Notes from 21 South St: "A Sac of Withered Infants": The Literary Abortions of Djuna Barnes
by Ben Tarnoff

On September 3rd, 1939, the day France officially declared war on Nazi Germany, Djuna Barnes lay in her sickbed at the Hotel Académie in Paris. She was running a high fever, and had recently been discharged from the American Hospital, where the staff was preparing to evacuate. Penniless and severely weakened by her illness, Barnes stayed on in Paris, chronicling her impressions of the city in its first month of war. Young couples on the Champs Elysées clutched gasmasks; frantic Americans crowded the Embassy, pleading to be sent home. No one knew when the war would reach Paris. The French, Barnes would later write, were “[s]haking silently as dogs shake for something that is coming to pass a long way off, knowing the horror of its vibration without exact knowledge of its location.” Barnes’ own situation became increasingly dangerous. Finally, on October 24th, her friend and patron Peggy Guggenheim put her on a train to Bordeaux, where she boarded a ship for New York.

Just three years earlier, Faber & Faber had published Nightwood, the book that established Barnes’s reputation as a major modernist writer. The initial reception was only lukewarm, and several publishers rejected the manuscript. But she had some high-profile supporters, among them T.S. Eliot, who pushed the book through at Faber, and got Harcourt, Brace to publish an American edition the following year. In his introduction, Eliot hailed the book as “so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.” Nightwood does read more like a prose poem than a novel. The characters soliloquize endlessly, acutely aware of their circumstances but powerless to change them. The extraordinary sophistication of their speech makes the task of piecing together a single-thread storyline difficult, although the characters themselves seem to have no trouble traversing the elaborate play of metaphor to arrive at each other’s meaning. Entering their world is like deep-sea diving into a strange, sunken ecosystem, its creatures only dimly visible through columns of refracted light.

Despite their strangeness, the characters in Nightwood do have some basis in reality. Barnes’ own lesbian love affairs provide the novel with its principal theme, and many of its colorful characters are based on people she knew in Paris during the 1920’s, like fellow American expatriate Thelma Wood, with whom she had an eight-year relationship. In 1921, McCall’s magazine sent Barnes to report on the Left Bank expat scene, where she remained through much of the decade, establishing a reputation for herself among the era’s most prominent writers and artists. Returning to New York at the outbreak of World War II, Barnes lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village until her death in 1982, outliving many of her contemporaries. She became notoriously reclusive and crotchety; e.e. cummings, who was Barnes’ neighbor, occasionally stuck his head out the window to check up on her: “ARE YA STILL ALIVE, DJUNA?” In the forty-three years she spent in the Village, Barnes continued to write poetry, plays, and fiction, but the success of Nightwood always eclipsed her later work, and remains the single book for which she is known today.

Published in early 2006 by the University of Wisconsin, Collected Poems, With Notes Toward the Memoirs gives an excellent panorama of Barnes’ literary career. The editors, Phillip Herring and Osías Stutman, have collected almost all of the poems Barnes published in her lifetime, from her first in Harper’s Weekly in 1911, to her last, published the year of her death in 1982. Many unpublished poems recovered from her papers, including four held by Houghton Library, are also included. By consulting the original manuscripts, the editors reproduce marginalia and alternate wording that Barnes had scrawled over the texts, sometimes decades later: a number of her early poems, for instance, have “awful” written in the margin.

While her language becomes much more sophisticated over the years, Barnes’ core themes change very little. In his 1937 review of Nightwood for The New York Times, Alfred Kazin described the story of the novel as “the biological routine of the body; it is the pattern of life, something that cannot be avoided.” This claustrophobic sense of fatality figures prominently in her early poetry, often accompanied by a disgust with human frailty. “Ah my God, what is it that we love!” she writes in a 1918 poem, “This flesh laid on us like a wrinkled glove?”. The body’s slow rot represents only one aspect of a decomposing world: as she remarks in one of her unpublished poems, “The worm heaves her everywhere abroad.” For Barnes, beauty never exists in the present; it is only accessible as a memory, lodged in some nostalgic artifact. While the living body repulses Barnes, the corpse, particularly the female corpse, fascinates her, and recurs frequently in these early poems as a melancholy testament to lost beauty. “The Flowering Corpse” depicts a woman lying in her grave, her hair mingling with the vegetation: “Soft hairs blow; and beneath her armpits bloom / The drowsy passion flowers of the dead.” The sleep of death, its “fine brand of peace,” would never lose its appeal for Barnes, in her verse or in her personal life: suicidal tendencies surface throughout her work, and she twice attempted to take her own life.

Although her early poetry develops many of the themes that remain consistent throughout her career, the young poet often relies heavily on Gothic tropes. Much of her graveside imagery is directly lifted from her Gothic predecessors, and the language has a desperate, confessional tone. When Barnes moved to Paris in 1921, the effect on her poetry was dramatic. She started to experiment with more complex, highly nuanced imagery, and her verse of this period echoes the rhythms of English metaphysical poets like John Donne: “Mock fallow this fearful day foregone throughout,” begins one unpublished poem. By the 1960s, Barnes has refined the wordiness of her earlier style into a distinctly original voice, as in the following passage from “Quarry”, published in the New Yorker in 1969:

The mournful mood of these lines is familiar, but the precise sentiment has become harder to place. The acute misery of her earlier poetry has diffused into a more abstract ache: we have the lament but not the corpse, no description of whoever has “gone to earth.” Her use of archaic vocabulary such as “sowl” (“To pull, seize roughly, etc., by the ear or ears,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary) shows her enduring affinity for older poetic traditions, and the language, while still indebted to John Donne, has moved further in the direction of the King James Bible. Spirituality emerges particularly strongly in her late poetry, and she often describes her poems as prayers, even addressing God directly: “Lord, what is man that he is in Thy wick?” Christianity, instead of soothing her deep-seated sense of doom, intensifies it, by confirming the inherent sinfulness of the flesh. But there is no possibility for redemption in Barnes’ world, no hope for transcendence. Published the year of her death, “Rite of Spring” captures in three lines man’s captivity to himself:

Collected Poems also includes selections from autobiographical sketches that Barnes wrote between 1939 and 1982, and these passages, while still in the draft phase, offer memorable portraits of her contemporaries. In “Selected Notes on T.S. Eliot”, the editors have captured Barnes’ complicated relationship with Eliot. While he was her foremost literary advocate, he could be highly critical, even cruel. “He is often wicked without (apparently) knowing it,” Barnes writes. In fact, with the exception of Nightwood, Eliot disliked her work, especially her poetry: “Tom says my verse ‘limps’.” When asked to write a blurb for her 1958 play The Antiphon, Eliot, while conceding that Barnes was “incontestably one of the original writers of our time”, ungraciously added, “that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.”

Four other sketches detail Barnes’ life in Paris, and contain many colorful descriptions of the era’s most prominent writers and artists. Among the most entertaining of these is her portrait of Gertrude Stein, whom she parodies as the pompous, ungainly matriarch of the Left Bank: “Gertrude used to drive a Ford so small, and she so large, that the quarter used to say, ‘Here comes everybody.’” Her depiction of Jean Cocteau is equally vivid: “… he seemed to be made of something more ancient than flesh; a plan in bones as excellent as a Gothic perpendicular; his head might have belonged to Chartres” . Ezra Pound “used to appear walking up the Avenue de l’Opéra in broad daylight, carrying a basket full of lobsters, aubergines, and fruit pâtés”; Marcel Duchamp was a “man famous for nothing.”

In these brief pieces, writers and artists who have long since petrified into fossils of the modernist canon thaw from more than half a century of history, their dependencies and depravities magnificently restored by Barnes’ pen. Their lives were marked by an intensity of experience closer to the debauchery of a college weekend than a night spent writing a term paper, a world in which people made frequent trips to Berlin to get cheap cocaine, young girls leaped out of taxis dead drunk, and cafes were regularly raided by the police. Art had the power to provoke, even violently so; at a George Antheil concert attended by Picasso, Joyce, and Pound, a riot broke out (“Pound applauded, but there were those in the audience who raised umbrellas and some in the gallery who threw things.”) Barnes’ ever-present nostalgia runs strong in these sketches, and she frequently laments the irretrievable loss of the expatriate life of the Twenties. “We were taking in the last breaths of Rome before the fall, Carthage before the destruction, Pompeii before the ruins,” she writes. “No one in our generation will ever again taste it as it was.” For Barnes, only what had died was worth saving, whether it was Paris of the interwar period or the metaphysical verse of the 17th century. She was her generation’s most eloquent eulogist, always postponing her own funeral for the sake of memorializing others: “Now I lie here, with my eyes on a pistol. / There will be a morrow, and another, and another.”

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