"When it was first published in 1928, Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, a bawdy mock- Elizabethan chronicle of a family very much like her own, was described in the Saturday Review as “the most amazing book ever written by a woman.” One of modern literature’s first and best denunciations of patriarchal repression, Ryder employs an exuberant prose by which narrator Julie Ryder derides her hated father, polygamous Wendell Ryder. Barnes satirizes masculinity and domesticity by way of parable, poem, and play, and a prose style that echoes Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bible, and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. For this edition, several of Barnes’s previously suppressed illustrations have been restored."
“Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still be—vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad.”—Argonaut
"How to describe Djuna Barnes’s utterly sui generis 1928 comic novel Ryder? It is, to begin with, a family history, covering four generations of the hilariously troubled Ryder clan. Particularly emphasized is Wendell Ryder (modeled on Barnes’s father, Wald Barnes), a procreation-obsessed narcissist whose troubled relationships with his two wives, Amelia and Kate, and their eight children constitute much of the book’s action. The bigamous Ryder family is drawn directly from Barnes’s own; she would return to the havoc wrought by her egomaniacal, and possibly abusive, father in her 1954 play The Antiphon. The Antiphon stages Barnes’s family history as psychosexual tragedy; Ryder, on the other hand, as bawdy farce.
Djuna Barnes is best known today for her 1936 novel Nightwood, which might be described as a gothic lesbian romance. Notable for its taboo-breaking themes and dense, highly wrought language, Nightwood was loudly praised on its publication by T. S. Eliot, who, in his capacity as editor at Faber and Faber, got the book published. Eliot contributed a memorable introduction to the American edition of Nightwood in which he favorably compares the “musical pattern” of Barnes’s prose to that of “most contemporary novels, [which] obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication.”
No one could mistake the prose of Ryder for such quotidian chitchat. Ryder is written in a mock Elizabethan and Jacobean idiom similar to, though more extreme than, the rambling sentences of Dr. Matthew O’Connor in Nightwood. Much of Ryder’s faux-archaic prose recalls the syntax of the King James Bible—say, those familiar, endlessly aggregated “begats” with which the Old Testament records genealogical succession: “And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech.” Barnes was a great devotee of Joyce and surely felt authorized by his example to experiment with the long, litany-like, word-drunk line. In a 1936 article, she writes that she first “sensed the singer” in Joyce reading lines like Ulysses’ “Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, spherical potatoes and iridescent kale and onions, pearls of the earth, and red, green, yellow, brown, russet, sweet, big bitter ripe pomilated apples and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes.” Every page of Ryder delights in this joyous Joycean list-making.
In Ryder, such paragraph-, page-, even chapter-long enumerations often involve themes of parentage and generation, those Biblical “begats” ever hovering in the background. Consider, for example, one of Wendell’s many obsessive orations on fatherhood, here given a metaphysical turn:
I, my love, am to be Father of All Things. For this I was created, and to this will I cleave. Now this is the Race that shall be Ryder—those who can sing like the lark, coo like the dove, moo like the cow, buzz like the bee, cheep like the cricket, bark like the dog, mew like the cat, neigh like the stallion, roar like the bull, crow like the cock, bray like the ass, sob like the owl, bleat like the lamb, growl like the lion, whine like the seal. …
Much of Ryder—the bulk, even—consists of lists like this, by turns exhilarating and exhausting, “as if,” notes Paul West in his afterword, “[Barnes] were intent on producing La Brea tar pits of blather, just to get us in a primitive mood, amazed that humans could come to the Word.” Barnes’s authority may have been Joyce, but her primary model is surely Robert Burton, the 17th-century divine whose Anatomy of Melancholy established the art of the list in English prose.
Burton, by the way, recognized that “such as lie in child-bed” are subject to melancholy (hardly a surprise, since everyone, for Burton, is subject to melancholy), and Barnes makes it clear that Wendell’s ambitious procreating has its downside—for the woman, who has the business of bearing all the brats. As Amelia, in the painful throes of childbirth, says to one of her not-yet-born: “Out then, mole! Who taught you a woman’s body had a way for you? Why, now I’ll be afraid of you forever, for this road makes me most aware of you.” Ryder, in its depictions of pregnancy, participates in an important modernist trend: increasingly frank literary treatments of childbearing. One thinks not only of the maternity ward episode in Ulysses and Katherine’s death in A Farewell to Arms but also of Mina Loy’s deliberately grotesque lines on childbirth in her long poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, published several years before Ryder: “They pull / A clotty bulk of bifurcate fat / out of her loins.”
Barnes’s sentences, like Burton’s, like Joyce’s, are rhythmically precise rivers of language, rollickingly pointless litanies sweeping the reader along on a tide of lexical self-infatuation. Ryder is a tissue of digressions. As Burton knew, such obsessive digressiveness will not appeal to everyone: “Which manner of digression howsoever some dislike, as frivolous and impertinent, yet I am of Beroaldus his opinion, ‘Such digressions do mightily delight and refresh a weary reader, they are like sauce to a bad stomach, and I do therefore most willingly use them.’” But the reader weary of the dry, responsible prose of so much contemporary fiction will not lack for sauce in Ryder. This attractive new edition of Ryder, which restores some of Barnes’s hitherto unpublished illustrations, is a treat." - Len Gutkin
"MAKE Magazine has Len Gutkin reviewing the 2010 Dalkey Archive reprint of Djuna Barnes’s 1928 novel Ryder, the modernist and rather bawdy work that drew heavily on her childhood experiences (and set up the author herself as patriarch Wendell Ryder) and was influenced by the shifting of styles befitting one James Joyce. Ryder was also briefly a New York Times bestseller, but many of its French folk art–inspired illustrations were cut from the original (replaced by Dalkey in the new edition) due to their unrefined nature. (Images removed include one in which character Sophia is seen urinating into a chamberpot and another of daughter-in-law Amelia and son’s mistress Kate-Careless sitting by the fire knitting codpieces. Shouldn’t be a problem!) In his review, Gutkin expands on Barnes’s influences, delving into, interestingly, the literary models for the litany:
Barnes was a great devotee of Joyce and surely felt authorized by his example to experiment with the long, litany-like, word-drunk line. In a 1936 article, she writes that she first “sensed the singer” in Joyce reading lines like Ulysses’ “Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, spherical potatoes and iridescent kale and onions, pearls of the earth, and red, green, yellow, brown, russet, sweet, big bitter ripe pomilated apples and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes.” Every page of Ryder delights in this joyous Joycean list-making.
In Ryder, such paragraph-, page-, even chapter-long enumerations often involve themes of parentage and generation, those Biblical “begats” ever hovering in the background. Consider, for example, one of Wendell’s many obsessive orations on fatherhood, here given a metaphysical turn:
I, my love, am to be Father of All Things. For this I was created, and to this will I cleave. Now this is the Race that shall be Ryder—those who can sing like the lark, coo like the dove, moo like the cow, buzz like the bee, cheep like the cricket, bark like the dog, mew like the cat, neigh like the stallion, roar like the bull, crow like the cock, bray like the ass, sob like the owl, bleat like the lamb, growl like the lion, whine like the seal.…
Much of Ryder—the bulk, even—consists of lists like this, by turns exhilarating and exhausting, “as if,” notes Paul West in his afterword, “[Barnes] were intent on producing La Brea tar pits of blather, just to get us in a primitive mood, amazed that humans could come to the Word.” Barnes’s authority may have been Joyce, but her primary model is surely Robert Burton, the 17th-century divine whose Anatomy of Melancholy established the art of the list in English prose.
Gutkin goes on to say, rightfully, that “Ryder is a tissue of digressions.” But poets know that digression often rides alongside the most dexterous of observation. It’s a treat to have such delightful prosody considered." - Harriet Staff
"In the last few pages of Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, one of the title character’s multitudinous offspring describes another of the fiction’s minor figures (Dr. O’Connor, the renowned monologist central to Barnes’s Nightwood) as sounding as if his wisdom “were ill gotten”; “and when it has become mature,” the boy prophesies, “I would be the first to fly from it, for it will be overheady and burst from its sides.” A few pages later, upon completing the fiction, the reader may well wonder whether such a statement might not be applied to Barnes herself. For there definitely is something about the message of Ryder that strikes one as “ill gotten,” as emanating from an author who, more than precocious, is painfully clairvoyant.
When this work was first published in 1928, with its jumble of picaresque, anatomy, and epistolary genres, it appeared as a startlingly archaic hybrid, as a fantastic blend of the best of James Branch Cabell, the worst of Joyce. The fact parts of it were censored helped to put it for a few weeks on the list of best sellers; but reviewers and critics of the day clearly did not know how to respond to such eclecticism. “In brief, a piece of rubbish,” scoffed The American Mercury. Today, in the context of such works as Russell Bank’s Family Life, Barbara Guest’s Seeking Air, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, and John Barth’s Letters, Ryder—now reprinted by St. Martin’s Press—in its linguistic and generic mix is at once familiar and fresh.
Contemporary readers no longer expect—even desire—“pure” fiction, that seamless weave of voice, time, place, character, and plot by which authors such as Barnes, Lewis, Stein, and ultimately even Joyce (in Finnegans Wake) were tested, judged negligent, and exorcised from academic reading lists.
The irony is that Barnes, perceived by Moderns as an avant-gardist “gone too far,” is actually a moral classicist. She never really adapted much to the modern way of thinking and writing of life. Barnes’s is a Medieval vision of a universe inhabited by creatures from a Restoration play. Accordingly, in Ryder, as in all her works, everything and everyone is ajingle, in continual battle between the body and the intellect, between spirit and animal lust.
No figure is more aware of such perpetual alternation than is Jonathan Buxton Ryder, a character based on Barnes’s father. Having been raised in an atmosphere of high wit and sexual freedom (Barnes’s grandmother—Sophia Grieve Ryder in the fiction—held a salon which included such notables as Elizabeth Stanton and Oscar Wilde), Ryder attempts to bring the twain together in polygamy. And much of the fiction’s plot—such as it is—is focused on his fruitless schemes to reconcile the wife and mistress he sleeps between, in himself. But life, Barnes demonstrates, is not about to permit humankind its birthright, its full range. Entrapped in poverty and a two-room cabin, the religious Amelia and lusty Kate—bearing children at prodigious rates—fight tooth and claw for the soul of Ryder. If Ryder survives these hostilities with humor and grace, he cannot withstand the social dictums of the village bourgeoisie nearby. While he saves his growing offspring from a “public” education, he cannot save himself.
Delegations of outraged citizens are visited upon him; and, in the end, he must send his legal wife packing in order to protect his helpless mistress and his progeny, whom he has come to call “the Ryder race.” In short, Ryder must give up the spirit to continue to produce his own and, by metaphor, the human species. At novel’s end, having had to sever his love of the spiritual from his love of life, Ryder recognizes that he can no longer achieve the ideal. In a world where everyone is broken, damned by circumstance, one can only “disappoint.”
Humankind is doomed to failure, Barnes seems to argue, from the start; her theme, so it appears, is one of despair. Such conclusions, however, are highly Romantic, and help to explain, perhaps, why Moderns had such difficulty with her writing, why they “flew” from her visionary truths. For in Ryder, as in its successor, Nightwood, Barnes is less a tragedian than a comic, a comic in the way Dante was. If man’s desire is to be whole, his condition, to Barnes’s way of thinking, finds him caught—where the Great Chain of Being put him—“halfway between the angels and the beasts.” The fact that Ryder can only “disappoint” is not meant to bring the reader to despair, but to knowledge, to the awareness of what it means to be the human beast.
Just before the young Ryder bastard tells Dr. O’Connor what he thinks of him, O’Connor recites the “Three Great Moments of History”: the moment when Cleopatra, reaching for a fig, saw beneath it an asp, and placing it to her left dug, “drew her breath backward through her teeth,” saying “oooooooOOOO Jesus!”; the moment when Stonewall Jackson went riding by, and Barbara Frietchie, “putting her head out the window, shrieked, ‘UUUUh, HHHu, Stonewall!’”; and the moment when General Lee, “knowing he had to surrender, polished-up his medals, reswung his epaulets, tightened his girdle, and burnishing up the old blade, walked into the courthouse,” and “drawing himself up to full height,” presented it, hilt first, to Grant, saying, ‘You know what you can do with this, don’t you?’” (pp. 304-306). In a fiction riddled with parables, fables, and tales, O’Connor’s is especially significant. For these three moments represent, I suggest, the three basic attitudes with which humankind, faced with that chasm between desire and destiny, has dealt with life: abandonment, involvement, and surrender. In a world where there are no solutions, each position has its grandeur. And which posture this fiction’s hero takes, the reader is never told. In Ryder’s cry of “And whom shall I disappoint?” however, one senses his need for an object to disappoint, and one suspects that his lament is the impetus of another search. Like all picaros, Ryder retains the potential to begin the voyage again." - Douglas Messerli
"Ryder is a multi-voiced, multi-faceted novel, a roman à clef by Djuna Barnes about her trauma, her family, her polygamist, free-loving father, her scamming, enabling grandmother, her sexual abuse as a child, and female oppression. “It covers fifty years of history of the Ryder family: Sophia Grieve Ryder, like Zadel a former salon hostess fallen into poverty; her idle son Wendell; his wife Amelia; his resident mistress Kate-Careless; and their children. Barnes herself appears as Wendell and Amelia’s daughter Julie.” - Wiki
Ryder functions as a set of Matryoshka Dolls, the Russian Dolls. Each layer nests, and masks what I think is the heart of the story, Julie. Each layer moving inward, towards the center, towards Chapter 24: “Julie Becomes What She Has Read.”
The fantastic range of styles and voices may be merely a fan dance to distract the reader from the passages concerning sexuality and sexual abuse, or the plot in general.
As mentioned, Julie is based on Barnes, but the reader is only given little bits about her, creating a tremendous amount of distance between us and the character. And in 24, it is the only time we are given a Ryder event without a beginning.
If we are to look at Ryder with a psychoanalytic lens, we can uncover the language of a traumatized child, forced to fragment and flower her prose in order to censor the content, not only from the censors, but possibly from herself. These fragmented pieces, clipped memories, which she fled from, reoccur in her mind in an emotional order, a hierarchy of impact versus a hierarchy of time.
The subject of rape gets an entire chapter. “Rape Re-pining”. To pine is to suffer a physical decline from a broken heart, but to re-pine denotes some form of hope squeezed in between each occurrence of loss. Possibly meaning, multiple rapes. And when the specific sentences are closely looked at, deconstructed, the mystery of Wendell and Julie’s sexual congress could be extracted from the text.
(Within the parentheses are my interpretations, more interpretations like this below.)
“Yesterday (the previous chapter, “Wendell is Born”) swung upon the Pasture Gate (A reference to the Garden of Eden, a child’s genitalia) with Knowledge (Sophia is Greek for knowledge) no-where (to protect her as she tried to in Ch. 24), yet is now, to-day, no better than her mother (Amelia, whom Wendell clearly sleeps with).”
Assuming that Barnes is unveiling a scene of molestation within 24, the child Julie is faced with a contradiction, she must repress or she will go mad, and she must emotionally and intellectually deal with this, speak about it, or she will die. And in order for her to accomplish this, she splits herself and becomes Arabella Lynn, who’s destined for death, but then she also safely remains Julie. Barnes is using dream sequences to dramatize how the trauma of molestation results in a splitting off and disassociation within Julie’s psyche.
Julie also does this psychic trick with her father, who is split into God and Dog. And though in the end these two symbols seem to be interchangeable, the idea is to protect the good father from contamination from the bad.
To further this feeling of dislocation, Julie dislocates the reader, makes them feel ashamed at their confusion and anger towards the break with unexpected relationship between reader and text.
But this feeling of dislocation is not reserved for Julie’s chapters alone. Because the book is wrapped in veils, in layers, the reader is constantly kept at arm’s length.
The novel opens with a Biblical opus. Genesis. The Father was there from the beginning. To a child, the parents, the family and the home are the child’s only world they know. Just as in “The Coming of Kate-Careless, a Rude Chapter,” Wendell appears to his family, to Kate, naked, astride the opening to his log’s cabin second floor, his three legs form the Holy Trinity, the tripod over the trapdoor, as he says: “Look that you may know your destiny!” From the Bible to bawdy folklore.
Ryder incorporates the sermon, anecdote, tall tale, riddling, fable, elegy, dream, epitaph, vision, parable, tirade, bedtime story, lullaby, satiric couplet, parallel structuring, ghost story, debate, sentia or aphorism, and emblem or epitome activated as epiphany.
These stylistic juxtapositions, bring about an intense irony, one that unfathers the Father, questions the allotted gender roles, and turns the traditional values of the patriarchy on its head.
Ryder was written during a time when the social construction of motherhood was deteriorating, and the ideas of mothers and child bearing were in transition. Excessive childbearing was thought to be an epidemic. 23,000 women died through childbearing in 1918 alone. Just as Sophia’s mother did, and as Amelia threatened. In 1920 Margaret Sanger published Woman and the New Race, which presents the revolt of women against sex servitude; urging the benefits of limiting reproduction by voluntary motherhood. As a result, American women who married in the 20’s produced fewer children than those marrying in any decade between the 1880’s and the 1950’s. Because Julie Ryder is the only character that changes, thinks outside of the family, she serves as a sketch for the contemporary female in revolt, one who questions the traditional roles of Mother and Father assumed so self-consciously by Wendell and Sophia.
To do this, Barnes must bring the idealized Mother and Father down to earth. She must represent these archetypes as they are, their grotesque bodies, back down to the womb and the tomb. Barnes does this by epitomizing eating and shitting, sex and pregnancy, childbirth and physical decay. This puts the body in direct opposition to the classical canon of literature, the canon that Barnes is parodying.
In chapters like “What Kate Was Not” when Kate pours her chamber pot onto a police officer, or when Dr. Matthew O’Connor pontificates on his profession and his desires, “staring down into and up through the cavities and openings and fissures and entrances of my fellowman, and following some, and continuing others, and increasing many, and them swelling and opening and contracting and pinching like the tides of the sea, and me a mortal like the sea with my ebb and flow, and my good heart, and my thundering parts and my appetites and my hungers.”
This is Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the Carnivalesque. It refers to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the hegemony though humor and chaos. Named because during the Annual Feast of Fools, every rite and article of the Church, no matter how sacred, was celebrated in mockery.
Barnes was always a lover of the spectacle, of the carnival and the underbelly of society, and I’m suggesting that she’s setting out to do exactly this within her prose by taking the power of the father, be it Wendell, or God, or a conflation of the two, and subverting it by bringing down the idealized sexuality of the female body to the womb/tomb metaphor.
For Bakhtin, such images convey a sense of life in a vital, holistic relation to the world. Each character would then be fully open, an incomplete body, never a closed and complete unit, but in constant connection with the earth, within its process of change and renewal. Just as Amelia talks about in the A-Dunging chapter.
This also coincides with Wendell’s desires to break down the barriers between human and animal, celebrating the abundance and fertility of the earth itself, but this is a utopian ideal. To Barnes, for the woman, the emphasis falls on decay, pain, debasement and death.
The contradictory images of birth and death, and sexuality and childbirth are concentrated in Wendell’s story of Thingumbob. The female gives herself in love and undergoes birthing and death within the same moment.
The illustration of the beast and his bride, illuminate Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque. The beast is conglomerate animal, extending from the clouds, from above, from ideals, while the female is one with the earth. He is upon her, her which is predominantly a woman body, but with ten breasts and hooves instead of feet. There is then emphasis on the maternal breasts, ten breasts, ten babies, and there is a de-emphasis on the individuality of the woman, who has no face, no eyes, no feet, and as Sophia places a great emphasis on feet: “large feet and small feet have played a great part on the history of man.”
Together, the beast, and his bride convey the porous quality of the grotesque body. He as the rain, she as the harvest, tied to the earth, part of the renewal cycle which betrays the woman, using their bodies for pleasure, maternity, physical suffering, and death.
Barnes’ language is modernism at its best: gorgeous, pregnant, obscured, and alienated: Joycian, if Joyce were a woman. Both richly veiled and devastatingly deep, it’s down right shocking that she’s isn’t more well known.
Anaïs Nin writes to Djuna, ”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.”
Here, below, is what I think Nin means when she says this. Here, below, are more examples of the genius behind Barnes’ layered prose.
Again, within the parentheses are my interpretations.
“Arabella Lynn, coming down the cold and pillared (death by phallus) stair, past (skips) the potted, odiferous, cyclomen (A Cyclamen Woman is one who has too frequent and too profuse of menstruation with the flow of black, clotted blood.)” 132
“Yet no sooner is Arabella laid beneath the unthinking sod than the thunders roll! The rain bursts in all its fury! … The heavens crack asunder, and the valleys are inundated! The fig tree fattens on the rain, and the fruit is whelmed.” 136.
“So Danae endured, the beautiful,
to change the glad daylight for brass-bound walls,
And in that chamber secret as the grave
She lived a prisoner. Yet to her came
Zeus in the golden rain.” -Greek Mythology
“Did I not her de-riding me?” 138
Deride. To insult. To not ride. To not be ridden. Not Ryder.
Which can only be a response to “Not I, not I, not I.” - Catherine Borders
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, New Directions, 2006. [1936.]
"The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece—one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era.
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.
The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another persona woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature.
Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936."
"Nightwood is not only a classic of lesbian literature, but was also acknowledged by no less than T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. Lesbian readers will admire the exquisite craftsmanship and Barnes' penetrating insights into obsessive passion. Barnes told a friend that Nightwood was written with her own blood "while it was still running." That flowing wound was the breakup of an eight-year relationship with the lesbian love of her life. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title." - Amazon.com Review
"The expatriate Barnes's 1936 novel was a breakthrough both as a work of modernist fiction and for its frank treatment of lesbianism. Although it no doubt raised an eyebrow or two, the original version had actually been toned down by T.S. Eliot. This edition restores much of the deleted material and includes facsimiles of early drafts as well as a scholarly introduction and notes. The best version of Nightwood ever to see print." - Library Journal
"Admired by Joyce, Nightwood is as important to the history of the 20th century novel as Finnegans Wakeand more readable." - Miranda Seymour
"Djuna Barnes remains a reminder of the Road Not Yet Takeninternational, devious, perverse, verbally abundant, psychologically subtle." - Edmund White
"I read Nightwood back in the 1930s and was very taken with it. I consider it one of the great books of the twentieth century." - William Burroughs
"Nightwood . . . is one of the top ten novels written this century and is undoubtedly . . . one of the greatest gay novels ever written. It is a magnificent, passionate, lyrical work which probes deep beneath the surface skin of life where so many novels are content to stay. . . . The editor, Cheryl J. Plumb, is to be congratulated . . . It is a work which goes on resonating after every reading." - Gay Times
"The 72 discarded pages, full of Barnes' wonderful poetic prose, alone makes this edition worth purchasing. We need as much of Djuna Barnes' writing available as possible." - Harvey Pekar
"WHEN the question is raised, of writing an introduction to a book of a creative order, I always feel that the few books worth introducing are exactly those which it is an impertinence to introduce. I have already committed two such impertinences; this is the third, and if it is not the last no one will be more surprised than myself. I can justify this preface only in the following way. One is liable to expect other people to see, on their first reading of a book, all that one has come to perceive in the course of a developing intimacy with it. I have read Nightwood a number of times, in manuscript, in proof, and after publication. What one can do for other readers - assuming that if you read this preface at all you will read it first - is to trace the more significant phases of one's own appreciation of it. For it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole.
In describing Nightwood for the purpose of attracting readers to the English edition, I said that it would "appeal primarily to readers of poetry." This is well enough for the brevity of advertisement, but I am glad to take this opportunity to amplify it a little. I do not want to suggest that the distinction of the book is primarily verbal, and still less that the astonishing language covers a vacuity of content. Unless the term "novel" has become too debased to apply, and if it means a book in which living characters are created and shown in significant relationship, this book is a novel. And I do not mean that Miss Barnes's style is "poetic prose." But I do mean that most contemporary novels are not really "written." They obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication; and what part of a novel is not composed of these noises consists of a prose which is no more alive than that of a competent newspaper writer or government official. A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give. To say that Nightwood will appeal primarily to readers of poetry does not mean that it is not a novel, but that it is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appre-ciate it. Miss Barnes's prose has the prose rhythm that is prose style, and the musical pattern which is not that of verse. This prose rhythm may be more or less complex or elaborate, according to the purposes of the writer; but whether simple or complex, it is what raises the matter to be communicated, to the first intensity.
When I first read the book I found the opening movement rather slow and dragging, until the appearance of the doctor. And throughout the first reading, I was under the impression that it was the doctor alone who gave the book its vitality; and I believed the final chapter to be superfluous. I am now convinced that the final chapter is essential, both dramatically and musically. It was notable, however, that as the other characters, on repeated reading, became alive for me, and while the focus shifted, the figure of the doctor was by no means diminished. On the contrary, he came to take on a different and more profound importance when seen as a constituent of a whole pattern. He ceased to be like the brilliant actor in an otherwise unpersuasively performed play for whose re-entrance one impatiently waits. However in actual life such a character might seem to engross conversa-tion, quench reciprocity, and blanket less voluble people; in the book his role is nothing of the kind. At first we only hear the doctor talking; we do not understand why he talks. Gradually one comes to see that together with his egotism and swagger -- Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Conner -- has also a desperate disinterestedness and a deep humility. His humility does not often appear so centrally as in the prodigious scene in the empty church, but it is what throughout gives him his helpless power among the helpless. His monologues, brilliant and witty in themselves as they are, are not dictated by an indifference to other human beings, but on the contrary by a hypersensitive awareness of them. When Nora comes to visit him in the night (Watchman, What of the Night?) he perceives at once that the only thing he can do for her ("he was extremely put out, having expected someone else") - the only way to "save the situation" - is to talk torrentially, even though she hardly takes in anything he says, but reverts again and again to her obsession. It is his revulsion against the strain of squeezing himself dry for other people, and getting no sustenance in return, that sends him raving at the end. The people in my life who have made my life miserable, coming to me to learn of degradation and the night. But most of the time he is talking to drown the still small wailing and whining of humanity, to make more supportable its shame and less ignoble its misery.
Indeed, such a character as Doctor O'Connor could not be real alone in a gallery of dummies: such a character needs other real, if less conscious, people in order to realize his own reality I cannot think of any character in the book who has not gone on living in my mind. Felix and his child are oppressively real. Sometimes in a phrase the characters spring to life so suddenly that one is taken aback, as if one had touched a wax-work figure and discovered that it was a live policeman. The doctor says to Nora, I was doing well enough until you kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes. Robin Vote (the most puzzling of all, because we find her quite real without quite understanding the means by which the author has made her so) is the vision of an eland com-ing down an azsle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear; and later she has temples like those of young beasts cutting horns, as if they were sleeping eyes. Sometimes also a situation, which we had already comprehended loosely, is concentrated into a horror of intensity by a phrase, as when Nora suddenly thinks on seeing the doctor in bed, "God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!"
The book is not simply a collection of individual portraits; the characters are all knotted together, as people are in real life, by what we may call chance or destiny, rather than by deliberate choice of each other's company: it is the whole pattern that they form, rather than any individual constituent, that is the focus of interest. We come to know them through their effect on each other, and by what they say to each other about the others. And finally, it ought to be superfluous to observe - but perhaps to anyone reading the book for the first time, it is not superfluous - that the book is not a psychopathic study. The miseries that people suffer through their particular abnormalities of temperament are visible on the surface: the deeper design is that of the human misery and bondage which is universal. In normal lives this misery is mostly concealed; often, what is most wretched of all, concealed from the sufferer more effectively than from the observer. The sick man does not know what is wrong with him; he partly wants to know, and mostly wants to conceal the knowledge from himself. In the Puritan morality that I remember, it was tacitly assumed that if one was thrifty, enterprising, intelligent, practical and prudent in not violating social conventions, one ought to have a happy and "successful" life. Failure was due to some weakness or perversity peculiar to the individual; but the decent man need have no nightmares. It is now rather more common to assume that all individual misery is the fault of "society," and is remediable by alterations from without. Fundamentally the two philosophies, however different they may appear in opera-tion, are the same. It seems to me that all of us, so far as we attach ourselves to created objects and surrender our wills to temporal ends, are eaten by the same worm. Taken in this way, Nightwood appears with profounder significance. To regard this group of people as a horrid sideshow of freaks is not only to miss the point, but to confirm our wills and harden our hearts in an inveterate sin of pride.
I should have considered the foregoing paragraph impertinent, and perhaps too pretentious for a preface meant to be a simple recommendation of a book I greatly admire, were it not that one review (at least), intended in praise of the book, has already appeared which would in effect induce the reader to begin witb this mistaken attitude. Otherwise, generally, in trying to anticipate a reader's misdirections, one is in danger of provoking him to some other misunderstanding un-foreseen. This is a work of creative imagination, not a philosophical treatise. As I said at the beginning, I am conscious of impertinence in introducing the book at all; and to have read a book a good many times does not necessarily put one in the right knowledge of what to say to those who have not yet read it. What I would leave the reader prepared to find is the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.“ - T. S. Eliot
"Written in convoluted and poetic language, Nightwood is an obsessive romance illuminating the demonic and destructive aspects of love. It tells the story of a beautiful young woman, Robin Vote, and Nora and Jenny, the two women who desire her and are eventually overwhelmed and destroyed by their own passions. Robin Vote, sketchy and paradoxical, angelic yet amoral, intriguing because of what is kept from the reader rather than what is revealed, is the pivotal point upon which the story turns. A gothic undercurrent charges the book with tension: human is transformed into beast, beast into human. This theme appears over and over, and Djuna Barnes' obsessive telling of the tale melds style with subject matter. Throughout the book, Djuna Barnes interjects monologues from Dr. Matthew O'Connor, a gender-bending character and unusual literary device whose monologues illuminate the storyline and provide a cohesive understanding of the plot. Formal, dense, even verbose, yet fluid and vivid, Nightwood circles and spirals, swirling around the shadowy plot to create a timeless tale of love and tragedy.“ - Heather Downey
“Djuna Barnes is a writer of wild and original gifts. . . .To her name there is always to be attached the splendor of Nightwood, a lasting achievement of her great gifts and eccentricities---her passionate prose and, in this case, a genuineness of human passions.” - Elizabeth Hardwick
“To have been madly and disastrously in love is a kind of glory that can only be made intelligible in a sublime poetry—the revelatory and layered poetry of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood.” - Dorothy Allison
"The version of Nightwood published in 1936 and revered ever since both as a classic modernist work and a groundbreaking lesbian novel differs in many ways from the book Djuna Barnes actually wrote. The Dalkey edition not only restores to the main text the material Barnes reluctantly allowed to be cut, but also reproduces in facsimile the seventy pages of discarded drafts that survive of earlier versions. More than sixty years after its publication, Nightwood is firmly established as a twentieth-century classic, and this critical edition will allow readers and scholars to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of this unforgettable work."
Certain texts work in homeopathic dilutions; that is, nano-amounts effect significant change over long periods of time. Djuna Barnes's Nightwood is not much more than a couple of hundred pages long, and more people have heard about it than have read it. Reading it is mainly the preserve of academics and students. Others have a vague sense that it is a modernist text, that TS Eliot adored it, that Dylan Thomas called it "one of the three major prose works by a woman" (accept the compliment to Barnes, ignore the insult directed elsewhere), that the work is an important milestone on any map of gay literature - even though, like all the best books, its power makes a nonsense of any categorisation, especially of gender or sexuality.
Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.
In his preface, Eliot talks about the necessity of reading Nightwood more than once - because the second reading will feel very different to the first. This is true. Nightwood is demanding. You can slide into it, because the prose has a narcotic quality, but you can't slide over it. The language is not about conveying information; it is about conveying meaning. There is much more to this book than its story, which is slight, or even its characters, who are magnificent tricks of the light. This is not the 19th-century world of narrative; it is the shifting, slipping, relative world of Einstein and the modernists, the twin assault by science and art on what we thought we were sure of.
That is why, in Nightwood, Baron Felix represents a world that is disappearing. It is why he is so confused about the world he must live in, and why his son Guido is a kind of holy fool. As Gertrude Stein put it so well, "There is no there there." It can be read in two ways - as a comment on matter, and a warning against consolation.
There is no consolation in Nightwood. There is a wild intensity, recklessness, defiance in the face of suffering. All the characters are exiles of one kind or another - Americans, Irish, Austrian, Jewish. This is the beginning of the modern diaspora - all peoples, all places, all change.
Djuna Barnes's 1920s and 30s Paris is on the cusp of leaving behind forever the haute world of Henry James, taken from Proust. That is a world where the better people dine in the Bois, and where open horse-drawn carriages still circle the park. It is in this world that the eager hands of Jenny Petheridge first claw at Robin Vote, the American whom we meet passed out, dead drunk, in one of the new class of "middle" hotels, designed for a new kind of tourist - definitely not of the old world of servants and steamer trunks.
The seedy Paris of whores and cheap bars has not yet begun to change. It is to this world that Robin is drawn; the night-time world, where she will not be judged, and where she can find the anonymity of a stranger's embrace. This world is faithfully tracked by Robin's lover, Norah Flood, hunting faint imprints of her errant amour, sometimes finding her, collapsed with drink, and threatened by police, beggars, and women on the make.
It is a bleak picture of love between women. Petheridge avid and ruthless: "When she fell in love it was with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty; she became instantly a dealer in second-hand and therefore incalculable emotions ... she appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora's for Robin. She was a squatter by instinct."
Nora Flood: "I have been loved," she said, "by something strange, and it has forgotten me."
Robin Vote "sitting with her legs thrust out. Her hair thrown back against the embossed cushions of the chair, sleeping, one arm fallen over the chair's side, the hand somehow older and wiser than her body."
Robin's passivity, Jenny's predatory nature, and Nora's passionate devotion make an impossible triangle. The daily assaults of selfishness and self-harm do not offer a picture of love between women as anything safe or easy. A negative reading would sink us into the misery of the "invert"; the medical pathology of Havelock Ellis, and the bitterness of Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness (1928).
Barnes was well aware of these readings, and her own Paris community had its share of destroyed lives - think of Renée Vivian or Dolly Wilde. Barnes had spoofed the gay and not-so-gay times of her circle in Ladies Almanack, but if she was able to lampoon it - and that in itself is much healthier than Hall's miserable mopings - then she was also able to celebrate it.
Nightwood has neither stereotypes nor caricatures; there is a truth to these damaged hearts that moves us beyond the negative. Humans suffer and, gay or straight, they break themselves into pieces, blur themselves with drink and drugs, choose the wrong lover, crucify themselves on their own longings and, let's not forget, are crucified by a world that fears the stranger - whether in life or in love.
In Nightwood, they are all strangers, and they speak to those of us who are always, or just sometimes, the stranger; or to the ones who open the door to find the stranger standing outside. And yet, there is great dignity in Nora's love for Robin, written without cliche or compromise in the full-blown, archetypal language of romance. We are left in no doubt that this love is worthy of greatness - that it is great. As the doctor, Matthew O'Connor remarks: "Nora will leave that girl some day; but though those two are buried at the opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both."
"Grave" would have been a cliche; "dog" is a snapping stroke of genius.
Robin, Nora, Jenny. Robin's brief and disastrous marriage to Baron Felix, Felix's own story of inferiority and loss, the underworld life of Paris are all seen through the glittering eyes of a creature that is half leprechaun, half angel, half freak, half savant, half man, half woman: the "doctor", Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor.
It is the doctor who first finds Robin drowned in drink; the doctor who becomes the confidant of Felix, and urges him to carry his son's mind "like a bowl picked up in the dark; you do not know what is in it".
It is the doctor who talks his way through life as though words were a needle and thread that could mend it. When Nora finally comes to him, in the blackness of her despair, he talks her through it, alright, sitting up in his tiny iron bed, in a servant's room at the top of a house, the slop bucket to one side, "brimming with abominations".
The doctor is wearing full make-up, a nightgown and a woman's wig - he had been expecting someone else, but he begins his speech, as good as Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses, and this episode is a linguistic, artistic and emotional triumph. It matters that it is emotional. Nightwood is not afraid of feeling.
Barnes's Paris is of its moment, however Nightwood has not survived as a slice of history, but as a work of art. The excitements and atmosphere of her period are there, but there is nothing locked-in about Nightwood. Readers in 1936, when it was published in Britain, would have been uncomfortably aware of Hitler's rise and rise, and his notorious propaganda offensive at the Berlin Olympics - remember, "strength through joy"?
It was the year of the British abdication crisis, when Edward VIII chose his American mistress, Wallis Simpson, over the British throne. In America, other women were in the headlines - Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind, and Clare Boothe Luce's stage play, The Women, was taking Broadway by storm. This year also saw the start of the Spanish civil war.
Peculiar, eccentric, particular, shaded against the insistence of too much daylight, Nightwood is a book for introverts, in that we are all introverts in our after-hours secrets and deepest loves. Our world, this one now, wants everything on the outside, displayed and confessed, but really it cannot be so. The private dialogue of reading is an old-fashioned confessional, and better for it. What you admit here, what the book admits to you, is between you both and left there. Nightwood is a place where much can be said - and left unsaid.
For the rest of my life I will be climbing those stairs with Nora to the doctor's filthy garret. Something of Nightwood has lodged in me. It is not my story, or my experience; it is not my voice or my fear. It is, through its language, a true-shot arrow, a wound that is also a remedy. Nightwood opens a place that does not easily skin over.
There is pain in who we are, and the pain of love - because love itself is an opening and a wound - is a pain no one escapes except by escaping life itself. Nightwood is not an escape-text. It writes into the centre of human anguish, unrelieved, but in its dignity and its defiance, it becomes by strange alchemy its own salve. "Is there such extraordinary need of misery to make beauty?" asks the doctor, but the answer is already written: yes.“ - Jeanette Winterson
„Nightwood by Djuna Barnes is a complex, dense, and stunningly beautiful novel, and one can well understand this admonition by T. S. Eliot in his classic Introduction to the novel: “only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it” (p. xviii). But after looking at the critical sources, one begins to wonder if the popular interpretations really hit the mark with what seems to be an apologetic approach to how the spectacle of the novel was misunderstood in its own benighted times and only now rediscovered and reclaimed by our more enlightened Modern minds. Certainly there is a case to be made for this, but one wonders if it doesn’t miss the mark by not giving the work credit for what it tells us today about our own enlightened selves.
It is a novel about love, loss, language, and identity that challenges understandings of gender, identity, and sexuality, suggesting that these categories are unstable, ever-shifting entities. Barnes evokes a carnival atmosphere of Decadence that scorns contemporary society and its manners, and champions the artificial, the morbid, and the grotesque in a search for novelty and the dark underside of experience. The sensuality and self-indulgence of novelty and spectacle, however, are inevitably followed by dissatisfaction and ennui, a hangover of the soul that leads to sadness and a sense of unwholesomeness.
One of the central themes of Nightwood is an omnipresent yet ever-shifting presence which embraces the process of change and transformation, “the Night.” This presence of transformation, this entity invoked by Dr. Matthew Mighty-grain-of-salt Dante O’Connor as “the Night” is the underbelly of love: it is possession, domination, expansion, aggression, dissolution, despair, alienation, colonization, and assimilation. It is into this presence that Robin runs seeking satisfaction for a material maternal loss that remains unfulfilled by love, both heterosexual and Other-wise: the lack of a tradition of womanhood adequate to her needs in a society of rapid transformation and her subsequent self-identification with the carnivalesque spectacle of alterity.
Barnes also raises the problem of definition or classification, of whether or not a stable definition of lesbian experience can exist, but she refrains from (re)producing a popular view of the spectacle: the frame of reference that the audience already knows. We are taken out of our comfortable customary experience of lesbianism as theorized by reproductive heterosexual ideologists for the edification of other reproductive heterosexual ideologists, and placed into the direct empirical reality of alterity, the experience of being Other than what we assume we are.
Robin participates in both sides of this spectacle: she is both an object of desire, a blank screen on which Nora and Felix project their desires, and part of an alienated public searching for the satisfaction of their desire in the spectacle's promise of happiness, a promise that constantly evades them. Robin sleepwalks through her life. Robin eventually leaves her lover for the anonymous, alienated spaces of the late night bars and streets. Following Robin, Nora unwillingly moves from circus spaces to isolation as their relationship is transformed from participating in the heterogenous public spaces of theatres, circuses, and roadside attractions to becoming a dark drama of loss and betrayal in the streets of Paris. All Nora can do is remember their early relationship and their travels to heterogeneous public spaces, mourn its loss, and helplessly witness the relentless dissolution of Robin’s self-identity.
In the end, tradition emerges in Nightwood not as sentimental, bourgeois banality, but as the circus. The circus performers in Nightwood take on fake aristocratic titles in order to make themselves mysterious: Princess Nadja, Baron von Tink, Principessa Stasera y Stasero, King Buffo and the Duchess of Broadback. They are at home in the disquiet and falseness of entertainment — their identities are never natural but are knowingly performed in complex, multiple and dynamic ways. In true carnivalesque style, Nightwood inverts the privilege of tradition over circus, raising up the meek and casting down the mighty, if only for “the Night.” Thus, it becomes more than a “lesbian novel,” embracing instead the stranger which we all must sometimes be.“ – Michael Dellert
"Nightwood by Djuna Barnes is one of the few books I’ve read more than once. At times it feels like an elongated poem. For, as T.S Eliot remarks in his introduction, the language in Nightwood is of an astonishing beauty. The sentences seem to flow over the pages, at once 'heftig bewegt', then 'utterly tranquil' or 'quietly flowing' as Anton Webern annotated his Five Movements for String Quartet and his Six Bagatelles for String Quartet.
Nightwood is all about confusion, doubt, uncertainty, the unknowable, the impossibility of communication and the need to communicate. It is set in 1920s Paris. The central characters are Nora Flood, a typical American in Paris, attracted by a romantic idea of Old Europe, doctor Matthew O’Connor, an Irish doctor who isn't a doctor, Robin Vote with whom Nora had an affair and Felix Volkbein, Robin's former husband and father to her child. Chance has brought them all together and has woven their lives into an intricate network. This is why Nightwood works as a metaphor of life. We like to think of our lives as meaningful and of ourselves as being in the driving seat, but in reality life is driven by chance and chance meetings.
Robin, whose name could be a man's name, is the most enigmatic character of the whole novel. She is a sphynx, mysterious, elusive and beautiful. She eludes all those who want to know and possess her, which only makes them desire her more. Her identity is her lack of identity. She seems to be constantly on the run, from others, but most of all from herself. After her marriage to Felix Volkbein she had an affair with Nora Flood, whom she leaves to go back to America with another woman, Jenny, but she too will lose her mind because she is unable to possess Robin.
We only get to know the characters through their thoughts and feelings, their effects on each others lives and through their conversations, in which they comment on others, but thereby also reveal their own thoughts and feelings. Matthew O'Connor talks end on end. Whereas others hide in silence, he hides in a flood of words. He prides himself in that he only tells lies. This is the famous paradox of the liar. It casts doubt on everything he says and everything we come to know about others through his words.
Indeed, the whole book is shrouded in doubt and uncertainty, about oneself and others, about one's feelings and (sexual) identity (Doctor Matthew is a transvestite, Robin was first married to Felix Volkbein before going off with a woman), about the present and the future and the whole of the past. It brims with rhetorical questions and other questions that are unanswerable because they are too subjective for anyone else to answer but oneself. "Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?" Nora asks Matthew at some point. What kind of a question is that and how is anyone supposed to answer?
This uncertainty is typical of the modern novel. It is one reason why Nightwood stands as one of the classics of modern fiction alongside Mrs Dalloway, Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time.
Nightwood is full of memorable metaphors. "Only the impossible lasts forever; with time it is made accessible". "Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself." "Your body has a life of its own that you like to think is yours".
So, if you are a dancer and like this book, don't hesitate to contact me.“ – Ivar Hagendoorn
"Modernism is easy. Most contemporary readers are spoon-fed chunks of Eliot, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway in their teens; by their 20s, they likely know Joyce, Woolf, Pound, and Stein, if only by reputation. In fact, most of the foundational modernist texts are attached to strict critical dogmas, and the knowledge that they have been pre-assigned values and interpretations by The People Who Know These Things does much to discourage or warp individual readers’ relationships with the works themselves. It has become nearly impossible to encounter a great book without critical intervention.
Fortunately, there is Nightwood. Djuna Barnes’ novel, published in 1936, has always inspired fervent admiration, and has sold steadily enough to stay in print (albeit at a fairly small press). However, it has managed to escape the disastrous good intentions of English teachers, and has never acquired a legend big or gassy enough to dull its impact. One has the sense that the reclusive, cranky Barnes would have appreciated this fact. This fall, Nightwood has been published in a new edition, prefaced by Jeanette Winterson and T.S. Eliot, which is slicker, prettier, and far more available than any of its previous incarnations. However, when new readers enter the book, there will be no looming, spectral Howard Bloom figure to tell them where and how to react to it (at least, not if one doesn’t count Eliot, who describes his own introduction as “impertinence,” or this column, which I doubt will transform the cultural landscape). More likely than not, they will come to it fresh.
The story of Nightwood is, on the surface, fairly simple. It centers on the disastrous partnership of Robin Vote and Nora Flood. Robin is an androgynous “somnambule,” a woman who compulsively pursues sexual and chemical excess, yet retains an otherworldly detachment from the people around her. Nora Flood is the bright, honest, idealistic woman who takes Robin in after she abandons her husband, Baron Felix, and their retarded child Guido. Nora and Robin share a brief, gleaming moment of perfectly matched love, which quickly deteriorates when Robin begins to wander the streets alone at night, and Nora begins to suspect her of having innumerable affairs. When Robin finally leaves Nora for another woman, Jenny Petherbridge—a character whose lines are drawn in pure poison—Nora’s clean, sharp sense of self begins to deteriorate, and she falls into late-night talking jags with her friend, the loquacious and elusive Doctor O’Connor, who lives divided between the man he is expected to be and the woman that he feels he truly is. (O’Connor’s pronouns remain male throughout the novel; nevertheless, he refers to himself as a woman on numerous occasions. His character, thought surreal or perverse at the time of Nightwood‘s original publication, prefigures much contemporary discourse on transgendered and “gender queer” identity.) The scenes between Nora and O’Connor are the heart of Nightwood—long, spiralling, spangled philosophical dialogues, speeches clotted with startling image and tricky metaphor, oblique, half-told truths that seem, at first, like a species of morbid surrealism, and that become more and more unsettling as the reader begins to detect their meaning.
Near the end of the novel, the Doctor reminisces about a time “when Catherine the Great sent for me to bleed her. She took to the leech with rowdy Saxon abandon, saying: ‘Let him drink; I’ve always wanted to be in two places at once!’” It is an odd speech, though not his oddest, and will be greeted by most readers with resounding confusion. And yet Nora voices the same thought, more simply, when she asks, “have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?” It is a question that nearly all the characters of Nightwood can answer in the affirmative. As the narrative progresses, identities break down, exposing a resounding emptiness. Everyone aches to be filled with someone else, and so Nora and Jenny and Robin and Felix and O’Connor circle and shift places, finding themselves none the happier for it.
Nightwood works by compression, like the best poetry—Winterson memorably characterizes it as a “nano-text.” At just over two hundred pages, it is dense and expansive enough to fuel four hundred theses. And yet, one can’t help but feel that it is best reserved for intimate, undocumented readings. Nightwood is a mystery, and a secret, and it is at its best in the dark.“ – Sady O.
„I have begun reading Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, and I can already tell I’m going to need to read it again. I’m considering reading it again immediately after I finish the first time around, although I’ll wait to see how I feel when I get there. It’s a short book, 150 pages with large font, and I’ve already read about 45.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of it or even how to describe my difficulty knowing what to make of it. Perhaps quoting the opening line is the best thing to do:
Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein, a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin in which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms — gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken.
Yes, that gives you a taste of what it’s like to read this book. The prose is exquisitely well-crafted; I love how this sentence slowly winds its way around to its point, taking in along the way all kinds of information about Hedvig, who turns out not to be a character in the book at all, but is important, perhaps, for the way she sets the tone and gives us information about what kind of person that son will be — who is a character in the book.
The pace of the book is both fast and slow; after two chapters a lot of events have occurred — that son has grown up and now has a child of his own — but the narrator also lingers over conversations at length, allowing the character called “the doctor,” although I don’t think he really is one, to go on and on. I’m not always sure exactly what he’s saying. The characters seem a little like Hedvig, larger than life, not quite real, and fascinating.
You see why I’m going to have to read this book again? It’s not coming together for me in the way books usually do by the time I’m nearly 1/3 of the way through. But this book strikes me as good enough to spend some time with, trying to figure it out.“ – Outmoded Authors
"In recent years, Nightwood has been republished by two different publishing houses with introductions and prefaces with noteable lesbian literati Dorothy Allison (Modern Library, in 2000) and Jeanette Winterson (New Directions, in 2006).
Like Gertrude, Djuna was another American expatriate who lived, in the 1920s and 30s, in the Left Bank of Paris, where they were both part of the same literary coterie. Although their artistic circles transcended both gender and sexual orientation, both Stein and Barnes were impressive constituents of what the critics of the time referred to (harkening back to the Sappho's golden city on Lesbos) as "The Mytilene elite."
It is said that art imitates life and this is certainly the case with Nightwood in which Djuna wrote about her heart breaking experience in her long-term relationship with the faithless artist Thelma Wood. In 1922, Djuna moved in with Thelma, who she would come to refer to as the "Great love of her life." Djuna longed for stability and monogamy but after a few idyllic years with Thelma remarked (bitterly one imagines) that Thelma wanted her "along with the rest of the world."
Thelma, who has an increasing dependence on alcohol, would leave their home and go from café to café and Djuna would follow. In Nightwood, Djuna turns Thelma into a character named Robin (in Robin there was this tragic longing to be kept, knowing herself astray) and elaborates:
"In the beginning, after Robin went away with Jenny to America, I searched for her in the ports. Not literally, in another way. Suffering is the decay of the heart: all that we have loved becomes 'forbidden' when we have not understood it all, as the pauper is the rudiment of the city, knowing something of the city, which the city, for its own destiny, wants to forget. So the lover must go against nature to find love. I sought Robin in Marseilles, in Tangier, in Naples, to understand her, to do away with my terror. I said to myself, I will do as she has done, I will love what she has loved, then I will find her again. At first it seemed that all I should have to do would be to become 'debauched' to find the girls that she had loved; but I found that they were only little girls that she had forgotten. I haunted the cafés where Robin had lived her nightlife. I drank with the men, I danced with the women, but all I new was that others had slept with my lover."
In real life, Djuna and Thelma lived together until 1928 when Thelma left to commence a relationship with the heiress Henriette McCrea Metcalf. In Nightwood, Djuna cast Henriette into the character of Jenny and wrote about her in excruciating detail:
Jenny Petherbridge was a widow, a middle-aged woman who had been married four times. Each husband had wasted away and died; she had been like a squirrel racing a wheel day and night in an endeavour to make them historical; they could not survive it.
She had a beaked head and the body, small, feeble, and ferrous, that somehow made one associate her with Judy; they did not go together. Only severed could any part of her have been called "right." There was a trembling ardour in her wrists and fingers as if she were suffering from some elaborate denial. She looked old, yet expectant of age; she seemed to be streaming in the vapours of someone else about to die….She was the master of the overly sweet phrase, the overly tight embrace…..
When she fell in love it was with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty; she became instantly a dealer in second-hand and therefore incalculable emotions As, from the solid archives of usage, she had stolen or appropriated the dignity of speech, so she appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora's for Robin. She was a squatter by instinct.
Nightwood is not an easy read. It is peopled with numerous characters. In addition to the narrator, Nora, and Thelma; there is Jenny, the heiress; a transgendered doctor; an ex priest; and a Baron with whom Nora has long rambling philosophical conversations that spring from the vast wilderness of her heart. Nightwood is deeply Parisian and bohemian, in a setting with deeply iconic images--in one passage Nora likens herself to the Virgin Mother, waiting patiently for Robin to return.
It is tortured and complex but ultimately it remains a classic tale about a love so great that it is capable of stripping away the self. The question that Nora poses to her transgendered doctor friend, and ultimately, to the reader near the end of the book is:
"Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?" – Janet Mason
"I came to hear of Djuna Barnes when I started reading Anais Nin, who was influenced by her. I read a little about Barnes and liked what I read – she was an American in Paris in the 1920s, wrapped up in the Modernist scene. I read recommendations from TS Eliot. This was enough to sell her to me, and I purchased Nightwood. I knew nothing about it except that it was set in Europe in the 1920s. I went with Eliot’s recommendation and dived in.
From the start, it is odd. It is an odd book. That is the word I would choose to describe it if I was allowed only one. Do not misunderstand me, it is not a bad book – it is just odd. But then Modernism is odd. When first encountering it in AS English Literature, most people in my class just thought ‘What the heck is this?’ Barnes goes for the more surrealist approach (if there is such a thing) and quite literally seems to ‘paint’ her story across the pages with rambling speeches and memories from before the war, abstract descriptions of personalities and making everything more extravagant than is necessary.
First we hear about the birth of Felix. The opening paragraph is one long sentence describing this, detailing his mother’s heritage and strength, as well as the elaborate bed in which the child enters the world. She dies after she has named him and ‘thrust him from her’, and we are told his father died six months earlier. Felix grows up with an obsession with his dead father and shares his obsession with the past, with heritage and legend, with maintaining the family of Volkbein. Felix’s father more or less created his own ‘legend’ of aristocracy and nobility, and Felix does his best to keep this alive. He appears sporadically throughout the book, lamenting what has changed or ended, worrying about the future of his son, Guido (named for his grandfather – how fitting!), and his failing marriage.
He is married to one of the two central figures in the book, a girl named Robin. They meet through the other central figure, the doctor, and seem to get married simply because they get on well and Felix wants an heir. Soon after little Guido grows into a child, Robin vanishes and is never reunited with her little family. Then begins the saga, the drama, the love triangle that provides the rambling prose for the rest of this odd book.
Robin forms a relationship with Nora, and they create a sort of married life, living together in Paris. Robin, however, starts to spend all night, every night, out of the house, driving Nora to distraction. Obviously she is having it off with other girls, but to Nora it is so much more complicated than that. There are two sections in the book, during which one yearns for the simplicity of Eliot, that Nora sits with the doctor and drives herself round the bend dissecting her and Robin’s relationship and trying to explain how she cannot live without her. Meanwhile the doctor philosophises on just about everything and more than once proclaims himself to be a woman. In this odd book, he is the oddest thing of all. Only about halfway through do we begin to learn bits of his actual name, and only at the end do we know that he is in fact called Dr Matthew O’Connor. He is a medical man but acts more as a sort of agony uncle-therapist-philosopher type figure, listening to Felix and Nora as they prattle on about Robin, and taking the opportunity to ramble to a rapt audience.
There are some moments in Nightwood when Barnes seems to be making an actual point, but they are few and far between. There are quotable lines – such as ‘The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy’ and ‘Don’t you know your holding on is her only happiness and so her sole misery’ – and there are interesting speeches about the blurring of the genders, but the rest of this novel seems to be Barnes taking the opportunity to, well, ramble to a rapt audience.
Modernism was dominated by men and was sometimes quite clearly misogynistic, so it is a marvel that Barnes’ novel about a lesbian love triangle was praised so highly be male modernists (Eliot being the key one) and many others after. To me it seems that Nightwood is a novel of its time. She was adored by many female authors, including Nin, Carson McCullers and Bertha Harris, though she does not seem to have been very receptive to this praise. Though Nightwood was initially edited by Eliot to make it less controversial (in regards to sex and religion) Barnes takes advantage of being able to write anything she wants and does not adhere to any particular set of literary rules, not even really those of Modernism. However the book is certainly Modernist, as the prose is quite poetic and abstract, and of course it is set in the 1920s. It is a sort of rampant Modernism that employs every theme and device, spanning location and time, flitting between reality and memory; or imagination.
Nightwood is more interesting than it is enjoyable. There are moments when Barnes has gone on too long on one topic and the reader wishes to skip ahead a few pages; but there is some really wonderful writing in those pages, and a real beauty and sadness and tragic understanding of the world. To one familiar with Modernism and intrigued by Barnes as a character, this is well worth the effort.“ - Lizzi Thomasson
"In some ways, the story of how I came to read Nightwood is as interesting as my thoughts on the book itself. One of the bloggers whom I follow regularly, Kerry at Hungry Like the Woolf, ran both a contest and daily posts on this year’s Tournament of Books, an NCAA-style fiction competition run by the online Morning News. The tournament starts with 16 books (ranging from Wolf Hall, the eventual winner, through the bookclub favorite The Help, to the graphic novel, Logicomix). There is a “game” every day as the brackets wind down — and there is a commentary that welcomes responses from those who are following the tournament. It was late in the contest that commentator John Warner (a professor at Clemson University) offered this incentive: list the last five books that you have read and he would provide a recommendation for future reading. (The offer provoked more than 300 comments and some excellent recommendations — you can see the full exchange here. It is worth the visit.) After giving me two books that I had read and liked (John Banville’s The Book of Evidence and Tim Parks’ Europa), John finally came up with Nightwood.
First published in 1937, this novel probably qualifies as a “cult” book. Barnes had kicked around almost all of the between-war literary havens — Greenwich Village; Provincetown, Mass. and Paris (where she hung out with Gertrude Stein and James Joyce). Venice, too — the book is dedicated to Peggy Guggenheim and John Ferrar Holms. Even before publication, Nightwood acquired a powerful advocate in T.S. Eliot who not only lobbied Faber to publish it, but also wrote the introduction to the first and subsequent editions.
I will admit upfront that Nightwood is not my preferred kind of novel. I lean towards reportage, context and characterization, rather than language and style. To illustrate my distance from this book, Eliot concludes his introduction by saying:
What I would leave the reader prepared to find is the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizaberhan tragedy.
That is a perceptive summary: language and style do carry the book, but in its own way it does have both characterization and horror/doom. While it was that latter part that kept me involved in the book, I am going to run against form in this review and focus on examples of language and style — for other readers, I am sure that is where the real strength of this novel lies. In the opening of his introduction, Eliot also says “it would appeal primarily to readers of poetry”. I confess to not being a reader of poetry since I left university.
The two characters that we meet in chapter one are appropriate symbols for what the book will become; they are as unreliable as any character could be. Felix calls himself Baron Volkbein; his father had invented the noble title which has no legitimate basis whatsoever and Felix invented inheriting it:
Felix was heavier than his father and taller. His hair began too far back on his forehead. His face was a long, stout oval, suffering a laborious melancholy. One feature alone spoke of Hedvig [his mother], the mouth, which, though sensuous from lack of desire as hers had been from denial, pressed too intimately close to the bone structure of the teeth. The other features were a little heavy, the chin, the nose, and the lids; into one was set his monocle which shone, a round blind eye in the sun.
Felix hooks up with another character who will become even more important to the book: Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor. He isn’t really a doctor, although he acts as one. He is a declining never-was (as opposed to has-been) and, if I can be permitted to borrow from North American First Nations spiritualism, he will perform the role of The Trickster throughout the novel. O’Connor’s monologues occupy much of the novel, as all of the characters “bounce” off him (his role is like that of a Father Confessor, shrink, talkative barhound, all rolled into one), so it is worth paying attention to his style. Here’s an example, comparing himself to Felix:
“The Irish may be as common as whale-shit — excuse me — on the bottom of the ocean — forgive me — but they do have imagination and,” he added, “creative misery, which comes from being smacked down by the devil, and lifted up again by the angels. Misericordioso! Save me, Mother Mary, and never mind the other fellow! But the Jew, what is he at his best? Never anything higher than a meddler — pardon my wet glove — a supreme and marvellous meddler often, but a meddler nevertheless.” He bowed slightly from the hips. “All right, Jews meddle and we lie, that’s the difference, the fine difference.”
If you find echoes of Joyce’s prose in that, you will find many more. I am a long way into this review and I am only now getting to the main point of the “story” — it is a study of lesbianism, hermaphrodites and the anxiety and pain that were involved in “deviant” behavior in the 1930s (and decades after). The focal point for this is Robin Vote who, while she almost never speaks in the book (her role is that of being a more or less permanent victim who transfers her woes to even greater effect for others), has a dramatic impact on every other character in the novel. Here is how Barnes introduces her:
On a bed, surrounded by a confusion of potted plants, exotic palms and cut flowers, faintly over-sung by the notes of unseen birds, which seem to have been forgotten — left without the usual silencing cover, which, like cloaks on funeral urns, are cast over their cages at night by good housewives — half flung off the support of the cushions from which, in a moment of threatened consciousness she had turned her head, lay the young woman, heavy and dishevelled. Her legs, in white flannel trousers, were spread as in a dance, the thick-lacquered pumps looking too lively for the arrested step. Her hands, long and beautiful, lay on either side of her face.
Robin Vote is, in fact, the evil centre of the book and I make no apology for leaving an introduction of her until so late in this review — Barnes does the same thing in the novel. She will marry Felix and bear his child, desert him for Nora Flood, desert her for Jenny Petherbridge and move to America. (Nora and Jenny are very important characters in the book, but you will have to read it to discover why). Robin is the vision of the future that keeps elusively moving away; Dr. O’Connor is the voice of the past which is always disturbingly present and more than ready to review and pontificate on your circumstances. That tension between perceptions of the future that are conflicting with memories of the past is a central feature of the book.
I am not even going to attempt to provide a concluding opinion regarding this book. As I hope the review shows, it does have a version of a plot. And it certainly has characterization. More than anything else, it has prose and style — I’ve included more quotes than usual to acknowledge that. If you like the excerpts, I am sure you will like the book. Nightwood is a signicant novel and I am very glad that I read it, even if it did not fit my normal pattern — I will be very interested in what my memories of it are a few months down the road. I suspect that I may be remembering more than I am willing to admit now.
And finally, to get back to the world of fun reading, I would like to offer to repeat John Warner’s “five book” exercise. If you would care to indicate what five books you have most recently read, I’ll do my best to suggest one that you should consider. No promises of success, however.“- KevinfromCanada
"After reading T.S. Eliot's introduction to Djuna Barnes' novel, Nightwood, I expected a bit more than was actually delivered.
Nightwood is the complex and emotionally disturbing story of Robin Vote, and the men and women she both loves and destroys. As an early example of open writing on homosexuality, Nightwood delivers a straightforward and un-clichéd tale of relationships between women. That is perhaps one of the very remarkable points of the novel.
The character of Doctor Matthew O'Connor serves as the Greek chorus/comedic relief of the novel, lightening the mood just as one might begin to despair of Robin and her dramatic mood swings, which set her fleeing from whichever lover she was with at the time.
The doctor's monologues are at times repetitive and tedious, other times convoluted and vague, and other times wildly bawdy and crass. Most times, however, the monologues are at least an entertaining and uplifting diversion from the melodrama of Robin and her lovers.
Djuna Barnes has the soul of a poet, and this is evident when the reader gets past the novel's introductory phase (introducing characters, setting, etc.). As an example, the following is from one of the doctor's long monologues, in which he is lecturing one of Robin's cast-off lovers, Nora:
We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it.
Seen as a whole, Nightwood is a wonderful piece of literature to read. It's modernity and guts in use of social satire truly earn it the high regard it has enjoyed since its appearance. Its enduring strength lies in Barnes' writing style, the poetry of which eclipses any faults one might otherwise find in the novel.“ – berniE-zine
Nightwood tumblr
Robin’s Silence in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
Carrie Rohman: Revising the Human: Silence,Being, and the Question of the Animal in Nightwood (pdf)
Ann Kennedy: Inappropriate and Dazzling Sideshows: Interpellating Narratives in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood
ENRIQUE GARCÍA DIEZ: DJUNA BARNES'NIGHTWOOD; A MODERNIST EXERCISE
Sarah Henstra: Looking the Part: Performative Narration in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and Katherine Mansfield's "Je Ne Pane Pas Francais"
Read it at Google Books
"Blending fiction, myth, and revisionary parody and accompanied by the author's delightful illustrations, Ladies Almanac is also a brilliant modernist composition and arguably the most audacious lesbian text of its time. While the book pokes fun at the wealthy expatriates who were Barnes' literary contemporaries and remains controversial today, it seems to have delighted its cast of characters, which was also the first audience. Barney herself subsidized its private publication in 1928. Fifty of the 1050 copies of the first edition were hand colored by the author, who was identified only as a lady of Fashion: on the title page."
"Lesbianism, its flories and sorows, is the subject and quest of this marvelously erverse sentimental journey by Nightwood's author... A striking lesbian mainfesto and a deft parody." —Library Journal
Barnes's affectionate lampoon of the expatriate lesbian community in Paris was privately printed in 1928. Arranged by month, it records the life and loves of Dame Evangeline Musset (modeled after salon hostess Natalie Barney) in a robust style taken from Shakespeare and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and is illustrated throughout with Barnes's own drawings.
This new edition is a facsimile of the 1928 edition with the addition of an afterword providing details on the book's origins and a key to its real-life models.
"Djuna Barnes must have had great fun writing and illustrating this book. It's a lively lampoon of her lesbian chums of Left Bank Paris in the 1920s. The main character, Dame Evangeline Musset, is based on the notorious dyke Natalie Barney. Structured as a month-by-month almanac in a style that owes as much to Shakespeare's comedies as to any literature of the intervening centuries, Barnes's book follows the Dame's amorous, often naughty, adventures." - Amazon.com Review
“[I]f you are able to contain your cackling long enough to consider the truth underlying the jest, you will come away with an understanding of the dilemmas facing lesbians at the opening of the century. You'll find that they are not much different from the questions we grapple with today.” - Lambda Book Report
“As an 'Almanack,' the book celebrates the uniqueness of women . . . extolling their society with separatist sentiment not violent or radical so much as mirthful and delightful.” - The Daily Helmsman
“Djuna Barnes remains a reminder of the Road Not Yet Taken—international, devious, perverse, verbally abundant, psychologically subtle.” - Edmund White
Djuna Barnes, The Book of Repulsive Women: And Other Poems, Carcanet Press, 2006.
"Published together for the first time, this collection features work from 1914 to the 1970s—many pieces first appearing in pamphlets and literary journals in New York and Paris—including illustrations by the author"
‘What an autopsy I’ll make, with everything all which ways in my bowels’- Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Djuna Barnes (1892 - 1982) is one of the twentieth century’s most interesting and elusive authors. She wrote short stories, journalism, drama, poetry, three experimental novels and she illustrated much of her own work. She once described herself as the most famous unknown writer and this was an astute remark. During her lifetime her name was widely familiar, but her work was little read. She was partially responsible for her lack of a readership. From the 1950s until her death in 1982, she lived in Greenwich Village in seclusion. Editors approached her to request the republication of her work but she flatly refused. In the latter years of her life she seemed determined to keep herself out of print. Since her death her work has appeared in new editions, including my collection of her poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women and Other Poems (Carcanet).
I wrote my doctoral thesis on Djuna Barnes (Oxford University, 2002). Newspaper City: Djuna Barnes’s New York Journalism looked at the relationship between Barnes’s writing in New York newspapers and the urban space of the city. The newspapers and the city beyond its edges shaped each other; Barnes’s writing was a creative medium between the two.
Nightwood appeared in 1936. This carnivalesque novel is the story of a tangled web of personal obsessions set in between-the-wars Europe and America in an atmosphere of spiralling anti-Semitism, rising fascism, and an underground bohemian expatriate community peopled by outsiders: Jews, transvestites, lesbians, First World War veterans, circus freaks and disinherited aristocrats. Barnes once remarked that ‘there is more surface to a shattered object than a whole’, and this applies to her novel, which has no centre, being a series of fractured edges instead. Following its publication, Nightwood attracted much favourable attention. Between the 1940s and the early 1980s, however, the book languished at the very edges of the literary world. It gained the status of a cult classic and was trumpeted by those who were themselves on the edge of the literary canon. William Burroughs said, ‘I consider it one of the great books of the twentieth century.’ Nightwood is now rightly regarded as an important twentieth century text.“ – Rebecca Loncraine
Excerpt
Djuna Barnes, Collected Poems: With Notes Toward the Memoirs, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.
"This groundbreaking edition compiles many of the late unpublished works of American writer Djuna Barnes (1892-1982). Because she published only seven poems and a play during the last forty years of her life, scholars believed Barnes wrote almost nothing during this period. But at the time of her death her apartment was filled with multiple drafts of unpublished poetry and notes toward her memoirs, both included here for the first time. Best known for her tragic lesbian novel Nightwood, Barnes has always been considered a crucial modernist. Her later poetry will only enhance this reputation as it shows her remarkable evolution from a competent young writer to a deeply intellectual poet in the metaphysical tradition. With the full force of her biting wit and dramatic flair, Barnes’s autobiographical notes describe the expatriate scene in Paris during the 1920s, including her interactions with James Joyce and Gertrude Stein and her intimate recollections of T. S. Eliot. These memoirs provide a rare opportunity to experience the intense personality of this complex and fascinating poet."
"Famous for her grim lesbian novel Nightwood (1936) and for her life as a fabulous expatriate in Paris between WWI and WWII, Barnes (1892– 1982) has never enjoyed a reputation as a poet, partly because almost none of her post-Nightwood verse saw print. This diligent and exhaustive edition both restores her hard-to-find magazine verse of the 1910s and 1920s and makes available her dense, sardonic late poems. The early poems are conventional in form, but extreme in emotion. Some focus on same-sex desire; others perform a self-conscious wildness, with disturbing or deadly tableaux—a lady's "profile like a dagger lain/ Between the hair," a "snail that marks the girth of night with slime." The later poetry, as the editors write, "challenges us to savor lines that appear to be English, but... elude us," condensing almost to unintelligibility a gothic-sarcastic sensibility derived from T.S. Eliot, and from the 17th-century dramatists Barnes, like Eliot, admired. She casts herself as a neo-medieval scourge of hypocrisy named Dan Corbeau ("Lord Crow"), attacks authority of all sorts, or invokes "Lucifer, the salmon of the air,/ The kiss killing man," who "Breeds himself by falling from the air." Often the editors print multiple drafts of a single unfinished poem. Of more general interest, perhaps, are the pages from Barnes's unfinished prose memoir of Paris: despite their repetitive, fragmentary state, they contain witty remarks and observations on Joyce, Stein, Jean Cocteau and other luminaries, among them her own mentor T.S. Eliot, whom she admired and resented to the end." - Publishers Weekly
"Djuna Barnes may seem like a one-hit wonder to readers familiar with her tragic modernist novel Nightwood, which was touted by T. S. Eliot. But she actually published a lot of poetry early in her career, and remained prolific until her death. Compiled here for the first time are the poems and memoir pieces that Barnes wrote during the last 40 years of her life, plus many poems that had been published previously and forgotten. Editors Herring and Stutman carefully sifted through numerous drafts and fragments, and their work reveals Barnes' developmental stages as a poet, while also confirming her skill and originality. Barnes was an enigma who guarded her privacy and resisted simplistic labeling, including the designation of her work as lesbian literature. Looking at Barnes' rhyming, Parkeresquely satiric, and formal poems in the context of today's largely autobiographical poetry, it may be difficult for the average reader to embrace them. The memoir pieces, however, offer a wonderful glimpse into Barnes' Paris years and show off her engaging modernist prose." - Janet St. John
Djuna Barnes, Collected Stories, Sun & Moon Press, 2000.
"Distinguished Djuna Barnes biographer Phillip Herring (Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes [Viking]) has here gathered all the short stories of Djuna Barnes, including several that have never been published previously. Beginning in 1914, Djuna Barnes contributed regularly to numerous magazines and newspapers works of fiction, poetry, essay, and drama. Unlike some works in other genres in which she wrote, Barnes held her stories in particularly high regard, revising several of the stories collected in A Book (1923; reprinted as A Night Among the Horses in 1929) late in her life. These stories from Spillway, her other early tales, and other stories never before published are collected in this volume. What they reveal is the breadth and consistency of Barnes's story writing, and should help establish her as one of the most interesting and vital storytellers of the great period of American literary output after World War I. Barnes is recognized internationally for her masterwork Nightwood and for other works of fiction, including Ryder and Ladies Almanack. She also wrote plays, most notably The Antiphon - which will he republished by Sun & Moon Press next year - and shorter works collected in At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays. Her early poetic work, The Book of Repulsive Women, has increasingly gained readers over the past few years. A selection of her drawings, which often accompanied her literary writing, has just been published by Sun & Moon Press as Poe's Mother."
"Beginning in 1914, Djuna Barnes contributed regularly to numerous magazines and newspapers works of fiction, poetry, essay, and drama. Unlike some works in other genres in which she wrote, Barnes held her stories in particularly high regard, revising several of the stories collected in A Book (1923; reprinted as A Night Among the Horses in 1929) late in her life. These stories from Spillway, her other early tales, and other stories never before published are collected in this volume. What they reveal is the breadth and consistency of Barnes's story writing, and should help establish her as one of the most interesting and vital storytellers of the great period of American literary output after World War I.
Barnes is recognized internationally for her masterwork Nightwood and for other works of fiction, including Ryder and Ladies Almanack. She also wrote plays, most notably The Antiphon-which will be republished by Sun & Moon Press next year-and shorter works collected in At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays. Her early poetic work, The Book of Repulsive Women, has increasingly gainer readers over the past few years. A selection of her drawings, which often accompanied her literary writing, has just been published by Sun & Moon Press as Poe's Mother."
"Djuna Barnes, best known for her 1936 novel Nightwood, was a modernist with a fertile talent, who worked as an illustrator, a reporter, and a feature writer for newspapers and avant-garde magazines in the first half of this century. In their playfulness with words and syntax, the short stories in this volume, written between 1914 and 1942 and collected by her biographer, Phillip Herring, show the influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Many were written for magazines and end with a plot twist. As one might expect from a visual artist, these stories are full of symbolic images, often hauntingly grotesque." - Amazon.com Review
"A cult writer whose melodramatically unhappy life brought her into the Left Bank orbit of expatriate authors ranging from James Joyce to Gertrude Stein, Barnes employed an elliptical, sometimes surrealistic style as an elaborate screen for the autobiographical sources and raw pain that lie behind much of her work. Unfortunately, many of the 41 tales collected here?her entire short-story output? highlight her weaknesses as a writer rather than her strengths. Barnes was not a particularly adept shaper of plot, and often the deeper roots of her characters' grief and erratic behavior are too obscure to discern. In many of her stories, such as "The Rabbit," characters exhibit an intensity of feeling that seems to go way beyond the story's initial context, making them appear merely pathological. While her best tales?"A Night Among the Horses," "Oscar," "The Doctors," "Saturnalia" and, most prominently, "Spillway"?are fit company for her classic novel Nightwood, most of the fiction here will be of interest chiefly to scholars." - Publishers Weekly
"Barnes biographer Philip Herring introduces this comprehensive collection—every tale known to have been written by Barnes—which will be of great interest to scholars and devotees.
Others, however, might be confused by the inadequately annotated gathering, since the 41 stories are not dated, nor are the original places of publication noted. Most of the early fiction (written for weekly magazines) is identifiable by its melodramatic naturalism: slangy stories of urban romance that emphasize class distinctions and the harsher realities of city life, featuring bohemians in Greenwich Village, dance-hall girls, and immigrant workers. Then, after roughly a hundred pages, the high priestess of modernism emerges in dark lyrical tales of disaffection and alienation. With their cosmopolitan settings and points of view, Barnes's mature work displays all the ambiguity, world weariness, and cynicism that distinguish Nightwood (1936), her dense, elusive modern masterpiece. There are several stories about dying aristocrats, beset by age, indifferent to their past. "The Terrorists" is a scathing view of la vie bohémienne (cafe revolutionaries preach destruction while indulging their appetite for the good life), and the particular horrors of modern life are on view in stories like "Oscar," with its intimations of incest, madness, and murder. Mismatched lovers are common in Barnes's work: older women entertain young men in hopes of staving off decay; a mother falls in love with her daughter's suitor; a doctor's wife randomly beds a salesman to debase herself; a wealthy woman wants to marry her footman; and two coquettish sisters tantalize Parisian gentlemen. At the center of many of these mordant tales are relations that lead to spiritual death, if not actual destruction. "Dusie," a portrait of bohemian lesbians in Paris, recalls the pervasive smolder of decay and decadence in Nightwood.
The best were already available in other collections, but it's always worthwhile to see an author complete. Unfortunately, you'll need a bibliography to locate many of these pieces in Barnes's unusual career. - Kirkus Reviews
"If one short novel is enough to establish a writer as "major," and it is, then Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) achieved that distinction in 1936, when Nightwood was published in London. The first edition carried an introduction by T.S. Eliot which has accompanied subsequent printings and in which he praises "the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy." Later, with enthusiasm that just manages to outshine an absurd, lamentable hyperbole, the language-addicted poet Dylan Thomas called Nightwood "One of the three great prose books ever written by a woman."
In addition to its many incidental pleasures, three things make Nightwood powerful and compelling: the dark brifliance of the writing, which is by turns aphoristic, satirical, witty, passionate, musical, melancholy, sonorous, biblical and funereal; the love story of Robin Vote and Nora Flood, two American women on the Left Bank in the incredible Paris of the 1920s; and Dr. Matthew Mighty-grain-o-sand Dante O'Connor, the novel's Tiresian commentator, confessor, and chorus. It is now widely known that Robin was modeled on the great love of Barnes' life, Thelma Wod, Nora on Barnes herself, and Dr. O'Connor on the Irish-American, quack doctor, sometime abortionist, flamboyantly campy homosexual and cafe raconteur, Daniel Mahoney.
Nightwood was published in the United States in 1937 and published again by New Directions in 1946: it has remained in print for 50 years. Yet as recently as the early 1970s, Barnes and her work were comparatively unknown. One sometimes encountered groups of friends (particlarly gay and lesbian readers) who were devoted to the novel, but one also encountered professors of modern fiction who had not read Nightwood--or had read it with distaste and condescension. Barnes collection of short stories, published as A Book (1923) and as A Night Among The Horses (1929), received little attention when it reappeared, edited and revised, as The Spillway (London, 1962; New York, 1972). The Selected Works of Djuna Barnes (1962) did not much extend Barnes' audience or get her into the college curriculum. Other works of fiction, particularly Ladies Almanack and Ryder, were hardly known and hard to come by.
All that has changed over the last quarter century, thanks to the rise of feminism and gender studies, the recognition by scholars of something called "gay and lesbian literature," the recognition by publishers of something called "gay, lesbian and bi-sexual readers," and by curiosity about Barnes' life. Since 1976, she has been the subject of three critical biographies, most recently Phillip Herring's superb Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes.
Barnes has been called "The Garbo of literature": although she was a sought-after and well-paid journalist and interviewer in the early decades of this centry (when she interviewed F. Scott Fitzgerald, he reportedly said "I ought to be interviewing you!"), although she was part of the legendary expatriate community in Paris after World War One and was "the red-haired Bohemian" liked and admired by such figures as Joyce, Eliot, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Robert McAlmon, Mina Loy, Peggy Guggenheim and Janet Flanner, Barnes spent the last half of her life as a virtual recluse in a small apartment in Gqeenwich Village. She spent those solitary 42 years in straightened circumstances, although not (as one sometimes hears) in abject poverty. Ironically enough, among the seven requests for the movie rights to Nightwood that she turned down was one from Ingmar Bergman: legend has it she might have relented, if Bergman could have signed Garbo for the role of Robin!
Barnes spent the last decade of her life feeling besieged. She trid to get the feminist bookstore, Djuna Books, to change its name; she denied a mime troupe permission to do an interpretation of Nightwood; although she would not read the manuscript, Barnes vehemently opposed publication of my book of poems, The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty (an extended homage to Nightwood and to the Paris of the inter-war years) and kept it out of print for four years. When Douglas Messerli, publisher of Sun & Moon Prss, discovered that Barnes' early stories had gone out of copyright, she tried--and failed--to stop him from publishing them as Smoke and Other Early Stories (1982).
If Messerli caused the combative octogenarian discomfort, he has more than redeemed himself. Collected Stories is the most recent of six Barnes' titles from Sun & Moon Press, and three more books are in preparation. There are forty-three stories here, edited and introduced by Barges' biographer Phillip Herring and accompanied by a substantial bibliographic note by Messerli, ranging from early, naive work such as "The Terrible Peacock" (1914) to her last story, the high-spirited, witty and satirical "The Perfect Murder" (1942). As Barnes' readers would expect, all are economical (the longest is twenty-one pages, the shortest barely two) and consciously--sometimes, too self-consciously--crafted.
Readers who come to the Collected Stories expecting Nightwood's desperate, passionate words about the betrayal of love will be disappointed. They will find nothing like
"Time isn't long enough," [Nora] said, striking the table. "It isn't long enough to live down [Robin's] nights. God," she cried, "what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you prepare for that? Everything we can't bear in the world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.... There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purty's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?"
or
"And then that day I'll remember all my life, when I said: 'It is over now'; she was asleep and I struck her awake. I saw her come awake and turn befouled before me, she who had managed in that sleep to keep whole. Matthew, for God's sake, say something, you are awful enough to say it, say something!"
and Dr. O'Connor's answer:
"Oh, for God's sweet sake, couldn't you stand not learning your lesson?....You are full to the brim with pride, but I am an empty pot going forward, saying my prayers in a dark place, because I know no one loves, I, least of all, and that no one loves me, that's what makes most people so passionate and bright, because they want to love and be loved, when there is only a bit of lying in the ear to make the ear forget what time is copiling....Be humble, like the dust, as God intended, and crawl, and finally you'll crawl to the end of the gutter and not be missed and not much remembered."
Those who come to Collected Stories expecting the gay high-camp of O'Connor's more frothy monologues will also be disappointed. They will find little that resembles Matthew's cafe debate about the merits of particular pissoirs ("If you think certain things do not show from what dstrict they come, yea, even to an arrondissement, then you are not gunning for particular game, but simply any catch, and I'll have nothing to do with you!"), or his conversation with his penis ("Tiny O'Toole") in the church of St. Merri.
They will find just one story with an explicitly homosexual subject. "Dusie" is set in Paris in the house of "Madame K," who is transparently modeled on "the Empress of the Amazons," Natalie Clifford Barney. The stoqy itself hardly amounts to a story, but its satire is telling and its title character prefigures the "Robin Vote" of Nightwood. Collected Stories also includes "Behind the Heart," which is pastel and a little gauzy and quite unlike Barnes' other fiction, an affecting love story based on Barnes' infatuation with the much younger, bisexual writer Charles Henry Ford. Barnes refused to publish it during her life time. Sensitively written, "Behinb the Heart" has more in common with T.S. Eliot's early poem "Portrait of a Lady" than it does with (for example) the luh, androgenous sensuality of Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis."
Barnes was not a great short story writer, although she was often very good. Herring's introduction uses expressions such as "one of Barnes's better stories" and "one of Barnes's most successful stories," and avoids exaggerated claims like "one of the greatest." Barnes herself recognized the core of her accomplishment in the form, preserving and revising most of her best work in each of hr short story collections and finally narrowing the cannon down to just nine in Selected Works. She also made mistakes of judgement: there are at least eight or nine other stories that should be counted among her best.
In his introduction, Herring quotes a 1923 letter from Barnes to her mother "which goes far to explain the mood in which many of her stories were written":
"having life is the greatest horror--I cannot think of it as a 'merry, gay & joyous thing just to be alive'--it seems to me monstrous, obscene & still with the most obscene trick at the end."
In story after story Barnes confronts us with a dark view of our precarious, metaphysical predicament: that we are neither as unconsciously noble and disinterested as other animals nor as wisely noble and disinterested as angels.
I don't mean to mislead the reader: the pleasures of Collected Stories are many. We get to observe the evolution of Barnes' distinctive prose (a little of the Renaissance charater book and Jacobean revenge drama, a little of the Nineteenth Century short story, a little of Oscar Wilde, and a great deal of Senecan wit and Barnesean strangeness). We encounter a full cast of Barnes eccentrics--humble laborers, immigrants, farmers displaced to the city, competing lovers, defunct aristocrats, pretenders to noble lineage, bon-bon-brained ingenues and worldly widows. We enjoy short sojourns in times and places which have now vanishd.
But the greatest pleasure of Collected Stories, I suspect, is reserved for those who know and love Nightwood and crave more--even minor work--by the author of that monstrous masterpiece.“ - Peter Klappert
Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon, Green Integer, 2000.
"Drama. Djuna Barnes's great verse drama, written, in part, about her own family, was first published in 1958, and was last reprinted in her SELECTED WRITINGS of 1962. Since that time the play has been out of print. The play certainly is a strange one; even the author observes in her cautionary note that a misreading of THE ANTIPHON is not possible; and she herself described the work as a closet-drama. However, upon its original publication, Dag Hammarskjold translated this highly poetic and theatrical play into Swedish, and it was performed at the Royal Swedish Theater to mostly positive reviews. There have been few notable productions since then, but THE ANTIPHON remains on of Barnes's highest poetic achievements, fitting comfortably alongside the great prose masterwork NIGHTWOOD".
Djuna Barnes, Smoke: and Other Early Stories, Sun & Moon Press, 1988.
"If my memory serves me well, I first learned of "Smoke and Other Early Stories" after reading an article about Douglas Messerli, founder of Sun & Moon Press in Los Angeles. Messerli spoke of his giddy discovery that the copyright on many of Barnes' short stories had run so he had the legal right to publish them. Though Barnes apparently was not pleased by this, this collection is the result. And God bless the result. These fourteen tales (puntuated by Barne's own strange and evocative pen-and-ink illustrations) should be read by anyone who loves well-crafted, provative short fiction; and it should be a must for those who are beginning writers. The first sentence of each story introduces you to a world where everyday people and things transmute inexplicably into something weird and dreamlike: "Every Saturday, just as soon as she had slipped her manila pay envelope down her neck, had done up her handkerchiefs and watered the geraniums, Paprika Johnson climbed onto the fire-escape and reached across the strings of her pawnshop banjo." (From "Paprika Johnson.") Sometimes, she sets the stage simply as with the first line of "What Do You See, Madam?": "Mamie Saloam was a dancer." As Messerli notes in the introduction, Barnes' stories were published in newspapers at a time (the first two decades of the 1900s) when the public expected to see short fiction in such venues. Reading this collection can only make you long for such an era." - Daniel Olivas
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