Auletris

The commission's history explains the gap. What Nin wrote for the collector went out as typescripts; what she kept became Delta of Venus and Little Birds after her death. But not everything came home. Auletris preserves material that survived in a separately made carbon — a copy bearing the title 'Auletris' (Greek: a female flute player) — which passed through collectors' hands for decades before scholarship caught up with it. 'Marcel' partially overlaps text Delta of Venus printed; 'Life in Provincetown' was essentially unknown.

Publication came from inside the Nin world: Sky Blue Press, the small house devoted to her work, with Paul Herron — editor of the unexpurgated diary volumes — establishing the text and the provenance. For readers, the interest is double: more of the forties erotica in its unretouched register, and a case study in how a scattered, half-anonymous body of work keeps yielding finds a lifetime after it was written.

Two long pieces from the 1940s commission. 'Life in Provincetown' turns the Cape Cod art colony Nin knew from wartime summers into a linked erotic portrait of a town — painters, fishermen, models, and visitors circling one another through the season. 'Marcel' — a version of which partially appeared in Delta of Venus — follows its title character and the narrator through the commission's more Parisian register. Both run in the mode the collector paid for and Nin subverted: explicit by assignment, psychological by instinct.