Gentle Porn

By Paul Gray

LITTLE BIRDS: EROTICA

by Anais Nin;

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

146 pages; $8.95

Anais Nin was an indefatigable diarist, a sometime poet, novelist and Spanish dancer, a Boswellian collector of literary friends and a flamboyant promoter of her small but genuine talents. Ironically, her death two years ago at age 73 preceded by only a few months the general fame she had courted so long. The source of this attention was a cache of erotic stories she had written, for cash, in the early 1940s; her patron was an anonymous collector who told her to "leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex" and paid her a dollar a page. Published posthumously under the title Delta of Venus, these stories climbed the bestseller charts in mid-1977 and settled there for more than six months. Nearly a million paperback copies of the original have been sent out into the world.

Such success prompts repetition. No one should be surprised, therefore, to learn that there are still more sexual stories where Delta of Venus came from and that 13 of them are now being released as Little Birds. Although shorter and weaker than their predecessors, these newly uncovered tales radiate the same musty, hothouse sensuality, and their appeal as literary curiosities seems equally strong. For in tackling explicitly sexual subjects, Nin was poaching on an established male preserve. Pornography in all its guises had al most always been written by men and for men. Not only was Fanny Hill no lady, she was not even a woman; she was the mouthpiece for John Cleland. Moll Flanders, another notable 18th century bawd, was of course the creation of Daniel Defoe. Nin recognized this problem, and her attempted solutions give Little Birds some historical value.

Occasionally she simply imitates men writers, particularly D.H. Lawrence, who was the subject of her first book. The Laurentian passages veer close to parody: "She was cutting, biting. She herself was like an impregnable virgin, though not puritanical or squeamish. She was open like a man, used lusty words, told bawdy stories, laughed about sex. But still she was impregnable to all."

More often, Nin's tone is languid, dreamy; she clutters her stage with fin de siecle props and elegant clothes. Her potential lovers meet in artist's studios or Parisian sidewalk cafes. Traditional pornography gets to the point quickly, setting out the sexual ABCs with no nonsense. Nin, however, lingers over the calligraphy; she works as hard keeping her partners apart as she does bringing them together.

But her biggest break with erotic conventions involves the introduction of impotence. This subject, needless to say, is the last thing a man wants to find in his porn. Yet some form of this failure figures in nearly all Nin's tales. A typical situation involves a husband who places his new wife so high on a pedestal that he cannot reach her to make love. Artists paint nude models instead of possessing them. Though these repeated male shortcomings may constitute a kind of sexual revenge, they also lend Nin's stories a plausibility missing in most erotica.

Successive Supreme Court decisions have left the issue of pornography hopelessly muddled, but it is difficult to imagine a community whose standards would be offended by Nin's tales. Read in the supposedly liberated '70s, these pictures from a stricter age take on a quaint charm. They are reminders that there was a time of garters and romantic assignations, an age when sex delighted not because it was healthy but because it was naughty.

-- Paul Gray

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