Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes (June 12, 1892 – June 18, 1982) was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing by women and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens. Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an introduction by T.S. Eliot. It stands out today for its portrayal of lesbian themes and its distinctive writing style. Barnes spent the last forty years of her life as a recluse in New York City. Since her death, interest in her work has grown and many of her books are back in print.

Early Life and Writings

Barnes was born into Cornwall-on-Hudson, a New York artists' colony. Her father, Henry Budington Barnes, was an unsuccessful artist and her mother, Elizabeth Chappel, had studied violin in England before her marriage. Barnes was brought up by her mother and grandmother and she received her early education at home. She was sexually abused by both her father and her grandmother, a factor which strongly influenced her later work. In the early 1910s, she studied art briefly in New York City at both the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League.

By 1913, her parents had divorced and she was writing and illustrating a regular column for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. A collection of her magazine stories appeared in 1982 as Smoke and Other Early Stories. A collection of her celebrity interviews from this period, I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes, was published in 1987.

Personal Life

It has long been known that Barnes was primarily lesbian, and she has been described by other women of the day as being magnetic and appealing. With a reputation of being promiscuous, she was involved with numerous women in the artistic and writing communities throughout her life. When she lived in Greenwich Village she had an affair with a woman named Mary Pyne, and she met and lived for a time with noted photographer Berenice Abbott, and although it is unclear as to whether they had a sexual relationship it is believed to be likely. ^*

She was also involved romantically with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, controversial socialite and writer Nancy Cunard Peggy Guggenheim. After she published her first book of poetry in 1915, she met and became romantically involved with Jane Heap ^*" target="_blank" >Chicago Arts and Crafts Movement, and a later lover to editor Margaret Anderson. Djuna also had a lengthy on and off affair with writer Natalie Barney that spanned a number of years, and with whom she remained in regular contact with throughout her life, as well as having a year long affair with Barney's longtime lover, artist Romaine Brooks. ^*" target="_blank" >1920s Barnes also became involved in a brief affair with the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and when the Baroness fell into poverty, Djuna convinced Natalie Barney and others to help fund a flat for her in Paris. [http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/VSALM/mod/brandelmcdaniel/index/imagespage.htm" target="_blank" >^*

Obsession, the Barnes/Wood affair

Barnes and sculptress Thelma Ellen Wood ^* began a passionate relationship that lasted from 1921 to 1929.

Barnes was known to be incredibly jealous and possessive of many of her lovers. This was reflected in both her affairs with Millay and Thelma Wood, although her affairs with Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks and others seemed to have been more free with no real problems of this sort. Wood was notoriously unfaithful, and although Barnes also had affairs during the relationship, it would be Wood's affairs that eventually led to the end of their affair. The combination of sexual obsession, jealousy, and unfaithful activities by both would prove to be an explosive combination.

Wood was a former lover to photographer Berenice Abbott, and they met one another through her. Fueled by sex, alcohol, infidelities, jealousy, and violence, the relationship was said to have been the "great love" of each of their lives. The two women fought often, many times in front of their friends and colleagues, usually in a jealous rage over one or the other having flirted with or slept with another woman. They would often hit one another or throw things at one another, which would be followed by passionate making up and coddling.

It was during this time that Barnes became secretly involved with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay and Barnes were also incredibly jealous of one another, and neither was faithful. Possibly in response to Barnes being involved with both Millay and Wood, Millay also became involved romantically with Wood, and allowed the fact that she was involved with both to come to light. Upon discovery of this, it spawned one of the greatest fights between Wood and Barnes.

Both Barnes and Wood ended their relationship with Millay, but still their relationship ended badly when Wood began another affair with the wealthy Henriette McCrea Metcalf (1888-1981). ^* She and Wood continued to have sexual liaisons and stay in contact until the mid-1930s, but Barnes refused to become involved exclusively with her, even though Wood continually professed her love.

Later Writings and Plays

Barnes' first published her poetry in 1915 as a collection of "rhythms and drawings" entitled The Book of Repulsive Women. She also wrote one-act plays, three of which were produced at the Provincetown Playhouse in the period 1919 - 1920. She married Courtenay Lemon, but remained primarily involved in affairs with other women, and the marriage was short-lived. In 1920 she moved to Paris on an assignment for McCall's magazine.

Paris

Djuna Barnes arrived in Paris with letters of introduction to Ezra Pound and James Joyce and she soon entered the Parisian world of expatriate bohemians who were at the forefront of the modernist movement in literature and art. Her circle included Pound, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Kay Boyle, Robert McAlmon, and her former lovers Natalie Barney and Peggy Guggenheim. She also maintained a friendship with the Italian poet Eugenio Montale. Pound disliked Barnes and her writing, but Pound's opinions were widely ignored by most within the literary community, as he was often considered inconsistent. However, she developed a close literary and personal friendship with Joyce, who discussed his work with Barnes more freely than he did with most other writers, and who allowed her to call him Jim, a name otherwise only used by his wife, Nora Barnacle. Barnes considered Joyce a great writer and a source of inspiration, but unlike many other Paris expatriates, she was not overawed by him. She was also promoted by Ford Madox Ford, who published her work in his Transatlantic Review magazine.

In Paris, Barnes set up home with her lover Thelma Wood and soon won a reputation as both being openly lesbian and a heavy drinker, which in later years detracted from her reception as a writer. Barnes published a second book, a mixture of prose and poetry called A Book in 1926. In 1928 she brought out a semi-autobiographical novel in a mock-Elizabethan style, Ryder that became a best seller in the United States. She also anonymously published a satirical roman à clef of Paris lesbian life called Lady's Almanack that same year. An enlarged edition of A Book called A Book - A Night Among the Horses appeared in 1929.

Nightwood

Barnes left Paris in 1931, after her relationship with Thelma Wood ended, and she lived for a time in both London and New York. She stayed at Peggy Guggenheim's rented country manor, 'Hayford Hall', along with diarist and confidante Emily Coleman, lover and writer Antonia White and critic John Ferrar Holms. It was here that she wrote her best-known work, Nightwood (1936). [http://myweb.lsbu.ac.uk/~stafflag/djunabarnes.html Her reputation as a writer was made when Nightwood was published in England in 1936 in an expensive edition by Faber and Faber, and in America in 1937 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, with an added introduction by T. S. Eliot.

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 real-life love affair. Wood, feeling she was wrongly represented, cut all ties with Barnes over the novel, and Barnes was said to have been comfortable with never speaking to her again. In his introduction, Eliot praises Barnes' style, which while having "prose rhythm that is prose style, 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."

Writer Bertha Harris regarded Djuna Barnes's work as "practically the only available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world" since Sappho. Her Nightwood novel remains today as one of the most compelling same-sex novels ever written, and was number 12 on the list of the top 100 gay books, compiled in the USA in 1999.

New York

Barnes returned to Paris briefly in 1937 to sell the apartment that she and Wood had shared. She moved to New York in 1941, where she became a recluse, living in a small apartment at 5 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. Her neighbours included the poet e. e. cummings.

Despite failing health which eventually saw her completely confined to her apartment, she published several more works, including the surrealist verse play, The Antiphon in 1958. This play was translated into Swedish by Karl Ragnar Gierow and U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and was staged in Stockholm in 1962.

Barnes has been cited as an influence by writers as diverse as Truman Capote, William Goyen, Isak Dinesen, John Hawkes, and Anais Nin. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961. She was the last surviving member of the first generation of English-language modernists when she died in New York in 1982.

Quotes by and about Barnes

Once, when described by an interviewer as morbid, Barnes replied "Morbid? You make me laugh. This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid. Look at my life. Look at the life around me. Where is this beauty that I am supposed to miss? The nice episodes that others depict? Is not everything morbid? I mean the life of people stripped of their masks. Where are the relieving features? Often I sit down to work at my drawing board, at my typewriter. All of a sudden my joy is gone. I feel tired of it all because, I think, 'What's the use?' Today we are, tomorrow dead. We are born and don't know why. We live and suffer and strive, envious or envied. We love, we hate, we work, we admire, we despise. . . . Why? And we die, and no one will ever know that we have been born." ^*

"Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on."--Djuna Barnes to Emily Holmes Coleman, February 2, 1934 ^*

"It is a dreadful fact about parenthood that after maturity the child does not need the parent, but the parent continues to need the child--I ought to live with him, but I never will."--Emily Coleman to Djuna Barnes, August 27, 1936 ^*

"There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole."--Djuna Barnes ^*

"I have to tell you of the great, deep beauty of your Nightwood . . . . A woman rarely writes as a woman, as she feels, but you have."--Anais Nin to Djuna Barnes ^*

"Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?"--Djuna Barnes in a 1960s letter to Natalie Barney ^*

Works

The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings (1915)
Three from the Earth (1919) (play)
Kurzy from the Sea (1920) (play)
An Irish Triangle (1921) (play)
She Tells Her Daughter (1923) (play)
A Book (1923)
Ladies Almanack showing their Signs and their Tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers, written & illustrated by a lady of fashion (1928)
Ryder (1928)
A Night Among the Horses (1929)
Nightwood (1936)
The Antiphon (1958) (play)
Spillway (1962)
Selected Works (1962)
Vagaries Malicieux (1974)
Creatures in an Alphabet (1982)
Smoke and Other Early Stories (1982)
I Could Never Be Lonely without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes (1987) (ed. by A Barry)
Djuna Barnes's New York (1989)
At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays (1995)
Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings (1996) (ed. and with an introduction by Douglas Messerli)
Collected Stories of Djuna Barnes (1996)

Online works

Online version of The Book of Repulsive Women

References

Print

Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900 - 1940 (Virago, 1987). ISBN 0-86068-925-5.
Encyclopedia of Homosexuality Dynes, Wayne R. (ed.), Garland Publishing, 1990. p. 108

External links

www.studiocleo.com Djuna Barnes Web site
www.kirjasto.sci.fi Biography
www.leftbankreview.com Biography
House of Incest: Exile from the Family in Modernist Women's Literature www.leftbankreview.com About the women of the Left Bank
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