Djuna Barnes ( / ˈ dʒ uː n ɑː / JOO -nah ; June 12, 1892 – June 18, 1982) was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer. She is best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), which is a well-known book among some readers and an important example of modernist literature.
In 1913, Barnes started her career as a freelance journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. By early 1914, she became a highly sought-after feature reporter, interviewer, and illustrator. Her work appeared in the city’s leading newspapers and magazines. Later, her talent and connections with famous artists in Greenwich Village helped her publish her writing, poems, illustrations, and short plays in both experimental literary journals and popular magazines. She also published an illustrated poetry book called The Book of Repulsive Women (1915).
In 1921, Barnes accepted a paid job with McCall’s magazine, which took her to Paris. She lived there for 10 years. During this time, she published a collection of poetry, plays, and short stories called A Book (1923). This book was later reprinted with three additional stories as A Night Among the Horses (1929). She also published Ladies Almanack (1928) and Ryder (1928).
During the 1930s, Barnes lived in England, Paris, New York, and North Africa. It was during this time that she wrote and published Nightwood. In October 1939, after living mostly in Europe for nearly two decades, Barnes returned to New York. She published her final major work, the verse play The Antiphon, in 1958. She died in her apartment at Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, in June 1982.
Life and writing
Barnes was born in a log cabin on Storm King Mountain, near Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. Her paternal grandmother, Zadel Barnes, was a writer, journalist, and Women's Suffrage activist who once hosted an influential literary salon. Her father, Wald Barnes (born Henry Aaron Budington), was an unsuccessful composer, musician, and painter. An advocate of polygamy, he married Barnes's mother, Elizabeth J. Barnes (née Chappell), in 1889. His mistress, Frances "Fanny" Clark, moved in with them in 1897, when Barnes was five years old. They had nine children (five from Elizabeth: sons Thurn, Zendon, Saxon, and Shangar, and daughter Djuna; four from Fanny: sons Duane and Brian, and daughters Muriel and Sheila). Wald made little effort to support the family financially. One half-sibling died in childhood. Zadel, who believed her son was a misunderstood artistic genius, struggled to provide for the entire family. She supplemented her income by writing begging letters to friends and acquaintances.
As the second oldest child, Barnes spent much of her childhood helping care for her siblings and half-siblings. She received her early education at home, mostly from her father and grandmother, who taught her writing, art, and music but neglected subjects like math and spelling. She claimed to have had no formal schooling at all. Some evidence suggests she was enrolled in public school for a time after age ten, though her attendance was inconsistent.
It is possible that at age 16, Barnes was raped, either by a neighbor with the knowledge and consent of her father or possibly by her father. However, these are rumors and unconfirmed by Barnes, who never completed her autobiography. What is known is that Barnes and her father continued to write warm letters to each other until his death in 1934. Barnes refers to a rape obliquely in her first novel Ryder and more directly in her final play The Antiphon. Sexually explicit references in correspondence from her grandmother, with whom she shared a bed for years, suggest incest or overly familiar teasing. However, Zadel, who died 40 years before The Antiphon was written, was not criticized in the play. Shortly before her 18th birthday, Barnes reluctantly "married" Fanny Clark's brother, Percy Faulkner, in a private ceremony without benefit of clergy. He was 52. The match was strongly promoted by her father, grandmother, mother, and brother, but she stayed with him for no more than two months.
In 1912, Barnes's family, facing financial ruin, split up. Elizabeth moved to New York City with Barnes and three of her brothers, then filed for divorce, freeing Wald to marry Fanny Clark. The move gave Barnes an opportunity to study art formally for the first time. She attended the Pratt Institute for about six months from 1912 to 1913 and the Art Student's League of New York from 1915 to 1916. However, the need to support herself and her family—primarily her responsibility—soon drove her to leave school and take a job as a reporter at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Upon arriving at the Daily Eagle, Barnes declared, "I can draw and write, and you'd be a fool not to hire me," words that were inscribed inside the Brooklyn Museum.
Over the next few years, her work appeared in almost every newspaper in New York, including the New York Press, The World, and McCall's. She wrote interviews, features, theatre reviews, and a variety of news stories, often illustrating them with her own drawings. She also published short fiction in the New York Morning Telegraph’s Sunday supplement and in the pulp magazine All-Story Cavalier Weekly.
Much of Barnes's journalism focuses on the subjective and experiential view. Writing about a conversation with James Joyce, she admitted to missing part of what he said because her attention had wandered, though she revered Joyce's writing. Interviewing the successful playwright Donald Ogden Stewart, she shouted at him for "roll[ing] over and find[ing] yourself famous" while other writers continued to struggle, then said she wouldn’t mind dying. As her biographer Phillip Herring notes, this is "a depressing and perhaps unprecedented note on which to end an interview." For "The Girl and the Gorilla," published by New York World Magazine in October 1914, she had a conversation with Dinah, a female gorilla at the Bronx Zoo.
For another article in New York World in 1914, she submitted to force-feeding, a technique then used on hunger-striking suffragists. Barnes 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."
While she mocked conservative suffrage activist Carrie Chapman Catt when Catt admonished would-be suffrage orators never to "hold a militant pose" or wear "a dress that shows your feet in front," Barnes supported progressive suffragists. Barnes suggested that Catt's conservatism was an obstacle to the suffrage movement when Catt tried to ostracize fellow suffragists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who sought the vote for women through media attention directed at their strikes and non-violent protesting. It was their mistreatment that motivated Barnes to experience for herself the torture of being force-fed.
Barnes immersed herself in risky situations to access experiences that a previous generation of homebound women had been denied. Writing about the traditionally masculine domain of boxing from the ringside, Barnes explored boxing as a window into women's modern identities. In 1914, she first posed the question "What do women want at a fight?" in an article titled "My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight," published in New York World magazine. According to Irene Gammel, "Barnes' essay effectively begins to unravel an entire cultural history of repression for women." Barnes's interest in boxing continued into 1915 when she interviewed heavyweight champion Jess Willard.
In 1915, Barnes moved out of her family's flat to an apartment in Greenwich Village, where she entered a thriving Bohem
Works
Barnes's chapbook The Book of Repulsive Women (1915) includes eight poems and five drawings. The poems show the influence of late 19th-century Decadence, and the illustrations look similar to those of Aubrey Beardsley. The setting is New York City, and the subjects are all women: a cabaret singer, a woman seen from an elevated train, and, in the final poem, two women who died by suicide in a morgue. The book describes women's bodies and sexuality in ways many readers find disturbing. However, Barnes's attitude toward these themes is unclear. Some critics believe the poems criticize and mock society's views of women.
Barnes later considered The Book of Repulsive Women embarrassing. She called the title "idiotic," excluded it from her resume, and even burned copies. However, because the copyright was never officially registered, she could not stop the book from being republished. It became one of her most frequently reprinted works.
Barnes's novel Ryder (1928) is based on her childhood in Cornwall-on-Hudson. It follows 50 years in the life of the Ryder family, including Sophia Grieve Ryder, a former salon hostess who fell into poverty; her son Wendell; his wife Amelia; his mistress Kate-Careless; and their children. Barnes appears as Wendell and Amelia's daughter, Julie. The story includes many characters, and some characters appear only in one chapter before disappearing. The book mixes different styles, including children's stories, songs, letters, poems, parables, and dreams. It changes style from chapter to chapter, copying the writing of authors like Chaucer and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Both Ryder and Ladies Almanack use a visual style inspired by French folk art, rather than the Beardsleyesque style of The Book of Repulsive Women. Many illustrations are based on images collected in the 1926 book L'Imagerie Populaire, which included engravings and woodcuts copied since medieval times. Some illustrations in Ryder were removed from the first edition because they were considered too explicit, such as one showing Sophia urinating into a chamberpot and another showing Amelia and Kate-Careless knitting codpieces. Parts of the text were also edited. Barnes explained in an introduction that the missing words were replaced with asterisks so readers could see the "havoc" caused by censorship. A 1990 edition restored the missing drawings, but the original text was lost when the manuscript was destroyed during World War II.
Ladies Almanack (1928) is a roman à clef about a lesbian social circle centered on Natalie Clifford Barney's salon in Paris. It is written in an old-fashioned, humorous style, with illustrations resembling Elizabethan woodcuts. Clifford Barney appears as Dame Evangeline Musset, a woman described as a "Grand Red Cross" for helping others. She is portrayed as a wise and kind woman who helps those in need and is later honored as a saint. Other real people also appear in the book under pseudonyms, including Élisabeth de Gramont, Romaine Brooks, Dolly Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge, Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, and Mina Loy.
The complex language, inside jokes, and unclear meanings in Ladies Almanack have led critics to debate whether the book is a kind satire or a harsh critique. However, Barnes loved the book and read it many times throughout her life.
Barnes gained recognition as a writer when Nightwood was published in England in 1936 by Faber and Faber and in the United States in 1937 by Harcourt, Brace and Company. T.S. Eliot, Barnes's editor, wrote an introduction for the American edition. The innovative novel, supported by Peggy Guggenheim, became famous in feminist circles.
Set in Paris during the 1920s, Nightwood follows the lives of five characters, two of whom are based on Barnes and her partner, Wood. The story reflects the end of their relationship. Eliot praised Barnes's writing style, which has a musical rhythm that is not like poetry but is still powerful enough to be appreciated by readers familiar with poetry.
Because of concerns about censorship, Eliot edited Nightwood to make some language about sexuality and religion less harsh. A 1995 edition by Dalkey Archive Press restored these changes.
Dylan Thomas called Nightwood "one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman," and William Burroughs described it as "one of the great books of the twentieth century." It was listed as number 12 on a 1999 list of the top 100 gay books by The Publishing Triangle.
Barnes's verse play The Antiphon (1958) is set in England in 1939. Jeremy Hobbs, disguised as Jack Blow, brings his family to their ruined ancestral home, Burley Hall. His motive is unclear, but he seems to want to force his family to confront their past. His sister Miranda is a stage actress who is now poor and struggling. Her brothers, Elisha and Dudley, see her as a threat to their wealth and accuse their mother, Augusta, of helping their abusive father, Titus Hobbs. While Jeremy is away, Elisha and Dudley wear animal masks and attack the women, making cruel and suggestive comments. Augusta treats the attack as a game. Jeremy returns with a doll house, a miniature version of the home where the children grew up. He accuses Miranda of allowing her father to rape her by a man much older than her. In the final act, Miranda and Augusta are alone. Augusta, jealous of Miranda's freedom, tries to exchange clothes with her daughter to pretend she is young again, but Miranda refuses. When Augusta hears Elisha and Dudley driving away, she blames Miranda and kills her with a curfew bell, dying from the effort.
The play was first performed in 1961 in Stockholm in a Swedish translation by Karl Ragnar Gierow and U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.
The play was later translated into French and performed at the Odeon Theater in Paris by the Comédie-Française in March 1990.
Barnes's final book, Creatures in an Alphabet (1982), is a collection of short rhyming poems. The format resembles a children's book, but the poems include complex references and vocabulary, making them unsuitable for young readers. For example, the entry
Legacy
Barnes has been mentioned as an influence by writers such as Truman Capote, William Goyen, Karen Blixen, John Hawkes, Bertha Harris, Dylan Thomas, David Foster Wallace, and Anaïs Nin. Writer Bertha Harris said her work was "one of the few expressions of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world" since the ancient poet Sappho.
Barnes's biographical notes and collection of manuscripts have been an important resource for scholars who have given more attention to Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in Dada history. These materials helped create Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (2011), the first major English collection of the baroness's poems, and a biography titled Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity (2002).
Fictional portrayals
Cynthia Grant and Svetlana Zylin co-wrote the play Djuna: What of the Night, which is based on Barnes's life and works. The play was first performed in 1991.
In Woody Allen's 2011 film Midnight in Paris, Emmanuelle Uzan appeared in a short role without speaking lines.