The Life of Djuna Barnes, Stunt Reporter and Shocking Modernist

She hung out in the Village, in the blooming literary scene. In addition to writing fiction, Djuna was an accomplished, successful, and prolific reporter, writing for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York World Magazine, and Vanity Fair. One of her best early pieces is a bit of stunt journalism that would fit right in on the web: “How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed,” which includes a series of photos of Barnes having feeding tubes forced into her nostrils. In 1915 she published a chapbook with Guido Bruno, The Book of Repulsive Women. In another piece she spent time with a female gorilla at the Bronx Zoo in an attempt to “solve the riddle of the simian.” She was on the women’s boxing beat. She interviewed James Joyce for Vanity Fair in 1922.

Nightwood, a semi-autobiographical novel about a failed marriage followed by an intense but disastrous lesbian affair. written during her expatriate years in France and published in 1936, is considered Barnes’s masterpiece. This assessment is true in that its prose represents the heights of Barnes’s power to evoke… whatever she evokes. “Sometimes,” she writes of Robin Vote, the alluring, dangerous character around which the rest revolve,

“one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person’s every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey.”

Nightwood was edited with an introduction by T.S. Eliot, who softened some of the language and toned down the descriptions of the sexual relationship between the two female characters. Barnes based a lot of the novel on her relationship with artist Thelma Wood. Barnes and Wood both fled New York for Paris—Barnes to write for McCalls—meeting around 1921, their turbulent relationship lasting until 1929. They were, according to multiple sources (including themselves), both unfaithful, both partiers and heavy drinkers. Djuna suffered the most emotionally, but her professional life and reputation grew during the period. It took her a few years to find a publisher, but Nightwood made Barnes quite famous. It was reviewed by Alfred Kazin for the New York Times, though he seemed a bit confused, asking “what’s the point?” without really answering the question.

“Miss Barnes,” he continued, “has gone beyond Mrs Woolf’s practice of her own theory. For Miss Barnes is not even concerned with the immediate in time.” Kazin, like other critics, could only nail down that the novel is so experimental that almost nothing concrete could be said about it in a review, and so he finally resorted to attempting to summarize the plot.

In 1940, Barnes returned to the United States, settling in an apartment in Greenwich Village on Patchin Place, where she would reside for the rest of her life. She was still drinking pretty heavily, not writing very much, and living on a stipend furnished to her by her old friend and now patron Peggy Guggenheim, who in 1944 held a show of Djuna’s paintings at her gallery on West 57th Street. None of the paintings sold. She somewhat theatrically took on the character of a recluse over the years in New York, going out rarely, and seeing only a few of the many people who tried to stop by.

In 1950 Djuna Barnes gave up drinking altogether, and forever, apparently. She also—maybe not incidentally—finally started writing again, working on a play this time. She’d produced three of her own plays in her Greenwich Village years with the Provincetown Players, a small collective including people like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugene O’Neill. Barnes’s last major published work—The Antiphon—was published in 1958. She spent nearly a decade writing it, and it is her least approachable and most exhausting work. The blurb which Eliot wrote for the book—a nearly impenetrable verse play about an extremely dysfunctional family in England in the late 1930s—reads thus:

“From the point of view of the conventionally minded The Antiphon will be still more shocking — or would be if they could understand it — and still more tedious — than Nightwood. It might be said of Ms. Barnes, who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.”

It was not commercially successful, but reviewers praised it quite uniformly. Though Barnes was pretty reclusive, she struck up a friendship with Dag Hammerskjold, the UN Secretary General, who was such a fan of The Antiphon he translated it into Swedish.

The last book that Barnes published was a poetry collection, Creatures in an Alphabet, in 1982, the same year she died at the age of 90. By then, most of the unwanted visitors—Anais Nin used to try to stake her out, though Barnes apparently managed to avoid her—had stopped, and much of her work was or would soon be out of print. (In recent years she has enjoyed newfound popularity and recognition for her contribution to Modernist literature, and most of her works are widely available.) Two years later, Robert Giroux—who had published The Antiphon—wrote a remembrance of Barnes in the New York Times: “With the passing years, it was her fate to become more and more of a legend. She even called herself ‘the most famous unknown in the world.’”

This is the first installment of Literally, a semi-regular exploration of some of the lesser known lady writers of the last several centuries. Top photo by Berenice Abbott.