some translations render it as “tiger”. Is it meant as a meant as a pastiche? Don’t know. Who was Rustaveli? What did he achieve in life, and what did he experience? Was the book an attempt to win the favor of “King Tamar” (as quatrain 4 indicates), or is it more personal?

But maybe this ambiguity is fitting, because Georgia is an ambiguious country. It’s neither east nor west. It’s at the crossroads of people groups and faiths. Empires have warred over it. At the time of King Tamar (who was a queen!), it was a nascent empire in its own right.

As conquerors and Khans and and immigrants rolled across the country, each left their own stamp. Like the Balkans across the Black Sea, Georgia ended with up a gestalt, mongrelized identity, and an aesthetic outlook to match. If Christianity is red and Islam is green, Georgia’s religious makeup could be described as yellow (perhaps with a pinkish tinge), and that comes through in the book.

Rustaveli was probably a Christian. The book contains plenty of nods in that direction, and some phrasings seem drawn directly from the Bible (“gall of bitterness” in quatrain 99, for instance). But there’s also some references to Mohammed, Mecca, the Koran. The philosophical outlook is very Sufi – some of the odder asides could be dropped in from the tales of Nasruddin and you wouldn’t notice. Rustaveli has a very…cosmopolitan view on faith, and this apparently got copies of the book burned by ecclesiastical powers in the 18th century.

But how does it read?

Viewed as a historical text, Knight is fascinating. Viewed as literature, your ability to enjoy it depends on your willingness to let go of modernness. Some medieval literature is bloodless. But Panther has the opposite quality: it’s entirely blood. It’s a raging river of emotion and feeling that quickly drowns the senses. Nobody’s just handsome. They glow with such aureate splendour as to dim the sun. Nobody’s merely upset. They rend their faces and decant bitter wormwood tears.

He lay down on his bed, he weeps, it is difficult for him to wipe away the tears, he shivered and swayed, like an aspen in the wind; when he fell into slumber he dreamed his beloved was near, he starts, he cries out loud, his suffering increases twentyfold.

Quatrain 139

Rustaveli writes with a bludgeon, not a scalpel. This was the style of the time, I guess. But it makes you appreciate modernism, and its softer, lighter touches. After a few hundred quatrains of that, it has a deadening (or deafening) effect. When everything is turned up to 11, you lose track of what’s actually important. It’s like having a gong banged beside your head constantly as you read.

The book is rewarding, but it’s hard: I can’t stress that enough. Vast amounts of meaning have vanished from The Knight in the Panther’s Skin‘s core and cannot be recovered. You feel the loss, which resounds right through the text. It’s like wood that’s been subtly eaten from inside by termites – it still holds together, but it’s less weighty than it should be. Thousands of holes seem to be chewed in the book’s meaning.

Reading about turns us all into knights errant, seeking answers. It’s a story for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, but which still matters, because it lead directly to the world we have now.

When you read early erotic novels (1748’s Fanny Hill, 1747’s Les Bijoux indiscrets, 1787’s Justine, etc), something sticks out. No, not that. Don’t be disgusting.

I’m talking about the authors: Cleland, Diderot, Sade, etc. They’re all men. Female-written erotic work in the Western canon literally crosses from Sappho’s poetry (~570 BC) to Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1957) in one step, with nobody in the intervening 2,527 years. Early erotica authors were literally all male.

Or were they? It’s possible (though unprovable) that one of the shadier early manuscripts was written by a woman, and either published anonymously or under a man’s name. Note that that the two prominent female erotica authors of the postmodern era – Réage and Anaïs Nin – both took active steps to conceal their identities. Réage was a pen name. Nin’s stories in Delta of Venus (which were written in the early 1940s and published posthumously in 1977) were intended for a private collection.

“Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret,” Stephen King wrote in one of his books. So is sex, at least where women are concerned. We accept with a shudder that they have sex (that’s where babies come from), but writing or reading about sex? That’s just too weird. Men are beasts and can’t help themselves, but why would a lady write about something that should be hidden?

Well, the hiddenness makes it attractive. The box you most want to look inside is the one you’re told to leave alone. It’s the censor’s paradox: people want forbidden fruit.

The increasingly explicit content of the mid 20th century ruined erotica, in books as well as film. It’s rather like Johnny Rotten’s observation that you demystify the swastika by wearing one: if everyone dressed in Nazi regalia, it wouldn’t trigger the cultural acceptance of fascist ideas: it might actually do the reverse. Could anyone feel awe at the sight of a sonnenrad, after seeing the lamest dork in the neighborhood wear one?

Anaïs Nin’s early writing actually has more shock value than modern porn; you can see her hands bleeding as she pulls walls down.

As I’ve said, we were never meant to read Delta of Venus. This adds the reader’s unintended voyeurism to sins on the page, which are legion: incest, buggery, rape, bestiality, and pedophilia. Nin writes about all of this with an praeternatural lack of judgment. She just documents human iniquity on the page, the way a camera obscura might.

It’s certainly diverse. One wonders what Nin’s collector (probably a heterosexual man) got out of stories like “The Boarding School” (“The experienced boys penetrated his anus to satisfy their desire, while the less experienced used friction between the legs of the boy, whose skin was as tender as a woman’s. They spat on their hands and rubbed saliva over their penises. The blond boy screamed and kicked and wept, but they all held him and used him until they were satiated.”). Sometimes the tales are gruesome and excessive. “Mathilde” and “The Ring” feature genital mutilation. Horrible stuff. You shouldn’t want to read it. I forbid that you read this book. Please don’t open the box.

It seems to me that erotic writing has gentrified itself. It now possesses rules about what subjects are okay, what subjects are off-limits, trigger warnings, and so forth. Some AO3 stories have lists of tags and disclaimers that are nearly as long as the stories themsevles. By contrast, Delta of Venus offers a look back at a weirder, wilder time: where erotica was so far from the pale it was almost in the black.

Nin, like Tolkien, was rediscovered in the 70s. She cuts a confusing figure: it’s hard to know what to make of her. She was of Hispanic descent, yet her settings of Brazil and Peru seldom rise above exoticism (her descriptions of Paris in “Marcel” are far more vivid). She rejected the Catholicism of her youth, yet it hangs across her writing like the Shroud of Turin (“The Boarding School”, for example, gets most of its punch from the emotional repression of its setting).

She’s hard to claim as a feminist figurehead. She lived under the shadow of men all her life: Henry Miller, DH Lawrence, her father, and the anonymous “collector” who made all of this possible. The stories are all written for male consumption, although with shards of her personality poking through the pornographic narrative like iceberg-tips. She stands in two epochs: old-fashioned yet modern. This make her captivating: she can’t be captured for some political cause.

“I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”

Anais Nin, Henry & June

Even her descriptions of sex embody this contrast, with high romantic verbiage clashing with gutter crudeness.

“For the first time, the hunger that had been on the surface of her skin like an irritation, retreated into a deeper part of her body. It retreated and accumulated, and it became a core of fire that waited to be exploded by his time and his rhythm. His touching was like a dance in which the bodies turned and deformed themselves into new shapes, new arrangements, new designs. Now they were cupped like twins, spoon-fashion, his penis against her ass, her breasts undulating like waves under his hands, painfully awake, aware, sensitive. Now he was crouching over her prone body like some great lion, as she placed her two fists under her ass to raise herself to his penis. He entered her for the first time and filled her as none other had, touching the very depths of the womb.”

Artists and Models

The stories are mostly fast and short, thrashed out quickly, establishing a scenario that swiftly builds to an explosive climax (or climaxes). None take more than a few minutes to read. Nin was supposedly paid a dollar a page for this stuff: one admires her restraint in using so few paragraph breaks.

And while the stories seem bold and incredibly revealing, they’re nothing of the sort. Nin wrote this stuff for money. She was pushed at every turn by the “collector” to focus more on sex, more on body parts, more on the beast with two backs. Her natural inclination toward poetry was throttled. The introduction contains a letter, written by Nin to the Collector. It’s basically history’s first “men only want one thing, and it’s disgusting”.

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.

introduction

Delta of Venus is well-written, but its stories often have a note of cynicism, or contempt. “The Hungarian Adventurer” describes a man of incredible attractiveness, charm, and virility (perhaps how the Collector liked to imagine himself?) before turning him into a bloated, aging pig, abandoned by his children. “Lilith” involves a woman trying to spice up a marriage with Spanish fly. The ending is such a thudding anticlimax that I think this must have been the intended effect.

These little rebellions against form are as fascinating as the form itself. Like Nin, the book is complex, with many layers.

“There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned,” he said. “I see it in fragments of cut marble, I see it in worn pieces of wood. There is a perfection in a woman’s body that can never be possessed, known completely, even in intercourse.”

Marcel

By her own standards, Nin was perfect. Worn, broken, weird; selling prose for a dollar a page.

Yet she could not be possessed.