Djuna Barnes

“Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.”

 

Djuna Barnes (1892 –1982) was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer. She is also an LGBT+ icon, who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction.

Barnes was born in a log cabin on Storm King Mountain, near New York into a somewhat unconventional family. Her paternal grandmother, Zadel Barnes, was also a writer and journalist as well as a Women's Suffrage activist. Her father, Wald Barnes, was an unsuccessful composer, musician, and artist. An advocate of polygamy, he married Barnes's mother Elizabeth in 1889; his mistress Fanny Clark moved in with them in 1897, when Djuna was five. Djuna was the second oldest of eight children, whose father made little contribution to their upkeep. Zadel, who believed her son to be a misunderstood artistic genius, burdened herself up supporting the family both through work and through the benevolence of her acquaintances.

Barnes spent much of her childhood looking after her siblings and half-siblings. She received little formal education, but her family gave her some instruction in writing, art, and music. It is believed that she was raped at the age of sixteen – either by a neighbour with the consent of her father, or by her father himself. While she continued to write warm letters to her father until his death, she made explicit references to rape in her later work which was based on her own family. Her letters to her grandmother are sexually explicit, suggesting incest or at least a physical over-familirity. Shortly before her 18th birthday Djuna reluctantly "married" Fanny Clark's 52 year old brother in a private ceremony without clergy. She had been pressured into the match by her family, and left her husbnd after only two months.

In 1912, with her family facing financial ruin, Barnes moved to New York with her mother and three brothers. Her mother swiftly filed for divorce, and Wald married Fanny. In New York, Djuna was able to formally study art for the first time  until 1916, when she was forced to quit in order to provide for her family. To do so, she took work as as a reporter at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, declaring:  "I can draw and write, and you'd be a fool not to hire me".1)2)

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“What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?”

Over the next few years her work appeared in almost every newspaper in New York. She often illustrated her work with her own sketches. Her work was largely experiential and betrayed a familiarity with her interviewees and she often startled them with her abruptness.

In 1914, she voluntarily submitted for force-feeding in order to investigate the procedure used on hunger-striking suffragettes. Of the experience she wrote: "If I, play acting, felt my being burning with revolt at this brutal usurpation of my own functions, how they who actually suffered the ordeal in its acutest horror must have flamed at the  violation of the sanctuaries of their spirits." She concluded "I had shared the greatest experience of the bravest of my sex."

Barnes was stood in solidarity with the suffragettes and defended their militant tactics from their critics. Her submission to the torture they endured was taken in protest at the mistreatment of suffragists Alice Clarke and Lucy Burns.

This was not the only example of Barnes taking risks to investigate experiences denied to previous generations of homebound women. Writing about the traditionally masculine domain of boxing from the ringside, Barnes explored boxing as a window into women's modern identities. According to Irene Gammel, "Barnes' essay effectively begins to unravel an entire cultural history of repression for women".

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“A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.”

In 1915, Barnes left her family and moved into a thriving Bohemian community of artists and writers. Here she met Guido Bruno, an entrepreneur and promoter with a reputation for unscrupulousness. Nevertheless, he was a strong opponent of censorship and was willing to risk prosecution by publishing Barnes' 1915 collection of "rhythms and drawings".Despite a description of lesbian sex, the book was never legally banned – perhaps owing to the fact that such matters were so taboo that many did not understand its references.

Barnes was also a member of the Provincetown Players, an amateur theatrical collective whose prioritising of creativity over profit gelled well with her principles. It played a significant role in the development of American drama.

Greenwich Village in the 1910s was known for its sexual as well as intellectual freedom. While Barnes strongly disagreed with her father’s belief in “unlimited procreation” (in fact she wrote passionately against child-bearing, which was fairly radical at the time), she shared his affinity for polygamy and sexual freedom.  She told a friend that: "she had no feeling of guilt whatever about sex, about going to bed with any man or woman she wanted". Her letters also suggest that her family were aware of her bisexuality by the age of 21, and she had a number of liasons with both men and women during these years.

Most notable of these relationships was her engagement to Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Harvard graduate whose family owned a publishing business. He had once been closely affiliated with the American government, however he became agitated by the anti-German sentiment building in the US during WW1. In 1916, he broke Djuna’s hearts by telling her he wanted a german wife. However, she perhaps had a lucky escape as he returned to Germany where he became a close friend of Hitler’s. A year or so later, she met her “common-law husband”, Courtenay Lenon, but this relationship too fell apart. She also had a passionate romantic relationship with Mary Pyne, a reporter for the New York Press and fellow member of the Provincetown Players. Pyne died of tuberculosis in 1919, nursed by Barnes until the end.

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“The truth is how you say it, and to be ‘one’s self’ is the most shocking custom of all.”

In 1921, Barnes travelled to Paris – a hub of modernism in art and literature. She soon became well-known with the writers and artists of the city and was remembered for her distinctive black coat as well as her wit. Even before the publication of her first novel, she had a high literary reputation and was one of the inner circle of prominent hostess and later patron, Natalie Barney. The most important relationship of Barnes' Paris years was with the artist Thelma Wood, an American artist. They moved in together in 1922. Here she also developed a close friendship with the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, whom she supported with money and clothes.

Barnes was always drawn to the unusual, even the grotesque but this was not surprising given her life story. Her autobiographical debut novel confused readers with it’s literary style but also was difficult for them to relate to as the experiences of a polygamous household were far removed from most readers' background.

Nevertheless, the novel’s bawdiness drew attention, and it briefly became a New York Times bestseller. Its popularity caught the publisher unprepared; the first batch sold out quickly but interest had fizzled out by the time more were produced. However, the profits allowed Barnes to buy a new apartment for herself and Wood in 1927.

Barnes dedicated her first to novels to Thelma Wood, but the year both books were published—1928—was also the year that she and Wood split. Barnes had wanted their relationship to be monogamous, but had discovered that Wood wanted her "along with the rest of the world." Wood had a worsening dependency on alcohol, and she spent her nights drinking and seeking out casual sex partners; Barnes would have to seek her out, often winding up equally drunk. Barnes eventually ended it over Wood’s affairs. However, although Barnes had other female lovers, in her later years she was known to claim "I am not a lesbian; I just loved Thelma."

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“For most people, life is painful, nasty, and short…in my case it has been only painful and nasty.”

Much of Nightwood was written during the summers of 1932 and 1933, while Barnes was staying at Hayford Hall, a country manor in Devon rented by the art patron Peggy Guggenheim. The book was  published in 1936 but did not sell well despite favourable reviews. Barnes had published little journalism in the 1930s and was largely dependent on Peggy Guggenheim's financial support.

Her situation was not aided by her ailing health and her increasing alcoholism…drinking a bottle of whiskey per day. In February 1939, she attempted to take her own life in a London hotel. Guggenheim funded medical care but but finally sent her back to New York. There Djuna shared a single room with her mother who had converted to Christian Science. In March 1940, she was sent to a sanatorium by her family to sober up. In retaliation Barnes began to plan a biography of her family, writing that "there is no reason any longer why I should feel for them in any way but hate." This became her play, The Antiphon. She was eventually thrown out by her mother.

With nowhere else to go, Barnes stayed at Thelma Wood's apartment while Wood was out of town, then spent two months on a working ranch in Arizona. She returned to New York and, in September, moved into the small apartment at 5 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village where she would spend the last 41 years of her life. She became notoriously reclusively and continued to drink heavily. She wrote virtually nothing and relied on stipends from Guggenheim.

In 1950, she realised that her alcoholism had affected her writing and stopped drinking. Instead, she poured her energies into her writing. She wrote eight hours a day despite a number of health problems including arthritis which made writing increasingly difficult. Much of her work from this time was never finished and only a few were published in her lifetime

Barnes died in her home in New York on June 18, 1982, six days after her 90th birthday.

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Barnes's chapbook The Book of Repulsive Women (1915) collects eight "rhythms" and five drawings. The setting is New York City, and the subjects are all women: a cabaret singer, a woman seen through an open window from the elevated train, and, in the last poem, the corpses of two suicides in the morgue. The book describes women's bodies and sexuality in terms that have indeed struck many readers as repulsive, but, as with much of Barnes's work, the author's stance is ambiguous. Some critics read the poems as exposing and satirizing cultural attitudes toward women. Barnes came to regard The Book of Repulsive Women as an embarrassment; she called the title "idiotic," left it out of her curriculum vitae, and even burned copies. But because the copyright had never been registered, she was unable to prevent it from being republished, and it became one of her most reprinted works.

Barnes's novel Ryder (1928) draws heavily on her childhood experiences. It covers 50 years of history of the Ryder family. The bawdiness of Ryder's illustrations led the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to ship it. Parts of the text were also expurgated. In an acerbic introduction, Barnes explained that the missing words and passages had been replaced with asterisks so that readers could see the "havoc" wreaked by censorship.

Ladies Almanack (1928) is a roman à clef about a predominantly lesbian social circle centering on Natalie Clifford Barney's salon in Paris. The obscure language, inside jokes, and ambiguity of Ladies Almanack have kept critics arguing about whether it is an affectionate satire or a bitter attack, but Barnes loved the book and reread it throughout her life.

Barnes's reputation as a writer was made when Nightwood was published in England in 1936 and in America in 1937, with an added introduction by T.S. Eliot, Barnes's editor. The avant-garde novel, made Barnes famous in feminist circles. The novel, set in Paris in the 1920s, revolves around the lives of five characters, two of whom are based on Barnes and Wood, and it reflects the circumstances surrounding the ending of their relationship. Due to concerns about censorship, Eliot edited Nightwood to soften some language relating to sexuality and religion. An edition restoring these changes was published in 1995. It was number 12 on a list of the top 100 gay books compiled in 1999.

Barnes's last book, Creatures in an Alphabet (1982), is a collection of short rhyming poems. The format suggests a children's book, but it contains enough allusiveness and advanced vocabulary to make it an unlikely read for a child. Creatures continues the themes of nature and culture found in Barnes's earlier work, and their arrangement as a bestiary reflects her longstanding interest in systems for organizing knowledge, such as encyclopedias and almanacs.

Ashamedly, I had never heard of Djuna Barnes until a passing reference to her in Midnight in Paris. I decided to look her up and discovered a really interesting and inspiring figure. Despite her difficult past and the demons she had to fight, she was a radical lady in many ways who was unashamed of her gender and her sexuality and challenged the taboos of both of them.