Internal Landscapes

Hiroshima mon amour

Gillian Anderson reads Anaïs Nin's passionate letter about sex and poetry From Delta of Venus, originally published: 1977

In the 1940s, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, and a small circle of other writers were commissioned by a wealthy, anonymous client referred to only as "The Collector" to write explicit, erotic stories for $1 per page. This client had a very particular request: he demanded that they "leave out the poetry" and "concentrate on sex." However, Anais Nin, being the deeply poetic and literary writer she was, hated this restriction and found it suffocating. She didn’t believe in writing about sexuality without depth, emotion, and art. Frustrated by his demands, she wrote a scathing yet beautifully worded letter to the anonymous patron, in which she defended eroticism as an art form and refused to strip her writing of its lyrical, sensual, and psychological depth.