Djuna Barnes

Writer

  • Born: June 12, 1892
  • Birthplace: Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York
  • Died: June 18, 1982
  • Place of death: New York, New York

American novelist

A noted member of the American expatriate community in Paris, Djuna Barnes wrote a highly influential experimental novel and was a pioneer in developing lesbian literature.

Area of achievement Literature

Early Life

Djuna Barnes (JEW-nah bahrnz) was born to an eccentric, bohemian family in the New York community of Cornwall-on-Hudson. Her mother, Elizabeth Chappell Barnes, was English and her father, Wald Barnes, American. Wald Barnes (a name he adopted in preference over his birth name, Henry Budington) pursued many cultural interests but does not seem to have been successful in any of them. He does, however, seem to have had an overwhelming and largely negative influence on his daughter. There is indirect but compelling evidence of incest. Djuna Barnes takes up the theme of father-daughter incest repeatedly in her work, although usually obliquely. Whatever the physical or psychological reality of what took place, Djuna was evidently presented by her father in 1910 to a man far older than she was Percy Faulkner, the brother of the woman destined to become Wald Barnes’s second wife. Djuna’s relationship with Faulkner seems to have been both informal and brief.

Barnes had been educated at home. Some time after 1910 she moved to New York City, where she studied art at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students’ League. Barnes showed promise as both writer and artist: By the time she was twenty-one, she was producing articles and illustrations for New York City newspapers. Within a few years, she was able to earn a good living writing for these papers and for such magazines as Harper’s. Besides reporting on local events, she interviewed a number of personalities, many of them long since forgotten, and turned out stylized, satirical sketches reminiscent of English artist Aubrey Beardsley.

In 1915, Barnes moved to Greenwich Village, a bohemian section of New York City synonymous with the newest ideas and trends in society and the arts. Her first “book,” a pamphlet entitled The Book of Repulsive Women, also appeared in 1915. It consisted of a handful of poems and drawings and announced another theme that was to dominate her work, lesbian sexuality.

Although she began to have many women lovers during this period, Barnes’s sexual allegiance had not shifted entirely to women. About 1916, she was married to fellow writer Courtenay Lemon. This marriage may have been as informal as her first relationship with Faulkner; in any case, she and Lemon had separated by 1919. Sometime that year or the next she left for Europe and, except for brief trips home, remained there until 1940. During those twenty years she produced a number of works, including a novel that would come to be regarded as one of the most important American literary works of the century.

Life’s Work

Once in Europe, Barnes was commissioned to write various celebrity profiles and subsequently lived in both Paris and Berlin. Among the figures she interviewed was Irish writer James Joyce, author of the novel Ulysses (1922), considered one of the most influential English-language works of the century. Barnes admired Joyce immensely, and declared after reading Ulysses that she would never write again. Nevertheless, she soon published her first substantial work, entitled simply A Book (1923). A Book consisted of stories, plays, poems, and drawings. The stories were the most important components of the work; many subsequently appeared usually in reworked versions in the collections A Night Among the Horses (1929) and Spillwax (1962). In style they are unexceptional, but in their subject matter individuals cast adrift from ties of class or country they are very much products of their time.

Barnes’s next two works exhibited greater innovation: A Ladies’ Almanack (1928, identified only as being “Written & Illustrated by a Lady of Fashion”) and the novel Ryder (also 1928). A Ladies’ Almanack is a short, mock-Elizabethan work that defies easy classification. Arranged in twelve sections, one for each month of the year, it is actually a gentle satire on the lesbian community of Paris. Those who were familiar with the community would be expected to recognize the real figures behind such characters as Evangeline Musset and Daisy Downpour.

Because of its sexual and scatological content, A Ladies’ Almanack was privately printed in Dijon, France. Ryder was published openly in New York, but in a censored version that omitted several passages and drawings. Ryder is far longer and more stylistically complex than anything else Barnes had previously written. It draws on her painful and convoluted family history and clearly illustrates Barnes’s interest in the intense literary experimentation that was going on around her.

The novel’s central character, Wendell Ryder, has a wife and a mistress and children by each. The two families live an unconventional life together in one house, with the children being kept from school and Ryder finding himself chronically unable to choose between the two women who share his household. Ryder is an amalgam of styles and influences, ranging from the King James Version of the Bible to such English writers as Geoffrey Chaucer and Laurence Sterne. Despite its dark undercurrents, Ryder is light and airy in tone, if perhaps forbidding in its display of archaic language. Its risqué reputation made it a best seller for a short time, although in later years it has been read mainly as a precursor to Barnes’s greater and more accessible novel, Nightwood (1936). Ryder was dedicated to “T. W.” The initials belonged to Thelma Wood, Barnes’s lover for a number of years and, next to her father, the most influential person in her life. Wood had been born in Missouri and was a gifted artist and sculptor. She and Barnes had met early in the 1920’s and became a familiar, strikingly elegant couple in the expatriate community. They maintained an often-strained relationship for about a decade.

If in one sense Ryder is “about” Barnes’s family, then Nightwood is “about” her relationship with Wood. Nightwood is set for the most part in Paris. Its eight sections revolve around the tangled lives of a group of expatriates, chief among them Robin Vote, a young American woman who seems to live beyond the categories right, wrong, waking, sleeping, animal, human, and so on that rule the others’ existence. Another American, Nora Flood, has an intense affair with Robin, but loses her to Jenny Petherbridge. In her distress, Nora seeks out the bizarre Dr. Matthew O’Connor, an unlicensed physician whose long, drunken soliloquies on love and the night form the heart of the novel. O’Connor, who made his first appearance in Ryder, is Barnes’s most brilliantly conceived character. Gay and a transvestite, he is able, like the mythological Greek character Tiresias, to experience both the male and female sides of existence.

Barnes’s British editor, poet T. S. Eliot, thought very highly of Nightwood and wrote an introduction comparing its mood to that of Elizabethan tragedy. The novel was published in London in 1936 and in New York City in 1937. The reviews were mixed, but sophisticated readers and other writers were as enthusiastic as Eliot, and the book has remained in print ever since.

Barnes had worked on the manuscript of Nightwood on a visit to Morocco in 1933 and had finished it in England. She returned to France in 1939, only to flee to the United States in 1940 with the approach of war. She eventually took an apartment in her old haunt of Greenwich Village an apartment she would keep for more than four decades, gaining the reputation of a recluse. She had complained of exhaustion after completing Nightwood, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that she had put a lifetime of painful experience into its composition.

Barnes did have in her a third major work: The Antiphon (1958), a play on which she labored for years. It treats a family strikingly similar to the one in Ryder, but from a tragic point of view. Its three acts take place on the same day in ruined Burley Hall, in which the aged Augusta and her daughter and three sons reenact the disintegration of their family. The Antiphon is a dense and stylistically forbidding work. Part of its difficulty stems from the fact that Eliot insisted on extensive cuts before its publication. The result was tighter but more obscure. It received its world premiere in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1961 (where one of its translators was United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld) but has rarely been performed since.

Barnes’s last years were often difficult. She had no regular income and subsisted for the most part on gifts from a small band of friends and admirers, including Irish-born author and Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett. She rarely left her apartment and seems to have gone for months at a time without speaking to anyone.

Barnes continued to write but published very little. She resisted efforts to collect her early journalism, declaring it undeserving, and scorned those of her contemporaries who produced their memoirs. Almost everything she wished to be remembered for Spillway, Nightwood, and The Antiphon appeared in her Selected Writings in 1962, to respectful reviews. A small renewal of interest came with the publication of two late poems, “Quarry” and “The Walking Mort,” in The New Yorker in 1969 and 1971 respectively. In their brief compass, these dense, dark poems are among her very best works. Barnes died a few days past her ninetieth birthday in 1982 after a short stay in a nursing home.

Significance

Barnes’s novel Nightwood has come to be regarded as one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. Its highly poetic yet precise language, its rejection of realism, and its darkly comic vision rank it with such masterpieces as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). Although it has never achieved great popularity, it has had a continuing impact on Barnes’s colleagues, influencing such American writers as Faulkner, Anaïs Nin, John Hawkes, and Thomas Pynchon, and such British novelists as Lawrence Durrell.

Barnes’s body of work is also important as a pioneering, if highly ambivalent, depiction of lesbian sexuality in literature. As announced in The Book of Repulsive Women and A Ladies’ Almanack and developed most fully in Nightwood, Barnes’s treatment of lesbian sexuality is far from being a didactic endorsement of a particular way of life. Nightwood is not a celebration of lesbian love per se, but a monument to the anguish of all love. Barnes herself stood aside from all movements, holding out little hope for the improvement of man’s or woman’s lot. She scoffed at the idea of “women’s liberation,” and declared, in reference to a key relationship in her life, that she was not a lesbian but had simply loved Thelma Wood.

Bibliography

Barnes, Djuna. Interviews. Edited by Alyce Barry. Washington, D.C.: Sun & Moon Press, 1985. A collection of forty-one interviews conducted between 1913 and 1931, accompanied by Barnes’s original illustrations. Subjects range from Diamond Jim Brady to James Joyce. Taken in total, a useful memoir of the period in which Barnes developed as a writer.

Bombaci, Nancy. Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Todd Browning, and Carson McCullers. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Bombaci analyzes the work of Barnes and others to examine what she calls “late modernist freakish aesthetics,” or the use of distorted body images to reinvent modern progress narratives and challenge social assumptions.

Broe, Mary Lynn, ed. Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. An invaluable compilation of essays about Barnes’s work, supplemented with photographs and drawings, many of the latter by Barnes herself. Some strictly biographical material appears in a series of “Reminiscences.”

Field, Andrew. Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. A revised and corrected version of the biography that first appeared in 1983. Criticized for its idiosyncratic arrangement and lack of notes, it is still a lively and admiring work. Photographs, extensive bibliography.

Martin, Ann. Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism’s Fairy Tales. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Examines how Barnes, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce used representations of fairy tales in their writing.

O’Neal, Hank.“Life Is Painful, Nasty & Short . . . In My Case It Has Only Been Painful & Nasty”: Djuna Barnes, 1978-1981: An Informal Memoir. New York: Paragon House, 1990. Memoir by an admirer who handled many of Barnes’s literary and financial affairs near the end of her life. A series of portraits from the 1950’s by Barnes’s friend, photographer Berenice Abbott, appears in an appendix.

Scott, James B. Djuna Barnes. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Thorough study of Barnes’s work in an accessible format. Most biographical material appears in the opening chapter, “Early Life.” Written before Andrew Field revealed the more controversial aspects of Barnes’s life. Chronology, bibliography.

1901-1940: Fall, 1905: Stein Holds Her First Paris Salons; 1925: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway Explores Women’s Consciousness.