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Djuna Barnes ( ; June 12, 1892 – June 18, 1982) was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.Parsons, 165-6.
In 1913, Barnes began her career as a freelance journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.Herring, 66, 75. By early 1914, Barnes was a highly sought feature reporter, interviewer, and illustrator whose work appeared in the city's leading newspapers and periodicals.Parsons, 166. Later, Barnes's talent and connections with prominent Greenwich Village bohemians afforded her the opportunity to publish her prose, poems, illustrations, and one-act plays in both avant-garde literary journals and popular magazines, and publish an illustrated volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915).Messerli, 3.
In 1921, a lucrative commission with McCall's took Barnes to Paris, where she lived for the next 10 years. In this period she published A Book (1923), a collection of poetry, plays, and short stories, which was later reissued, with the addition of three stories, as A Night Among the Horses (1929), Ladies Almanack (1928), and Ryder (1928).Messerli, 4-11.
During the 1930s, Barnes spent time in England, Paris, New York, and North Africa.Herring, xxv. It was during this restless time that she wrote and published Nightwood. In October 1939, after nearly two decades living mostly in Europe, Barnes returned to New York.Herring, 247. She published her last major work, the verse play The Antiphon, in 1958, and she died in her apartment at Patchin Place, Greenwich Village in June 1982.Messerli, 15.Herring, 311.
As the second oldest child, Barnes spent much of her childhood helping care for siblings and half-siblings. She received her early education at home, mostly from her father and grandmother, who taught her writing, art, and music but neglected subjects such as math and spelling.Herring, xviii. She claimed to have had no formal schooling at all; some evidence suggests that she was enrolled in public school for a time after age ten, though her attendance was inconsistent.Herring, 40.
It is possible that at the age of 16 she was raped, either by a neighbor with the knowledge and consent of her father, or possibly by her father. However, these are rumors and unconfirmed by Barnes, who never managed to complete her autobiography. What is known is that Barnes and her father continued to write warm letters to each other until his death in 1934. Barnes does refer to a rape obliquely in her first novel Ryder and more directly in her furious final play The Antiphon. Sexually explicit references in correspondence from her grandmother, with whom she shared a bed for years, suggest incest, or overly familiar teasing, but Zadel—dead for 40 years by the time The Antiphon was written—was left out of its indictments.Herring, xvi–xvii, 54–57, 268–271. Shortly before her 18th birthday she reluctantly "married" Fanny Clark's brother Percy Faulkner in a private ceremony without benefit of clergy. He was 52. The match had been strongly promoted by her father, grandmother, mother, and brother, but she stayed with him for no more than two months.Herring, xxiv, 59–61.
Over the next few years her work appeared in almost every newspaper in New York, including the New York Press, The World and McCall's; she wrote interviews, features, theatre reviews, and a variety of news stories, often illustrating them with her own drawings. She also published short fiction in the New York Morning Telegraphs Sunday supplement and in the pulp magazine All-Story Cavalier Weekly.Herring, 40–41, 64–66, 75–76, 84–87. Much of Barnes's journalism foregrounds the subjective and experiential view. Writing about a conversation with James Joyce, she admitted to missing part of what he said because her attention had wandered, though she revered Joyce's writing. Interviewing the successful playwright Donald Ogden Stewart, she shouted at him for "rolling over and finding yourself famous" while other writers continued to struggle, then said she wouldn't mind dying; as her biographer Phillip Herring points out, this is "a depressing and perhaps unprecedented note on which to end an interview."Herring, 96–101. For "The Girl and the Gorilla", published by New York World Magazine in October 1914 she has a conversation with Dinah, a female gorilla at the Bronx Zoo.
For another article in New York World in 1914, she submitted to force-feeding, a technique then being used on Hunger strike suffragettes. Barnes wrote "If I, play acting, felt my being burning with revolt at this brutal usurpation of my own functions, how they who actually suffered the ordeal in its acutest horror must have flamed at the violation of the sanctuaries of their spirits." She concluded "I had shared the greatest experience of the bravest of my sex."Mills, 163–166.
While she mocked conservative suffrage activist Carrie Chapman Catt when Catt admonished would-be suffrage orators never to "hold a militant pose", or wear "a dress that shows your feet in front",Green, 82; Espley. Barnes was supportive of progressive suffragists. Barnes suggested that Catt's conservatism was an obstacle to the suffrage movement when Catt tried to ostracize fellow suffragists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who sought the vote for women through media attention directed at their strikes and non-violent protesting. It was their mistreatment that motivated Barnes to experience for herself the torture of being force-fed.
Barnes immersed herself in risky situations in order to access experiences that a previous generation of homebound women had been denied. Writing about the traditionally masculine domain of boxing from the ringside, Barnes explored boxing as a window into women's modern identities. In 1914, she first posed the question "What do women want at a fight?" in an article titled "My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight" published in New York World magazine. According to Irene Gammel, "Barnes' essay effectively begins to unravel an entire cultural history of repression for women". Barnes's interest in boxing continued into 1915 when she interviewed heavyweight champion Jess Willard. In 1915 Barnes moved out of her family's flat to an apartment in Greenwich Village, where she entered a thriving Bohemianism community of artists and writers. Among her social circle were Edmund Wilson, Berenice Abbott, and the Dadaist artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, whose biography Barnes tried to write but never finished. She came into contact with Guido Bruno, an entrepreneur and promoter who published magazines and from his garret on Washington Square. Bruno had a reputation for unscrupulousness, and was often accused of exploiting Greenwich Village residents for profit—he used to charge tourists admission to watch Bohemians paint—but he was a strong opponent of censorship and was willing to risk prosecution by publishing Barnes's 1915 collection of "rhythms and drawings"
Despite a description of sex between women in the first poem, the book was never legally challenged; the passage seems explicit now, but at a time when lesbianism was virtually invisible in American culture, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice may not have understood its imagery.Field, 65–76. Others were not as naïve, and Bruno was able to cash in on the book's reputation by raising the price from fifteen to fifty cents and pocketing the difference.Barnes, Collected Poems, 43. Twenty years later Barnes used Bruno as one of the models for Felix Volkbein in Nightwood, caricaturing his pretensions to nobility and his habit of bowing down before anyone titled or important.Field, 77–78. Barnes was a member of the Provincetown Players, an amateur theatrical collective whose emphasis on artistic rather than commercial success meshed well with her own values. The Players' Greenwich Village theater was a converted stable with bench seating and a tiny stage; according to Barnes it was "always just about to be given back to the horses." Yet it played a significant role in the development of American drama, featuring works by Susan Glaspell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, and Theodore Dreiser, as well as launching the career of Eugene O'Neill. Three one-act plays by Barnes were produced there in 1919 and 1920; a fourth, The Dove, premiered at Smith College in 1925, and a series of short were published in magazines, some under Barnes's pseudonym Lydia Steptoe.
These plays show the strong influence of the Irish playwright J. M. Synge; she was drawn to both the poetic quality of Synge's language and the pessimism of his vision. Critics have found them derivative, particularly those in which she tried to imitate Synge's Irish dialect, and Barnes may have agreed, since in later years she dismissed them as mere juvenilia.Herring, 118–126. Similar opinions of the early plays are expressed by Field, 92, Retallack, 49, and Messerli. Yet in their content, these stylized and enigmatic early plays are more experimental than those of her fellow playwrights at Provincetown.Larabee, 37; see also Messerli. A New York Times review by Alexander Woollcott of her play Three From the Earth called it a demonstration of "how absorbing and essentially dramatic a play can be without the audience ever knowing what, if anything, the author is driving at ... The spectators sit with bated breath listening to each word of a playlet of which the darkly suggested clues leave the mystery unsolved."Quoted in Field, 90.
Greenwich Village in the 1910s was known for its atmosphere of sexual as well as intellectual freedom. Barnes was unusual among Villagers in having been raised with a philosophy of free love, espoused both by her grandmother and her father. Her father's idiosyncratic vision had included a commitment to unlimited procreation, which she strongly rejected; criticism of childbearing would become a major theme in her work.Field, 169. She did, however, retain sexual freedom as a value. In the 1930s she told Antonia White that "she had no feeling of guilt whatever about sex, about going to bed with any man or woman she wanted";Herring, 239. correspondence indicates that by the time she was 21 her family was well aware of her bisexuality,Herring, 71. and she had a number of affairs with both men and women during her Greenwich Village years. Of these, the most important was probably her engagement to Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Harvard graduate who ran the American branch of his family's art publishing house. Hanfstaengl had once given a piano concert at the White House and was a friend of then-New York State Senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he became increasingly angered by anti-German sentiment in the United States during World War I. In 1916, he told Barnes he wanted a German wife; the painful breakup became the basis of a deleted scene in Nightwood. He later returned to Germany and became a close associate of Adolf Hitler. Starting in 1916 or 1917, she lived with a socialist philosopher and critic named Courtenay Lemon, whom she referred to as her common-law husband, but this too ended, for reasons that are unclear. She also had a passionate romantic relationship with Mary Pyne, a reporter for the New York Press and fellow member of the Provincetown Players. Pyne died of tuberculosis in 1919, attended by Barnes until the end.Herring, Djuna, 66–74 and 108–112.
Barnes arrived in Paris with a letter of introduction to James Joyce, whom she interviewed for Vanity Fair and who became a friend. The headline of her Vanity Fair interview billed him as "the man who is, at present, one of the more significant figures in literature," but her personal reaction to Ulysses was less guarded: "I shall never write another line ... Who has the nerve to after that?"Quotations from Field (109) and Whitley, respectively. It may have been reading Joyce that led Barnes to turn away from the late 19th century Decadent and Aesthetic influences of The Book of Repulsive Women toward the modernist experimentation of her later work.Whitley; Herring, 98–102. They differed, however, on the proper subject of literature; Joyce thought writers should focus on commonplace subjects and make them extraordinary, while Barnes was always drawn to the unusual, even the grotesque.Herring, 77. Then, too, her own life was an extraordinary subject. Her autobiographical first novel Ryder would not only present readers with the difficulty of deciphering its shifting literary styles—a technique inspired by Ulysses—but also with the challenge of piecing together the history of an unconventional polygamous household, far removed from most readers' expectations and experience.Field, 110.
Despite the difficulties of the text, Ryders bawdiness drew attention, and it briefly became a New York Times bestseller. Its popularity caught the publisher unprepared; a first edition of 3,000 sold out quickly, but by the time more copies made it into bookstores, public interest in the book had died down. Still, the advance allowed Barnes to buy a new apartment on Rue Saint-Romain, where she lived with Thelma Wood starting in September 1927. The move made them neighbors of Mina Loy, a friend of Barnes's since Greenwich Village days, who appeared in Ladies Almanack as Patience Scalpel, the sole heterosexual character, who "could not understand Women and their Ways."Herring, 141–153. Quotation from Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 11.
Due to its subject matter, Ladies Almanack was published in a small, privately printed edition under the pseudonym "A Lady of Fashion". Copies were sold on the streets of Paris by Barnes and her friends, and Barnes managed to smuggle a few into the United States to sell. A bookseller, Edward Titus, offered to carry Ladies Almanack in his store in exchange for being mentioned on the title page, but when he demanded a share of the royalties on the entire print run, Barnes was furious. She later gave the name Titus to the abusive father in The Antiphon.Herring, 141–153.
Barnes dedicated Ryder and Ladies Almanack to Thelma Wood, but the year both books were published—1928—was also the year that she and Wood separated. Barnes had wanted their relationship to be monogamous, but had discovered that Wood wanted her "along with the rest of the world."Letter to Emily Coleman, November 22, 1935. Quoted in Herring, 160. Wood had a worsening dependency on alcohol, and she spent her nights drinking and seeking out casual sex partners; Barnes would search the cafés for her, often winding up equally drunk. Barnes broke up with Wood over her involvement with heiress Henriette McCrea Metcalf (1888–1981), who would be scathingly portrayed in Nightwood as Jenny Petherbridge.Herring, 160–162.
Faber published the book in 1936. Though reviews treated it as a major work of art,Marcus, "Mousemeat", 204. the book did not sell well. Barnes received no advance from Faber and the first royalty statement was for only Pound sterling43; the U.S. edition published by Harcourt, Brace the following year fared no better.Field, 215. Barnes had published little journalism in the 1930s and was largely dependent on Peggy Guggenheim's financial support. She was constantly ill and drank more and more heavily—according to Guggenheim, she accounted for a bottle of whiskey per day. In February 1939 she checked into a hotel in London and attempted suicide. Guggenheim funded hospital visits and doctors, but finally lost patience and sent her back to New York. There she shared a single room with her mother, who coughed all night and who kept reading her passages from Mary Baker Eddy, having converted to Christian Science. In March 1940, her family sent her to a sanatorium in upstate New York to dry out.Herring, 241–250; Field, 220. Furious, Barnes began to plan a biography of her family, writing to Emily Coleman that "there is no reason any longer why I should feel for them in any way but hate." This idea would eventually come to fruition in her play The Antiphon. After she returned to New York City, she quarreled bitterly with her mother and was thrown out on the street.DeSalvo, 247; Herring, 249–250.
In 1950, realizing that alcoholism had made it impossible for her to function as an artist, Barnes stopped drinking in order to begin work on her verse play The Antiphon. The play drew heavily on her own family history, and the writing was fueled by anger; she said "I wrote The Antiphon with clenched teeth, and I noted that my handwriting was as savage as a dagger."Herring, 258–263. When he read the play, her brother Thurn accused her of wanting "revenge for something long dead and to be forgotten". Barnes, in the margin of his letter, described her motive as "justice", and next to "dead" she inscribed, "not dead".Herring, 281.
After The Antiphon, Barnes returned to writing poetry, which she worked and reworked, producing as many as 500 drafts. She wrote eight hours per day despite a growing list of health problems, including arthritis so severe that she had difficulty even sitting at her typewriter or turning on her desk lamp. Many of these poems never were finalized, and only a few were published in her lifetime.Levine, 186–200.
During her Patchin Place years, Barnes became a notorious recluse, intensely suspicious of anyone she did not know well. E.E. Cummings, who lived across the street, checked on her periodically by shouting out his window "Are you still alive, Djuna?"Herring, 309. Bertha Harris put roses in her mailbox, but never succeeded in meeting her; Carson McCullers camped on her doorstep, but Barnes only called down "Whoever is ringing this bell, please go the hell away."Allen, 1–2; Field 233. Anaïs Nin was an ardent fan of her work, especially Nightwood. She wrote to Barnes several times, inviting her to participate in a journal on women's writing, but received no reply.Noel Riley Fitch, Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anais Nin (Back Bay, 1993), p. 212. Barnes remained contemptuous of Nin and would cross the street to avoid her.Fitch, p. 250, citing Herring's biography. Barnes was angry that Nin had named a character Djuna,Herring, 279: Fitch, p 266. and when the feminist bookstore Djuna Books opened in Greenwich Village, Barnes called to demand that the name be changed.White. Barnes had a lifelong affection for poet Marianne Moore since she and Moore were young in the 1920s.
Although Barnes had other female lovers, in her later years she was known to claim "I am not a lesbian; I just loved Thelma."
Barnes was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961 and was awarded a senior fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1981.
Barnes was the last surviving member of the first generation of English-language modernists when she died in her home in New York on June 18, 1982, six days after her 90th birthday.
Barnes came to regard The Book of Repulsive Women as an embarrassment; she called the title "idiotic", left it out of her curriculum vitae, and even burned copies. But because the copyright had never been registered, she was unable to prevent it from being republished, and it became one of her most reprinted works.Hardie.
Both Ryder and Ladies Almanack abandon the Beardsleyesque style of her drawings for The Book of Repulsive Women in favor of a visual vocabulary borrowed from French folk art. Several illustrations are closely based on the engravings and woodcuts collected by Pierre Louis Duchartre and René Saulnier in the 1926 book L'Imagerie Populaire—images that had been copied with variations since medieval times.Burke, 67–79. The bawdiness of Ryder illustrations led the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to ship it, and several had to be left out of the first edition, including an image in which Sophia is seen urinating into a chamberpot and one in which Amelia and Kate-Careless sit by the fire knitting . Parts of the text were also expurgated. In an acerbic introduction, Barnes explained that the missing words and passages had been replaced with asterisks so that readers could see the "havoc" wreaked by censorship. A 1990 Dalkey Archive edition restored the missing drawings, but the original text was lost with the destruction of the manuscript in World War II.Martyniuk, 61–80.
Clifford Barney appears as Dame Evangeline Musset, "who was in her Heart one Grand Red Cross for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction, of such Girls as in their Hinder Parts, and their Fore Parts, and in whatsoever Parts did suffer them most, lament Cruelly."Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 6. "A Pioneer and a Menace" in her youth, Dame Musset has reached "a witty and learned Fifty";Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 34, 9. she rescues women in distress, dispenses wisdom, and upon her death is elevated to sainthood. Also appearing pseudonymously are Élisabeth de Gramont, Romaine Brooks, Dolly Wilde, Radclyffe Hall and her partner Una Troubridge, Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, and Mina Loy.Weiss, 151–153.
The obscure language, inside jokes, and ambiguity of Ladies Almanack have kept critics arguing about whether it is an affectionate satire or a bitter attack, but Barnes loved the book and reread it throughout her life.Barnes, Ladies Almanack, xxxii–xxxiv.
The novel, set in Paris in the 1920s, revolves around the lives of five characters, two of whom are based on Barnes and Wood, and it reflects the circumstances surrounding the ending of their relationship. In his introduction, Eliot praises Barnes's style, which, while having "prose rhythm ... and the musical pattern which is not that of verse, is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it."
Due to concerns about censorship, Eliot edited Nightwood to soften some language relating to sexuality and religion. An edition restoring these changes, edited by Cheryl J. Plumb, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1995.
Dylan Thomas described Nightwood as "one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman," and William Burroughs called it "one of the great books of the twentieth century." It was number 12 on a list of the top 100 gay books compiled by The Publishing Triangle in 1999.
The play premiered in 1961 in Stockholm in a Swedish translation by Karl Ragnar Gierow and U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.
The play was translated into French and set at the Odeon Theater in Paris by the "Comedie Française" in March 1990.
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Barnes's last book, Creatures in an Alphabet (1982), is a collection of short rhyming poems. The format suggests a children's book, but it contains enough allusiveness and advanced vocabulary to make it an unlikely read for a child: the entry for T quotes William Blake's "The Tyger", a seal is compared to Jacques-Louis David's portrait of Madame Récamier, and a braying donkey is described as "practicing solfege." Creatures continues the themes of nature and culture found in Barnes's earlier work, and their arrangement as a bestiary reflects her longstanding interest in systems for organizing knowledge, such as encyclopedias and almanacs.Casselli, 89–113; Scott, 73, 103–105.
Barnes's biographical notes and collection of manuscripts have been a major source for scholars who have brought the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven forth from the margins of Dada history. They were key in producing (2011), the first major English collection of the baroness's poems, and a biography titled Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity (2002).
Emmanuelle Uzan played Barnes in a brief cameo role with no dialogue in Woody Allen's 2011 film Midnight in Paris.
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