“I am the most famous unknown of the century.” — Djuna Barnes

When Barnes called herself a “famous unknown” she may have been being elliptical or ironic, or she may have been just telling it like it is. Her writing didn’t have literal chronological through-lines and some readers found it challenging. So SHE was more famous than her WORK. Her fame came from her love affairs with women, and her immortalization in all the memoirs written by members of the vibrant bohemian lesbian ex-pat community in Paris, particularly its main scribe, the Amazon (her actual nickname) Natalie Clifford Barney. Djuna Barnes was a huge “player” in that scene, and in the ex-pat writer “scene” in general. She knew everyone. She was pals with James Joyce, Hemingway, Sylvia Beach. She was a writer and illustrator, and is most remembered for Nightwood (1936), a lesbian cult classic, written in a curlicue almost Gothic style but flavored with ironic Modernist detachment. Djuna Barnes shows up briefly in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (played by Emmanuelle Uzan) – an event gratifying to any Barnes fan. She dances with Owen Wilson, and he comments afterwards: “That was Djuna Barnes? No wonder she wanted to lead.” Ba-dum-ching.

Barnes worked on Nightwood for a number of years, giving public readings, editing, passing the manuscript around for feedback. Nobody wanted to publish. It is a difficult book. Nightwood eventually landed on T.S. Eliot’s desk. It was just ten years after his Wasteland cracked apart the certainties of the literary tradition. He was not afraid of difficult. He edited Nightwood, and eventually published it in 1936, with Faber and Faber. (He also said, famously, of Barnes: “Never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.” He wasn’t the only one who felt this contradictory way.) Nightwood is a roman a clef, with barely-disguised portraits of Barnes, her lovers, all of the women in that fascinating crowd.

 
 
Barnes and Joyce were good friends. His influence on her work is clear. She pushed the “difficulty” factor and – I know I say this all the time but it bears repeating to the people who don’t even know they’re being snobs when they sniff-sniff at Joyce’s stylings – James Joyce is not difficult once you get into the swing of it. (Okay, the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter in Ulysses is difficult. He’s just showing off there!) But the NARRATIVE is clear to the point of being prosaic. A man takes a walk. A man goes to sleep. I mean, he wasn’t trying to be clever or bury the lede. In any way. He wasn’t writing for an elite. He really wasn’t. He was writing for everyone. He wanted a universal language. Joyce’s prose experimentations did create monsters of imitation, however! William S. Burroughs called Nightwood “one of the great books of the twentieth century”. So take your pick.

Barnes wrote a profile of James Joyce for Vanity Fair in 1922 (the year Ulysses was published). I cherish it for a lot of reasons, the main one being that in it he spouted off maybe my favorite thing he ever said about his magnum opus. He sits down at the table, ready to talk: Ulysses had come out, and it was immediately controversial (understatement). It was being banned left and right, entire countries – like the United States, like his native country – refused to allow it off the damn boats. Joyce said to Barnes: “The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book – or worse they may take it some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.” This comment from him became a guiding principle when I read Ulysses for the first time.

Barnes’s drawing of James Joyce illustrated her 1922 interview with him in Vanity Fair.

Barnes was a talented artist and illustrator. I found this image of an illustration she did for J.M. Synge’s play The Well of the Saints, and it reminds me of Beardsley:

Kate Zambreno (a recent-ish discovery, I adore her) wrote a lot about Djuna Barnes in her book Heroines, about the “mad” wives of Modernist writers. Highly recommend it. Djuna Barnes wanders through the pages. Zambreno writes this about the following photo of Djuna Barnes and Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, known universally as “The Baroness”:

That picture of the Baroness on the beach with Djuna Barnes while they were still young, their elegant pointed shoes, the Baroness is subtly dressed, for her, Djuna always posed like a fashion model, always elegantly turned out, her dark shiny hair in the chignon, the red lipstick, the jaunty hat. These women like silent film stars for me.

Barnes’ life was not easy. She was an alcoholic. She lived in almost obscurity for decades, almost baffled by the young gay women who sought her out to tell her how much Nightwood meant to them. She had no concept of what she had done. Or maybe she did, but she lost interest in it, or couldn’t relate it to the newer generations.

Nightwood is difficult but worth it, an essential portrait of Modernism, and the lesbian-scene in Europe in between two cataclysmic wars.

She was nervous about the future; it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time –because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was the master of the over-sweet phrase, the over-tight embrace.
— Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

 
 
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