Arts and Letters

For over half a century I have believed that I knew Djuna Barnes. I met her in Paris in the twenties, and we would see each other casually several times a week, but never alone, never as intimate friends, but sitting with others on café terraces in Montparnasse. She was always the dashing figure in her dark cloak and dramatic turbans and hats, and always the outspoken conversationalist, with either a great deal of laughter or a great deal of anger in her voice. It was in the early thirties that I began to know her as a separate person, when she would come down the long way from Paris to stay with Laurence Vail and me and our children in the French Alps. She came there to sleep, to escape whatever it was she didn't want to face any more in Paris, perhaps people (both the homage-givers and the betrayers), perhaps the mere sight of café terraces, as if avoiding for a while the demands made on her to be alive. The mountains surrounding us might not have been there, or the deep drifts outside the door, or the village of Mégève (a simple alpine hamlet then) a quarter of a mile down the road. She stayed with us for brief periods, lost to the present in the total isolation of memories.

I believed I knew Djuna as well as I knew a number of the people who live in her stories. I knew Moydia of the story "The Little Girl Continues" (published in the 1980 Selected Works under the title "The Grande Malade"). Moydia had borrowed a pair of high-heeled slippers from Laurence Vail's sister, Clotilde, to wear to the funeral of Monsieur X. The elegant shoes turned out to be too small for Moydia, so she carried them reverently in one hand as she walked through the streets of Paris in the funeral procession of her young lover. I knew Monsieur X through his second novel, Le Diable au Corps, which I had translated for The Black Sun Press. His name was Raymond Radiguet, and he was barely twenty when he died.

I also believed that I knew Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor, the anti-hero of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood. I had met him on several occasions, and dismissed him from my mind in impatience, having no time for his painted face and his false lashes. But I did not know him at all until Djuna's book revealed him to me in his pain and loneliness and drunken despair. But I still believed that Djuna had a rather elaborate fixation on curious human beings. I did not know until 1982 that she was quite simply obsessed with the lives, the griefs, the thwarted loves, of all humanity. For it was not until then that I learned of her other published but, until 1982, uncollected work.

Beginning in 1913, when Djuna was twenty-one, and continuing through the next six years, she published over a hundred articles and interviews in New York newspapers, as well as twenty-five dramas and fiction pieces in the New York Morning Telegraph's Sunday Magazine. This fiction of Djuna's adds one more important chapter to what Eugene Jolas called "the revolution of the word." The editor and publisher of the 1982 collection quotes from Djuna's revolutionary writing in his preface to her work, such remarkable sentences as, "Paprika had a moribund mother under the counterpane, a chaperone who never spoke or moved, since she was paralyzed, but who was a pretty good one at that, being a white exclamation point this side of error." And I would add this further sample of her rebellion against the accepted literary vocabulary of any time: "…(he) was a tall blond wimpet who had put his hands into his mother's hair and shaken it free of gold; a lad who had painted his cheeks from the palette of the tenderloin, the pink that descends from one member of a family to the other, quick-silver running down life's page."

In his preface to "The Newspaper Tales of Djuna Barnes" contained in this book, Douglas Messerli writes that "readers today may find it difficult to imagine how the mass audience of a newspaper that in its later years marketed itself as New York's 'racing sheet,' would or even could have responded to fictions so peculiar as these, with their radical metaphors." He explains this seeming paradox by reminding us that in 1916 the American newspaper was a far more eclectic forum than it is today, and that "fiction and drama were standard features" of its content. But I believe that another explanation may be that, despite Djuna's fierce, and fiercely expressed, contempt for many things, the "mass audience" of readers to which Messerli refers knew at once that she had no contempt for love.

A biography of Djuna Barnes by Andrew Field has just been published. It is a book that will not bring any glory to Djuna, and glory she should have. The ravenous, the obscene hunger of a large segment of the American reading public is responsible for biographies such as this. Indeed, Field admits that Djuna once said to him: "You have come too late to write about me, Mr. Field." And yet he did. He has also had the temerity to quote again from Djuna, and fail to apply her words of wisdom to himself. In 1931, she wrote in The Theatre Guild Magazine: "I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished."

It is a ravishment of that silence when Andrew Field tells us that Djuna considered Natalie Barney "a shit" and Jane Heap likewise. Field also advises us that Djuna, having met Katherine Anne Porter briefly, considered her "vulgar," and described Maurice Sterne as "a bit of a stinker." No clarification of Djuna's reasons for these cryptic judgments is provided by Field.* Among all the misstatements and factual errors in this biography, page 49 alone stands out as characteristically Djuna. It is a page entirely free of the biographer's interference (albeit he published it), for it provides facsimiles of eleven of Djuna's early newspaper headlines. Here are four of them: "COME INTO THE ROOF-GARDEN, MAUD. And, Maud dear, Bring a Sense of Humor with You, for the Place Has None of It." And "SATAN GIVES INTERVIEW. Admits It's Best Man Has Done So Far But Declares It Still Falls Lamentably Short of Hell. Suggests Improvement." And: "BILLY SUNDAY A FIRE-EATER IN PULPIT. War, He Says, Has Been the Best Thing for Religion in All the Last Century." And: "MANY WANT BABIES, how about yourself?"

Djuna Barnes died in New York at the age of ninety. When her play-poem The Antiphon was published in 1958, Howard Nemerov wrote of it that "the play represents the soul seeking life and finding death, and finding death a mercy." *Except in the case of Sterne, when Field offers a vague, perhaps unrelated assumption.