Sex & The Book / The Fire of Passion by Anaïs Nin

The writer Anaïs Nin was born in France in 1903 to a singer of French-Danish origin and a Cuban pianist, who left her family when Anaïs was only 11 years old. He soon moved to New York with his mother and brothers, before returning to Paris in the 1930s and experiencing the artistic ferment of the most glamorous capital there is. Married to a banker, with whom she will remain tied all her life despite her unhappy marriage, Anaïs is a restless spirit and an enlightened writer, one of the most controversial of the twentieth century, thanks to her strong stories with an erotic content. Accustomed to taking refuge in adulterous relationships to escape marital unhappiness, Nin begins an affair with her psychoanalyst, then meets the writer Henry Miller and is immediately passionate, even with his wife, in fact.

"Instead of a single sex center, Elena's body seemed to have millions of equally sensitive sexual openings, each skin cell endowed with the sensitivity of a mouth. The very flesh of her arms opened and contracted as her tongue or fingers passed. Leila's fingers. Elena moaned, and Leila bit her flesh as if to tear out louder moans. Her tongue between Elena's legs was like a dagger, nimble and sharp. When the orgasm came, it was so vibrating that it shook theirs. bodies from head to toe "

Elena is one of the protagonists of the erotic stories of Nin collected in the work The Delta of Venus. They were commissioned by a man of unknown identity, known as "The Collector", for his very private use and consumption. The writer explores with intensity and unscrupulousness the most controversial issues related to eros, in a world - literary and not only - which until then had left very little room for the female voice and everything she had to say about sex. The Elena of the story is in love with Pierre, but that love is not enough for her. Rather, he seems to have awakened her true nature in her, an active, masculine nature: "You are too full of love", Says her friend Miguel,"You will love a lot of people". And this is how Elena begins a relationship with Leila, a singer of a dubious sex night club, an uninhibited advocate of female homosexuality.

In the taxi, next to her, Elena is able to feel all the tragic spirit that hides under a refined patina, she understands her wounded soul and is fascinated by it: "Leila had to suffer more than a man, because of his lucidity on women, of its inability to be deceived ”. Elena's love for Leila is immediately a carnal love, an insatiable hunger. But when their relationship also ends up stabilizing, Elena will feel the push towards new adventures. What interests her is not the "rootedness of love", but the burning of passion and the more she will love Pierre, the more she will feel within herself the power and need to love someone else.

Anaïs' writing seems to catch fire. It is sensual, brash, poetic like its protagonist. Can love for a man be so strong that it ceases to be a prison for two and free our most infinite capacity to love? Can it become the beginning of a journey into the world of pleasure, an invitation to explore one's most hidden desires? After all, Anaïs seems to tell us, love is nothing but a continuous search for oneself.

by Giuliana Altamura

Opening photo from the film Henry & June, © Universal, which tells the love triangle between Anaïs, Henry Miller and his wife, June

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