Djuna Barnes

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Djuna Barnes (born June 12, 1892-1982), an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer best known for her book Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and a significant piece of modernist literature, was published in 1913.

Barnes, a pioneering journalist, interviewer, and illustrator whose work appeared in the city's top newspapers and periodicals by early 1914.

Later, Barnes' talent and connections with influential Greenwich Village bohemians gave her the opportunity to publish her prose, poems, images, and one-act plays, as well as a illustrated volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915).

Barnes' book (1923), a collection of poetry, plays, and short stories, which was later reissued with the addition of three stories, A Night Among the Horses (1929), and Ryder (1928) spent time in England, Paris, New York, and North Africa during the 1930s.

It was during this tumultuous period that she wrote and published Nightwood.

Barnes returned to New York in October 1939 after nearly two decades living mostly in Europe.

She died in her apartment at Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, in June 1982, when she first published her last major work, The Antiphon.

Life and writing

On Storm King Mountain, near Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, Barnes was born in a log cabin. Zadel Barnes, her paternal grandmother and Women's Suffrage activist who had once held an influential literary salon, was a writer, journalist, and a feminist Suffrage activist. Wald Barnes (born Henry Aaron Budington) was a frustrated composer, singer, and painter. He married Barnes' mother Elizabeth J. Barnes (née Chappell) in 1889, but his mistress Frances "Fanny" Clark came with them in 1897, when Barnes was five years old. They had eight children (five from Elizabeth, Zendon, Saxon, and Shangar; four from Fanny: Duane and Brian, five from Fanny; four from Fanny: daughters Muriel and Sheila), whom Wald did not bother to help financially. In childhood, one half-sibling died. Zadel, who believed her son was a misunderstood artistic genius, struggled to provide for the entire family by writing begging letters to friends and acquaintances, adding to her decreasing income.

Barnes spent a significant portion of her childhood caring for siblings and half-siblings. She received her early education at home, mainly from her father and grandmother, who taught her writing, art, and music, but not so much in terms of math and spelling. She denied to having formal education at all; instead, some evidence shows that she was attending public school for a time after age ten, but her attendance was inconsistent.

It is likely that she was assaulted at the age of 16, either by a neighbor with the knowledge and permission of her father or perhaps by her father. Nonetheless, these are rumors and unconfirmed by Barnes, who has never managed to finish her autobiography. Barnes and her father wrote warm letters to one another until his death in 1934. In her first book Ryder and later in her tense final play The Antiphon, Barnes does obliquely refer to a rape. Incest, or overly familiar teasing, according to sexually explicit descriptions in her correspondence, but Zadel, who died before The Antiphon was published, was left out of the criminal court. Fanny Clark's brother Percy Faulkner was married in a private ceremony without the benefit of clergy just shy of her 18th birthday. He was 52 years old. The match had been heavily promoted by her father, grandmother, mother, and brother, but she stayed with him for no longer than two months.

In 1912, Barnes' family, who was in danger of financial ruin, split up. Elizabeth and three of her siblings migrated to New York City with Barnes and three of her brothers and sisters, then filed for divorce, freeing Wald to marry Fanny Clark. Barnes' move allowed her to study art for the first time; she attended the Pratt Institute from 1912 to 1916, but a greater burden fell on her, causing her to drop out of school and begin a career as a reporter at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. "I can draw and write, and you'd be a fool not to hire me," Barnes said upon arrival at the Brooklyn Museum.

Over the next few years, her work appeared in nearly every newspaper in New York, including the New York Press, The World, and McCall's; she wrote essays, profiles, theater studies, and a number of news articles, often depicting them with her own drawings. In the Sunday supplement of the New York Morning Telegraph and the pulp magazine All-Story Cavalier Weekly, she also published short fiction.

Much of Barnes' writing was personal and historical. When speaking about a talk with James Joyce, she confessed to missing a piece of what she said because her attention had wandered, but she revered Joyce's writing. When other writers began to fail, she yelled at him for "roll[ing] over and finding[ing] yourself famous"; later, her biographer Phillip Herring says this is "a depressing and possibly revolutionary note on which to end an interview." Dinah, a female gorilla at the Bronx Zoo, is featured on "The Girl and the Gorilla," which was published in New York World Magazine in October 1914.

She submitted to force-feeding in another article in New York World in 1914, a practice that is now being used on hunger-striking suffragists. "If I, playing myself, understood my being enraged at this brutal usurpation of my own services, how those who had to deal with the horror and torture would have blazed at the breach of their sacred sanctuaries." "I had the most wonderful experience of the bravest of my sex," she said.

Barnes, who mocked conservative suffrage campaigner Carrie Chapman Catt while Catt told prospective suffrage orators not to "hold a militant position" or wear "a jacket that shows your feet in front," she said of feminist suffrage orators. When Catt sought to oust Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who sought the vote for women by media coverage, Barnes suggested that Catt's conservatism was a barrier to the suffrage movement. Barnes was driven by their mistreatment to try the torture of being force-fed for the first time.

Barnes embedded herself in dangerous situations in the hopes of learning about experiences that had previously unheardoned women. Barnes, who wrote about the traditionally masculine field of boxing from the ringside, explored boxing as a window into women's modern identities. "What do women want at a war?" she asked in 1914. In an article titled "My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight" published in New York World magazine, titled "My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight." "Barnes' essay, according to Irene Gammel, "Barnes' essay opens an entire cultural tradition of oppression for women." As she interviewed heavyweight champion Jess Willard, Barnes' interest in boxing peaked into 1915.

Barnes converted from her family's house to an apartment in Greenwich Village, where she joined a burgeoning Bohemian community of artists and writers in 1915. Edmund Wilson, Berenice Abbott, and Dadaist artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, whose biography Barnes attempted to write but never completed, were among her social circle. She met Guido Bruno, an entrepreneur and promoter who sold magazines and chapbooks from his garret on Washington Square, and she was in contact with him. Bruno had a reputation for unremarkableness, and he was often accused of misusing Greenwich Village residents for profit—but he was a strong critic of censorship and was willing to risk prosecution by releasing Barnes' 1915 series of "rhythms and drawings"—but he was not one of censorship.

Despite a tale of sex between women in the first poem, the book was never legally challenged; the passage seems to have been clear now, but the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice may not have recognized its symbol. Some people were not as nave as others, and Bruno was able to cash in on the book's reputation by increasing the price from fifteen to fifty cents and pocketing the difference. Bruno was one of Felix Volkbein's models 20 years ago, caricaturing his nobility and his habit of bowing down before anyone named or significant.

Barnes, a founder of the Provincetown Players, an amateur dramatic group whose emphasis on artistic rather than commercial success meshed well with her own ideals. According to Barnes, the Players' Greenwich Village theater was a converted stable with bench seating and a tiny stage; "always just about to be returned to the horses." Nevertheless, it was instrumental in the formation of American drama, including works by Susan Glaspell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, and Theodore Dreiser, as well as launching Eugene O'Neill's career. Three one-act plays by Barnes were staged in 1919 and 1920; a fourth, The Dove, premiered at Smith College in 1925; and a series of short closet plays were published in magazines, some under Barnes' pseudonym Lydia Steptoe.

These plays show the strong presence of Irish playwright J. M. Synge's words as well as the danger of his imagination; he was attracted by both Synge's poetic style and the skepticism of his imagination. Critics have found them derivative, particularly those in which she attempted to imitate Synge's Irish dialect, and Barnes may have accepted them in later years, dismissing them as mere juvenilia. These stylized and enigmatic early plays, on the other hand, are more experimental than those of her fellow playwrights at Provincetown. Alexander Woollcott's review of Three From the Earth described it as a "how absorbent and essentially dramatic a play can be without the audience knowing what, if anything, is driving at." The spectators are in bated breath as they listen to each word of a playlet of which no apparent clues have been given.

Greenwich Village in the 1910s was known for its sexual and intellectual liberation. Barnes was unusual among Villagers in that she was raised on a free love philosophy, which was promoted both by her grandmother and father. Her father's idiosyncratic vision included a pledge to infinite procreation, which she vehemently opposed; childbearing criticism would become a prominent theme in her work. She did, on the other hand, keep sexual freedom as a value. "She had no feeling of shame about sex or going to bed with any man or woman she liked," Antonia White told Antonia White in the 1930s; the correspondence shows that by the time she was 21 her family was well aware of her bisexuality, and she had a number of affairs with both men and women during her Greenwich Village years.

Of these, Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Harvard graduate who supervised the American branch of his family's art publishing house, was the most notable. Hanfstaengl performed piano at the White House and was a mentor of then-New York State Senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but anti-German sentiment in the US has grew in the aftermath of World War I. He told Barnes he wanted a German wife in 1916; the painful breakup became the basis of a deleted scene in Nightwood. He later returned to Germany and became a close associate of Adolf Hitler. Courtenay Lemon, a socialist scholar and activist who described herself as her common-law husband, lived with her from 1916 to 1917, but this too ended for reasons that are unclear. Mary Pyne, a New York Press reporter and a fellow member of the Provincetown Players, had a long-term affair with her. Pyne died of tuberculosis in 1919 and was on display at Barnes until the end.

Paris was the center of modernism in art and literature in the 1920s. Barnes first went there in 1921 on a trip for McCall's. She consulted with her fellow expatriate writers and artists for US periodicals and soon became a well-known figure on the local scene; her black cloak and her acerbic wit are among her time memoirs. Her literary reputation was already high before her first book was published, largely as a result of her book "A Night Among the Horses," which was published in The Little Review and reprinted in her 1923 collection A Book. Natalie Barney, a lifelong acquaintance and patron, as well as the central figure in Barnes' satiric chronicle of Paris lesbian life, Ladies Almanack, was part of her inner circle. Thelma Wood, the artist's most significant friendship of Barnes' Paris years, was with him. Wood had intended to become a sculptor in Paris, but instead of Barnes' invitation, the artist created drawings of animals and plants that one critic likes to Henri Rousseau. They had set up housekeeping in a flat on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in the winter of 1922. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a father from Freytag-Loringhoven, with whom Barnes began a long correspondence in 1923, was another close friendship that developed during this period. The Baroness suggested an erotic marriage whose love child would be their book." "Where Wood gave Barnes a doll to represent their symbolic love child." Barnes, a Paris company, sponsored the Baroness in Berlin with money, clothes, and magazines. She also collected the Baroness' poems and letters.

Barnes received a letter of introduction from James Joyce, who was interviewed for Vanity Fair and who became a mentor. He was branded "the man who is, at this time, one of literature's most influential figures," according to her Vanity Fair interview, but her personal reaction to Ulysses was less guarded: "I will never write another line after that." It may have been reading Joyce that prompted Barnes to abandon the late 19th century Decadent and Aesthetic influences of The Book of Repulsive Women in favor of a modernist experimentation in her later life. They did differ on the proper subject of literature, though Joyce thought writers should concentrate on commonplace subjects and make them extraordinary, while Barnes was always drawn to the unexpected, even the grotesque. Her own life, as well as the others, was an extraordinary topic. Ryder's autobiographical first novel will not only provide readers with the challenge of deciphering the changing literary styles, but also with the challenge of piecing together the past of an unusual polygamous household, far removed from most readers' expectations and experience.

Despite the text's intricacy, Ryder's bawdiness drew notice, and the book was briefly a New York Times bestseller. The publisher was unprepared for its success; a first edition of 3,000 sold out quickly, but by the time more copies made it to bookstores, public interest in the novel had died down. Despite this, Barnes was able to buy a new apartment on Rue Saint-Romain, where she worked with Thelma Wood beginning in 1927. The change made them neighbors of Mina Loy, a Barnes' cousin who appeared in Ladies Almanack as Patience Scalpel, the sole heterosexual character who "could not know Women and their Ways."

Ladies Almanack was published in a small, privately printed edition under the pseudonym "A Lady of Fashion" due to its subject matter. Barnes and her companions sold copies on the streets of Paris, and Barnes and her associates were able to smuggle a few into the United States to sell. Edward Titus, a book dealer, offered to carry Ladies Almanack in his store in exchange for being mentioned on the title page, but Barnes became outraged when he demanded a share of the royal estates on the entire print run. In The Antiphon, she later gave Titus to the abused father.

Thelma Wood dedicated Ryder and Ladies Almanack to Thelma Wood in 1928, but that year — 1928 — was also the year she and Wood separated. Barnes wanted their relationship to be monogamous, but Wood had discovered that she wanted her "along with the remainder of the world." Wood's increasing dependency on alcohol, with nights spent in booze-sex and looking for casual sex partners; Barnes would search the cafés for her, often getting her into a fatal state. Barnes and Wood parted over her friendship with Henriette McCrea Metcalf (1888-1981), who would be portrayed in Nightwood as Jenny Petherbridge.

Much of Nightwood was written during 1932 to 1933, when Barnes was staying at Hayford Hall, a country manor in Devon rented by art patron Peggy Guggenheim. Antonia White, John Ferrar Holms, and Emily Coleman, a novelist and poet, were among the evening guests. Evenings at the manor, nicknamed "Hangover Hall" by its residents, often featured Truth, a party game that encouraged brutal honesty, which created a dramatic emotional atmosphere. Barnes was reluctant to leave her work in progress unattended because the tumultuous Coleman, who had told Barnes one of her secrets, had threatened to burn the book if Barnes revealed it. Coleman was still the book's champion after she had read it. Barnes made major structural changes after the publisher rejected the manuscript, and Coleman, then an editor at Faber and Faber, pressurized it to read it.

In 1936, Faber published the book. Despite how well it was regarded as a major work of art, the book did not sell well. Barnes was denied a refund, and the first royal oath was only £43; the Harcourt, Brace edition in the United States fared no better. Barnes had little journalism in the 1930s and was largely dependent on Peggy Guggenheim's financial assistance. She was always sick and drank more heavily, so according to Guggenheim, she took a bottle of whiskey per day. She checked into a hotel in London in February 1939 and attempted suicide. Guggenheim sponsored hospital visits and doctors, but she eventually lost patience and sent her back to New York. She and her mother, who coughed all night and who kept reading her passages from Mary Baker Eddy, all night, were in a single room together. Her family took her to a sanatorium in upstate New York in March 1940 to let it dry out. Barnes began to write a biography of her family, telling Emily Coleman that "there is no reason any longer why I should feel for them in any way but fear." In her play The Antiphon, this plan would come to fruition. She screamed bitterly with her mother and was kicked out on the street after returning to New York City.

Barnes stayed at Thelma Wood's apartment when Wood was out of town, and spent two months in Arizona with Emily Coleman and Coleman's lover Jake Scarborough. She returned to New York and, in September, she moved into the tiny apartment at 5 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village, where she would live for the next 41 years. She continued to drink alcohol and wrote practically nothing in the 1940s. Despite misgivings, Guggenheim gave her a small stipend and Coleman, who couldn't afford it, paid US$20 per month (about $310 in 2011). Barnes was included in Peggy Guggenheim's show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York in 1943. She worked with Henry Holt as a manuscript reader in 1946, but her reports were always skewed, and she was fired.

Barnes stopped drinking in order to begin focusing on her verse play The Antiphon in 1950, realizing that alcoholism had made it impossible for her to function as an artist. The play drew a lot on her own family history, and it was fueled by indignation; she wrote "I wrote The Antiphon with clenched teeth, and I noted that my handwriting was as savage as a dagger." As she read the script, her brother Thurn accused her of wanting "revenge for something long deceased and to be forgotten." Barnes referred to her motivations as "justice," and "not dead" next to "dead" after his letter.

Barnes, The Antiphon, returned to writing poetry, which she did and reworked, with up to 500 drafts. Despite a growing list of health issues, including arthritis so severe that she had trouble even sitting at her typewriter or turning on her desk lamp, she wrote eight hours a day. Many of these poems were never published, and only a few were published in her lifetime.

Barnes became a well-known recluse during her Patchin Place years, he became incredibly suspicious of anyone she did not know well. E.E. Djuna, a street vendor, checked on her periodically by yelling out her window, "Is it really alive?" Cummings, who lived across the street, wondered. Bertha Harris put roses in her mailbox, but she never succeeded in meeting her; Carson McCullers camped on her doorstep, but Barnes said, "Whoever is ringing this bell, please go the hell away." Anas Nin, especially Nightwood, was a ardent fan of her art. She wrote to Barnes several times, requesting her to publish in a journal on women's writing but she got no response. Barnes remained dismissive of Nin and would cross the street to avoid her from entering her. Barnes was furious that Nin had named Djuna, and Barnes called to request that the name be changed when the feminist bookstore Djuna Books opened in Greenwich Village. Since she and Moore were children in the 1920s, Barnes had a lifelong admiration for poet Marianne Moore.

Despite Barnes' other female lovers, she was still in her teenage years that she was adamant to say, "I am not a lesbian; I just love Thelma."

Barnes was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961 and was given a senior fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1981.

When Barnes died in her home in New York on June 18, 1982, six days after her 90th birthday, she was the last surviving member of the first generation of English-language modernists.

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