This month features Anaïs Nin's A Spy in the House of Love, Penguin Classics, 0141183713, £6.99
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There is, unlikely as it may at first seem, a good deal of the essayist in the famously erotic writer Anaïs Nin - just as there was in D.H.Lawrence and Aldous Huxley.
At one point in A Spy in the House of Love, the narrator is introduced by her current lover to her current lover's lover. Her real name, or the name given the reader, is Sabina; her lover jokingly introduces her as 'Dona Juana.'
For most of the book, Sabina is self-consciously trying to turn herself into a female Don Juan, the ultimate spy in the house of love.
Sabina has a regular partner, Alan, who is possessed of an 'equable smile and [an] equable temper'. He is solid, dependable, and does not provide her with the wildness she craves.
Sabina, widely travelled but currently resident in Manhattan, also has a 'repulsion of home, husband and children'. She 'wills to be like man, free to possess and desire in adventure, to enjoy a stranger.' At one point, she observes, 'How good not to love.'
And so, as they say, she 'embarks upon a series of affairs' - and as this is Anaïs Nin, they are symbolic affairs: with Philip, an opera Singer who represents high culture, Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war; with Mambo, a quad- or octoroon from the Ile Joyeuse, a drummer, writer, unwilling primitive; with John, a grounded airman who stands for wounded, crazed America; with Donald, a camp Freud-suggestive mother's boy. Finally she meets up with Jay, an old lover with whom she recalls her Bohemian days in Paris with 'all her friends the artists'.
At the start of the novel, Sabina dials a wrong number, and the recipient of that call, known only as 'the lie detector', pursues her from then onwards. At the end, assisted by the real-life writer Djuna Barnes, he conducts an amateur psychoanalysis of his quarry: 'Yours is a story of non-love...'
It has become clear that, despite her ambition to be Don Juan, Sabina is essentially, if momentarily, changed by each of her encounters. The mother's boy calls out the maternal part of her; she is unable to resist. In this, she fails truly to become a female Don Juan, because the Don, despite infinite conquests, remains changeless.
A Spy is the House of Love, whilst clearly anticipating women's struggles to achieve sexual liberation during the 1960s and '70s, is very much a novel of its time. (It was first published in 1954.) The episode with mostly-black Mambo, 'the composer of music which was a distillation of the barbaric themes of his origin' can be cringe-making: 'Drum! Mambo, drum! Drum for me.' But becomes more forgiveable when understood as part of an extended sexual fantasy, or rhapsody, or essay.
Anaïs Nin is propounding, but also subtly undermining, a fairly modish primitivism - the kind that derives from Pablo Picasso's collection of African sculpture, from Vachel Linday's poem 'The Congo', from D.H.Lawrence's theories of the blood, from ideas about Jazz, jungle drums and debased American Negritude.
Sabina wishes to 'destroy everyday life'. She prefers, or pretends to herself that she prefers, the ruins of a South American city ravaged by earthquake to the 'perfect lawns, costly churches, new cement and fresh paint' of Long Island. White Westerners have become the 'zombies of civilization, in elegant dress with dead eyes'.
At its most interesting, and contemporary, the novel tries to deal with a fragmented subject, 'A divided woman indeed, a woman divided into numberless silhouettes'.
And it wishes to argue for a natural, sensible, liberated solution: 'Each year, just as a tree puts forth a new ring of growth, she should have been able to say: "Alan, here is a new version of Sabina, add it to the rest, fuse them well, hold on to them when you embrace her, hold them all at once in your arm, or else, divided, separated, each image will live a life of its own, and it will not be one but six, or seven, or eight Sabinas who will walk sometimes in unison, by a great effort of synthesis, sometimes separately, one of them following a deep drumming into forests of black hair and luxurious mouths, another visiting Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war, and still another lying beside an insane young man, and still another opening maternal arms to a trembling frightened Donald." Was this the crime to have sought to marry each Sabina to another mate, to match each one in turn by a different life?'
Halfway through, another outcome is subversively hinted at: 'Every spy's life ended in ignominious death.'
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